The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [52]
We will lie side by side, devising our own language. As in Sundays past we will push and pull at the only one we have in common. Yours is a languid French, a vestige of your southern America and its rich cadences, an English so different-sounding from my Mesdames'. My French is clipped and jagged, an awkward careless collection, a blind man's home, a drunk man's stumbled steps. We will throw all our words onto the table and find those saturated with meaning. Like the nights that we have had together, there will be few. We will attempt to tell stories to each other with just one word. We will end up telling them on our bodies. We always do. You, like my Madame and Madame, have already given up on saying my name. You say instead what sounds to me like the letter "B." But you do not say "bé" like the French, but like they do in America, you tell me. You draw me a picture of a hive, and you draw a honeybee nearby. You point to it and then to me and say that I am your "Bee." Better than "Thin Bin," I think, but still no closer to my name.
The thought comes to me gradually, creeps into the room. I struggle six days a week and on Sweet Sunday I struggle no more. I tell you to speak to me in the language of your birth. I free myself from the direct translation of your words into understandable feelings and recognizable acts. I leave your words raw, allow myself to experience your language as a medium of songs, improvising and in flux. I imagine your language as water in my hands, reflective and clear. You reply that if you return to the place where moss hangs, wavy-haired from the trees, where mosquitoes bloody the nights, you will not want to stop. You will talk for hours, unearthing words whose origins lie deep within the shades of magnolia trees, whose roots have grown strong from blood-rich soil. You will tell me that you are southern but that you are not a southern gentleman, that your father owns land, which you will never inherit, that you are a son in blood only. Even before you were born, your mother had forfeited your father's name for a lifetime income. A lover who, unlike your father, would always be constant, she thought. Your mother, you explain, is a woman whose legitimacy had also been compromised from the moment of her conception. Her legacy to you is that drop of blood, which made her an exile in the land of her birth. But you are not like her, you say, touching the tips of my eyelashes. The blood is your key, not your lock. A southern man without his father's surname is a man freed, you tell me, dispensing irony like a hard, uncrushed peppercorn. A man with a healthy income from his mother is also a freed man, you add, with a laugh that falls to the ground, exhausted and sad. Your mother's money has paved your way to this city. It first sent you to the north of your America for college. It knew that there the texture of your hair, the midnight underneath the gauze of your skin, were more readily lost to untrained eyes, you say, tracing the line of my collarbone as it rises to meet your shoulders. You are tempted to call it his money, but, when you think about it, it is hers now. She has earned it, fair and square. Squarely on her back, that is, you say, closing my eyes with a lock of your hair. Sweet Sunday Man, go ahead and talk, and I will get up and prepare our evening meal. For your benefit as much as mine, you can pause and say "Bee," your name for me, insert it where a breath would be, and I will look