She seems to understand. Her hands leap to my face, press at my cheeks. “No. No. I don’t mean you. His ghost. My father is dead. Please believe that. His ghost is here trying to come between us.”
I close my eyes. I’m still cold. I feel some asshole in me from Court TV boring on, filling my mouth with words when all I want in the world is just to do what Tien says, just believe her and go on with my life. I say, “I came to this street — you found me sitting downstairs — because this is where I knew the woman called Kim. This used to be a street full of bars. If your mother worked near here, then the chances turn into something really troubling.”
No worse than that I’ll have cancer growing in some part of me in the next twenty years, no worse chance than that, and I never think about that possibility: this is how I argue back. But I can’t get warm again. I begin to shiver.
Tien leans forward and puts her arms around me. I say, “I have to know.”
“How?”
I don’t know for a moment. My mind thrashes its way toward obvious answers. “There are tests.”
“You mean tests of the blood?”
“I think those are too broad. They won’t tell us for sure. There are others.”
“My darling, this is something I cannot say in my job, but we are in my bed naked, so I think it is okay. We do not have even enough medicine in Vietnam. We do not have enough doctors. We do not have laboratories for these things. I doubt we could even do the test of the blood. But surely not something more difficult.”
I bow my head, close my eyes, focus on the stretching at the back of my neck. I think, How fragile these bodies are.
“There is one way,” she says. She lifts at my face with her hand. I yield. Her eyes are very dark. The light is almost entirely gone from the room and the neon has not started up outside. She asks, “We must do this?”
I try once more to shake this thing off. I lift my hand. I touch her cheek. I think about kissing her mouth. Here in the gathering dark. The path is so secret that only she and I will know. Everyone I know in my life but her is an ocean away. All the Vietnamese on their motorbikes rushing past out in the street are ignorant of us, utterly ignorant. And if her father’s ghost is in this room with us, then at least he isn’t me. I bend to her. I bring my mouth to hers. Slowly. I feel her breath on my upper lip. Then we touch. Soft. And I hope she is right. And I think — part of me does, in this good moment, it thinks — she is right. But the very sweetness of this kiss makes me let it go and I pull back just out of the touch of her breath and I say, “Yes. I must know.”
Do I even know myself how much I love this man? Until this moment I do not. I say, “I think my mother maybe has returned to her home village. It is near Nha Trang. We can try to find her.”
He sits back. His face, though I cannot see it clearly now in the darkening room, seems suddenly blank. He does not want to do that any more than I do, I think. This makes me happy. Whoever this Kim might be, he does not want to see her again.
Though she is not my mother. She is not. This is something I still blame on my father’s ghost. He puts all these confusing things inside Ben and me.
And then suddenly there is one more confusing thing. I have spoken of my mother’s village to Ben without thinking, because it is true that she could easily have gone there, because if he must have some proof that is not in his own heart about this, then to find her is the only way. But I think now: Is she alive?
Sometimes in these past nineteen years I have wondered this. I did so when I served tea to Ben, his first time in this very room. But when I am thinking I will never know for sure, I will never see her again anyway, it is a distant idea. But now it comes to me very strong. She might be dead. And I argue with myself. She was not harmed by my government. I know that. None of the prostitutes for the Americans was harmed, not even here in Ho Chi Minh City, where some of them shamelessly remained and offered themselves to the liberation forces. These women simply were sent to be reeducated and none of them was harmed. And my mother would — I don’t even know for sure how old she was when she left me; no more than thirty, I think—she would be perhaps fifty years old. No more. Perhaps still less. Not a woman ready to die of her years.
But she never came back. Even when it was clear — and it was quickly clear — that no harm would come to her, she never came back. She never even wrote a letter to my grandmother and me. She might be dead.
I feel a sudden chill. Not in me. In the room. I turn my face to look. There is nothing. The dark. The faceless shrine across the way.
“Do you think she might be there?” This is Ben’s voice. He sounds very far away.
“Yes,” I whisper and I listen for her. She might be in this room. It might be her jealousy, not my father’s, causing this trouble.
“You haven’t seen her since. .?”
I am hearing these words, I am even hearing the way he does not finish his sentence so that it becomes a question to me. But I am still straining to feel if she is in this room. I do not answer.
“Tien?” he says.
I turn to him.
He says, “If you don’t want to do this, I understand.”
“Do?”
“Find your mother.”
“You have decided you need this thing?”
“I don’t know. I want to just forget all this. I do. I want that more than anything. Just to touch you now.”
He says this and I am watching his eyes. They do not move to my body, though I am still naked before him. And I know we must go to Nha Trang. The chill is inside me now. I am very conscious of my body. In the old way. I shrink before him even though he is looking only in my eyes. I fold my arms across my chest, hiding my nipples.
He says, “You haven’t seen her since you were a child?”
“Eight years old,” I say.
“Can you do this?”
“If it means we can love each other again. Yes.”
“I love you now,” he says.
“You know what I am saying.”
“Yes,” he says, and he looks away, toward the window.
I rise. His face suddenly turns pale red, as if he is blushing from the sight of me. But it is the neon that has come upon him like a ghost, from the outside, from the hotel across the street, lighting up for the night. Still, I find that I am hoping Ben will keep his eyes turned away from me until I cross the floor and disappear into the bathroom.
I turn my back to him and move away and my flesh crawls with the desire to be hidden. This makes me very sad. I try to feel if my mother is here with us. Before me, the bathroom door is ajar and the light from the bulb is spilling out. I stop. As much as I want to leave Ben’s sight for now, I stop. I think it is her. I think I am her child again and she is there, behind the door, staying quiet, considering her spoiled life without my eyes upon her, perhaps staring into her own eyes in the mirror, like she did years ago, and she has come back now, to make trouble. I am afraid that all I have to do is touch the door and it will swing open and she will be there, her face turning to me.
But I am no longer her child. I am no one’s child. If she is there, if her ghost has spun itself into something visible and is waiting for me, then I am happy for that. We will finish with this right here.
I step to the door and I open it fast. The bathroom is empty. My silk robe dangles on a hook on the back of the door. I take it down and I put it on. As soon as I do this, I feel better about my body, and as soon as I feel better about my body, I want to be naked again for Ben.
This is a very odd time for me.
But I draw the robe tight around me and I tie the belt and I do not like this bare bulb light. I step in and reach to it and I pull the chain. The darkness feels like a kiss on my eyes. I want it to be Ben’s lips.