Monkey King

by Patricia Chao

  I felt a pang of jealousy.

  Marty wasn’t home. “She go back to New York for a couple of days,” Ma told me, but when I called the old number, there was no answer. “When you coming to New Haven?” my mother asked, and I told her I’d be there for my appointment with Valeric the day after tomorrow. “Good,” Ma said. “You come over afterward. I make special birthday dinner for you and your sister.”

  On the phone I told my boss a little about what had happened, using the term nervous breakdown, although I didn’t mention Willowridge. She asked me how I felt now.

  “Better,” I said.

  “Well, since you left things have been exploding around here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t talk. Let’s meet for lunch.”

  At O’Neal’s, two blocks from the office and exactly the kind of cavernous noisy New York restaurant I hated, she told me that the agency was in the process of being acquired yet again. She had decided to leave and start her own company. “I found a space in SoHo. Two thousand square feet, northeastern light, all the fixtures in. I already have a couple of accounts lined up.” She told me what they were and I knew I was meant to be impressed, so I said I was. The truth was I felt distanced from all that shop talk. Why was she persisting in treating me as if I were still Sally Wang-Acheson, senior art director? That person she thinks she’s talking to must have been good, I thought. She must have been something.

  Finally my boss leaned over, laying her hand over mine, looking at me shrewdly. “Okay, I can see you’re not into this. The reason I called was I thought maybe you’d be interested in coming aboard as full-time staff. But only if you’re completely okay.”

  “I’m a little distracted,” I said. “I’m sorry. How about part-time? Is that out of the question?”

  “I’ll be straight with you, Sally,” my boss said. “You’re the most talented designer I’ve ever worked with. You’re my first choice.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Part-time is a possibility. When do you think you can start?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe in a couple of weeks.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You call me when you’re ready.”

  This was a second chance, but I couldn’t bear to think about it. It was too soon for me to be in the outside world. I couldn’t wait to return to the safety of my apartment.

  In Valerie’s office there was a framed poster from an exhibition at the Met, an Indian tapestry of elephants crossing a river. It was all I’d been able to focus on, those last afternoons when I was trying desperately to keep a grip on my mind. The elephants were flat and brilliant, with intricate blue and gold trappings. I remember thinking that they resembled tropical fish and that if I were half as good an artist as that ancient court weaver I wouldn’t be in this fix.

  “Welcome back,” Valeric said in her husky voice. There had been a time when I hadn’t liked the way she looked, when her lankiness seemed gawky, when I believed her to be cold and harsh. Now I thought of her as a warrior, someone who’d fight to the death to protect another soul. A fresh legal pad was balanced on her knee. “How’ve you been sleeping?”

  “Not so well.”

  “Oh? How is that?”

  In Florida I’d slept long and drugged, at my aunt and uncle’s, in the condo with Mel. Now that I was back in my life I’d awaken in the night with a start, heart pounding, tensed as if ready to spring out of bed. Three A.M. on the dot, it got so I didn’t even have to look. I’d get out of bed and turn on the lights and it was a shock to see all the details of my apartment, not at all like I’d been imagining them in my uneasy doze. Sometimes a siren would be shrieking or a drunk yelling in the street below, adding to the surreal effect. The only thing that helped was food. Take-out leftovers or I’d make popcorn and bring it into bed with me, greasing up the sheets with butter. Then I’d smoke, even if I had managed not to all day—sometimes it was the only way to get through the night.

  Mornings were another kind of torture. Walking around my apartment I got light-headed—or maybe it was more like light-bodied. I simply felt way too much: the blood pulsing through the veins in my wrists—Lillith said that it would be easy for me, had showed me the precise vertical cut to use if I really wanted out—the air tickling the hairs in my nostrils, the smooth warm dusty floorboards against the soles of my feet. It was like I had no skin.

  I told Valeric about the conversation with my boss. She nodded. “Sounds promising.”

  “But I’m too fucked up, I can’t go back.”

  “How about part-time? Didn’t you just tell me she’d agreed you’d both think about that?”

  “Maybe. If I can concentrate.”

  “What’s that on your arm?”

  “I had a relapse.”

  “You could have picked up the phone.”

  “I know. I didn’t think.”

  “What happened in Florida?”

  “I had a fling with Mel.”

  Nothing surprised her. She nodded again and began writing.

  The day before, I’d called Waterbury information and was lucky enough to get it right on the second La Monte. “Mel’s busy,” a woman, his mother, I thought, told me. In the background I could hear laughter. “It’s prom night,” the woman explained.

  “Who is it, Mom?” I heard Mel ask. The woman put her hand over the mouthpiece and there was a garbled dialogue.

  “He’ll call you,” the woman said when she got back on.

  “Tell him it’s Sally.”

  “Oh, yes, he’s mentioned you. Good-bye now,” she said before I could give her the number.

  “I thought about him in bed, you know,” I told Valeric. “I thought about my father, while Mel was making love to me.”

  “And how did that make you feel?”

  “Sick.”

  “So that’s why you cut yourself. You never told me—did this ever happen with Carey?”

  “I think I was just numb with Carey. And he didn’t know about Monkey King. He didn’t even know where the scars came from. I told him I’d had an accident on a picket fence.”

  “Why do you think it was different with Mel?”

  “I guess being sick made me weaker.”

  “Is that what you would call it? Being weaker?”

  I looked at my arm, the right one, without the scars, at the curve of the forearm bone, the pronounced knob on the outside of the wrist like my mother’s. My hands, of course, were my father’s. I imagined the way his long fingers had held the chalk as he stroked characters on the blackboard for his first-year class. Though my mother was known for being strict, Daddy was willing to be led off on a tangent. What are the characters for planet? for comet? his students would ask. He’d put down the chalk and tell them the legend of the herdsman and the weaving maid, two stars doomed to be separated by the Milky Way because they had loved each other too much and forgotten the rest of the world. My father would have turned it into a moral tale. The weaving maid had deserted her father for another man and he had punished her by forever denying her what she desired most.

  After my session with Valeric I caught the bus to Woodside Avenue. When I walked in, using my key, I could smell pot roast in the oven. Ma was at the counter chopping carrots. “Lally’s coming to dinner,” she announced.

  “Fine,” I said.

  My sister was lying on the living room floor watching TV. “Hi,” she said, not looking up.

  “I tried to call you,” I said. The sling was off, but she had an Ace bandage on her right forearm. It reminded me of the time I’d gone down to see her in Charlottesville.

  “It doesn’t matter. The emergency’s over.”

  “What emergency?”

  “I thought I needed a place to stay. Dennis was going to kick me out.”

  Dennis was the producer, the one she’d gone to France with. I said: “No wonder, if you spent all that time up in Vermont with some other guy.”

  “Bill’s just a friend,” Marty sai
d. “But you know men. Anyway, it’s all right now.”

  “If it’s all right, then why are you here?”

  “I’m still healing, stupid,” she said.

  I went back into the kitchen, where Ma was making the salad. “Sal-lee, please get the dressing from the fridge.”

  “I’ll make it from scratch,” I said. She watched suspiciously as I peeled a clove of garlic and chopped it, mixed oil and vinegar. When her back was turned I added mustard, ginger, sherry, soy sauce, and the scrapings of an old jar of honey I found in the cupboard. Then I ground some black pepper in.

  “Don’t forget salt,” Ma said.

  “Okay,” I said, ignoring her.

  “I talk to Aunty Winnie today, she’s so excited.”

  “Well, Xiao Lu’s her only child, it must be a big deal.”

  “I tell her, lucky he’s a boy, she doesn’t have to pay.”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “I ever tell you about my cousin in Shanghai, she got a divorce?”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “In China this is unheard of. Her mother and father disown her. When they see her in the street, they look right through her. Like ghost.”

  “What is the point of this story, Ma?”

  “No point. Just conversation.”

  Lally rapped on the side door and I went over to let her in. “Hey, sweetie!” she brayed, giving me a hug. “Boy, you look like you’ve been somewhere. Bonnie, did ya see how dark she is? Looks like a Malaysian, almost. Here, this is for you. To celebrate your birthday, but more importantly, your total and final recovery!” Never one to mince words, was Lally. I snuck a glance at Ma, saw that her mouth was set in a mean line. The gift was a pewter heart on a chain bracelet. “I got one for your sister too.” Lally, like my uncle, had always wished for daughters.

  “Thanks, Lally. It’s beautiful.”

  “Go set the table, Sally,” Ma said. “We eat in the dining room tonight.”

  When we were all sitting down Lally said to me: “Now, I want to hear all about you. How are things in that big bad city?”

  “Sally lost her job,” Ma said. “She quit, and she can’t get it back.”

  “I’m freelancing,” I said.

  “Just another word for unemployed.”

  “Freelancing seems to be the thing these days,” Lally said. “God, this salad dressing’s divine, Bonnie, you’ll have to give me the recipe.” She started going on and on about some neighbor of ours who had a son who was a poet in New York and doing legal proofreading nights to pay the rent. She asked my sister, “And how did you say you made your living, dear?”

  Marty yawned.

  “She’s a clown,” I said. “She dresses up in a polka-dot suit and juggles at the South Street Seaport.”

  “You have to start somewhere.” My mother smoothed her apron and smiled at Lally. “Now, how about dessert?”

  After Lally left and Marty and I had loaded the dishwasher my sister retreated upstairs and I went into the living room and watched a couple of sitcoms. When I came into the kitchen for something to drink my mother was sitting at the table correcting papers. Flick, flick, flick. Marty and I used to imitate her on our already corrected school compositions and then hold them up shrieking: “I got a hundred!” It was one of the few things we did that could make Daddy look up from his newspapers.

  I was leaning into the refrigerator and jumped at the sound of my mother’s voice.

  “I call Valeric and she says you’re doing fine.”

  “She said fine?”

  “She said progress.”

  “That’s a little different, Ma.”

  “Maybe you don’t need her anymore.”

  My mother’s stare was level, telling me nothing.

  “I think it’s too soon to quit,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral.

  “When do you think you’re going to get better?”

  This was what she used to say when I was a little girl, home from school with the mumps or the measles. In the first hours of an illness, my mother was tender and magnanimous, running out to indulge every whim: a special brand of orange soda, a stuffed animal, another box of crayons. But then I’d wake up one morning to her standing over me: “You’ve been sick for two days. When do you think you can go back to school?”

  I could think of several answers to Ma’s question: Therapy is a process, not an instant cure; someone who’s just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital needs to be followed up; or even the desperate, I’ll pay for it myself if I have to. They all sounded weak, unconvincing.

  “It will probably take a little while. I’ll let you know.”

  This was the wrong answer—I could tell from the look on her face.

  “I don’t say anything when you’re in the hospital. I do all what Valeric says I should do, I even go to family therapy. But there’s no result!”

  “What do you mean, no result? What did you expect?”

  “You still don’t have decent job, you still see doctor all the time.”

  “Ma, it’s only been a month!”

  “I know all you do in Florida, your Aunty Mabel tells me. What kind of boy! Boy from the hospital!”

  “Just leave Mel out of it.”

  “You’re not so sick, you can fool around with this boy. You just feel sorry for yourself, I can tell. You think ‘Poor, poor Sally’ and you imagine everything that’s happen to you, what I do to spoil your childhood, terrible things about your daddy.”

  “You didn’t spoil my childhood.”

  “You’re so selfish, I’m embarrassed to speak about you to my friends. They all the time talk about their children, this one gets married, this one goes to law school, and what am I suppose to say? I have a crazy daughter? I spend so much money and she is crazier than before?”

  I’d never understood the expression “to see red,” but now a faint crimson bar appeared in the middle of my line of vision, so that I could only see the periphery of the scene, and not the focus, which was my mother sitting in the midst of her papers.

  “You are a horrible person,” I said. “You are not even a human being.”

  I turned and walked out of the kitchen. Behind me I heard her shouting, “We do everything for you, we send you to the best boarding school in America,” and it was as if Daddy were speaking. I found that I could tune it out easily—there seemed to be a switch in my brain designed specifically for this purpose.

  I went up to my room and into my day pack I stuffed the following items: the carved wooden horse, my summer correspondence with Fran, the snapshot of Marty and me on the swing set on Coram Drive. Also a postcard from Lillith I found on my bureau—a photograph of a giant hot fudge sundae with a message I couldn’t quite make out, something about feast or famine. From Ma’s bedroom I called a taxi to take me to the train station and then I went down to the living room to wait.

  My mother came to stand in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going back to New York.”

  “Too late to take the train.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I can drive you to the station, if you want.”

  I picked up a copy of Newsweek from the coffee table and opened it.

  The next time I looked up she had disappeared.

  I studied the room, as if seeing it for the first time: the wooden laughing Buddha seated cross-legged on his cushion on the stereo cabinet, the tapestry of the Great Wall over the sofa, the set of three porcelain stools with their elaborate raised red and green curlicue designs like script on a birthday cake; there had once been four, but Marty had broken one pretending to be a circus elephant. If I could have taken anything with me, it would have been the painting in the foyer. It was of a boy on the back of a water buffalo. The boy was so insouciant—he was playing a flute and looking off into the distance. I remembered the painting was a gift from Mr. Lin, and now it occurred to me that it was probably his work.

  Across from where I was sitting was a low table disp
laying my mother’s collection of framed photographs. My and Carey’s wedding portrait, once in the position of honor, had been removed. There were my parents and Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard all dressed up in a nightclub somewhere in Florida. A sepia picture of Nai-nai from her singing days, a perfect fullblown orchid in her sleek hair, her mouth a dark bow. Marty leaning against the front door of our house in Monterey—the photo was black and white, but I remembered the dress, a pale yellow, with navy stripes across the bodice. Marty as the Virgin Mary in the eighth-grade play, draped in blue and gold. Marty’s head shot when her hair was longer, in a bob. In none of these pictures was my sister smiling, but there was something seductively relaxed about her look, the confidence of someone who was thinking at the moment her image was being recorded: yes, yes, I am beautiful, and I deserve to be adored, I deserve everything the world is able to give me, and more.

  24

  On Memorial Day weekend I finally saw Fran for the first time in over a year. We had both been invited to a cocktail party given by a friend of ours from boarding school. She came over early to pick me up, and when I opened the door my first impression was that despite being dressed up she looked haggard, a little hollow-eyed. But Fran was one of those people whom exhaustion becomes, it made her seem more alive, somehow. After we’d hugged, she plopped herself into the baby rocking chair. “Listen, kiddo,” she said, “I just want to get this out of the way before we start catching up. You have no idea what you put me through this spring. It was a crime, what you did.”

  “Franny, you don’t understand, I was like a vegetable.”

  “You know what suicide is? Murder in the first fucking degree.”

  “You have no right to judge me. You have no idea what it was like.”

  She was silent, rocking, and then she said: “I’m sorry I didn’t come to visit you in that place. You know how it is with me.” When we were teenagers, Fran’s mother had gone through several breakdowns and she’d had to leave school to check her into Payne-Whitney. Fran would never talk about these trips, although once she told me that when she was nine, right before her parents got divorced, she’d found her mother passed out on the pantry floor. “Tranquilizers, of course,” Fran told me. “Mom was never very original.” As neither I had been.