I move my hand. I have not seen that part of Ben yet. I will wait until the time is ours alone. But I move my hand. I hope my father is watching. I should feel shame at that, but I do not. I move my hand and I reach and I lay my palm against the point of Ben’s hip. He is lying on his side facing me. His arm is around me and his hand is on me, just below my breasts. His lips are pressed against the side of my throat. I wonder if he can feel my heart there. It is beating fast for him, for the thing I want to do. I move my hand over his hip and across the tight curls of his hair and I open my hand wide, like my mouth wanting a deep kiss, and he is in my palm and my fingers softly curl around this part of him that I am not ashamed for the ghost of my father to see me touch but that I have trouble speaking a word for.
Penis means nothing to me. Cock means nothing to me. In my language this part is ngo.c hành, a word that is acceptable for a person to say if there is a good reason, but when I hear this word as a girl I am very puzzled, for it is made up of two words: ngo.c, which means a gem or a precious stone, and hành, which means an onion. These things contradict each other, it has always seemed to me. And neither thing is what I am touching now with my own hand, with my own will and my own desire. The street word for this male part, the word that my friend would whisper in the hidden place inside the banyan tree where we would talk, is cu, a word that it is not acceptable to say. It means turtledove. And this is the word now. Ben’s secret part is a turtledove to me, a fragile thing, a soft thing, very soft, and it moves in my hand, a bird caught sleeping in its dark nest and I feel a very tender thing for it, and I know it is Ben’s cu and this is why there is tenderness and why I feel my heart in my throat and I hope he can feel my heart, too.
I move him in my hand, the sweet softness of the flesh spilling between my fingers. He makes a sound. I tell my hand to be still. “Does this hurt you?” I say.
His face pulls away from my throat. He takes a deep and ragged breath. I do not want to stop touching him.
“I will hold my hand still,” I say. “Please do not make me let go of you.”
There is that little sound again, deep in his throat. I do not know if it means yes or no. But he says no words. I do not move my hand. My palm has grown as sensitive in its own way as the secret part of my own body, another part that I hesitate to name.
Her hand is on me and all day long I wandered the streets of Saigon, around and around, and I yearned for this moment and I dreaded this moment and my head is telling me now that it’s okay, we’ve talked this out, it’s come down to odds, that’s all, one in twenty-five thousand, as easily ignored as the possibility I’d die each time I stepped into the cab of my truck in America and eased out onto the interstate. But I can’t just go on like before. Her hand is on me and I should either touch her in return or I should tell her to stop and keep on trying to reason this out. But I can do neither thing, all I can do is say nothing and lie still and let her hand stay where it is.
But it’s clear to me that my body won’t respond. The part of me that’s still out there in the street afraid to come up to this room and face what might be a terrible thing, is glad for that. The other part, the part that desperately wants a future in this woman’s life, in her body, lifts my free hand and puts it on the top of her thigh. But can move it no farther. Tien and I lie there a long while like that. I am slack beneath her hand and my own hand is dead and distant.
Then she says, “Do you know what my sexual place there is called in Vietnamese?”
“No.”
“It is âm-d-a.o. They are two words. Âm means secret. -Da.o means path. It is my secret path. I think that is so, do you agree?”
“Yes,” I say.
“But it is not a secret for you,” she says. “To all others, yes. But not for you.”
My hand moves at last, but not to this place on her. Instead to her face. I turn her face to me and I kiss her there. On the forehead. On her eyes, which she closes quickly for me, happily. One in twenty-five thousand. I want to kiss her mouth, too. This kiss on the forehead, as sweet and soft a place as this is on Tien, is a kiss that carries the shadow of that other thing. I want to open her mouth with mine and kiss her like the woman she is — she is a woman, she is no one’s child — but I can’t, I can’t, her hand still clutches my penis softly and my kiss animates her there, she kneads me gently and I wish I could rise to her touch, I wish I could accept this secret she offers, but I am clenched there instead, from fear.
She says, “So this part of you must be a secret traveler then. Yes?”
Her voice is small and sweet and is talking around the edges of her desire for me. This pain now in me, a clear pain that has begun in my temples, will not let me answer.
She says, “Asleep at the edge of the forest. Resting for a while before pressing on.”
I finally will these words. “You know I love you.”
“I do?” She says it with the lift of a question in her voice.
“I want you, my sweet Tien. I want to be inside you very much.”
“Oh please,” she says with a rush. “I am not a girl who demands a man’s body to do this or that when I say so. Please. I did not mean to criticize the sleepy one. I adore him.”
She lets go of me and she sits up, my hand falling from her hip, my other coming from around her. She is straightening and now bending forward. She means to kiss me there, I realize. I cry out.
“Wait,” I say. I slide up to sit before her. Her face is wide-eyed with shame. I grasp her hand. “Please don’t mistake me, now. You were about to do something that. .” Her hand is warm from touching me. I have trouble saying what I know I must in order to reassure her, not because it isn’t true but because it is: I can see her in my mind completing the gesture, leaning forward and putting her lips on me there and she would kiss me with the same delicate indirection of her voice and she would be so utterly herself in that gesture and I want that very badly and that is why I can’t bear to have her do this, can’t bear to have even this image of her doing it, until who she is and who I am are clear and certain.
“You don’t like that?” she asks.
“I like it too much. Too much, my darling.”
“You are still thinking the terrible thing.”
“Yes.” And admitting it, I suddenly let all the questions back in. “The chances aren’t one in twenty-five thousand,” I say. “I found you here, didn’t I?”
“This is where I live.”
“Didn’t you say this is the place where your mother left you?”
“Yes.”
“You lived here when she was working as a bargirl?”
“Yes.”
“And where was her bar?”
“I don’t know. She never took me there. Never.”
“Near this place?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know.” I say this too loud. I can hear myself at once. She has flinched, drawn back a little. I reach to her. I take her hands in mine. “I’m sorry,” I say.
She squeezes my hands. “Ben. It is my father causing this trouble.”
I can’t figure how to make sense of this.
“He is in this room,” she says and I go cold, the place in my head that’s been pounding goes sharp cold, mountain-pass cold.