“What references to Paul Volcker?”
“I feel confident he got my gist, though,” he says. “And just so you know, that was a conscious decision on my part not to tell him about all the nineteen-year-old girls from Appalachia who board those cruise ships five to a room in the hope of bagging someone good. I calculated it would be overkill. Because forget coeds-a girl from the mountains will commit acts at sea she wouldn’t dream of doing ashore. Are you kidding? With an American professor in a balcony penthouse? I make out like a bandit.”
“So everything’s great,” I say. “Why the long face? You having second thoughts about your donor?”
“I’m delighted with my donor,” he says. “What’s not to like? He’s thirty-one.”
Count on Larry to cut to the chase. He’s right-the donor’s youth is a plus. I guess it’s too much to expect moral hair-splitting from Larry; I should just be relieved he didn’t try to make a deal for the other kidneys-the six kidneys of the donor’s murder victims-for him to scalp outside Dolphin Stadium.
Rather than lightening his mood, however, the schnapps seems to be readying him for his next set of problems.
“I couldn’t help noticing there was no mention of price,” he says. “Did he say how much discount he was willing to give us?”
“I didn’t hear the word ‘discount’ at all,” I say.
“I continue to have the feeling I’m being set up for a stupendous fall.” He fixes his cinder-block gaze on his drink, takes another sip. Meanwhile Jade’s exploring the miracle of her American cocktail, like a hummingbird at a feeder of sugar water. “Unless my ears deceived me,” Larry says, “I’m pretty certain he said he would try to keep expenses down.”
“I didn’t hear that either, but let’s hope so.”
“Well, let’s do more than hope,” Larry says, leveling a placid gaze on me, “because it’s only fair to tell you that I won’t go through with this if the price is too high.”
I assume he’s kidding. “That raises an interesting question, though,” I say. “What price do you put on saving your own life? Is fifty grand appropriate for an extra few decades? Is sixty? Seventy?”
“If it doesn’t come in under fifty, I’m jumping ship,” Larry declares.
I give it a beat. “Sure you will,” I say, laughing. I examine his face for any sign of levity and start to get a sour feeling.
“I’m serious, Dan. I’m very concerned about cost. I can always start over again and negotiate a better deal in some other country.”
I have to be mishearing him. I look helplessly at Jade. “Take it easy on that drink,” I advise her, because she goes back for additional sips every few seconds, less like a hummingbird now than one of those plastic bird toys that clips to the rim of a glass and ducks its beak up and down, up and down.
Back to looking at Larry. I’m hoping the intervening seconds will have erased his dangerous thought process.
“You’re not telling me,” I say slowly, rationing out my words, “that after coming all this way, after all the people who’ve put themselves on the line for us, that you’ll leave everyone hanging if the price comes in too high.”
“You’re the one who’s always telling me to watch my pennies,” he says. “And I agree: A penny over fifty and I’m on the next plane outta here.”
After a while I exhale. “You know what?” I say. “I’m going to pretend you’re not here, that you’re back in the hospital suite, not really saying what you’re saying.”
It works, temporarily. It’s like holding my breath and ducking under the water to swim away from a sea monster. I turn my attention to Jade, who’s counting the beads of condensation on the outside of her glass. A harelipped boy wanders by hawking pink balloons. I startle to see three Westerners across the room, just as the natives always startle when they see me. They’re our mirror image: two women and a man, and they’re all laughing together, the best of friends. The man and I raise glasses to each other. This whole scene could be jolly if there weren’t a death-radiating killjoy breathing moistly at my elbow.
We order some standard American dishes. Jade is inspecting the rice inside the salt shaker, holding it upside down without realizing it’s emptying onto her place mat. Wearing an expression that makes me suspect that the strawberry schnapps has loosened her tongue, she raises her hand with an important announcement.
“Yes, you with the bubbles in your teeth.”
“I don’t care for McDonna,” she says.
“Really!” I say, scandalized to my core. “Well! And what is it exactly you don’t like about Madonna?”
“She too sexy in a bad way.”
“Okay, I’ll accept that as the statement of a tipsy, tipsy woman. Any Americans you do happen to favor?”
She picks up her swizzle stick with two hands and begins to turn it like a tiny corncob, nibbling its maraschino cherry all around. “I like Benjamin Franklin very much. He is like chairman of American history.”
“Okay, one vote for Ben Franklin,” I say, opening my large illustrated menu for the first time, even though we’ve already ordered. “You know what I’ve been meaning to ask you, though? Where’s the ‘chicken without sexual life’? I used to love that twenty-five years ago.”
“They rename. Now call ‘spring chicken.’”
“Tell me it ain’t so! What about ‘bean curd made by pockmarked woman’?”
“Now call ‘stir-fried tofu in hot sauce.’”
“Is nothing sacred? Why would they mess with a proven crowd-pleaser?”
Jade skillfully gnaws around the cherry until there’s only a spot of red left. “It so Olympic tourist don’t get wrong idea. All menus scrubbed clean of so-so names.”
Larry watches over us judgmentally, severe as a Spanish duenna, cracking his knuckles. I know the warning signs for when to desist, and the echo of distant ballistics is one of them. But I don’t care if his disgruntlement is ethical, intestinal, or whatever. Let him stew. Serves him right.
“So,” I ask Jade, running my finger down the menu. “You like the cow stomach?”
“It is very milled,” she says, meaning “mild.” I’m not clear whether this is a good thing or bad, in her book.
“What about pig’s heart fried with pickled peppers or pig’s intestines sautéed with black bean sauce?”
“I like,” she says.
All this organ talk is driving Larry deeper into his funk, which is fine by me. “How’s about kidney?”
“Um, good roasted!” she says enthusiastically.
“Which one’s best: the black kidney in this picture or the redder one?”
“I like everything in the menu,” she says. “The bitter pig’s nails. The spicy chicken’s ear. The stewed soft turtle feet.”
“And what’s this beautiful item on the back page?”
“I do not know how to speak this,” Jade says after a short struggle. “Maybe it is like floor of dog? No, not dog. My error. Collie, floor of collie-”
“Collie-floor?”
“Cauliflower!” she exults. She takes another hit of her strawberry schnapps, then guffaws with a new thought. “So now we know what you think is beautiful: cauliflower!”
I decide to see if I can get Jade to open up in a new way. “Well, there are all kinds of beautiful. For instance, cauliflower’s not beautiful,” I say, “in quite the way you are.”
As if struck in the face by a flower, Jade swiftly lowers her gaze to her drink.
“What, you don’t think you’re beautiful?” I pursue.
Jade breathes strangely, something between a gasp and a sigh. Her eyes look porous, like charcoal.
“Come on,” I coax.
She takes one last long draw on her straw and-open sesame!-gives us all she’s got, a blue streak special complete with parentheticals she must have picked up from some rhetorical master somewhere.
“Only middle level,” she says. “Okay, maybe upper middle. (But not like Koreans in magazine, so stylish! I do not prej
udice against Koreans, for they are a mother lode of TV stars.)”
I ask how she compares to, say, Cherry.
“Cherry is very pleasant, capable person,” she says. “Definitely not spy, in my belief. But Cherry does not always smell, is her only problem. I always try to smell. Wait, do I say this right? Smeil. Yes, smile.”
The food arrives. Larry takes one bite of his baby back ribs but loses interest and gestures that we should help ourselves from his plate. Jade turns her fork and spoon upside down to use as chopsticks for her mac ’n’ cheese and keeps chattering.
“Mao is genius, I think. If she come back now, not dead, she be very happy, because we Chinese are so strong and so rich! (Oh, sorry for saying ‘she.’ In China we have no different word for the man and woman. It all one word. So I say ‘he, she’-sorry!)”
“And would Ms. Mao allow Tibet to go free?” I ask, taking my knife to stab! stab! stab! through the bright glaze of Larry’s baby backs.
“Of course no, for it belong to us!” Jade exclaims, also gorging herself from my cousin’s plate, her face burning bright from this carnivore’s feast. “It’s not I think, it’s I know: a fact. I am feeling strongly about this! I stick to my gun!”
“Just one big happy family, eh?” I ask, savoring Larry’s bloody sauce, stuck to my front teeth.
“Is true, Chinese people are like my friendly relatives,” she says. “I call any old man ‘uncle’ or old lady ‘grandmother,’ because we are one family. It too bad you have nothing like this in your country! Are you sad?”
But in fact I’m not sad. It’s been a great day. We’ve established a rough timetable for Larry’s surgery. We’re on track for a new Princess. Larry’s wrapped Dr. X around his little finger. I’ve gotten out from under Larry’s thumb. My banquet toast of twenty-five years ago has come back to me intact. Nothing can wreck my mood: not even the news that it’s time to take Jade back to the train station.
“But so soon?” I protest. “The round-trip is longer than the time you stayed!”
“I schlep again soon. Bullet train so fast I come and go many quickies!” She looks around bewildered. “So where is evidence for this meal?”
I hold up the bill. She tries to snatch it but misses.
“My treat,” I say.
“Nice thought, but don’t even think it,” Larry says, snagging it from my fingers like one of those frogs with a lightning-fast tongue. It’s the first thing he’s said in an hour.
At the station I’m still not sad. I’ll see Jade again soon. Larry will somehow come around to springing for the surgery, whatever the cost. Everything seems doable, even the notion of transplanting a living organ from one human body into another. What’s the big deal? You slice it out of one person and you stitch it into another person. “Danny Boy” seems the right thing to hum as Larry and I walk Jade to her track.
“Thank you again,” I tell her.
“Don’t always say ‘sank you,’” she says with impatience. “Normally in my country, if you are friends or you are family, you do not say.”
“Oh, it’s understood, like ‘I love you,’” I say.
“Yes, too stupid to say.”
I stand corrected. Not to say reprimanded. But nothing can wreck my mood. I push her shoulder slightly. “I nudge you,” I say.
“Exactly!” she says, looking pleased as she pushes my shoulder slightly back. Emboldened suddenly, she reaches her fingertips to my chin. “I do?” she asks, touching my goatee experimentally. It’s the first time she’s dared to touch my face, but she must feel safe, because we’re well chaperoned by our Spanish duenna. “So like wire,” she says and shivers slightly. “I think this night I will have sweet dreams,” she says.
I do not answer this. It’s in my wedding vows.
From an invisible distance, trains chug, firecrackers ignite.
Down the lonely platform, we see a fuzzy figure all by herself, swaggering under many pieces of luggage. The poor thing must have missed her train or be lost or something. But now the figure is waving, making noises, all but yodeling to us. Let’s listen:
“Larry-Mary! Mary-Larry!”
I rub my eyes. Am I dreaming? Swaying under her baggage, sweating like a rhino in Larry’s mother’s fur coat, it’s Mary, returned from her open pit of a city near the Korean border, back to her beloved. “I bring you mashed!” she says, waving a bag of KFC.
“Huwwo, Mary,” Larry says evenly as he accepts a hug without emotion. “I thought not till next week. Any case, thank you for coming.”
We wave Jade off on her train. We bring Mary back with us in a cab.
One woman out, one woman in.
“Danny Boy” dies in my throat. I was wrong. There was something that could wreck my mood.
CHAPTER 15. Knock-Knock-Knock
Quarreling is like cutting water with a sword.
So now we are three again. A new three. Group dynamics have changed. The Gang of Two rules the suite.
The only way a truce can work is for Larry and me to give each other as wide a berth as possible. Immediately we set up some house rules. The door between our two rooms is to remain closed. He seals his and Mary’s room so it can stay tropically heated; I allow mine to cool at night by keeping my windows open. When we need to initiate communication, we’ll use the phone. Or at the very least knock. Larry accepts the conditions, but not happily.
“You make me sound like a manipulator even to myself, Dan, as though I planned this arrangement. Did I ask for Mary and you and me to end up in the same cell block? Go home if you want. Leave me to my own devices. I don’t care. I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself.”
The preceding was for rhetorical purposes only; we both understand the situation. Luckily, there are still reserves of goodwill that we can draw upon, and the door clicks cordially between us. All that can be heard is the sound of the lullaby piped in overhead through the soft-speakers. Three blind mice, three blind mice…
No, actually that’s not the only sound that can be heard. The passage of hours, then days, brings further intimacies, as I discover to my chagrin that I can’t avoid overhearing the housekeeping between them.
“I’ll brush my hair myself, Mary… Because I like brushing my hair, that’s why…”
See how they run, see how they run…
Mealtimes are always interesting. The din from Chez Larry-Mary usually begins with the popping open of a Coke can, punctuated by celestial screeches from Mary when she gets ambushed each time by a burst of fizz in her face. Then even happier sounds as she drops two or three artificial sweeteners into her brew and savors the result. “Goooooooooood…” Then domestic tranquillity, for a while, as they settle into their meal and work out mutual misunderstandings in their own way.
Mary: “What is?”
Larry: “McFish of some sort, except the KFC variety. Can you hand me my Blistex…no, not my reading glasses…thank you…”
Silence. Contrapuntal chewing.
“Mary, can you open another Coke for me?…I would happily do it myself, Mary, if I were strong enough… Thank you, Mary… On the subject of fish, can you ask the nurse what kind of fish this medicine comes from? I can see from the illustration on the box it’s supposed to swim in water, but-”
“Fish.”
“I know that, but what sort of fish?”
Mary goes into a hubbub with the nurse, while the refrigerator squawks, coughs, and recovers-to come up with this answer:
“Fish-fish.”
When I go to the bathroom, I tiptoe through their tropical room and glimpse them like any normal couple: he hunched in hospital robe and Businessman’s Running Shoes, going through his closet, she sprawled in fur coat and hairnet, devotedly cracking pistachio nuts for him. Overheard in passing, a disquisition on his wardrobe, snatched midstreak:
Bought this jacket at a Hadassah thrift store sale in Hallandale, Florida. Fifty cents. It’s thirty dollars in the catalog. Keeps the rain off, more or less. Now this clip-on bow tie I
found at a Cub Scout bake sale in-
Sometimes they bicker, but usually they both show an impressive amount of patience for each other, watching the Chinese weather channel for hours in harmonious silence. After which conversation resumes in respectful tones.
“Storm predicted.”
“Ummm, storm!”
“You like your food?”
“Hot.”
“I know it’s hot, Mary. Hot wings means hot. I like it, too.”
And so forth. I don’t know how he’s pulled it off. Right here in the middle of the East Asian landmass, a configuration of lofty mountain ranges and vast areas of inhospitable terrain, Larry’s managed to recreate the dinner-table conversations between Sam and Rivie in Lynn, Massachusetts, circa 1962.
Meanwhile we seem to be getting the runaround from Cherry. Two weeks come and go like nothing, and still there’s no sign of a kidney. I decide against hounding Dr. X but think there should be some sort of progress report. “You sure the dead horse is coming to the live horse?” I ask Cherry.
“I am sure. Maybe off by just one-two weeks, because first week of October is national holiday, or some screwup possible, quite minor.”
“And it’s not going to leak out to the authorities?”
“Chill, Daniel. Do not ransack yourself.”
Agreed: I should not ransack myself. It’s high time to get the silence and space I need. Fortunately, to this end, the elevator goes both up and down.
“Hello, Saudi Arabia,” I say to my friends in long robes, whom I haven’t seen in weeks.
“Hello, America,” they say to me. “Bush still suck, eh?”
“Big time.”
“Beeg time, beeg time.” They parse my words.
As usual, the women of the second floor are invisible-the Pakistani wives in blue shawls, the Egyptian mothers in head scarves and beads, the Yemenite sisters with wide belts and swaying hips. It’s the men who speak loudly, gesture broadly, pop their pecs before serving the birdie. But you get the feeling it’s the women behind the scenes who are conducting life, quietly making it all happen.
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