Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

I float now in the shadows of the tamarinds with this thought. The girls in white ao dais race past on their motorbikes and I close my eyes and I cannot remember such a thing happening, the nursing baby at the breast of Kim’s friend, but it might have. I could have stood before Tien’s mother with my own bargirl lover and seen the infant Tien suckling at a breast that I might have paid to suckle at, easily, if I had not been with Kim instead. And at this thought I feel a sweet rush of guilt. Sweet, yes, sweet. Sweet with relief. A thing like this is what has been troubling me. A thing like this. I am this much older than Tien. I have been this sort of man, who has paid to sleep with a woman like her sort of mother. Sweet guilt. These are my sins. Only these.

I pass him in the street and he does not see me. I am in my Saigontourist car with Mr. Thu the driver and in the backseat are a man and woman who are husband and wife from Germany. Ben is in a xich lo and a very old man is pedaling him through the street. I see him and I am in the middle of telling the German couple something or other about Ho Chi Minh City and I stop what I am saying right away. I turn to see my Ben who is leaning forward in his seat and his eyes are closed so that he does not see me and the old man is wearing a straw hat and I begin to roll down my window. I would put my body halfway out of the car and call to my Ben, but he is gone too soon, the window is not even all the way down. I laugh. He was looking so sweet, his eyes closed, and I think that his thoughts are about me.

I turn to the German couple. We are speaking English because they speak it well and so do I and our German-speaking guide is off with a busload from Berlin, and I say to the man and the woman, who are perhaps fifty years old, “I am sorry. I saw someone I know passing by.”

They nod and look out the window as if they would recognize right away who I mean.

“It is a man,” I say and the German woman turns her face to me and smiles.

I want to say to her, I know what you feel with this man who sits beside you. We are women, you and I, and we lie with a man we love and we open our bodies and we love these men with some parts of us that only they know about and I think that they do not even know that they know.

I want to say these things to her as we smile at each other, one woman to another woman. But instead I say that in the two thousand square kilometers of Ho Chi Minh City, more than five million people are living. Her smile fades and she looks at me thoughtfully. Her husband is looking at me now again, too. I am trying to be the tour guide once more. I think of those five million people and I want to speak of the great advances in housing and employment that our revolutionary government is making but I am really thinking of the half of those five million who are women and how they must all yearn to have what I now have, this kind of love. I look at this German woman’s face and she and her husband are sitting with a wide space between them, each pressed against a window, and I have not seen them touch on this day, though we have been in the Ben Thanh Market and in a pagoda and in the Military Museum where a man and a woman who loved each other very much would surely think to touch, since the museum itself — I am ashamed to say this but it is true — is very boring. And I think that no one in this city, not one of the two and a half million women here, or any of the women in Germany either, for that matter, has ever felt what I am feeling. But they want to, they want the secret places of their bodies to feel as sweetly sore from the attentions of love as mine does, they want their breaths to catch as mine does and their bodies to strive to leap through a car window as mine does at the sight of the man who has lain with them, even if he is gone in a moment and he is dozing or dreaming in the care of an old man with a straw hat. That such an odd and simple thing as this should bring such joy, they must all want that and not be able to have it. That is perhaps a selfish and reactionary thing to think, but in this moment it seems true or else these two people in the backseat would be pressed against each other even then and every woman on the street would be rushing in wild distraction to leap into the arms of the man she loves.

But, of course, I am doing no such thing at the moment. I laugh at myself for all these thoughts. The husband and the wife both wrinkle their brows at me.

“I am sorry,” I say.

For a moment I have no idea what to do with my body. I stand before the Rex Hotel and I should he doing something, I should turn one way or another and I should make my legs move, I should go somewhere, into the hotel, perhaps — I think I came here for the rooftop bar — or off in some direction along the street, perhaps now back to my own hotel. But I have no impulse at all. Nothing. I do ache for the night to come and to be back in Tien’s bed. That’s very clear. But all the moments between this one on the street and that one, still hours away, are unimaginable to me.

And still, I know that things are much better inside me. That’s the very reason I have this sudden emptiness. The thing that had been growling in the dark in me is silent, but the guilt that took its place was an old one and faded away at once. I’m not proud of the way my life has gone. I knew that long ago. So if Tien in some strange way was present in the past I’m ashamed of, then that’s okay. If she was, she was there as a brief glimpse of a purity and innocence that would someday return to me in the form of a woman and make me whole.

And standing on the sidewalk on this morning in Vietnam in 1994, I think: what it must mean is, I’ve been forgiven. If there is some higher power in the universe that gives a damn about guilt and shame and forgiveness, then surely for Tien and me to be brought together like this and to be made to touch like this and to feel like this — especially if she’s the child of a bargirl herself, especially if I saw her for one ignorant moment in that former life of mine — if such a power exists, then surely, for all this to happen, it shows that I’ve been forgiven.

This is what I think for a few sweet moments. And then I decide to go back to my hotel and lie on my bed and think about Tien until it is time to go to her again. And so I cross the street into the plaza before the Rex. A photographer lopes up and motions for me to turn so that the City Hall and Ho Chi Minh’s statue will be behind me and I wave him away. A girl with handfuls of postcards takes his place, following me step for step as I move down the plaza now, heading for the fountain at the traffic circle, and I wave her away too. And then the little man with the mustache is at my side and I recognize him as the pimp on the motorcycle and he’s speaking low to me.

“You want nice Vietnam girl? Boom boom all day all night?” he says.

“No,” I say and he doesn’t turn away, he continues to follow me and I wonder what it is about me that he won’t believe what I’ve said.

“She is very nice,” he says. “Do anything for you.”

“No,” I say again and I try to make it sharper but I’m not sure it is and I know there’s no desire for another woman, a faint shudder runs in me at the thought of touching any woman but Tien now, and that makes me happy, but the very happiness of it turns at once to a dark thing and I know I’ve been thinking about bargirls too much, that’s what’s going on, this is connecting to all of that, and I want to rush away from this man but I can’t make my legs go any faster.

“Here is she,” he says, and I look and we’re moving toward the motorbike parked at the curb and the girl is there, perched on the back of the seat, and she’s very young and her hair that was rolled up when I saw her before is unpinned now, falling long and dark, over her shoulder and down over her breast. She is looking at me with steady eyes, looking into my eyes.