Monkey King

by Patricia Chao

  “My piano teacher used to say I had the widest hand span of any child she’d ever taught.”

  “I didn’t know you played the piano.”

  “Badly.”

  I told him about the after-dinner recitals where Mimi sang Chinese love songs in a piercing falsetto. Xiao Lu, who was studying the violin, had a repertoire of fancy pieces, starting with “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” which I suspected he played much more slowly than he was supposed to, so he would be sure not to make any mistakes. A lot of the music was modern, so that it was hard to tell if he was making a mistake at all if you didn’t watch Aunty Winnie’s face.

  I never played as well as I did when I was alone, and I didn’t dare look up for fear of meeting the frozen polite expressions of the guests. What were they really thinking? Unlike Xiao Lu, I played faster than I was supposed to, to get it over with. Afterward there was always a surprised silence, as if the audience hadn’t really expected it to end. “So good, so good,” the grown-ups would murmur, and my mother’s voice would rise over them all—“Oh, no, she’s terrible, really.”

  After me came my sister, the comic relief. She’d announce her piece—“Indian War Dance”—and then pound it out as forcefully as possible. The applause for her was more enthusiastic. “She doesn’t practice” was my mother’s only comment on Marty, as if that were the only reason she wasn’t a musical genius.

  The only guest who seemed to prefer my playing to Marty’s was Mr. Lin, a friend of Daddy’s who lived by himself in the top floor of a rickety house in a bad neighborhood downtown. Mr. Lin was an artist who had been chased out by the Communists. Ma said he was too sad to paint anymore.

  Once Mr. Lin took our family to an exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting at Yale. “Which one you like best?” he asked my sister and me. Marty chose a cat chasing a butterfly. I looked awhile, and then selected a very long horizontal painting of grasses bent by the wind. “Why you like?” he asked me.

  “It looks like writing.”

  “Pau-yu, your elder daughter has the heart of the philosophers,” Mr. Lin said.

  One afternoon Mel said he was going to make me lasagna with white sauce. “White?” I asked.

  “Northern,” he told me. “At my dad’s restaurant they don’t serve anything else.”

  We went to the Winn-Dixie and Mel fretted over their selection of olive oils and ricotta. Then he banned me from the kitchen and I curled up on the brown dog-smelling couch to sip Chianti and watch the six o’clock local news, which had replaced talk shows as my new addiction.

  “God, that’s so much food,” I said when it was all laid out.

  “Well, you ought to eat. My mom would faint if she saw you.”

  Besides lasagna, there was pompano fried in beautiful little crisps and risotto and a salad with three kinds of lettuce and, of course, garlic bread. Zabaglione for dessert. Espresso, black and unnervingly strong.

  Mel came over to my side of the table, knelt down, and lifted up my shirt. “Hmm. Looks like an expansion of at least three belt holes.”

  “That tickles.”

  “What are the chances of your staying the night?”

  “I don’t know. I think I better go back.”

  “You sure?”

  “Don’t you think we should do the dishes? Or maybe I should, since you cooked.”

  “Should you?” He slid his hand up the leg of my shorts and stroked. “Did you know that garlic is considered an aphrodisiac?”

  On the stereo Eric Clapton was playing the blues.

  I thought of plausible lies to tell Aunty Mabel.

  We stuck one of the candles we’d bought at the Winn-Dixie into the empty Chianti bottle. It was a cliche, but like many cliches I’d never had a chance to try it.

  “It isn’t going to work, you know,” I said to Mel. He was inside me but we weren’t moving, he was blowing on the little hairs that grew along my temples, the ones Marty used to call sideburns when she was making fun of me.

  “Who said anything about work? We’re screwing, honey.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, okay, I know what you mean.”

  “What about your girlfriend? The one with the rabbit coat?”

  “Bethie? She’s history.”

  “But there must be others.”

  “Christ, Sally, you really know how to kill a mood.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And you’re not concentrating. Concentrate on this.” He began again, and I forgot what more I was going to say.

  Afterward he whispered, “I’ll miss you, you know.”

  “That’s what you said at Willowridge. That time in the kitchen.”

  “Well it was true then. And it’s true now.”

  I didn’t tell him that what had kicked me into coming this time was my father’s face above me in the dark, his straining Monkey King scowl. And he stayed, that ghost, in the bed with us. As Mel twitched into sleep I lay there counting each breath in, each breath out.

  I was awake at dawn and drawing. I hadn’t brought my pad with me but managed to find an old composition book in a desk drawer and took the liberty of ripping out several blank pages. Mel found me at the kitchen table bearing down so hard I’d torn holes in the paper.

  “Hey, hey,” he said, his voice husky with sleep.

  I stopped and looked down at what I was doing. It was stupid and crude. “Okay,” I said and ripped the page up into the smallest pieces I could and brushed them off the table so they snowed onto the linoleum. The gesture was familiar but I couldn’t remember why.

  “Whadja do that for?”

  I didn’t answer but picked up the other drawings and tore them up too. I could feel Mel standing in the doorway, waking up, watching me.

  “You feel like explaining or are you just going to sulk?”

  “It’s my pathetic attempt to make myself feel better.”

  “Feel better about what?”

  “The fact that I can’t paint anymore. Or draw, for that matter.”

  “I’ve seen your stuff.”

  “What you saw was shit. Art therapy shit. Anybody can be a star in a loony bin.”

  “What I think is pathetic is you feeling so sorry for yourself.” He turned away. “I’m going back to bed.”

  I made tea and drank it sitting out on the dock. Behind me I could hear doors opening, cars starting, people going to work, beginning their normal day.

  It was amazing how up until now I had almost been able to fool myself that if I worked hard enough, I could become an artist again. But it took something I didn’t have anymore. Going through the motions was a futile exercise. I had lost that peculiar quality of concentration needed to tap into the soul. That was the price for being allowed to live after having swallowed thirty-six tranquilizers. Or perhaps the truth was I had lost it way before that, at RISD, and I had known it then. That was the real reason I’d dropped out, gotten married.

  I had my Swiss Army knife with me, but it was back in the bedroom with Mel. There was a paint scraper lying in the bottom of one of the rowboats, and I retrieved it, wiped the blade off on my shirt, and tested it on the inside of my wrist, where the impressions of Mel’s nails were still printed from last night like sickle moons. Then I moved higher until I found an open spot, closed my eyes, and flicked.

  “When was your last tetanus shot?” Mel asked. He was furious, I could tell, although his voice was even. We were in the car, driving down the coast to a place where we’d heard brown pelicans congregated.

  “I’m fine, I promise. It’s just a scratch. Anyway, I thought you liked my scars.”

  “If this is a game, I’m not playing, Sally.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve been doing it since I was fourteen.”

  “You sound proud of yourself.”

  “I’m not. Why’re you being such a pill? You’re the one who brought it up. I wasn’t even going to mention it.”

  “I think you’re mixing me up with someone,
Sally.”

  “Oh, so now we’re going to play group therapy. Who might that be? My father?”

  “You said it, not me.”

  “Maybe you should drive me home. I’m worried about my uncle, anyway.”

  “We can turn around anytime you want.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  When we were almost to the beach he said: “Did you know that Catholic suicides can’t be buried in consecrated ground?”

  “Are you trying to make me feel worse?”

  “I’m trying to tell you a story. A cousin of mine blew his brains out. My aunt asked around at various Protestant churches to see if they’d take him as a member posthumously. No luck.”

  “I want to be cremated.”

  “Well, that’s what they did with Joey. His mom and dad flew to Italy and threw his ashes into the Mediterranean.”

  Strewing ashes was what I was thinking about as we fed the birds. The pelicans ate only fresh fish, but you could buy plastic bags of meal at a shack by the road for the gulls and terns. A very touristy thing to do, I saw other people with bags, but I didn’t care. Not only did I want to be a regular tourist, I also wanted to be faceless, anonymous, not special. I was sick of being special.

  The birds liked Mel. It was the way he flung the meal, so that it fell in an ostentatious arc, easily visible.

  “They’re so ugly,” I said.

  He pulled me so that my face was in his shoulder, so that no one could see me crying.

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess they are.”

  “Do you really want to know what I think about in bed?” I asked

  It was our last night on the lagoon. Mel was steering and I was resting, slouched in the front of the canoe, knees up and my own paddle balanced on top of them. His voice came from behind me: “You know that stuff I talked about in the hospital, about my older cousins in the garage?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, there’s a part I left out. They jerked off on me while they were sticking the pins in.”

  “Jesus. Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I didn’t realize what was going on until I was older. I used to think they were peeing. That was bad enough. The point is, I used to think about it during sex. In this very fucked-up way, it used to turn me on.”

  “Why didn’t you tell that to the group?”

  “I bet they’re some things you didn’t tell the group.”

  “So do you still think about it?”

  “Sometimes. Does that upset you?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess you know what I think about then.”

  “Yes.” The way he said it made me realize that not only did it not upset him, he got off on it a little.

  “The trouble with us is that we know too much about each other.” I leaned over into the swamp, slid my arm in right up to the elbow. We were in a relatively deep passage and I could feel the variation in temperature, from body to lukewarm to a hint of chill. Mel made a crunching noise but I ignored him. I was remembering that dream I’d had at Willowridge, of the black water that was going to reflect something unspeakable back at me.

  It was quiet, too quiet. Mel tapped the bottle of rum and Coke on my back. I knocked back a long swig and felt it almost immediately.

  I said: “You know all I can pay attention to in the news are crime stories. Violent crime. The more violent, the better. Is there something wrong with me?”

  “No, honey. It’s drama you miss.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Willowridge was one big soap opera. You’re going to have to get used to the mundanity of daily life.”

  “I’ll show you dramatic.” Without thinking about what I was going to do I began stripping, pulling off my T-shirt—I wasn’t wearing a bra—and then my shorts and underpants. Then I stood up in the prow, the boat jerking abruptly with the movement. Mel watched me, smiling, until I took a breath, and jumped.

  Despite its murkiness, the water was surprisingly clean feeling, although as I surfaced I could feel my toes dragging a bit of seaweed. Or was it an alligator? Live body overboard.Let them get me, I thought.

  Mel was leaning right above me. “Are you nuts?”

  “Yes,” I said, and moved several feet away from the canoe. It was like I couldn’t stop myself. Treading water, I threw back my head and screamed up into the dark gray-green sky fringed with overhanging trees. Screamed once, got the echo, and screamed again. And again.

  “Get back in here, Sally.” Mel sounded a million miles away, or maybe it was just the water in my ears. I swam over and he helped me aboard, a precarious and clumsy process which slopped a lot of water into the canoe. “You were afraid of drowning in the Gulf, but you don’t give a shit about being Jaws bait,” he said.

  “I don’t know why I did that.”

  “Sshhh.” He put his arms around me from behind, and we sat there like that until I stopped shivering.

  “Feel better?”

  “Guess so.”

  “You probably needed to do that, although I wish you hadn’t picked alligator swamp.” He took off his own shirt, patted me dry, helped me get dressed.

  I said: “I’m sorry about the other morning.”

  “You don’t have to apologize to me.”

  “I haven’t slipped up since I left Willowridge. D’ya think there’s a support group for that kind of thing?”

  “You mean like Self-Mutilators Anonymous?”

  “I guess not. Wouldn’t be a pretty sight, anyway. The meetings, I mean.” I thought of Douglas.

  We headed back, neither of us talking, although we kept passing the bottle. I knew I was getting drunk and I didn’t care. I could smell and feel the swamp drying on my skin and hair, that high stagnant odor like the Katzes’ goldfish pond. When we tied up at the dock Mel said we’d better bail out the canoe, so we found a couple of old paint cans and scooped methodically until he laid his hand on my arm.

  “Look.”

  The sky above the trees where we’d just emerged was alive with silver streaks.

  “Meteor shower,” Mel said.

  “Wrong time of year.”

  “Nonetheless.”

  In a minute it was over. The regular stars shimmered demurely in the dense black.

  “Did you make a wish?” Mel asked me.

  “No. I didn’t have time to think.”

  He put his arm around me and we stood there on the dock watching the sky for a while, waiting for something else to happen.

  22

  The restaurant was dim and for once just the right coolness, not the usual bone-chilling freeze I’d come to expect in Florida. Amber cut-glass tumblers clinked discreetly as ice water was poured into them from a silver pitcher, a relief compared to New York City restaurants, where you felt as if you were at a very loud nerve-racking party with everyone else in the room. Our waitress’s name was Slim, which I thought was a strange name for a woman until my uncle explained that Slim was what you called anyone who was tall. Like Red, for redheads. Down South, nicknames stuck. In my class at RISD there had been a girl from Alabama named Shug Maloney, Shug short for Sugar.

  It was my last night in Florida, which also happened to be my birthday. I was wearing the hibiscus print dress Aunty Mabel had bought for me although I had a cardigan on over it because I was self-conscious about my newest scar. My hair was up in a bun like Nai-nai’s. The trick, I’d found, was to do it right after you got out of the shower when your hair was still wet. I could feel the chill of the jade point on my nape.

  “I’m a lucky man,” Uncle Richard pronounced. “Out on the town with the two handsomest women in St. Pete.” He was looking the healthiest he had in days and dressed like a real high roller-gleaming black oxfords, gold cuff links, but not, I was relieved to see, the parrot tie. It made me feel less guilty about the mornings I’d missed with him. He squinted at me behind his glasses. “So who you think she looks like?” he asked my aunt.

  Aunty Mabel considered. “She used to
look like her ba-ba. Now she looks a little like her Aunty Ching-yu.” She explained to me: “My second-to-oldest sister. Serious face, always thinking.” I tried, unsuccessfully, to remember which face that was from Nai-nai’s old albums.

  “And what happen to this sister?” My uncle picked up a roll and reached for the butter dish as my aunt deftly slid it away from him.

  “She married a merchant’s son. Three children.”

  “Merchant’s son,” said my uncle. “That means rich. We gotta find a rich man for Sally, support her be an artist. That Mel, is he rich?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “He’s a good boy, though.”

  My uncle had met Mel only once, when he’d come by to pick me up and Aunty Mabel had persuaded him to come in for lemonade. They’d talked basketball. Everyone was polite. I knew Ma would hear every detail of my bad behavior, how I hadn’t even come home for the last two nights.

  That morning I’d watched Mel shaving naked, angling into the bathroom mirror, one foot up on the edge of the bathtub, as classical a stance as any marble Greek warrior. “You could drive back with me, you know,” he said.

  “My plane ticket’s nonrefundable.”

  “Maybe I’ll just have to make a pit stop then.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, there was this gas station attendant in Savannah.”

  “How old is she?”

  “You’re jealous,” he said, reaching behind to wrap his arm around me. “I like that.”

  On this, our last morning together, we drove into St. Pete to a consignment shop and he bought me a birthday present, the cardigan I was wearing, black with pearl buttons in the 1930s style I liked. Then we got some postcards and sat in a coffee shop to write them.

  “Which should we send to Doug?” Mel asked me. “The manatees?”

  “How about the alligator wrestling one?”

  “Excellent choice.”

  “The manatees go to Lillith.”

  “You wanna do it?”

  “Sure.”

  I wrote: “This is how Mel and Sally spend their time in Florida, swimming and getting fat. We hope you are too.”