Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

“I will hold my hand still,” I say. “Please do not make me let go of you.”

There is that little sound again, deep in his throat. I do not know if it means yes or no. But he says no words. I do not move my hand. My palm has grown as sensitive in its own way as the secret part of my own body, another part that I hesitate to name.

Her hand is on me and all day long I wandered the streets of Saigon, around and around, and I yearned for this moment and I dreaded this moment and my head is telling me now that it’s okay, we’ve talked this out, it’s come down to odds, that’s all, one in twenty-five thousand, as easily ignored as the possibility I’d die each time I stepped into the cab of my truck in America and eased out onto the interstate. But I can’t just go on like before. Her hand is on me and I should either touch her in return or I should tell her to stop and keep on trying to reason this out. But I can do neither thing, all I can do is say nothing and lie still and let her hand stay where it is.

But it’s clear to me that my body won’t respond. The part of me that’s still out there in the street afraid to come up to this room and face what might be a terrible thing, is glad for that. The other part, the part that desperately wants a future in this woman’s life, in her body, lifts my free hand and puts it on the top of her thigh. But can move it no farther. Tien and I lie there a long while like that. I am slack beneath her hand and my own hand is dead and distant.

Then she says, “Do you know what my sexual place there is called in Vietnamese?”

“No.”

“It is âm-d-a.o. They are two words. Âm means secret. -Da.o means path. It is my secret path. I think that is so, do you agree?”

“Yes,” I say.

“But it is not a secret for you,” she says. “To all others, yes. But not for you.”

My hand moves at last, but not to this place on her. Instead to her face. I turn her face to me and I kiss her there. On the forehead. On her eyes, which she closes quickly for me, happily. One in twenty-five thousand. I want to kiss her mouth, too. This kiss on the forehead, as sweet and soft a place as this is on Tien, is a kiss that carries the shadow of that other thing. I want to open her mouth with mine and kiss her like the woman she is — she is a woman, she is no one’s child — but I can’t, I can’t, her hand still clutches my penis softly and my kiss animates her there, she kneads me gently and I wish I could rise to her touch, I wish I could accept this secret she offers, but I am clenched there instead, from fear.

She says, “So this part of you must be a secret traveler then. Yes?”

Her voice is small and sweet and is talking around the edges of her desire for me. This pain now in me, a clear pain that has begun in my temples, will not let me answer.

She says, “Asleep at the edge of the forest. Resting for a while before pressing on.”

I finally will these words. “You know I love you.”

“I do?” She says it with the lift of a question in her voice.

“I want you, my sweet Tien. I want to be inside you very much.”

“Oh please,” she says with a rush. “I am not a girl who demands a man’s body to do this or that when I say so. Please. I did not mean to criticize the sleepy one. I adore him.”

She lets go of me and she sits up, my hand falling from her hip, my other coming from around her. She is straightening and now bending forward. She means to kiss me there, I realize. I cry out.

“Wait,” I say. I slide up to sit before her. Her face is wide-eyed with shame. I grasp her hand. “Please don’t mistake me, now. You were about to do something that. .” Her hand is warm from touching me. I have trouble saying what I know I must in order to reassure her, not because it isn’t true but because it is: I can see her in my mind completing the gesture, leaning forward and putting her lips on me there and she would kiss me with the same delicate indirection of her voice and she would be so utterly herself in that gesture and I want that very badly and that is why I can’t bear to have her do this, can’t bear to have even this image of her doing it, until who she is and who I am are clear and certain.

“You don’t like that?” she asks.

“I like it too much. Too much, my darling.”

“You are still thinking the terrible thing.”

“Yes.” And admitting it, I suddenly let all the questions back in. “The chances aren’t one in twenty-five thousand,” I say. “I found you here, didn’t I?”

“This is where I live.”

“Didn’t you say this is the place where your mother left you?”

“Yes.”

“You lived here when she was working as a bargirl?”

“Yes.”

“And where was her bar?”

“I don’t know. She never took me there. Never.”

“Near this place?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know.” I say this too loud. I can hear myself at once. She has flinched, drawn back a little. I reach to her. I take her hands in mine. “I’m sorry,” I say.

She squeezes my hands. “Ben. It is my father causing this trouble.”

I can’t figure how to make sense of this.

“He is in this room,” she says and I go cold, the place in my head that’s been pounding goes sharp cold, mountain-pass cold.

She seems to understand. Her hands leap to my face, press at my cheeks. “No. No. I don’t mean you. His ghost. My father is dead. Please believe that. His ghost is here trying to come between us.”

I close my eyes. I’m still cold. I feel some asshole in me from Court TV boring on, filling my mouth with words when all I want in the world is just to do what Tien says, just believe her and go on with my life. I say, “I came to this street — you found me sitting downstairs — because this is where I knew the woman called Kim. This used to be a street full of bars. If your mother worked near here, then the chances turn into something really troubling.”

No worse than that I’ll have cancer growing in some part of me in the next twenty years, no worse chance than that, and I never think about that possibility: this is how I argue back. But I can’t get warm again. I begin to shiver.

Tien leans forward and puts her arms around me. I say, “I have to know.”

“How?”

I don’t know for a moment. My mind thrashes its way toward obvious answers. “There are tests.”

“You mean tests of the blood?”

“I think those are too broad. They won’t tell us for sure. There are others.”

“My darling, this is something I cannot say in my job, but we are in my bed naked, so I think it is okay. We do not have even enough medicine in Vietnam. We do not have enough doctors. We do not have laboratories for these things. I doubt we could even do the test of the blood. But surely not something more difficult.”

I bow my head, close my eyes, focus on the stretching at the back of my neck. I think, How fragile these bodies are.

“There is one way,” she says. She lifts at my face with her hand. I yield. Her eyes are very dark. The light is almost entirely gone from the room and the neon has not started up outside. She asks, “We must do this?”

I try once more to shake this thing off. I lift my hand. I touch her cheek. I think about kissing her mouth. Here in the gathering dark. The path is so secret that only she and I will know. Everyone I know in my life but her is an ocean away. All the Vietnamese on their motorbikes rushing past out in the street are ignorant of us, utterly ignorant. And if her father’s ghost is in this room with us, then at least he isn’t me. I bend to her. I bring my mouth to hers. Slowly. I feel her breath on my upper lip. Then we touch. Soft. And I hope she is right. And I think — part of me does, in this good moment, it thinks — she is right. But the very sweetness of this kiss makes me let it go and I pull back just out of the touch of her breath and I say, “Yes. I must know.”