It was the longest he’d ever spoken to me, I think. I was breathless from hearing his voice for all of these words, wondering when they would stop, grateful for them no matter what it was he was saying. He almost died. Fourteen years before I was born. Fighting a man. Killing a man. These were things a father might tell a son someday, but why on this day? It wasn’t until later that I wondered why, and of course I never asked him. Maybe it was because he had just told his only child that he should go to war. Maybe he wanted me to know that he had faced death himself in what he saw as another kind of war. Without that, he felt he had no right to ask me. Maybe it came up because of it being another chance for me never to have been born. He was glad I was born and he was determined to tell me and that could have been the connection in his head. And maybe all of it, all of it, including why I should go to Vietnam, had something to do with deciding what it is you’re ready to die for.
Whatever the reasons, he just said the things he wanted to say and he didn’t say any more and I didn’t ask. I turned my face to my own beer and I laid my hands on the bar and there was a blur of baseball words around us and the whoosh of a semi rushing past outside and I drag my wrist across my forehead, wiping away the sweat here in Tien’s apartment, and there is no longer a threat of tears. The past is no longer a matter of tears and smoke. It’s simple now. I went away. I came back. He died. My mother died.
And this memory that came to me before Tien was about to emerge from her bath, I see now that the talk with my father was the first marker on a long road that would one day bring me to her bed. And the switchback that would have prevented it was there, too. If it had been my father who had gone down that shaft. But in those thirty seconds in the stove at B-furnace more than sixty years ago and half a world away, my father killed a man, and as a result, Tien came out of her bathroom with her hair and throat and hands still damp and she found me there, and now I have put my hand in that soft and secret place on her body and she speaks my name and I am afraid I have gone too fast but she says it’s okay and I move my hand once more to that place and touch her.
This time, knowing for certain that it’s okay, knowing that Tien and I will make love, I flare inside, I have climbed down inside the stove and the brickwork is clean and the heat seethes through and I burn. Sweetly, but I burn. I am hot in my clothes and blocked in some painful way and her dark eyes are watching me, waiting, and I bend to her and our lips touch again, and very gently I move my hand upon her and she sighs into our kiss, I feel her breath move into me as if I’ve been dragged dying from the sea and she wants to bring me back to life.
And still I’m hesitant. I must ask her first. I pull my mouth away from hers and say, “Can I take these clothes off?”
“Yours or mine?” she says.
“Both. Though I meant mine.”
“Am I ready?”
I hear how childish I sound. I should know if my own body is ready to take a man into it. It has done this thing before. No. I have spoken a true lie to Ben and I must hear its truth for myself. It is not just a matter of readiness for a man. It is this one man. No one else has been Ben.
“Are you ready?” he repeats, completely baffled by the question, and I am embarrassed.
“Yes, I am,” I say, pretending that it is his question and I am giving him my answer. This confuses him some more. “Thank you for asking me,” I add.
He stares at me, trying to figure all this out.
“Yes you can,” I say, trying to move on to the question of our clothes.
“Are you doing this on purpose?” he asks. His voice is gentle and in the neon light I can see his brow knit and his mouth shape a smile. He is enjoying me.
“Yes. I am a great kidder,” I say, though if it is true about me, then it has come about only in the past few moments.
“I’m very confused now,” he says, but there is a playful thing in his voice and there is nothing confusing about what is going on between his hand and that special place on my body. I know this for sure.
I say, “I will help make things clear for you. Yes I am ready. Yes you can remove these clothes. Yours and mine.”
He smiles again and he brings his face close and he kisses me on the lips and I like that kiss, but as soon as it is over, I say, “I am not kidding.” Because I am ready.
He nods and he says, “Thank you.”
“No, thank you,” I say.
And he begins with me. He pulls back and I am already naked above the waist and I am very comfortable with that and he puts his hands on the rim of my pantaloons. And I expect things to be floating by in my head, like the bits of the jungle in the Saigon River, I expect the things I always live with in my head to just keep on passing through: my mother and my father and my grandmother and my work and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam — what it is and what it expects of me — and even the dragons and the jasmine flowers of our lovely stories. But when Ben puts his hands inside the top edge of my pants and his knuckles lie warm on my hips, all those things vanish from me and there is only’ the slip of his hands over my hipbones and down the outer edges of my thighs and past my knees and my calves and my ankles, and as his hands move I feel my nakedness emerging for him in their wake, and then the silk bunches over my feet and then is gone and I close my eyes and all that I am is in my skin, all that I need ever to know opens with my pores into the moist air of this room and I wait with my eyes closed, not because I am afraid but because in this moment I have become my skin and seeing has nothing to do with that, and then Ben’s skin falls upon me, his thigh against my thigh, his chest against my chest, I open my eyes and his face is to my side and I turn to him. We touch our lips. He touches my cheek with his lips. I close my eyes again and his lips are on my eyelids, and now there is a new place of touching. A clear, hard spot on my hip and I know what part of him is doing this, and then he shifts and the spot disappears and he is over me and I wait. I close my eyes and I feel as if I am waiting beneath a jasmine flower, waiting for a drop to fall on my mouth so that I can speak for the first time. And then in that special place on my body, that place of such strange and sometimes sloppy mystery, that place that sometimes I love and sometimes I shun, Ben is beginning to nudge his way in, and I wait for this now, I wait for the rest of my life to begin, and I open a little and a little more and then there is a hard, fleshy wrenching, a bloom of pain that unfolds quick and sharp into my womb and my thighs and I gasp.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I do not want him to stop. I open my eyes to Ben. His brow is knit above me. He is not moving. I feel held open. And the pain is blunt now. And then it is tiny. And then it is gone.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asks.
“Go forward for the good of the revolution,” I say and this surprises me. It is from some schoolbook from the early days of the liberation. Perhaps I am a great kidder after all. We both laugh and that special part of me clenches with the laughter and his special part moves a little, and the effect, I quickly decide, is very nice and I would like to have that effect with no laughter. “No more questions now,” I say.
And now he makes love to me. And I am close to him. I am close to this man. I suddenly understand how far away people are from each other, even passing near in the street, even brushing shoulders, even looking into each other’s eyes and speaking each other’s names, there is this great empty space between us and now there is no space at all, I clutch Ben’s naked back and he is inside me and my body is a blur, the very cells of it are twisted away from each other and perhaps they have always been like that and I am just realizing it and I gather for Ben, everything is twisted apart so that something can find its way out and gather in me, ready for him, and now suddenly all of this, all these cells of mine, rush into focus, I am pulsing hard where our bodies are joined and everything is suddenly very clear and I am put together again.