Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

“Then you don’t know what your grandmother knew. Was she there when your mother told you?”

“No.”

“Your mother could have lied.”

“We spoke of this last night.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Is this the thing that worries you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” I ask this and for a moment it is still like I do not know the answer. All through these words we speak to each other on the bed, I have played the fool to myself. Now he simply fixes his eyes on me and I know. His brown eyes like mine. I grab the hand with the fingertips like mine. I have gone cold. There is a tumbling in me. I lean forward, my head goes down, I thump into his chest, my forehead there, and I pull back instantly. Suddenly I cannot touch him, and that is not a thing I can live with, I know that at once, the hissing has returned and it fills my lungs, this sound, and I cannot breathe.

“What?” he says. “Do you know something?”

I know nothing. This is his fear, I cry to myself. It can’t be true. It isn’t true.

“What is it?” he says.

I can barely shape words now. “Tell me your worry. Now. Please. I have this thought. A terrible thing. Tell me.”

God forgive me, all I want to do is put these things aside and touch her. I should have done that when I first came through the door. She is a woman. She is not my child. She is no one’s child.

But perhaps no forgiveness is necessary. I haven’t figured out the months exactly, but it feels wrong. The time feels wrong. And how could we meet like this? How could we feel like this if it was true? But she deserves to know my fear. For the sake of all the love I feel for Tien, I can’t keep such a secret from her, even if it’s a foolish thing, as insubstantial as a dream I would wake from out on the road, sleeping in my rig in a rest stop in the middle of some dark night and I wake and I can’t even remember what it was only seconds ago that made my heart pound like this and made this cry come from my mouth but there is only the smell of the earth and hay and the vinyl of the truck cab and there’s just the tick of metal and a wind rush of some semi going by trying to make up time. There was never anything left of a fear like that, whatever it’d been, after I sat up and shook my head. That’s all it will take now.

I say, “When I was here during the war, I was. . with a woman.”

“With her? You mean you sleep with a Vietnamese woman?”

“Yes.”

“Was she a bargirl, this woman?”

“Yes.”

Tien draws the sheet up around her. I’ve not been looking at her body. Not till I can just put this thing away for good. But I regret her gesture now. I’m anxious to get this over with.

“That was long ago,” I say. “Please.”

“Before I was born.”

“Yes. A year before. More than that.”

“More than a year?”

“Yes.”

“Then. . Oh, Ben, I am a foolish girl.”

She throws back the sheet and puts her arms around me. I hold her close. I lay my hands on the bareness of her back.

She says, “I think a terrible thing.”

“It’s what I was thinking.”

She puils back, looks at me. “How can this be?”

“It can’t. I don’t think. I’m not sure about the time. Should we stop and figure it out carefully?”

“Why should you think this? There were many bargirls for the American imperialist army in this city.”

“Please.”

She puts her hand over her mouth. “I am sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

She lowers her face. “This time it was not the state speaking.”

“No?”

“It was my jealousy.”

“Tien. Listen to me. What there is between us. . I’ve never felt this way before. Not for a bargirl. Not even for my wife.”

“Is this true?”

“Yes, my darling.”

She rises up on her knees. Her nipples pass in front of my eyes, dark in the fading light, and they stir me, instantly. I yearn to touch my lips there. And now only the tiniest dropping of my eyes and I can see her softest place. I am nearly ready to do what I should have done when I first came into this room tonight.

She says, “Hands can look alike. There are only so many hands.”

“Yes,” I say.

“With so many girls. So many. For her to be the same, the girl who was my mother, the girl who was. . What was she for you? This was a one-time girl?”

“No.”

“Two times? Three?”

I can hear her voice going tight. “Please. I’m about to turn into the evil imperialist power again.”

“Sorry.” She sinks back down to sit on the bed, though she doesn’t draw the sheet around her. I find myself trying to keep my eyes on her face once more. She says, “Did you love her?”

“I thought so.”

“Did she get pregnant?”

“Not that I know of. No. No, she didn’t.”

“Then I cannot be. . what you feared.”

“No.”

“Please,” she says. “Can we make love now?”

My hands move to hers, take them. But I remember our fingers lying beside each other last night, the moons echoing, echoing. Was Kim pregnant? “I want to be entirely honest,” I say, trying to remember when it was that Kim and I parted. “I don’t know if she was pregnant. I met her a while after I came here. Perhaps in May. When I left Vietnam I hadn’t seen her for a few months. So. . I don’t know.”

“You met her in May?”

“Yes.”

“May 1966?”

“Yes.”

“Then it was not more than a year.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Before I was born. When you slept with this bargirl.”

The thrashing begins. A physical thing, in my chest, in my throat. A thing in my head, too, now that the math has betrayed me. The two years between Tien and Kim are gone.

“I know,” Tien says. “You ask me her name last night, my mother. I tell you her name. This is a simple thing, is it not? Was this girl you sleep with named Huong?”

And now I am back to this. The thing that drove me nearly mad this afternoon. I say, “She called herself Kim,” and I watch Tien carefully. Her face instantly softens. She smiles.

She says, “You see? There is nothing to this fear.”

I have another chance, another clean chance just to go on with the rest of my life loving this woman sitting naked here before me.

Then she begins to explain her earlier words, to fix the tiniest misimpression. “I do not mean to criticize your life,” she says. “When you were here as a member. . See? I am about to speak of imperialist powers again. When you were here in 1966, you were a young man, a lonely man, a frightened man. I am glad you had a beautiful Vietnam girl to hold close to you. It prepared you for me? Yes?” She laughs lightly at this and already I am having trouble. I hear my mother’s manner in her and I’m crying out inside my head: this is not genetic, something like this, this is a learned thing. But then she laughs and she lifts her face and I even see something in her face, all of a sudden, I’m not sure what, something around her mouth, her chin, something. I turn my face sharply away from her.

I feel her hand on my shoulder. She says, “I am not laughing at you.”

“I know,” I say, moving my shoulder just a little bit, trying to make the gesture small, gentle, when it wants to be big, when I want suddenly to jump up and throw myself through that window Why? Why? It’s my imagination now, I tell myself. There’s nothing in her face. The way she explains herself can’t come from her blood. But I do say, “Was your mother ever called anything else? Around the bar?”

“I did not go around the bar.”

“You never heard a man call her. .”