At the Heart of the Universe

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At the Heart of the Universe Page 6

by Samuel Shem


  “You are?”

  “Yes. We’re all on the same quest, together.”

  “Right,” Pep says, “and we’re learning a lot, and we’ll go home a lot better for it. Just like Orpheus and Eurydice.”

  “Da-ad—Orpheus lost Eurydice! She rotted forever in Hell!”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Katie is silent for a few moments. “I’m... I don’t know, I’m trying to think like if I’d grown up in China I’d be different—shorter and smaller and browner?”

  “Really?”

  “Un hunh.”

  “You think you’d be a lot different?”

  “Yeah, this isn’t like home.”

  “That’s why we came,” Clio says. “To try to understand all this, together.”

  “Cool. G’night.”

  “Goodnight, hon. Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  “G’night, Kate-zer,” Pep says. “Love you.”

  Silence. Finally, Katie says, “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You shouldn’t treat beggars so rough-like?”

  “You mean like outside the hotel?”

  “Yeah and like the waiters too?”

  “Waiters too? What waiters?”

  “All the waiters if you don’t get what you want right away like if they don’t know what a Sprite is, you yell at them?”

  “You think?”

  “Most definitely. Mom and me don’t like it.”

  Hearing the “Mom and me,” Pep feels a rush of shame, and then irritation. For the past several years, he’s felt the two of them bond together, at odds with him. They’re mother/daughter, of course, but still. Sometimes he feels his position in the family has fallen to a niche somewhere below Cinnamon the dog and above Dave the lovebird. Lying in bed now, he feels cast out, alone. Like the loneliness he increasingly feels at home when the two of them are out at a horse show or gymnastics or art or music or shopping or Mary’s Farm and he’s left rattling around the big, empty house throwing the ball to Cinnamon or playing his trombone—with only the dog listening.

  Clio has her circle of friends, mostly moms. Then there is Carter, her best friend from Wellesley, and her partner Sue, who lived in her building in New York and who moved up to Columbia and started Oblique Antique, where Clio sometimes works. It was while Clio was visiting Carter that she and Pep first met. Last year Clio invited him to join her and Carter in taking meditation lessons from Tulku, the cash-poor Tibetan janitor at Katie’s school. He tried, but at his age neither his body nor his mind could bend that way. Clio thinks he doesn’t like Carter—not true. It’s more complicated than that. He’s amazed at how easily women can connect—even on this trip the fourteen women—hetero, gay, single, whatever—all of them got along like quote sisters. And what does he have? Golf pals and poker buddies and Rotarians, a lot of ’em Columbians he’s known since kindergarten, and if they ask, “How are you?”, well, you could be dying of cancer but you say, “Fine,” or “Pretty good,” and that’s that. Meanwhile Clio makes her daily rounds of “cancer calls” to her stricken friends. She seems to think he’s uneasy with lesbians and even homophobic. She doesn’t know that deep down it isn’t resentment at all, but envy. His envy of their closeness, and his having no way of getting there. The closeness he and she had before the infertility crap, before Katie.

  Suddenly chilled, he shivers. He knows that if he could just admit to his loneliness, Clio might respond, but he can’t seem to. Why the hell not?

  He feels terrible, almost like crying. What is it that Clio said last month, about Katie being so “authentic” all the time?—“She’s got a genius for the real. It’s like living with a Zen master, twenty-four hours a day.” Once, after Katie painted a red horse galloping on the original oil painting of Pep’s great-great-grandfather, Gifford Macy—he had been cleaning it, had left it lying on his desk—he said through clenched teeth: “Please, Katie, don’t do that again.” She looked at him and said, “You said that without love in your voice.” Startled, with difficulty he swallowed his pride and said, “Okay. You’re right. I did.” She paused and said, “You said that without love in your voice too!”

  The girl has a light beam for anything cruel or phony—she’ll call you on it with such innocence, you melt. And she even had it the first time they saw her, when she was brought out into the bright October sunlight and handed to them and he opened like a flower, felt a blast of love from his toes to his head and he started to say, “What a little muffin,” but the “muffin” part got lost in the choking tears of joy, the love he had never felt before, and when he looked into her eyes they held his gaze, dark eyes so electric!—and he fell in love with the peacefulness of the three of them, the birth of this finally family he’d yearned for, sitting together in the concrete courtyard with old iron play gyms and bamboo seats that kept the toddlers imprisoned, and the bright flash of a rainbow of baby clothes hanging on a line, flapping in the wind of south China in the glorious fall, and all of it blurred like a rushed photo because he was weeping.

  Now he counts to ten to calm himself.

  “Okay, Kate-zer. With the beautiful nice beggars and the waiters? I’ll try.”

  “You’ll do it, Daddy, I know you will. Love you too.” As she slips down the steep slope of sleep Katie remembers a girl she saw outside the Beijing Zoo. She had a hurted arm in a sling she looked real sad and hungry. That could have been me, if... if something else happened to me. Why was it me who was given up? Why me?

  Clio feels Katie relax, turn over, and go out like a light. She doesn’t feel sleepy. Her mind is going over and over what Katie has just said. Chinese but not Chinese. Chinese American? It’s true. Watching her walk down the street here, you know she’s not Chinese—she doesn’t walk stiffly like they do, or gesture like they do, or cover her mouth when she laughs. What a relief, to have her see the real China. Katie’s back, in sleep, molds against her front—like she herself used to mold against Pep, warm, there.

  

  With Katie breathing deeply, Clio senses the sexual in the air. Even though they’ve had a lot of time alone on the trip, nothing has happened—they’ve both been strangely reluctant. When they first met, their attraction was immediate and intense.

  Clio had been invited up from the city by her friend Carter for a charity event at Olana, the home of the great painter Frederick Church. Perched high on a hill just south of Columbia, it faced a glorious panorama overlooking the Hudson River with its glittering silver bracelet of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, and the granite Catskills. It was Victorian Day and Pep was working as a volunteer guide. A tall, red-haired, boyish man dressed in formal Victorian leisurewear: dark suit, white shirt and cravat, purple cape. He was standing in front of a ten-foot-tall Persian window, all done in amber—her favorite stone since a trip to Morocco with her family—with a hand-cut black stencil latticework of arches within arches like the Alhambra. She liked him at once, for the gentleness in his face.

  She asked: “Is the window positioned there for the seasons?”

  “Yes,” he said enthusiastically, as if happy to be asked a good question, “Church was often depressed—a lot of family tragedy—and he craved the light, for relief. The window is perfectly set to catch the most light, the whole year round. I admire that about him. He was a great artist, but marvelously practical.”

  “And the amber?”

  “He loved amber, the way it shines against the dark. My favorite painting is all amber—The Entrance to Persepolis—would you like to see it?” He led her to it: a view through the dark scalloped cliffs to the ruins. It took her breath away—a foreboding that gave way to the soft light on limestone, the Greek temple facade.

  Pep went on, “I see it as his coming out of his depression over the death of his little son, finding a glimmer of light.”

  “Wonderful. I’ve always wanted to
go there.”

  “To the light?”

  She wondered if he was joking, but no. “Yes. But first, Persepolis.”

  “Well then,” he said, gallantly crooking his arm for her to take. “Shall we? I’ll change.”

  It was so good-natured, he was so with her right then, she actually blushed.

  They began. A new beginning for them both. She thirty-seven, he forty-three. To any new adventure, they said, “Yes!” Later, he told her that she had tipped him out of his middle-aged leaning into aloneness—into the dead history and expectations of his Mayflower family: his father Phillip Noble Macy, a rock of insurance and curiously disinterested in him, and his Boston-bred mother Faith Cabot Macy, fragile and cautious, cowed and fearful and early dead. Yes, she had tipped him out of all this shit into something new and exciting and sexy and fun and of great meaning—a leaning into life. Those were his words, “of great meaning, a leaning into life.” It was an adventure, one of meaning, which she too was ready for after wandering the tropics and then bucking the slithery and glib New York art scene. And the essence of their adventure was not the two of them alone, but their shared vision of a child with them.

  The electricity of the romance led to a startling passion—they were a great match in making love. She loved his horizontal height on the bed, his strength, and his attentiveness to her. And his playfulness—as he put it, one long sensual afternoon, “There’s nothing for endurance like a man who sells insurance.” Why have they had so much trouble getting back to lovemaking? When they do, it’s still great. But they don’t get there easily. She wonders, why not? Part of it is Katie, to be sure, always around—for years sleeping in their bed—and if not there in person, there all the time in her awareness. He resents it, but all her friends say that it’s normal. The real crusher was the infertility—having to do what their doctor in Columbia, Orville Rose, called “work sex”—doing it at certain times no matter what, poor Pep feeling like a bull with a ring in his nose having to “get it up,” hoping that it would take and then each month—month after month of failure—the sorrow and rage when she got her period. And then the miscarriage. At one point Pep himself–despite his squeamishness—was giving her tightly scheduled hormone shots—running upstairs at a party, pulling up her dress and pulling down her panties and jabbing her in the butt.

  But still, every month, bleeding. No explanation, no diagnosis, just that they were maybe too old. The trauma of having to see other women cradling their babies—she’d cross the street rather than meet one of them. One failure after another. And then, both of them depressed as hell, a profound and mostly unspoken sorrow eating away at the marriage, trying to try to drag themselves out of their exhausted desolation and get it up to adopt? More failures—they soon found out that they were either too old to adopt, or they hadn’t been married long enough, so that when they had been married long enough they would be too old—every avenue they tried leading to a dead end.

  They were ready to give up, to say no, until a trip to visit old friends in Vermont. The friends with a perfect house, a perfect garden, perfect jobs—and no children. And after that weekend, on the drive home she and he agreed that it all really was perfect, and absolutely sterile. That was his word, “sterile.” She said to him, “I can’t give up.” He asked, why not? She said, “Because I just keep seeing that little face!” What little face? “I don’t know, just a little face that needs us and that we need too. Just that little face.”

  Two weeks later, the agency called and told them that China had opened up for adoption, and they could be among the first group to go. No age requirement, no marriage requirement. If they hurried with their documents, they could have a baby girl in eight weeks. After being so close to saying no, now they said, “Yes!”

  “Peppie?” she says to him now, in a whisper so as not to wake Katie.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve missed you.”

  “And I you.”

  “It’s my fault.”

  “Nope. It takes two, you know.”

  She disengages carefully from Katie, and slips in beside him. Clio knows that he won’t push her. She feels the familiar big body, and as she settles into the crook of his neck, she breathes in the comforting scent of his hair, his aftershave. They caress each other, she his chest, he her breasts.

  Soon she hears him breathing deeply, asleep. Katie mumbles something from a dream. At once, Clio is attuned to her daughter’s needs. She finds herself thinking once again that she’s made a mistake in sending Katie to Spook Rock, an almost all-white school. She’s the only Asian, one of only two kids of color, the other an African American boy named Nigel, who is driven to school every day in a limo. Year after year of school photos of white children but for those two faces. How much of Katie’s growing isolation is from being Chinese? How much from being adopted?

  Clio needs to be close to her, and slips out of Pep’s bed into Katie’s. She puts her arms around her again. Her mind is too awake for her body. She finds herself thinking of their first trip to the orphanage, ten years ago. From the moment she first saw her, when the Chinese woman in the long white coat came out of the one-story redbrick building into the slanting autumn sunlight of the concrete playground with two babies in her arms and called out, first, “Ying!” for the one who, just then, became Faith Ying Schenckberg, and then, “Chwin! Chwin-Chwin!” for Chun, Katie Chun Hale-Macy, she knew they’d done the right thing. The sight of her baby stunned her, enfolded all her senses into one sense, of awe. There she was—her black hair tinted red in the sun and sticking straight up on top of her head, her round face and plump cheeks and fair skin and lips a pink of roses. Beautiful big eyes like teardrops on their sides and pupils dark as history. Dark irises too, with a catch of blue—but maybe it was only the reflection of the dazzling late-October sky. She was swaddled tightly in a tattered purple sweater, and wrapped up and tied with plain twine. She had just awakened and looked at them sleepily but steadily, as if strangely sure. From the start her eyes were so alive! As if, Clio said to Pep, she had been so tightly swaddled for so long—three months in the orphanage—that her arms couldn’t move and her fingers couldn’t touch, and she had learned to touch everything with her eyes. Her hair grew out from two dark whorls, a “double crown,” which her caretaker said was a sign of great wisdom. The hair on the back of her head was rubbed off, showing bare scalp—Clio realized with a sense of horror she had been kept lying on her back, unmoving, for hours at a time. Her heart went out to her. She fell in love instantly. Pep was weeping. In that one moment we went from two to three. Tomorrow we go back there again.

  Her mind floats this way and that over the incredible images of the day and settles on the vision of the woman at the police station in the white silk dress and blood-red sandals and umbrella and with the face of Katie at thirty. Again she watches her walk in, stare at her and Pep, disappear into a doorway and then into Changsha and seemingly off the face of the earth, this impossible possibility come on this tenth birthday, less an actual woman than an aura or a divine presence or even a sinister one, a breakaway spirit a rising and falling on a jasmine sea sure it’s impossible but happens...

  8

  The next morning Katie decides to wear her best dress to the orphanage. It is bright red, with white flowers on sinewy vines. It fits her frame closely, making her look older, less a girl than a stunning young woman. She and Clio take care with her long hair—no ponytail today, but straight down on her shoulders, pulled back by a purple headband. Like Clio’s.

  The four bellboys in red with pillbox hats escort them out the great brass revolving door. A sudden heavy rain has started to fall. They turn around and go back to find hotel umbrellas, one of which shelters all three of them. Huddled together under the umbrella they tiptoe through the yellowish mud and screaming machinery widening the road, wading alongside a dozen barefoot men in tattered undershirts, who are digging more trench with pickaxes
and shovels. Suddenly there it is, in the middle of a block of low shops being destroyed, the exact same red pagoda-like gatehouse. Clio looks up and sees, once again, the roof gods on the upcurved beams, the last in line “the man riding the chicken,” who, she knows from her study of Chinese art and architecture, is prevented from bedeviling the inhabitants of the building below because a man can’t fly down there on a chicken. A sign, in Chinese and English:

  CHANGSHA SOCIAL WELFARE CENTER NUMBER ONE

  FAMILY PLANNING IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS

  The entrance is the same as they recall but for a uniformed guard who carefully checks identification, and a shiny new chest-high steel gate, which completely blocks the entrance. The guard swings the massive gate open.

  Inside, everything has changed. To the right, the spot where the one-story redbrick building with the courtyard/playground once stood, the spot where they were handed Katie, is a pile of rubble and bricks. To the left, where the low recreation room was located, is a four-story building, the administrative offices. Nearby, where the room for the newborns and the schools for the older, special needs children used to be, is an eight-story concrete building looking like a new apartment house. Shocked at how the place has grown, they go into the administration building for their meeting with the new director.

  Mr. Ma is about thirty-five, a chunky, handsome man with eyes that seem alert, humorless, and firm. He wears a robin’s-egg-blue short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants. But for his face, Pep thinks, he could be a Columbian neighbor in high-summer garb—say, a golfer. He sits at the head of a boardroom-type table on a marble floor, with eight cushy leather high-backed chairs on rollers; standing up in a corner of the room is a ferocious air conditioner. Damp from the rain, they are soon chilled. The place gives a feel of being well funded. Probably, Pep thinks, by grateful Westerners like us.

  Pep explains who they are and why they’ve come. Mr. Ma shows little reaction—it’s hard to tell how good his English is. Pep speaks slowly and gestures every question, like charades. Has Mr. Ma gotten the photos they sent showing Katie in the arms of her nurses when they adopted her? No. Where are they? He doesn’t know. He gets a lot of letters and photos, it is hard to keep track of them all. Pep asks to see whatever documents the orphanage has on Katie.

 

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