Lying in Bed

by J. D. Landis

  I want to stay inside her closet. I want to read her books more than I’ve ever wanted to read any book. But I also want to see her one more time. I can’t remember what she looks like.

  The door chimes.

  I leave the lights on in her closet but slam it shut and run all the way across the apartment. My legs feel heavy. My shoes are all wrong. Not just for running. They have always been wrong. Women have laughed at them. I run across the apartment and think of nothing else. If I think of Clara, I think of death. I think, My shoes are running to her.

  The door chimes.

  I pull it open. It swings out of my hand and past me and crashes violently against the wall.

  Standing before me is a man. He is one of those pathetic young Orientals in a grayish-white shirt that’s buttoned to the neck over his scrawny bones and shiny black pants that are too long and sneakers made by his slavish countrymen back home for wages that have subverted the American shoe industry. His eyes are dull behind surprisingly large glasses that sit halfway down his small nose, which lacks the bone-structured character to hold them up. Those eyes seem not even to have registered the violent slamming open of the door. He is passive and silent, a recent immigrant who speaks no English and whose lone skill is an ability to move his legs round and round on his bicycle pedals.

  In his hands is a brown bag with a bill and menu stapled to the top. He holds it out to me. When I take it our hands touch. His feels greasy. I fear the food has leaked and will get all over my own hands and tie and our granite countertop. I lift the bag up over my eyes and see no grease. I wonder if the grease ever leaves his skin. I wonder if he ever washes.

  I take the bag to the kitchen and place it in the smaller of our sinks. I look over at him unnecessarily: he has not moved. He knows at least not to step over the threshold. His eyes stare straight ahead, dull, showing no interest whatsoever in this magnificent space that’s been opened up to him. I would like to push his glasses back up where they belong. But I appreciate his docility. And I deplore it. How can anyone bear to live with a mind so dead in a body as disposable as the cartons in which he delivers his food and which he will spend his life delivering until one day his greasy hands slip off his handlebars and he and his bike fall beneath the wheels of a bus?

  I almost thank him for appearing when he has. My own life seems now at least slightly more reclaimable than his could ever be.

  He waits. I look at the bill. I walk back to my closet and enter and find my eelskin wallet. I remove a fifty. This will provide him a huge tip, but I know that if I ask for change he will stare at me uncomprehendingly, not out of greed but out of ignorance of the very currency with which he is so foolish as to try to support himself in this country. But I am always munificent in this situation and never suffer over it as did my father because I never expect to see this man again and would not care to be recognized by him if I do.

  I emerge from the closet. He waits where he waits. I walk toward him determined not to touch his hand again when I give him the money. I picture my fingers trailing grease through Clara’s diaries.

  As I pass him the money, I notice a different look in his eyes. Even through the tiny slits I can see they have come alive. He is looking over the rims of his glasses and beyond me into the loft. His nostrils have flared slightly against his glasses. There is the beginning of a smile on his plump lips.

  I wonder if he thinks he can come back here one day to rob me when I am out. I want to tell him I am never out. I don’t need to go anywhere. I have the perfect life. She comes home to me each evening. We talk. We eat. We talk. We fuck. We sleep the holy, guiltless, ataraxic sleep of marriage.

  He takes the money almost reluctantly. Our hands don’t touch. I look up for some acknowledgment, not of my largesse but of our simply standing here together in the doorway carrying out this most primitive of transactions. I notice his ears. They move up slightly even as I look at them, and as they move up they seem to open. I realize he is concentrating on something. It is the contracting of the muscles of his face that has caused his ears to levitate. Is he listening for someone else in the apartment? If he thinks I am alone will he kill me?

  I am alone.

  My wife has gone out for the evening—or should I say for the evering?

  Kill me if you like.

  He smiles a discreet, knowing smile. His lips thin out and open up and display perfect, brilliantly white teeth.

  He says something. It is foreign. I hear the word and fail to hear the word.

  I must look puzzled.

  He says it again.

  “Shostakovich.”

  “What?”

  “Shostakovich. The F-sharp minor.” His voice surprises me. It is soft, yes, but aggressive, arrogant. And by no inflection does it betray his tramontanity.

  I listen to the music. I wonder if my own ears move. I realize I have heard nothing since I opened Clara’s Week-at-a-Glance. It appalls me to think there was music playing and I heard not a note. I wasn’t even aware of when the Shostakovich cello sonata ended and this string quartet began.

  “How do you know?” I wonder if somehow he’d run into the apartment while I was in my closet and read the name off the jewel box.

  “I know the piece.” He measures the words out slowly.

  “I meant,” I say testily, “how do you know the piece?”

  He looks at me blankly, with that Oriental calm. “I play it.”

  “Which recording do you have?” I ask reflexively. It is a relief to find myself with something to chitchat about, particularly in the secure realm of musical small talk.

  “The Manhattan,” he replies. “But I meant I play it.”

  “Play it?”

  “What’s the matter with you, man? Am I not making myself clear? I play it. I’m a musician.”

  “You’re a musician?”

  “No, I’m a Chinese delivery boy.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “I am a musician. I study music. I am also”—he is speaking slowly, as if talking to a child—“a person who delivers food.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you deliver food?”

  “Because people like you are too lazy to go out and get it.”

  “I never go out,” I confess.

  “I wouldn’t either.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Not if I could afford to stay home and listen to Shostakovich.”

  “Is that why you deliver food? For the money?”

  “No,” he answers. “I do it to meet interesting people.”

  I take that as a compliment. “Thank you.”

  “But I never do,” he says.

  I must look hurt, because he explains, “I was being sarcastic.”

  “I see.”

  He looks at the fifty, still in his greasy fingers. “You want change?”

  What an interesting question. I think, yes, I want my wife back.

  “For this.” He waves the bill.

  “No.”

  He looks suspiciously at the money before he slides it into the pocket of his shapeless pants.

  “The food was late,” he says, as if trying to fathom the perversity of my improvidence. “Hang told you it would take half an hour. ‘Okay thirty minutes, mister, okay.’ Right?”

  His imitation of the man on the phone is perfect. Finally, he sounds Chinese. His own voice, without accent, sounds out loud the way I sound to myself within.

  I don’t care for mimicry, or otherwise I might well laugh at how he does this Hang. But I do say, “Right.”

  “It never takes thirty minutes. It takes thirty minutes to get the food out of the kitchen, forget onto the bikes and through the fucking streets. ‘Thirty minutes mister, okay.’ He doesn’t know what thirty minutes is. Hang has no sand in his hourglass, if you know what I mean.”

  “No need to apologize,” I say.

  “I wasn’t.” He turns and walks out my door.

  I fol
low him and actually put one foot outside the apartment before I say, “What do you play?”

  As soon as I say it, I pull my foot back in. I realize how frightened I am to step into the life I led before I met Clara.

  He turns back to face me. I can see behind him the pale button of a light that indicates he’s pressed it to summon the elevator.

  “Music,” he answers.

  “I meant, what instrument?”

  “Violin.”

  “I used to play the violin.” I remember Clara saying, “I’d like to see it,” but meaning my apartment.

  “No shit,” he says, as if the world were full of violinists.

  The elevator arrives. Its door opens. He steps in.

  “I still have my violin,” I call after him. “I’d like to show it to you.”

  He is in the elevator now and facing directly toward me. He has to hold the door open with his hand, or it will close automatically.

  “I see enough violins,” he says.

  “It’s a Carlo Bergonzi,” I entice.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Do you know Bergonzi?”

  “Didn’t Al Pacino play him?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know …”

  “Al Pacino,” he repeats.

  “Is he a violinist?”

  “You don’t know who Al Pacino is?”

  “No, I don’t. Do you know who Carlo Bergonzi is?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “You don’t know Carlo Bergonzi!”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t care who made your violin. Mine was a gift to my school from a benefactor in Connecticut. I love the way it sounds. I don’t know who made it.”

  “But it’s not a Bergonzi?” I ask.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I’d like to give you my Bergonzi.”

  Instead of running out of the elevator and right back into the loft to claim his prize, he looks as if all he wants is to escape.

  He shakes his head at me again.

  “It’s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,” I say. For all I know, it’s worth millions.

  “Right.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “About what?”

  “About anything. About my violin. That I even have one. That I ever played it. That it’s a Carlo Bergonzi. That I want to give it to you.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Because I tell the truth.”

  “People don’t give away violins.” He still doesn’t believe me.

  “And that man from Connecticut?” I say like a lawyer trying mightily to prove a point.

  “It was a woman,” he says wearily. “And that was a tax thing.”

  “The last thing I’m worried about is the IRS,” I tell him. “They think I’m a diaskeuast, for God’s sake. I don’t want a deduction. I don’t want a receipt for value. I just want to give you the violin. What are you afraid of?”

  “Nothing,” he answers. But he doesn’t leave the elevator.

  I realize what I must look like to him. So much larger than he, my eyes undoubtedly filled with a desperation he cannot understand, my huge hands gripping the door frame.

  “I’m not going to rob you,” I say. “I have more money than I can ever spend. And neither am I going to make you eat the food you brought.”

  He is amused by that. I am so pleased he is amused by that.

  He leaves the elevator. “Where’s the violin?”

  “Please come in,” I say.

  The elevator door shimmies closed behind him. As I lock us in my apartment, I say, “There is one condition.”

  He looks at me with his eyes so tight they are hardly eyes at all. “What’re you, negotiating?”

  “You have to play it for me first,” I tell him.

  He turns back to the door.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  “I have enough auditions in my life.”

  “Think of it as practice.”

  I get a smile from him. “You sound like my teacher.”

  “Who’s your teacher?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  Beneath his antagonism, I sense a certain modesty or arrogance, which I realize can be indistinguishable.

  “No difference,” I answer placatingly. “I just wondered if I might be familiar with him.”

  “Her,” he says pointedly.

  “A woman,” I say idiotically.

  “Yes, of course a woman.” As if further to prove his point, he names her: “Dorothy DeLay.”

  “Oh, you’re at Juilliard.”

  “Yes, I’m at Juilliard,” he says indifferently, wholly unimpressed with the fact that I might have heard of his teacher and know where she teaches. I suppose that when you live in the world of music, just as when you live in the world of language, you cannot imagine that what you know isn’t known universally. Why not expect that the humblest laborer at his jackhammer would whistle the Dumky and know Dorothy DeLay? Why should we have to live in a world where more people know the wind-chill factor than the Winterreise?

  “She is supposed to be the best,” I say to flatter him so he will stay, though my flattery isn’t excessive, for she is said to be a brilliant teacher.

  “She’s a better teacher than I am a violinist.”

  “And if you become a better violinist than she is a teacher …?”

  “That’ll only mean that she’s become a better teacher.”

  “Well put,” I say and wonder if such pithy profundities are passed on within the Oriental gene pool, though this boy hardly seems Chinese beyond his appearance.

  “Thank you,” he says and comes toward me in the middle of the room. Here he is a musician, and it’s praise of his ability to speak that captures his attention.

  “Where are you from?” I ask. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you really don’t sound Chinese.”

  “I’m from Queens, and I really would appreciate it if you would pronounce it right.”

  “Queens?”

  He laughs. His laugh is deep. I would have expected a giggle from so slight a boy. “Not Queens. Chinese. It doesn’t rhyme with release or geese the way you said it. It rhymes with ease or cheese or freeze. Chinese.”

  “Ease or cheese or freeze,” I repeat. And then, to befuddle him in order to cover my own embarrassment at my apparent mispronunciation, I ask, “Is that freeze or frieze?”

  “Is that what or what?”

  “Is that freeze or frieze?”

  “Yeah, it’s freeze or frieze. Or freeze and frieze. Or just plain freeze. Or just plain frieze. Like I’m just plain Chinese.”

  “From Queens,” I say.

  “From Queens,” he reiterates.

  “They’re homophones,” I tell him.

  “They’re what?”

  “Homophones.”

  “What’re homophones?”

  “Freeze and frieze, naturally.”

  “What are homophones? I assume we’re not talking Nynex here.”

  Now I laugh. “No, we’re not talking Nynex, though what an interesting name that would be for a new language. The language spoken over the phone. I don’t use the phone much myself, but I’m sure it has, in certain subtle ways, a language all its own, a rhetoric, a rhythm, an etiquette.”

  I think of Clara and that implicit sexual play on homophone she concocted—my mind is playing word games of its own—that night of the day we met and only moments before she raised her legs and removed her tights and socks.

  “What’s the matter?” he asks me.

  “Why?”

  “Your lips were moving and you weren’t saying anything.”

  I clap my hand to my mouth. “Really?”

  “It was peculiar, man.” He puts his delicate hand to his own mouth to try to quell his amusement.

  “Homophones,” I explain, “are words that are spelled differently but are pronounced the same and mean different things. Freeze and frieze, for example.”<
br />
  What greater antidote against laughter than pedagogy? Now he just nods his head in a pretense of interest.

  How am I going to keep him here? I’m in no hurry to get the violin for him. Then he’ll just take it and leave. I can’t even force him to play it for me.

  “Sit down.” I lead the way to the sprawling leather couches in the middle of the loft, but I don’t know if he follows. He steps so lightly in his homely sneakers. He makes no sound. I cannot feel him through the floor.

  But when I turn, he’s there, and when I sit, he sits. I am filled with great comfort. Across from me, he nearly disappears into the supple skin. He is becoming a part of the room.

  “How did you get to Queens?” I ask, hoping that autobiography will long-wind him.

  “Subway.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I reply sharply.

  “I know.”

  He is playing with me. I don’t care. Just to have him here. I have never known this loneliness before. It’s so much worse to be left alone than simply to be alone.

  We sit in silence. As long as he doesn’t leave. We look at each other. Or I look at him. I cannot tell what he looks at or sees. His eyes are withdrawn like a snake’s.

  “I’m third generation.” His voice itself seems part of the silence we have created. I am soothed by it. “American. My grandparents came over here from Taiwan. On both sides. Years ago. My father’s family is from Taipei. My mother’s parents came from Taichung. Do you know anything about Taichung?”

  “Nothing.” I am grateful.

  “It’s up among the lakes. The Sun-Moon region. They told me it is the most beautiful place on earth. More beautiful than the Vale of Kashmir. More beautiful than Queens.” He laughs. “That’s all I heard about when I was little and they were still alive. Sun-Moon. That’s what they called me. Sun-Moon. And that became Sonny.”

  “What is that in Chinese?” I take care to pronounce it correctly.

  “English,” he says contemptuously. “That’s what they called me in English.”

  “It’s a good name,” I compliment him. “Night and day.”

  “Day and night,” he corrects me.

  “What’s your real name?” I ask.

  “One Gone Jew.”

  I must look surprised. “What did you expect, Henry Ding-Dong?”

  I shake my head. “Will you spell your name for me.”