“Miss Wilson?”
Her shoulder blades stiffened, and she stared at her book a moment longer before raising her head. Mr. Chen pretended to look around the garden. “You like this place,” he said.
She shut her book, her fingers still caught between the pages.
“I receive your letter. You say you have a job?”
She gave a slight cough, clearing her throat. “It was only temporary.”
Mr. Chen nodded. “You find another job.” She set her book down on the bench without saying anything. “Why don’t you ask help from parents? Your parents can help, right?”
She looked down at her lap, studying her hands as if they didn’t belong to her. Then, in a calm voice, she told Mr. Chen that her parents were dead. With one hand, she smoothed the creases in her dress.
Mr. Chen was silent. He felt a curious lightness take over his body, as if he were watching proceedings from far away. For the first time, he wondered if the Christian lady was a liar. “Oh, too bad,” he finally said. He was too embarrassed to bring up the subject of money now.
She looked at him, smiling faintly. “I will give you the money as soon as I can.”
“Okay,” Mr. Chen mumbled, turning away. “Thank you.”
On the way home, Mr. Chen found himself stuck in traffic, amid a procession of alien, glittering cars. The image of the Christian lady sitting in the garden with her eyes half-closed and her lips moving seemed unreal to him, a fragment of a dream. A car honked, and Mr. Chen realized that the cars ahead of his had begun to move. He pushed the gas too hard, and the engine roared to life as his car leapt forward.
When he came home, he found his wife on the bed propped up against her pillows. She was wearing cotton pajamas, the seat of her pants marred by faint circles of blood. She had scrubbed them again and again until they were only terra-cotta outlines. “Do you know what day this is?” she asked him.
Mr. Chen looked at her blankly.
“Today is our anniversary,” she said. She narrowed her eyes, looking at him carefully. “I’m not surprised that you should forget. There isn’t anything happy to remember about this day. Do you remember we spent two hundred dollars for the reception? Ha! That was a lot of money to us then.”
“It still is a lot of money,” he said.
“You always were stingy in your heart,” she said. “That woman can’t pay a few hundred dollars, and you go sniffing for it like a dog.”
“What do you want?” Mr. Chen muttered. “You complain if I go, and you complain if I don’t.”
“That’s because you make me sick,” she said. “Do you hear that? Nothing you do will make me happy.” She began to cry and wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. She got off the bed and went into the bathroom, slamming the door. Mr. Chen heard a sound of something smashing. He was silent for a moment. “Mingli,” he said. He knocked on the door. He could hear his wife sobbing. “Open the door.”
“Go away,” she cried.
Mr. Chen went back to their bedroom. He sat down on the edge of their bed in a stupor. In a few minutes, he heard her opening the door. “Do you know what I regret the most?” she said. Her face was a terrible sight. He could stand any viciousness from his wife, but he couldn’t stand her tears. They made him deeply afraid.
“I don’t want to hear,” he said.
“Do you remember that time when he cried outside our door? He was four years old and he cried outside our door wanting to sleep with us. We didn’t let him in because we didn’t want to spoil him. He cried for an hour maybe, and we listened to him for all that time, and when he was quiet, we thought he had gone back to bed. But in the morning, we found him lying outside our door, his forehead burning with fever. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” Mr. Chen said.
Mrs. Chen got into bed, turning her back away from him. “That memory makes me feel bad,” she said. “I can’t ever forget it. It’s what I regret the most.” She reached over and turned off her light.
Mr. Chen received a call from the apartment management. People in the building were beginning to wonder about the woman who sat all day in the conservatory. “They thought at first she didn’t live here, that she came off the streets,” the office manager told Mr. Chen. “A resident saw her distributing pamphlets under people’s doors.” The manager laughed uncomfortably.
Mr. Chen grunted.
“Believe me, we don’t have anything against your tenant. But I thought you should know about her behavior. Maybe you could talk to her?”
“Me? What can I do? She hasn’t paid rent for two months.” The week before, the Christian lady had sent Mr. Chen a check for three hundred dollars along with a handwritten note. Once I win my case with the government, I will be able to pay you the money I owe.
“Is that so?” The manager sounded pleasantly surprised, then immediately lowered his voice. “You are the landlord, after all.”
Mr. Chen sighed as he hung up the phone. He dug around in the closet for his typewriter, which he used for official business only, and poking at the keys with two fingers he fashioned a reply to the Christian lady. I hear no more excuses. I come on Monday to speak to you.
On Monday evening, he drove to Garden City Apartments, wondering whether she would be in. The weatherman had predicted a storm, and the air had turned breezy and cold. Mr. Chen gripped the steering wheel whenever he felt the wind nudging his car into the other lane. The sky was dark and clear, without a hint of rain.
In the apartment building, he was surprised to find the Christian lady’s door half-open. He glimpsed through the crack and saw her kneeling on the floor. At first, he thought she was patting an animal, but then he saw that she was straightening the fringe of her rug. He knocked on the door, and she told him to come in. She stood up, slowly wiping her hands against her skirt. She wore a blouse with tiny red flowers embroidered around the collar.
“Hello,” Mr. Chen said, nodding. He continued to stand even though she motioned to one of the chairs. “I like to talk to you about this check.”
“You must forgive me,” she said. “It’s all I have.”
Mr. Chen flushed. “I can’t afford to have tenant that cannot pay,” he said. “Isn’t there someone—sister maybe—who can help?” Marnie Wilson gazed back at him without any expression in her eyes. “You go to church, right? Someone from your church can help you?”
She looked as if she were about to speak, but then she closed her mouth. She gave her head a barely perceptible shake.
“Maybe you find a roommate,” Mr. Chen persisted. “Someone to move in here, someone you can talk to, you pay only half the rent?”
“I like living here alone.”
“What about work? You work, right?” She was silent, and Mr. Chen closed his eyes, shaking his head. A sound of hissing escaped from his teeth. “I’m sorry. You find another place to live.”
The Christian lady turned her head to look out the window. “I don’t like to go outside.”
Mr. Chen looked at her. “Bad weather,” he murmured.
From the windowsill, she picked up a green and silver box that looked as if it were meant to hold cigars. She traced the pattern with a finger before passing it to him. Mr. Chen held the box awkwardly in his hands. It was decorated with intersecting green and black lines in the shape of diamonds and three-petaled flowers with a streak of red in the center. He fumbled with the lid, thinking there might be something inside, but the box was empty. He saw only his blurred face upside down in the warped metal.
The Christian lady said he could keep it, but Mr. Chen shook his head, looking for a place to set it down. She said he could give it back once she paid him the money she owed. Mr. Chen stood with the box in his hands, feeling suddenly depressed. “You never go out?”
She pointed to the window. Mr. Chen could see the first drops of rain tapping the pane. He looked down to the parking lot and could hardly make out his small green car in the dusk, everything coated in a pale silver sheen. The trees w
ere stirring to life, dry leaves circling the asphalt. It was a quiet world, Mr. Chen thought, waiting to be seized.
“It makes me afraid,” she said. “I think terrible things will happen.”
He heard the wind rising, an ocean in his ears. He could see lights flickering in the distance. The woman stood gazing out the window with her back toward him. His own body felt vacant and cold. The apartment had become a still life, he and the woman faceless, incorporated into the silence of the room.
The woman turned, and Mr. Chen took a step back. Though her mouth was moving, he couldn’t hear anything. Only the sound of his blood in his ears.
“Mr. Chen, are you well? Would you like some tea?”
He shook his head. His body had broken out into a cold sweat, and he realized he was shivering. “Sorry,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Mr. Chen, why don’t you sit down and rest?”
“No, I’m okay,” he muttered, moving toward the door.
“I promise to pay you soon.”
Mr. Chen barely nodded as he shut the door behind him.
Driving home through the rain, he caught glimpses of branches and debris scattered on the road. Black leaves streamed in the wind, slapping his windshield, getting tangled in the wipers. Mr. Chen felt as if his mind had been infected. At home, he found his wife sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. When she saw him, she raised her eyebrows. “Well?”
“Nothing,” he muttered.
“You need to kick her out.”
Mr. Chen took off his coat and hung it in the closet. He had not known what to do with the box and had hidden it underneath the seat of his car.
“She can’t continue living there for free,” Mrs. Chen said.
“She isn’t well,” he told her. “Something wrong with her head.”
That night, he dreamed that he’d gone to the apartment again, but it had turned into an endless cavern of rooms. An orange cat followed at his heels, and this made him worry that the management would charge him a fine. When he found the Christian lady, she was standing before a mirror, wearing purple eye shadow and drinking a glass of wine. “My mother,” she said, gesturing to the wall. Mr. Chen realized that what he’d thought was a mirror was actually a photograph of a woman sitting morosely in a chair, her thin, dark hair plastered to her skull, her eyes vacant and heavily lidded. A white bow in the shape of a rose was pinned to the front of her long black dress. Her lips seemed to be waxed shut, and she grasped a startled baby in her lap between both hands. The Christian lady laughed. “No need to feel sorry for her,” she told him.
Mr. Chen wondered about his dream. He knew so little about the Christian lady. When he imagined her, he always saw her alone, reading or looking out a window, gazing into one of her mirrors or studying her meaningless collection of boxes.
December arrived, and he did not hear from her. No checks or apologies. He tried calling her number, but there was a recorded message saying the line had been disconnected.
“That woman is robbing us blind,” Mrs. Chen said. “But you continue to act as if we are running a charity organization.”
Mr. Chen felt a terrible pressure in his head. “What can I do?” he burst out. “Throw her onto the street?”
“Don’t be naive,” his wife said.
He drove to Garden City Apartments the next day. No one answered the door, and he let himself in. The card table, the chairs, the bookcase—all her things were in the places he remembered, untouched, as in a museum display. The silent, airless room made him feel trapped. It was difficult to imagine how anyone could live here.
In the kitchen, the photograph of the two little girls standing in the plastic pool was slipping from its magnet. Mr. Chen straightened the photograph and opened the refrigerator door. There was a box of cereal, a shrunken apple, and a jar of floating olives. They seemed like odd artifacts in the empty white space of the refrigerator.
In the bedroom, the Christian lady’s mirrors glimmered faintly as Mr. Chen walked by. The mattress had been stripped of its sheets, and dust had gathered in balls in the corners of the room.
He heard a sound of shifting from the closet.
“Miss Wilson?” he said aloud.
He tried to slide the closet door back, but it got stuck along its groove. The sleeves of her dresses poked through. In the dark of the closet, he discerned something moving, a tangled mass of hair, though he wasn’t sure if it was a face or the back of a head. He looked down and saw chapped heels protruding from a blanket. The Christian lady lay on her stomach, her nightgown tightly wound around her body, her hands hidden beneath her. Her body was stiff, yet she seemed to be struggling underwater. She turned her head to look at him, and her eyes had a shiny faraway luster, as if she were drugged. Mr. Chen thought she looked like some kind of animal. He did not say anything but hastily slid the closet door shut and left the apartment.
At the grocery store, his wife sat on a stool in front of the cash register watching Chinese videos. “So are you going to kick her out?” she said.
“I will call the lawyer that the Zhangs used,” he replied.
His wife continued to watch her video, but after a while her lips twisted into a strange smile. “That poor woman,” she said.
Mr. Chen could not sleep. Though it was winter, he didn’t need a blanket because his wife’s body burned like a furnace all year long. When they were newlyweds, he had joked with her about the temperature of her body, pretending to scorch his fingers whenever he touched her skin. She was a young woman then; her passion had been a great deal of her charm. But her temper had increased with age, and Mr. Chen feared that his wife was like a piece of burning wood that appears firm and unyielding until it suddenly collapses.
He turned over in bed and looked at the red eyes of the clock. Three a.m. In four hours, both he and his wife would be up—she to open their store, he to drive to Garden City Apartments. He wondered if the Christian lady would be gone by that time, the apartment as clean and empty as it had been five months ago, not a sign that she had ever lived there.
She had never shown up for the hearing. Mr. Chen learned about her absence from his lawyer. The judge had set a month’s deadline for her to pay what rent she owed, but she hadn’t been able to do this. Instead, she sent Mr. Chen a Christmas card. On the front, a quiet, even desolate painting of a lake turned blue with ice, a few spruce trees buried in a drift of snow. In mournful, slanting letters, she wished him a merry Christmas with a promise to pay back the money she owed. He turned over in bed once more, flipping his pillow to get to its cool side.
His sleep was no longer good. Even before his son became ill, Mr. Chen often woke up in the middle of the night, his temples smarting as his thoughts turned inexorably against him. He would escape by going to the bathroom, flicking on the light, and then he would wander down the hallway to check on his son. He would stop by the doorway, listening to his son’s breathing, heavy and asthmatic in the darkness. Usually he had kicked his blanket to the ground. Mr. Chen would stoop to pick it up, awkwardly pulling at the corners of the blanket to cover him.
It was Mr. Chen’s lasting regret that they had never been close. His son had preferred his mother’s company. Somehow Mr. Chen had never been able to find the right words. His questions were always gruff, and he didn’t know how to smooth out his tongue. Where were you? Did you eat? Why didn’t you wear your jacket? Have you finished your homework? To these questions, his son had replied in monosyllables. What Mr. Chen meant to ask was whether he was hungry, whether he was cold, whether there was anything that he lacked which Mr. Chen could offer? He hadn’t been able to show his love in any other way than by providing for him, and so he gave him food to eat, clothes to wear, and a bed to sleep in. These things hadn’t been enough to keep him alive.
Mr. Chen’s head felt swollen as he waited for the sky to lighten. At seven a.m., he rose from bed, his brain throbbing with a swarm of useless images. His wife’s face was slack against her pillow, her dry lips parted sli
ghtly. She seemed to be lost in sleep as he stood watching her, but then her eyes opened. “I’m leaving soon,” he said. Mrs. Chen stared vacantly at him, and he wondered if she had understood what he said. “I’ll be back before noon,” he told her. She lay there, stiff and unblinking, and Mr. Chen turned away to change.
When he returned to the bedroom, the bed was empty and his wife was no longer in sight.
He found her in the garage, sitting in the passenger seat of his car. She wore a brown sweater with large yellow flowers and brown wool pants, and she was getting her makeup out of her purse when he opened the door. “That woman is a rat,” she said. “I’d like nothing more than to sweep her out with a broom.”
“What about the store?” he asked.
She smeared powder along her forehead. “I put up a sign yesterday.”
When they got onto the beltway, there were rows of gleaming cars stretched into the distance ahead of them. They sat and waited, the inside of the car filling up with exhaust. By the time they reached Garden City Apartments, they were half an hour late. Large wreaths decorated with white and gold ribbons hung in the entranceway, even though Christmas had passed almost a month ago. The lobby was crowded, and when Mr. Chen inhaled the scent of a woman’s perfume, he experienced the same light-headed sickness he felt in department stores. Cold air blew along the back of his neck as people passed in and out of the revolving doors. Boxes were already stacked along the wall, and the movers he had hired were busy unloading furniture from the freight elevator. A man in a gray suit came up to him. “George Chen?” he inquired.
Mr. Chen nodded.
The man shook his hand and said he was from the justice court.
“Sorry to be so late,” Mr. Chen muttered.
“Nothing to worry about. Your apartment is almost all cleared out. Miss Wilson will be coming down shortly.”
“I want to go up and see,” his wife told him in Chinese. Before Mr. Chen could say anything, she stepped onto the next elevator, the doors closing quickly behind her.
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