Soon after I got back here to Vietnam I came to this street I once knew. It was the only one that stuck in my head after all these years. And that was because of a woman. I guess we used the word love to each other for a few months, her and me. Whatever love was for me at twenty. And there was something between us for a while. Something. But I didn’t come back here looking for her. It was just a street I knew. There were bars along here, in 1966. A clothing shop now. A noodle shop. A place on the sidewalk fixing tires. Just a street with its life out in the open like life in this city always seemed to be and it still is and I walked around here and I sat at a tiny plastic table in the open garage mouth of the noodle shop and I drank a warm Coke, staying away from the ice, and this was all I had to worry about now, the water, and I watched these people moving around and I just held still knowing that I didn’t have to be afraid about Vietnam anymore.
The water and the dogs. They always shy away as if every one of them has been beaten since birth, but I don’t trust them. They’re slick-featured, scoop-eared, more like dingoes or hyenas than like American dogs and while I was sitting there on that first day at the noodle shop, one of them sniffed by, stopping at a stain on the sidewalk and then he saw me watching him and he flinched back right away, ducking his head like I’d raised my hand to hit him. I was thinking I shouldn’t have this feeling. He’d just had it bad as a pup and I sucked back my nerves and clicked at him a little bit. He stopped at this but he was clearly not going to come to me. “Be careful of all the dogs,” a voice said and I looked up into her face.
That first moment I saw her, I flinched a little inside, her face was so beautiful. And like with all these Vietnamese, it surprised me. There’s always something floating in a Vietnamese face that you don’t expect. There was an old woman with her gums red from chewing betel leaves who’d been crouching for a long while off to my left, drinking her soup with her bowl up at her face the whole time, but once, she’d glanced over to me, just a couple of minutes before I clicked at the dog and started all this, and she smiled her bright red smile and she had a color in her eyes like when the interstate ahead looks like water and is reflecting the sky. Wet and almost blue but dark from concrete. And I thought when I saw the mama-san’s eyes that her daddy was French or something. So when there was this beautiful face before me telling me to be careful of the dogs, I wasn’t surprised by the things you didn’t expect in it. Her eyes were very dark but they weren’t so sharply lidded. They looked soft around the edge and her face wasn’t so round. She had a squareness to her jaw and a mouth that smiled now a little bit but just on one side and her skin was pale and I just eased back and thought, Holy shit this is a beautiful woman, and she said, “They might be sick.” She’d been talking English, too, with not much of an accent at all.
“Thanks,” I said, and she was moving off. Just like that. Nothing more. She was through a passageway a couple of storefronts down and gone and I sat there wondering what the hell just happened. I looked over to where the dog was and he’d taken off. I thought about standing up, about walking down to the passageway and at least looking along to where this woman disappeared, but I didn’t. The mama-san was gone too. There was the buzz and rush of motorcycles in the street, of course, and people crouching on the sidewalk in either direction, but it was the time of day in Saigon when if you’re on foot, you find some shade and stay still and nobody was near me or coming toward me and for a moment I felt absolutely alone. In the midst of this city of all places, I felt invisible, and that was a feeling I realized I wanted to hold on to for a while and so I didn’t get up. I let her face fade and I waited and I even closed my eyes.
Then there was a car horn close by. I opened my eyes and at the curb was a Renault with a Saigontourist decal across its back window and I knew she was going to appear again. And she did. Out of that passageway and across the sidewalk and into the car and she didn’t even give me another glance. So I thought, That’s the end of it. But a week later I have my hand on her naked chest and she says yes it’s okay and I still don’t move. This time, it’s from sitting there and wondering at the switchback my luck just seemed to take.
He does not move his hand when I tell him it is okay. I am ready for this moment, but he is waiting. I like this about him. He will be very gentle with me. Very slow. I listen to hear him breathe. There are still too many night sounds and I tell him, “Bring your face close to mine, please.”
This makes him cock his head, like he has not understood. “Bring your face close,” I say and he does, sliding to
me, and he thinks I want him to kiss me and I say, when he is very near, when his breath has touched my cheek, “Just there. For a moment wait please. I want to know that you are real.” He waits. He is real. I can feel his breath on me.
On the day I first saw him, I would not look at him a second time. Not straight at him. But I glanced in the rearview mirror as the car pulled away. I am a careful girl. I already acted a different way from who I am by finding some American man sitting almost directly beneath my window and speaking to him, even if it was for his own good. Now I could only see him again in a mirror, like the American legend I read, a story about a man and a woman with snakes for hair who could turn him to stone if he looked at her directly. And his face was turned this way and I wondered if he could see me watch him in this small mirror and so I looked for the dog. I feared this man might try to touch it and he would be hurt. I saw no dog and I thought that I was not really so very interested in where the dog was, and when the car began to move and the man’s face was gone, I was a little bit angry with myself for my shyness.
But I am not shy when he brings his face close to mine in my bed. I feel his breath on me and I pull back just a little bit to see him clearly. His eyes are very dark, like a Vietnamese, I think. And I am reminded of the dragon once more. There are many straight lines in the face of a dragon, square corners. Ben’s face has much of this in it. At the bottom of his face, at his jaw, there is a squareness that I think is like a dragon’s head. I am still trying to understand the story I learned from my friend inside the banyan tree. For a moment I try to see the terribleness of such a face as beautiful. I mean by this, the dragon’s face. When I feel Ben’s breath and he becomes real and when I know that this real man is about to put his hands on me and his mouth and all the secret parts of him, I do not find him terrible. But I think he can help me understand, because on this night there is something inside me that is afraid, and this is in the same moment with some other thing inside me that wants to reach to him and to put my hand behind his head and pull him to me.
I tell myself, the fairy princess loved the dragon. She loved him. There are things that frighten us for a while and then from the very strong feeling of this fear we find a different strong feeling. I lived sometimes in a room not far from this one. I was still with my mother and it was on the nights when she did not leave me with my grand- mother. I know now that these were the times when there was no all-night man from the bar where she worked. Some man may be there in the afternoon, but she did not lie naked with him through the long night till the morning, and it was those times she kept me on a pallet nearby. And when it was the rainy season I woke from the sound of thunder. The storms came in and bellowed in the air and I heard them with my ears but I felt them inside my body also, each cry. And for a few years it was like this. The cry of the thunder would carry me into my mother’s bed on the nights when there was no one else and she would hold me in her arms.
Sometimes the bed smelled very strange to me, not the smell of my mother at all, something wet, a little like the rain that was rushing outside but stronger, thicker, a smell more like brine, like the sea. For a while I wondered if she was loved by a dragon. The thunder would beat at my body and this smell was in me and my mother was naked beneath the thin silk robe she wore and she held me close and I dreamed of the dragon rising from the South China Sea and flying to my mother and loving her in some wa
y that I did not understand and then he went up into the sky because his kingdom needed him and he did not want to go but he had no choice and he rose high into the air and he cried out his pain and she felt it in her body and I felt it in my body and the dragon cast the sea down upon us to remind my mother of his love and he flew away. And so I came to love the thunder. On the nights I was with my mother, I went to the window at this call and I opened the shutter and I let the sound take me in its hands and squeeze me until I grew wet from the rain and my mother would draw me away. In jealousy, I thought. And when my mother was gone away and the rockets brought another thunder to Saigon, I would go to the windows and the sky was red and my grandmother would pull me away and tell me that there was something dangerous out there. But I still loved the sound. I loved this thing I once had feared.
I lift my hand and I put it at the back of Ben’s head and he is not wet from the sea and his flesh is not hard scaled. He is soft. His hair is soft and I let my fingers slide inside his hair and I pull him to me and he does not rush, he lets me draw him to me as slow as I wish. Then his breath is on my face and then his lips touch mine.
I have known other kisses. A boy, dim now in my mind, in those dark early years of our socialist republic, and I was sixteen and he was a guard at Reunification Hall, and he wore a uniform the color of a tree gecko, and we treaded on each other as lightly as that, like lizards. And there was Mr. Bao, who was a driver for a while at Saigontourist. He asked me one night to go to a theater that plays movies from America. It is in a long room with a distant screen and it is very dark. He asked me to go to this place because Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman would he there in a movie called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He did not speak good English and he wanted me to tell him the meaning of this title. I did not know. It was not an idiom I had studied. I said that it must be some American legend that would be made clear in the movie.
It was so dark we could not see to move once the movie began, but all around us, there were couples kissing. This is the only place in public in our city where this is possible. On the screen was a woman’s voice translating all of the speaking in the film into Vietnamese, for all the characters, both men and women. I could hear only a murmur of Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman speaking beneath this one female voice. I tried hard to listen to the American voices, but I could make out none of their words. I grew angry at the very sound of my own language. I should have felt shame at this, I think. But I cared only for these Americans on the screen. I grew more ashamed, conscious now of my secret attachment to these people. But Elizabeth Taylor was very beautiful and her husband was very harsh with her and I was concerned. He did not wish to touch her, in spite of her beauty. And he also was very angry at his father. The father wanted very much to please his son. He tried hard, I think. He was there in a great house with his son, alive, and he was trying hard, and I grew very angry at Paul Newman for not understanding.
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 Vi
etnamese 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.”
The Deep Green Sea Page 2
