“Thanks,” I said, and she was moving off. Just like that. Nothing more. She was through a passageway a couple of storefronts down and gone and I sat there wondering what the hell just happened. I looked over to where the dog was and he’d taken off. I thought about standing up, about walking down to the passageway and at least looking along to where this woman disappeared, but I didn’t. The mama-san was gone too. There was the buzz and rush of motorcycles in the street, of course, and people crouching on the sidewalk in either direction, but it was the time of day in Saigon when if you’re on foot, you find some shade and stay still and nobody was near me or coming toward me and for a moment I felt absolutely alone. In the midst of this city of all places, I felt invisible, and that was a feeling I realized I wanted to hold on to for a while and so I didn’t get up. I let her face fade and I waited and I even closed my eyes.
Then there was a car horn close by. I opened my eyes and at the curb was a Renault with a Saigontourist decal across its back window and I knew she was going to appear again. And she did. Out of that passageway and across the sidewalk and into the car and she didn’t even give me another glance. So I thought, That’s the end of it. But a week later I have my hand on her naked chest and she says yes it’s okay and I still don’t move. This time, it’s from sitting there and wondering at the switchback my luck just seemed to take.
He does not move his hand when I tell him it is okay. I am ready for this moment, but he is waiting. I like this about him. He will be very gentle with me. Very slow. I listen to hear him breathe. There are still too many night sounds and I tell him, “Bring your face close to mine, please.”
This makes him cock his head, like he has not understood. “Bring your face close,” I say and he does, sliding to
me, and he thinks I want him to kiss me and I say, when he is very near, when his breath has touched my cheek, “Just there. For a moment wait please. I want to know that you are real.” He waits. He is real. I can feel his breath on me.
On the day I first saw him, I would not look at him a second time. Not straight at him. But I glanced in the rearview mirror as the car pulled away. I am a careful girl. I already acted a different way from who I am by finding some American man sitting almost directly beneath my window and speaking to him, even if it was for his own good. Now I could only see him again in a mirror, like the American legend I read, a story about a man and a woman with snakes for hair who could turn him to stone if he looked at her directly. And his face was turned this way and I wondered if he could see me watch him in this small mirror and so I looked for the dog. I feared this man might try to touch it and he would be hurt. I saw no dog and I thought that I was not really so very interested in where the dog was, and when the car began to move and the man’s face was gone, I was a little bit angry with myself for my shyness.
But I am not shy when he brings his face close to mine in my bed. I feel his breath on me and I pull back just a little bit to see him clearly. His eyes are very dark, like a Vietnamese, I think. And I am reminded of the dragon once more. There are many straight lines in the face of a dragon, square corners. Ben’s face has much of this in it. At the bottom of his face, at his jaw, there is a squareness that I think is like a dragon’s head. I am still trying to understand the story I learned from my friend inside the banyan tree. For a moment I try to see the terribleness of such a face as beautiful. I mean by this, the dragon’s face. When I feel Ben’s breath and he becomes real and when I know that this real man is about to put his hands on me and his mouth and all the secret parts of him, I do not find him terrible. But I think he can help me understand, because on this night there is something inside me that is afraid, and this is in the same moment with some other thing inside me that wants to reach to him and to put my hand behind his head and pull him to me.
I tell myself, the fairy princess loved the dragon. She loved him. There are things that frighten us for a while and then from the very strong feeling of this fear we find a different strong feeling. I lived sometimes in a room not far from this one. I was still with my mother and it was on the nights when she did not leave me with my grand- mother. I know now that these were the times when there was no all-night man from the bar where she worked. Some man may be there in the afternoon, but she did not lie naked with him through the long night till the morning, and it was those times she kept me on a pallet nearby. And when it was the rainy season I woke from the sound of thunder. The storms came in and bellowed in the air and I heard them with my ears but I felt them inside my body also, each cry. And for a few years it was like this. The cry of the thunder would carry me into my mother’s bed on the nights when there was no one else and she would hold me in her arms.
Sometimes the bed smelled very strange to me, not the smell of my mother at all, something wet, a little like the rain that was rushing outside but stronger, thicker, a smell more like brine, like the sea. For a while I wondered if she was loved by a dragon. The thunder would beat at my body and this smell was in me and my mother was naked beneath the thin silk robe she wore and she held me close and I dreamed of the dragon rising from the South China Sea and flying to my mother and loving her in some way that I did not understand and then he went up into the sky because his kingdom needed him and he did not want to go but he had no choice and he rose high into the air and he cried out his pain and she felt it in her body and I felt it in my body and the dragon cast the sea down upon us to remind my mother of his love and he flew away. And so I came to love the thunder. On the nights I was with my mother, I went to the window at this call and I opened the shutter and I let the sound take me in its hands and squeeze me until I grew wet from the rain and my mother would draw me away. In jealousy, I thought. And when my mother was gone away and the rockets brought another thunder to Saigon, I would go to the windows and the sky was red and my grandmother would pull me away and tell me that there was something dangerous out there. But I still loved the sound. I loved this thing I once had feared.
I lift my hand and I put it at the back of Ben’s head and he is not wet from the sea and his flesh is not hard scaled. He is soft. His hair is soft and I let my fingers slide inside his hair and I pull him to me and he does not rush, he lets me draw him to me as slow as I wish. Then his breath is on my face and then his lips touch mine.
I have known other kisses. A boy, dim now in my mind, in those dark early years of our socialist republic, and I was sixteen and he was a guard at Reunification Hall, and he wore a uniform the color of a tree gecko, and we treaded on each other as lightly as that, like lizards. And there was Mr. Bao, who was a driver for a while at Saigontourist. He asked me one night to go to a theater that plays movies from America. It is in a long room with a distant screen and it is very dark. He asked me to go to this place because Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman would he there in a movie called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He did not speak good English and he wanted me to tell him the meaning of this title. I did not know. It was not an idiom I had studied. I said that it must be some American legend that would be made clear in the movie.
It was so dark we could not see to move once the movie began, but all around us, there were couples kissing. This is the only place in public in our city where this is possible. On the screen was a woman’s voice translating all of the speaking in the film into Vietnamese, for all the characters, both men and women. I could hear only a murmur of Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman speaking beneath this one female voice. I tried hard to listen to the American voices, but I could make out none of their words. I grew angry at the very sound of my own language. I should have felt shame at this, I think. But I cared only for these Americans on the screen. I grew more ashamed, conscious now of my secret attachment to these people. But Elizabeth Taylor was very beautiful and her husband was very harsh with her and I was concerned. He did not wish to touch her, in spite of her beauty. And he also was very angry at his father. The father wanted very much to please his son. He tried hard, I think. He was there in a great house with his son, alive, and he was trying hard, and I grew very angry at Paul Newman for not understanding.