Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

“Do you think so?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Do you think something like a god brought you here?”

I should have expected her to take what I said this way. It’s natural. But this is far beyond the point I think I’m making. “I don’t know,” I say. “I think I’m just saying things that come into my head. Things people are supposed to say when they talk like this.”

“I am not familiar with this custom.”

“But I think I believe what I’m saying, too. About us.”

“I was brought up a Buddhist,” Tien says. “Not a very good one. My mother wasn’t very religious. How could she be and do what she did in her life? My grandmother believed in her dead husband’s spirit, and the spirit of her father. But that’s not really Buddhism. That’s something the Chinese oppressors brought us a thousand years ago.”

“Does Buddhism explain why I’m here?” I ask.

“I do not think so,” she says. “Buddhism says that all the suffering in the world comes from desire.”

I draw Tien closer to me, sliding my hand down to the point of her hip, letting her skin run softly into my hand and up my arm and into my head. I want things to be clear for me now, about her, about what this all means. Too much is going on in me that I wasn’t expecting. It feels like there’s something waiting in the shadow for me to come along. “Are you suffering now?” I ask her.

“From my desire for you?”

“Yes.”

“I said I was not a very good Buddhist.”

“It’s only the good Buddhists that suffer from desire?”

“They suffer from the desire not to feel desire.”

“This is better, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she says, and her hand slides down my stomach and onto that place that is slack now and quiet but I stir at her touch. And almost at once the night begins to blur at its edges, just when I think I’d be waking up in my head like I seem to be doing in my body, the darkness above me billows like mill smoke and the gecko disappears and I suddenly want to let go of all I can see and hear and feel against me. I say, “I’m very tired now, Tien,” and her hand stops.

“Is it okay?” she asks. “That I touch you?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Will we sleep now?”

“I think so.”

“Can you say this thing once more before we do?”

“Yes. And you?”

“I will.”

“I love you,” I say and I know I mean it, though this time the words come hard. From this sudden weariness. From that, I decide, because I feel the deep sea-wave of sleep rolling under me and lifting me into the dark and I don’t even hear her say the words back to me.

And I wake in bright sun. I remember a brief moment when she kissed me good-bye. She was up early for her work and I was deep in a dreamless sleep and her lips woke me, on my cheek, on my brow, then on my mouth and I put my arm around her and she was in Saigontourist clothes and I smelled her makeup and she said, “I will come to you this evening.” Then she was gone and I blurred back into sleep.

And now I’m awake and it’s late in the morning. The roar of motorbikes fills the room and I sit up. The sheet is twisted away from me and I’m naked and I think of Tien’s kiss, how she might have seen me lying here in my nakedness. I stir at this. And at once my hands go out to the sheet and scrabble at the knots and pull the cloth over me. This odd surge of modesty in an empty room seems to come directly from my hands and I look at them as if they could explain.

Then I try to doze again, but I cannot. I rise up finally and I am naked for a moment in the middle of the room, in the sunlight, and again I feel unsettled by this, again my hands drive me to cover myself. I put on my pants and my shirt and I’m breathing hard. Like I’m on a drug or something. Like something is in my body. I look around as if there’d be some proof from the night before. A mirror on a tabletop and a dusting of powder, the butt end of a reefer. Something. Anything. Though I know we weren’t even drunk, Tien and me. I know there’s been nothing in this room but the feeling between us. And that is unaffected by this sudden mood. I see her silk pantaloons on a chair and these same hands of mine that have wanted to cover me stir now with the memory of her skin on their palms, they feel the cool run of her flesh on them, right now. But still there is something.

I finish dressing and go out of her rooms, closing the door softly, leaning there a moment, wondering at all of this. And then I go along the outer balcony and it smells of fish sauce and wood fire and there’s a jumble of red tile roofs and straw mats and hanging laundry and the clucking of chickens from somewhere down the alley, and as I pass by an old woman crouching near the metal circle of stairs, she nods at me and puts a fold of betel leaf in her mouth.

I go down the stairs and out into the street and I seek the sun, stay out of the shade. I walk along the street for a long way in the sun, taking it in hard and straight on my face and my arms, trying to sweat this feeling away. Then at last I hail a pedicab and the driver asks where I want to go and I don’t know. I think of my hotel, but I don’t want the empty room again, the empty bed, the paddle fan moving the wet air, and so I say the Hotel Rex, which is down near the circular fountain at Le Loi and Nguyen Hue.

I sit in the pedicab’s open chair, the driver out of sight behind me, and there is nothing before my eyes but the street full of Vietnamese people rushing past on their motorbikes and I move as if in a dream, floating in this street that looks just like it did years ago, in 1966. How many years ago? I shape that question in just those words in my head and I expect it simply to be the prompter of a bit of elementary math — I’m talking to myself in my head in some simpleminded way — but with that question comes another question and it surprises me, it’s unwilled, it’s from some ongoing self-interrogation that’s deeper, darker, and the question is: how old is Tien? Why should the one question lead to the other? I pose this to myself and do not want an answer, I lean forward, try just to float here in this street, like in a lovely dream, yes, try to sense the tamarind trees joining overhead, try to drift through their shadows knowing I can wake at any moment, but she’s on my skin, this woman I love, she’s burning in me like incense, and the question slides forward again, even though there’s no past to reckon with, all the women I’ve ever known, as few as they are, have faded from me, it’s as if they never existed, and she has said I love you to a man three times in her life and it was only me, I am that man. Except the math is this: twenty-eight years. She can be very close to that age and it has been twenty-eight years since I’ve been in these same streets, since I’ve gone to a bar in the very street where Tien once lived with her bargirl mother.

Her mother Huong. The woman I met and loved was Kim. Perhaps Huong’s friend. Perhaps there was this wonderful crossing of paths. Perhaps one hot afternoon I was drinking in the bar with Kim and she drifted to the back of the place, to the little room behind a curtain, where they kept a shrine with incense and fruit for the woman who once owned the bar, a woman killed one night on the street in front by a drunken Army man, and her picture was there in the center of the shrine — I remember her now, her face in a photo in the center of the shrine — and she had no family to pray for her and so her girls prayed for her, my Kim and all the other girls, and perhaps one hot afternoon the girls curled up in the booths and in the back room and took their naps but Kim was with me and so she stayed awake, drinking with me, and she stepped through the curtain and perhaps Huong was there. Perhaps I followed Kim and before me was this other bargirl whose name, Huong, I’ve long forgotten, and perhaps her blouse was open and a baby girl was nursing at Huong’s nipple, an infant, and perhaps this infant was Tien.