by Wendy Lee
Today the front door to the house was open, so Emily went through it and into a living room packed with Chinese people. The atmosphere was akin to that of a party, with people eating and chattering away. She caught snippets of conversation in English and Mandarin, about mundane topics such as which college whose son was going to, or whose daughter was having another baby. It was strangely like being at a family reunion rather than a wake.
She tapped an elderly man on the shoulder and asked him if he knew where Jean was. He pointed up the stairs. Emily stepped into a bedroom that seemed almost entirely filled with women. Jean sat on the bed, her face strained, exposing lines that hadn’t been evident before. But Emily noticed she was as impeccably dressed as when she’d first met her, and she’d made an attempt to put some color on her lips and cheeks. No matter what happened, you had to look good in front of other people. She remembered going through her mother’s closet, looking for something appropriate for her mother to wear to the funeral, and finding a black silk dress that she had never remembered seeing her mother wear before.
Noticing that she was a stranger, the other women made way for Emily to approach Jean. Not knowing how else to react, Emily ended up saying “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” over and over to Jean, who began to parrot it back to her; “I’m so sorry,” as if apologizing for her husband being late to an appointment. There was a delayed reaction to her movements that Emily had seen in her own mother when her father had died, probably from a sedative.
The crowd parted again, and Sam came in to lean against his mother’s shoulder. His lips were clamped shut, so you couldn’t see that his teeth had grown in straight.
“Sam,” Emily said softly, reaching a hand out to him, but he looked away, as if he didn’t know her. She wondered again what he had been told—how did a child grow up knowing that his father had been tortured to death?
Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe anymore; the presence of all these people in this room was suffocating her. With a mumbled apology, she got up and went downstairs into the hallway, where she leaned against the wall. She remembered her father’s funeral, the kind of people who had come, the church families who had said the same nauseating things to her about her father being in heaven (not if he had anything to do with it, she thought, since he had been clear that he didn’t believe in it), and the coworkers who had seemed surprised to get a glimpse into the private life of someone they only had ever seen in a lab coat.
There had also been the neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Bradley. Their son, Scott, Emily remembered as being a bit of a creep. Once, when they were children, he had given her a dead butterfly. In high school, he had been one of those kids that Emily frowned upon, who cut classes to smoke in strip-mall parking lots. She didn’t know what had happened to him, although she figured he must have straightened out by now, and the last she’d heard was that he’d moved out west. The daughter, Amy, had been too young for Emily to know much about, but she recalled that she and Michael had been friends. Amy had been there that day at the funeral too, her reddish-blond hair long and sleek against her elegantly asymmetrical, all-black outfit. The last time she’d seen Amy, as a teenager, she’d had spiky hair dyed electric blue and wore combat boots, and a stud that flashed silvery in her tongue as she spoke.
Emily saw that Amy still sported that piercing as she came forward and hugged her, said something comforting. Then Amy went over to Michael, and Emily watched as she linked arms with her brother, and they went out of the room together. Something akin to jealousy pricked at her skin, at the sight of a woman who was closer to her brother than she was.
Emily looked around for her mother and saw that she appeared to be holding her own among the guests. So she went and collected Julian from where he had been chatting with some church lady about the merits of compost, and pulled him up the stairs and into her bedroom. It looked the same as when she’d left thirteen years before to go to college: the dresser whose top was laminated with stickers, the shelf of trophies she’d won in debate and mock trial, the four-poster bed with its white quilted bedspread. Tacked above the bed, completely unironically, was a poster that said: EVERY JOB IS A SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE PERSON WHO DID IT. AUTOGRAPH YOUR WORK WITH EXCELLENCE!
Julian, who was flipping through one of her yearbooks, started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m not laughing at you, just with your glasses.”
“Let me see that.” Emily grabbed the book away from him.
Of course he’d had it open to her senior year high school picture. She’d been so earnest in her thick, plastic, tortoiseshell-framed glasses and flowered turtleneck, the amount of coolness she exuded in inverse proportion to the number of clubs listed below her name.
She’d been able to turn that gawky seriousness into something more purposeful in college. Although she ended up going to school in the city, less than an hour-long train ride away from the suburban town where she’d grown up, she felt like she had entered a glittering new world, where people stayed up late to talk about obscure forms of poetry, foreign philosophers, and failed social experiments. She became an activist, marching for sweatshop-free sneakers and cruelty-free meat in the dining halls. This intersected nicely with the campus AV club, whose members were looking for demonstrations to film, which was how she had met Julian.
It had been in Washington Square Park, in the middle of winter, when she had been participating in a demonstration advocating equal opportunity in tenure, and he had been filming. Female professors are half as likely to gain tenure as their male counterparts, she told him as the snow fell around their heads. Women with children are a quarter less likely as men with children to achieve tenure in the sciences. She had thought he was cute, despite the scruffy long hair that poked out from beneath his knit cap. He had thought she was a lesbian.
She disproved that one evening, a few weeks later, when she came over to see the final cut of the video he’d put together. She’d watched with horror as the camera focused on her wildly gesticulating hands and then on her face until it filled nearly the entire screen, zooming in on her flared nostrils. Nobody looked good on amateur video, especially a video of a demonstration, but this was too much. She had felt so disgusted that she promptly offered to sleep with Julian, who appeared to accept out of pure surprise.
When she had first brought Julian home from college, she had been acutely embarrassed of her family; the way her father blew his nose so loudly it could be heard down the hall; how her mother shuffled around in her house slippers and plastic apron; her weird little brother, who wore vintage black T-shirts with the names of bands that sounded like things you might find in a hardware store: Anthrax, Black Flag, Nine Inch Nails. Then she found that Julian had been ignored for so long by his own parents that he welcomed the attention, her father’s gruff questions about what he planned to do with his future, her mother’s insistence that he was too thin and should eat more. Things that would drive any normal person crazy, but Julian seemed to appreciate them so much that in the beginning she wondered whether he liked her family better than he liked her.
During those visits, Emily slept up in her room while Julian was expected to stay on the couch. At around midnight, when her parents were in bed, she’d steal down and they’d have sex on the nubby brown sofa, cautious of her parents and brother one floor above, and then she’d go back to her bed. But they’d never actually done it in her bed. The closest that bed had ever come to seeing any action was when Emily and Alvin Wang, her partner in mock trial and equally bespectacled, had necked for two hours on one of the rare occasions her parents were out.
“Come here,” she said to Julian, and when he did, she pulled him down on the bed next to her.
“Ouch,” Julian said as his elbow hit the headboard.
She started wrestling playfully with him, trying to provoke him with little jabs, and somehow she started crying. It was as if she couldn’t stop, as she continued to hit him softly with her clenched fists. He simply absor
bed the blows, holding her wrists, until it appeared she was worn out. Then, in one fluid movement, she shifted so that she was straddling him, pinning him down.
At first he tried to return her kisses, but she was moving so fast, darting back and forth so quickly, that he kept missing her mouth, and they landed on her jaw, her ear, the corner of her eye. His hands moved down her back, beneath her ugly, black knit dress, where he pressed the palm of one hand between her legs. She gave a cry, almost as if she were begging something of him, and her fingers worked to pull down his zipper. Then they both froze in place, her dress worked up around her hips, his fly undone. The bedroom door was ajar, just as they had left it, but there had been a flicker of movement beyond, accompanied by the faint sound of footsteps.
“Did you hear something?” Emily asked.
He shrugged. She tried to get back into their rhythm, but the moment had passed. He sat up, extricating himself from her, stuffing himself back into his pants.
“Please,” she said.
“Em, I don’t think we should be doing this.”
“You’re right.” She rose from the bed, drawing her dress down over her knees, and peered into the mirror over the dresser, where she tucked her hair behind her ears so that two precise curlicues fell over her shoulders. “I’m going downstairs,” she announced, and left him among her old trophies.
That night, when they were lying on the brown foldout sofa in the den, which they had been allowed to sleep on together since they had gotten married, they did not reach for each other, and the next day, Julian returned home while Emily stayed to help her mother. She’d been surprised at the quickness with which her mother had bundled her father’s things down into the basement. At first, she thought her mother might be considering moving into an apartment or a smaller house near where her church friend Beatrice Ma lived, but that wasn’t the case. Then on subsequent visits, she’d been alarmed at how it almost seemed as if her father had not lived there at all.
When her mother had asked her to take whatever she wanted of her father’s, she’d hesitated. Nothing seemed appropriate; not the belts nor ties nor a single pair of cuff links that her mother pushed on her to take home to Julian. For one thing, none of it was anything Julian would wear, and what about Michael? Wouldn’t he want any of this to remember their father by? Apparently, her mother had made that suggestion, and Michael had refused. So she’d selected the photograph of her father from the funeral, which her mother told her had been taken at her wedding, but Emily didn’t remember it. He was very happy at your wedding, her mother had told her, but Emily certainly didn’t think her father looked very happy; tight-lipped, with his bushy eyebrows making him appear even more stern than he really was. Where had she been when this picture was taken? Probably worrying about the flower arrangements or the seating plan. She had not been thinking about him at all.
She put the photo in the living room when she got home, the only picture that showed her father because in all her other family photos—a Christmas from a few years ago, her graduation from law school, a childhood vacation to Florida—he was the one taking the picture. She couldn’t afford not to display it. Since there was nothing from Julian’s side of the family, this was all she had.
“Hey.”
Emily looked up to see Rick’s broad, familiar face.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he said.
“Did you see Jean?” she asked.
“Just briefly. I can’t imagine what she’s going through. What’s with all these people, though?”
She shrugged. “Relatives, I think.” That, she belatedly realized, was the biggest difference between her father’s funeral and today. “I feel like we’re in the way here.”
“We definitely can’t discuss anything. Maybe we should go get that drink we were talking about yesterday?”
Emily glanced at the clock. “Now? It’s, like, three.”
“I know a place.” Rick offered his hand to her, and she took it as he led her through the crowd.
Emily followed Rick in her car until they came to what she thought must be the sorriest bar this side of the Triborough Bridge. Every surface appeared to be covered with a sticky film, and half the lights twinkling on the walls had burned out. A gray-haired, itinerant-looking man was nursing a drink at the counter, while two kids who appeared to be underage were shooting pool.
Emily found a table while Rick got their beers. For a moment she wondered if it was wise of her to be drinking with her colleague in the afternoon. But when Rick came back and sat down beside her, he immediately started talking business. Emily tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but her mind was fuzzing over quickly from alcohol and the events of the day.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” he was saying. “We’re going to have to go back to the detention center, question the other inmates. We’re fighting the whole system now.”
“What about Jean?” Emily asked. “She’ll need time. She has Sam to think about.”
“The sooner we can get her talking, the better. We’ll just have to be careful about what media she speaks to.”
“How long do you think this could take?”
“To win the case? Years. But consider what could happen at the end of it. I don’t mean just getting a settlement for Jean and Sam. I mean changing legislation, changing the way illegals are treated. That could be huge.”
Emily looked into her beer. “I don’t think I can do it.” It came out plainer than she had intended, flattened by the dank atmosphere of the bar, but in truth she had been thinking this ever since she had received Rick’s call that morning. In her shiny, perfectly appointed kitchen, she felt the very walls drop away from her for a moment before she willed them, and herself, upright again. It wasn’t entirely unlike what she had felt the year before, sitting in her office, listening to her mother tell her that her father had died. She couldn’t go through it all again.
“What did you say?” Rick was asking.
“I said, I can’t do it,” Emily repeated, with more certainty. “As of now, I’m off this case.”
“What do you mean? We’ve only just started. I can understand that you’re intimidated by what’s ahead. I am too. But we can do it, if we work together.”
“I can’t put Jean and Sam through this. I just can’t. They’ve already endured enough. If you or someone else wants to remind them every day how their husband and father died, then go ahead. But I, for one, don’t have the stomach for it.”
“Emily,” Rick said. “This is the kind of case you’ve always dreamed of. What’s happened to that?”
She shrugged. “I guess I’ve changed.”
He regarded her warily. “Is this about something else? Is there something going on at home that you want to tell me?”
“No,” she said. “Everything’s fine. I guess I’ve just been working too hard lately. I need a break.” Until that point, she hadn’t even considered taking time off her job. But how easy it would be to take a day or two off, to let those days stretch to a week, maybe to leave her work and Chinatown itself. To walk away from everything that had ever been expected of her.
“Emily.” Rick sounded very concerned now. He placed his hands on her shoulders, turning her to look at him. “I know you don’t mean that. You love your work. That’s what I’ve always loved about you. Besides”—here he stopped for a second, before continuing—“I don’t know what I would do without you.”
She tried to smile. “That’s nice of you to say that, but you’ll be fine. You’ll make partner, Lisa will be so proud of you—”
His exhalation cut her off. “Lisa and I might be spending some time apart.”
“Really?” She was incredulous, but for a second also wondered if Rick was lying, to try and get her to change her mind. She hadn’t recalled him mentioning any kind of marital strife lately, and she liked to think that he felt comfortable by now to confide in her about such things. Then again, the case had taken over both their lives l
ately.
“Things haven’t been good between us since . . . well, since around the time the baby was born. We’ve tried a lot of things since then—couples’ therapy, individual therapy. Nothing’s helped.”
“What about the kids?”
“They’d be fine, I guess. Lisa would have them during the week, and I’d get them every other weekend. That how it works, right? It seems like half the parents we know are divorced, so they’d fit right in. Anyway, it appears that my marriage may be on its way out. And if you leave me too, Em, I don’t know what I would do. . . .”
He turned to her, and it was the most natural thing in the world to put her arms around his neck. She was aware of his breath against her cheek, the way his hands felt flat against her back. Their mouths met, sloppily, tasting of sour beer and bitter desire, for so long that the two teenagers on the other side of the room took notice and hooted.
“Get a room!” one of them shouted.
“Should we?” Rick asked softly, his tone joking, but his eyes were serious. He held her hand, his thumb tracing circles in her palm.
That would be easy, too. They’d get into their respective cars and go to a motel even seedier than this bar. They’d undress each other slowly underneath the fluorescent lights, and she was sure that the sex would be good, but the whole time he’d be thinking about the wife he might not love anymore, and she would be thinking about the husband who might not love her, and in the middle there would be the kids he and his wife had, and the kids that she and her husband didn’t have. It was entirely too messy.
“Emily?” Rick asked.
Emily forced herself to focus back to the present, Rick’s hand that remained on hers although now it was still, as if he was holding his breath for her answer. “I’m sorry,” she said.
She got up and walked out of the bar. She thought she heard Rick call her name again, but she didn’t look back. Once she had gotten in her car, closed and locked the door, she felt safer, although she wasn’t sure from who or what. She had told Rick that she was off the case, and she meant it. Jean would be all right; she had those relatives to help her. In time Sam, too, would be fine. People got over these tragedies every day, of spouses dying, of parents dying, no matter how young or how tragic. She wasn’t dropping the case because of what she was afraid it might do to Jean and Sam. She was afraid of what it might do to herself.