The Size of the World

by Joan Silber

  But he thought Viana had chosen. Once again she’d gone over to the other side, taken her place with the people from her other life.

  “It’s a crime to send pictures of Rosa eating ice cream?” I had to live with Umberto forever, so I didn’t say more, but I was bitter against him then, for not moaning in horror, for his daughter’s sake. I looked at his glinting eyes, his familiar hawk nose. Why was I married, if I had no one to moan with me?

  AFTER WE TALKED TO MIKE, all I could think about was Viana in a cell in jail. I didn’t know what jails were like here but there was no way they could be good. I pictured her alone in a dank root cellar of a room, but for all I knew she was crowded in a fluorescent-lit pen with other women. At night she would’ve been on a cot bare as a shelf.

  No jail has any kindness in it. The point of jail is to be mean to you, to break you down. Mike didn’t even find out where she was till the next day. The only night in my life I slept in a room alone was my sister’s wedding night. Viana must have been better at this than I ever could have been, on her own in a cell. She had the dignity of her stubbornness and she had a hardness from her own life that might have kept her calm. Her friend Toon had told me how she believed (and all the Buddhists were supposed to believe) that if you knew not to cling to what was impermanent, you weren’t so fearful. Perhaps Viana thought this too. On those nights. You needed human love, in the worst times, and you needed something that was independent of all love.

  “IN ITALY SHE NEVER would have been arrested,” I said to Umberto. Mike would have said, Italy when? WhichItaly? but Umberto just grumbled. My sister Vincenzina liked to say how extremely well we’d all done in America, as if she’d personally rowed us across the ocean. A very good country, I had nothing against it. But now I did, and I had the old, peculiar feeling that I’d switched sides. In my head, I wanted to say, Piddu, can you believe this? except that Piddu was beyond sides, where he was.

  I would have liked Piddu to know I’d been to Thailand. Their temples are gold and they eat frogs like we do, I wanted to tell him. I hadn’t imagined such a place, how could I have? At the time when Viana left, I had thought of her only as gone to a hated nowhere, lost to me, as if she’d dropped off the flat table of the earth. What a stone I’d had for a heart then. How full the world was of such stones.

  The great, swarming world—I knew more of it now, didn’t I? Even I.

  I hadn’t wanted to know either. Carried away across it nonetheless, swept up into air. Sometimes in deep night now I liked to tell myself that it was afternoon of the next day on the other side of the world—all that hot glare and bright, bright sunlight—and I did what I could to hold this improbable truth in my mind.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD

  Owen

  IDIDN’T KNOW I WAS GOING to be so homesick for the life I’d had in Siam, on my own. In Kingston I had plenty of useless connections, men I’d gone to school with, girls who’d married cousins of mine. It wore me out to try to talk to them, to go to their houses for unspeakably dull dinners. How parochial they seemed, and how affected and full of myself I must have seemed to them.

  Kingston’s bars were still speakeasies then, dens of merry lawbreakers—a seedier and more interesting side of my town than I’d known as a boy. The customers were young marrieds in their smart and daring phase, salesmen being snappy, local hookers, sometimes a farmer in a pressed shirt. Most of the bars were near the river and I’d get that dirty-water smell as I got near the row of them. I loved that smell. At the end of the night I’d walk by the marshy edge and look out at the dark Hudson and the string of electric lights along one of the dingy piers. I would’ve shot myself the first month if it hadn’t been for those bars.

  I was not what I’d once been. Each morning I thought that, even when I hadn’t been drinking at all. What I did at the bank was imitation work to someone like me, as if I spent each day carrying on my back trunks and boxes filled with nothing but air. I’d catch myself looking at the granite in the portico of the bank building, the white marble columns and the travertine panels, and I’d be hit with nostalgia for the lucid facts of minerals.

  Getting a job in a bank in 1928 was not a lucky stroke anyway, as it turned out. After the Crash, my father’s friends kept me on as long as they could. When the job ended finally (and none too soon for me), I wrote to Corinna in Siam, Hallelujah, I’m a bum. But then I drove to all the nearby burgs—Poughkeepsie and Catskill and Albany—and humiliated myself asking every insurance company, every underwriter, every lowly accounting firm for work.

  One morning I could not get out of bed at all. In my rented room I lay in the sheets, nauseous and sweating and shivering. This is the sad result, I thought, of drinking cheap alcohol, and I was disgusted with myself for not having money anymore for better. But by evening I knew it was the malaria coming back. And where was my sister when I needed her? Where was Zain to tend me? I thought about summoning my aunt on the phone, but the thought was not bearable. In the very early hours of the morning, I heard the clatter of a horse-drawn milk truck in the street, and I called out the window and had the driver carry up a great vat of milk. I lived on that for a week.

  The fever ebbed while I sipped the souring milk. When I went out, I was still a sight—yellowed eyes and hollowed neck—and I alarmed my grocer. I stayed in my room eating soup out of tin cans and reading Byron and Jack London. I was down to my last hoarded dollars when one of the hookers I knew from the bar sent word that a company in Schenectady was hiring and I should get my heinie over there fast.

  I drove to what turned out to be a factory called Universal Screw and Fastener. I thought I’d been sent as a joke, but an office boy inside pointed me to a line of men. The company was hiring salesmen, and I hardly knew why I lined up, since I was hardly a glad-handing sales type. “I don’t suppose you know anything about metals,” the exhausted interviewer said, and I had the sense to ask what kind of ferrous alloys they used.

  So I got the dumb job. At least it had to do with metals and the world of matter—that was how I comforted myself—at least I was being paid to talk about significant particulars. And right away I was on the road all the time, I had a territory to cover. I did like that part.

  I liked the roads that curled around the scratchy slopes of hills, I liked the lit roadhouses at night and the eager little hotels in small towns. My sister wanted to know if I could stand such a life if I were married. Female company could always be found, but that was not what Corinna meant, of course. I’d forgotten how men and women talked to one another here. Women were coy or hilarious in ways I never got used to. I could not imagine coming home to one of them.

  What did I imagine? Mostly still Noo Kiang. Girl of my dreams, who had married a Chinaman a month after I sent her away. In my dreams she was given to admiring me lavishly, craving me constantly, understanding me perfectly. She lived in the Siam at the end of the rainbow, a place foreign men were notably partial to. We were both younger there too.

  TO FIND OUT WHAT screws a company needed, you had to know its true wants—aside from strength, what about corrosion resistance or weight or magnetic permeability? I was good at sorting that out, and I didn’t have to tell corny salesman’s jokes either. One client called me the Screw Doctor. Holding the world together, one sale at a time.

  I made a good name for myself at U-Screw (as we liked to call it) and they shifted me to more demanding accounts, to people who made transport for the Army or the Navy. “As a veteran myself,” I would say to some engineer in a tie, before I recited statistics. It was not a lie, but I felt that I was lying. I meant: An old soldier like me only wants the best for our boys. Had I gone all the way to France and lived like a snake in a ditch and seen real men get blown to gore just to get a client to believe me? It was a whorish thing to do, but it wasn’t lying. No one made me do it either.

  I SOLD SO MUCH glittering hardware that my boss asked if I wanted to head the Western Division. Western New York didn’t sound like any prize—h
ow many inches of snow in Buffalo?—but he meant California, which pleased me so much it hurt me to know I no longer thought of these things for myself.

  From the first, I took to that part of the country. What San Francisco had, first of all, was a Chinatown. I had forgotten most of the bits of Chinese I’d once had, but I still knew phrases you said for politeness or to a girl. It was wonderful to see the girls again. In the streets most of them were dressed like American girls, with short hair combed flat or curled against their cheeks. In the clubs I sometimes saw them in qipao, those slinky silk dresses with high collars—they carried fans too! I didn’t want to be a slathering Caucasian patron, a gawking male with a wallet, but what did I want to be, then? A man Asians thought was almost Asian, a chameleon with cosmopolitan gifts. I wasn’t a boy, I knew how silly that was.

  I lived on the other side of the city, but when I had time I liked to walk the blocks that were built to be Asia, the wedged-in shops open to the street, the smell of hot oil and sizzled pork, the hanging lanterns added for tourists. I wanted to stop every resident and brag about what was familiar. And what did I think I’d have when I was with a woman from the East again? I was as bad as my sister, who’d made her lingering crush on Zain a lasting metaphor for the attachment she couldn’t fix to a whole country.

  But because I was a man I lived out that metaphor. I found a pretty woman who wanted to be called Lily (why did she pick that name? it was hard for her to say) and who was glad enough to have someone like me, not ugly like an old man and not hungry or rough the way young ones could be. The first time I went with her—to a hotel with a pink-red roof like a pagoda—when she held her arms out to me, I was as touched as if she were yielding a great unspoken kindness. No one could have kept her self more separate, and yet I felt that she had yielded, and the honor of it stirred me. She was not at all like a Siamese girl really, haughtier, cooler, daintier, less playful, but a part of myself came back to me, an old rhapsodic alertness. Afterward I thanked her in Cantonese, which made her giggle. “Very nice person,” she said to me.

  We got along fine. It elevated my life to have her in it. I felt that I was no longer a man eaten up by old ideas, that Lily was my shimmer of farther vistas. One of the men I drank with called her my “armchair travel,” which was not entirely wrong. I had Lily’s singsong voice to think of, while I was motoring along a dusty road by the coast or on a train across some godforsaken stretch of desert, and I was more interesting to myself because of it.

  I wanted to keep Lily for myself, only me, and for two years I paid her enough for that arrangement. But when she asked for more, I had to let her go, she cost too much. She made a face when I told her—a wriggle of disappointment at me and at fate. It stung me to see her so grasping; the ending was hard on both of us. She went on to a richer patron, and the next year I went on to Fu-Rong, a round-bodied girl who scurried when she walked because her feet had once been bound. Fu-Rong still had family in China and lived in great fear that Japanese armies were coming close to where they lived, though she tried not to bother me, her special friend, with this. I pointed to a map in the newspaper—in the autumn of ’38, there were X’s for battles near Canton—but she couldn’t tell, on the map, where her town was.

  Sometimes when I gave her money I wanted to say, For your father, who might be dead, or For your mother, whose suffering we can only guess at. But I didn’t. I was wary of being sentimental with her, of taking liberties—she had enough to bear without my alien violations; a customer’s decency was to mind his own business. I thought that the money made me less human then, but I couldn’t see how else to be.

  SALESMEN DIDN’T REALLY get rich, but I was earning more than I had. When I took the train all the way to Florida to see my sister and her family, Corinna amused herself making jokes about what swank suits I wore nowadays. Corinna was a little sour, but her kids, Thea and Bob, really liked me. Their father had made them an elaborate terrarium, with a vast herd of lizards they kept giving me to hold. Christopher seemed very much in his element, squinting into the sun, red-faced and wryly calm, though Corinna said he missed England.

  The kids were great fans of my stories, my quips and tricks. Part of me was sorry I hadn’t had children. I didn’t think I’d missed what life was for, but at times I thought that I had. I was always taking them for long walks on the beach and letting them dangle big ropes of seaweed and smelly hermit crabs in front of me. When Thea complained of sand in her sneakers, I said, “Do you know how many eons it took for the waves to smash the rocks and shells and calcified plants into sand fine enough to get between your toes? Say: Thank you, dear waves, for making sand to itch me.”

  Thea and Bob made elaborate bows in the wet tidal sand and called out, Thank you, thank you. They were too young to be awed or consoled by notions of mineral time, but I wasn’t. To be a speck freed me from dwelling on local complaints. Speck among specks! One of the bars I used to go to in Kingston had a hokey sign that said, DON’T WORRY, IT WON’T LAST, NOTHING DOES. The geologist’s motto, I always thought. The necessary longer view.

  I had reason to want to repeat these sustaining truisms to myself, because I knew that when I went back to San Francisco, I was going to lose Fu-Rong. An old man was coming from China to marry her, and who could blame her for wanting to leave the life she had? I could, but my woe and my protests were no good to anyone. I was a sputtering rogue, a spoiled boy, a leftover colonial in a freed state.

  FU-RONG WAS ALREADY gone by the time I got back, swept off to Sacramento by her doddering groom. One of her friends asked if I didn’t want to send my girl a red packet to wish her well. Reluctantly, angrily, I folded a couple of twenties in one of the shiny red envelopes you could buy in the district and I mailed it to her in her new name. It was a very depressing way to be a good sport, and it made me feel ancient.

  After Pearl Harbor, I was on the road a lot of the time, immersed in a constant emergency of work, the war effort firing up sales. I kept away from any steadiness with a woman. All through those years, we were more afraid that we might lose than anyone would admit later. I’d been in one war, and trudged with my unit in retreat too—not a good memory, retreat—but I knew not to talk about it. I thought of Noo Kiang too, and I pictured her demure and polite to Japanese soldiers. I was embarrassed for Thailand, giving way to Japan at once, siding with the Axis the way a child decides to side with a bully, scared, resigned, hoping for favors. But what would I have had it do? No strategy, no bravery, could’ve saved it.

  For a long time the Allies kept losing battles in the Pacific—Makassar, Badung, Sunda—and I woke in the night trying to think how we’d survive if we lost everything. How I would. Countries did lose wars, didn’t they? The Jews I’d known all my life would be taken away somewhere. What might be done to the Chinese did not bear thinking about. We knew by now about the live burials in Nanking and the massacres of Chinese in Malaya. And what would the rest of us be, the survivors, the lucky white people?

  I dreamed of California under fire, the rocky coast falling into the sea. My city occupied, like Paris. A woman I knew in Reno used to call me Mr. Ready for the Worst. But I drank all night from gratitude when D-Day finally came. I toasted every soldier, every pilot, every sailor. I blew a week’s income treating the bar. I went out to the street and gave bottles of beer to passersby.

  Later I had a hangover like a hail of stones, my brain was a ballroom of thudding rocks. I was in a movie theater that week watching newsreels of troops landing in the waves at Normandy when I saw footage (who took the photos?) of Japanese rail lines bombed to smoke—in Bangkok! U.S. planes were dropping bombs on Bangkok—and the audience was applauding. I think I applauded too, in wincing astonishment, in victory.

  Later that summer, the Siamese changed government and anti-Japan factions from the Free Thai underground seemed to be sharing power with the old guard. Both together? How could that be? Now they will be all right, Corinna wrote to me, when Japan loses. Hurray for the Free Thai! Ch
ristopher is not as glad for Siam as I am.

  THE NEXT YEAR, when the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the brute gaudiness of the war’s end made science seem lethal and glamorous to people. All sorts of men—and women too—thought that because I could explain atomic fission I had an elegant mind and was someone to respect. I’d show off and be depressed afterward.

  All I did was talk in the night and drive in the day. I wasn’t so pleased with myself the year I turned fifty. I had the inner riches forever of my time in Siam, but what kept me from being another moody old lush stuck on glory days? There was a birthday gathering for me at a bar—a few other sales reps, an engineer I hung out with—and at the end of the night I was given the key to a hotel room where a girl named Pearl waited.

  She couldn’t have been more than twenty, a Chinese girl, with straight-cut bangs and the world’s most delicate neck. When I came into the room, she said, “Hello, hello. Happy birthday, right?” Her voice was American, she’d been raised here.

  “Honey,” I said, “you’re in for an easy night, because I’m too drunk to do anything. Just don’t tell the fellows.”

  “Look at you, an honest man,” she said. She patted the bed for me to sit next to her, and I worried that she was going to try her best to rescue me—I actually didn’t want that. But she put her head on my shoulder, as if we were teenagers on a front porch, and said, “I’m very tired myself, you can’t imagine.” They never said that. She wasn’t a scared amateur either—had a whole new order taken over?

  It was just her—the Pearl way of being a working girl—though I didn’t know that till later. She fell asleep before I did, and we both woke at dawn with our clothes on. “It’s your birthday until eight a.m.,” she said, and I made a joke about rising to the occasion, which I managed to do. I was very glad not to be an old man entirely, trite though that may have been. The next time I woke up she was throwing her clothes on. “You can sleep, my friend,” she said. “I have a babysitter waiting.”