I laugh, and I cry, “Wait.”
But he does not listen, he is going forward into the water.
“Wait,” I cry again but he can hear the thrill in my voice and he does not stop. Then I bend near, putting my mouth against his wet and salty ear. I say, “Don’t you want me to be naked?” He stops. I am very conscious of those places where our flesh is touching. Beneath my leg, along my thigh, my forearms against his chest.
He turns and he wades toward the shore and I cling tight to him and for a moment I think I know what it feels like to have a father. I am small upon him and I am glad for that because the way he is big makes me safe and makes me loved and makes it so that I am not alone, and these are good things, but I am more glad for my thighs clutching his naked sides and more glad that my true father is nothing but smoke and air and I am more glad for where we are heading, out of the water now, and he does not stop, he is heading for the top of the beach and a stretch of low scrub grass there, before a dune. And beyond, the only light in the sky is spread along a jagged line of mountains and the light has turned red and we are in the dark shadow of the dune and he puts me down on the grass and my hands go to work instantly at my blouse, the buttons, the bow, it is off me and he is before me as I am doing this and watching my hands, watching what will be revealed beneath them. The blouse is gone and then my bra and he smiles at my nipples and the skirt is gone and my panties and then we are on the grass and my hand goes to this part of his body that at last I can see in my head and it is ardent now for me, unimpressed and withdrawn as it was with the sea, and if I am so much more exciting to his body than the South China Sea, I have no right to delay him, for I am rich with my own inner sea and I will drench and wash him now and I draw him into me right away, my Ben, my love, he will come into this place where our child has begun to grow.
How good it feels inside her, how good, there will be many more nights to go slow but on this shore on this night she wants me inside her quickly, she draws me there with her hand, and I move onto her and I look at the sea and the moon is out there, I didn’t notice it before, though it’s been there all along, hiding in its paleness, not showing itself, but now the daylight is almost gone and the moon has appeared, fat and golden.
I look at her face beneath me and her eyes are open and she is Tien, she is herself, I move in her and there’s nothing here to fear at all. I am up Highway One in Vietnam and this alien sea lies beside me and on my skin, and there is nothing of war, nothing of death, nothing of the past, there is only this joining of me and this woman, this Vietnamese woman, this woman I love, and I am at peace.
And then I rush and she digs hard at my back and her lips are against my ear and she cries out softly there, and only now are we related, only now, only this way, as we share one body, and then we slow and we stop and we lie still. Though I shift and am no longer inside her, this feeling between us does not change and she curls against me and I hold her, and for a long time, we lie still.
And the sky goes black and bursts with stars and the moon rises and grows small but it turns so white it almost hurts my eyes. I think she sleeps for a while. Then she wakes with a little start. I draw her closer and she whispers, “Yes.”
“Did you have a dream?”
After a silence, she says, “In my sleep now I listen to my body.”
“What does it say?”
She is quiet again, for a long while. Then she says, “What will we do tomorrow?”
“Make love.”
She presses me onto my back and crawls directly on top of me, her chest hovering over my chest, her legs hugging my sides, her face eclipsing the moon. “That is a good answer,” she says.
I can’t see her eyes in the darkness, only the silhouette of her head. I lift my hand and with my fingertips I touch her lips and then trace up her check to her brow to the bridge of her nose, to her eye, feeling her eyelid close for me, I touch her there and her eye moves beneath my finger, the sign of dreaming.
I say, “Are you listening to your body right now?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t answer me the last time, so I move my hand from her face to her hip and I simply wait.
“I am glad I was born,” she says.
“I am too.”
“My father is dead.”
“Yes.”
The moon flares in my eyes. Her head has moved, she slides off me now, and I can see her face, I turn to her and I move to kiss her and I see her eyes shift to me and they are black, black as the empty spaces between the stars, and I close my own eyes with the touch of our lips. We kiss and she gently ends it and I look up into the sky and draw her close.
She says, “I almost was not born. I have always thought, now and then, that it made no difference, really. Now my body tells me that it is very important that I am alive.”
I think of abortion. That her mother almost let Tien go. I want to tell her that I, too, am glad she is alive, but I sense something else running in her. I close my eyes against the brightness of the moon and I wait.
Then she says, “My mother made up a fairy tale for me once. She said it was about my father so I think there was a real story behind it. I loved a certain fairy tale of a dragon when I was a child, so she made it about dragons. In this story my father dies at the end. But it was really about his father, the part where I almost never was born.”
I open my eyes. I turn my face out to the sky over the horizon, away from the moon. I feel a tiny stirring in me, like the flicker of one of the stars out there.
She says, “It happened that he almost died, my father’s father. And if he had, then I never would have been born.”
Something in me says to just keep quiet now But this flicker is actually a distant burning. I say, “What is the story? How did he almost die?”
“It is about a dragon — who turns out to be my grandfather — who goes every day into a fiery hole where he works. . When I start saying this, it sounds silly. I do not know what parts are real and what parts are not.”
“No,” I say, and whatever is driving me to hear this is working on its own. I feel like I’ve floated off a ways down the beach. I’m out taking a smoke while this other part of me does some damn stupid thing. “It’s not silly,” I say. “What’s the story she told?”
Tien adjusts her head into the dip between my shoulder and my chest. She says, “My grandfather’s enemies try to kill him in this fiery hole. A place where he works. But he fights them and kills them instead. And it was after all this that my father is born. So you see, if he had died there instead, my father would not have been born and then he would not have gone to a distant land and met the princess — this was how my mother saw herself, I guess. But then I would not have been horn. And then. .”
She stops abruptly, but there is already a stopping in me. The flicker is gone, the burning is gone, there is only cold now and a shift of gravity, a collapse in my chest. I try to wrench a thought from this place. The story is too familiar. Too familiar. The story my father told me about him going into the B-furnace stove in the Depression and the plant owner’s goons trying to kill him. This was my story, and Tien’s mother told her this thing just like it. Kim. Kim. But I can’t remember ever telling Kim about my father and his fight in the mill. I try now. Try hard to remember. Nothing. This is good, I tell myself. They’re different stories.
Tien finally finishes her thought. “And then I would not have made love to you. I would not be here tonight in my body, which I am very happy for.”
I can say nothing. I think to ask for more details from her fairy tale. But it’s about dragons and fiery holes and princesses — it is suddenly unimaginable that Kim could think of herself as a princess with me. Not even in a made-up story for her child. Never. This was a fairy tale and fairy tales are designed to make you think of your regular life. This fiery hole could be anything. But I am breathing heavily now, gasping for air. I gently untangle from Tien and I sit up.