The Deep Green Sea (16 page)

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.”

Do I even know myself how much I love this man? Until this moment I do not. I say, “I think my mother maybe has returned to her home village. It is near Nha Trang. We can try to find her.”

He sits back. His face, though I cannot see it clearly now in the darkening room, seems suddenly blank. He does not want to do that any more than I do, I think. This makes me happy. Whoever this Kim might be, he does not want to see her again.

Though she is not my mother. She is not. This is something I still blame on my father's ghost. He puts all these confusing things inside Ben and me.

And then suddenly there is one more confusing thing. I have spoken of my mother's village to Ben without thinking, because it is true that she could easily have gone there, because if he must have some proof that is not in his own heart about this, then to find her is the only way. But I think now: Is she alive?

Sometimes in these past nineteen years I have won­dered this. I did so when I served tea to Ben, his first time in this very room. But when I am thinking I will never know for sure, I will never see her again anyway, it is a distant idea. But now it comes to me very strong. She might be dead. And I argue with myself. She was not harmed by my government. I know that. None of the prostitutes for the Americans was harmed, not even here in Ho Chi Minh City, where some of them shamelessly remained and offered themselves to the liberation forces. These women simply were sent to be reeducated and none of them
was harmed. And my mother would—I don't even know for sure how old she was when she left me; no more than thirty, I think—­she would be perhaps fifty years old. No more. Perhaps still less. Not a woman ready to die of her years.

But she never came back. Even when it was clear—and it was quickly clear—that no harm would come to her, she never came back. She never even wrote a letter to my grandmother and me. She might be dead.

I feel a sudden chill. Not in me. In the room. I turn my face to look. There is nothing. The dark. The faceless shrine across the way.

“Do you think she might be there?” This is Ben's voice. He sounds very far away.

“Yes,” I whisper and I listen for her. She might be in this room. It might be her jealousy, not my father's, causing this trouble.

“You haven't seen her since . . . ?”

I am hearing these words, I am even hearing the way he does not finish his sentence so that it becomes a question to me. But I am still straining to feel if she is in this room. I do not answer.

“Tien?” he says.

I turn to him.

He says, “If you don't want to do this, I understand.”

“Do?”

“Find your mother.”

“You have decided you need this thing?”

“I don't know. I want to just forget all this. I do. I want that more than anything. Just to touch you now.”

He says this and I am watching his eyes. They do not move to my body, though I am still naked before him. And I know we must go to Nha Trang. The chill is inside me now. I am very conscious of my body. In the old way. I shrink before him even though he is looking only in my eyes. I fold my arms across my chest, hiding my nipples.

He says, “You haven't seen her since you were a child?”

“Eight years old,” I say.

“Can you do this?”

“If it means we can love each other again. Yes.”

“I love you now,” he says.

“You know what I am saying.”

“Yes,” he says, and he looks away, toward the window.

I rise. His face suddenly turns pale red, as if he is blush­ing from the sight of me. But it is the neon that has come upon him like a ghost, from the outside, from the hotel across the street, lighting up for the night. Still, I find that I am hoping Ben will keep his eyes turned away from me until I cross the floor and disappear into the bathroom.

I turn my back to him and move away and my flesh crawls with the desire to be hidden. This makes me very sad. I try to feel if my mother is here with us. Before me, the bathroom door is ajar and the light from the bulb is spilling out. I stop. As much as I want to leave Ben's sight for now, I stop. I think it is her. I think I am her child again and she is there, behind the door, staying quiet, consider­ing her spoiled life without my eyes upon her, perhaps staring into her own eyes in the mirror, like she did years ago, and she has come back now, to
make trouble. I am afraid that all I have to do is touch the door and it will swing open and she will be there, her face turning to me.

But I am no longer her child. I am no one's child. If she is there, if her ghost has spun itself into something visible and is waiting for me, then I am happy for that. We will finish with this right here.

I step to the door and I open it fast. The bathroom is empty. My silk robe dangles on a hook on the back of the door. I take it down and I put it on. As soon as I do this, I feel better about my body, and as soon as I feel better about my body, I want to be naked again for Ben.

This is a very odd time for me.

But I draw the robe tight around me and I tie the belt and I do not like this bare bulb light. I step in and reach to it and I pull the chain. The darkness feels like a kiss on my eyes. I want it to be Ben's lips.

I come out of the bathroom and there is a shape in the dark, in the middle of the dark, and I fall back and it is large, filling the room, and I almost say aloud, Father, but the shape speaks, “What is it?” and it is Ben.

“I thought you were a ghost,” I say.

He comes closer. I am glad now I did not speak. I wish I had left the light on. I want to see his face. I love his face. But the only light is the neon behind him and his face is dark and ringed in red, like the aura I have read that people give off, the living ghost we carry around. Though I cannot see them, I could find his lips if I wanted to. But I know we must do this thing first.

I say, “You want to hire a Saigontourist guide for a road trip to Nha Trang. Yes?”

He does not say anything for a moment. I begin to hope that once we are away from this room, away from the spirits here, he might find the answer in himself, we might go to Nha Trang and simply swim together in the South China Sea without having to do more.

I say, “It has a very beautiful beach.”

He says, “Can you arrange this tour?”

“Yes.”

“Will it be . . . private?”

“My driver will be happy to have a secret holiday. Yes.”

He is silent again. I am suddenly restless in my hands: they yearned to touch him tonight but they know it will not happen.

Then I say the thing that I want to feel but do not. “There is no reason to be afraid.”

He says, “I can't tell you how sorry I am to put you through this.”

I know what he means but I am not ready to think how it might be to find her. So I push the thought of this away from me, as I have done for all these years. I will simply let him be sorry for leaving my bed tonight.

“You will go to your hotel now?” I ask.

I hear him draw in a breath at this. It had not occurred to him yet. I grow a little impatient: it must be so, my Ben; you have led us to this; just accept it now and go. But I do not even come close to speaking these words aloud.

His shadow grows larger and he takes me in his arms and he lifts my face and kisses me on the lips, and though the kiss is brief, I feel if he lets go of me now, I will fall to the floor.

“When will I see you?” he asks.

“Tomorrow at noon in front of Ho Chi Minh,” I say.

“The statue?”

“If you can find Uncle Ho himself, I will meet you there instead. He is very wise. Maybe his ghost can save us a trip.”

Ben laughs softly and I laugh too, though I think I hear a little anger in me when I say that, but I am glad if he thinks only that I am a great kidder.

Then he is gone.

Outside her door I take a step and another and another and my legs are trying to throw me down and I lean against the balustrade on this long back balcony and I'm in front of somebody else's doorway, Tien's neighbor, and the door is open and a dim light is burning and there's a smell of kerosene and a wet, soupy smell—fish sauce and some cheap part of a pig—something like that, a food smell that's suddenly mixed up with an image of Kim, the smell in a back alley like this coming in through the window while I'm naked with Kim and it's been all these years and she's near me now and it could be in a room in this very alley, along this very common balcony, the place where I went in to make love for the first time. I press on. Another doorway standing open, a woman combing her hair out, long and dark, right now, not the past, I try to move faster, keep my eyes before me, and Kim is combing her hair before her dead grandfather's shrine and I am waiting naked on her bed.

I go down the twisting staircase, holding on tight, and I can see myself coming up metal stairs just like these, Kim climbing a step ahead of me, her sweet cheeks swaying in my face, making my hands itchy, the night smells of Saigon around us, wood fire, incense, alley rot. I'm moving away from Tien's rooms and all of this is coming back and I don't want to touch Kim, not even in my memory, I try to take the covers in this memory and pull them across my body as she combs her hair, but I can't, it's already happened, whatever it was between me and this woman whose name may not even have been Kim, it's happened and there's no taking it back and when I go there in my memory, as I'm doing now, trying to hurry along this alley, I can't cover myself, I remain naked and she crosses the room and I must pull her down to the bed with me, I must put my mouth on hers, I must feel her hand cup my penis, I must rise to her touch instantly.

I grab at my head with my hand, squeeze tight at my temples. She will go away for good when I know who she is. Or who she isn't. I'm out of the alley now and down the way is a pedicab and I move toward it and then I stop. I think that something here will tell me. I'll look closely and it'll be the wrong street altogether, the wrong part of town, the chances will turn long again. Another moment
in a dark and distant night: I step down from a pedicab and I'm in front of a bar and I let myself be there, I try to see what it is in the window. Two Vietnamese words in neon, I think. Some of the bars had American names but not this one. This is the bar where she works and I can't remember the Vietnamese name for it. I look now and there's only the flickering fluorescence in the noodle restaurant, the tiny plastic tables in front ringed by the shapes of people eating. Was Kim's bar near the mouth of an alley like this? I try to look as I stand before the pedicab in my memory, but I can't see. The place floats in my head with nothing around and Kim is in the doorway, her face dark, the light from inside the bar ringing her head in gold. Was this the first moment I saw her? Hey GI, she says. Come in drink beer with Vietnam beauty, she says. My name Kim, she says.