As I said, we worked together, whenever we could. But we spent other time together too, scheduling around my classes and her part-time day job where she sat in a stuffy fifth-floor office in Chinatown and translated economic reports for a nonprofit international think tank.
Well, that was what she was doing when I met her, anyway.
We drove out to Walden Pond in Concord one day, following the trail that leads around the lake. It was late fall, and the leaves were turning, falling; they crunched beneath our feet. There was a hawk, I remember, circling over the lake, opening its wings, riding some unseen current, silent and magnificent.
To be honest, I hadn’t seen it. My eyes had been down, on the path, and I didn’t know that anything was happening until Sophie grabbed my arm. “Look!” she breathed, her eyes following the figure dipping in graceful circles above us. I followed her pointing finger with my gaze, then turned and watched her instead, watched Sophie’s amazement, her absorption, her obvious overwhelming awe in the presence of the beauty of the hawk, the day, the lake.
I remember thinking that I wished I could feel with that kind of intensity.
Sophie had been sexually abused when she was a child. Her enemy was her own blood: her father, adoring her until she reached puberty and then brutally rejecting her once she started looking like a female. She had no siblings – her parents were faithful adherents to China’s one-child policy. There were no brothers, no sisters to witness and contradict her increasingly warped perceptions of love and family and truth.
Her mother should have, of course. But her mother was the child of a traditional household and did not have the inner resources that it would have taken to reject its dogmas. She did not question her husband because she could not question her husband. So she tiptoed down the corridor, shutting her bedroom door behind her, and she sat in her marriage bed waiting for – what? Expiation? Forgiveness? Redemption? I imagine her there, staring straight ahead, deliberately blind, deaf, and ignorant, not knowing because it would have killed her to know. I imagine her quilted robe, her expressionless face. I cannot forgive her. I can accept that I will never understand the pressures and constraints that she was dealing with; but she also had this child, flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. I wonder if she cried out in pain as that child was violated.
I imagine the father, too, but I cannot think of him rationally. There is too much anger coloring those thoughts.
It’s odd: on the admittedly dubious strength of my undergraduate work in psychology, I had assumed that a lot of the women in the business would have been abuse or incest survivors. I saw them with the older clients, wretchedly trying to create a love and acceptance they had never known in their families of origin. Or I imagined them using their positions for vengeance, to punish men – men as a generic, as a species – for what had been done to them.
It turned out that I was wrong. Either I was way off-base in my assumptions, or else Peach did a really good job of identifying issues, of making sure that the damaged did not get more damaged through working for her. I tend to think that the latter is true; Peach had her own collection of ghosts, some of which were inexpressibly toxic. She wasn’t going to contribute to anybody else’s.
The French have a saying: they talk about “travelers of the interior,” those who find the richest and most satisfying explorations to be those that take place within their own souls. Sophie made that expression come alive for me; she epitomized it. She was forever pushing her own limits, trying to ascertain what and where they were.
I don’t know what she was reading in her native Chinese; but I saw the English-language books to which she gave her hours, her energy, her intensity. Unlikely combinations, but making their own kind of sense if you thought about them long enough: Jung and Anne Rice, Sartre and Mary Shelley, Françoise Sagan and Dostoevsky, Calvino and Hemingway.
She talked about them, too, but not the way that the rest of us talk about books. We see fiction in terms of story lines, characterizations, action, dialogue. Sophie didn’t care about any of that. She followed more esoteric pathways, looking for truths hinted at, for answers half-revealed. She lived inside the words, tracing the geography of the souls’ progress, unerringly identifying the precise moment when the author had been unable to take the one additional step that would have turned their work into something bigger, more significant, more genuine. Sophie talked about that a lot, obsessed about it perhaps: that everyone is willing to settle, to accept the ordinary, because we’re unwilling to put our beliefs, selves, and souls on the line, to challenge ourselves to go further.
She gave me a ceramic jar once, a simple cylinder covered with Chinese characters. “It is a poem, a very beautiful poem,” she said. “Written by a man who had been very great, successful in politics and in literature, but who fell out of favor and was imprisoned. He wrote this poem in prison. It is filled with visions, with thoughts that he never would have had before.” And I was reminded of some of my own readings, back when I was in parochial school and looking among the great minds of the Church for answers to my restless questions. I had found none – had nearly given up, in fact – until I got, curiously enough, to Thomas Aquinas, that most rational and intellectual of theologians. “I have seen things,” he wrote in a letter to one of his students, “that make all my writings seem as straw.”
I think that Sophie had caught a glimpse of some of those things. Or, if she hadn’t, she at least knew that they existed somewhere, which is more than most of us go through our lives knowing.
I still have the jar she gave me. It sits now on my desk, filled with an odd eclectic assortment of pens and pencils and old faded ribbons, and sometimes I look at the calligraphic characters and wonder what words they enable to take flight, what dreams they might unlock, what magic they once whispered to Sophie.
There was so little in her apartment that told you she was Chinese. There was a rice-paper lamp over her bed, with delicate characters brushed on it. There were chopsticks in her kitchen drawers, a rice-cooker, generic bits of life that could have belonged anywhere. There was a Chinese stuffed lion, that she kept in a closet; it had been a gift from an old lover, brought from a province famous for making lions just like this one. She never talked about the lover. After she told me about her abused childhood, she never talked about her family. Only once, in a dreamy, unguarded moment, she said that she missed the rice-porridge that had been her childhood breakfast, the smell of it, watching her mother stir it, her features set and determined.
It was deliberate, I think: in turning her back on her tortured childhood, Sophie had also turned her back on her country, and she had come to a place where she could no longer separate the two. She spoke of China only when I asked her about it, responding to specific questions with precise, unrevealing answers.
After a while I stopped asking.
We worked together when we could. Sophie had private clients, and she often could persuade them to include me in the call when she went to see them. I never told Peach; they weren’t Peach’s clients, it had nothing to do with her. Those were good times, lots of laughter and champagne, Sophie’s giggle spontaneous and happy – I could have sworn that she sounded happy. Maybe, in those moments when she played a role, slipped into a persona, maybe then she really was happy. I don’t know.
I do know that as soon as we got back to her apartment after a call, she couldn’t wait to start smoking. Often she already had the cocaine; sometimes if we had been doing lines with a client she would ask him for a gift bag to take home with her; the rest of the time she called for a delivery. Just like Dining In, I thought irreverently, only these guys never closed. When business is good twenty-four hours a day, there’s no reason to keep banker’s hours.
I’d take whatever I was drinking, wine or beer or a cocktail, and would stay with her in the kitchen while she prepared the coke. I was usually a little high, a little buzzed from whatever we had done with the client; the last thing that you want at a time like that is to b
e sitting alone in a room with a giraffe staring you down. You want to talk, and so I did, babbling on as though what she was doing was perfectly normal.
She would light several cigarettes to burn down while she was cooking – crack pipes need ash in order to draw. She’d mix the coke and the baking soda in a test tube, add water, and swirl the mixture as she held it over the flame of her gas cooker.
And after that we’d sit and listen to music and talk and talk, and I’d do the lines that she’d left out for me, and she would take carefully-spaced hits off the pipe. She would close her eyes and lean back, an expression of sheer physical orgasmic pleasure enveloping her face. That made me curious: I liked the effect of cocaine, but nothing in my experience with it had ever affected me like that.
Eventually, of course, she started passing the pipe over to me, and that was when I began to understand what the guy in the PBS documentary had been talking about. It was sudden, immediate, pulsating pleasure, completely unlike anything else I had ever experienced. A slight ringing in the ears, and then a rush of – well, ecstasy may be a little too strong a word, but the feeling was very close to that. It was better than any sex I had ever experienced. It was better than anything I had ever experienced.
I wanted to both keep doing it and to go back to never having done it.
Perhaps it was a good thing that we fell somewhat out of touch for a while after that night. Well, a good thing for me, anyway. I liked the feeling I got from freebasing. I liked it, I thought, a little too much.
I didn’t see Sophie, in point of fact, for nearly two months, though we spoke several times on the telephone. And then one evening she called, her voice casual; she had rented Fargo; did I want to come over and watch it with her?
My name had been on the waiting list for that movie for nearly two weeks. And, besides, I missed Sophie. I gave Scuzzy some of his special expensive treats to keep him company and headed out to Natick.
And walked straight into one of Dante’s circles of Hell.
If I had not known it was Sophie, I would not have recognized the woman who opened the door. She had cut off most of the long glossy black hair; it was short and untidy, and she was wearing clothes that had surely been slept in. More than once.
I sat down in the living room and watched her move about nervously. She had cued up the video and turned it on almost at once, then went to the kitchen for bottles of Sam Adams and the plastic water bottle she had converted into a pipe. I took a hit when she offered it to me, and the immediate sharp sensation was as good as I had remembered.
Halfway through the opening credits, Sophie pressed the pause button on the VCR. “Do you have a camcorder?” she asked.
“No,” I replied, mystified. “How come? What do you need taped?”
“Nothing.” She flicked her lighter and inhaled off the pipe, savoring the hit, then inhaling the smoke that had remained in the bottle. She put another rock on the filter, lit it again, one hit following the other, before eventually passing the makeshift pipe back to me. I realized that she had upped the ante since the last time that I had been there: she was doing about four or five hits for every one of mine. From my own perspective, that was fine. I had ambivalent feelings (to put it mildly) about freebasing anyway, and each time I did a hit I told myself that I wouldn’t do another. Well, maybe just one more. So having someone else control my intake was not a bad thing.
The fact that she was smoking practically nonstop, on the other hand, was a very bad thing indeed.
“It’s just,” Sophie said at last, not looking at me, talking as if what she was saying had no meaning, no importance, “It’s just that there’s this guy, he said he’d pay me for movies. You know, skin flicks. Me and guys, me and girls, if you had a camcorder you could do some of them with me, I’d cut you in with this guy. He said he’d pay for anything… It’s like a job, you know. Not just one time, but over and over again, as many movies as I want to make.” She shrugged. “Never mind, Jen. It doesn’t matter.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Vinnie, a client I saw regularly at the Chisholm Motel, had wanted to film me, too. “I’ll never show it to anybody,” he had said, straight-faced. He even offered me more money so he could film us together, film me going down on him, film me fucking him. And maybe from his point of view it made sense, it might have given him something to watch in between visits to the Chisholm.
In fact, to show just how trustworthy he was, he offered to put on a video then and there that he had made with one of Peach’s other girls. “She loved being filmed,” he assured me. “She loved taking it up the ass in front of a camera.” I didn’t to ask him if he had told her, also, that he wouldn’t show the video to anyone else.
There was, in any case, no amount of money in the world that was going to induce me to leave behind a permanent and accessible record of what I was doing.
I looked at Sophie pityingly. I wouldn’t have done it for her, either, but in that moment I wished I had the camera. I wished I had the answers, anything to take away the pain in her face, in her voice.
She would have done well, too. A lot of amazingly racist good ol’ boys like the idea of women of color… in bed.
We watched the movie in silence for some time, and then Sophie said something about Frances McDormand’s accent, which she was having a hard time understanding, and I talked about the Scandinavian settlements in Minnesota and North and South Dakota, and after that, finally, wonderfully, we were talking again. The snow and the accents and even the fairly grisly murders that were happening on-screen in front of us were meaningless. We sat there, oblivious, the words pouring out, talking like we used to. Sort of. Close enough, as the rat bastard used to like to say, for government work.
It wasn’t until I was leaving that I noticed the missing furniture. I guess that when I had come in I was too busy noticing Sophie.
She immediately shrugged it off. “I had kind of a yard sale,” she said. “I didn’t need it all.”
I looked at the denuded living room and foyer and couldn’t think of an appropriate response. Or any response at all, to tell the truth.
The cherry armoire in the corner… the heavy sideboard, with all its intricate carvings… “What about your desk?” I asked at last. “Don’t you need it for when you do work from home?”
And then she told me what had happened.
*
The next day, having struggled with the issue over a restless night of blurred dreams and tense wakefulness, I invited one of my colleagues from the state college to lunch. “I’ll be honest with you,” I said on the phone. “This may sound racist, but I want to talk to you because you’re Chinese, because I need help with something and you’re the only Chinese person I know.”
Henry wasn’t offended. He was kind, and extremely clear.
“First of all, in a situation such as the one you have described, the girl would never make progress. If she had stayed in China, she would never have a responsible position, she would never have respect. And she would not expect it. She would be held back by her guilt, and by having brought shame to her family.”
I stared at him. “She brought shame to the family? Henry, her father was abusing her. Surely the shame belongs to him.” But of course in the real world it didn’t; even in our supposedly liberal and gender-equal country, in cases of rape, domestic abuse, and even sometimes incest, more often than not the victim is still blamed. Why should China be different?
Henry pursed his lips, thinking about it. “Perhaps that would be so, if behavior was how we measured worth. But there are other things, more important things. She told people – not specifics, you say, but enough to cast a shadow on the family name. She did not take the place at Beijing University that was being held for her – Beijing University, it is very prestigious, it is our Harvard. It is an insult to her family, to the important people, Party officials perhaps, who had sponsored her for the position. There must have been many talks, many exchanges, for someone such as her to be o
ffered a place there. She had to have been an excellent student. Every student in China works hard, but only a very few go to Beijing University. It says that she was the best of the best, and it also says that she had some sponsors, somebody willing to – how do you say this? – put themselves on the line for her. Somebody did this, and then she said no. To say no is very bad, Jen. It is an insult to the school. And, of course, to the People’s Republic.”
I struggled to find something to say. I was stuck with the image of Sophie, emerging from the hell that was her childhood, and even despite all that, becoming one of “the best of the best.” I was right about her brilliance. “Kids in the States do it all the time,” I said. “I guess that education isn’t taken as seriously here as it is in China.”
He looked at me pityingly. Every developed country in the world is eons in front of the American educational system. He pursued his own thoughts. “It is not just the issue of the university. For us, family is the most important thing. Family loyalty is a great virtue. Taking care of your parents as they once cared for you is expected. And I would suggest to you that even though this friend of yours is far away from China, no matter how successful she is here in America, the guilt and shame of what she has done is pressing down on her. She is expected to be there, now, with her parents, caring for them in their middle and old age. It is an honor, for us, to care for those who have cared for us, who have so much wisdom and experience. It is what she has been taught, it is what she believes in her inner person, even though her mind may think that it believes something else.”
Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Page 14