And still, I know that things are much better inside me. That’s the very reason I have this sudden emptiness. The thing that had been growling in the dark in me is silent, but the guilt that took its place was an old one and faded away at once. I’m not proud of the way my life has gone. I knew that long ago. So if Tien in some strange way was present in the past I’m ashamed of, then that’s okay. If she was, she was there as a brief glimpse of a purity and innocence that would someday return to me in the form of a woman and make me whole.
And standing on the sidewalk on this morning in Vietnam in 1994, I think: what it must mean is, I’ve been forgiven. If there is some higher power in the universe that gives a damn about guilt and shame and forgiveness, then surely for Tien and me to be brought together like this and to be made to touch like this and to feel like this — especially if she’s the child of a bargirl herself, especially if I saw her for one ignorant moment in that former life of mine — if such a power exists, then surely, for all this to happen, it shows that I’ve been forgiven.
This is what I think for a few sweet moments. And then I decide to go back to my hotel and lie on my bed and think about Tien until it is time to go to her again. And so I cross the street into the plaza before the Rex. A photographer lopes up and motions for me to turn so that the City Hall and Ho Chi Minh’s statue will be behind me and I wave him away. A girl with handfuls of postcards takes his place, following me step for step as I move down the plaza now, heading for the fountain at the traffic circle, and I wave her away too. And then the little man with the mustache is at my side and I recognize him as the pimp on the motorcycle and he’s speaking low to me.
“You want nice Vietnam girl? Boom boom all day all night?” he says.
“No,” I say and he doesn’t turn away, he continues to follow me and I wonder what it is about me that he won’t believe what I’ve said.
“She is very nice,” he says. “Do anything for you.”
“No,” I say again and I try to make it sharper but I’m not sure it is and I know there’s no desire for another woman, a faint shudder runs in me at the thought of touching any woman but Tien now, and that makes me happy, but the very happiness of it turns at once to a dark thing and I know I’ve been thinking about bargirls too much, that’s what’s going on, this is connecting to all of that, and I want to rush away from this man but I can’t make my legs go any faster.
“Here is she,” he says, and I look and we’re moving toward the motorbike parked at the curb and the girl is there, perched on the back of the seat, and she’s very young and her hair that was rolled up when I saw her before is unpinned now, falling long and dark, over her shoulder and down over her breast. She is looking at me with steady eyes, looking into my eyes.
I stop. If there’s a moment in a body that’s the opposite of sexual desire, this is a thing that is happening to me now, like driving in a fog and not daring to stop on the shoulder because you know someone will crash into you from behind and not seeing enough even to find an exit ramp and knowing you can only go forward and knowing something is waiting out there that you won’t see until you slam into it and your body squeezes hard to make you very small and you feel it most in your penis and in your balls, they suck in and clench tight, and it’s like that, seeing this woman waiting for me to take her to a loveless bed.
“She is my sister,” the man with the mustache says. “She is one virgin. You say hello to her. Her name Kim.”
I turn to him. “Kim?” I don’t know what’s in my voice but the man flinches.
“Sure,” he says, but it’s meek, a child caught in a lie. “You no like name Kim?”
Whatever surprised the man in my voice is kicking up inside me now. I’m clenching tighter. Some shape in the fog ahead. I start to turn away and his hand is on my arm.
“Wait,” he says. “She not Kim. That name Americans like, so we say she name Kim.”
I stop. He angles his face around trying to look me in the eyes. He laughs a little laugh that is full of something that sounds like respect.
“You know already. You know Vietnam. I see you smart GI vet. Her name Ngoc. American like Kim better.”
I want to tell him to shut up. I’m not looking at him and keeping my face turned is just making him say more. I force my eyes to go to him and when I do he smiles broadly and he cuffs me on the arm.
“You smart man,” he says. “All Vietnam good-time girl name Kim.”
Now she is near me. “My name Ngoc,” she says. “I do for you special.”
It is ten minutes until six o’clock and I get out of the car and I say good-bye to Mr. Thu over my shoulder. I am thinking of my heart, how I can feel it rushing inside me. I look to the little table where I first see him, and some men of Vietnam are in that place drinking beers and then I am in the shadow of the alleyway that leads to my rooms.
I go up the iron stairs and I pass women crouching and playing Chinese cards. I say hello to these women every night but I say nothing now. I am sorry for that, but Ben has filled me up and he has squeezed all my words out and he is squeezing also at my chest, making it difficult to breathe, and I am loving this feeling.
My door is unlocked, this is the way I leave it always, I tell him so just last night, so when I push open the door I am ready to be in his arms. But he is not there. I stop. I stand in the middle of the room. I look around. The sheets are thrown back. Like he has risen only just a few moments ago and he has gone into the kitchen or into the bathroom. I go to the kitchen door and the room is empty. The water drips from the faucet into my metal pan. The sound is very loud. There is no other sound. I step to the bathroom door and I know already that he is not there. The door is open and I can see this clearly. I move back to the center of the room where I live and I look to the ancestor shrine. The incense is cold. The fruit is turning dark. No face is there, either. A rooster crows somewhere out in the alley, far away. He does not like how the light is going from the sky.
I try not to think of my father. I tell myself: Ben is not gone forever. It is not fair to think of my father because of him. For one thing, Ben will come up the stairs and along the balcony and through that door any moment. For another thing, my father is dead. He did not leave me forever without another thought, he is simply dead. And perhaps his spirit did not leave me at all. Perhaps I drew him here with my prayers long ago and he has all these years been very grateful to me for supporting him in the afterlife, as we are supposed to do for our dead ancestors, and he has wept ghostly tears because he was not able to come back to Vietnam as a man, as a father, and find his daughter. These are the things scrambling around in me as I stand here. Thoughts like these.
But I am afraid there may be more. My face and hands have gone cold now. My heart is still rushing, but for some new reason. I stand halfway between the empty bed and the empty shrine and the beats of my heart are like pebbles, piling up, filling my chest and pushing up now into my throat. I must move from this place where I am standing. This much I know.
I turn my body around. It is very heavy. I push against it and I am moving to the bathroom. I go in and I pull on the chain and a light comes from the bare bulb into the room, a light like on those late nights when I would lie in my mother’s bed and she would rise and go into the bathroom and I would be awake — as soon as she rose and left me alone there, I would wake — and she would go in and pull the bathroom door just partway closed and turn the light on and there would be only silence for the longest time and I do not know what it was that she was doing.