The Deep Green Sea (12 page)

“Is it okay?” she asks. “That I touch you?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Will we sleep now?”

“I think so.”

“Can you say this thing once more before we do?”

“Yes. And you?”

“I will.”

“I love you,” I say and I know I mean it, though this time the words come hard. From this sudden weariness. From that, I decide, because I feel the deep sea-wave of sleep rolling under me and lifting me into the dark and I don't even hear her say the words back to me.

And I wake in bright sun. I remember a brief moment when she kissed me good-bye. She was up early for her work and I was deep in a dreamless sleep and her lips woke me, on my cheek, on my brow, then on my mouth and I put my arm around her and she was in Saigontourist clothes and I smelled her makeup and she said, “I will come to you this evening.” Then she was gone and I blurred back into sleep.

And now I'm awake and it's late in the morning. The roar of motorbikes fills the room and I sit up. The sheet is twisted away from me and I'm naked and I think of Tien's kiss, how she might have seen me lying here in my naked­ness. I stir at this. And at once my hands go out to the sheet and scrabble at the knots and pull the cloth over me. This odd surge of modesty in an empty room seems to come directly from my hands and I look at them as if they could explain.

Then I try to doze again, but I cannot. I rise up finally and I am naked for a moment in the middle of the room, in the sunlight, and again I feel unsettled by this, again my hands drive me to cover myself. I put on my pants and my shirt and I'm breathing hard. Like I'm on a drug or something. Like something is in my body. I look around as if there'd be some proof from the night before. A mirror on a tabletop and a dusting of powder, the butt end of a reefer. Something. Anything. Though I know we weren't even drunk, Tien and me. I know there's been nothing in this room but the feeling between us. And that is unaffected by this sudden mood. I see her silk pantaloons on a chair and these same hands of mine that have wanted to cover me stir now with the memory of her skin on their palms, they feel the cool run of her flesh on them, right now. But still there is something.

I finish dressing and go out of her rooms, closing the door softly, leaning there a moment, wondering at all of this. And then I go along the outer balcony and it smells of fish sauce and wood fire and there's a jumble of red tile roofs and straw mats and hanging laundry and the clucking of chickens from somewhere down the alley, and as I pass by an old woman crouching near the metal circle of stairs, she nods at me and puts a fold of betel leaf in her mouth.

I go down the stairs and out into the street and I seek the sun, stay out of the shade. I walk along the street for a long way in the sun, taking it in hard and straight on my face and my arms, trying to sweat this feeling away. Then at last I hail a pedicab and the driver asks where I want to go and I don't know. I think of my hotel, but I don't want the empty room again, the empty bed, the paddle fan moving the wet air, and so I say the Hotel Rex, which is down near the circular fountain at Le Loi and Nguyen Hue.

I sit in the pedicab's open chair, the driver out of sight behind me, and there is nothing before my eyes but the street full of Vietnamese people rushing past on their motorbikes and I move as if in a dream, floating in this street that looks just like it did years ago, in 1966. How many years ago? I shape that question in just those words in my head and I expect it simply to be the prompter of a bit of elementary math—I'm talking to myself in my head in some simpleminded way—but with that question comes another question and it surprises me, it's unwilled, it's from some ongoing self-interrogation that's deeper, darker, and the question is: how old is Tien? Why should the one question lead to the other? I pose this to myself and do not want an answer, I lean forward, try just to float here in this street, like in a lovely dream, yes, try to sense the tamarind trees joining overhead, try to drift through their shadows knowing I can wake at any moment, but she's on my skin, this woman I love, she's burning in me like incense, and the question slides forward again, even though there's no past to reckon with, all the women I've ever known, as few as they are, have faded from me, it's as if they never existed, and she has said I love you to a man three times in her life and it was only me, I am that man. Except the math is this: twenty-eight years. She can be very close to that age and it has been twenty-eight years since I've been in these same streets, since I've gone to a bar in the very street where Tien once lived with her bargirl mother.

Her mother Huong. The woman I met and loved was Kim. Perhaps Huong's friend. Perhaps there was this wonderful crossing of paths. Perhaps one hot afternoon I was drinking in the bar with Kim and she drifted to the back of the place, to the little room behind a curtain, where they kept a shrine with incense and fruit for the woman who once owned the bar, a woman killed one night on the street in front by a drunken Army man, and her picture was there in the center of the shrine—I remember her now, her face in a photo in the center of the shrine—and she had no family to pray for her and so her girls prayed for her, my Kim and all the other girls, and perhaps one hot afternoon the girls curled up in the booths and in the back room and took their naps but Kim was with me and so she stayed awake, drinking with me, and she stepped through the curtain and perhaps Huong was there. Perhaps I followed Kim and before me was this other bargirl whose name, Huong, I've long forgotten, and perhaps her blouse was open and a baby girl was nursing at Huong's nipple, an infant, and perhaps this infant was Tien.

I float now in the shadows of the tamarinds with this thought. The girls in white ao dais race past on their motorbikes and I close my eyes and I cannot remember such a thing happening, the nursing baby at the breast of Kim's friend, but it might have. I could have stood before Tien's mother with my own bargirl lover and seen the infant Tien suckling at a breast that I might have paid to suckle at, easily, if I had not been with Kim instead. And at this thought I feel a sweet rush of guilt. Sweet, yes, sweet. Sweet with relief. A thing like this is what has been troubling me. A thing like this. I am this much older than Tien. I have been this sort of man, who has paid to sleep with a woman like her sort of mother. Sweet guilt. These are my sins. Only these.

I pass him in the street and he does not see me. I am in my Saigontourist car with Mr. Thu the driver and in the backseat are a man and woman who are husband and wife from Germany. Ben is in a xich lo and a very old man is pedaling him through the street. I see him and I am in the middle of telling the German couple something or other about Ho Chi Minh City and I stop what I am saying right away. I turn to see my Ben who is leaning forward in his seat and his eyes are closed so that he does not see me and the old man is wearing a straw hat and I begin to roll down my window. I would put my body halfway out of the car and call to my Ben, but he is gone too soon, the window is not even all the way down. I laugh. He was looking so sweet, his eyes closed, and I think that his thoughts are about me.

I turn to the German couple. We are speaking English because they speak it well and so do I and our German-speaking guide is off with a busload from Berlin, and I say to the man and the woman, who are perhaps fifty years old, “I am sorry. I saw someone I know passing by.”

They nod and look out the window as if they would recognize right away who I mean.

“It is a man,” I say and the German woman turns her face to me and smiles.

I want to say to her, I know what you feel with this man who sits beside you. We are women, you and I, and we lie with a man we love and we open our bodies and we love these men with some parts of us that only they know about and I think that they do not even know that they know.

I want to say these things to her as we smile at each other, one woman to another woman. But instead I say that in the two thousand square kilometers of Ho Chi Minh City, more than five million people are living. Her smile fades and she looks at me thoughtfully. Her hus­band is looking at me now again, too. I am trying to be the tour guide once more. I think of those five million people and I want to speak of the great advances in housing and employment that our revolutionary government is making but I am really thinking of the half of those five million who are women and how they must all yearn to have what I now have, this kind of love. I look at this German woman's face and she and her husband are sitting with a wide space between them, each pressed against a window, and I have not seen them touch on this day, though we have been in the Ben Thanh Market and in a pagoda and in the Military Museum where a man and a woman who loved each other very much would surely think to touch, since the museum itself—I am ashamed to say this but it is true—is very boring. And I think that no one in this city, not one of the two and a half million women here, or any of the women in Germany either, for that matter, has ever felt what I am feeling. But they want to, they want the secret places of their bodies to feel as sweetly sore from the attentions of love as mine does, they want their breaths to catch as mine does and their bodies to strive to leap through a car window as mine does at the sight of the man who has lain with them, even if he is gone in a moment and he is dozing or dreaming in the care of an old man with a straw hat. That such an odd and simple thing as this should bring such joy, they must all want that and not be able to have it. That is perhaps a selfish and reactionary thing to think, but in this moment it seems true or else these two people in the backseat would be pressed against each other even then and every woman
on the street would be rushing in wild distraction to leap into the arms of the man she loves.

But, of course, I am doing no such thing at the mo­ment. I laugh at myself for all these thoughts. The hus­band and the wife both wrinkle their brows at me.

“I am sorry,” I say.

For a moment I have no idea what to do with my body. I stand before the Rex Hotel and I should he doing something, I should turn one way or another and I should make my legs move, I should go somewhere, into the hotel, perhaps—I think I came here for the rooftop bar—or off in some direction along the street, perhaps now back to my own hotel. But I have no impulse at all. Nothing. I do ache for the night to come and to be back in Tien's bed. That's very clear. But all the moments between this one on the street and that one, still hours away, are unimagin­able to me.

And still, I know that things are much better inside me. That's the very reason I have this sudden emptiness. The thing that had been growling in the dark in me is silent, but the guilt that took its place was an old one and faded away at once. I'm not proud of the way my life has gone. I knew that long ago. So if Tien in some strange way was present in the past I'm ashamed of, then that's okay. If she was, she was there as a brief glimpse of a purity and innocence that would someday return to me in the form of a woman and make me whole.

And standing on the sidewalk on this morning in Vietnam in 1994, I think: what it must mean is, I've been for­given. If there is some higher power in the universe that gives a damn about guilt and shame and forgiveness, then surely for Tien and me to be brought together like this and to be made to touch like this and to feel like this—especially if she's the child of a bargirl herself, especially if I saw her for one ignorant moment in that former life of mine—if such a power exists, then surely, for all this to happen, it shows that I've been forgiven.

This is what I think for a few sweet moments. And then I decide to go back to my hotel and lie on my bed and think about Tien until it is time to go to her again. And so I cross the street into the plaza before the Rex. A photographer lopes up and motions for me to turn so that the City Hall and Ho Chi Minh's statue will be behind me and I wave him away. A girl with handfuls of postcards takes his place, following me step for step as I move down the plaza now, heading for the fountain at the traffic circle, and I wave her away too. And then the little man with the mustache is at my side and I recognize him as the pimp on the motorcycle and he's speaking low to me.