She tells me I’m the first man she’s ever done it with and I stop right off. It wouldn’t make a difference in my feelings for her, either way, but when she says she’s never made love before, I do feel like I’ve been given some kind of a second chance. I almost tell her it’s the same for me. For Christ’s sake, to be able to start again from a place where there’s nothing to remember, nothing to ask about, nothing but what’s there for both of you right in that moment, without any history at all, that’s almost too good to be true. And to my surprise, my face goes hot and I get a feeling in my eyes like when you step in front of a coke oven and you take that first blast of heat before you start shoveling the spill.
Like that maybe, like a feeling at the mill, but that’s a little bit of bullshit on my part. In fact, it’s like when you’re about to cry. This woman lying here in a dim room saying she’s a virgin and she wants me to be inside her body and she is who she is, she listens to me talk like she does with those sweet dark eyes never looking away even for a second and she takes me into a room like this and says so easily this is my good luck Buddha and this is my long life Buddha and this is my ancestor shrine and it’s like she thinks I’m going to understand these things right off. She just makes me part of them, though a couple of the things should seem silly to me, little ceramic fat guys sitting on the floor, but I don’t want to laugh at them, only maybe a quiet laugh in pleasure from her being like this. A Vietnam woman. In a room in goddamn Saigon, after all. Those people out there going around and around all night on their motorcycles, a bunch of them maybe guys who twenty years ago were in the business of killing Americans. And she tells me that there is no past at all and she wants me and I feel like I’m going to goddamn cry.
So I turn my face to the window. And I hope that it will be all right for her. I hope she shouldn’t be waiting for the man she’s going to marry, though it’s not like I’ve ruled out that the man she could marry is me. If I figured otherwise, I think I’d be strong enough to get up and thank her as sweetly as I could so it wouldn’t hurt her and I’d get the hell out of here. But I realize — and this is a shock to me, as a matter of fact — that it could be me. It took me to come back to the fucking Nam to realize that I could be married to somebody again. And just at the moment I come to the little shock of that, Tien says, “It is all right,” and she takes my hand and puts it on her breast.
This is the first real touch. The first touch of sex. We’re half naked at the moment and we’ve been kissing, but this is the first touch. I take my hand away but not very far. I can’t say that something’s warning me. I just want to be sure she isn’t making a mistake about what she wants. They think about these things a little different over here. Even if the communists are in control, they still seem to think in some older ways. I don’t want her to end up convinced she’s spoiled for some other man, just in case. Though I’m wanting to go on with this very bad now. And it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this way. I don’t even try to think of the last time. I lift my hand just a little bit and my palm is burning with the tiny hard spot where the tip of her nipple was and what I do think of is a moment when I was pulling oil on the California coast, some years ago now, and I stepped out of my rig in a rest stop somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley and it was night and the air was full of the smell of oranges. A couple of Peterbilts had just huffed away and they’d been full of oranges and the smell was everywhere, that and the smell of diesel fuel, and I suddenly wanted a woman bad. I wasn’t sure why but it seemed to have something to do with this place. Saigon. These streets are always full of that kind of mix of smells, some sweet something, fruit or flowers or incense, but something else too in the same air, dry rot or old fish or the exhaust from the motorbikes. I got out of my truck, and what passed for a marriage in my life was dead already and I didn’t care if my pecker ever saw the light of day again and it was a thing that smelled like Vietnam that made me want a woman once more.
I push Tien a little bit. “Are you sure you want to?” I ask her and I hope the answer is going to be yes. And it is. She says it right away and I put my hand in the center of her chest and I wish my hand is big enough to hold her in it, all of her, just cover her with the palm of my hand and keep her safe and make her happy. I ache in the shoulders from wanting that. And the mix of things is in the air right then. The incense from her ancestor shrine and the smell of all the cheap motors outside and somebody in a room nearby cooking with the fish oil they use.
Soon after I got back here to Vietnam I came to this street I once knew. It was the only one that stuck in my head after all these years. And that was because of a woman. I guess we used the word love to each other for a few months, her and me. Whatever love was for me at twenty. And there was something between us for a while. Something. But I didn’t come back here looking for her. It was just a street I knew. There were bars along here, in 1966. A clothing shop now. A noodle shop. A place on the sidewalk fixing tires. Just a street with its life out in the open like life in this city always seemed to be and it still is and I walked around here and I sat at a tiny plastic table in the open garage mouth of the noodle shop and I drank a warm Coke, staying away from the ice, and this was all I had to worry about now, the water, and I watched these people moving around and I just held still knowing that I didn’t have to be afraid about Vietnam anymore.
The water and the dogs. They always shy away as if every one of them has been beaten since birth, but I don’t trust them. They’re slick-featured, scoop-eared, more like dingoes or hyenas than like American dogs and while I was sitting there on that first day at the noodle shop, one of them sniffed by, stopping at a stain on the sidewalk and then he saw me watching him and he flinched back right away, ducking his head like I’d raised my hand to hit him. I was thinking I shouldn’t have this feeling. He’d just had it bad as a pup and I sucked back my nerves and clicked at him a little bit. He stopped at this but he was clearly not going to come to me. “Be careful of all the dogs,” a voice said and I looked up into her face.
That first moment I saw her, I flinched a little inside, her face was so beautiful. And like with all these Vietnamese, it surprised me. There’s always something floating in a Vietnamese face that you don’t expect. There was an old woman with her gums red from chewing betel leaves who’d been crouching for a long while off to my left, drinking her soup with her bowl up at her face the whole time, but once, she’d glanced over to me, just a couple of minutes before I clicked at the dog and started all this, and she smiled her bright red smile and she had a color in her eyes like when the interstate ahead looks like water and is reflecting the sky. Wet and almost blue but dark from concrete. And I thought when I saw the mama-san’s eyes that her daddy was French or something. So when there was this beautiful face before me telling me to be careful of the dogs, I wasn’t surprised by the things you didn’t expect in it. Her eyes were very dark but they weren’t so sharply lidded. They looked soft around the edge and her face wasn’t so round. She had a squareness to her jaw and a mouth that smiled now a little bit but just on one side and her skin was pale and I just eased back and thought, Holy shit this is a beautiful woman, and she said, “They might be sick.” She’d been talking English, too, with not much of an accent at all.