Robert Butler: The Deep Green Sea

These thoughts were in me when Mr. Bao’s hand came and turned my face to him and he put his lips on mine. At the touch of his lips, I felt only a hard little knot in my chest. I pulled back. He said he was sorry and I said that it was okay and we both looked at the screen. I wanted to jump up from my seat and scream at Paul Newman to go to his father and embrace him. He is your father, I would cry, you should he grateful to have his love. And then I would tell Paul Newman to go to his wife and do what she desires. People should touch when they are in need. And I heard these words in my head and I felt Elizabeth Taylor’s pain as my own and I looked toward the darkness where Mr. Bao was sitting, hurting still from my coldness.

And so I took my hand and I turned his face to me once again and we kissed some more, though I wondered at this thing, why people sought it so, and then time went on from that night, and eventually we were in the bed in his rooms, and with each touch between us, the thing I wanted so much to feel murmured beneath our acts like the voices of the American actors in the movie, saying things I wanted to hear but being drowned out by this other, too-familiar voice. And I lay beside Mr. Bao afterwards, and all the voices were silent, and when he coughed softly I was startled, because I had forgotten that he was there.

So I rose up from that bed and left Mr. Bao and after that I have not touched a man. I have been free to do so. But I have chosen not to. I have taken my place in the state, working for Saigontourist to show the truth of how we live to those from other countries that come here. And until this moment, this is how I live. When I do not work, I have some girlfriends and we go to a movie or to a park or to a restaurant or to karaoke or to the show at the theater that was once the French Opera House and was then the national assembly building of the puppet government of the divided Vietnam. Or I sit alone in this room and I read a book or I listen on the radio to the classic Vietnam opera or I say prayers and light incense for the soul of my father.

These prayers I say every night. I am a modern girl of a great socialist state but I am not a communist. Not so very many Vietnamese are communists. I can still pray for the spirits of the dead like my mother and my grandmother taught me. I pray for my grandmother, too, but the ancestor shrine that sits against the wall next to the window has one careful purpose and that is to receive the prayers for the soul of my father, a soul that I have always understood to be suffering terribly in the next life and in great need of these things I offer him.

And when I lie down in my bed and it is night, there is still the smell in the air of the incense I have burned for him. I lie in my bed and sometimes I wear a silk robe and sometimes I am naked. I lie in my bed for all these years that I have been in this room as a woman, and I always lie alone until this night when Ben touches me for the first time. But it was not clear to me how alone this was until Ben came to me. I did not feel how painful all the nights without him have been until he was here. This is a strange thing to me. As Ben kisses me and I feel he is here with me and I feel that no one has ever been here until this moment, I think that perhaps my father has always protected me from that pain. Perhaps what I gave to my father’s soul, the company of my prayers, he always gave back to me. This is what I think as Ben kisses me. And I may seem shy still, as I think too much of Mr. Bao and Elizabeth Taylor and my friends who go with me to restaurants and fill the air with empty words, and I do not concentrate on the feeling of his lips on mine. But it is not shyness. There is at this moment the smell of incense in my room. His lips are upon me and I smell the smoke of my father’s soul.

My first time in this room, she asked me if I could wait for a few minutes. She said it was her custom to pray at a certain moment of the day, as soon as she came home, and she felt that the soul who was in her care knew that. “He is waiting,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. I didn’t mention it at the time hut I was just happy to be here with her in a private place at last. She could do what she wanted, if she’d just let me hang around her.

There wasn’t much furniture. It would have been a natural thing for me to sit on the bed to wait, but I didn’t. I sat on a straw mat instead, before a low, black lacquer table with inlaid white cranes.

We’d just spent the day together. The previous afternoon I’d waited in front of the noodle shop to catch sight of her again, and the Saigontourist car finally arrived. She got out, dressed in the same white blouse with a big bow at the throat and tight skirt cut down to her knees that she’d worn the day before. She was clearly a guide of some sort. I’d been waiting a long time and I was caught off guard now. She was going to dash across the sidewalk and disappear before I could even rise to my feet. But she saw me and hesitated. She looked over her shoulder — I think to see if the car was gone, and it was. Then she came toward me. I stood up.

“I’ve been staying away from the dogs,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “But you came back here.”

“Yes.”

“Is this place in the guidebooks now? I have thought it is a place where only a Vietnamese would eat.”

“Oh, it’s very good,” I said. I tried to read her tone. Did she know I was waiting for her and she was flattered and was flirting with me? But I couldn’t catch that in her voice. It almost sounded as if she was really trying to get a fix on this noodle shop.

Then she asked, “Was it a coincidence that you are here when I am coming home from work?” She was still deadpan. I was very conscious of her being a young woman working for a communist government. But her eyes were bright and they seemed happy to stay fixed on me.

“Did I look surprised to see you?”

She wrinkled her brow at this, trying to remember. “I should have noticed that. I might figure you out without even asking.”

I said, “I don’t think I looked surprised.”

She nodded and her eyes didn’t leave me. “Is there some other sign I should be seeing?”

“I’ve been here about three hours. But that wouldn’t show.”

She looked past me to the little table where I’d been sitting. There were half a dozen empty bottles. Three beers, three Cokes. I’d started with the beer, but I didn’t want a buzz on when I saw her again. I wanted to have a clear head for her.

“Yes. Maybe it shows,” she said.

I wanted to explain about the beers, but I just felt myself grinning at her like a fool. It was clear to me now that, deadpan though she was, she was playing with me, and I wanted to keep that going. But all I could think of was something sincere. I said, “I wanted to see you again.”

This made her eyes break with me. She looked down, her face dipped, and I thought I’d made a bad mistake. But she came back to me. Only a moment later she came back. Her eyes were on mine again and she said, “Why is that? There are many girls in Ho Chi Minh City for you to look at.”

I had no answer for that question. She was right, of course. But it had never really been like that for me in my life, always flashing on some woman or other, instantly, though if you believed most of the guys I’ve been around, that’s the way the world works. And there was something there between this woman and me, even as we stood on the sidewalk in front of the noodle shop talking around it. There was something right away, and somehow our eyes knew it while our brains didn’t. Finally I said, “No one else cared about saving me from the dogs.”