Re Jane

by Patricia Park

  I met Sam Surati’s cologne first. A thick, spicy, boozy scent—like something one of Mary’s boyfriends would wear—rolled in through the front door like a red carpet announcing his arrival. And there he stood: a tall man with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair that crested over his right eye like a schoolboy’s and ruddy skin that looked as if it’d been scrubbed too vigorously with one of Hannah’s red washcloths. Sam Surati looked around Sang’s age, maybe older, but he dressed like a much younger man. He wore a fitted gray blazer and a blue-striped button-down shirt that attempted to draw attention away from what was clearly a protruding belly. His bottom half was outfitted in stylish dark-rinse bootcut jeans. On his feet were a pair of what looked like expensive brown bowling shoes.

  He looked at me over Beth’s shoulder. “I thought you told me you’d adopted a little girl from China. Not a woman,” he said, jerking a thumb at me. It was an inappropriate comment; my cheeks burned with some mixture of embarrassment and indignation. Mostly indignation. I wished I had enough nerve, like Nina, to call him out on it.

  But Beth laughed, pressing her tapioca-flour-coated, aproned chest to him, her oniony lavenderness mingling with his cologne. She did not notice him brushing off the streaks of flour from his blazer when they pulled apart. “That’s Jane. She helps us with Devon. But this”—she pushed Devon forward, as though she were offering up a gift—“this is my daughter, Devon.” Sam and Devon shook hands.

  What was most interesting was Sam and Ed’s greeting, or lack thereof. There was no “Hello, how are you, happy Thanksgiving.” They simply stated each other’s first name. There was a tense handshake. Ed’s lips were drawn into a tight line.

  “I’d apologize for being late,” Sam said to Beth, “but I blame the remoteness of your fair borough. It’s simply impossible to catch a cab to Brooklyn. I had to tip my guy an extra five bucks.”

  “Or you could’ve taken the subway,” Ed said.

  Beth shot him a look. “Well, never mind that. You’re here now. Come, come, let’s eat.”

  She led the way to the dining room. As Sam walked to the table, the loose denim fabric around his thighs and calves bunched up around his spindly legs.

  Beth’s Thanksgiving meal seemed to really embrace the colors of fall: orange, brown, and green were heaped onto clay serving platters. But it was hard to believe that the endless bags brimming with groceries across the kitchen counter had been reduced to these pureed mounds, uniform in texture and consistency. If I hadn’t known how much work had gone into the meal, I would’ve thought Beth had unscrewed a couple dozen jars of Gerber’s baby food and dumped them onto the platters.

  But all those side dishes seemed a foil for the true highlight of the meal: Beth’s Thanksgiving turkey. It was a tawny, speckled lump of glazed tempeh resting on a white blanket of silken tofu. It had a walnut-shell beak and slivers of black olive X’s for eyes, and a peel of Red Delicious apple dingle-dangling from its chin. Alternating raw zucchini and carrot spikes poked out from its backside, and below that were fresh cranberry droppings. From where I sat, the tempeh turkey looked as if it were cowering behind the wall of moon cakes, piled high like bricks on a plate, and had soiled itself from fright.

  “That’s quite a sight,” Sam said.

  “Isn’t it?” Beth said, carving the “turkey.” “White or dark?” she joked as she passed plates of the tempeh around the table.

  “My God, Beth,” Sam said, swirling his glass of wine. “I don’t even want to think of how many pages of your manuscript were forgone in the making of that . . . that centerpiece.”

  “About that, Sam,” Beth said, “did you have a chance at all to review those chapters I sent—”

  “Yes, I did. And I mentioned them to Jennifer at see-you-pee yesterday.” Devon and I exchanged a look across the table and started to titter. Only later would I learn he’d meant CUP. “She had some concerns about its crossover appeal—you know it’s all about the market these days—but follow up with her early next week. Tell her you and I talked. And how’s everything else looking? You’re serving on how many . . . ?”

  “Five,” Beth said immediately, and Sam nodded with approval. They spoke in a shorthand, finishing each other’s sentences as they volleyed words across the table.

  “And how are your student evals?” he asked.

  Beth wrung her cloth napkin. “My students either love me or hate me.”

  “What did I say about going easy on them, especially now?” Sam said. “Offer to drop their lowest grades.”

  “Or you could just focus on doing a good job. Less scheming, more teaching.” It was Ed who broke in.

  But then Sam Surati let out a strange laugh. I recognized the tone—it was the same tone Beth had used with Ed when they fought about the Italian ices. It was condescension. I thought about how delicious it would feel to fling my plate of Beth’s murky foodstuffs at his face.

  When his laughter subsided, he said, in a tone that matched that laugh, “By the way, how is that dissertation coming along?”

  Beth nudged her husband eagerly. “Yes, Ed, what a great opportunity for you to ask Sam for his advice.”

  “Beth, I really don’t think now’s the time to discuss this.” Ed put down his napkin.

  “Sam,” Beth said, “what’d you at least think of Ed’s intro chapter?”

  “You sent him my manuscript?” Ed said.

  “I thought it’d be helpful for you to have a second set of eyes on it,” she said breezily.

  Sam put down his wineglass. There was a flicker of nunchi in his eyes, as if he, too, thought the most diplomatic thing was to drop the subject.

  But Beth egged him on. “Who knows when next we’ll see you, Sam! My God, Ed, the man’s so busy. He very generously took the time to look at your work. Now, Sam, be honest. What did you think?”

  “I thought . . .” Sam was, for the first time, flustered. “To be brutally honest, I thought your argument felt a little . . . familiar. A bit déjà vu–ish, if you will.”

  “See, Ed? Wasn’t I telling you the same thing?” Beth cried, delighted to be in accord with Sam Surati. “You state things like you were the first person to discover them. Meanwhile there’s a whole body of work that posits the same theories you’re claiming as your own.”

  Sam Surati receded from the conversation as Beth went on to list a mountain of the dissertation’s other faults: its failure to engage with past scholarship, to anticipate counterarguments, and, what seemed to be its most egregious offense, its “far-too-readable” language. She chewed out Ed the same way Hannah worked her teeth over a piece of pear peel, scraping off all traces of flesh. Was Beth, as Devon might have put it, truly so clueless? Couldn’t she see she was the reason her husband was pulling away?

  If I couldn’t save Ed, then I could at least distract everyone else from his growing humiliation. “So . . . Dr. Surati,” I said. “I find your . . . dialectic on . . . femininity . . . um, interesting.”

  Sam Surati tittered, corrected himself. “You mean my discourse on ‘the feminine,’” he said, his eyes snapping away from Beth and Ed and onto me. He clearly found my verbal slips more entertaining than their fight. “Yes, yes, and what facet of it exactly did you find interesting?”

  “You had this part about, like . . .” The way Sam Surati stared at me intently made the words even harder to get out.

  “Please—take all the time you need,” he said. Then he reached over to pat my hand. This made both Beth and Ed stop in their tracks.

  “Oh, Sam,” Beth called out in a yoo-hoo! voice. “Don’t be too hard on her. Before Jane met us, she’d never once been exposed to this kind of material.”

  “Is that so?” Sam said. He tried to pat my hand again, but I’d already withdrawn it to my lap.

  As Beth and Sam went on, talking about me as if I weren’t there, I recalled an article she’d made me read about how
Victorian men gangbanged women with language. They’d “thrust” and “parry” words over the female body, while the body in question was forced to just sit there in silence and take it. The article was called “Wanting a Piece of Fanny: Male Dominance and Violation in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.”

  Devon, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet during the meal, suddenly interrupted her mother. “Ma, I want to apply to Hunter for seventh grade.”

  “Devon!” I whispered, nudging her. I was grateful to her for diverting the attention from me, but she should have had the nunchi to see that now was a bad time to be pleading her case.

  Beth disengaged with Sam and turned to her daughter. “No. Absolutely not,” she said. “Carroll Prep is an excellent school, and you’ll be staying put till college.”

  “But Hunter’s a good school, too! And it’s free!” Devon offered, to which Beth scoffed. “Devon, that’s the last thing you should be worried about. I’ll not put a price on my daughter’s education.”

  “Beth, it’s not a bad idea,” Ed said. “I agree now’s not the time to talk about this, but we should at some point—”

  “And have my daughter romp about in the city on the subways all by herself? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?” Then Beth fixed her dark, dark eyes on me. “Was this your idea?” Before I could answer, she added, “Don’t encourage her. Please. The matter is settled.”

  “You always tell us to think for ourselves, but you’re a hypocrite and a tyrant!” Devon squealed, rising from the table. “You’re worse than . . . than Mao!”

  Beth gasped. Her fork dropped onto her plate; it would have clattered if its fall weren’t softened by a bed of brown puree. Devon stormed from the table. I could hear her footsteps clomping up the stairs. I wasn’t sure whether to stay put or follow after her.

  “Do you know that’s the meanest thing she’s ever said to me?” Beth said. “Not only the meanest but also the most uninformed. If it weren’t for Mao’s Cultural Revolution, half a billion women never would’ve gained equal rights.” She stared at her daughter’s empty seat and blinked, fighting back tears. “I swear I must’ve told Devon that at least a dozen times.”

  Sam Surati cleared his throat. “Yes, well . . .” He glanced at his watch. “Anyway, I should be off. I’m meeting Stanley for drinks, and who knows how long it’ll take to get out of these far-flung regions.”

  “With . . . Stanley?” Beth dabbed at her eyes. She looked hopeful, as though she, too, might score an invite. Even I recognized the name: Stanley Obuheim of The Feminist Primer fame. He was a scholar oft quoted by Beth, second only to Sam Surati. But she had never actually met him.

  “The one and only.” Sam turned to me. “Have you been to the Campbell Apartment? There’s nowhere else in the city that makes a better old-fashioned. In my humble opinion, that is. Perhaps we could continue this ‘dialectic on femininity’ there.” His fingers fluttered into air quotes.

  I almost said yes. Not because I wanted to spend another second with Sam Surati, but out of retaliation against Beth for the way she’d treated Ed. A little booyah! if you will. But then I’d lose my job.

  I should have demurred, politely. I should have averted my eyes or tee-heed into my hemp napkin, to let him down easy. But I’d been holding back the whole evening. Sam Surati was insufferable, and my mounting anger was making me tap-tap-hae. I couldn’t stop my face from contorting with disgust. I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, “But you could be my dad.” (And for all I knew, he very well could be.)

  Never before had my words had the power to cause a man to shrivel so quickly into himself. Like that, Sam Surati’s arrogant puff deflated. His cheeks flushed with more than just too much wine. Male desire was at its most problematic, according to one of Beth’s articles (“The Hottie in the Granny Panties: Cindy Sherman and the Reversal of the Male Gaze”), when it was mixed with disgust.

  “Ah, yes, well. Another time, then,” he mumbled. “Beth, you’ve been wonderful, as ever. And thank your family for suffering me on their day off.”

  With that, Sam Surati collected his things and left, his sickly-sweet cologne lingering in his wake.

  “At least that’s over,” Ed muttered, throwing down his napkin. He got up to start clearing the dishes.

  “It wouldn’t have killed you to make some effort,” Beth said.

  Ed looked like he was about to burst with anger, but then his voice became muted, like a piano when you press down the middle pedal. “Beth, another time. Really.”

  “That’s almost becoming a cliché with you,” she muttered.

  It was this that finally set Ed off. “It’s so ironic,” he said, his tone escalating. “For all your talk about your daughter getting a good education, you and Sam Surati sit there plotting in plain sight! What is he, your Lady Macbeth?” His Brooklyn accent thickened with anger.

  “Ed, you’re projecting.” Her tone was calm.

  “Devon’s right. Maybe you are a hypocrite.”

  “And you’re just above us all, then, aren’t you? And where exactly has that gotten you?”

  It was only Ed whose voice crescendoed, rising with emotion, while Beth maintained her even-keeled tone. At first the contrast made Ed seem like the irrational one, immature for not keeping his cool. But then I realized it was something else entirely. It felt mean, the way Beth did not deign to raise her voice. It was patronizing—it kind of made her seem like a phony.

  Sang and Hannah did not hold back when they fought. Their fights were loud and quick, like bursts of compressed air. But later Hannah would cook up the spicy fish stew that Sang loved, or he would bring her an unblemished Asian pear. Sang and Hannah, I knew, had jung for each other—a deep-seated regard. Jung was the kind of bond that formed equally between a mother and her child, a student and his beloved mentor, a woman and the dreadful mother-in-law she grows to cherish over time. Maybe Americans—er, white people (Beth was constantly on my case about correcting that: You’re American, too)—expressed their jung in a different way. But it seemed to me that Beth and Ed had not an ounce of jung between them.

  I took one last look at the two of them before I slipped away. And this much I knew: If Ed and Beth continued like this, she’d work him down, like the pureed heaps left over on our Thanksgiving plates.

  * * *

  A few hours later I heard the front door slam, then movement above me: Beth pacing the length of her office upstairs. Dull thumps back and forth, until finally the sound tapered off.

  That night I wondered whether Ed would want company or if he’d prefer to be by himself. I sat on my bed trying to read (not Sam Surati’s book; I couldn’t stand the sight of it), but my thoughts kept returning to him. Ed was fast becoming a comforting presence. I longed to see him, I craved the reassuring sound of his voice. Should I venture downstairs? Or should I stay away?

  I heard a knock on the door. It was Devon; Ed stood behind her. “Ma’s asleep. Daddy says we’re going on a secret road trip!”

  “Kiddo, it’s not secret per se,” Ed said.

  I reached for my coat. “Oh, I am so in.”

  We walked to the car. In the dark we heard a voice call out, “Ed Fawley? That you?” A man in a dark coat was walking toward us. “How you doin’? Lawng time no see!”

  “Sal Mastronardi. Happy Thanksgiving,” Ed said. “Hope you’ve been well.”

  Ed and the man had an awkward embrace—the man had his arms spread wide while Ed held out a hand.

  The man and his wife were having company over on Sunday after Mass. Did he . . . did we—he looked questioningly at us—want to come over?

  Ed shook his head. “My wife—she has to work.”

  The man was shaking his head. “That wife a-yours still locked up in her awfice? Whatta shame.”

  Sal Mastronardi knew how to take a hint. After a few more words, they parted. We walked on to th
e car.

  It was clear from dinner that night that Ed Farley did not belong in Beth and Sam Surati’s world. But he also no longer belonged to the one he was from.

  We drove down Court Street until we reached the expressway overhead and the neighborhood shops and brownstones gave way to abandoned warehouses, bodegas, and auto-body shops. We were not far from Sang’s old store, the one from the blackout. I looked behind at Devon, seat-belted in the back. Was this weird for her, the three of us together without her mother? She didn’t look as if it bothered her at all—she was bouncing in her seat, sharing a joke with her father—“Da-ddy, you already told us that one!”—and laughing. Her face glowed. Devon had been three when Beth and Ed adopted her; she might have been just old enough to remember the feel of her own mother’s touch, but she said she had no memories of her life back in China. Did she feel any pangs of wistfulness, or did she have so much jung for Beth and Ed that a heavy emptiness never swelled in the pit of her heart, the way it did in my own?

  Up until I was Devon’s age, I used to fantasize—of all mundane things—car rides with my mother and father. They’d pull up in a convertible in front of 718 Gates Street and whisk me off. I had only one grainy picture of my mother. She was looking away from the camera and smiling up at someone—my father?—her thin, graceful arm shielding her eyes from the sun. In the passenger seat of that imaginary convertible, my mother looked over at my father with that same shy hint of a smile.

  The picture of my father, sitting behind the wheel, was always hazier. When I was a child, my hair was so much lighter and my face was covered in freckles, so I made the back of my father’s head a chestnut brown, same as all the dads’ on TV sitcoms. From that backseat I could make out only a sliver of his profile, but he was strong-jawed and chiseled, with his eyes fixed adoringly on my mother. Although that was before he had cast her aside.

  Kids always knew I was different, but it wasn’t until the summer after fourth grade that they started to say things. Your dad was a migun—a GI! Your mom was so crazy for Hershey’s chocolate bars. She was willing to have a weirdo baby like you! You’re worse than an orphan ’cause your parents didn’t even want you. By the time I started fifth grade, I forced the forged memories of my parents, and those joyrides, out of my head. After that I started to regard my mother the same way everyone else did: as a loose, foolish woman who’d been abandoned by her no-good American boyfriend.