Number One Chinese Restaurant

by Lillian Li

  Sometimes, as if it were a cosmic joke, the parent was the best combination of the children. Johnny got her charm, Jimmy her spine. Johnny got her restraint, Jimmy her anger. They both got their father’s pretensions. They both got his determined disdain for her, his dismay when she proved that without her, none of them would have been anything.

  Without her, her stories and her tenacity in retelling them, Bobby would still be in the back kitchens of Chinatown. She and the boys would still be abandoned in Hong Kong, blacklisted from Beijing because her husband’s uncle had owned too nice a restaurant. She’d made sure Bobby remembered to bring them over, when he was spending his new money on things that let him forget. She wrote to him every day, finding his new addresses when he moved to cheaper apartments, pestering him with news of his children, and when that didn’t work, she began to hint at the rumors she could spread. Not of his unfaithfulness, or his drunkenness, but of his total failure, of his inability to get even a dishwasher’s job, the position he’d started in in China, and one he hadn’t deigned to hold in years. “Even if you become a millionaire,” she wrote to him, “I will make it my mission to convince your family and friends, your old rivals and lovers, that you are a fraud. A wife holds all your secrets. Even the ones that aren’t true.”

  Then she’d sent her cousin his way, writing to Ah-Pang to shape up her gutless husband. Ah-Pang had been the reason Feng Fei knew about America at all, while all those around her believed Beijing to be the heart-center of the universe. From her aunt, she’d heard of Ah-Pang’s success abroad, how much money he was sending back to his family, often once a week, and without alerting the village officials that remunerations were coming from abroad. In their childhood, she’d played with Pang-Pang in the countryside, where his family lived. To this day she remembered the afternoon she saw him wringing the neck of an injured bird. What had stuck with her was not the bird’s limp body or the sound of the snapping bone. It was the bored look in Pang-Pang’s eyes when his hands went around the flapping bird’s neck. It was the slight pleasure in his voice when, after he’d carried the dead bird into his mother’s kitchen, he asked her how they might cook it. So pleased by results yet so cold about the painful routes to achieve them. He might be the only man who could bring the Hans to America and help them thrive. Then again, perhaps this was just the best story.

  Feng Fei had tired herself out, thinking about her family and how they continued to find new ways to torment her. But this was a different kind of exhaustion than the one that had kept her in the basement all year. This tiredness would lift, like a curtain blind. It was merely a reminder of her power, which could suck the energy right out of her. She sank into bed, kicking off her slippers. She didn’t bother to take off her clothes. She had missed feeling this tired. She had missed the sensation of sleep not for escape but relief.

  19

  Nan pulled Ah-Jack through the restaurant, keeping an eye out for Jimmy, who was, mysteriously, nowhere to be found. Ah-Jack held her hand all the way to the car.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, after she’d started the engine.

  “Don’t forget your seatbelt.”

  “It was all my fault,” he said. “I thought I could handle the weight.”

  “I should’ve been watching out for you,” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “Let’s stop hogging all the blame.”

  She looked over to find him smiling at her.

  “What will we do?” she said. Then, “We’ll get you to a doctor.”

  “If anything, the heat cured my athlete’s foot!” he said as she started to drive.

  “You have to be extra careful with your feet. Infection. Nerve damage.”

  “My feet are fine,” he said, but when they reached Urgent Care, he got out of the car without prodding.

  *

  The doctor’s face was placid while examining Ah-Jack’s feet, until Nan told him about the diabetes.

  “Better safe than sorry,” the doctor said. He was an Indian man with chubby cheeks and beautiful eyes, sunken from sitting behind thick glasses.

  “That’s what I tell him.” Nan shoved Ah-Jack with the point of her elbow. “He never listen.”

  “Listen to your wife,” the doctor said, scribbling on his prescription pad.

  “Wife know best,” Ah-Jack said. “Happy wife, happy life.”

  The doctor laughed and ripped off the prescription, handing it to Nan with a wink. She had been the one to claim she was his wife, in case they barred her from the examination room. Yet she was flustered by how easily Ah-Jack leaned into the lie. What did they look like to the doctor, to the nurse out in the waiting room, to the three other patients, who peered at them from behind old Time magazines? In China, they would have seemed a strange couple, with Ah-Jack clearly decades older than she was and both of them dressed in stained formalwear. But in this waiting room, they belonged together if only because they were both Chinese.

  Or if it hadn’t been their shared skin then perhaps it was the comfort with which they’d sat side by side. Strange as she’d felt in his presence all day—really ever since they’d begun sharing a bed—Nan hadn’t known how awkward she’d been acting until tonight’s emergency had returned them to their old, familiar roles. Ushering Ah-Jack back into the car, she realized she didn’t know more than one way to be around him.

  Nan picked up the burn ointment at the CVS near her house, throwing in a pair of slippers. She forced Ah-Jack to stay in the car, practically locking the doors to keep him from following. Standing in the checkout line, the bright, disorienting lights making her eyes dance, she felt the giddy confusion of wanting to laugh and cry at the same time. Finally she had what she’d been too afraid to ask for. She knew what his mouth felt like on hers, on her skin, and the weight of his hands, how they differed from the weight of his head, his arms, his feet. She not only knew but was growing accustomed to the smell of his breath in the morning and the noises his body made in the middle of the night. Suffused with all these fresh experiences, her love should have been transformed into something new. But her feelings hadn’t changed. It was as if they were cut from the same dusty cloth as the old, original love, the one that had flowered thirty years ago. A love so perfectly petrified over time—could it possibly have been real and organic to begin with?

  Perhaps, though, their problem was simple. Her feelings hadn’t changed because they hadn’t yet gone to bed. Not truly. At night, they touched purely for comfort. Their relationship was in limbo, too skittish to be strong. They couldn’t be timid with each other for much longer. She returned to the car, eyes still blinded, now by the absence of those bright lights.

  “Here you are.” She slid behind the steering wheel.

  Ah-Jack took the taped box with nodded thanks. In his woozy state, he could not figure out how to open it. He scratched helplessly at the packaging, denting the thick cardboard. Nan could not help herself. She took the box back out of his hands.

  *

  While Nan tried to peel back the silver foil latched over the mouth of the ointment tube, Ah-Jack relished the bound, tingling sensation in his feet. The doctor had done a wonderful job of dressing them—more of a precaution than a necessity, Dr. Gupta had assured him—and Ah-Jack’s feet had never felt so clean and sterile. Like they were in their original packaging. The quarter dose of Vicodin he’d sweet-talked from the nurse didn’t hurt either. The heavy, floating quality of his body, like a fish ball bobbing in warm broth, was like sleep without the sleepiness.

  “Wonderful,” he murmured, when Nan finally succeeded in un-foiling the tube with her teeth. “You’re wonderful.”

  “I have to be to deal with you,” she mumbled. The foil was stuck between her lips.

  He reached out and brushed the metal off her mouth, pinching it between his thumb and middle finger.

  “I’ve got the reflexes of a cat,” he said.

  “A lazy cat.” The warmth in her smile was delightful.

  “Laziness is not so
bad,” he said. “At our age, we can both be a little lazy.”

  She made a noise halfway between a scoff and a laugh and started the car.

  “After a night like this, I’m thankful.” He wanted to pull her gaze off the road and back onto him. “When I look at you, the world quiets down.”

  “We have a poet in the car.” Nan shot a little glance at him that he found supremely sexy. “Were you so effusive with Michelle?”

  Ah-Jack puffed out his cheeks, distracted by the sensation of his skin stretching.

  “Poetry just sneaks out of me, like passing gas,” he said.

  “How is she?” Nan said.

  “I thought you were my friend, not my wife’s.”

  Nan laid a cool hand on his. “Michelle is still my friend.”

  “You get in bed with all your friends’ husbands?” He spoke not with anger, which the medicine blunted. In this moment, everything was matter-of-fact.

  Nan had been about to speed through a yellow, but she slammed on the brakes instead. They both rocked forward, seatbelts straining.

  “Don’t be nasty.” She looked intently at the stoplight.

  He briefly rose out of his fog. “Michelle was only friends with you because she was suspicious.”

  “Okay, fine,” Nan said. When the light changed, she sped out as if racing the car beside her.

  “I can’t wait to lie down.” Ah-Jack slid as far as his seatbelt would let him. He was already forgetting what they had been talking about. The even heaviness of his body was pure pleasure. He’d been turned into peanut butter and spread over a piece of toast.

  “Perhaps we should go to bed when we get home.” Nan’s voice was strange, but not strange enough to fully penetrate his bubble. “After a shock like today, we need to rest. Together.”

  “Wherever.” He flopped his hand around. A near-thought formed in his head, concrete enough for a wolfish smile to bloom. “As long as I can be horizontal.”

  *

  As soon as she shut the front door behind them, Nan was seized by a swirling panic strong enough to suck her down with it. She hurried up the stairs, faster than Ah-Jack could handle. Without turning around, she started to complain about her job, hoping to disguise her coldness toward him, which had come over her so quickly she felt poisoned. If only she hadn’t suggested that they go to bed together. If only she’d convinced him to sleep on the downstairs futon, just for tonight.

  “You look very sexy in your duck-carver outfit,” he said, trailing her up the stairs. He was alarmingly bright-eyed after his nap in the car. “Especially that little hat. It looks so delicate but sturdy at the same time. Just like you!”

  “You’re not listening.” She was out of breath. “I feel like a servant. I can’t even talk to the customers. Jimmy says it’s unprofessional. No one wants to hear me open my mouth.”

  “He’ll relax his policies.” Ah-Jack’s hand rubbed her back. She slipped out of reach again. “Remember when he wouldn’t let us speak Chinese at the Duck House? The same will happen with this rule.”

  “But he’s right.” Nan tried again. “The customers don’t want to talk to me. They want me to pose for their photos. Or try harder to scrape the duck fat off the skin.”

  “Your old customers will want to talk to you,” he said. “And as for the others, who cares about talking to them? That’s not your job anymore. Your job is better. You get to sit down, take turns. You don’t even have to memorize which table is ordering your duck. It’s as close to retired as you can get!” Ah-Jack had a habit of ending all his last sentences louder than the rest: an emphatic stamp sealing his missives. Nan suddenly detested how easily he could shout.

  “I was a manager!” she shouted back. “Jimmy didn’t even tell us that he was buying a new restaurant, that we were two months away from no job, no money, nothing. But he tosses me a small scrap, and I’m supposed to be thankful? I gave that family thirty years of my life. What’s even keeping me here?”

  Desperate for any kind of delay, she threw the comforter off her bed and went to work smoothing the bedsheet. Ah-Jack walked over to the other side and held on to the corners, pulling them taut to keep Nan from yanking the sheet completely over to her. In his silence, the echo of her frustrated words rebounded back to her. He would never say what he was thinking right then, but she saw in his downturned face the question: What about me?

  And since she could pluck the thoughts straight out of his head as if they were worms wiggling from his ears, wasn’t she responsible for reassuring him? For answering the question he was too afraid to speak?

  He should ask his own damn questions. Nan was done playing her part. She was tired. She was mortified by her job, her age, her son. She couldn’t get Michelle, her kind, round face, out of her head. She wanted to scold herself, her nervous body.

  The bed made to her exacting standards, she looked around for something else to tidy. Before she could attack the mirror with a damp cloth, Ah-Jack came around the bed and softly rubbed her arms. His hands went up and down, brushing the dry points of her elbows and rounding the curve of her shoulders. He was pushing air back into her chest, reminding her to breathe and be still. In her stillness, her heart beat and her breath flowed; the weight of her body pressed down into the floor. The bed was so close. Their calves grazed the cotton duster. She kept her eyes peeled on the journey his right hand was making on her left arm. Age spots speckled the hand, as if someone had spilled seeds over the skin. It was not the same hand she had shaken when they had first met. It was a hand that trembled, sometimes, and dropped what it tried to hold. But his hand was not shaking now.

  She closed the gap between them and laid her head on his chest. Thirty years too late she heard the hitch in his breath. His arms went around her and his fingers danced a steady beat over her lower back, where she was her strongest. Her hands went up to his shoulders, forearms hooked underneath his armpits. She felt for the knots of muscle near his neck.

  Slowly, with a little hesitation, they allowed their hands to drift. Nan was surprised when Ah-Jack began to lower into a crouch. His hands traveled down her legs. She raked her fingers through his hair and traced the bumps of his skull. He touched her thighs through her pockets and explored the terrain of her knees.

  “There you go!” He gripped her ankles and unbalanced her into bed.

  “You never change!” she shouted, but she was laughing too hard to protest.

  He joined her on the bed, which bounced from his weight.

  “To think, you made this bed for no reason.” He began to unbutton her shirt.

  “If I hadn’t made the bed, you wouldn’t be trying to seduce me in it,” she said, returning the favor. “The only time you move off your lazy ass is to make a mess.”

  “The only time you move is to clean up my messes.”

  They continued to tease and snap while they slowly removed their clothes. At some point, Nan reached up and shut off the light.

  “I’ve gone blind!” Ah-Jack moved his hands over her in wild pantomime, and she laughed, barely realizing that he’d gotten on top of her until she felt his knees press the outsides of her legs.

  “You haven’t gone blind.” She pushed her legs out. His knees relocated to bump against her inner thighs. “You’ll go senile before you go blind. You need your sharp eyes to look for little misses to harass.”

  “You were always my favorite little miss to harass.” His mouth was both dry and wet against her skin, and she only realized he was whispering from the sensation of his breath.

  With pleasure growing, she forgot to keep the teasing up, and in the soft-breathed silence, she saw their old bones rubbing up against each other. Her body tightened.

  “Maybe we’re too late.” She started to move out from under him.

  He dropped down on his elbows and pressed his entire body against hers.

  “I like being late.” His voice was airy all of a sudden. With a start, she realized where all the blood in his speech had gone.

>   She finally slid the elastic of her underpants down, then reached up and tucked her fingers under the waistband of his. There, she hesitated. He rested his forehead against hers, their noses bumping lightly. He waited. His quiet patience won her over.

  *

  Ah-Jack was breathing deeply beside her; Nan could not get her eyes to stay closed. Her body prickled with shame over what she had just used it for. She had slept with someone else’s husband. Michelle’s husband. She could get no more than a few shallow sips of air. Why had she thought that sex would make things easier?

  Carefully, she got out of bed and took her phone into the hallway. She thought she might be feverish, but when she pressed her hand against her forehead, the skin was chill and clammy. In the hall, Ah-Jack’s breathing was still audible. The phlegm in his throat shook with every inhale. Guilt drove a heavy cylinder into her chest. Ah-Jack—she couldn’t stop referring to him in that brotherly way—would never forgive her if he woke up and found himself in another empty bed. She dialed Michelle’s number anyway.

  Unexpectedly, a man answered the other line.

  “Hello?” His wariness barely dampened what must have been a booming voice.

  “Hello,” she said. What did Ah-Jack say was this man’s name again? “This is Nan. Michelle’s friend. I was hoping to check in on her.”

  “She’s in the bathroom right now.” He was crass but friendly. “But I’m sure she would love to hear from you.”

  “How about I come over, then.” Nan looked down the hall, at her bedroom door. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “I think she’d like that.”

  “I can be there by ten-thirty,” Nan said. She hadn’t been home this early in years. “If that’s all right.”

  “That’s fine. We’ll see you then.”

  *

  After stopping at a Starbucks to buy the last of their pastries, Nan parked in Michelle’s driveway. She sat in her car, listening to its little clicks after she’d shut off the engine. She pressed the box of pastries hard into her lap. She hated the lingering rawness between her legs. She hadn’t thought this plan through at all. How shameless to visit Michelle right after sleeping with her husband. Who barged in on a sick woman with stale Danishes while her own body recovered from the aftershocks of sex?