The Deep Green Sea (21 page)

He moves quickly now, almost running, and I run with him and all I am thinking is my stockings should go to hell, my life has changed, and now all that I regret about my clothes is that I have not stripped them from me.

We are at the waterline, the waves bubbling and swiping at us, and we turn to the north, where there is not even a hint of a distant figure, and we move together by the South China Sea and the water splashes up our ankles and I say, “Wait.”

We stop, and again I look ahead, and behind, and even the speck that might have been a person to the south is gone, and to the west there are only dunes and rocks and the creep of the mountains toward the sea. We are alone. So I lift my skirt, and I find the rim of my panty hose with my thumbs, and I grasp only the hose and not my panties underneath, and I strip them down and roll them soggy and ragged off one foot and then the other and my thighs and my legs and my ankles and my feet are naked, and I throw the panty hose into the sea—let some crab inhabit them—and I let my skirt back down to where it was. I look and Ben has squared around to watch this. He lifts his eyes to mine and he smiles and then I gasp as he falls forward and he is on his knees before me and he lifts my skirt again and he bends and I feel his lips on one knee and then on the other and I lift my face to the hunch of the distant mountains and my skirt climbs and he kisses one thigh and then the other. My hands fall to the top of his head, but lightly, so as not to discourage him. I wish now I had stripped off the panties as well. I do feel a pressure there, on that most tender of spots on my body, his mouth is there, but I do not feel the flesh of his lips on me. I lift my hands from his head, ready to take this barrier from between us, but he rises and his arms are around me and I am in his arms and his mouth is on my mouth, briefly, and then he has turned again, taken my hand again, and a great surge of the sea bumps us, rises quick up my leg, floats my hem, jealous, I think, of Ben's kiss, wishing to kiss me there, too, and we try to stay on our feet, from the nudging of the sea, and Ben laughs and lets go of my hand and moves on ahead.

I know I am to follow, but this sudden vision of him, his whole body at once, moving, is a rare thing for me. I have seen him very close up far more often. The sea runs away from me, too, and I move after Ben, but slowly, angling up the beach a bit, letting him go. He loves the water. I can feel this in him. He is twenty or thirty meters ahead of me now, slowing, watching out to sea. The fishing boats are tiny, about to disappear, the sound of their motors has dwindled into silence.

And now his shirt is off, flying back behind him up the beach. And he is stripping his pants down and my breath catches, I think to do this too, throw off my clothes and run to him, but I am still loving to watch, and he strips off his underpants and my Ben is naked and his shoulders are broad like the hills at the turn of the beach and his back is straight and his bottom is small and my hands stir, this is a part of him I have not seen yet, really, and I want to lay my palms on this sweet part of him, and he is striding forward now into the water.

He has not looked back to me. He is thigh deep in the water and now his bottom has disappeared and he is pushing hard and he still has not looked over his shoulder—it is like he has forgotten me—and something dark comes into me, an old thing, and he falls forward and I see the flash of his arms and his legs and he is lifted by a wave that does not break and he falls and he is still swimming and I know what the dark thing is, it is the dragon, how he missed his kingdom in the sea and one day simply was gone. The princess—who was his wife and the mother of his children—woke and he had gone back to the sea.

I want to cry out to Ben. I take a step forward. He is far out now—how quickly he seems to have gone—he rises on a distant swell and the swell falls and I do not see him. He has vanished. I cry out at last, a pitiful sound, a tight pathetic sound that no one can hear, and I am rooted where I am, I cannot move and I am clothed tight and I am suddenly alone. I keep my eyes fixed there, where he was a moment ago. I wait. I wait. The sea swells again and falls and there is foam and breakers and there is a vast sky, going dark, going very dark, and still Ben does not reappear. He is gone. I touch my belly. I press there. I do not want our child to follow him.

Then his head—far away—appears in the sea. He shakes his head sharply, clearing water from his face and now I can see him looking to the shore, he is looking for me. I lift my arm, I wave, and his arm comes up from beneath the water and he waves, and then he disappears again. But before the darkness can clutch at me once more, his body comes up and he is swimming, fast, lifting with a swell and speeding in and then dropping, but I can see him instantly again, and he swims and rises and falls, over and over, and now he angles upright and he is wading toward me, the water to his chest and then to his waist.

I am quaking again, for it is time. I have not looked at this part of him yet and now it is time. He moves, the water falls, a dark splash of hair appears, but the water swells, up to his chest, pushing him to me, and then suddenly the sea dips and I can see him there. Not nearly so large as it felt inside me, this part is withdrawn into the circle of the rest of him there, like a cameo, but he is coming from the sea and I know he will grow with my touch. He is striding now from the foam of the breakers and I keep my eyes on this part of him and he quakes there like this quaking inside me and he is drawing nearer and even as I am watching him, this part is changing, growing, from the touch of my eyes, no longer a cameo but a clasp now, a great clasp to connect to me and to hold me tight and to carry me along. And he stops. And I look up to his face and he is drenched and he moves his hands on his chest, as if to wash himself with the sea, and he smiles at me, a soft smile that tells me we have all the time in the world, all the rest of our lives, and he tells me this so I won't worry as he turns slowly around to look out to the sea once more, before coming nearer.

And I find that I am moving toward him, faster, and I am yanking my skirt up to my waist, and I leap up onto his back. I throw my arms around his neck and I hook my legs around his waist and he laughs a loud, sharp laugh of surprise and his wrists come under my knees and lift at me, hold me up, and I think that one day he will carry our child on his back but for now I am glad it is me and he carries me forward and I know what he is planning to do.

I laugh, and I cry, “Wait.”

But he does not listen, he is going forward into the water.

“Wait,” I cry again but he can hear the thrill in my voice and he does not stop. Then I bend near, putting my mouth against his wet and salty ear. I say, “Don't you want me to be naked?” He stops. I am very conscious of those places where our flesh is touching. Beneath my leg, along my thigh, my forearms against his chest.

He turns and he wades toward the shore and I cling tight to him and for a moment I think I know what it feels like to have a father. I am small upon him and I am glad for that because the way he is big makes me safe and makes me loved and makes it so that I am not alone, and these are good things, but I am more glad for my thighs clutching his naked sides and more glad that my true father is nothing but smoke and air and I am more glad for where we are heading, out of the water now, and he does not stop, he is heading for the top of the beach and a stretch of low scrub grass there, before a dune. And beyond, the only light in the sky is spread along a jagged line of mountains and the light has turned red and we are in the dark shadow of the dune and he puts me down on the grass and my hands go to work instantly at my blouse, the buttons, the bow, it is off me and he is before me as I am doing this and watching my hands, watching what will be revealed beneath them. The blouse is gone and then my bra and he smiles at my nipples and the skirt is gone and my panties and then we are on the grass and my hand goes to this part of his body that at last I can see in my head and it is ardent now for me, unimpressed and withdrawn as it was with the sea, and if I am so much more exciting to his body than the South China Sea, I have no right to delay him, for I am rich with my own inner sea and I will drench and wash him now and I draw him into me right away, my Ben, my love, he will come into this place where our child has begun to grow.

How good it feels inside her, how good, there will be many more nights to go slow but on this shore on this night she wants me inside her quickly, she draws me there with her hand, and I move onto her and I look at the sea and the moon is out there, I didn't notice it before, though it's been there all along, hiding in its paleness, not showing itself, but now the daylight is almost gone and the moon has appeared, fat and golden.

I look at her face beneath me and her eyes are open and she is Tien, she is herself, I move in her and there's nothing here to fear at all. I am up Highway One in Vietnam and this alien sea lies beside me and on my skin, and there is nothing of war, nothing of death, nothing of the past, there is only this joining of me and this woman, this Vietnamese woman, this woman I love, and I am at peace.

And then I rush and she digs hard at my back and her lips are against my ear and she cries out softly there, and only now are we related, only now, only this way, as we share one body, and then we slow and we stop and we lie still. Though I shift and am no longer inside her, this feeling between us does not change and she curls against me and I hold her, and for a long time, we lie still.

And the sky goes black and bursts with stars and the moon rises and grows small but it turns so white it almost hurts my eyes. I think she sleeps for a while. Then she wakes with a little start. I draw her closer and she whispers, “Yes.”

“Did you have a dream?”

After a silence, she says, “In my sleep now I listen to my body.”

“What does it say?”

She is quiet again, for a long while. Then she says, “What will we do tomorrow?”

“Make love.”

She presses me onto my back and crawls directly on top of me, her chest hovering over my chest, her legs hugging my sides, her face eclipsing the moon. “That is a good answer,” she says.

I can't see her eyes in the darkness, only the silhouette of her head. I lift my hand and with my fingertips I touch her lips and then trace up her check to her brow to the bridge of her nose, to her eye, feeling her eyelid close for me, I touch her there and her eye moves beneath my finger, the sign of dreaming.

I say, “Are you listening to your body right now?”

“Yes.”

She didn't answer me the last time, so I move my hand from her face to her hip and I simply wait.

“I am glad I was born,” she says.

“I am too.”

“My father is dead.”

“Yes.”

The moon flares in my eyes. Her head has moved, she slides off me now, and I can see her face, I turn to her and I move to kiss her and I see her eyes shift to me and they are black, black as the empty spaces between the stars, and I close my own eyes with the touch of our lips. We kiss and she gently ends it and I look up into the sky and draw her close.

She says, “I almost was not born. I have always thought, now and then, that it made no difference, really. Now my body tells me that it is very important that I am alive.”

I think of abortion. That her mother almost let Tien go. I want to tell her that I, too, am glad she is alive, but I sense something else running in her. I close my eyes against the brightness of the moon and I wait.

Then she says, “My mother made up a fairy tale for me once. She said it was about my father so I think there was a real story behind it. I loved a certain fairy tale of a dragon when I was a child, so she made it about dragons. In this story my father dies at the end. But it was really about
his
father, the part where I almost never was born.”

I open my eyes. I turn my face out to the sky over the horizon, away from the moon. I feel a tiny stirring in me, like the flicker of one of the stars out there.

She says, “It happened that he almost died, my father's father. And if he had, then I never would have been born.”

Something in me says to just keep quiet now But this flicker is actually a distant burning. I say, “What is the story? How did he almost die?”

“It is about a dragon—who turns out to be my ­grandfather
—who goes every day into a fiery hole where he works . . . When I start saying this, it sounds silly. I do not know what parts are real and what parts are not.”

“No,” I say, and whatever is driving me to hear this is working on its own. I feel like I've floated off a ways down the beach. I'm out taking a smoke while this other part of me does some damn stupid thing. “It's not silly,” I say. “What's the story she told?”

Tien adjusts her head into the dip between my shoulder and my chest. She says, “My grandfather's enemies try to kill him in this fiery hole. A place where he works. But he fights them and kills them instead. And it was after all this that my father is born. So you see, if he had died there instead, my father would not have been born and then he would not have gone to a distant land and met the ­princess—this was how my mother saw herself, I guess. But then I would not have been horn. And then . . .”