The Deep Green Sea

by Robert Olen Butler

  And we do not separate our bodies for a long while. At some moment we turn onto our sides, still joined, a world spinning on its axis, but we neither of us want to let go after what we’ve done, and we lie without speaking, and whenever she makes some slight movement, the shift of a leg, the slide of an arm, the tiniest adjustment of her face against my chest, it surprises me a little and then it delights me, she is someone other than me but she is me as well, I feel the movement of her body as my own movement and I am not only whole, I am multiplied, I am rich with limbs and flesh and voices.

  “I love you,” I say. I do not expect to say it, though I mean it, and I wait for my other voice to reply.

  He says the words that I realize I would myself have said in just a few moments. I pull my face back so I can look at him. His cheek is red from the neon and though his eyes are in shadow, I can see how steady they hold on me. It is very easy to find an answer for him, but I have to struggle to undo a great, hard knot in my throat in order to let my voice through. I say, “I love you.”

  “Is that true?” he says.

  “It is true.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “One of us had to say it first.”

  “I didn’t expect to say it,” he says.

  “Did you not realize?”

  “Not till I said the words.”

  “I am glad you said it first. Is that selfish of me?”

  “No.”

  “I knew my own feeling for certain, and since you spoke first, I could be certain of yours.”

  He straightens his face before mine and his eyes are very dark. “You can be certain,” he says.

  “You can be certain, too,” I say. “Of me. This is why you asked is it true. You spoke it first.”

  “I didn’t really doubt you. I think I asked you if it was true to make you say it a few more times.”

  “I can do that,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “I love you,” I say. “I love you.”

  “Is that selfish of me?”

  “No. I am happy to say it. I say it only three times in my life to a man.”

  I could sense him counting.

  “The answer is three,” I say.

  “Just now?”

  “Yes. You are the only one.”

  His eyes slide away from me and his head angles into the shadow.

  “Is there anything wrong?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, though I know there is something.

  I say, “I understand that there were others for you.”

  He nods at this, though I feel there is still more.

  I grow a little afraid. “Is there someone now?”

  “No.” He says this quickly, a hard little rock of a word, and I believe him.

  “I feel something troubling you.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s funny. The only thing I can think of that’s like this feeling is when I was on the plane that would take me away from Vietnam. You believe you’re going to die at any moment and you’ve believed it so long and so hard that it seems like you’ve always believed it. Then suddenly you know you’re going to live. That’s what I’m feeling right now.”

  I draw him to me and hold him and he holds me. We do this for a while. Then he pulls a little bit away, so he can look into my face.

  He says, “It’s been two years since I’ve touched a woman. The touching had all become so bad that I was certain I’d die from it. But I got a test and I’m okay. You can know that. I have nothing in me that will kill us from making love.”

  I kiss him briefly on the lips and I say, “If you were not sure, you would not have done this thing. I know that.”

  “How could you know that?” He asks this not like I am a foolish person. I think he wants to understand how it is that I can know to love him.

  I say, “I looked into your eyes and I saw all the gentleness I had dreamed for.”

  “You know so little of me.”

  “I could say the same thing.”

  “Ask me,” he says. “If there’s anything that might frighten you about me. Anything you want to know about me. Ask.” And he sits up to show me he is serious.

  I sit up, too, and face him. “You are free to love me?”

  “Yes. You asked that before.”

  “Have you been married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she dead?” I ask, and my face grows hot from the shame of the question. I wish for it to be so.

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t heard anything about her for some years.”

  “Did you love her very much?”

  “No. Not very much. As much as I could at the time, I guess. It was my fault. As much as I could wasn’t very much, is all. I came here, to Vietnam, and then I went home and I’d watched her when I was in high school. She was . . . I don’t know. There was something pretty about her, but not soft. That was a kind of thing that I wanted then. I’d watched her in high school and she’d watched me and I guess she saw something in me she liked, but we never got together. Then when I got back from Vietnam, she was working in a dime store and I was living with my parents and when we watched each other again, we could imagine life being better, more interesting, if we lived in some little place together. That was all. And it was better for a time. Better than the heavy days. The way the days just went on, back then. I don’t know if this means any­thing to you, what I’m saying.”

  It means something to me, I think, when Ben says all of this. I think I know about heavy days. I think it is the same for me, when I am not thinking about what I owe to the country or to the ghost of my father or to the people who come to Vietnam to understand it and I speak to them in English about what we are. In the other times, the days I do not work and my prayers are done, there is some heavy thing in the center of me. I can sit in this very room and I listen to the sound of the motorbikes going by and going by and when there is a little bit of quiet from them, there is a place in the roof of this building that catches the wind and hums a low hum and it just goes on and on and the day is very hot sometimes and I want to sweat but I cannot, my skin fills with my sweat and does not let it go, and this is all there is to my life, just these little sounds and my sweat held in and I grow sad in some dull way. I think this is what Ben is talking about. I have this feeling, too. He and I are the same. But I do not say any of this to him on this night of our first touching. There is something else that trails into my head with his wife, like the smell of her perfume. I say, “Did you have children?”

  “We were together more than ten years. But we never had a child.”

  “Can you have a child?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that. Mattie and I never checked to see what was the matter. It might’ve been me. It might’ve been her. It might’ve been we just didn’t try hard enough. We never did try, exactly.”

  We are sitting before each other on my narrow bed. Our legs are crossed and we are still naked and a feeling comes into me that I never have before. I feel that place between my legs as an opening into me, a way in. But without him inside, I sense the break of me there, and there is the flow of him, cold now, from inside me, and I close my eyes for a moment and there is a spinning in my head. His hands are on my shoulders.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  I open my eyes and things steady. “I am okay now,” I say.

  He takes his hands away and we are facing each other and I have not looked at him yet. I have not seen that special part of his body. I can cast my eyes down now, I know, and I will see, but as I think to do that, I feel the spinning begin inside again. I will wait to see him there. I will wait. It is enough for now that I can feel my own body in this new way. And there are many things I still want to know.

  “How did you de
cide it was time to stop your marriage?” I ask.

  “After I got married, I worked in the steel mill for a while. My father wanted that very badly, me to be back at the mill. So I did that. I got married to Mattie and we rented a little brick house and I took the job my father wanted for me. And nothing felt right. Ever.”

  “Did the crimes of the war bother you?”

  He looks away and I suddenly hear myself. These are true things maybe, that I was taught, but I cannot hear my own voice when I speak them, and if I am sitting naked on a bed with a man and he can look down to see this part of me that is open now, then I want to speak only in my voice. I put my hands on his shoulders, just as he did when I was dizzy. I say, “I do not think you commit any crimes. That was not the way I mean to say it.”

  He looks back at me and he smiles a little bit, but out of only one side of his mouth. I try to understand what that smile means. I say, “Whatever you did, it was your country that was the criminal.” I stop. I hear myself again. I say, “These words come out of my mouth. I do not know where they are from.”

  He touches my cheek with his fingertips. “It’s okay,” he says.

  “I do know where they are from. I have heard these things all of my life. You hear something all of your life and it makes you talk in a certain way. Even if you have just made love.” I turn my face and kiss his fingertips.

  When Tien goes into a little riff about the propaganda-talk that’s coming out of her mouth, I touch her cheek and she kisses my fingertips and I know I’m loving her more in that moment because of her self-consciousness, and my being here suddenly feels like a thing that began a long time ago without my even knowing it, like this was all set up somehow, and it’s an odd feeling, I guess, espe­cially for me to have, because I’ve never bought into all that, but I can’t shake it, this feeling. It’s like somebody’s arranged this, and I think of my mother.

  It was summer and it was late in the afternoon and my father had just disappeared down the street with his lunch box, gone till midnight. I sat on the top step of our front porch and I’d just watched him, the slow roll of his shoul­ders in his walk, until I couldn’t see him anymore. Then there was a rustle behind me and my mother sat down at my side. “He’s gone,” I said.

  She looked off in the direction of the mill and then she turned back to me and she said, “That’s okay. I have some­thing for you, anyway.”

  Suddenly there was a book in her lap. Something from the library that she’d waited till my father was gone to show me. And I can’t think of what book it was. I’m sorry, Mama, but I can’t think of any of the books, really, though I did read them for you and maybe I got some good from them. But she had a book and then she heard herself, how she’d just sounded. “I don’t mean it’s okay your father is gone. He likes books too.”

  I didn’t say anything in answer to this. And my mama never wanted to tell me lies. She was very careful about that. So she had to keep talking till things were straight. She said, “He doesn’t like them, exactly. But he doesn’t have anything against them. He just doesn’t love them like you and I do. Like I don’t love all the things to do with the mill. You and he love that together. See how many wonderful things there are about you? There’s so much more to you than anybody.”

  She went on like that, listening very carefully to every word she said, trying to correct this or that, down to the tiniest possible misimpression. She comes back to me like that, my mama, when Tien scrambles around trying to undo her words. And I don’t think I’m remembering my mother’s words from forty years ago. Not really. Not so exactly. But she comes into my head while Tien and me are sitting naked on the bed and we’ve just made love and Tien is going on in that suddenly familiar way. And I can hear my mother’s voice speaking those exact words that may not be exact at all. And she seems tangled up in all of this, somehow, maybe like she was pointing me toward the woman I would someday love.

  But I say only, “You remind me of someone.”

  “Who’s that?” Tien says.

  “My mother, for a moment.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Yes. It’s very good.”

  “It’s gone, though? That feeling is gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forgive me, but I’m glad. I like to be your lover better than a mother.”

  I laugh and put my hand on the calf of her leg. “I do too. It was never anything like that.”

  “Good.”

  “And your mother?”

  “You don’t remind me of her at all.”

  “Good,” I say. “I like being your lover better than a mother.”

  “I do too.”

  I love Tien’s play, but I’m interested now in a real answer. I say, “Where is your mother?”

  “She’s dead.” Tien says this instantly, looking me straight in the face.

  I think of Tien’s shrine. “You don’t pray for her?”

  “She’s not worth praying for.”

  I say this lie to Ben without thinking. It is very easy and that scares me.

  Then I speak a hard truth without thinking and maybe that scares me, too, because it is a true thing that I am not ready to say.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  So because I say one lie that I do not want to say, I tell him a truth I do not want to say either. “There is no reason to be sorry,” I say. “She was a prostitute.”

  “After your father died?”

  He is wanting to make excuses for her. He is asking things that make me want to lie some more. But I also feel I have to speak the truth to this man. I am sitting here naked for him. I have opened my body for him. I do not want all the lies. The lies my mother figured out for me. But to open my mouth and tell all the truth, all at once, seems a terrible thing. I have no strength for that. I try to shape the true words in my head and move them through my voice into this space between Ben and me and I feel suddenly like I am made of stone, like I have looked now at the woman with snakes for hair and all of my insides are turning to stone. But I do manage to say, “No. Before he died.”

  I hear my voice and I sound very sad. And Ben, being gentle in his way, says no more. He lowers his eyes and murmurs some quiet thing, something full of sorrow and love for me. I love him even more now. Just in these few moments I love Ben more. It fills me with the urge to speak, to have only the full truth about this between us, but it also fills me with the fear of losing him. I say nothing for a while. He says nothing for a while.

  Then he speaks. “I don’t know who were the criminals and who were the victims and even what the crime was, exactly. But I did see some very bad things when I was here. It’s funny. Those things bothered me for a few months when I first got home. But that faded away. It was very bad, but I was able to handle that. It wasn’t burning in me after those few months.”

  “That is a good thing,” I say, trying to make up for my foolish words from before. “I am glad for that.”

  “But something else took over. It was odd. It was another feeling and it didn’t burn hot but somehow burning dull made it even worse, and it never stopped. Never did. And it came from me being in the war. I knew that clearly. Because I was in the war, when I got home and faced the rest of my life, everything seemed flat, heavy. There wasn’t anything important around me. For a year, here in Vietnam, I woke up every day and I was scared and I could see people dying, or walking around and about to die, not even realizing what was next, though it was like it was all arranged somehow, because tomorrow’s death roster was going to be what it was going to be, and it could be me who was chosen, and I never lost a sense of that. And it made everything else . . . I don’t know. Clear, I guess. Strong. I felt alive when I was here. Keyed up. Back in the States I didn’t even know what being alive felt like sometimes. I’d wake up in the morning and I’d look around at the furniture and out
at a few trees in the yard and I’d look at the smoke from the mill in the sky and nothing felt like it was really there. I felt like nobody could kill me now but it didn’t mean a fucking thing.”

  He says all these things and I think I understand him. I put my hand on his leg. He puts his hand on mine and he looks at our hands together. I look down, too. I say, “You tell me things that sound true.”

  “I haven’t said these things before. Except to myself out over the road. I left the mill a few years before Mattie and me broke up and I started driving trucks. I drove a truck in Vietnam and it seemed a good thing to do at home. It got me away from the furniture. But it didn’t really solve anything.”

  He squeezes my hand and lets it go and for a moment his hand and mine lie beside each other. “Look,” he says.

  But I am already determined to say something. “My mother was a bargirl,” I say. “And I do not know if she is alive or dead. That is the truth.”

  He keeps his eyes on our hands. I do not know if he is really listening to me. His voice goes soft and he says again, “Look.”

  I do. He strokes his hand gently over mine and then lays it on me so that our fingertips are flared to each side like the wings of a bird. He says, “Our hands look the same.”

  He says it very softly. Like how sweet this is. The light upon us is red, from the neon, and his hand is very thick and strong and mine is fragile and thin, but suddenly I see what he sees. The moons are the same. That is the first thing I see. He has wide rising moons there at the bottom edges of his fingernails and so do I. Then he slides his hand until our thumbs are beside each other and they are different, of course, in some ways, but there is something else there, a squareness to them around the tip, that we share.

  “You see,” I say. “I was made for you.”

  “Yes,” he says, very quiet, still studying our hands.