Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

“Yes,” she says and she gets up.

I watch her cross the room, her nakedness coursing in me, filling me, in spite of my having made love to her already this very night. I cross my legs to cover myself when she sits down again, a photo in her hand. She scrambles to the other side of the bed and turns on a lamp on the nightstand. She scrambles back, jaundiced by the pale bulb, and I take the photo in my hand, my heart pounding. From her nakedness, I think. From the nakedness of this woman that I love. I hold the photo for a moment and something in me wants to put it down unseen. Just put it aside and touch Tien again. Right now. Enter her and live forever inside the sweetness of her body, the sweetness of her mind. But I cannot. I have to look at the photo.

It is the photo of a child. Very simple. A girl maybe seven or eight standing in the shadow of a broad-leafed tree that’s just off camera. Maybe a banana tree. She isn’t posing. She’s hardly smiling. She looks up with her deep-cut Asian eyes into the future, at the daughter she will leave at just about this age and at the man this daughter loves. She could be anyone.

Ben looks at my mother and I crouch on the bed behind him and look at her too. I lean against his back, put my hand on his shoulder. He feels very warm. I am suddenly frightened for him. I touch his forehead to see if he has a fever. He does not. But to touch him feels like drawing near a flame.

“She’s a child,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Is this the only photo you have?”

“Yes. My mother destroyed all the photos before she left. She was very frightened. She was a little crazy with the fear.”

He looks at my mother’s face for a long while.

“You feel very warm,” I say.

“Do I?”

“I thought you had a fever.”

“She could be anyone,” he says.

“I never was frightened for anyone’s health before.”

“Frightened?”

“When I thought for a moment that you have a fever, I was afraid for you.” He reaches up and touches my hand that lies on his shoulder.

“Don’t be afraid,” he says.

“I am not afraid now,” I say. “You have no fever.”

He squeezes at my hand. Then he lifts my mother’s photo for me to take it. I do. I rise up and I begin to cross the room and all my body prickles from being naked and being seen by this man I love even more than I did a moment ago, just from that little squeeze of my hand and from the way he is surely looking at me from behind as I move. And I take a step away from him and another and I am naked for him and I am feeling heavy now, my limbs are turning again to stone as I take still another step and another and I do not know why, but I am suddenly very conscious of my mother in my hand and I wonder where she is and what she would look like if I could see her right now, with my own adult eyes.

I am before my vanity chest and I bend to the bottom drawer and I open it and I lift the lid on a small lacquer box and I put the picture away. I close the lid and I slide the drawer shut and I turn, expecting to find Ben’s eyes upon me. But he is in the bed now, lying with his face to the ceiling, covered to the waist with the sheet.

I cross back to him, still heavy in my legs and a little self-conscious now, feeling exposed. He turns his face at the last moment and sees me and he smiles, with a very soft look in his eyes, and I feel all right again. The past is put back in its box and my body is light and I even stop for him, linger a little, knowing from his eyes that he likes to see me.

“I’m very tired,” he says.

“I am too, I think.”

“I can stay?”

“Yes. I did not even imagine you would be in some other place tonight.”

He smiles again and looks up at the ceiling and closes his eyes. I slip into the bed beside him, covering myself also to the waist, my hip touching his beneath the sheet. I feel for a moment joined to him there, like the place we touch can never be undone, like we are the twins I have read about, who come from their mother’s womb with their bodies joined. Brother and sister. Not that I want anything like the feeling of brother and sister with Ben. It is just this connection I imagine in that place on our naked hips.

What I really want is for him to touch me again, even now. Not like brother and sister at all. I want him to touch my secret place again, even though I feel very tender there. It would hurt a little for him to touch me there now, I know, but I want him to do that anyway. And all this makes me think of my mother’s urgent words when I brought the story of the beginning of Vietnam to her. There were one hundred sons, she told me. My friend told me that there were fifty boys and fifty girls among the children of the dragon and the princess, and these children grew into adults and they became the ancestors of all the Vietnamese people.

But as I lie beside Ben on this night we make love, I suddenly realize that in the story I have heard in the banyan tree, these brothers and sisters would have had to make love with each other. In this story, all our people began with a brother and a sister lying down naked together and touching and joining their bodies. My mother would not let me think of this. That was behind the heat of her words. But her version of the story only explained the line of our kings. It did not explain where the rest of us came from. In her story, that remained a mystery. But the wives of these kings did not spring from the trees or from the smoke of their fires or from the earth. There had to be more. Surely such a thing as the love between a dragon from the sea and a fairy princess was meant to begin a whole nation and not just put men on a throne. Perhaps this was another of my mother’s lies. Perhaps these brothers and sisters lay down together and loved each other.

I shiver at this, like I am suddenly chilled, like there is something crawling just beneath my skin and it is very cold. I have never had a brother or a sister, so the thought of this happening is just between invented people in my head, but even so, it feels very strange to me, it catches in my chest like in the early days of the liberation when the men in the streets with guns would suddenly look at you and you did not know if they recognized that you were just a little girl or they thought you were someone else and they might kill you. I feel like that.

So I turn on my side toward Ben, breaking that place on our hips where he and I are joined, and I put my hand on his chest and I want to move my hand down to the place where we have been joined like the children of the dragon and the princess, the brothers and sisters who knew no shame from the blood between them. But I do not move my hand. Not right now. I am glad to hold back and know that I could do this thing at any moment. He will sleep beside me and I will sleep and I could wake at any moment in the night and touch him there. Knowing I can touch him and holding back is a sweet thing. That odd warmth that feels like fear, fades away. Ben’s arm comes around my shoulders and draws me tighter against him. I say, “Why did you come here?”

There’s an answer in my head right away, to this. Like almost everything that’s been going on inside me since Tien and I made love, this answer just comes on me and it’s like I’m sitting back waiting to see what it is, myself. Things come into me and I don’t know from where. I say, “I think it was to find you.”

This answer puzzles her as much as it does me. She says, “You knew?”

“I didn’t know a thing,” I say. And I wait a moment to see what I mean. I look hard into the dark above us. A gecko is motionless in a shadow, just outside a stripe of neon, waiting for something he knows is coming along. I feel the warmth of the palm of her hand on my chest, the press of her body inside the circle of my arm. She seems so familiar. I think I feel that briefly. But that would happen now and then on the road. I’d slide into a town somewhere and I’d never been there in my life but it was familiar. I take it like that. I say, “I mean it was supposed to happen this way somehow.”