A Thread of Sky, page 15
“Did he actually mention his granddaughters? Did he ask about me or you?”
“Some things can be left unsaid.”
“Are you his mouthpiece? His mind reader?”
“He’s eighty-six. You expect him to keep up on your lab work, or Sophie’s grades, or—”
“No, I don’t,” Irene said crisply.
Susan stared at her sister, at her sister’s defiant face in the mirror, her sharp eyes and jutting chin—and at her own profile, wan and skinny, confined to the edge of the frame.
“He wants to see Ma,” she said finally. “That’s all I know.”
Irene nodded. “And if you want to do his dirty work, go ahead. Leave me and my daughters out of it.”
“Dirty work? Imagine your time was near. Wouldn’t you want one last chance to see your—the one you—” Susan couldn’t finish the sentence.
The bathroom door opened. Sophie emerged, toweling her hair.
Susan murmured, “I was just leaving.”
Sophie gave a faint smile. “Good night.”
Susan turned to her sister. “Good night.”
Irene, face stiff, didn’t answer.
In the corridor, Susan leaned against the carpeted wall to catch her breath, and remembered one Mid-Autumn Festival, many years ago. She and Irene gnawing on duck wings they’d bought on the street while the other families feasted, then sitting on their dark stoop watching the neighborhood girls gather for their yearly game of catching the moon’s reflection in water-filled cups. Ever the newcomers, they weren’t included.
Suddenly Irene grabbed her hand. Let’s chase the moon. It’s always following us. Let’s chase it down. At first Irene had to drag her, around the house, through inky alleys, down red-lantern-lined streets. Then, as Susan saw how low the moon hung that night, orange and full like it might drip, she saw a possibility. They ran, spinning and darting, panting and plotting: Right. No, left. No, this way! She was still caught up in the chase when Irene stopped, stamped, and scolded, You’re too slow. It was probably their only attempt to celebrate a holiday together.
Susan decided to call Winston. He would sympathize, though he might also remind her that Irene was widowed.
As children, Susan had vowed never to marry at all, while Irene had vowed never to marry a man like Ba. Bill had seemed the opposite—hearty, handsome, wholesome, like he’d been fed on American milk and beef, good humor and crisp air—while Ba was slight, mean-eyed, twitchymouthed. He looked as if whoever made him had been stingy, and he behaved as if he needed to recompense himself for the rest of his life with women, with power, with power over women.
In the elevator, she joined a pair of businessmen who, once they hit the lobby, trundled into the hotel bar. It radiated cheap jazz and an amber glow, with backlit lettering over the doorway: Passions. She veered away, bought a calling card from the front desk, encased herself in the mottled glass of a phone booth, and found herself dialing Taiwan.
The phone rang and rang. At last: “Wei?”
“Ba. How are you?”
“What?” he barked.
“It’s me.” Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “Ba, it’s me. How are you?”
“I was asleep.”
“Sorry. I wanted to tell you—we’re in Beijing. We arrived yesterday.”
He grunted.
She was a girl again, craving his notice, trying to be worthy of his time. “Today we saw the Great Wall. Tomorrow—”
“Is everything set?”
“Yes—” She wavered. “Yes. Winston will meet you at the airport while we finish our tour. Then we’ll all come see you.”
She wondered if he’d say he wanted to see only Ma. But he grunted again, more agreeably. They hung up.
He always thought she didn’t know how he tried to manipulate her. She knew, probably better than he, but somehow that merely enabled his manipulation. Only one other man had ever done that to her.
She needed a drink. What would Ma say if she raided the minibar? She was fifty-six, for heaven’s sake. There was Passions—she ducked in. Her elevator companions sat with two tensely smiling, tarted up girls. She slid into a booth and ordered a martini. It came tinted brown and tasted ghastly. She drank it in large sips, holding her breath.
More than a decade ago, in a September week of drizzle and mist, she’d met Ernesto in a wet parking lot. She was leaving a faculty dinner where the department chair had assigned her to give a talk on the state of Chinese poetry. She was going home to the little yellow house she’d rented, thinking why not, a whole old house instead of another generic one-bedroom, why not an address she might remember a year later. But it was too much space. Scared to wander, she kept to the bedroom and left the other doors closed. The cracked parquet floor, destroyed during a summer keg party, stabbed the soles of her feet and snared her hems and socks. At night, ladybugs swarmed through the torn window screens and whizzed overhead while she tried to sleep.
She was thinking of how she should have retorted (“You speak English. You have a wife. Why don’t you give a talk on the state of British marriage?”), and wondering if she’d take him or any other man at dinner to her bed over the semester, when she saw a glistening creature, features fine and pointed as a swallow’s, lit by a bulb strung over a heaping dumpster. He was watching a man pull away in a station wagon. He didn’t step back when it ground through a puddle and splattered his pants, which were white and belted too tightly. He raised his middle finger and issued a stream of curses she couldn’t quite distinguish. They sounded as if his tongue had savored, then twisted each syllable. They sounded bewitching. Through her rain-streaked windshield, he caught her gaze and smiled—though later, it seemed more a sneer. She rolled down her window.
When his accent rang into her car, she thought perhaps he worked in the back of the restaurant. The town wasn’t diverse; they never were. When he opened the door and the light blinked on, she thought he might be an exchange student. She didn’t ask. He didn’t, either.
His eyes were liquid and large and darker than her hair. His upper lip stuck softly out, a pink morsel of unconscious flesh. His skin was pale, but all the men she’d known were pale. Pasty academics in each town, each semester, pasty and droopy-shouldered and much too clever, with some keening frailty that was the only thing resembling fervor. They were cold, and left her colder—a wan victory, but easily repeated. His skin was pale and tender like the undersides of her own arms, like her inner thighs, but all over. Every part of him a secret, uncovered for her. Pale and glowing like the moon.
In her bed, ladybugs whizzing overhead, they both closed their eyes. (He kept his shut tight as a newborn’s. She peeked.)
A few days later, he walked into her classroom. Creative Writing 1, fall 1989. That night, he knocked on her door, glistening in drizzle and mist. The next night, and the next, she let him in.
She kept the shades drawn. They lolled in bed, unwashed and unclothed. He killed ladybugs, smearing black on the walls, flicking maroon to the floor. They made meals of spiked coffee and saltines, canned oysters and vodka. They both grew even paler and gaunter. Night bled into day into night, until she needed to write, and made him leave. He took pains to wound her before he left. She didn’t know where he lived. She had no way of reaching him, outside of the classroom, until he knocked on her door again.
The little yellow house was their world. Outside stretched wide, flat, and bright, and more forbidding than ever.
Their affair felt like a culmination of how she’d lived for twenty-odd years. No continuity, no sense of future. Everything could fall away, and did, except this single pearl, this beautiful thing. That thing was him, until it was a poem—no in-between. Her poems flourished that year, cool and spare, with sudden, luminous blooms.
In class, he fretted about his novel, taunted the sunny-haired students writing in earnest detail about fishing trips with Dad, glowered when she critiqued his critiques. You are not qualified to teach fiction, he once erupted. The sunny heads spun in unison. I’m more qualified than you, she said, and lifted the next double-sided, double-spaced story.
The first semester ended—seven weeks of poetry, seven weeks of fiction. He asked if he should refrain from signing up for the second. She shrugged. What I am asking, Professor, he said, is would you be seen with me then? She shrugged again. She wasn’t affecting coldness. She didn’t know what would happen next. She was never good at planning.
When she walked into the classroom, he was waiting. He stood over her desk and whispered, I won’t have you seducing another student. Blood surged and made her dizzy.
She began to appease him, him and her own hunger. They drove to greasy spoons where they’d each have gotten stares alone, too, sucking up milkshakes, eating chicken-fried whatever. They drank at a dive in the next town where she’d hand back her martini glass when she wanted another; Dave the bartender had just the one, uncracked from an old gift set. They started to gain weight and color.
Still, in the house they kept to the bedroom. Ernesto asked about the dim closed rooms, about using a desk, a dresser, a bed for when she needed to be alone. But to her the unused spaces had become necessary, buffers between passion and poetry, inside and out, together and apart.
In certain lights, he made her swoon. But when his patchy stubble bristled, when that upper lip curled, the times she caught sight of his delicate frame slinking out of the men’s room—she’d tell herself, Soon, this flame will die soon.
You need me. Until you don’t. And I never learn my lesson, Professor. He snarled the last word. She looked away until his face was wistful and pretty again. Each moment I take as the truth, he said, like a plea. So she did not say: Each moment is the truth. To try to string them together—that is fiction.
Along with the pearls, they had another bit of banter—funny, until it was bitter: He was her hotheaded Latin lover, she was his inscrutable Asian. Once, at Dave’s, a woman hissed, Lookit the chink and the spic. Like the title of a children’s fable: The Chink and the Spic. The woman was perfectly matched with her mate—both doughy and heavy-set, with faded frizzy hair, pale tired eyes, plaid flannel shirts.
I am going to throw a pretzel at her, Ernesto announced, and he did. It bounced off one boulderlike breast. The woman smashed a bottle. Her mate picked up a stool. Dave came to their defense but, he warned, they were on their own next time they looked for trouble. They retreated to the little yellow house again.
She was no town personage—not a college dean or a church deacon, not even a noteworthy collector of steins or lamps. She was just an Asian lady, the Asian poet lady to some. She hid less from the possibility of professional censure than from the acknowledgment, in the form of public scrutiny, of their perfect futility.
If not for their perfect futility, she never would have kept letting him in.
Ernesto became more difficult to appease. He declared he loved her, and demanded she say it, too, and say it again, say it louder, tell him how much, tell him for how long. He asked about next year, and sulked when she explained her contract, her lack of control. He wanted her to know every detail of his asylum application, his visa problems, but she couldn’t help him. He presented her with plants she didn’t want, and blamed her when they withered. He bought a tank and a pair of tropical fish that ate each other’s brilliant tails until one died. The other died one day later. He bought another pair, and another.
He panted and cried out in his sleep. He howled when she told him to go. He announced there were others, and bloodied his fists against the door when she refused to raise an outcry.
We are star-crossed lovers, you and I, he used to say. Always you and I, as if she might think he meant himself and another. He loved the sound; he thought it meant their union was blessed. Even after she explained, he kept saying it, another joke until it was no longer.
Us? she’d scoff. I’m twice your age.You’re a boy. A beautiful, petulant boy.
You try to hold yourself like so. He stood back, flattened and rigid. But nobody wants to die alone. Obviously.
She held herself like so, sure and cool as a sheet of ice, while he coursed through the spaces beneath, between, inside her; while she began to believe in their subsistence, in living a life of tonights; while the end of the year closed in and the start of the next loomed, impossible and inevitable; until the little yellow house proved a battered farce of a world, like an internment camp, like a bomb shelter; until the moment it collapsed.
After three drinks—the second and third, whiskey straight—Susan still wasn’t sleepy. She was cold in the air-conditioning, itchy and restless. On her way through the glittering lobby to the elevators, she stepped into a warm air current, an electric hum—the business lounge. Unmanned cubicles, cushioned chairs, dozing computers.
Almost silently, key by key, she typed ernesto@ernesto.com.
She typed, I see your star is rising. She added, Congratulations. She modified this: Congratulations from your old professor.
She backspaced to rising. She started a new line: Meanwhile, I’ve settled.
That second semester was nearly over when Irene called to announce Nora’s graduation, Ma’s visit, the whole family driving to her house. Like a slumber party, Irene chirped. Susan could have said no. Mouth dry, she asked where they’d sleep. Irene said, Don’t you live in a house? Not Irene’s idea of a house. Damp closed rooms, rented chintzy furniture, stained mattresses she’d never touched. She could have said no.
She swept Ernesto’s effects—paltry, damning—into one of her totes, and put it by the door. His upper lip trembled: Can’t I have one drawer? She refused. She raised the shades. She spread new sheets. She scrubbed and sprayed. The house reeked. Dead and dying plants, the last pair of fish, passion and weakness—they’d sense it, she was sure, they’d probe the junctions in her foundation she’d been trained to seal and reinforce, they’d find every patch of dry rot. He sat in the middle of her bed like an Indian figurine and demanded not to be swept out. If you have a soul, he said, prove it now.
She decided these lines about her soul were gibberish, him falling victim to assimilation—assimilation of a sham native culture, just as she’d found herself saying, more than once, In China, we have a proverb . . . Dot dot dot.
We are star-crossed lovers, you and I. She laughed a crazy laugh.
Ernesto kicked a plant. The pot broke and spilled across the cracked parquet floor. She never mopped it all up. She didn’t try very hard. At least the family stayed out of her bedroom. All summer, gravel and soil, ceramic and root embedded themselves in her soles.
Just like that. Poof. He gestured as if flicking magic dust. To you, I—us—this—never existed.
It existed. Later, it wouldn’t. This was not a contradiction. It wasn’t even strange, if you saw time as rotational, not linear. When you see the moon, you say, There’s the moon. The moon shows a different face every time you look, each one true. You don’t say this, but you know.
For the last time, they went to bed. Then she offered dinner in town, at a well-lit establishment. In the parking lot, they paused before the grimy window of a pickup. “Clean me,” someone had traced. Underneath that, the work of another hand: “Bite me.”
At dinner, the stares felt compassionate, as if she and Ernesto emanated such heartbreak, others couldn’t help but overlook the particulars. She ordered a dirty martini, wanting the bitterness. It tasted only of brine.
She said she didn’t know if she could, but she’d try to stay, if he would. She said maybe they’d find a way to stay together, somewhere else, if not here.
He told her his application for asylum had been denied, his family struggling to pay more tuition, his student visa soon expiring.
You’re a citizen. If you married me, we could stay together anywhere, here.
She spilled her drink. It seared her skin. A wife—not her, not his.
He said he didn’t mind if they never had a child.
She laughed another crazy laugh.
His upper lip curled. He went to use the men’s room. She didn’t see him slip out the back door.
She found him in the parking lot, in the passenger seat of that pickup. Through the grimy window, through the scrawled words, she saw his head in the lap of a man with a square-jawed straining face, a bristly salt-and-pepper beard.
Susan discarded the message and headed for the elevators. A girl was inside the phone booth she’d vacated, her voice sharp and broken, the sound of a fierce creature wounded. A bang, then a louder bang—the door swinging open: Nora. Susan jabbed the up button. One elevator began a leisurely descent. Mustering surprise, Susan turned.
Nora looked alarmed, then resentful. She was Irene’s daughter, all right. She muttered, “It’s nothing. I’m fine. I was talking to my—Jesse, my ex.”
Without thinking, Susan asked, “Was he unfaithful?”
“What’s with you and Mom and Grandma? Why do you all assume that?”
Susan apologized. Nora’s eyes were still narrowed. “Because of your grandfather, I guess.”
“So he cheated on Grandma? That’s why she left him? And moved in with us?”
“I think by then, it was more about starting a new life.”
“By then she was old,” Nora mused.
Four years older than Susan was now.
“Until then, they were happy?” Nora asked.
Susan let out a short laugh.
“I mean—things were different back then, but—” Nora’s brow furrowed again. “Did she catch him cheating?”
“I don’t think he tried hard to hide it.”
“He cheated more than once?”
“All along, as far as I recall.” Susan added, “She wasn’t very pleasant, either.”
“She was a revolutionary, right? So how could she stay for as long as she did? And why did she finally leave?”
Susan shrugged. As Winston sometimes clucked affectionately, she had no head for history. Nor for cause and effect—there, Ernesto was right. The elevator doors opened. Susan felt too tired to step in. She sank onto a loveseat. Nora looked at her curiously, then sat beside her. They watched the doors close.
