Transparency

by Frances Hwang

  “I don’t like reserved women,” he said. “Shy is okay, but not reserved. Now, my question is are you being shy or reserved?”

  I looked at him, feeling a fascination but also a repulsion, as with the lilies he had given me. “I’m being reserved.”

  “Well, maybe we can change that.” He got up and sat down beside me. “Does this make you feel uncomfortable?” He smiled, staring me down, and I couldn’t help it and looked away. I wondered what it would be like to be so confident, to never show doubt, to insist, to bombard, to never hesitate or relent. I was sick and afraid of such people.

  “Why aren’t you looking at me?” he asked. “Are you being shy now?” He reached out to turn my face toward him, but I shoved his hand away. His brow furrowed as he leaned in closer, and I jabbed him with my elbow, getting quickly off the bed. “You need to back off,” I said.

  He stood up quickly as well. “I was just about to do that,” he said. There was a red spot on his cheek, and I could hear him breathing through his mouth.

  “I mean, what were you doing just now? You can’t force me to like you. I don’t like you and never will.”

  He nodded curtly. “Message taken loud and clear.”

  “If a person doesn’t return your calls, it means they’re not interested.”

  He was silent, reflecting. “I’m not usually this aggressive,” he said.

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “No, really. I’m usually a more diffident kind of guy, but I’ve been trying to change that.”

  There was something slightly pitiful about this, which dismayed me. It opened up the whole possibility that the businessman was someone I would have to feel sorry for. “Diffidence is a good thing,” I said.

  He smiled. “Well, I’ll go now.”

  I nodded. “So long, Clay.”

  In December, Richard Goode gave a concert in San Francisco. More than a year had passed since the concert in the chapel, and I sat by myself on the second tier, barely able to make out the tiny faraway figure that was Richard Goode on the stage. Between each piece, people coughed violently, an unrestrained hacking that spread through the auditorium as they relieved the itches in their throats. A ripple of laughter arose at these desperate sounds while Richard Goode sat on the bench and mopped his brow with a handkerchief, which he stuffed back into his pocket. We wanted so much from him, to be transported, to go deeper into our memories, to lose ourselves in the feeling that the music evoked in us, to wander around for a while in our dreams, but we could not escape the minor irritations of reality, our own bodily complaints, and the distraction of other bodies surrounding us — people in the audience sneezing or whispering or looking at their cell phones or clandestinely untwisting a candy wrapper. I had been so close to Richard Goode in the chapel! I had heard his humming, his feet pressing down on the pedals as he hopped lightly on the bench. The Beethoven sonata he played had seemed a calm musing at first, until the mind took a turn and encountered an object it had desired and lost. A high delicate note was struck, and this was what the heart wanted and kept returning to, the memories hitting as light and quick as rain. Even then, I knew it wouldn’t last with Vincent, this is what the music was telling me, yet it made the moment sweeter as we sat close, our shoulders touching, breathing silently together.

  After the performance, I walked with a stream of other concertgoers to the BART station and thought about what Sylvia had said to me over the phone. Whenever I saw or read the news about New Orleans now, I thought about her and all that she was going through. “It’s like someone shuffled the deck and I’ve been given a completely different hand,” she told me. “I’m constantly sad, but it isn’t a lonely sadness. Everyone here has lost something.”

  I had heard from Clay again. He wrote to tell me he wanted to be friends. He had always liked me for my mind, and that hadn’t changed. If I thought he was going to sulk and play the role of rejected suitor, then I was wrong. He invited me to see a movie with him, but I’d seen the trailer already — the hero and heroine contemplating each other scornfully as rain and lust dripped down their faces. I thought this movie was the last one I wanted to see with him and didn’t write back.

  Vincent also wrote me. He was still swimming laps in the pool every day for his health. I imagined his thin, asymmetrical body and faintly blue feet stretching across the water in melancholy languor. I liked to think of him suspended like this and wondered if his life would turn out light or heavy. But I didn’t really want to know. Details only fixed him more clearly in my mind, and I had stopped writing him. Every day, he recedes a little more. In my mind he has become a Sisyphus, fated to move slowly back and forth through the water.

  Kate told me I should send out good wishes to people who have hurt or angered me most. “It’s a way of letting go of them,” she said. “Who knows if your prayers will do them any good? It’s a way of finding peace with them in your own mind.” Did I wish Vincent and Clay well? I wanted to.

  As I rode the subway going home, I noticed another train moving along beside mine. It was like watching a lit theater. I could see the people on the other train so clearly through the windows, and they were doing what people do on trains— sleeping, conversing, reading a newspaper, listening to music, staring into space—but there was an element of unreality to it all as everything unfolded in silence. It was like a pantomime, the actors partially hidden and set apart behind glass, the characters changing as the train slowly advanced beside mine. I saw a woman scratching her neck as she fanned herself, a man putting something away in a bag, a girl gazing out the window with her hand close to her mouth, and I wanted to know their secrets, all the things that are felt and never said. Their train floated parallel to mine, swaying luxuriously from side to side, sometimes falling a little behind or inching slightly ahead, and it seemed like a dance the way the trains moved sideways farther apart and then came close together again. Only when my train slowed down for the next stop could I see how fast the other train was moving as it turned into a silver blur rushing by.

  THE MODERN AGE

  Last week my friend Milly invited me to a latke party to celebrate Hanukkah. All of us sat around her table eating latkes with applesauce or sour cream, and Milly was telling me how to make them. “You grate the potato as finely as possible,” she said. “It’s from my mom’s belief that the more effort you put in, the better it will taste. My mom likes to make cooking a hardship.”

  Milly’s friend Cornelius was fiddling with a knife that he had picked up from the table. The cunning shape of the blade bothered me, as if it had been designed for something more sinister than paring potatoes. He kept turning it over on the tablecloth, pressing the blade against his thumb. I had heard that as a child he had undergone heart surgery to correct an arrhythmia, and now his languid body and swollen hands suggested a slow-pulsing heart. Milly couldn’t resist the morbid gleam of his mind. I had seen them sitting on a bench together in Rittenhouse Square, Cornelius speaking with his nose to the sky and his arms crossed over his chest as Milly toyed with the edge of her coat. My friend had the plain, delicate beauty of a moth — a pale, uncanny face and faded brown hair with a silver streak in front, though she was only twenty-six years old. Her loft apartment was whimsical and spare, a few glass objects lining the high windows.

  Cornelius gave the knife a lazy spin. “Let’s go around the table and tell each other persecuted ancestor stories.” We looked at him in surprise, and he said, “It should be easy. Everyone here is Chinese or Jewish.”

  Now we looked at one another, as if for the first time, and laughed.

  “I’ll go first,” Cornelius said, and he proceeded to tell us about his great-uncle Frederic who cut off his little toe to escape being drafted.

  “I have a story like that,” Milly said, “only my grandfather was smarter. He put special drops in his eyes and flunked the eye test to avoid joining the Russian army.”

  We went around the table, sharing stories we had heard from our fa
milies. Jennifer told us about her revolutionary grandmother, a spy for the Guomindang who was captured by the Japanese. Rachel told us about a second cousin of her mother’s who was hidden by a Polish farmer underneath the floor of his barn. David told us about his grandfather who walked all the way from Nanjing to Shanghai to escape the Communists.

  “In some versions, he takes a train, but the official version is that he walks barefoot across the whole of China.” David grinned and straightened his glasses. “When he gets to Shanghai, he has no money left. The Communists are on their way, and my grandfather is afraid he’ll be executed because he’s a member of the Guomindang. He spends the night under a tree and dreams of a female ghost beneath the ground reaching up to grab him. He wakes up to take a piss, and his stream of urine is so strong it uncovers something shiny from the soil. My grandfather bends down to find a woman’s gold ring. The next day he exchanges it for a boat ride to Taiwan, and that’s how he escaped the Communists.” David smiled at us again, clearing his throat. He was usually a quiet person, and that was the most any of us had heard him say in one evening.

  I told them about my mother’s uncle, who was beaten and held for ransom by local bandits hiding in the mountains near his village. He was released only when his family delivered a wood coffin filled with coins to his kidnappers.

  Cornelius raised his eyebrows. “A coffin?”

  I nodded. “His family went bankrupt in order to save him, even though they thought he was a useless person. He was addicted to opium, but when he was released he couldn’t afford to smoke it anymore and he became something like a servant to his younger brothers. Every morning he walked my mother to school, and the two of them would search the ground for cigarette stubs. Then he would slit them open and collect the remaining tobacco to make a cigarette for himself.”

  “What happened to him?” Milly asked.

  “No one really knows. He refused to leave when the Communists took over, and my family fled their village and lost track of him.”

  “Well, all of this makes me think how insignificant my own problems are,” Milly said with a little smile. “Here I am complaining about how I don’t have a boyfriend and hate my job, but I’ve never had to worry about anything really. Like I’ve never had to think about cutting my toe off. It just seems so absurd. Yet all these people had to struggle through so much adversity. And it had to do with when you were born and where you lived. I can’t imagine it.”

  “It’s easy to forget how lucky we are,” I said.

  “Where do you think our sadness comes from?” Cornelius said. “From owning too many things? From indigestion?” He had picked up the knife again and with the tip of it was tracing light circles on the back of his hand. “A person whose struggle, whose suffering, is created internally . . . well, it’s just one’s feelings, isn’t it, one’s depression. There isn’t anything really to despair about.”

  “But even so, isn’t that person’s suffering real?” I asked.

  Cornelius gazed at me with pity. There was something cruel about his regard. He believed he could do nothing for me. I experienced a similar hopelessness every morning when I opened up the newspaper. Or when I watched a spider drown in my bathtub.

  Milly lit the menorah from left to right, and she, Cornelius, and Rachel sang a blessing in Hebrew with low voices. Their warbling was sweet to hear, and we smiled at each other like children who have entered a magic circle.

  I left Milly’s party and walked along old narrow streets, feeling a peculiar tenderness as I passed by quaint eighteenth-century homes with their soft-lighted windows. Inside, I imagined lit candles, roses in glass vases, gleaming mirrors, and bowls of potpourri smelling of cinnamon and pears. I imagined those warm rooms and wished more than anything to step inside.

  The cold was vivid against my skin. By the time I reached my boyfriend’s apartment, I felt I was glowing. I tried to explain to him how interesting it had been, going around the table at Milly’s latke party, relating the terrible, miraculous things that had happened to our families. My boyfriend frowned. He is a serious person and wondered if we had told our stories in bad faith, simply to amuse ourselves. When I described to him how Milly made latkes, my boyfriend, who is Jewish, finally cracked: “That’s not how my mother makes them!” He has never liked Milly and thinks she is a cold person because she talks to a spot above his head without looking at him. My feelings for her are so different. I have a photograph of her standing under a huge magnolia tree, and she is wearing a blue dress and black Mary Jane shoes, and she looks just like Alice in Wonderland. Even if I show him this picture, my boyfriend will never see Milly as I do.

  Then we went to bed. I thought about Milly and Cornelius, and how nothing will ever happen between them. Cornelius is self-absorbed, and Milly, shy and repressed. Both of them are too afraid, but what is it that they are afraid of? As for my boyfriend and me, we had been together for over a year, yet not once had the word hue been spoken between us. Our hearts seemed too small for such a word to pass between our lips. We had not encountered adversity and seemed fated to walk through life unattached, glancing at one another through distant windows.

  INTRUDERS

  When I was still in my twenties, I lived for a few months in an artist colony in Oregon. Before then, I had never lived by the sea. I don’t know what it was I wanted there, but I kept imagining a pale room with glimmering walls. The room would be silent and modest, and if there was any sound it would be muted and far away like the sound of the sea inside a shell. In my vision, the room and its view of the shore were always absent of people.

  In March, I arrived at the colony, and the woman in the office handed me a key to my studio. The door turned out to be unlocked, drifting on its hinge. It was early afternoon, yet the room seemed steeped in twilight, the windows shadowed by a view of the stairwell and the parking lot. The room was cluttered with mismatched furniture—a futon covered with gaudy orchids, a narrow bench that served as a coffee table, an oak desk scarred with graffiti, a bright square of blood orange carpet—and the fireplace had long ago been sealed off with white plaster. It was a senseless patchwork of a room, as if composed by a distracted mind. One corner opened up into a deadend space used for storage, and here I found two coffee machines, a box of handmade Christmas ornaments, the head of a plastic doll, a recent crusty issue of a porn magazine, a flat white clamshell blotted with cigarette ash, and a tin can crammed with stiff, unusable paintbrushes.

  I closed the curtains and lay down in bed. Above me, a tile had broken loose like a rotted tooth. It sat on brass pipes, which ran straight across the ceiling and disappeared into the closet.

  Someone knocked on the door. It was Steve, the maintenance man, and he asked me how I liked the apartment. “It’s kind of dark in there so I made sure to put in plenty of lamps,” he said. “There’s even one that belonged to my mother-in-law.”

  I smiled and thanked him. Then I closed the door and returned to bed.

  An hour later, I heard another knock.

  “Hello,” a young man wearing small round spectacles said. “We haven’t met. Martin Leung.” He extended his hand, and I shook it. He had grayish green eyes and short cropped hair, and there were little gaps between his teeth. He had pulled back his shirt cuffs, which were unbuttoned and flared out loosely, and a number of colored rubber bands circled his wrist. He examined me more closely. “Were you sleeping?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Because there aren’t any lights on. What could you be doing in there?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Oh, fine,” he said. “If that’s your story.” He closed the screen door on me and began to walk away.

  “You don’t believe me?” I called out.

  He turned, smiling slightly. “I’ll let you get back to your nap.”

  I went back to bed, but this time I couldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t dare turn on the light because then I would have to look at the ceiling. I must have lain awake for hours like thi
s.

  The next morning, before anyone else was up, I walked down Market Street to look at the bay. It was tepid and flat and gray. Overweight seagulls brooded in the sand. I found an eroded brick covered with limpets and carried the cold, heavy thing back to my studio to put on the windowsill. The brick was still sandy, and I rinsed it with water, but the shells, which had been as inert as stones, began to move and rise, cracking loudly like ice. I set the brick on my desk, listening to the cracking until I couldn’t bear it, and then I picked up the brick and walked to the bay again and tossed it into the water.

  On my way back, I passed through the colony’s lounge and heard someone playing Chopin, the notes blurred and tinny and mournful, but the pianist stopped when I entered. “I’m sorry,” I said, wishing she would continue, but the woman rose slowly from the bench and regarded me with large, somber eyes. “You’re a composer, then?” I asked.

  The woman said she was a visual artist. Her name was Andrea.

  I lightly pressed a key down with one finger. “Don’t you like the way old pianos sound?”

  “Well, this one is very out of tune,” Andrea said. Her shape and stillness reminded me of those impassive Russian dolls, the ones that open to reveal another smaller doll inside that is exactly alike. This goes on until you reach a doll that is the size of a tiny wooden peg.

  I asked Andrea what she was working on at the colony.

  “Maybe I’ll tell you another time,” she said. “When I know you better.”

  But I didn’t think Andrea and I would ever be friends.

  In the mornings, I liked to walk down Market Street, catching glimpses of the bay in between the storefronts, the air pungent, smelling of the sea. I passed by the mailman making his rounds, a woman talking sweetly to her Boston terriers, a man tending roses in his garden, and I didn’t have to question anything, my mind as clear and calm as the day.