by Yiyun Li
Katherine: Gilbert and I did what we could to make our family holidays special. Even if they were only at Russian River or Tomales Bay. They were good dreams. I hope they were for you, too.
The first time we drove to Oregon, Lucy conducted her siblings to count down as we were nearing the state border. Like going into a new year. She was the prettiest eleven-year-old girl on that day. So sunny her face was, not a wisp of moodiness. No one would believe that girl would do something to harm herself. I wish we could have kept her that way forever.
Not that I didn’t welcome your birth, Katherine. But a mother’s heart is like leavened dough. There can only be one perfect moment. That day, watching Lucy, so pretty, so lively, I thought: This is happiness. There’s no more I would ask.
My heart is now stale bread. Good to be left on the windowsill for any greedy bird. A little longer and it’ll harden into a rock, and you can knock a burglar out with it.
That trip was the first time we’d visited another state. Gilbert grinned behind the steering wheel like an old bear. I wouldn’t trade this for any kingdom, he said aloud.
But no king would be interested in him and his brood of children chanting behind him. His small happiness.
I don’t think Roland understood that kind of happiness. He had never had it. He would say he never wanted it. But that’s like saying the food you’ve never tasted is not worth eating.
2 AUGUST 1929.
No need to go into details about last week. To bite the hand that pets you is a worse sin than to bite the hand that feeds you. I commend myself for enduring humiliation with composure.
[A diarist’s altruism is rarely understood by the world. All the moments in my life that are embarrassing, disheartening, and humiliating, can be found in my diary. If I am not always honest in life, I am among these pages, the honesty a pact between me and myself. Who can deny that someone reading my words—a young man arriving at a similar juncture in his life, or an older man taking a last, longing look at his youth—will not feel a momentary closeness to a kindred soul?
My triumph in life is that at an early age I developed the habit of saying to myself, “Look at that person who looks exactly like you, who is living your life, but much more stupidly. Aren’t you happy you are not him?” To make a distinction between one’s ego and one’s exterior, to be always prepared to laugh at the latter, to never waver in one’s tender care toward the former—these skills have stood me in good stead.—RB 26 March 1989]
* * *
LET’S FORGIVE ROLAND HIS BLUFFING. Let’s enjoy it. Not every man’s bluffing deserves admiration. Many men do it full-heartedly. Like women showing off their jewelry. No matter how expensive those stones and pearls are, you take one look and want to say to them: What would you do without them? The same with men who bluff, like those bodybuilders distorting their muscles onstage.
But not Roland. He wore his lies like tailored suits. And who could begrudge a man looking so dapper in his lies?
8 AUGUST 1929.
New York City. Last night it was near ten o’clock when I arrived in Greenwich Village. Nobody seemed to be sleeping, though some very old men and some rather young children were leaning against lampposts or crumpling in doorways. Streetcars and elevated trains and taxis and screaming people of all ages: It made me laugh to think that we were worried, back home, that a new branch of the railway, planned to run north of town, would disturb our peace.
Aunt E arranged my trip with the same efficiency that she had handled her own exodus. I am glad I proved myself able to rise to the occasion. She knew the obstacles I had to face back home. She did not ask, and there was no need to broadcast my courage. (Besides, I made my leave-taking sound provisional to Hetty and Aunt Geraldine. No need to go into that, either.)
Cousin Cliona and the woman she’s a companion to—Madame Zembocki—are planning to spend the next few weeks at the seaside. My job is to look after their parrot, Kotku.
I did not meet the two women until this morning. Being aware that they may be among the first real characters I can later use, I’ve studied them with my novelist’s eyes.
Madame Z does not look foreign at all. She looks like someone out of a George Gissing novel. She wears a sage green dress of indescribable material and shape. She is not young. Neither is Cousin C, who is dressed out of fashion, too, but looks a less odd version of her patroness. Cousin C is warm toward me but has few words. Madame Z looks as though she is constantly listening to some music unheard by the rest of us.
In proximity to these two odd women, Aunt E has lost some of her sheen in my eyes. Perhaps it is New York City’s doing. How many provincial affairs can survive the transplant to a metropolis?
[To contrast this arrival, dear reader, I would encourage you to look at the entry of 11 May 1969. On that day, I accompanied two Soviet artists from the Bolshoi Theatre to visit Madame Zembocki on her 100th birthday. Sidelle, the last living relative of Madame Zembocki, was too ill to travel, and had arranged that I take her place for this mission. Being sought out after years away from public attention, being followed by a camera crew—shall I say that was a brighter moment than a provincial youth’s first expedition to New York?—RB 27 March 1989]
* * *
I APPROVE OF THESE two women. For one thing, they are quiet.
At lunch today, two fools from the eighth floor inserted themselves at our table and went on about their various theories—between them they offered six or maybe seven, I stopped counting—of the psychology of dieting. Enough knowledge to kill any wife. In any case, yada yada they went, so I cut a roll, smeared half of it with butter, and left the other half without. Here, I said to them, please give the roll a thorough psychoanalysis.
Later.
After breakfast I took a walk. People in the street act with certainty, the fruit peddlers claiming the space around their crates, the pedestrians purposeful in their hurried steps. Yet their faces, sweaty and weary, make one feel that whatever they do or whoever they are is only temporary. What is going to become of them? What is going to become of me?
New York City is like a prostitute past her prime. There is no way to peel off this ageing layer, greasy and grimy, to see the city in its original and pristine form. Can any metropolis ever have been virginal? Paris, which I have not yet visited, retains its allure for me, but it’s the allure of an ageless courtesan.
This reminds me of the camping trip to Newfoundland last summer. One of Uncle William’s friends, an amateur topographer whose day job is to drill holes in people’s teeth, asked me to accompany him on a search for a small lake. After a day of trekking we found the lake, quite a distance away from where he had surmised it would be from the locals’ descriptions. He was going to name it Lake Harriet, he said. Why Lake Harriet, I asked, thinking it must be his wife’s name or an old lover’s. He was working alphabetically, he explained, and told me he had named his last discovery Lake Georgiana.
One supposes, by the greatest luck, one might discover a crack in this city that is unseen by others. Crevice Cressida. Pothole Portia.
A young man arriving in New York City is always arriving too late. It is like seeing a beloved who has long been married off to a rich man, given birth to his offspring, and now gained the status of a dowager queen. And you can’t even sidle up to the family members at a party and introduce yourself as one of their country cousins. Which doorman would allow you to cross the threshold?
Later.
It is hard to imagine how Cousin C and Madame Z pass their time in this house. It is not a dull house. It is full of all sorts of odd and useless objects, a bronze Buddha head mulling behind an umbrella stand, a plaque with indecipherable engravings lying belly up on the windowsill. Over the piano there is a framed drawing of a man, bald and morose. Stacks of music sheets are piled on the piano bench. A Japanese screen—heavy gold background with heavier-looking moun
tains depicted in an unsettling manner—separates the drawing room into two parts, making the room feel still darker and more crowded. The dining room, the hallway, the landing, the small guest room I am installed in—everywhere I look I see things better fit for a museum or a tomb. There is no dust, but time leaves indelible prints.
Imagine growing old in this house with a wife like Hetty.
Or any wife.
* * *
DID YOU REALLY IMAGINE this, Roland?
Hetty was the silk lining of finest quality for that coffin that was your marriage house. The objects in it were dusted daily. There was no other use for them. The vases were never empty of fresh flowers. What else could be filled in that house? I don’t have to imagine these things to know. Imagination is an activity best saved for what you cannot see. I see your marriage well.
What I can’t see, is how you went from being the Roland of San Francisco to the Roland of your marriage. I wonder if you understood it yourself.
[Here’s the story of Madame Zembocki, the skeleton of it, some of which I learned from Aunt E, the rest pieced together. Elizabeth Nugent was born in Ireland to an English mother and an Anglo-Irish father. Like all interesting people she was orphaned—not at a tender age, but young enough to put her in the charge of an ill-fitted guardian, against whom she rebelled with the same passion required for any revolution in human history. When she gained her independence she travelled to the Continent, and spent a few years studying music in Prague. There she met Milos Zembocki, a man thirty years her senior—a Polish revolutionary who would soon be exiled to Siberia but not before he convinced his protégée of her noble obligation to his revolutionary cause and his personal happiness. Elizabeth Nugent, now Lyse Zembocki, did not follow her husband into exile. Rather, she moved to Moscow, first working as an English governess, and eventually, starting to publish stories and novels in Russian. Her literary career, however, was cut short when the news of Milos Zembocki’s death reached her. Madame Zembocki returned to England, and then to Ireland, and from there she emigrated to America in 1912. She settled in New York and lived in the same building until her death at the age of 102.
It was said that her writing had been brought to the attention of Lenin by Maxim Gorky. After 1917, with both men’s blessing, her books, hailed for their realistic portraits of revolutionaries in continental Europe and heralding a communist future for mankind, sold well and were taught in Soviet schools.—RB 4 April 1989]
10 AUGUST 1929.
Madame Z and Cousin C left for the seaside today. Aunt E has booked her trip to Chicago. She said now that she had seen Cliona and knew all was well, there was no reason for her to linger.
Why wouldn’t things be well with her? I asked.
You have to understand there are people who’re destined to be only one thing in life. Once they lose that prospect they live a rudderless life.
She doesn’t seem rudderless, I said. (Madame Z composes song cycles, but not for publication or performance—this I’d learned from a conversation with Cousin C. Together they run a music society to educate working women and young girls without any means.)
If only you’d known her before, Aunt E said.
I wonder if I am one of those people who can be only one thing. What if this writing career doesn’t bring me fame and profit? But what’s the probability of that? Unlikely things happen—a train can derail, a future at Oxford can vanish, but those things are not within one’s control. Putting words on the page is what I can do. I must not act out of defeatism.
Cousin C was affectionate toward me. She had met my parents once at some relative’s wedding. They were not the youngest people there, she said, but they were the youngest-looking ones. Like a couple stepping out of a Bohemian folk song, she said.
To think of them as two dancing figures popping out of a music box…Had they been that fairy-tale couple they would have danced on forever, and the world would never have seen the birth of Roland Bouley.
Can one imagine one’s own parents as virgins? This question, once asked, cannot be unasked. Surely my father had other women before his marriage. The thought of this makes me feel agitated, especially since I have not yet seen a way to change my fate of being a virgin.
* * *
THERE ARE ENDLESS WAYS to group people. If you watch the news on television or read the newspapers, you’ll see that’s what people do all the time, and when they run out of labels they invent new ones. The more the merrier, and the smarter they think themselves. But sooner or later there will be more than enough labels to divide everyone from everyone. Then what? We all carry our own banners, no two alike. Every person has a reason to denounce the rest of the world. Maybe then we will fulfill Gilbert’s belief that the world’s population could be united. If we can’t be united under love for one another, then hatred it would have to be, no?
Here’s something I guarantee is more entertaining. I divide people into two groups. One group I can see their lovemaking and I will do so when I feel like it. The other group I cannot see them romantically engaged.
Like Roland, I’ve never been able to imagine my parents in their marriage bed. Children have a way of denying their parents such activities in their imagination. Those children who are charitable, I mean.
But here’s a secret joy of mine. When I was old enough—twelve, thirteen—I started to make up love affairs for my mother. You know how young girls fantasize about having young men courting them? I used to search for a beau for her everywhere I turned. A ranch hand, a postman, a salesman, a clerk, a schoolteacher. All the way to the point where she would scheme an elopement with the man. I didn’t go on thinking about them checking into an inn somewhere or settling in another town.
Maybe I was making stories for my mother the way she made stories for Miss Myrtle. Perhaps I was looking for a way to get her out of her marriage (and out of my life, too). But my stories only took place in my head. When you put words on the page, there’ll always be someone like me who reads them. Sometimes against your wishes.
These notes to you are different. I know who they are for, and who will be reading them.
I have no trouble seeing my siblings in their marriages. Even in their bedrooms. A limb here and a piece of undergarment there. But unless someone puts a pistol to my head I won’t go there! You shouldn’t waste your vision on everyone you know, unless of course you have a perverted mind. Mine is not.
I don’t have much interest in imagining Roland with Hetty in their bedroom. It must have been long and slow. Like the tasting menu Molly insisted I have for my eightieth birthday—known for “its exquisite presentation and poetic nuance”! It took me great self-discipline not to ask the waiter if someone old had ever died on him. “Mr. Smith suffered a heart attack while eating a poached quail egg.” “Mrs. Smith choked on a piece of smoked artichoke and was not revived.” Good stories for obits.
A tasting menu is not a meal to enjoy, but an exercise to keep your mind sharp. To stay awake I kept complimenting the waiter on his outfit. He wore a white jacket and a black bow tie. I wore a black dress with a white collar. I said had I been twenty years younger I’d elope with him. He asked me if I would allow him to flirt with other women, and I said only if he wouldn’t mind my flirting with other men. When he returned with yet another course I found a classified ad I had cut and kept in my purse. Read it, I said to him, and he said he didn’t have his reading glasses, so I read it aloud. “Choose me, foxy, sexy senior lady, well-educated, healthy, vivacious. Very clean and great dresser who is looking for a GENTLEMAN, age under 100, free of emotional baggage, well-off financially. Must be there for me. If you flirt with other women do not bother responding. My mindset is to be courted.” The waiter said he was not qualified, and I said I was not the woman. We both agreed that we should wish her the best of luck. All the time you could hear Molly calculating the extra tips for what she later described to me as
, “the constant and persistent harassment that gentleman had to endure.”
Well? I thought. Perhaps she’ll think twice from now on about ordering the tasting menu.
But I digress. No, no interest whatsoever in Roland and Hetty once they dim the bedroom light. But I do like to see them at their breakfast. Hetty stirring her coffee—I imagine she would count to the same number every morning, twenty, thirty, before raising the cup to her lips—and Roland, he would thank her for everything she placed in front of him, the whole time counting the words he had said. Once he had reached a decent number, he would open the newspaper.
When I think of his mistresses, I like to picture them in his bed, even though Roland never describes anyone in more than a sentence or two. Some must be long gone now. But the younger ones may still be alive. Dead or alive, they should all be grateful to me because I only see them in their best years and through a lover’s eyes.
Later.
This evening, Aunt E said if there was anything I wanted to know I should ask her. Who knows when we will see each other next? she said. Hetty said something similar when she saw me off. Why do women like to sound so dramatic and morbid? Even Aunt E is not exempt from such sentimentality.
Oh, I’m following you west, I said.
No, don’t, Aunt E said.
What do I do? I asked. Before leaving, through arguing and begging, I reached an agreement with Uncle Victor and Uncle William about managing part of my money until I turn twenty-one.
Stay in New York. Find some prospect here for yourself.
Aunt E gave me a list of people that I might contact. She also suggested that it wasn’t a bad idea to get in touch with the Bouleys. I promised to do all she asked me to, but a young man’s promise can stay an empty promise.