With a slow, uncertain smile, Inger said, “How are you?”
Beard picked up her suitcase. “You always travel first class?”
“Not always.”
“It depends on the gentleman who answers the door.”
“I’m very pretty,” she said, her tone sweet and tentative and faintly self-mocking.
“Also lucky.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m sure of it.”
He put her suitcase onto the seat strewn with magazines. Then he took her hand, drew her toward him, and slid the door shut behind her. She said, “Please. Do give me a moment,” but she didn’t resist when he pressed her to the floor, his knee between her thighs. Her gray eyes were noncommittal and vast as the world. Beard raised up on his knees to undo his trousers and then he removed Inger’s sandals. He kissed her feet and proceeded to lick her legs and slide her skirt to her hips. Then he hooked the crotch of her underpants with an index finger and drew them to the side and he licked her until she seized his hair with her fists and pulled him up, needing him inside as much as he needed her. He whispered, “I love you,” his mouth against her neck, and he shut his eyes in a trance of pleasure and thrust into her, in her clothes, as the train pressed steadily into a mute and darkening countryside.
Tell Me Everything
CLAUDE RUE had a wide face with yellowish green eyes and a long aristocratic nose. The mouth was a line, pointed in the center, lifted slightly at the ends, curving in a faint smile, almost cruelly sensual. He dragged his right foot like a stone, and used a cane, digging it into the floor as he walked. His dark blue suit, cut in the French style, armholes up near the neck, made him look small in the shoulder, and made his head look too big. I liked nothing about the man that I could see.
“What a face,” I whispered to Margaret. “Who would take anything he says seriously?”
She said, “Who wouldn’t? Gorgeous. Just gorgeous. And the way he dresses. Such style.”
After that, I didn’t say much. I hadn’t really wanted to go to the lecture in the first place.
Every seat in the auditorium was taken long before Rue appeared onstage. People must have come in from San Francisco, Oakland, Marin, and beyond. There were even sad creatures from the Berkeley streets, some loonies among them, in filthy clothes, open sores on their faces like badges. I supposed few in the audience knew that Claude Rue was a professor of Chinese history who taught at the Sorbonne, but everyone knew he’d written The Mists of Shanghai, a thousand-page, best-selling novel.
Onstage, Rue looked lonely and baffled. Did all these people actually care to hear his lecture on the loss of classical Chinese? He glanced about, as if there had been a mistake and he was searching for his replacement, the star of the show, the real Claude Rue. I approved of his modesty, and I might have enjoyed listening to him. But then, as if seized by an irrational impulse, Rue lifted the pages of his lecture for all to witness, and ripped them in half. “I will speak from my heart,” he said.
The crowd gasped. I groaned. Margaret leaned toward him, straining, as if to pick up his odor. She squeezed my hand and checked my eyes to see whether I understood her feelings. She needed a reference point, a consciousness aside from her own to slow the rush of her being toward Rue.
“You’re terrible,” I said.
“Don’t spoil my fantasy. Be quiet, O.K.?”
She then flattened her thigh against mine, holding me there while she joined him in her feelings, onstage, fifty feet away. Rue began his speech without pages or notes. The crowd grew still. Many who couldn’t find seats stood in the aisles, some with bowed heads, staring at the floor as if they’d been beaten on the shoulders into penitential silence. For me it was also penitential. I work nights. I didn’t like wasting a free evening in a crowded lecture hall when I could have been alone with Margaret.
I showed up at her loft an hour before the lecture. She said to her face in the bathroom mirror, “I can hardly wait to see the man. How do I look?”
“Chinese.” I put the lid down on the toilet seat, sat on it.
“Answer me. Do I look all right, Herman?”
“You know what the ancient Greeks said about perfume?”
“I’m about to find out.”
“To smell sweet is to stink.”
“I use very little perfume. There’s a reception afterward, a party. It’s in honor of the novel. A thousand pages and I could have kept reading it for another week. I didn’t want it to end. I’ll tell you the story later.”
“Maybe I’ll read it, too,” I said, trying not to sound the way I felt. “But why must you see what the man looks like? I couldn’t care less.”
“You won’t go with me?” She turned from the mirror, as if, at last, I’d provoked her into full attention.
“I’m not saying I won’t.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing. I asked a question, that’s all. It isn’t important. Forget it.”
“Don’t slither. You have another plan for the evening? You’d rather go somewhere else?”
“I have no other plan. I’m asking why should anyone care what an author looks like.”
“I’m interested. I have been for months.”
“Why?”
“Why not? He made me feel something. His book was an experience. Everybody wants to see him. Besides, my sister met him in Beijing. She knows him. Didn’t I read you her letter?”
“I still don’t see why …”
“Herman, what do you want me to say? I’m interested, I’m curious. I’m going to his lecture. If you don’t want to go, don’t go.”
That is, leave the bathroom. Shut the door. Get out of sight.
Margaret can be too abrupt, too decisive. It’s her business style carried into personal life. She buys buildings, has them fixed up, then rents or sells, and buys again. She has supported herself this way since her divorce from Sloan Pierson, professor of linguistics. He told her about Claude Rue’s lecture, invited her to the reception, and put my name on the guest list. Their divorce, compared to some, wasn’t bad. No lingering bitterness. They have remained connected — not quite friends — through small courtesies, like the invitation; also, of course, through their daughter, Gracie, ten years old. She lives with Sloan except when Margaret wants her, which is often. Margaret’s business doesn’t allow a strict schedule. She appears at Sloan’s door without notice. “I need her,” she says. Gracie scampers to her room, collects schoolbooks for the next day, and packs a duffel bag with clothes and woolly animals.
Sloan sighs, shakes his head. “Really, Margaret. Gracie has needs, too. She needs a predictable daily life.” Margaret says, “I’ll phone you later. We’ll discuss our needs.”
She comes out of the house with Gracie. Sloan shouts, “Wait. Gracie’s pills.”
There’s always one more word, one more thing to collect. “Goodbye. Wait.” I wait. We all wait. Margaret and Gracie go back into the house, and I stand outside. I’m uncomfortable inside the house, around Sloan. He’s friendly, but I know too much about him. I can’t help thinking things, making judgments, and then I feel guilty. He’s a fussy type, does everything right. If he’d only fight Margaret, not be so good, so correct. Sloan could make trouble about Margaret’s unscheduled appearances, even go to court, but he thinks if Margaret doesn’t have her way, Gracie will have no mother. Above all things, Sloan fears chaos. Gracie senses her daddy’s fear, shares it. Margaret would die for Gracie, but it’s a difficult love, measured by intensities. Would Margaret remember, in such love, about the pills?
Sloan finds the pills, brings them to the foyer, hands them to Margaret. There. He did another correct thing. She and Gracie leave the house. We start down the path to the sidewalk. Gracie hands me her books and duffel bag, gives me a kiss, and says, “Hi, Herman German. I have an ear infection. I have to take pills four times a day.” She’s instructing Margaret, indirectly.
Margaret glares at me to show that she’s angry.
Her ten-year-old giving her instructions. I pretend not to notice. Gracie is a little version of Margaret, not much like Sloan. Chinese chemistry is dominant. Sloan thinks Gracie is lucky. “That’s what I call a face,” he says. He thinks he looks like his name — much too white.
I say, “Hi, Gracie Spacey.” We get into my Volvo. I drive us away.
Gracie sits back. Margaret, sitting beside me, stares straight ahead, silent, still pissed, but after a while she turns, looks at Gracie. Gracie reads her mind, gives her a hug. Margaret feels better, everyone feels better.
While Margaret’s houses are being fixed up, she lives in one, part of which becomes her studio, where she does her painting. Years ago, at the university, studying with the wonderful painters Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff, Margaret never discovered a serious commitment in herself. Later, when she married and had Gracie, and her time was limited, seriousness arrived. Then came the divorce, the real estate business, and she had even less time. She paints whenever she can, and she reads fifty or sixty novels a year; also what she calls “philosophy,” which is religious literature. Her imagery in paintings comes from mythic, visionary works. From the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian cosmological chant, she took visions of land and sea, where creatures of the different realms are mysteriously related. Margaret doesn’t own a television set or go to movies. She denies herself common entertainment for the same reason that Rilke refused to be analyzed by Freud. “I don’t want my soul diluted,” she says.
Sometimes, I sit with her in her loft in Emeryville — in a four-story brick building, her latest purchase — while she paints. “Are you bored?” she asks.
I’m never bored, I like being with her. I like the painting odors, the drag and scratch of brush against canvas. She applies color, I feel it in my eyes. Tingling starts along my forearms, hairs lift and stiffen. We don’t talk. Sometimes not a word for hours, yet the time lacks nothing.
I say, “Let’s get married.”
She says, “We are married.”
Another hour goes by.
She asks, “Is that a painting?”
I make a sound to suggest that it is.
“Is it good?”
She knows.
When one of her paintings, hanging in a corner of a New York gallery owned by a friend, sold — without a formal show, and without reviews — I became upset. She’ll soon be famous, I thought.
“I’ll lose you,” I said.
She gave me nine paintings, all she had in the loft. “Take this one, this one, this one …”
“Why?”
“Take them, take them.”
She wanted to prove, maybe, that our friendship was inviolable; she had no ambition to succeed, only to be good. I took the paintings grudgingly, as if I were doing her a favor. In fact, that’s how I felt. I was doing her a favor. But I wanted the paintings. They were compensation for her future disappearance from my life. We’re best friends, very close. I have no vocation. She owed me the paintings.
I quit graduate school twenty years ago, and began waiting tables at Gemma’s, a San Francisco restaurant. From year to year, I expected to find other work or to write professionally. My one book, Local Greens, which is about salads, was published by a small press in San Francisco. Not a bestseller, but it made money. Margaret told me to invest in a condominium and she found one for me, the top floor of a brown-shingle house, architect unknown, in the Berkeley hills. I’d been living in Oakland, in a one-room apartment on Harrison Street, near the freeway. I have a sedentary nature. I’d never have moved out. Never really have known, if not for Margaret, that I could have a nicer place, be happier. “I’m happy,” I said. “This place is fine.” She said my room was squalid. She said the street was noisy and dangerous. She insisted that I talk to a realtor or check the newspapers for another place, exert myself, do something. Suddenly, it seemed, I had two bedrooms, living room, new kitchen, hardwood floors, a deck, a bay view, monthly payments — property.
It didn’t seem. I actually lived in a new place, nicer than anything I’d ever known.
My partner, so to speak, lives downstairs. Eighty-year-old Belinda Forster. She gardens once a week by instructing Pilar, a silent Mexican woman who lives with Belinda, where to put the different new plants, where to prune the apple trees. Belinda also lunches with a church group, reviews her will, smokes cigarettes. She told me, if I find her unconscious in the garden, or in the driveway, or wherever, to do nothing to revive her. She looks not very shrunken, not extremely frail. Her eyes are beautifully clear. Her skin is without the soft, puffy surface you often see in old people.
Belinda’s husband, a professor of plant pathology, died about fifteen years ago, shortly after his retirement. Belinda talks about his work, their travels in Asia, and his mother. Not a word about herself. She might consider that impolite, or boastful, claiming she, too, had a life, or a self. She has qualities of reserve, much out of style these days, that I admire greatly, but I become awkward talking to her. I don’t quite feel that I say what I mean. Does she intend this effect? Is she protecting herself against the assertions, the assault, of younger energies?
Upstairs, from the deck of my apartment, I see sailboats tilted in the wind. Oil tankers go sliding slowly by Alcatraz Island. Hovering in the fuchsias there are hummingbirds. Squirrels fly through the black, light-streaked canopies of Monterey pines. If my temperament were religious, I’d believe there had to be a cause, a divinity in the fantastic theater of clouds above San Francisco Bay.
Rue spoke with urgency, his head and upper body lifting and settling to the rhythm of his sentences. His straight blond hair, combed straight back, fell toward his eyes. He swept it aside. It fell. He swept it aside, a bravely feminine gesture, vain, distracting. I sighed.
Margaret pinched my elbow. “I want to hear him, not your opinions.”
“I only sighed.”
“That’s an opinion.”
I sat quietly. Rue carried on. His subject was the loss to the Chinese people, and to the world, of the classical Chinese language. “I am saying that, after the revolution, the ancients, the great Chinese dead, were torn from their graves. I am saying they have been murdered word by word. And this in the name of nationhood, and a social justice which annihilates language, as well as justice, and anything the world has known as social.”
End.
The image of ancient corpses, torn from their graves and murdered, aroused loonies in the audience. They whistled and cried out. Others applauded for a whole minute. Rue had said nothing subversive of America. Even so, Berkeley adored him. Really because of the novel, not the lecture. On the way to the lecture, Margaret talked about the novel, giving me the whole story, not merely the gist, as if to defend it against my negative opinion. She was also apologizing, I think, by talking so much, for having been angry and abrupt earlier. Couldn’t just say “I’m sorry.” Not Margaret. I drove and said nothing, still slightly injured, but soothed by her voice, giving me the story; giving a good deal, really, more than the story.
She said, The Mists of Shanghai takes place in nineteenth-century China during the opium wars, when low-quality opium, harvested from British poppy fields in India, was thrust upon the Chinese people. “Isn’t that interesting?” she said. “A novel should teach you something. I learned that the production, transportation, and distribution of opium, just as today, was controlled by Western military and intelligence agencies, there were black slaves in Macao, and eunuchs were very powerful figures in government.”
The central story of the novel, said Margaret, which is told by an evil eunuch named Jujuzi, who is an addict and a dealer, is about two lovers — a woman named Neiping and a man named Goo. First we hear about Neiping’s childhood. She is the youngest in a large, very poor family. Her parents sell her to an elegant brothel in Shanghai, where the madam buys little girls, selected for brains and beauty. She tells Neiping that she will be taught to read, and eventually, she will participate in conversation with patrons. Though only eight ye
ars old, Neiping has a strong character, learns quickly, and becomes psychologically mature. One day a new girl arrives and refuses to talk to anyone. She cries quietly to herself at night. Neiping listens to her crying and begins to feel sorry for herself. But she refuses to cry. She leaves her bed and crawls into bed with the crying girl, who then grows quiet. Neiping hugs her and says, “I am Neiping. What’s your name?”
She says, “Dulu.”
They talk for hours until they both fall asleep. She and Neiping become dear friends.
It happens that a man named Kang, a longtime patron of the brothel, arrives one evening. He is a Shanghai businessman, dealing in Mexican silver. He also owns an ironworks, and has initiated a lucrative trade in persons, sending laborers to a hellish life in the cane fields of the Pacific Islands and Cuba. Kang confesses to the madam that he is very unhappy. He can’t find anyone to replace his recently deceased wife as his opponent in the ancient game of wei-ch‘i. The madam tells Kang not to be unhappy. She has purchased a clever girl who will make a good replacement. Kang can come to the brothel and play wei-ch’i. She brings little Neiping into the room, sits her at a table with Kang, a playing board between them. Kang has a blind eye that looks smoky and gray. He is unashamedly flatulent, and he is garishly tattooed. All in all, rather a monster. Pretty little Neiping is terrified. She nods yes, yes, yes as he tells her the rules of the game, and he explains how one surrounds the opponent’s pieces and holds territory on the board. When he asks if she has understood everything, she nods yes again. He says to Neiping, “If you lose, I will eat you the way a snake eats a monkey.”
Margaret said, “This is supposed to be a little joke, see? But, since Kang looks sort of like a snake, it’s frightening.”
Kang takes the black stones and makes the first move. Neiping, in a trance of fear, recalls his explanation of the rules, then places a white stone on the board far from his black stone. They play until Kang becomes sleepy. He goes home. The game resumes the next night and the next. In the end, Kang counts the captured stones, white and black. It appears that Neiping has captured more than he. The madam says, “Let me count them.” It also appears that Neiping controls more territory than Kang. The madam counts, then looks almost frightened. She twitters apologies, and she coos, begging Kang to forgive Neiping for taking advantage of his kindness, his willingness to let Neiping seem to have done well in the first game. Kang says, “This is how it was with my wife. Sometimes she seemed to win. I will buy this girl.”
The Collected Stories Page 29