The Deep Green Sea (20 page)

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 l
ike 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.