Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

I could light just the incense. He deserves not to have to wait for that. I move toward the shrine and then I stop and my face grows hot and my hands fall to cover me and the trembling has begun in them and it is because I think he can see me like this. My father can. I have been naked in this room many times before, of course, and it never occurred to me that he was here. But surely I knew. I would pray, my nakedness covered, but barely, by my silk robe, I would let loose the smoke of the incense like a lover looses her hair, and I would finish and rise from where I kneeled and turn, and many times I would let the robe fall from me at once. It is often very hot in this room and the air is thick with rain that has died and turned into spirit and has filled the air unseen, like my father. And at those times my words had hardly faded from the room — he was still here where I called him to be — and I exposed my naked woman’s body, and so it was for him. I turn and hurry into the bathroom and close the door and I lean against it. Do I truly believe these things? Has my father lived with me all these years, watching? Did he see me touch Ben last night? Did he see my nakedness just now?

“Go away,” I say, aloud. Gently. I do not want to hurt his feelings. “Please,” I say. “I want a living man.”

I wait to see if he will go. I cannot tell.

And then I hear Ben coming in, the latch lifting, the hinges creaking.

I turn and I throw open this door and Ben is there. I am no longer ashamed in my nakedness. Because of him. He has taken any shame in this away from me. He is caught there, the door closing behind him, his hand still on the latch, his face turning now to my sudden appearance. He straightens and faces me. His eyes are wide and sad. I move quickly to him and I open my arms and I leap up for him to catch me and clutch me to him, knowing he will, and he does, his arms cross my back and press me hard against him as my legs go around his waist.

“Oh my god,” he says.

I think he says these words because he is so happy for me to be like this in his arms. I want him to carry me about the room, to spin with me and dance with me, holding me off the ground. But he does not move. He holds me close to him and he is breathing heavily, I can feel him, I put my face against the side of his throat and I wait and I can feel his heart there and it is beating very fast. I pull at his shirt. Pull it up out of his pants so that the part of me that only he knows can kiss at his skin. The cloth rumples across me there, a button touches me like a fingertip and is gone, then there is the mat of hair on his stomach against me and in all of this I am like a woman I never knew I could be, a woman so free like this about her body. I know very clearly that in this feeling I am being counterrevolutionary, my country would be ashamed of me. But I do not care. I am free, I am perched here high on a tree and I need only to leap one more time in order to fly, and it is because of him. And this is a strange and contradictory thing: clinging to him, I feel I can fly; devoted to him completely, I feel free.

“I love you,” I say.

“You’re a woman,” he says, very softly.

I know at once what he means. I let go of him with my legs and I climb down to stand on my own feet. He is right, and he is the man I love, to say this thing to me. I want to walk beside him to the bed. In Vietnam we have a society where men and women share their work equally and they should share their bed equally, and I am surprised that this man raised from childhood by an imperialist government can know this. It makes me want to jump up on him again.

“I love your smile,” he says, touching my cheek with his fingertips. It would be hard to explain the thing I have just smiled about, so I simply turn my face and kiss the fingertips that have touched me and then I take the hand in mine and bring it to my side and I tug at him so that we can walk together across the room to the place where we will make love.

He yields, he moves, but he feels very heavy. We go to the bed and he stops me before we lie down and he pulls me to him and presses me close. There is something in him, some feeling I do not understand. A quick dark thing is rushing into my head, and I say, “Is it only my smile?”

I feel his head move. He is looking at me, trying to see into my eyes, but I keep my face against his chest. I want the answer to this question first. Then I realize he does not understand what I mean. Still not looking at him I say, “Is it only my smile that you love?”

“No,” he says.

“I am sorry to ask this,” I say. “I am still a selfish girl.”

“It’s not selfish,” he says. “I thought we settled that last night.”

“And now I am sorry again. I should say I am a selfish woman . We settle that only one minute ago.”

He holds me gently away from him and we look into each other’s eyes. I want very much for us to make love now.

I let go and curl backward onto the bed, propped up a little with the pillow against the wall, and he eases down beside me. But he does not lie beside me, he does not touch me, he sits there as if he’s waiting for something to happen, something to be said. I wait, too. The light is fading in the room.

Then, when the motorbikes out in the street are filling my head like my own fears, rushing with a nasty sound around and around the block and not going anywhere, I say, “I guided a husband and a wife from Germany today. I do not think they love each other.”

And he says, very low, “Can I ask you some questions?”

I say, “Quickly. Please.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six,” I say.

He lifts his chin just a little bit, thinking something out.

Suddenly I believe I understand. I say, “You’re not too old. Vietnam girls respect an older man.”

He turns to me.

“More than respect,” I say. “A Vietnam girl can respect an older man and she can feel passion for him, too.”

“You sound like my mother again. The way you explain yourself.”

“It’s okay that way too. Think of me like I am forty-

six.”

He smiles. “No. I’m too old. That’s good. Too many years have gone.”

I am not understanding again.

“It’s 1994,” he says. “I was here in 1966. Don’t you see? That’s twenty-eight years.”

Yes?”

“You’re twenty-six.”

I am lost. I concentrate on these numbers that seem so important to him and there is a hissing in my head, some little sound from a dark corner in me, but I try to think only about the numbers. I say, “Almost twenty-seven.”

There is a little flinch in him, a catching. “Twenty-seven? Yes? All right. It’s still all right.”

“It’s all right,” I say. “We are closer in age. That’s good too, isn’t it?”

“When is your birthday?”

“May 15.”

“May? Next month?”

“Yes.”

“Look,” he says, almost sharply. “It’s all right. Really.”

“I know,” I say.

“I was here in 1966.” Then he hesitates. “I came in February. I left after a year. It was 1967.”

I wait for him. He is thinking hard again. I am not thinking at all. I do not feel comfortable with numbers. The hissing has stopped. Then he turns to me abruptly.

“Tien,” he says. “Please tell me about how you know your father is dead.”

“My mother told me this thing. When she left me with my grandmother.”

“Your mother told you.”

“Yes. She did not want to, I think. But my grandmother made her.”

“She didn’t want to. Good. That’s good.”

“Why is that good?”

“Your grandmother knew that he was dead?”

“Yes.”

“Did she talk about this, too?”

I try to think. “I can’t remember. I don’t think so.”