Water Ghosts

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  Don’t sit on that, Barrett said. He laid his own coat down and when she sat on it, he knelt before her and said, I drank only a little bit tonight, Chloe. I didn’t want to come to you stinking.

  He took a hand-rolled cigarette from his pocket and struck a match on the brick. The tobacco was sweet and he blew a ring with the first puff. Chloe stuck her finger through it so the ring broke into squiggly white lines in the night and she couldn’t distinguish her own cold breath from his smoky breath.

  You know that story where the women sing and make the Greeks smash their boats on the rocks? he asked.

  No.

  Well, you’re beautiful like them. In school, the teacher said they had a voice to beat all—prettier than Helen of Troy’s face. They made men smash themselves on rocks. I’d go to ruin for you.

  But it was Chloe who tempted ruin, pressed up against the outhouse wall. His skinny hips wriggled out of his pants, the buckle pressing into Chloe’s thigh.

  THE STEPPING OUT was easier than she imagined. During the morning bustle, no one noticed. She simply walked onto the county road and hitched a ride to San Francisco. She was done with Barrett and mean-eyed gossip and the way her hometown roped her up so tight in her family history that she could hardly breathe.

  From San Francisco, coach to Chicago on the Starlight Special. It was a twenty-nine-hour trip. one step out of the depot into the Chicago spring wind and Chloe knew she hadn’t gone far enough. She bought another ticket—this one all the way to New York City.

  NEWYORK.

  New York awed her; New York disappointed her. The buildings were tall, but not tall enough. She tried to look up at the gray—gray roads, gray buildings, and gray people—while keeping pace with the foot traffic. She had no one to go to, so she wandered. The wind cut through her coat. This was not spring as she knew it—a girl brought up on Central Valley sunshine, whose hair already bore the sun-kissed streakiness of summer. A few blocks over she found a small café with a dulled sign reading Good Food and a poster advertising breakfast.

  A brisk waiter with a flamboyant mustache seated her singly in a booth. He was impatient with her slow perusal of the menu, but how could she concentrate with the flurry of foreign tongues around her? She finally ordered eggs, bacon, rye toast, and orange juice. The waiter was just as brisk about her food.

  She wanted to float in her sleepiness. She sipped her juice and looked around. An old woman was seated at the booth next to hers. She wore old-fashioned pointed-toe lace-ups and a hat with a tattered black veil. The waiter stood patiently as she reiterated her order: Toast, wheat toast, not too dry. And a biscuit with some butter. Did you hear me ask for toast? Wheat toast? And you have biscuits? I’d like just one, with my coffee.

  The exchange bore the rhythm of routine. The woman clasped her hands before her, patiently waiting. A diamond sparkled in the morning sun. She turned her head and caught Chloe’s eye with the look of a woman who has just happened upon a presence in her own living room. Chloe looked away.

  Chloe dawdled over breakfast, reluctant to be thrust back into nameless wandering.

  . . .

  SHE RODE THE subway uptown. The rocking undercarriage lulled her toward sleep. The people were silent, eyes to themselves. A Chinaman entered the car through the rumbling space of the open door. He sold random things: mini manicure sets with tiny scissors and a tiny file; lollipops; tiny dolls that danced on strings; candied crabapples. He yelled these things out with a voice that Chloe strained to unravel. People stared; no one bought. He passed into the next car.

  She disembarked at a random stop. To the west she saw a river. She walked down to stare at the golden brilliance wending its way through the hustle.

  You should see it at sunset. A voice broke through Chloe’s four-day aloneness. It belonged to a dapper man in a hat.

  It’s beautiful now, Chloe said, finding her voice and afraid it would crack from disuse.

  He eyed her carpetbag and said, Far from home? or leaving town?

  I’m from California.

  Far from home, then, he said.

  Yes, far from home. Looking at him more closely, Chloe saw that he was handsome, young. Green eyes, black lashes, black hair. Italian? or something she couldn’t place, some ambiguous mix or race. The world contained in a city, in a face.

  I’m Alfred.

  Chloe Howell.

  Then Alfred made a move, a move that made Chloe fall down inside. He took off his hat and said how pleased he was to meet her. He took off his hat, held its felt top in his palm, against his chest.

  Chloe could only look at him, then squint back at the river.

  Are you visiting family?

  No, it’s just me.

  Friends?

  No.

  New York can be tough on a girl alone. He corrected himself: A woman alone. I was born and raised here, I can maneuver its streets a bit better. But you, California Girl. . . . Do you even have a hotel? He eyed her bag again, the unraveling seams and chipped clasp. No, you don’t. Let me buy you a cup of coffee.

  I’ve had coffee, Chloe said. It jumbles up my stomach. I think, I think, I should go look for a place to stay.

  An egg cream? A soda? Maybe a drink will calm you down.

  It was real concern Chloe saw when she turned to him again. And he smelled so good, like fresh shaving cream lathered on a brush. He was so clean, from the milky shine of his shoes to the strict white lines of his collar.

  THEY RODE THE subway to his flat in the Bronx.

  He lived on the third floor where everything was new and white. Modern, like Chloe had never imagined. Furniture that curved rather than bent, a huge bay window, waxed tile floors that tinkled against Chloe’s heels.

  Alfred asked what she would like to drink. Chloe walked over from the window. Behind the bar, a mirror reflected back the neatly lined bottles of every height and shape, the contents varying in color. Gin, vodka, absinthe, brandy, rum, red wine. Alfred held out a thick crystal tumbler full of ice. Anything you want.

  My god, Chloe said. She brought her hands to her face and cried.

  ALFRED MADE HER. The first thing they had to do, he said, was get rid of her country look. He took her shopping down sidewalks swept clean, into shops with wood and brass interiors where the shopgirls called her ma’am and measured her with straight pins in their mouths. Skirts, blouses, dresses, even tailored pants. Sleek gowns for the evening, and over these, a fur-trimmed coat.

  He took her to music clubs and dinner clubs with red-draped tables. Sometimes it was the two of them, sometimes his friends came along with their own women—women who laughed loud with big teeth and drank hard.

  New York laughed in its wealth. It was 1926.

  THEY BECAME REGULARS at the Scat Cat! Club in Harlem, mostly for a singer named Ruby Moore. Chloe thought of Ruby as a swan because of her long neck. A birthmark, ruby-colored and shaped like a chrysanthemum, lay dead center on her throat. When Ruby tipped her head back in song, the chrysanthemum pulsed and fluttered its dozens of petals in the tide.

  Chloe’s favorite song—the one that would not leave her mind (even years later, engaged in chores at Madam See’s)—was the “Split Water Blues”:

  God dried up the Jordan

  He split the Red Sea

  but He can’t

  (nuh-uh, He can’t)

  bring back my man to me.

  Chloe, pleased that she understood the references, spent the length of the song enraptured and wondering who was the man that drove such a song. She looked over at Alfred, feeling bluesy and sad for a lost moment in the melody.

  Chloe was in love with Ruby Moore. Not in-love-in-love, she’d laugh if asked. In love the way a woman loves a woman. In love with precisely the womanliness of Ruby—the breasts that grew as Chloe’s didn’t, the hips that stretched the dress fabric until it shone. When she was silent during the song, Alfred said to his friends, Look at my little moll! She’s head over heels for that bitch. If Chloe was silent, they found her
intelligent and beautiful, so she replied with only a glance.

  Ruby sent her secret messages. only a woman knows what a woman knows, she sang, and Alfred nudged Chloe and laughed.

  THE HUMID HEAT of a summer. In a roof garden with drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Listening quietly to conversations between women who sounded as if they had been born into wealth.

  No, Alfred told her in bed, they’re country like you. They couldn’t tell a salad fork from a soup spoon.

  So Chloe fell deeper into imagining Ruby’s life. She followed her home from the club, to what she imagined was a fantastic home in Manhattan. Baroque, with gilded moldings. Ruby, with her harem of lovers.

  Chloe fell out of love with Alfred—the way he sat around in his undershirt in the heat, talking angrily on the telephone; the way he smoked in front of the window so that it curled back into the room; the gun that traveled with him through the apartment, left on the dining table, on the vanity, on the nightstand.

  SHE AWOKE TO hot metal pressed to her cheek. It was hot like it had been nestled against his side for the night.

  You know I love you, Chloe, he said. The gun hard on her bone.

  He scooted on top of her and squeezed her face, holding the gun with his right hand.

  Don’t you love the danger of me? Me, Chloe. She closed her eyes and prayed as he fucked her with the gun against her cheek.

  Afterward, she lay still, waiting for morning, but fell asleep. When she awoke, she found a note on the table.

  Sorry about last night. Off to San Fran. Alfred.

  She stayed on, waiting for the cash he’d left to run out. She went to the Scat Cat! and wondered if her man would come back to her. She stayed through the snow, until people came to collect the furniture.

  You can’t! she said. She scurried back and forth following the men, and stood beside them as they lifted and left. That’s our furniture! Alfred will be so upset! Please!

  They called her Lady like they didn’t care. They eyed her fat belly protruding through her robe. They left her with dishes, silverware, and thick crystal tumblers empty of ice. She slept on the dusty tile, a towel rolled under the small of her back.

  At the end of March, she locked up the place, left the key in the mailbox, and took the train to San Francisco.

  West, again.

  ALFRED STOOD AT the window, lit by luminous fog. He had his back to the room. Sitting on the couch—a woman Alfred had introduced as Dixie. She wore nothing more than a slip, and she smoked a pipe full of sweet Indian tobacco.

  No one spoke. Everyone waited for Alfred.

  The apartment was even lovelier than the one in New York, with a view of cypress trees and the gray, foamy Pacific.

  He hadn’t even asked Dixie to leave the room. He knew what Chloe wanted and she waited for his answer. Would he go back with her? Would he let her stay?

  The lights of the homes around them popped up gold, one by one, in the fog. The three sat in the darkening room. Silently, a maid slid in and pressed a switch. The lights came up sparkling in an electric chandelier.

  They hadn’t even offered Chloe a drink.

  Alfred was stilted and silent. His discomfort surprised Chloe, because when they had, through some perversity of coincidence, passed on Market Street, he had given her his address.

  Finally he turned from the window: Dixie, what’s that place? That place for . . . He looked at Chloe’s stomach without meeting her eyes.

  Dixie leaned her pockmarked face forward to tap the tobacco into an ashtray. Her breasts swung beneath her slip: The Florence Crittenton Home?

  Alfred walked to the table and wrote the name on a card. You can read, can’t you? he asked Chloe.

  She bit her lip against the comment. Florence Crittenton, she repeated.

  Alfred flipped money out of his billfold and handed Chloe one hundred dollars. This ought to take care of everything. But this is it. You’re a big girl now, Chloe. Back and forth across this country two times, all by yourself. Don’t look for me again, all right?

  You loved me? Chloe wished to make it a statement, but couldn’t prevent the lilt at the end.

  He finally met her eyes. His green eyes, those emerald eyes that glowed in twilight and glimmered under electric lights in a San Francisco apartment. There was the waiting of Chloe and Dixie for his answer.

  You loved me? he asked.

  Chloe paused. Had she? Who had she loved, ever? She busied herself putting the money into her handbag.

  I’m ready to go, she said without looking up at him. She allowed him to show her to the door. As she crossed the threshold into the hall, a response came to her. She tilted her head toward him and said (if ever there was a moment when she needed strength, when she needed bravery)—

  I loved the danger of you.

  but He can’t

  There was a single heartbeat before he said, Good-bye, Chloe.

  (nuh-uh, He can’t)

  ’Bye, Alfred.

  He shut the door while she still waited for the elevator.

  bring back my man to me.

  22

  RICHARD DOES NOT know why he has so much fear when she kneels down in front of him. She brings her hand like a blade between his knees and opens his legs. She slides her hands from his knees to his thighs. He wants to stop her; this is what he means when he puts his hand on her head. Neither of them speaks, and she leans forward to unbutton his pants. When he squeezes her hair in his hand, tangles it in his fist, he means, Stop. He can’t say it.

  She licks him and sucks on him and he feels like he’s getting weaker. The protests still roil inside him, but he can only open his mouth and breathe. He leans back onto the bed.

  This is what they warn in the stories—women can steal your strength, your essence. Richard has always laughed, interpreting the idea of essence as a literal thing, but with his mouth going weak, his lungs going empty, essence feels more nebulous. He is unsure what it is, but is sure he is losing it.

  She rises from the floor. She hitches up her dress and crawls onto him. His hands on her back, slipping under the shirt and to the skin—this means stop. His fingers pressing so hard he feels bone, this means stop. His heart-pound is fear, not pleasure, he tells himself.

  Please look at me, she says. He opens his eyes and looks at her. The pallor of her face seems to be fading, even as they move. Her face takes on a color, a luminosity that it had lacked when she first came two weeks ago. She watches him carefully. Her eyes move from his eyes to his forehead, to his nose, to his mouth. She kisses him. His heart slows. The pump, as steady and measured as the ticking of a clock, fills his ears. So slow, he feels the blood fill one chamber and push out of another. He feels the muscles contract in their choreographed dance and the blood leave his chest.

  His hands slide off her back and fall to the bed. She puts her hands on both sides of his face and holds him, kisses him. Her mouth is salty. He thinks of the shore, rather than the water. Blood fills one chamber. It pumps out of the other. He’s too weak now to kiss. His mouth goes still and she moves her lips insistently over his. She covers his mouth with hers and he hiccups for breath. He closes his eyes and waits for the waves.

  When it is over, when he opens his eyes again, she is above him, smiling. She seems to glow—her cheeks are flushed, her eyes shine like wet ink.

  She drops her face into his neck and murmurs, You’re so pale.

  Richard feels his heartbeat gain strength and start to quicken. He touches his forehead; it feels gray and cool. I feel like you’ve drained my life away.

  She giggles, and her laugh is a hot vibration against his cold neck.

  ON THE UPPER level of the Yuen Chong, they flip through dresses. Scarlet, flame-orange, purple like blood flowing under skin. Ming Wai pulls a low-waisted, ice-blue silk dress off the rack.

  Siu Dai’s wife had a dress this color, she says.

  Pretty, Richard says. He nods at a woman, the Chinatown-born wife of one of the restaurant owners. She scurries past, dist
racts herself with men’s slacks. The store owner’s daughter wipes down a glass case. The gloves and handkerchiefs inside it splay in multicolored rainbows.

  I wish you could see their children, Ming Wai continues as she looks down at the silk rippling off the hanger. Ga Jeun is a funny little piglet, always playing pranks, but a real mama’s boy.

  The fan ticks lazily, pink string fluttering off the blades to scare the flies.

  And Mui Mui is a mean little witch. The boys go crazy over her. Morning glares through the window, hazing the air. Richard doesn’t want to discuss children with her. Try it on, he says.

  Ming Wai glances at him with surprise, looks at the uninterested salesgirl, then slips behind a slatted folding screen. You should see your father’s house. Siu Dai bought an electric refrigerator. I really don’t know why you left. It’s a more comfortable life there. An unseen hand flings over the old dress from Corlissa Lee. She emerges like a shimmer of water. She turns in the three-way mirror.

  Lovely, says the girl from the counter.

  Ming Wai holds up her hair, looks at the line from armpit to hip, the flatness over her belly. She’s as beautiful as an advertisement, selling face lotion or bug spray. Richard can see her painted across bricks on the side of a city building, the blue dress like glass windows reflecting the sky.

  She’s got the perfect flapper figure, the girl says.

  Richard nods.

  Wear it home, he urges. He’s feeling generous. Billfold out, fingers across the bills. Clang of the register, pop of the drawer. The shush shush of rustling silk, his hand on her back.

  23

  SURPRISING TO POPPY’S ears, the morning world is silent. She expects to hear liveliness below—women laughing, men talking, even George lumbering about, but there is not even the settling of walls.

  The stink of her own vomit on her blankets and nightdress has awoken her. Clear wet stains smeared across cloth that smells of gin. The first drink always makes her cringe, but she feels better and better until she does not know how much, how long. The bottle stands half full on the nightstand, delicately placed. Despite the way her muscles feel—soaked with liquor—she knows that if the bottle is upright, the night has not been too bad.