Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

I stop. If there’s a moment in a body that’s the opposite of sexual desire, this is a thing that is happening to me now, like driving in a fog and not daring to stop on the shoulder because you know someone will crash into you from behind and not seeing enough even to find an exit ramp and knowing you can only go forward and knowing something is waiting out there that you won’t see until you slam into it and your body squeezes hard to make you very small and you feel it most in your penis and in your balls, they suck in and clench tight, and it’s like that, seeing this woman waiting for me to take her to a loveless bed.

“She is my sister,” the man with the mustache says. “She is one virgin. You say hello to her. Her name Kim.”

I turn to him. “Kim?” I don’t know what’s in my voice but the man flinches.

“Sure,” he says, but it’s meek, a child caught in a lie. “You no like name Kim?”

Whatever surprised the man in my voice is kicking up inside me now. I’m clenching tighter. Some shape in the fog ahead. I start to turn away and his hand is on my arm.

“Wait,” he says. “She not Kim. That name Americans like, so we say she name Kim.”

I stop. He angles his face around trying to look me in the eyes. He laughs a little laugh that is full of something that sounds like respect.

“You know already. You know Vietnam. I see you smart GI vet. Her name Ngoc. American like Kim better.”

I want to tell him to shut up. I’m not looking at him and keeping my face turned is just making him say more. I force my eyes to go to him and when I do he smiles broadly and he cuffs me on the arm.

“You smart man,” he says. “All Vietnam good-time girl name Kim.”

Now she is near me. “My name Ngoc,” she says. “I do for you special.”

It is ten minutes until six o’clock and I get out of the car and I say good-bye to Mr. Thu over my shoulder. I am thinking of my heart, how I can feel it rushing inside me. I look to the little table where I first see him, and some men of Vietnam are in that place drinking beers and then I am in the shadow of the alleyway that leads to my rooms.

I go up the iron stairs and I pass women crouching and playing Chinese cards. I say hello to these women every night but I say nothing now. I am sorry for that, but Ben has filled me up and he has squeezed all my words out and he is squeezing also at my chest, making it difficult to breathe, and I am loving this feeling.

My door is unlocked, this is the way I leave it always, I tell him so just last night, so when I push open the door I am ready to be in his arms. But he is not there. I stop. I stand in the middle of the room. I look around. The sheets are thrown back. Like he has risen only just a few moments ago and he has gone into the kitchen or into the bathroom. I go to the kitchen door and the room is empty. The water drips from the faucet into my metal pan. The sound is very loud. There is no other sound. I step to the bathroom door and I know already that he is not there. The door is open and I can see this clearly. I move back to the center of the room where I live and I look to the ancestor shrine. The incense is cold. The fruit is turning dark. No face is there, either. A rooster crows somewhere out in the alley, far away. He does not like how the light is going from the sky.

I try not to think of my father. I tell myself: Ben is not gone forever. It is not fair to think of my father because of him. For one thing, Ben will come up the stairs and along the balcony and through that door any moment. For another thing, my father is dead. He did not leave me forever without another thought, he is simply dead. And perhaps his spirit did not leave me at all. Perhaps I drew him here with my prayers long ago and he has all these years been very grateful to me for supporting him in the afterlife, as we are supposed to do for our dead ancestors, and he has wept ghostly tears because he was not able to come back to Vietnam as a man, as a father, and find his daughter. These are the things scrambling around in me as I stand here. Thoughts like these.

But I am afraid there may be more. My face and hands have gone cold now. My heart is still rushing, but for some new reason. I stand halfway between the empty bed and the empty shrine and the beats of my heart are like pebbles, piling up, filling my chest and pushing up now into my throat. I must move from this place where I am standing. This much I know.

I turn my body around. It is very heavy. I push against it and I am moving to the bathroom. I go in and I pull on the chain and a light comes from the bare bulb into the room, a light like on those late nights when I would lie in my mother’s bed and she would rise and go into the bathroom and I would be awake — as soon as she rose and left me alone there, I would wake — and she would go in and pull the bathroom door just partway closed and turn the light on and there would be only silence for the longest time and I do not know what it was that she was doing.

I lift my hands to my blouse buttons and I begin to undo them. This feels good. My hands rush now. I strip off my blouse and throw it down at my feet and I unsnap my bra and it falls away and my nipples awake at their sudden nakedness. I think this will bring him through the door. I slip off my shoes and I unzip my skirt and I dig my thumbs deep into these daylight layers of me and I drag the skirt and my panty hose and my underwear off all at once, stepping quickly from the clinging toes, and I am naked now, completely naked, and the secret lips of me pout for him and I reach up to my hair and pull out pins, throwing them down, my fingers trembling until my hair is tumbling over my shoulders and down my back.

I listen for the door. There are motorbikes distant in the street and the laughter of the women playing cards, and I listen to the place in front of those sounds, I wait for the sound of the door. But there is nothing. Except, now, a child crying somewhere nearby, passing, just outside, and then the child is gone, and the women are silent now, and there are only the motorbikes. But the door does not open. And it is all right, because I am not clean. It is good that Ben is late. This is what I tell myself.

I run the water into my plastic tub and I crouch beside it and I take my sponge and I soap it up with the soap that says it is 99 and 44 one-hundreds percent pure. I am far less pure than that now. But it does not bother me to think so. There is another kind of pureness possible, I think. A pureness that happens when he fills me with the part of his body I still have not looked at. I will look at that part tonight. I rub the soap beneath my arms, around my breasts, down to the place on my body that is his alone to touch. I wash myself and rinse with fresh water and I rise and I dry myself with soft pats of my towel. He would be that gentle if he were here to dry me now. I touch myself with the towel just as Ben would.

Then I reach for my silk robe hanging on the back of the door, but my hand hesitates and falls. I realize that I like being naked. He will be happy to find me naked when he comes through the door.

I step into the room. I have not done my prayers. I think to take that robe now and do this thing for my father. But I do not. I want to remain naked. My eyes fill with tears, and this surprises the part of me trying to figure all this out. I know I want Ben to hurry now. I know I am afraid he will not come here. I am afraid he has gotten on an airplane and gone back across the sea and he will forget me and I will wait naked in this room all night and all day tomorrow and the next tomorrow and the next until they find me dead here like this. If there is something more to these tears, or to this trembling that wishes to start in my hands, I am not ready to think of that. It is surely enough for now that I am afraid Ben has left me.