Monkey King

by Patricia Chao

  I would have used my own blood if it weren’t for the limited supply and the fact that it did not dry true to color.

  By the end of the day my studio looked like a massacre had taken place. I had to turn the canvases to the wall so that I could sleep.

  “Aunty Winnie says she looks forward to see you at wedding,” my mother said on the phone.

  “I don’t know if I’m going.”

  “How come you don’t go? Such an old childhood friend.”

  “Look, I’ll think about it, okay?”

  And I did. Sitting on the floor of my studio with the sun pouring in, I decided, what the hell. But first I had to get back into my life. Slowly, Sally, I told myself.

  “Why do you think she keeps calling you?” Valerie asked.

  “Control, of course. She wants to keep tabs on me now.”

  “Why now?”

  “Before I wasn’t dangerous. Now she knows I could hurt her. I could tell everyone the truth about my father.”

  “And?”

  “If I tell the truth about Monkey King, I tell the truth about her.”

  “And what truth is that?”

  “She let it happen.”

  “Yes. She let it happen.” Valerie leaned forward, her chin in her hands.

  “She was a failure,” I said.

  “As what?”

  “As a mother.”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What else was she a failure at?”

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “Wasn’t she a failure as a wife?”

  “Oh.”

  “Think about it.”

  Why was everyone always telling me to think about things? “I guess so,” I said. “But why did she stay with him then?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “She thinks the ancestors will curse you if you get a divorce. She was afraid, I guess.”

  I wrote out a check for five hundred dollars to my sister, put “Loan” in the memo section, and mailed it to Woodside Avenue, with MS. MARTHA WANG in block letters so Ma wouldn’t open the envelope. I didn’t know why I did it. It wasn’t like I owed her anything. But she was my sister, after all.

  A few days later Marty called. She didn’t mention the money.

  “I’m coming into the city tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s have lunch. My treat.”

  “Where?”

  “You live near Chinatown, don’t you?”

  “Fine with me.”

  “Good,” she said, sounding like a little kid. “We’ll have bao zi.”

  I went down early so I could stop at Pearl Paint beforehand. Since I’d gotten back I’d been deliberately avoiding it, but Pearl was the best and cheapest in Manhattan for art supplies, so I guessed sooner was better than later. I was apprehensive. What if back in February they’d caught me on tape walking out of the store with a bulge in my parka, or worse, actually slipping the tubes of paint into my pocket? When it came right down to it, I didn’t have my sister’s nerve. I put on the largest sunglasses I owned and the red lipstick I’d bought for pool nights, tied my hair up in an uncharacteristically high pony-tail. We all have our ways of courting luck, although maybe this was more of a disguise.

  I needed brushes, not beautiful calligraphy ones like my uncle and aunt had given me, but the cheapest kind of oil brushes, which I could abuse and leave paint on overnight. I was going through a sloppy stage, working until the small hours of the morning, when I was too exhausted to clean up. There were piles of red-stained rags all over my studio, and it seemed I could never get my hands completely clean. By then there was no doubt in my mind that what I was doing was calligraphy. Sometimes when I squinted my eyes I could make out familiar characters from Chinese class I thought I had forgotten. The stocky pitchfork strokes of the word for mountain, the delicate voluptuous curves of the word for heart.

  Nothing happened at Pearl. I just walked in and up those precarious stairs like millions of others before me, chose my brushes, paid, and left. The saleswoman didn’t even meet my eyes. The whole time my pulse was rabbiting as crazily as it had the last time I’d been there. As soon as I got outside I felt my knees buckle, and I had to go into a coffee shop so I could sit down and have a cup of tea.

  The block where my sister wanted us to meet had a string of those tiny jewelry stores that my parents used to hurry us by when, as kids, we would be caught by the displays of rings. Marty seemed paler than the last time I’d seen her. For once I was the tanner one. She was still wearing a bandage. Our arms are our weakness, I thought.

  “You look very fifties,” my sister said. She peered down the block. “I think it’s the third store to the right, that one.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “The best prices in town,” Marty said. “I bet you didn’t know they’re pawnshops too.”

  “No, I didn’t. What are you thinking of pawning?”

  “What else? Jewelry.”

  She had a little leather zippered bag, from which she withdrew her stash and placed it carefully, item by item, on the piece of black velvet the proprietor had laid over the counter. I noticed she was wearing the pink cameo ring. I hoped she wasn’t going to sell that.

  The proprietor, a grouchy old man, was impassive, grunting every so often. “No good” is what he said to most of what she showed him. And they were beautiful things, some of them. An aquamarine ring in a white gold setting, an opera-length necklace of jade beads, a half dozen hammered silver cuffs. But the man looked unimpressed until she produced a pair of gold grape-size earrings in the shape of lovers’ knots, each trimmed with a tiny line of diamonds following the curves. He picked one up to peer at it through his loupe. “Cartier,” my sister said.

  I could picture her strolling down Fifth Avenue with Dennis, both of them dressed in leather jackets and jeans. It would have been early in the relationship, maybe right after they’d moved in together. At the comer of Fifty-second he’d turn to her and say casually, “Sweetie, do you feel like stopping in here?” And so they’d push through those monstrously heavy doors with their entwined CC handles into the sepia interior, intimate and heavily carpeted, so unlike Tiffany’s with its light and sparkle.

  The proprietor gave her $350 for the things he wanted. This seemed criminally low to me, and when we were out on the street again I told her: “You should have bargained him up.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about any of that stuff. I just want to make my first month’s rent and security, and this will do it, along with what you loaned me.”

  “You already found a place?”

  “Yeah. A share, on the Upper West Side.”

  “Why didn’t you ask Ma for the money?”

  Marty rolled her eyes. “She’s gotten it into her head that I’m staying in New Haven. She’d throw a fit if she knew I’d even been looking for an apartment.”

  It occurred to me that my sister probably didn’t have very many close women friends. In fact maybe I was it.

  I’d forgotten exactly where the bao zi shop was, and Marty didn’t have a clue, so we ended up going down a couple of wrong streets. Since it was Saturday there were lots of tourists mixed among the natives and as always I felt displaced, not being either. My sister made her way through the crowd confidently, somehow blending in, maybe because she was short. But I noticed that she distinctly favored her right arm, and I wondered how long it would take until she didn’t. Would it be until the bandage was off, or a week after that, a month, a year, or would it become a tic, a vulnerability, the way she’d edge her left shoulder forward as she walked?

  When we finally found the place I was shocked to see that they had changed it all around, refurbished it. The old Formica counter and stools had been replaced by little cafe tables, and you ordered from a waitress instead of the cheerful baker behind the counter. But there were still those old glass cases by the door, all steamed up with warm pastries, and I recognized the baker as he emerged f
rom the kitchen shouting orders at a boy pushing a cart full of trays.

  Marty gave our order in the sketchy Mandarin she’d picked up in a semester at the University of Vermont. It always made me jealous that she had finished college and I hadn’t, that she was naturally more clever than me though she never studied. After the waitress had left, my sister opened up the zippered case and we inspected what the jeweler had rejected.

  “You want any of this?”

  “What about the cameo ring?”

  “I like that, I’m not going to get rid of it. It was Nai-nai’s, you know. Ma gave it to me.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I deserve something from her, after all, she was always so hard on me.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. I think she saw herself in me.”

  “Oh, come on, Mar, you’re not a thing like her.”

  “I look exactly like her.”

  “You look a little like her.”

  My sister pursed up her mouth and said in a high, choppy voice: “You girls should be proud, you have Han ancestors,” and the imitation was so perfect I had to laugh. She laid her left hand in front of her on the table, spreading her fingers out like a star, and we admired the precisely cut ivory silhouette on its dusty pink background. It was a Victorian lady’s profile with a small bun at the nape. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been commissioned especially for my grandmother. Sitting there with my sister, it was as if I could feel Nai-nai’s stern eye on us, her disapproval at Marty’s punk haircut. “That lipstick wrong color on you!” she’d say to me. “Not feminine enough.” My sister took out her Gauloises and offered me one. I shook my head. “I’m trying to quit.”

  “Good for you,” she said. I couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic or not. She struck the match in a precise gesture, touched the flame to the cigarette end, and then I knew why I had lent her the money. It was bait, so she’d talk to me. “Look,” I said. “I’m just going to ask you this once. Why didn’t you back me up in the hospital? About Monkey King.”

  Marty didn’t say anything for a moment, but I could tell from her eyes she’d heard. When she did speak, I could barely hear her.

  “It wasn’t my fault, Sa.”

  “That you and Ma ganged up on me like that?”

  “It wasn’t my fault he did that to you.”

  My sister coming to wake me in the morning. When I wouldn’t get up, she’d climb into bed with me, whispering like a chant: “Monkey King, Monkey King.” This was how I knew it was real, not a dream.

  “I never said it was your fault, Mar.”

  “When we moved to Woodside Avenue I started locking my door.”

  “But he never touched you.”

  “No.”

  The waitress had brought our orders—sweet bean for Marty, pork for me. I pushed my plate away and picked up my teacup, but my hand was shaking so badly that I couldn’t drink.

  “Did Ma know?”

  My sister shook her head.

  “Does that mean, ‘No, she didn’t know,’ or ‘No, you can’t answer’?”

  “Ma was the one who said there was something wrong with you. That’s why we had to send you away.”

  “I wanted to go away.”

  “She cried all the time, that first year you were at that school. You didn’t know, did you? She told me I was her only comfort. You were only home summers. Can you imagine what it was like living in that house day in and day out? I told Ma she should get a divorce. She said she couldn’t leave him. You think Ma’s so strong, well, that was her blind spot.”

  I thought: But you’re her blind spot.

  “Look,” she said. “I know you’re into being the victim and everything, but at least he paid attention to you.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “He never even cared what I did. Do you know what he said to Ma? That he was sorry I’d turned out to be so stupid. That it must have been his sister’s genes—you know, the one who never finished primary school. The one who died. Can you believe it? He didn’t even have the guts to say it to my face. And all that crap about a piece of meat, I was just a piece of meat.”

  “He called me that too. And that’s bullshit about him not caring. Remember, you were the one he was talking about when he had the stroke.”

  My sister closed her eyes. “Oh God, Sally,” she said. “You actually believed that. I made it up. Didn’t you know?”

  “Were you lying then or are you lying now?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  I wanted to strangle her. I could have at least slapped her face, right in the restaurant in front of all those people. But I didn’t. Because the truth was, my sister was right. It didn’t matter. I’d wanted her to say she was sorry, I had wanted to forgive her. It was clear to me now that this would never happen.

  I said: “You know, if he had tried to do it to you, I would have told Ma.”

  My sister was silent.

  “When he did it to me, I could stand it. For you I would have told.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Marty stubbed out her cigarette and lit another.

  “You’re my sister.”

  She looked away. It was the old story: Yes, I’m your sister but I’ll never be you, thank God.

  I said, “I give up. I guess it’s just impossible for you to understand.”

  We sat in silence for a while before our untouched plates. Finally my sister asked, “So, you going to the lingerie shower?”

  “What lingerie shower?” It was by the greatest effort that I kept my tone as casual as hers.

  “The one Mimi Sung’s giving for Grace.”

  “Grace?”

  “You know, Xiao Lu’s Grace. I met her, you know. Ma invited her and Aunty Winnie to tea.”

  “Wasn’t Nai-nai’s cousin named Grace?”

  “It’s just one of those Chinese names, like Pearl or Ruby. We’re lucky they wanted us to be so assimilated.”

  “I didn’t get an invitation so I guess I’m not going.”

  “They called people. I bet you’re not picking up your phone again. Anyway, you have to go out and buy a piece of lingerie, size six, she likes red and pink. She looks like the type to wear sexy underwear. You know, like the magazines say, prim and proper on the outside and a whore underneath. I think we should get her a Merry Widow with a hole cut out in the crotch. Can you imagine Xiao Lu’s face?”

  “I have a theory about this shower,” I said. “I think it’s just a cover.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think Grace is the one who is going to wear the lingerie.”

  It wasn’t that funny, but we both started to giggle until we were out of control, until we were laughing so hard I thought our hearts might break.

  I thought, She’s not the only liar in the family. I had lied too. Both of us had lied all our lives, by omission and creation, about what our father was to us.

  26

  When I got back from Chinatown there was a message on my machine from Mel telling me to call him right away. His voice was higher pitched than I remembered, the tone a little distant. This time it was he, not his mother, who picked up. “How are you?” he asked.

  “Oh, just dandy.”

  “I deserved that,” he said. “I’m sorry I haven’t called. I have some bad news. It’s Douglas. He’s dead. He killed himself.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “They think he drank himself to death.”

  “What?”

  “He was renting this cabin in the Poconos and when his lease ran out the manager went to see why he hadn’t checked out. At first they couldn’t figure out what happened, and then when they did the autopsy they found a lethal dose of alcohol in his blood.”

  I was thinking that finding a dead person must change you forever.

  “Are you okay, Sal?”

  “Yes. I’m surprised he didn’t use a gun, that’s all. Since he really meant it.”

  “Hi
s dad said they found an old bear rifle in the cabin, but it hadn’t been fired.”

  “So God is capable of mercy.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Sal, the funeral’s Monday. I think I’m going.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you guys were friends.”

  “Are you interested in coming?”

  “I didn’t know him that well.”

  “I realize that. I’m asking for me, honey. For moral support.”

  “This is kind of sick, isn’t it? Trying to con me into attending a funeral when you don’t even bother calling to say hi?”

  “Lillith is going to be there.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “If you take the train up I’ll drive you back to the city.”

  “All right,” I said.

  Greenwich was the first stop, an hour from New York. Since it was off-peak I got a triple seat to myself in the back of the car—I could tell that it used to be a smoking one because it was never possible to completely get the smell out of the upholstery. I thought of Uncle Richard and all our illicit cigarettes together. I’d sent him a postcard of the Statue of Liberty doing a jig, telling him that I had a feeling my fortunes were going to change. It’s not coincidence that fortune means both luck and money, he’d informed me once.

  There was a girl several seats ahead of me, sprawled out with her socked feet up on the seat. She was intently reading a Penguin paperback, making notes in it with a fat pen. She looked smart, serious, unstoppable. Her shoulder-length dark hair needed washing, and she had on a Yale sweatshirt. When the conductor came by she handed him her ticket without looking up. I couldn’t remember ever in my life feeling as confident as she looked.

  The other people in my car were a family, a mother and three kids—two young daughters and a baby whose sex was indeterminate because it was bald and wearing a yellow blanket. The two little girls, in party dresses with sashes and patent leather Mary Janes, kept getting out of their seats and running up and down the aisle. “How much longer?” “Where are we now?” they kept asking, and their mother said to me apologetically, “We usually drive.”