The Deep Green Sea

“You don’t like that?” she asks.

“I like it too much. Too much, my darling.”

“You are still thinking the terrible thing.”

“Yes.” And admitting it, I suddenly let all the questions back in. “The chances aren’t one in twenty-five thousand,” I say. “I found you here, didn’t I?”

“This is where I live.”

“Didn’t you say this is the place where your mother left you?”

“Yes.”

“You lived here when she was working as a bargirl?”

“Yes.”

“And where was her bar?”

“I don’t know. She never took me there. Never.”

“Near this place?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know.” I say this too loud. I can hear myself at once. She has flinched, drawn back a little. I reach to her. I take her hands in mine. “I’m sorry,” I say.

She squeezes my hands. “Ben. It is my father causing this trouble.”

I can’t figure how to make sense of this.

“He is in this room,” she says and I go cold, the place in my head that’s been pounding goes sharp cold, mountain-pass cold.

She seems to understand. Her hands leap to my face, press at my cheeks. “No. No. I don’t mean you. His ghost. My father is dead. Please believe that. His ghost is here trying to come between us.”

I close my eyes. I’m still cold. I feel some asshole in me from Court TV boring on, filling my mouth with words when all I want in the world is just to do what Tien says, just believe her and go on with my life. I say, “I came to this street — you found me sitting downstairs — because this is where I knew the woman called Kim. This used to be a street full of bars. If your mother worked near here, then the chances turn into something really troubling.”

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.

I look around now. For something familiar, though I want there to be nothing. And there is nothing. Bodies move past me. Soup. Flats Fixed. A tailor’s dummy in a window. It’s all changed so much. The bars are long gone. The things that might still be the same — the alley, a balcony, a row of second-floor windows — are all a blur in my memory, or darkness. I turn around and looming over me is a big thing I should be able to remember: a hotel, the Metropole. But it’s slick and clearly new. Or maybe remade. Was there a hotel across from Kim’s bar? This feels faintly familiar. But I don’t recognize this place. As big as this thing is, I can’t say either that it was there or it wasn’t. Something like panic revs in me, like the center of my chest is the engine for all these crazy feelings and it’s revving into the red. I need to move. I need to get out of this street now, I think. But fuck that. I have to fight for Tien. If I can possibly find something that can end it here, something that will let me go back up to her now, right now, and say, It’s over, we can be lovers forever, then I have to try.

I face the shop fronts. I let myself see the past. And there’s nothing more. The street all around me is still black, like I’m passing out. There’s only the bar in front of me. I stride across this space and I’m before the woman in the door and I say in my head, You’re not Kim. That’s for the GIs. What’s your real name? She looks at me. I could have said those words at any time in those months I was with her. Just those few words and her answer — my real name is Kim — or any name at all except Huong — would put me in Tien’s arms right now. But once we were more to each other than GI and bargirl, she could have told me her real name, if it was different, without my asking. She would have done that. Surely. And she never did. Isn’t that as good? Isn’t that proof? I want it to be all the proof I need, but it isn’t.

So I turn away, I move to the pedicab and I speak the address of my hotel and we go off into the night. The motorbikes race past and I close my eyes and if the worst is true, then the last time I was with Kim, Tien was already there inside her body. I try to remember that and I find nothing. These things that remain — a moment on an iron stair, across a room, in the doorway of a bar — they’re all snapshots — like a child under a tree, looking without a smile into the camera — they have no story to them, they tell me nothing. The thing between us just died. There was no revelation in the rush of our sex, there was no connection, there was nothing, and the cute words ended, I suppose, and there may have been money again, in the transaction, and then it was over for good. She wanted to come to America. A thing I couldn’t give her. I said no. It ended like that. If she was pregnant, she would have used that to try to go with me. But she didn’t. Unless she didn’t know. But the way things were, it feels impossible that a new life had begun from what we’d done. I never went back to her. I never even went to another bar. I was dead to her and she was dead to me.

I shudder at this thought and I lean forward into the flow of the dark street beneath the pedicab. I went back to America alone and I married Mattie and I realized I was still alone and then I found my truck and the road, and on a run sometimes, I’d lean over my wheel and I’d watch the thin black track of exhaust burn on the highway as it rushed under me, and I felt it was leading me, sometimes I felt I was following this dark line into a future that held some big thing, like running after your fate instead of just driving another goddamn thousand miles one way to turn around and drive another thousand back again. There was more to me that I just hadn’t reached yet. Much more.

Then I am lying in a bed on this night, in the dark, in my hotel in Saigon, and I wait for sleep and I wait for tomorrow. I know the road to Nha Trang, know it well: Highway One, where I watched the driver ahead of me, standing by the side of the road, part of him ripped away, and he was calm, very calm, wondering where that part might be. And there is the same stunned calm in me now, I think. I watch the paddle fan spinning above me and for the first time in my life, alone is not just the place I live in, sometimes with no one around, sometimes with a truck stop restaurant full of truckers, sometimes with a woman sleeping nearby in the bed. For the first time, alone means the absence of someone else: the crook of my arm, the point of my shoulder, the skin along my hip and thigh, all feel the prickle of her absent body, the shadow of her body still pressing there softly. I know the answer to the question that I share with the guy in the scrub grass by the side of Highway One. I know where the missing part of me is. She’s in her own bed right now, in this very city. I was there tonight. And I walked out her door. Is she naked again? I am not. From fear of all this I am still in my clothes, afraid of my body now. But I can still feel her body on my skin. I’m sweating and the fan moves in the dark and I am alone.

When the door is shut, I cannot hold back my tears. For a few moments. But I stop them. I will not lose Ben. The room is dark. I go to the stand beside my bed and I turn on a lamp. The shade is thin and from the top comes light that is like the bulb in the bathroom. Is she here? Is she just out of my sight, keeping quiet? Someone knows the answer to that and I will talk to him now, as I have done every day of my adult life.

I cross to the shrine and I kneel and my hands go through the motions they know so well. I draw the box of matches from beneath the skirt of the little table. I take a match from the box and I strike it and the flame hisses itself alive and I touch the tip of the first stalk of incense, angling the match, putting the hot yellow point of the flame on the blunt edge and it begins to glow and then the incense seems to go dark, but smoke begins to rise and it is burning, I know. I do this for the second stalk and the third and I put the match flame before my lips and I blow the flame away. I drop the match beside me. I press my palms around the three sticks of incense and I pull them from the sand. I bow my head.

Father, I say inside me. Father, I am here.

I lift the incense, help the smoke go up and into the spirit world. I think of him turning his head. He smells the scent of my prayers, carried from this fire with no flame, and he moves from wherever it is that he goes in that other world — I try to see the place but there is nothing, only darkness — and he comes to me now.

I say that I think of him turning my way, coming to me, but I cannot picture his face. I have tried, often, in my prayers, but whenever I see a face, I know very clearly that it is only me, only my own construction from the faces of other men: an Italian tourist, a Russian official, Paul Newman. But though I cannot see him, he does come to me here, my father. That much I do know, also very clearly, and he is not a figment of my own mind, he is real.

Father, I say, I offer your spirit the peace that comes from the love and prayers and devotion of your child and I ask you for the harmony and the peace that a father can give to his family.

These are the words I always say, following the custom of the Vietnamese people. I am told that even some of our government officials pray to their ancestors. We are a communist country, caring for the masses according to the truths of Karl Marx, but we are also Vietnamese. I think perhaps the spirit of Karl Marx is wandering lonely and afraid in the afterlife because he and his children did not understand certain other truths. They were from Germany.

I place the stalks of incense in the sand once more and let the smoke rise on its own to carry the rest of my prayers.

Father, I say. You do not have to fear this man who loves me. I will not forget you. I say this to you, thinking again that it is you who has taken offense. Forgive me if I accuse you falsely, if it is my mother who is the jealous one. I ask you to let me know the truth. Is she there with you in the spirit world, causing this trouble between Ben and me?

I stop my own words and try to hear my father. He has spoken to me before, though not with the voice of a man. He puts his words into me whole and they grow there, from inside me. I wait for this to happen. My eyes are shut tight. There is only darkness. And the smell of incense. I am very still inside. And then I know he has told me. She is alive.

I open my eyes. I lift my face. Behind the three ribbons of smoke is the empty space where his face should be. I want to look him in the eyes so he can see my anger at him. But I have only words.

Father, I say, you must not try to make me choose. I am a living woman. Are you jealous of that, as well? You died a young man. Perhaps younger than I am now. But I have waited, Father. Until Ben touched me, no man had seen me naked in this room. Except you.

I pray these words and I stop. My face grows warm. I bow my head again but not in reverence. I am glad now not to look into his eyes. This thing that I had not thought of until today is very real inside me now, my being naked before him. And I have not told him of the two others, who saw me naked in other rooms.

I say to him, Why couldn’t you be alive? Why couldn’t you be alive and I could put the door between you and me and you could not see? And then I could dress myself and I could open the door and we could touch. You could take me in your arms. You could kiss my head. I could hold you close. I want that, too, Father. I ache for that too. But this man holds me in a different way. What we cannot have between us, you and me, is not replaced by what there is between Ben and me. I still yearn for you, Father. No less than before. See these tears streaming now from my eyes. They are for you. Not for the fear of losing Ben. For sadness at never touching you. Please take these doubts from Ben’s mind now. Take them away. Call him your son and give him the peace that a spirit owes to the family he leaves behind.

I fall silent. I wait for his answer to this. But I sense nothing inside me. He is gone. He is in some other place, far away from me.

Ho Chi Minh’s hand is on the head of the little girl. He’s in black stone, and from seeing him the other day I remember his one arm outstretched on the tree stump where he sits and I remember his arm around the girl, who holds a flower. But I’m seeing this left hand now for the first time as I wait for Tien. His hand touches the little girl’s hair and at first glance, it’s a tender gesture, a paternal gesture. But I stare at this hand as I stand here waiting for Tien, with a rush of people around me and out in the street, and the hand is bothering me. It touches lightly, open-palmed, at the back and slightly to the side of her head, as if it is stroking her there, stroking her hair. A paternal gesture, too, I tell myself. But the girl seems so deeply absorbed by the flower in her hand, unaware of this touch, vulnerable in her ignorance, and Ho is not looking at her, his face is forward and there is a darkly adult look in his fixed eyes, his faintly ironic mouth. The sculptor wanted it both ways. Ho the gentle father figure and Ho the tough, focused leader of a revolution. But this look informs his hand and I fear for the little girl and I can’t see this anymore and I find my own hands clenching, hard.

I turn away. A little girl slides past and she catches my eye and stops and she holds up a book of lottery tickets.

“You buy,” she says.

“No,” I say. “Sorry.”

“You buy,” she says, coming close. “Good luck win money.”

“No,” I say.

Her hand is on me, on my wrist. I yank the arm away.

“Go away. Please,” I say.

“Fuck you,” she says and she moves off and I rub at the place she touched, hard. Rub her touch away.

I jitter around. Move off from the statue. A man has a case opened up by a bench and it’s full of packs of cigarettes. I draw near. I haven’t smoked in years. I coughed my way one spring run from St. Louis to Denver and I stopped cold. But I want a cigarette now.

“You buy,” he says.

I look at the brands, all Chinese or Vietnamese but all of them with names in English: Lord Filter. Ruby Queen. Park Lane. White Horse. Sunny. Hero. And there’s a brand in a white pack called Memory. My hand goes out and it’s trembling. I think Park Lane was the brand name that masked the marijuana when I was here. I pass it over, though I’m sure it’s just tobacco now anyway. I take a pack of Ruby Queen and a pack of matches and I pay the man and walk away.

I open the pack and tap out a cigarette and put it in my mouth. I stuff the pack in my pants pocket and strike a match. I touch the end of the cigarette and pull the smoke in and it tastes like truck exhaust and I wait for the nicotine to kick in, to smooth out the rough spots, to steady my hand, but it only grates in me and all I’m getting is a shitload of blurry nights with a shitload of interstate exit signs drifting past in my headlights, and I flip the cigarette away.

I’m more jumpy than I was before. Then I see her crossing the street, far away, down at Le Loi near the fountain. I see her though there’s a hundred people around her and a hundred people between us. I see Tien and she’s dressed in that white blouse with the big bow and the dark, tight skirt that hides her knees. The way I first saw her.

She comes into the square and for a brief moment she doesn’t see me. I think to walk away. As connected as I am to her by my love — and I am as connected to her as I am to the limbs of my body — I almost turn and walk away fast and find some place to hide and then get the hell out of this country without ever seeing her again and never ask another question of myself about what it was that happened. Go back and get into another truck and follow the black track of the exhaust burn in my lane till I fucking die. But I’m not quite scared enough to do that.

Then she sees me and she starts to hurry, cutting through the threads of Vietnamese strolling in the square, dodging people, and she doesn’t seem to be one of them at all, she’s moving in a different way, quicker, more focused. I think: Like an American.

And she is. Half of her is. That’s already known. Watching her move like this, coming closer, is no reason for the revving to start again. I curse my cowardice. I curse these rushes of fear. I wait for her touch.

But it’s not Saigon anymore, it’s Ho Chi Minh City, and Ho is watching us and his own touch is secret, it seems to be one thing in this public place but is another, I’m certain now. Tien is here and she’s breathing heavily and our hands flap out in front of us, not knowing what to do, and I don’t quite know how it happens but our right hands connect and we shake, like two strangers meeting and introducing themselves, or maybe like tour guide and tourist. We both look down at our shaking hands and Tien laughs, though it is low, sharp, full, I think, of my failure last night.

“Hello,” she says, still looking at our hands.

“Hello.”

“This feels so strange,” she says.

“Uncle Ho is watching,” I say.

She brings her face up, glances over my shoulder. She laughs again, softer now, and then she says in a whisper, “He is easily offended.”

“Good to meet you,” I say, out loud, not letting go of her hand, playing the little game, though it’s the last thing I want to do right now. “I’m Benjamin Cole.”

“I am your guide, Miss Tien,” she says, and she bends near. She whispers again. “Does this mean we can start over?”

I know she’s asking if we really have to go to Nha Trang, if we can’t just take another tour of the city and then meet tonight and resume our love affair. But I can’t find a way to answer.

She says, “Out here. In this public place. Away from my room and all the. . things that are in it. Does it seem the same to you?”

Our hands separate. I say, “I still love you.”

“And I love you. But it is the other thing I ask about. The fear.”

I wait. I wait for some other answer than the one I know I must give. But there is nothing else. “We have to know for sure.”

She nods once. “Then I have reserved a car for us. I wish it was right now. But the soonest I could arrange was in three days’ time.”

“Three days.” It’s dumb repetition. I don’t know how to hold this feeling for three extra days.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “The city is full of Japanese businessmen until the weekend. They have booked many weeks in advance.”

“I understand.”

There are no words for a long moment and then she says, very softly, “Until then, it must only be a handshake for us. Is that not so?”

I look closely at her eyes. Surely if she is my daughter, I’d be able to look in her eyes and see something of myself and know. But there is nothing clear. And the fear won’t go away.

Tien nods as if I’ve answered her. She says, “I will see you on Friday. I will meet you with the car just over there, in front of the Rex Hotel, at eight in the morning. We can get very close to Nha Trang before the night.”

I say, “Are you angry with me?”

“No,” she says. “Not with you. I am angry with my father.”

What races in me now is gratitude for this woman. Her certainty lifts me, smooths the rough spots like I’d expected from the hit on the cigarette. I say, “I want to touch you now more than ever. You understand?”

“I wish not to understand until it can be more than words.”

“I love you, Tien.”

Her eyes fill with tears, but she lifts her chin slightly, keeps them from flowing. She offers her hand. “I will shake your hand for that,” she says.

I smile. She does too. I take her hand as if to shake but our hands do not move. We touch and people pass by, close to us. She releases my hand and goes off, past me.

I do not turn to watch her and suddenly she is near me again, at my side.

She says, “I do not want you to misunderstand for these three clays. When I shake your hand just now, I was full of some strong feeling about you, a good feeling. I did not say in return ‘I love you,’ but I do.”

And she’s gone. I watch her this time as she moves off, past Ho with his hand on the child, and into the crowd. When I lose sight of her, I dig my own restless hands into my pockets and I find the pack of Ruby Queens. I tap out another cigarette and I light it up and I suck in a deep drag and it burns in me but I keep it in and all the empty nights on the road come with it, all the nights pulling smoke in and letting it out, over and over, and I keep the smoke inside me now, like holding my own ghost.

He is on the curb when Mr. Thu and I drive up. He has a small bag beside him and we stop. I can see his forehead wrinkle when he sees Mr. Thu. I get out. We do not shake hands this time.

“You remember Mr. Thu,” I say, even before he can ask. “We will drop him at his house on our way out of town.”

Ben nods. I open the back door for him. Mr. Thu is already out of the car and picking up Ben’s bag and he heads for the trunk. “Please,” I say to Ben, motioning him into the backseat. I feel how formal I am, how distant this all sounds. He does too. He gives me a brief, sad look and he moves and bends, entering the backseat. I do not care if anyone sees or what they think, though I am very discreet, really, turning my body to shield this thing I do, but as he goes by me I move the hand holding the door and touch him on the back of his thigh, just a quick touch and I grasp the door again and close it.

I step away from the car and my heart is racing. I should be more considerate of Ben’s fear. But I will not share it. I am looking for this trip to escape my father, not find my mother. I will not even think of my mother. Somewhere along Highway One, well before Nha Trang, I think things will become clear on their own.

I turn from the car. I look around. The xich lo drivers are in a clump in the midst of their cabs, arguing about something. The doorman at the Rex is looking down the street. No one has seen my counterrevolutionary act. I get into the front passenger seat. As soon as I close my door, I hear the trunk slam shut. I look into the backseat at Ben. I want him to be smiling, happy for my touch. He is not. His eyes are very sad.

I say, “I am sorry.”

“Why?”

“For touching you.”

Mr. Thu is opening the driver door, unaware what we are saying in English.

“Don’t you know what it is I’m afraid of?” Ben says.

“Of course I know.”

The door closes. Mr. Thu is beside me.

Ben leans forward and touches my shoulder, just with the tips of his fingers, and he sits back deep in his seat again, his eyes looking out the side window. I tell Mr. Thu to take us to his house.

Mr. Thu lives in a place where I have taken many foreign officials and businessmen, a New Economic District where the rapid development of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is very clear. There are many streets, soon to be full of children and trees, where blocks of beautiful apartments, constructed from highest grade portland cement made in modern factories in Can Tho, glisten white in the sunlight. We drive down such a street and stop. Before Mr. Thu gets out, he and I speak a little in Vietnamese — he thanks me for this time off, because he has a sick child and his wife’s two brothers and their families are visiting from Hanoi, and I thank him for letting me take the car — and while I am speaking my own native language, I am feeling very strange. I am thinking very much how Ben cannot understand what I say or what I hear. And I am hearing even the English in my head as a foreign thing, words about cement production and economic development. And I know I cannot touch Ben when Mr. Thu is gone, though that is what my body yearns to do. This strange feeling makes itself clear to me: I feel suddenly like a person who does not know who she is.

Then Mr. Thu is out of the car and walking away and I watch him until he has disappeared into one of these modern socialist-state apartments. I sit for a moment even after he has gone and I do not say anything and I do not look into the backseat. Ben is silent, too. I am the ghost now. I think what it must be like for my father, watching someone he loves without a language to speak with or a body to touch with.

Then Ben speaks my name. “Tien.”

I turn. He slides forward in the seat. Our faces are very near. I wait but this is as close as we are going to get. So I ask him, “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think you can drive on Vietnam’s roads?”

“You forget what I used to do here.”

“My truck driver.”

“I know the rules. Never stop. Small gives way to large.”

“You are ready to be as dangerous as my countrymen.”

He smiles at this thing I say. I am glad. He gets out of the car and goes around and he slides in behind the wheel, beside me.

I clutch the steering wheel and it’s a stunningly familiar thing. To drive and not to feel.

“What have you done these three days?” This is Tien’s voice and I turn to her, trying to hear what it is that she’s said.

Finally I answer, “I’ve watched a paddle fan spin on the ceiling.”

“I have no fan to watch. I have only tourists and prayers to a man I think maybe does not hear me anymore.”

My hands are cranking the engine. I want to drive now.

Even though it’s not a truck and an interstate. It’s a Fiat sedan with a Saigontourist sticker across the back windshield and an alien street rimmed by an ugly block of apartments. And another street, running through a cleared field waiting for more concrete, and another, packed full with motorbikes squeezing past ramshackle produce stands and restaurants and warrens of scrap wood and corrugated-sheet-metal houses. She tells me where to turn, but says no more than that. I’m glad. I want to hold a wheel and drive in the silence that was my life for years. Even going slow. Even with young men with black flares of hair and young women in sunglasses looking in on all sides while I creep ahead only to find myself in another press of new eyes. It’s all right. I’m holding the wheel, I’m moving, I turn off the air-conditioning and roll the window down and let in the smell of exhaust, a smell of the road, and I have a place to drive to, a place ahead that will resolve all this.

And finally the city traffic loosens somewhat and the road widens a little and though it’s full of potholes and oxcarts and trucks pushing in front of me or jumping out of the oncoming lane and forcing me over, still I can push a bit and I lay on my horn and the women on bikes and the tiny three-wheel Lambretta buses and all the motorbikes give way for me. I just stay clear of the trucks and they’re funky-ass things, for the most part, old deuce-and-a-halfs or old commercial De Sotos and Jimmys, with jerry-built water tanks on the tops of their cabs and copper tubing feeding down into the engines, doing the work of long-gone radiators that can’t be replaced.

And then we’re farther out of town, heading for where Long Binh must’ve been, a massive Army base camp out northeast of Saigon, the place we all passed through on the way into the war. And there are billboards: an enormous display of a piece of PVC pipe, a giant tube of some Hong Kong toothpaste, and a billboard that pleads, GOLF VIETNAM. And then there’s a turnoff to the place where a sign says they’re building the Vietnam International Golf Club. I try to figure how far we’ve come, to see if they’re building that right there on the doorstep we used for all the guys to come and fight in Vietnam. But I don’t think the government that has filled Tien with all those little riffs of ideology would have the sense of humor for that.

I think of her. I look. She has her face turned to the rush of countryside. A flooded rice paddy now. Women out there in conical straw hats bent into their work, up to their ankles among the low green plants. And a boy near the road on the back of a water buffalo. I look to the highway and I swerve around a pothole as big as the buffalo’s head.

But being on the road is good. The road rolls, even if you’ve got to dodge and honk and give way. Your life passes. You get through the hours you wouldn’t know how to get through if you were sitting still somewhere. And I must have missed whatever was left of Long Binh because we’re going through a town called Honai and there was nothing like that between Saigon and the camp. We’re crawling again, but still moving. Four Catholic churches almost one after the other. And no pictures of Ho out here. It’s a country I don’t expect.

Then the road again and rubber trees, a plantation, the quick run of the even, deep rows of trees, their white trunks all with the same dark slashes, and a grave out there, a little stone monument in the trees. I follow it with my eyes and I see Tien again and she’s looking, too, turning to see the tomb. I think to speak to her. At least to explain my silence, though surely it’s best for her, as well. It’s a kind of touching, our talk. This trip is hard on her and I’m very sorry for that. But the rubber trees vanish and now there’s a pond, and I turn to the road and it is narrowing down, and something is fitting together in my head and Tien slides away from me once more. The pond — I look again before it’s gone — the pond curves away from the highway and out to the north and it’s shaped like a sickle blade and the sun flares there and is gone and the pond is gone and I know the place. Ahead, the road has narrowed but tree lines have taken up, maybe a hundred yards back, on both sides.

And suddenly this feels like the place. I have never remembered these things — the rubber trees, the curving blade of a pond, the narrowing of Highway One — even in my dreams of that day. But now it’s clear. I slow down, I draw off the road, the shoulder is narrow, but I squeeze far over, the wheel bucking a little in the uneven ground, and I stop.

“What is it?” Tien says.

I get out of the car. A truck flashes past, ragged and Army green, and its horn blares and Dopplers away down the road. I look and it’s full of hay but it’s still a deuce-and-a-half, a truck from some old convoy, and I know where I am, I feel sure I know, and a cluster of motorbikes races by, a voice floating out, shouting, meaningless words. I start across the road. Hurrying before another truck coming from the north. And I’m off the road and the truck’s draft buffets me and I wade into the scrub growth and I stop and he could have stood right here.

I turn. I stand just as he stood, the blond guy with the missing arm. I wait. The sounds from the highway are faint now. I wait for something to clarify itself. I try to see him again. It’s been a year or more since I’ve dreamed about him. But when I did, he was very clear. And two years before that, clear. But he’s dim now. How odd, to find this place because of new memories, restored memories — the pond, the plantation — but now that I’m in the place again, the man who made all these memories important has faded. I can’t see his face anymore, it’s all darkness, as he looks at what’s happened to him. He’s an outline, blurred by the sun.

I lift my hands. I stare at them before me. My two hands. And then I look across the road. Tien’s face floats there in the window of the car. She has slid across to the driver’s seat so she can see what it is I’m doing out here without a word of explanation to her, and her eyes are clear from this place where I stand, dark and steady on me, and I feel her on the palms of these hands. I am in Vietnam, the place where I went to war for my father. I saw an image here, in this very field, an image that clung to me not by its horror or its strangeness but by how it fit all that I had felt till then and all that I would feel for years after. And it’s gone now. Gone. And in its place is this image across the road. The face of this Vietnamese woman, watching me, waiting for me, she has opened her body to me, and in it, this other image dissolved. A great dark mass erases her face, the flash of a truck, and for that moment he’s there again, like the flare from the first rocket in the attack, his face calm except for the knot of puzzlement in his brow, and the truck is gone and it’s Tien instead. Puzzled, too, I know.

I move through the scrub, onto the shoulder, I look and a Lambretta is coming and a motorcycle and to the right is a provincial bus, bright yellow and green and people are clinging to the doors and hanging out the windows and my legs don’t stop, I can’t wait to cross to Tien, horns cry from both directions and I rush now, hard, I feel the wisp of a flap of a woman’s ao dai across my back from the motorcycle and the grille of the bus bloats near me I feel it on my face and I lunge and it goes by trailing voices and I stumble in the uneven earth and I fall, palms and knees going numb and then my chest in the brush.

She is beside me. Her hands on my face, on my back, my arms, touching and moving, and her voice is with them. “Are you all right, my Ben? What is it, my love?”

I’m sitting now, brushing at my chest, and she takes my face in her hands, her touches are like kisses, like we’re kissing, and for the moment it’s okay, for the moment there’s nothing of my fear, only this release of the boy in the field, only Tien’s hands on me. I take one of them and turn it and I kiss the palm.

“Oh my,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“What was that about?”

“The kiss?”

“I hope I know what that was about. The other.”

“I remembered something.”

“You remembered to run in front of a bus?” She pinches both my cheeks at this, like a mother scolding a child. I am surprised at the comfort I feel from this gesture.

Her hands retreat. I look into her eyes. They are steady, soft with what I know is her love for me.

I say, “I left you without a word. I wanted to explain.”

“You would have much to explain if you died there. I would interrogate you very sharply, Benjamin Cole.”

“Do that again,” I say.

“What?”

“Pinch my cheeks when you scold me.”

She cocks her head at me, smiles that half-smile which was my first vision of her.

She lifts her hands, twists at my cheeks, though the comfort of this is gone now. She says, “My father is jealous enough as it is. Imagine if he had to share my shrine with you.”

I lift my own hands, cover hers. She flattens her palms against my face. We stay like that until a motorcycle brats past and voices cry out at us. She does not show even a flicker of recognition at the words, but she says, “This is a public place, my Ben. And this is not part of our tour package, these caresses.”

Our hands fall. I climb to my feet. I look once more across the road. The place is bland, a ragged field, distant trees.

I feel her draw near me. “Ben,” she says softly.

“Yes?”

“Should we go on? Or go back to a private place?”

I look at her. For a moment all that had been set aside. And even now the desperateness is gone. But when she asks the question, something of the darker question remains. “Did you tell me Nha Trang has a lovely beach?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “There are private places on the South China Sea.”

“We’ll go there. Maybe just for the beach.”

She does not speak, but I hear a sound from her, a soft thing, a flow of her breath that I wish was on my naked chest.

We move to the car and when we are inside, seated side by side, and my hand is about to move to the keys in the ignition, she says, “So what was it you rushed into the traffic to explain?”

I have no words for a time. I wait. I squeeze at the steering wheel and wait. Finally I say, “The past. I’m trying to let go.”

“This is very good,” she says. And her hand steals across the seat and touches my thigh and then retreats again.

It is not clear to me what we are to do after Ben tries to let go of some part of his past there on the side of the road. It is not clear to him either, I think. So I try to make myself slow down. I feel very much like a new socialist woman, an equal worker in the new social order, which means to me you can touch your husband when you want to and you do not have to wait for him to decide this. But I must consider his feelings, too.

I have thought husband. I cannot stop a smile at this word. I am telling myself how I should slow down, and even in the telling, I am going very fast. I watch out the window and I think that in Nha Trang, by the sea, in the wind off the South China Sea, all the spirits of the past will be blown far away and Ben and I can find a place alone together.

For now, I keep my hands in my lap and my eyes out the window. Perhaps I doze. I have not slept well for these three nights and my eyes grow heavy. Along the side of the highway women have spread out rice to dry and then it is manioc root drying there, the white chips they use for flour, and then it is coffee and now I know for sure I have slept, for we are passing the Long Khanh mountains, past Xuan Loc, a town which I have missed, which was a battlefield where our nationalist forces had many victories, and on the side of the road the dark brown beans are laid out to dry and the smell of the coffee fills the air.

I turn my face to Ben. I watch him for a while without him knowing. He is very intent on the road. His hands on the wheel are large, my truck driver’s hands, which know my body, which are part of my own body. There are shadows flashing over us. I look outside and we are running beneath eucalyptus trees, lining both sides of the highway, their bodies white, their thin arms drooping like mothers mourning, and beneath them some little girls in white ao dais are riding bicycles. Ben is driving slow now among these children.

It leads me to speak whatever I can find to say, just to touch him with my voice. “These are eucalyptus trees,” I say. “An oil comes from this tree that we use when we are sick.”

He does not seem to hear me at first. I watch ahead and we pass the last of the girls on bicycles and then an oxcart and we are free also of the trees and I do not expect any words in return now, but he says, “There are eucalyptus in California, along the highways to break the wind.”

These words make me as happy as if he has suddenly kissed me. But still, I can hear his voice working hard in order to speak. I watch a spot in the sky, out ahead of us, near a grove of cashew trees. It seems to be a great bird hovering, hanging motionless against the sky. We near, and the bird moves to one side and then jerks back to the other, and I know it is a kite. There is a child, invisible to us, beyond the trees.

“Tien,” Ben says, low. “I’m sorry if I’m quiet. I’ve driven half my life, nearly, and it has always been in silence.”

“I understand,” I say.

We pass the cashew trees by. The sky is empty now. I take this explanation as an act of love.

He says, “There’s a quiet place in me, since I stopped by the road. I want to keep that. I want it when we reach the sea.”

“Yes,” I say. “It is a good thing, this silent time.” I struggle with my hands, to keep them where they are, in my lap. They obey this time. I try to find that quiet place in me now, too.

And so, together, Ben and I become the landscape rushing past us. Red soil and the smoke of brick kilns and piles of brick along the road, and roof tiles. And in Phan Thiet, TV antennas on bamboo poles and in the air the smell of nuoc mam, our wonderful fish sauce that they make in the town, and then, beyond, the salt flats with their little levees of tan mud and great squares of seawater and the piles of white salt taller than a man, and then paddies again and the smell in the air of rice hay burning and swarms of ducks grazing the wet fields after the harvest, and then coconut trees and then the Truong Son mountains to the west. And the mountains slide over and squeeze us next to the sea. And the sea is there for Ben’s eyes, our first sight of it together, the South China Sea, sudden and vast coming out from behind the dunes and bright from the sun, and it is the dark green of the finest jade.

And now I steal a look at Ben, and his face is turned my way, though his eyes are far out to sea already. He glances at me and out again and then to the road. “We’ll lose it again for a few hours, won’t we,” he says, and I know he means the sea.

“Yes,” I say.

And we go on. And we stop only briefly at a roadside stand to eat, and we sit on tiny plastic chairs in the shade of an umbrella and I keep my eyes away from Ben, because his knees are almost up to his ears as he sits on this thing meant for a Vietnamese, and I like the size of him and I like him looking funny and not even realizing it, but these are the kinds of things I must put aside for now. Still, I am beginning to thrill again, like on the afternoon when I was preparing to make love to him, though we did not make love on that day, the preparation was a very sweet thing, and now I am having the same feeling. We are going fast. We will be at the sea near Nha Trang before the sun is gone.

So we go back on the road and soon we are passing tobacco drying in racks, the large green leaves, like the ears of elephants, and somewhere I think they must be burning the scrap because there is a strong tobacco smell suddenly around us and Ben is moving beside me. I look and he has lifted a little in his seat to dig in his pocket, and he pulls out a pack of cigarettes. This is a surprise for me. I have never seen him smoke. He does not take his eyes off the road. He does not take out a cigarette. He holds the pack for a moment, as if thinking about it, and then he tosses it into the backseat.

And what can it be that whispers in my body at this moment? I am a practical woman, a good citizen of a serious Marxist state, and this part of me says it is the food I ate by the side of the road, upsetting my body, just that, and perhaps also the smell of tobacco, which makes me feel a little bit unbalanced, since I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. Even perhaps it is some idle idea, a public health issue, since the man I love — the man who I am believing, in some shuttered-up room in my mind, will be living with me forever — has just rejected the smoking of a cigarette. I know that the smoke from a cigarette can harm others, especially delicate others. All of these things may be what turn my face to the landscape and whisper such an important message to me, so important that as soon as the thought comes, I ignore the message itself and instead I start thinking around and around about how it might have been prompted by nothing but indigestion or some other trivial thing. And even knowing how it is that I am avoiding the thought itself, I go on trying to discredit it. It could be a trick of the mind: I have just seen a Cham woman walking ahead of us and we raced past her and I turned to see her and she was carrying a baby in a pouch on her chest. The Cham are from different ancestors than other Vietnamese. They are Hindus. They have a god called Shiva who is very powerful and very terrifying to look at and who waits to destroy the world, and I can certainly understand Karl Marx being uncomfortable with religion when I hear of this god, I do not want to believe in this god either. Maybe this woman and her god and her baby are what make me feel this thing about my body.

And how can the most important message of my life be whispered to me in a moment like this? But it can. It can. For though I am in a Saigontourist car and I am watching two ragged dogs running beside us barking at the edge of this village and though my stomach is a little queasy from the soup I had by the side of the road and my head is a little light from the smell of tobacco, it was five days ago that Ben and I made love and I told him to stay inside me and now suddenly there is something deeper in my body I clearly can feel, something, like a shifting in my bones, like a quickening in my blood, something.

But I am a clearheaded modern woman. I know things about a woman’s body. And so I count the days, a thing I have not thought to do until this moment. And from that night to my next bleeding, it is two weeks.

I sit with this for a while.

There is no thought in my head.

But there is a deep shadow all around me, a secret place inside a banyan tree where I am a child myself and I have my first most vivid thought of a woman giving birth: a princess laying one hundred eggs. I know that Ben is nearby — I feel him next to me; he is enormous there— but the world he fills is just outside the root-trunk of this tree where I am, where I listen to the tale of the dragon and the princess, and it is Tien the child who listens, but I am there, too, Tien the adult, and I am inside the child, waiting to be born from her. And we are Chinese boxes, the tree and Tien the child and me. And my baby.

I try to return now, to the car. I lean into the rush of air through the window, I squint into the bright afternoon, the air full of the smell of wood fires, some village out of sight. I close my eyes. I lay my hands on my belly and Ben is nearby. I could reach out my hand and touch him, but I do not even look at him for now. His presence makes me very happy but it also fills me with terror, for there are questions I do not even begin to let inside my head, even simple questions about where I will live for the rest of my life, in what country, questions that I cast away from me, including the question of what to say to Ben. Nothing. For now, nothing. I do not drift again to the banyan tree, but I do think of the fairy princess once more. How she took inside her the seed of a dragon, and how she must have wondered what child would come of this.

The road goes on and though there’s no white line and no flat-out running, it does me some real good. Things are clean in my head out here, with an engine in front of me and a place to go to. And Tien is still beside me. She hasn’t disappeared in order for me to feel like this. And that’s the best thing of all. I don’t have to go back to being alone to make things simple. Tien loves me. I love her. We’re on the road together. The night is coming. It’s boiled sweetly down to that.

Still, I don’t turn us back to Saigon. I don’t want to give up the wheel. Out here on Highway One, I’ll go to sleep and wake up tomorrow morning with more miles to drive. Back in Saigon, it’s just the paddle fan or that room of Tien’s, which she thinks was part of my little scare, and maybe it was. Wherever it came from and however nasty it was, that panic was actually worth it, it seems to me now, to get Tien and me on the road together. Driving has been the way out for me for so long that being able to bring Tien into it was a necessary thing for the two of us to go on from here.

I’m glad my mama made me read all those books. I think I picked a few things up, hearing all those voices. But they didn’t do me jack shit when it came to the minute-to-minute drag of that life back there. I told Tien the truck driving didn’t solve anything either, and it didn’t, in the long run. That’s true. That’s why her sitting here next to me now as we go up Highway One is so important. But there was a place I’d get to inside me, sometimes, driving the highways, when the silence would feel comfortable, when being alone was a natural thing, and it was usually at night and I’d be watching the lane break in my headlights and it turned into a kind of white-line mantra and there’d just be this soft ticking in my head, with those white lines going by, and things would be okay. And then I’d hit a truck stop and I’d go in and some old woman would be dozing behind the register and maybe one or two other guys were hunched over some coffee and I’d rent a shower stall and go on back along some white-lit hallway and unlock a door and hang the key on the hook and I’d strip down and run the water and the grit of the road would roll off me and the water would feel almost as sweet and good as a shower in Vietnam, where you thought something as simple as that, a goddamn shower, could never ever feel as good again in your life. But once in a while it almost did, out on the highway.

And the sun is getting low and there’s just salt flats and shrimp ponds going by on the east side of the road. The South China Sea hasn’t reappeared. I turn to Tien. Though I’ve been conscious of her there, and happy for that, I haven’t looked directly at her for a long while. She has her hands tented in front of her, palms together, her chin resting on the tips of her middle fingers. Her eyes are closed. There’s a faint smile on her face. She could be sleeping or praying or playing beautiful music in her head, something very private. I look back to the road and keep my mouth shut.

But somehow she knows. She says, “Do you wish to stop?”

I look to her again. Her hands have settled in her lap. Her faint smile has turned to me. I say, “Nha Trang isn’t far, is it?”

“Less than an hour. Do you want to stay in the city?”

“Isn’t there a more private place, by the sea?”

“We can go east up ahead. There’s a narrow road to the shore.”

“What’s there?”

“A villa once owned by. . I was going to say a member of the puppet government of the south. I have caught myself. Am I not a changed woman?”

“Yes. And I’m a changed man.” I lay my hand, palm up, on the seat between us and her palm settles on mine and her fingers close softly and it feels like sex, for the first time in days our bodies are really touching and it runs through me fast and I punch the accelerator.

Up the highway, she motions and we turn off, and the narrow road is made of packed dirt and it’s rutted and it’s slow going, and then, at last, I can smell the salt water, and we go over a little rise and the South China Sea is before me, darkening now at the end of the day.

“Over there,” she says, and off to the right is a large, rambling house facing the sea, and I turn into a shell drive rimmed with palms and I slide up to the front walk and stop. Tien says to wait and she gets out of the car and I turn off the engine. There’s still the crawl of the road in my head and the vibration of the engine in my arms but there’s a letting go, too. My shoulders sag and the car ticks and I can hear the sea on the other side of the villa. I lay my forearm on the steering wheel and my forehead against my arm and I wait, feeling the cloak of the road on me, wanting to take that off. I’m ready to be naked with her again.

Then she’s at my window, leaning near. “Leave the car here,” she says. “We have a room.”

I should rent two rooms for us, for the appearance of it, but I tell the woman who runs the guesthouse we are married, we are Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Cole, and I believe it is true, in a way. I am not sure if the woman believes me, but I do not care. I so much want Ben to sleep in my arms tonight.

Ben and I walk around the house and beneath a gallery and suddenly the sea stretches wide before us. To the north, the beach curves toward Nha Trang, which is invisible beyond the big shoulders of some hills at a distant turning. No one is on the shore. Out in the sea is a little string of four fishing boats, heading back to Nha Trang. Their engines beat faintly over the rushing sound of the waves. I have just begun to listen to this sound, which is a familiar thing, when Ben says, “It’s like the motorcycles in Saigon.”

I look at him. He is reading my mind now, not even my mind, he reads my ears. “They’ll be gone soon,” I say.

He looks to the south and I do too. Perhaps half a kilometer or more away, there is some figure on the beach, but that is not clear. Otherwise there is no one. The land along the sea flattens out and stretches far away. Ben takes in a slow breath of this sweet air. Now I try to name his thought.

I say, “We are alone on this sea.”

“Yes,” he says. “It feels that way.”

I was right about what was in him. I smile. “There is no one staying at this place tonight but us. The tourists who come along here go on to Nha Trang, I think.”

He turns to me abruptly. “Come on then. There’s still some light.”

He drops his bag on the ground and holds out his hand. I lift my own hand and I move it toward his and even before we touch, it feels as if I have a shadow body inside this one that he can see, and my hand nears his and the body inside, which normally fits snug inside me, has loosened for him and then the tips of our fingers touch and I begin to quake inside my skin. His hand grasps mine firmly and we are moving across a grassy plot and onto the beach, the sand gray and packed hard, and he lets go of my hand and he pulls off his shoes and drops them. I pull off my shoes too, knowing I will destroy my stockings, thinking to ask him to go back to the villa and into our room beneath the gallery facing the sea, for only a brief time, so I can change from these tour guide clothes. But he is groping for my hand again with an eagerness that makes me feel like we are two children and I am angry with myself, thinking of my stockings.

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. .”

She stops abruptly, but there is already a stopping in me. The flicker is gone, the burning is gone, there is only cold now and a shift of gravity, a collapse in my chest. I try to wrench a thought from this place. The story is too familiar. Too familiar. The story my father told me about him going into the B-furnace stove in the Depression and the plant owner’s goons trying to kill him. This was my story, and Tien’s mother told her this thing just like it. Kim. Kim. But I can’t remember ever telling Kim about my father and his fight in the mill. I try now. Try hard to remember. Nothing. This is good, I tell myself. They’re different stories.

Tien finally finishes her thought. “And then I would not have made love to you. I would not be here tonight in my body, which I am very happy for.”

I can say nothing. I think to ask for more details from her fairy tale. But it’s about dragons and fiery holes and princesses — it is suddenly unimaginable that Kim could think of herself as a princess with me. Not even in a made-up story for her child. Never. This was a fairy tale and fairy tales are designed to make you think of your regular life. This fiery hole could be anything. But I am breathing heavily now, gasping for air. I gently untangle from Tien and I sit up.

“What is it?” she says.

I try to catch my breath. There is no reason for panic now. It was a fairy tale. But I realize we have to go on in the morning. We have to find Tien’s mother.

“Ben?”

I finally say, “We have to find our clothes before the moon goes down.”

My hand reaches, expecting his body, my eyes are still closed but I am climbing from the dark hole of sleep and there is just bed and pillow and the South China Sea is roaring and I sit up fast. The door to our room is standing open to the sea and there are breakers and the sun is shattered all over the water. My eyes hurt from the light. I shade them with my hand. “Ben?” I say and there is nothing. I begin to feel a panic in me. “Ben,” I say louder, my feeling wound tight in the sound.

Then a shadow falls over my eyes. Ben is at the doorway. He steps in, moves to me. He is dressed. I look into his face, wait for my eyes to adjust. He stands over me and I can see him clearly now. His eyes arc soft, but something is wrong.

“What is it?” I say.

He takes my hand. “Nothing.”

I rise up on my knees, quickly.

He says, “It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong.”

I try to believe him. I realize it is about his eyes. I am naked here before him, but his eyes stay fixed on mine. I suddenly know what he will have us do. “You want to continue the search for her,” I say. “Am I right?”

“Let’s keep this room. Okay? We’ll be back here by sunset.”

“You are not my father.”

“Of course not,” he says, holding my hand tight. “I know that.”

“I do not ask for a mother.”

“Think of me as the child,” he says. “I’m afraid of the thunder. I know it can’t hurt me, but I hear it and I need to be reassured. That’s what this is.”

It occurs to me that this would be a time to tell him about what I am sure is going on inside my body. There should be no more talk of parents and children except for this real thing. And if I had awakened to find him sleeping beside me and he was naked and we were going no further on this trip, then I would. But I will not let our child be mixed up in this fear of his.

I say to him, “Let’s do this as quickly as we can. I want to make love to you on this beach tonight.”

He should say that this is what he wants, too. But he does not. He nods to me and he moves away, I suppose so he does not have to see me naked as I get up from the bed. I am angry. I feel my face glowing from this like I have been in the sun too long. His back is to me. He is at the door again. “Ben,” I say to him.

He turns. I say, “Do you love me?”

“I’ll show you how much tonight.”

This is a good answer, I think. I am letting my anger go with this answer. He is very troubled. I can tell that. I do not know why this should have come on him again. It had to be out on the beach, after we made love. Perhaps he slept, too, and had a bad dream. I rise up from the bed and he is already turning his back to me once more.

He has the motor running in the car when I come from the villa’s office. I get in and he asks, “Did she know where the village is?”

“Yes,” I say. “I will tell you where to drive.”

He nods and we pull away. I open my window and keep my face in the sea air. I must prepare myself now, to perhaps find my mother. The woman in the villa pulled out a map to show me where the village is. She has two cousins living there. It is called Trang Non, which means in English “full moon.” It is not a fishing village, as I thought. They are woodcutters and coffee growers. In the mountains by the sea. My mother might not be there. She might he dead. But if she is alive and we find her, I will say nothing. I will translate for Ben, if that is necessary, but only what he needs in order to realize that this woman is a stranger to him. Then we will go.

That is all the thought I wish to give to this day, and we bump from the dirt road and turn onto Highway One, and we travel on. I see only the turnings that we need to make. We slide into Nha Trang along the main seaside boulevard, lined with coconut palms, and then we go over two bridges and we arc through the city and we pass a great white statue of the Buddha looking out to sea, desiring nothing, except to sit by the sea and be perfect, and we take the cutoff that goes along the Hon Chong beaches.

There are mountains near us, but I do not look. One of these mountains is supposed to look like a reclining princess who married a giant who saw her bathing naked and made a handprint on some big rock and then she died. Or something like that. I am not caring to think of fairy tales at the moment. Things are suddenly very much what they seem to be. We are driving among mountains and rocks. That is all.

And then I have to find a gravel side road and we slow and I find the place and we start to climb for a ways and then the road cuts back toward the sea and we are shrouded in trees and the road squeezes into one lane and bounces us around a turn and there is only a grassy field in front of us and a wall of trees. We stop. Ben looks at me.

“We have to walk from here,” I say.

He turns off the engine and sets the emergency brake and we sit quietly for a moment. Finally he says, “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

And then I find myself saying, “How sorry?”

He looks at me, a little surprised.

I am, too, at the thrashing that has begun inside me.

“What do you mean?” he says.

I say, “Are you sorry enough to turn around now and take me away from here and never think about all this again?”

“We’ve come this far.”

“I am afraid. If she is here. I am afraid of her.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

He is right. I cry out to myself that he is right. If she is here, then she left me for herself, just for herself. Some part of me is afraid of that. But that is an old hurt. A thing long dead, it means nothing to me now. This is nothing to fear. But the thrashing goes on. From a darker wind. But if there is some other fear, then we must go on, or that fear will never end.

So I take Ben’s face in my two hands and I draw him to me and I kiss him on the mouth, not caring if he is ready to do this in return, though he does kiss me, but not enough, really, not as much as I am kissing him, but I do not care. My mother will not come between us. She will not hurt us. I will take these two hands and strangle her to death if we find her and she tries to hurt Ben and me. But she will be a stranger to him, and to me, as well, and we will be back in this car soon.

“I am all right now,” I say. “I want to do this thing and be done with it.”

“I do too,” he says. I expect him to get out at once. But he does not. He turns my face now, with his fingertips just under my chin, and he kisses me on the lips. Very light. Very brief. But he does kiss me.

I lean against the car door and I feel as if I have no strength. I do not need a mother. I press hard. It is for Ben. And the door opens and I move and I find myself out in the middle of the grassy place. The grass runs on to what looks like a cliff edge, and beyond is a slice of the sea. We have climbed a long way up already. Against the jade of the water is a distant fishing boat with a sail curved like a Chinese sword.

Now we can also see a wide path cut in the tree line and we move toward it. My legs are heavy. Ben does not take my hand. And we are into the trees and climbing some more, sea pines for a while, swaying high above us, silent, my legs are aching from the slope of this path, and I am breathing heavily and I can hear Ben breathing heavily and these are two breaths now, it strikes me, very hard, two separate breaths on this path, not the one breath we made last night, and I touch the baby, and I climb. And finally the pines thin and the path levels and we come out into bright sun and another clearing. To our left is a gentle slope and coffee trees planted in rows, and before us, straight on, shrouded in bamboo thickets and willows, is the village. A dog barks up ahead, out of sight, and another.

“Be careful of the dogs,” I say to Ben. “Village dogs can be vicious.”

She warns me about the dogs and wherever it is in my head that I’ve been hiding since last night, I’m chased out now. This is how we began, and she should be pissed as hell at me or scared as hell but here she is warning me about the dogs again and the only thing in her voice is concern for me. Ahead is the place. There’s bamboo all around and some trees, but I can see the palm leaf roofs of the houses and a track of smoke rising and I can smell a wood fire and the dogs are barking like crazy. I should say to her, You’re right about the goddamn dogs, let’s get the hell out of here. I turn to her and she’s gone. For a moment, I think she’s heading back down the path and this is good. Let her run like hell. I’ll follow her. She can just whisper Fuck no and we can go away and if I have to live with some weird goddamn fears once in a while, I can do it. There’s just no way ever to know for sure. Except if we end up in the States, which I figure we have to, there’s blood types and there’s DNA or whatever, so there is a way and I’ll have to know sooner or later and someday she’s going to want to know, too. Like as soon as she starts thinking about children of our own.

But she hasn’t bolted. She’s moving off to the right, toward the sea. I follow. She’s moving slow and dreamy and the sea is beautiful out there, it’s clean and the line of the horizon is sharp and wide, simple, things are simple there, and though I can’t hide the fear now, it’s too close — just along the path and behind some bamboo — I want this clean sword-cut of an answer, and I know it’ll be clean and it’ll be okay, some part of me is saying that louder and louder, to hell with fairy tales, and Tien moves to the cliff edge and stops.

I come up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. Her hands come up and touch mine. I kiss her hair and then I look beyond her and over the edge of the cliff, and it’s sheer, falling far, far away down to the rocks and the sea.

We stand like that for a long while. The breeze rustles at us but things feel very calm, all of a sudden. We made love last night along this sea. It’s ours. Her hands are on mine. I look down at them, and I see the moons there and the grinding starts again inside me.

“It’s time,” I say.

She nods and turns and she moves off without another word or another touch, and I feel this withholding—suddenly all that I feel about her hands is the yearning to take them in mine, to kiss those pale moons — but I follow her, across the grass and onto a wide dirt path, and the trees take up on each side and then the bamboo comes in and the path narrows and we turn once and again, surrounded by the stalks of bamboo sectioned like bone, and suddenly we are before a little square with a great stone cistern in the middle and ringed by little houses of thatch and palm. A woman is dipping a ladle into the water in the cistern. Her face is hidden by a conical straw hat. A dog barks nearby. I look and he is peeking around a house and when I meet his eyes he disappears. The woman turns her head. She is very old.

Tien crosses to her and the old woman greets her and they speak for a moment. First Tien and then the woman and then Tien again and the woman nods her head and it is a clear yes she is saying and she motions beyond the cistern, off down another path, and I try to keep still but I can’t, not for a moment, I come forward and Tien is turning to me and her face is drawn tight.

“She’s here,” I say.

“There’s someone here with my mother’s name,” she says.

“Where?”

Tien says another few words in Vietnamese to the woman who is smiling broadly at me and nodding her head over and over and Tien moves off and I follow and it’s hard just to walk, just to put one foot in front of the other in a regular way, but we do walk, slower than before if anything. Tien is having trouble moving.

“It’s okay,” I say to her. “I’m with you. This won’t take long.”

She smiles up at me. My words sound confident. Maybe I am. Maybe I am or I wouldn’t be wanting to bolt down this path to wherever it is we’re going. She touches my hand, briefly, and my penis instantly stirs. But this first. This first.

And we are moving through another maze of growth, and chickens scatter before us, clucking furiously, plunging into a tiny break in the bamboo, and we come out of the maze and Tien stops.

There are two small thatched houses before us. She turns to the one on the left and two women are crouching flat-footed in front, their knees up by their faces, two sexless middle-aged women, dark from the sun, their hair put up in buns, straw hats beside them. And between them is a small package, cut open, of lime paste and a scattering of rust-colored arcea nuts and the pale green betel leaves, and one of the women, the nearest one, has just rolled a hit of this stuff to chew. Two aging women getting high on a Saturday morning. And the nearest one puts the roll in her mouth and she looks up at us and I am looking only at her mouth, and her teeth and gums are red from this stuff already, and then I look at her eyes and they are glazed a little and they look into mine and I don’t know how it is that I know but I do, because I never carried her face with me, except her eyes, and her eyes always seemed memorable from being like all the other eyes in this country, but now they’re before me and they’re Kim’s, the woman is Kim, and I’m taking all this in slow, and I hear Tien’s voice start up in Vietnamese and it is very distant and Kim’s eyes swing away from me. There is a moment now. Tien’s voice fades in my head but Tien remains, the smell of her and the press of her body remain, and I realize that I am complete. But I am complete only with her body and through her body, hers, my child’s, the body of my child, and Kim’s face is on her daughter and it stays and stays and there is no sound in the world and I am poised in some high place and will fall, but in this moment of suspension I am whole, at last, whole, and now in this moment a sound breaks in me, the South China Sea, and in this moment the dark beneath me is the dark of the shore beneath a golden moon, and Tien’s body is imprinted on mine, and in this act of our love, her heart and her mind and her voice are there too, and she is in my blood, and I am in her, in all ways in her, and from this moment, I feel the lift of my penis for her, and now it is a gesture that will tear us apart, my child and me, because it is for her that my body is doing this, for my child, and a terrible heat begins in that lift, in that place of my sex, a deep, hot roiling that spreads fast from my groin to my legs to my hands to my head and Kim’s face is on mine now and her eyes have gone wide and I look at my daughter, my lover, and my body yearns for hers, yearns even as this thing spreads through me like the fire that I wish had taken my father, taken him in that fiery hole and killed the seed of me that lies now inside my own child, my own.

Ben and I come out of the path and the house has two figures before it and my heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my throat and these figures are both women and they are coarse women, low-class women, drugging themselves with arcea and betel, and the house is ragged and of the worst construction, unplaned sticks and bamboo tied with palm cord, and I am not even looking at the faces of these women. There is a sour rushing in me, like the fumy wind of motorcycles in the city, and I want this over now. I say in my native language, “I am looking for Le Thi Huong.”

The face nearest me turns and the rushing stops. I go very still inside. Her eyes rise to me and they are blank. She does not recognize me. I was only a child when she last saw me. But I know this face. She is not dead. She has been crouching here all along, chewing and forgetting, and she saved her own life from a threat that never was, and after that, she wanted nothing from the past, including her daughter. And I have nothing to ask her now. Nothing to say. There is only one thing more and I do not even need her for this. Ben already knows she is a stranger to him. But I hear my voice shaping the words anyway. I say, “Do you know this man?” and I already know the answer and I will hear it and Ben and I will walk away and I will never tell her who I am.

I follow the movement of her face, the lift of her eyes, back to Ben, and I look at him and his eyes are wild, though they are fixed, fixed hard, not moving, but I feel the wildness behind them, and I look at my mother and her own eyes widen, as if she has looked into the morning sky and a great ragged body had suddenly appeared, blocking the sun, ready to fall with teeth and claws flashing, and they flash now in me, the shape falls into me and begins to slash away, and I turn to Ben one last time, desperate to see a flush of relief there, a laugh, but he turns his wild eyes on me, and they are so beautiful, these eyes, these dark eyes, all the gentleness I have ever dreamed of is here in these eyes, and my hands ache to plunge to that sweet hard center of him and draw his body into mine, at this moment, at this very moment, I want to cling to my father’s secret body, and I cry out, I hear myself cry a wordless thing and I know that whatever horror is in this sound, there is also my woman’s love for him, I ache as a lover for my father, and I break away and I move into the bamboo shade and I turn in the path and I am running now and my foot falls and falls and each fall strokes that secret part of my body and he is in my head and we are by the sea and it is night and he falls in me and falls and strokes and I burst from the path and across the little square and past the cistern and I know where I am going now and I pulse in my sex and I pulse there and I cry out again at this terrible thing and there is nothing to stop it but this thing I must do and I am in the path again leading from the village and then I am in the open field.

I slow, I slow, I quake in my sex and I am nearly blind from the sun here and I push my body on, I push on, and the South China Sea waits and my eyes clear and the sea is enormous and it is green darkness like the dark inside the banyan tree and I move and I think of my child and the quaking makes it hard to put one foot before the other now and this is the child of my father inside me, and this much the quaking knows, this much is clear in the secret path I follow now across this field: we cannot all of us remain here in this life together, we cannot remain.

And I move more quickly and the sea grows larger and the edge is near and the wind beats at me but I am stronger I will go now and the clean cut of the cliff edge will be mine, another step another and a hard thing suddenly circles me, an arm is around my waist and jerks me back and Ben’s voice is in my ear. “Tien.” And the arm loosens and I turn and his face is above me filling the sky and his eyes are deep and I could leap there, I think, I could drown there and he pulls back from me, only a little bit, only for a moment, and we are touching eyes we are touching still and I say the word I do not mean to say, I do not want to say, I say “Father,” and we try to hold on to that word, I feel him straining like me trying to hold that word between us and the ache is wild in me and I feel it in him and then we are in each other’s arms and our mouths are touching from that ache and from what I know is good-bye and I am ready to go but he says, “Only one of us, my darling,” and his arms slip away and he is a blur now I cannot move he turns and he steps and he leaps and he flies he flies and he is gone.

Father, I am here. I left the dark burning of this incense for you. I offer your spirit the peace that comes from the love and prayers and devotion of your daughter and I ask you for the harmony and the peace that a father can give to his family.

I wait. I do not blame you for this pain. It is the suffering that comes from desire, my love. I desire the lie of our two nights of touching. The true lie of it. I desire, as well, that moment clinging to your back. I would find peace in just that. I light another stick of incense now, and another. I would fill my lungs with the smoke of your soul. I ask for you to give me peace, even as I offer you the same thing. We will try each night. We will try.

My father, my love, on this day, one month after her birth, I took our daughter to a pagoda, and a monk poured special water from the altar into a white jasmine flower. Then I held her before a great sandalwood statue of Long Vuong, the Dragon King, and our daughter’s dark eyes were open and she was very still and the monk put the blossom in my hand and I brought it gently over her face. My hand was very steady, Father, and she waited with great patience, a patience that I pray I will learn from her. And I tipped the blossom ever so slowly, and the water swelled and swelled, and then a single drop formed at the sharp tip of a petal, and as if she knew what gift this was, our daughter opened her mouth and the drop fell onto her tongue.

Father, her words will be sweet as jasmine all her life. One day her sweet words will join mine and rise with this smoke to you. She will atone for us, my darling. She will love you, always, with the pure love of a child who owes her life to her father. And I will love you, too, as I have been given to do, always.