It means something to me, I think, when Ben says all of this. I think I know about heavy days. I think it is the same for me, when I am not thinking about what I owe to the country or to the ghost of my father or to the people who come to Vietnam to understand it and I speak to them in English about what we are. In the other times, the days I do not work and my prayers are done, there is some heavy thing in the center of me. I can sit in this very room and I listen to the sound of the motorbikes going by and going by and when there is a little bit of quiet from them, there is a place in the roof of this building that catches the wind and hums a low hum and it just goes on and on and the day is very hot sometimes and I want to sweat but I cannot, my skin fills with my sweat and does not let it go, and this is all there is to my life, just these little sounds and my sweat held in and I grow sad in some dull way. I think this is what Ben is talking about. I have this feeling, too. He and I are the same. But I do not say any of this to him on this night of our first touching. There is something else that trails into my head with his wife, like the smell of her perfume. I say, “Did you have children?”
“We were together more than ten years. But we never had a child.”
“Can you have a child?”
“I don’t know the answer to that. Mattie and I never checked to see what was the matter. It might’ve been me. It might’ve been her. It might’ve been we just didn’t try hard enough. We never did try, exactly.”
We are sitting before each other on my narrow bed. Our legs are crossed and we are still naked and a feeling comes into me that I never have before. I feel that place between my legs as an opening into me, a way in. But without him inside, I sense the break of me there, and there is the flow of him, cold now, from inside me, and I close my eyes for a moment and there is a spinning in my head. His hands are on my shoulders.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
I open my eyes and things steady. “I am okay now,” I say.
He takes his hands away and we are facing each other and I have not looked at him yet. I have not seen that special part of his body. I can cast my eyes down now, I know, and I will see, but as I think to do that, I feel the spinning begin inside again. I will wait to see him there. I will wait. It is enough for now that I can feel my own body in this new way. And there are many things I still want to know.
“How did you decide it was time to stop your marriage?” I ask.
“After I got married, I worked in the steel mill for a while. My father wanted that very badly, me to be back at the mill. So I did that. I got married to Mattie and we rented a little brick house and I took the job my father wanted for me. And nothing felt right. Ever.”
“Did the crimes of the war bother you?”
He looks away and I suddenly hear myself. These are true things maybe, that I was taught, but I cannot hear my own voice when I speak them, and if I am sitting naked on a bed with a man and he can look down to see this part of me that is open now, then I want to speak only in my voice. I put my hands on his shoulders, just as he did when I was dizzy. I say, “I do not think you commit any crimes. That was not the way I mean to say it.”
He looks back at me and he smiles a little bit, but out of only one side of his mouth. I try to understand what that smile means. I say, “Whatever you did, it was your country that was the criminal.” I stop. I hear myself again. I say, “These words come out of my mouth. I do not know where they are from.”
He touches my cheek with his fingertips. “It’s okay,” he says.
“I do know where they are from. I have heard these things all of my life. You hear something all of your life and it makes you talk in a certain way. Even if you have just made love.” I turn my face and kiss his fingertips.
When Tien goes into a little riff about the propaganda-talk that’s coming out of her mouth, I touch her cheek and she kisses my fingertips and I know I’m loving her more in that moment because of her self-consciousness, and my being here suddenly feels like a thing that began a long time ago without my even knowing it, like this was all set up somehow, and it’s an odd feeling, I guess, especially for me to have, because I’ve never bought into all that, but I can’t shake it, this feeling. It’s like somebody’s arranged this, and I think of my mother.
It was summer and it was late in the afternoon and my father had just disappeared down the street with his lunch box, gone till midnight. I sat on the top step of our front porch and I’d just watched him, the slow roll of his shoulders in his walk, until I couldn’t see him anymore. Then there was a rustle behind me and my mother sat down at my side. “He’s gone,” I said.
She looked off in the direction of the mill and then she turned back to me and she said, “That’s okay. I have something for you, anyway.”
Suddenly there was a book in her lap. Something from the library that she’d waited till my father was gone to show me. And I can’t think of what book it was. I’m sorry, Mama, but I can’t think of any of the books, really, though I did read them for you and maybe I got some good from them. But she had a book and then she heard herself, how she’d just sounded. “I don’t mean it’s okay your father is gone. He likes books too.”
I didn’t say anything in answer to this. And my mama never wanted to tell me lies. She was very careful about that. So she had to keep talking till things were straight. She said, “He doesn’t like them, exactly. But he doesn’t have anything against them. He just doesn’t love them like you and I do. Like I don’t love all the things to do with the mill. You and he love that together. See how many wonderful things there are about you? There’s so much more to you than anybody.”
She went on like that, listening very carefully to every word she said, trying to correct this or that, down to the tiniest possible misimpression. She comes back to me like that, my mama, when Tien scrambles around trying to undo her words. And I don’t think I’m remembering my mother’s words from forty years ago. Not really. Not so exactly. But she comes into my head while Tien and me are sitting naked on the bed and we’ve just made love and Tien is going on in that suddenly familiar way. And I can hear my mother’s voice speaking those exact words that may not be exact at all. And she seems tangled up in all of this, somehow, maybe like she was pointing me toward the woman I would someday love.
But I say only, “You remind me of someone.”
“Who’s that?” Tien says.
“My mother, for a moment.”
“Is that good?”
“Yes. It’s very good.”
“It’s gone, though? That feeling is gone?”
“Yes.”
“Forgive me, but I’m glad. I like to be your lover better than a mother.”
I laugh and put my hand on the calf of her leg. “I do too. It was never anything like that.”
“Good.”
“And your mother?”
“You don’t remind me of her at all.”
“Good,” I say. “I like being your lover better than a mother.”
“I do too.”
I love Tien’s play, but I’m interested now in a real answer. I say, “Where is your mother?”
“She’s dead.” Tien says this instantly, looking me straight in the face.
I think of Tien’s shrine. “You don’t pray for her?”
“She’s not worth praying for.”
I say this lie to Ben without thinking. It is very easy and that scares me.
Then I speak a hard truth without thinking and maybe that scares me, too, because it is a true thing that I am not ready to say.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
So because I say one lie that I do not want to say, I tell him a truth I do not want to say either. “There is no reason to be sorry,” I say. “She was a prostitute.”