I shiver at this, like I am suddenly chilled, like there is something crawling just beneath my skin and it is very cold. I have never had a brother or a sister, so the thought of this happening is just between invented people in my head, but even so, it feels very strange to me, it catches in my chest like in the early days of the liberation when the men in the streets with guns would suddenly look at you and you did not know if they recognized that you were just a little girl or they thought you were someone else and they might kill you. I feel like that.
So I turn on my side toward Ben, breaking that place on our hips where he and I are joined, and I put my hand on his chest and I want to move my hand down to the place where we have been joined like the children of the dragon and the princess, the brothers and sisters who knew no shame from the blood between them. But I do not move my hand. Not right now. I am glad to hold back and know that I could do this thing at any moment. He will sleep beside me and I will sleep and I could wake at any moment in the night and touch him there. Knowing I can touch him and holding back is a sweet thing. That odd warmth that feels like fear, fades away. Ben’s arm comes around my shoulders and draws me tighter against him. I say, “Why did you come here?”
There’s an answer in my head right away, to this. Like almost everything that’s been going on inside me since Tien and I made love, this answer just comes on me and it’s like I’m sitting back waiting to see what it is, myself. Things come into me and I don’t know from where. I say, “I think it was to find you.”
This answer puzzles her as much as it does me. She says, “You knew?”
“I didn’t know a thing,” I say. And I wait a moment to see what I mean. I look hard into the dark above us. A gecko is motionless in a shadow, just outside a stripe of neon, waiting for something he knows is coming along. I feel the warmth of the palm of her hand on my chest, the press of her body inside the circle of my arm. She seems so familiar. I think I feel that briefly. But that would happen now and then on the road. I’d slide into a town somewhere and I’d never been there in my life but it was familiar. I take it like that. I say, “I mean it was supposed to happen this way somehow.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Do you think something like a god brought you here?”
I should have expected her to take what I said this way. It’s natural. But this is far beyond the point I think I’m making. “I don’t know,” I say. “I think I’m just saying things that come into my head. Things people are supposed to say when they talk like this.”
“I am not familiar with this custom.”
“But I think I believe what I’m saying, too. About us.”
“I was brought up a Buddhist,” Tien says. “Not a very good one. My mother wasn’t very religious. How could she be and do what she did in her life? My grandmother believed in her dead husband’s spirit, and the spirit of her father. But that’s not really Buddhism. That’s something the Chinese oppressors brought us a thousand years ago.”
“Does Buddhism explain why I’m here?” I ask.
“I do not think so,” she says. “Buddhism says that all the suffering in the world comes from desire.”
I draw Tien closer to me, sliding my hand down to the point of her hip, letting her skin run softly into my hand and up my arm and into my head. I want things to be clear for me now, about her, about what this all means. Too much is going on in me that I wasn’t expecting. It feels like there’s something waiting in the shadow for me to come along. “Are you suffering now?” I ask her.
“From my desire for you?”
“Yes.”
“I said I was not a very good Buddhist.”
“It’s only the good Buddhists that suffer from desire?”
“They suffer from the desire not to feel desire.”
“This is better, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she says, and her hand slides down my stomach and onto that place that is slack now and quiet but I stir at her touch. And almost at once the night begins to blur at its edges, just when I think I’d be waking up in my head like I seem to be doing in my body, the darkness above me billows like mill smoke and the gecko disappears and I suddenly want to let go of all I can see and hear and feel against me. I say, “I’m very tired now, Tien,” and her hand stops.
“Is it okay?” she asks. “That I touch you?”
“Of course,” I say.
“Will we sleep now?”
“I think so.”
“Can you say this thing once more before we do?”
“Yes. And you?”
“I will.”
“I love you,” I say and I know I mean it, though this time the words come hard. From this sudden weariness. From that, I decide, because I feel the deep sea-wave of sleep rolling under me and lifting me into the dark and I don’t even hear her say the words back to me.
And I wake in bright sun. I remember a brief moment when she kissed me good-bye. She was up early for her work and I was deep in a dreamless sleep and her lips woke me, on my cheek, on my brow, then on my mouth and I put my arm around her and she was in Saigontourist clothes and I smelled her makeup and she said, “I will come to you this evening.” Then she was gone and I blurred back into sleep.
And now I’m awake and it’s late in the morning. The roar of motorbikes fills the room and I sit up. The sheet is twisted away from me and I’m naked and I think of Tien’s kiss, how she might have seen me lying here in my nakedness. I stir at this. And at once my hands go out to the sheet and scrabble at the knots and pull the cloth over me. This odd surge of modesty in an empty room seems to come directly from my hands and I look at them as if they could explain.
Then I try to doze again, but I cannot. I rise up finally and I am naked for a moment in the middle of the room, in the sunlight, and again I feel unsettled by this, again my hands drive me to cover myself. I put on my pants and my shirt and I’m breathing hard. Like I’m on a drug or something. Like something is in my body. I look around as if there’d be some proof from the night before. A mirror on a tabletop and a dusting of powder, the butt end of a reefer. Something. Anything. Though I know we weren’t even drunk, Tien and me. I know there’s been nothing in this room but the feeling between us. And that is unaffected by this sudden mood. I see her silk pantaloons on a chair and these same hands of mine that have wanted to cover me stir now with the memory of her skin on their palms, they feel the cool run of her flesh on them, right now. But still there is something.
I finish dressing and go out of her rooms, closing the door softly, leaning there a moment, wondering at all of this. And then I go along the outer balcony and it smells of fish sauce and wood fire and there’s a jumble of red tile roofs and straw mats and hanging laundry and the clucking of chickens from somewhere down the alley, and as I pass by an old woman crouching near the metal circle of stairs, she nods at me and puts a fold of betel leaf in her mouth.
I go down the stairs and out into the street and I seek the sun, stay out of the shade. I walk along the street for a long way in the sun, taking it in hard and straight on my face and my arms, trying to sweat this feeling away. Then at last I hail a pedicab and the driver asks where I want to go and I don’t know. I think of my hotel, but I don’t want the empty room again, the empty bed, the paddle fan moving the wet air, and so I say the Hotel Rex, which is down near the circular fountain at Le Loi and Nguyen Hue.