I lift my hands to my blouse buttons and I begin to undo them. This feels good. My hands rush now. I strip off my blouse and throw it down at my feet and I unsnap my bra and it falls away and my nipples awake at their sudden nakedness. I think this will bring him through the door. I slip off my shoes and I unzip my skirt and I dig my thumbs deep into these daylight layers of me and I drag the skirt and my panty hose and my underwear off all at once, stepping quickly from the clinging toes, and I am naked now, completely naked, and the secret lips of me pout for him and I reach up to my hair and pull out pins, throwing them down, my fingers trembling until my hair is tumbling over my shoulders and down my back.
I listen for the door. There are motorbikes distant in the street and the laughter of the women playing cards, and I listen to the place in front of those sounds, I wait for the sound of the door. But there is nothing. Except, now, a child crying somewhere nearby, passing, just outside, and then the child is gone, and the women are silent now, and there are only the motorbikes. But the door does not open. And it is all right, because I am not clean. It is good that Ben is late. This is what I tell myself.
I run the water into my plastic tub and I crouch beside it and I take my sponge and I soap it up with the soap that says it is 99 and 44 one-hundreds percent pure. I am far less pure than that now. But it does not bother me to think so. There is another kind of pureness possible, I think. A pureness that happens when he fills me with the part of his body I still have not looked at. I will look at that part tonight. I rub the soap beneath my arms, around my breasts, down to the place on my body that is his alone to touch. I wash myself and rinse with fresh water and I rise and I dry myself with soft pats of my towel. He would be that gentle if he were here to dry me now. I touch myself with the towel just as Ben would.
Then I reach for my silk robe hanging on the back of the door, but my hand hesitates and falls. I realize that I like being naked. He will be happy to find me naked when he comes through the door.
I step into the room. I have not done my prayers. I think to take that robe now and do this thing for my father. But I do not. I want to remain naked. My eyes fill with tears, and this surprises the part of me trying to figure all this out. I know I want Ben to hurry now. I know I am afraid he will not come here. I am afraid he has gotten on an airplane and gone back across the sea and he will forget me and I will wait naked in this room all night and all day tomorrow and the next tomorrow and the next until they find me dead here like this. If there is something more to these tears, or to this trembling that wishes to start in my hands, I am not ready to think of that. It is surely enough for now that I am afraid Ben has left me.
I could light just the incense. He deserves not to have to wait for that. I move toward the shrine and then I stop and my face grows hot and my hands fall to cover me and the trembling has begun in them and it is because I think he can see me like this. My father can. I have been naked in this room many times before, of course, and it never occurred to me that he was here. But surely I knew. I would pray, my nakedness covered, but barely, by my silk robe, I would let loose the smoke of the incense like a lover looses her hair, and I would finish and rise from where I kneeled and turn, and many times I would let the robe fall from me at once. It is often very hot in this room and the air is thick with rain that has died and turned into spirit and has filled the air unseen, like my father. And at those times my words had hardly faded from the room — he was still here where I called him to be — and I exposed my naked woman’s body, and so it was for him. I turn and hurry into the bathroom and close the door and I lean against it. Do I truly believe these things? Has my father lived with me all these years, watching? Did he see me touch Ben last night? Did he see my nakedness just now?
“Go away,” I say, aloud. Gently. I do not want to hurt his feelings. “Please,” I say. “I want a living man.”
I wait to see if he will go. I cannot tell.
And then I hear Ben coming in, the latch lifting, the hinges creaking.
I turn and I throw open this door and Ben is there. I am no longer ashamed in my nakedness. Because of him. He has taken any shame in this away from me. He is caught there, the door closing behind him, his hand still on the latch, his face turning now to my sudden appearance. He straightens and faces me. His eyes are wide and sad. I move quickly to him and I open my arms and I leap up for him to catch me and clutch me to him, knowing he will, and he does, his arms cross my back and press me hard against him as my legs go around his waist.
“Oh my god,” he says.
I think he says these words because he is so happy for me to be like this in his arms. I want him to carry me about the room, to spin with me and dance with me, holding me off the ground. But he does not move. He holds me close to him and he is breathing heavily, I can feel him, I put my face against the side of his throat and I wait and I can feel his heart there and it is beating very fast. I pull at his shirt. Pull it up out of his pants so that the part of me that only he knows can kiss at his skin. The cloth rumples across me there, a button touches me like a fingertip and is gone, then there is the mat of hair on his stomach against me and in all of this I am like a woman I never knew I could be, a woman so free like this about her body. I know very clearly that in this feeling I am being counterrevolutionary, my country would be ashamed of me. But I do not care. I am free, I am perched here high on a tree and I need only to leap one more time in order to fly, and it is because of him. And this is a strange and contradictory thing: clinging to him, I feel I can fly; devoted to him completely, I feel free.
“I love you,” I say.
“You’re a woman,” he says, very softly.
I know at once what he means. I let go of him with my legs and I climb down to stand on my own feet. He is right, and he is the man I love, to say this thing to me. I want to walk beside him to the bed. In Vietnam we have a society where men and women share their work equally and they should share their bed equally, and I am surprised that this man raised from childhood by an imperialist government can know this. It makes me want to jump up on him again.
“I love your smile,” he says, touching my cheek with his fingertips. It would be hard to explain the thing I have just smiled about, so I simply turn my face and kiss the fingertips that have touched me and then I take the hand in mine and bring it to my side and I tug at him so that we can walk together across the room to the place where we will make love.
He yields, he moves, but he feels very heavy. We go to the bed and he stops me before we lie down and he pulls me to him and presses me close. There is something in him, some feeling I do not understand. A quick dark thing is rushing into my head, and I say, “Is it only my smile?”
I feel his head move. He is looking at me, trying to see into my eyes, but I keep my face against his chest. I want the answer to this question first. Then I realize he does not understand what I mean. Still not looking at him I say, “Is it only my smile that you love?”
“No,” he says.
“I am sorry to ask this,” I say. “I am still a selfish girl.”
“It’s not selfish,” he says. “I thought we settled that last night.”
“And now I am sorry again. I should say I am a selfish woman. We settle that only one minute ago.”
He holds me gently away from him and we look into each other’s eyes. I want very much for us to make love now.
I let go and curl backward onto the bed, propped up a little with the pillow against the wall, and he eases down beside me. But he does not lie beside me, he does not touch me, he sits there as if he’s waiting for something to happen, something to be said. I wait, too. The light is fading in the room.