By poking through her bills, pay stubs, calendar, and checkbook, Toua gleaned several more things: Caroline Yip had no money and lousy credit; she taught classes at three different colleges as a poorly paid adjunct instructor; she supported herself mainly by waitressing at Chez Henri four nights a week; she had no appointments whatsoever, not with a lover or friend or family member or even a dentist in the foreseeable future.
He downloaded her email and website usernames and passwords and configured her wireless modem so he could access her laptop covertly, but there wasn’t much activity there, nothing unusual. Nor did her cell phone calls, which he was able to pick up on his radio scanner, merit much interest over the next few days, nothing more personal than scheduling shifts at work. She was a loner. She didn’t have a life. Just like him.
She was also, like Toua, an insomniac. On consecutive nights, he saw her bedroom light snapping on for a while, going out, turning on, which explained the dark circles under her eyes and the strange ritual she practiced in the mornings, meditating on the living room floor, beginning the sessions by trying to relax her face, stretching and contorting it, mouth yowling open, eyes bulging—a horrific sight. What kept her up at night? What was worrying Caroline Yip, preoccupying her?
* * *
She would end up supplying the answers herself. He supposed, given their proximity, that it was inevitable they would run into each other. The morning of his fifth day, as he was going down the driveway, she surprised him by coming out the side door, laundry basket in hand. He thought she’d left on her jog already.
“Oh, hey,” she said. “You’re my new neighbor, aren’t you?”
They introduced themselves, shaking hands.
“Where’d you live before this?” she asked.
“Agassiz,” he said. “You know, near Dali.”
“I love that restaurant.”
“How about you? How long you been here?”
“Oh, four years, or so.”
Up close, she was more appealing than he’d anticipated. Opposed to Marcella Ahn, she was exactly his type, natural, unpretentious, a little shy, forgetful but not at all ditzy, not unlike his ex-girlfriend. Toua had to remind himself that Caroline Yip was the subject of his investigation, and that she was, in all probability, unstable, if not out-and-out dangerous.
“Hey, I gotta go,” she said, “but if you’re not doing anything later, we can have a drink in the ‘garden.’ ” They both looked over at the “garden,” broken concrete slabs and crab grass where a battered wire table and two cracked plastic chairs were perched, and they shared a smirk. “I make a mean gin and tonic.”
“I don’t drink,” he told her.
“Iced tea, then.”
It was a bit unorthodox, but Toua accepted the invitation. He thought it’d give him an opportunity to probe, so he met her outside at six, Caroline Yip bringing out two tall glasses of iced tea, Toua a plate of cheese and crackers.
They made small talk, mostly chatting about the neighborhood, the laundromat, nearby stores, takeout places—soul food from the Coast Café on River Street, steak tips from the Village Grill on Magazine. Then, as casually as he could, Toua asked, “What’s the owner of this property like?”
“What do you mean?”
“She a decent landlord? She fix things when they break?”
“She’s a cunt.”
“Okay,” he said. He had thought he’d have to work a little harder to uncover her feelings. He had agreed to give Marcella Ahn daily email reports, but thus far he’d had nothing to report. Caroline Yip wasn’t doing anything untoward in the house, and her water usage, according to the meter, which he dutifully checked every day, was normal. He had begun to think this was all a figment of Marcella Ahn’s imagination, that the gifts had been from a fan (did poets have fans?), that the meter had been malfunctioning or there’d indeed been a leak. But now, startled by the vehemence with which Caroline Yip said “cunt,” he reconsidered. “Why do you say that?”
“Let’s talk about something else. Want a refill?”
She took their glasses and went into the kitchen. She returned with a gin and tonic for herself. “When’d you quit drinking?” she asked, handing him his iced tea.
“The first time?” Toua said. “After college.”
“There must be a story there.”
“Long story. I’ll tell it to you some other time, maybe.”
“I’m interested.”
“It’s not very interesting.”
“Come on. Start at the beginning. Where’d you grow up?”
She kept pressing, and finally he told her the story, not bothering to disguise it. When he was three, his family had fled Laos to the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, where they spent three years before being shipped off to White Bear, Minnesota. He worked hard in school and was accepted to MIT, but once there, he felt overwhelmed, afraid he couldn’t cut it, and he started drinking. In his sophomore year, he flunked out. He enlisted in the Army and served as an MP in Kuwait during the First Gulf War, then returned to the States and joined the Cambridge Police, going to night school at Suffolk for years and finally getting his degree. Eventually he made detective, staying sober until two years ago, after which he quit the force.
“What happened?” she asked.
“It wasn’t one thing. It was everything. I burned out.” He was working on a new task force. A gang called MOD, Methods of Destruction, made up of Hmong teenagers, had moved into Area 4, and Toua was given the assignment because everyone assumed he spoke Hmong. Drive-bys, home invasions, extortion, drugs, firearms, prostitution—MOD was into it all, even sending notices to cops that they’d been “green lighted” for execution. Toua received one, emblazoned with MOD’s slogan, “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.” But the real menace was to victims picked at random. A couple coming out of a restaurant was robbed and macheted to death. A college coed was kidnapped and gang-raped for days. A family was tied up and tortured with pliers and a car battery, their baby scalded with boiling water. Senseless. Toua didn’t want to see it anymore.
“Jesus. Are these guys still around?”
“Some. I heard most of them have moved on.”
“I had no idea. I’ve always thought Cambridge was so safe. What have you been doing since?”
“Not a lot,” Toua said. He had revealed too much. He didn’t know why. Perhaps because he hadn’t talked to anyone in quite a while. “What about you? What do you do?”
“I’m a poet,” she told him.
* * *
He was an idiot. A lazy idiot. He had taken the client’s word for granted, when a simple Google search would have revealed the truth.
“You lied to me,” Toua said to Marcella Ahn at her house.
“Lying is a relative term,” she said, once again decked out as an Edwardian whore: a corset and bodice, miniskirt and high heels, full makeup, hair glistening. “I might have omitted a few things. Maybe it was a test, to see how competent you are.”
“She has every reason to hate you.”
“Oh? Is that what she told you? I’m the one at fault for her being such a failure?”
For several years, the two women had been the best of friends—inseparable, really. But then their first books came out at the same time, Marcella Ahn’s from a major New York publisher, Caroline Yip’s from a small, albeit respected press. Both had very similar jacket photos, the two women looking solemn and precious, hair flowing in full regalia. An unfortunate coincidence. Critics couldn’t resist reviewing them together, mocking the pair as “The Oriental Hair Poets,” “The Braids of the East,” and “The New Asian Poetesses.”
But Marcella Ahn came away from these barbs relatively unscathed. Her book, Speak to Desire, was taken seriously, compared to Marianne Moore and Emily Dickinson. Her poetry was highly erudite, usually beginning with mundane observations about birds or plant life, then slipping into long, abstract meditations on entropy and inertia, the Bible, evolution, and death, punctuated by the brie
fest mention of personal deprivations—anorexia, depression, abandonment. Or so the critics said. Toua couldn’t make heads or tails of the poems he found online.
In contrast, Caroline Yip’s book, Chicks of Chinese Descent, was skewered. She wrote in a slangy, contemporary voice, full of topical, pop culture allusions. She wrote about masturbation and Marilyn Monroe, about tampons and moo goo gai pan, about alien babies and chickens possessed by the devil. She was roundly dispatched as a mediocre talent.
Worse, in Caroline Yip’s eyes, was what happened afterward. She accused Marcella of trying to thwart her at every turn. Teaching jobs, coveted magazine publications, awards, residencies, fellowships—everything Caroline applied for, Marcella seemed to get. Caroline told people it didn’t hurt that Marcella was a shameless schmoozer, flirting and networking with anyone who might be of use. Yet, the fact was, Marcella was rich. Her father was a shipping tycoon, and she had a trust fund in the millions. She didn’t need any of these pitifully small sinecures which would have meant a livelihood to Caroline, and she came to believe that the only reason Marcella was pursuing them at all was to taunt her.
“You see now why she’s doing these things?” Marcella Ahn said. “I’ve let her stay in that house practically rent-free, and how does she repay me? By smearing me! Spreading anonymous rumors on forums! Implying I slept with judges! Posting bad reviews of my book! So enough was enough. I stopped speaking to her and asked her to move out. Was that unreasonable of me? After all I’ve done for her? I lent her money. I kept encouraging her. I helped her find a publisher for her book. What did I get in return? A hateful squatter who’s trying to mindfuck me, who’s intent on the destruction of my reputation and sanity!”
This was, Toua thought to himself, silly. He glanced around Marcella Ahn’s plush, immaculate house. Mahogany floor, custom wood furniture. Didn’t these women have anything better to do than engage in petty games? And what did this say about him? He’d given up his shield, only to go from trailing husbands to skip tracing debtors and serving subpoenas to accommodating the paranoid whims of two crackpot poets.
“I think I should quit,” he said.
“Quit?” Marcella Ahn said. “You can’t quit. Not now. I think she’s preparing to do something. I think she’s planning to harm me.”
“She’s not doing anything. You’ve gotten my reports.”
“Maybe she suspects. Maybe she’s stopped because she thinks she’s being watched.”
“I seriously doubt it.”
“Why won’t you believe me?” Marcella Ahn said. “Why?” And then she began to weep.
* * *
“Is it too late?”
“No, I was awake.”
“You sound tired.”
“Long day. I drove down to see Mom.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Better, I guess. Still kind of frail.”
“What else you been up to?”
“The usual. Work. You?”
“Nothing too exciting.”
“You know you can’t keep calling like this.”
“Is he there?”
“Not the point.”
“Is he?”
“No.”
“How is Pritchett?”
“Stop.”
“Ana, I still love you.”
“I know.”
“You know? That’s it? You know?”
“I don’t want to keep doing this. It’s painful.”
“Let me see, you cheat on me, with Pritchett, of all people, you kick me out, and you’re the one in pain.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Say… say there’s a chance.”
“There’s not. Not right now, there’s not.”
“But maybe things will change?”
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
“This is all I have, Ana. This is all I have.”
* * *
He watched her. He monitored her emails. He listened to her calls. He logged the numbers from the water meter every day. He talked to her, once more sat in the garden with her.
He had let Marcella Ahn persuade him to stay on, particularly after, as an additional incentive, she had offered him more money. Yet increasingly he felt it was a pointless exercise. He was convinced more than ever that Caroline Yip was oblivious to any of the transgressions of which she was being accused, oblivious to the fact that Toua was working for Marcella Ahn or even knew of their past. He was bored. At the end of the week, he would quit for good. By then, he’d have the security deposit for an apartment.
Thursday night, Caroline Yip knocked on his door. “I’m going to the Cantab. Wanna come?”
The Cantab Lounge was a dive bar in Central Square, known for its music and cheap drinks. The last time he fell off the wagon, Toua had been a regular there. He’d bar hop down Mass. Ave., beginning with the Cellar, then moving on to the Plough & Stars and the People’s Republik, ending the night at the Cantab, each place seedier than the next.
It was early still at the Cantab, the first set yet to begin, and they decided to go across the street first to Picante for a bite. They ordered chicken tostadas with a steak quesadilla to share, and they sat at a table beside the front window after loading up on salsa.
“How’re your poems going?” he asked.
“Así así.”
“What?”
“So-so,” she said. “Find a job yet?”
“Not yet.”
“I imagine it’d be easy for you to do something in security. What about private investigator work?”
Was she being coy? “I’ll look into it.”
“I have a question for you,” Caroline said. She wiped guacamole from the corner of her mouth. “What is it that you fear the most?”
“Like phobias?”
“No, about yourself. About your life. How you’ll end up.”
It was an awful question, one that immediately dropped him into a funk. Yet, although he didn’t realize he had been ruminating on it, he knew the answer right away. “Dead man walking,” he said.
“What? As in being led down death row?” She laughed nervously. “Feeling homicidal these days?”
He shook his head. He told her about the look he’d seen in some perps, the MOD gangbangers in particular, the vacancy in their eyes, a complete lacuna, devoid of any hope or humanity. “I’m afraid I might become like that. Dead. Soulless.”
“The fact that it worries you insures you won’t.”
“I don’t know.”
Caroline took a big bite of the quesadilla, chewed, swallowed. “I fear that all the sacrifices I’ve made for my poetry will have been for nothing, that really I have no talent, and someday I’ll realize that but won’t be able to admit it, because to do so would invalidate my life, so instead I’ll become resentful of anyone who’s had the slightest bit of success, lash out at them with stupid, spiteful acts of malice, rail against an unfair system and world and fate that’s denied me my rightful place of honor and glory. I’ll become a cold, bitter person. I’ll never find peace, or love, or purpose. I’ll die alone.”
He nodded. “I’m glad you brought this up. I’m feeling really good now. Very cheerful.”
Caroline giggled. “Let’s go listen to some music.”
The Cantab was in full swing now, and Toua and Caroline squeezed through the crowd to the bar. “Yo, Toua-Boua, long time no see,” boomed Large Marge, one of the bartenders. “What’s your pleasure?”
He got a rum and Coke for Caroline, a plain Coke for himself. Miraculously they found a couple of chairs against the far wall, and they listened to the funk and R&B band playing. The place hadn’t changed a bit, the green walls, the faux Tiffany lamps with the Michelob Light logos, the net of Christmas lights on the ceiling, the usual barflies and post-hippy graybeards in the audience.
Sitting there, it did occur to Toua that Caroline had implicated herself, expressing exactly t
he vindictive mindset that Marcella Ahn had described. What did it matter, though? What did it matter? It was all so trivial.
When he went to the bar for another round, he ordered two rum and Cokes. It tasted like crap—Jameson, neat, with a chaser of Guinness, had been his poison of choice—but since Caroline was drinking it, she wouldn’t be able to smell the alcohol on his breath. After several more rum and Cokes, Caroline hauled him onto the dance floor, and they swayed and bumped against each other, jostled by the sweating couples beside them.
Caroline hooked her arms around his neck. “I like you,” she shouted.
“I like you, too,” he said, and they kissed.
It was so good to feel something, he thought. To feel anything.
* * *
They woke up together the next morning on Caroline’s futon. “Was this a mistake?” she asked.
“Probably.”
“You weren’t supposed to say that.”
She made him breakfast—cereal, scrambled eggs, coffee, toast with peanut butter. “Do you ever think of leaving Cambridge?”
“To go where?” he asked.
“California. I went through a little town south of San Francisco once, Rosarita Bay. It’s a sleepy little place, very quiet. It’s not very pretty or anything, but for some reason it draws me. I love the idea of making a fresh start there, no one knowing who I am.”
“Sounds nice,” he said, his head pounding. He could have used a drink.
“Not tempted to join me someday?” she said hesitantly. He must have appeared alarmed, because she laughed then, as if she had been merely joking. “That was impulsive. Stupid. Never mind.”
“Not stupid. Just sudden.”
“Too sudden?”
He looked at Caroline. He did not know this woman. He was not in love with her, and she was not in love with him. But they might grow to love each other. It was possible. It seemed like the first opening of possibility in his life in a very long time, a fissure. “Maybe not.”
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