by John Irving
Danny was sorry that Joe was watching the television; the ten-year-old seemed transfixed by that image of the people clinging to the helicopters' skids, and then falling off. "What's happening to them?" the boy asked his dad.
"They're dying," Danny said. "There's no room for them on the helicopters."
Ed was coughing; he went out the kitchen door. There was an alley back there--it was used for deliveries, and for picking up the trash--and they all thought that Ed was just stepping out for a cigarette. But the dishwasher never came back.
Yi-Yiing took Ah Gou out the swinging door and through the dining room; he held his severed fingertip in place, but now that Danny was no longer tightening the towel around his upper arm, Big Brother was bleeding profusely. Tzu-Min went with them. "I guess I'm going to give everyone in the emergency room my cold, after all," Yi-Yiing was saying.
"What the fuck is going on?" one of the businessmen shouted. "Is there anyone working here, or what?"
"Racists! War criminals! Fascist pigs!" Ah Gou yelled at them, still bleeding.
In the kitchen, the cook said to his son and grandson, "You're my sous chefs now--we better get started."
"There are only two tables to deal with, Pop--I think we can manage this," Danny told him.
"If we just ignore the business guys, I think they'll leave," Kaori said.
"Nobody leaves!" Xiao Dee shouted. "I'll show them what kind of crazy, fucked-up place this is--and they better like it!"
He went out into the dining room through the swinging door--his ponytail in that absurd pink ribbon possibly belonging to Spicy--and even after the door swung shut, they could still hear Little Brother from the kitchen. "You want to eat the best food you ever had, or do you want to die?" Xiao Dee was yelling. "Asians are dying, but you can eat well!" he screamed at the businessmen.
"The guinea hen is served with asparagus, and a risotto of oyster mushrooms and sage jus," the cook was explaining to Danny and young Joe. "Don't slop the risotto on the plates, please."
"Where are the guinea hens from, Pop?" Danny asked.
"From Iowa, of course--we're out of almost everything that isn't from Iowa," the cook told him.
"You want to see how your mushroom and mascarpone ravioli gets made?" Xiao Dee was asking the businessmen types. "It's done with Parmesan and white truffle oil! It's the best fucking ravioli you'll ever have! You think white truffle oil comes from Iowa?" he asked them. "You want to come out in the kitchen and see a bunch of Asians dying? They are dying on TV right now--if you want to see!" Little Brother was shouting.
Tony Angel turned to the Japanese twins. "Go rescue the business guys from Xiao Dee," he told them, "both of you."
The cook accompanied the Yokohamas to the dining room, where they served the two couples the guinea hens. "Your pasta will be coming right along," Tony told the businessmen; he'd wondered why the business guys had so quietly listened to Xiao Dee's tirade. Now he saw that Little Brother had taken the bloody cleaver with him into the dining room.
"We need you back in the kitchen--we want you like crazy back there! We're dying for you!" the Japanese twins were telling Xiao Dee; they had draped themselves on him, being careful not to touch the bloody cleaver. The businessmen types just sat there, waiting, even after the cook (and Xiao Dee, with Kaori and Sao) had gone back into the kitchen.
"What are the fascist pigs drinking?" Xiao Dee was asking the Yokohamas.
"Tsingtao," Kaori or Sao answered him.
"Bring them more--keep the beer coming!" Little Brother told them.
"What goes with the ravioli, Pop?" Danny asked his dad.
"The peas," the cook told him. "Use the slotted spoon, or there will be too much oil on them."
Joe couldn't get interested in being a sous chef, not while the television kept showing the helicopters. When the phone rang, Joe was the only one whose hands weren't busy doing something; he answered it. They all knew there was no maitre d' in the dining room, and they thought it might be Yi-Yiing or Tzu-Min calling from Mercy Hospital with a report on whether or not they could save Ah Gou's finger.
"It's collect, from Ketchum," Joe told them.
"Say that you accept," his grandfather told him.
"I accept," the boy said.
"You talk to him, Daniel--I'm busy," the cook said.
But in the passing of the telephone, they could all hear what Ketchum had to say--all the way from New Hampshire. "This asshole country--"
"Hi, it's me--it's Danny," the writer told the old logger.
"You still sorry you didn't get to go to Vietnam, fella?" Ketchum roared at him.
"No, I'm not sorry," Danny told him, but it took him too long to say it; Ketchum had already hung up.
There was blood all over the kitchen. On the TV, the desperate Vietnamese dangled from, and then fell off, the skids of the helicopters. The debacle would be replayed for days--all over the world, the writer supposed, while he watched his ten-year-old watching the end of the war his dad hadn't gone to.
The Japanese twins were placating the business guys with more beer. Xiao Dee was standing in the walk-in refrigerator with the door open. "We're almost out of Tsingtao, Tony," Little Brother was saying. He walked out of the fridge and closed the door; then he noticed that the door to the alley was still open. "What happened to Ed?" Xiao Dee asked. He stepped cautiously into the alley. "Maybe some fucking patriot farmer mistook him for one of us 'gooks' and killed him!"
"I think poor Ed just went home," the cook said.
"I threw up in his sink--maybe that's why," Sao said. She and Kaori had come back to the kitchen to bring the business guys their pasta order.
"Can I turn the TV off?" Danny asked them all.
"Yes! Turn it off, please!" one of the Yokohamas told him.
"Ed is gone!" Xiao Dee was shouting from the alley. "The fucker-patriots have kidnapped him!"
"I can take Joe home and put him to bed," the other twin said to Danny.
"The boy has to eat first," the cook said. "You can be the maitre d' for a little while, can't you, Daniel?"
"Sure, I can do it," the writer told him. He washed his hands and face, and put on a clean apron. When he went into the dining room, the businessmen types seemed surprised that he wasn't Asian--or especially angry-looking.
"What's going on in the kitchen?" one of the men asked him tentatively; he definitely didn't want Xiao Dee to overhear him.
"It's the end of the war, on the television," Danny told them.
"The pasta is terrific, in spite of everything," another of the businessmen types said to Danny. "Compliments to the chef."
"I'll tell him," Danny said.
Some faculty types showed up later, and a few proud parents taking their beloved university students out to dinner, but if you weren't back in the kitchen at Mao's with the angry Asians, you might not have known that the war was over, or how it ended. (They didn't show that television footage everywhere, or for very long--not in most of America, anyway.)
Ah Gou would get to keep his fingertip. Kaori or Sao took young Joe home and put him to bed that night, and Danny drove home with Yi-Yiing. The cook would drive himself home, after Mao's had closed.
There was an awkward moment--after the Japanese babysitter had gone, and before the cook came home--when Joe was asleep upstairs, and Danny was alone in the third Court Street kitchen with the nurse from Hong Kong. Like Danny and his dad, Yi-Yiing didn't drink. She was making tea for herself--something allegedly good for her cold.
"So, here we are, alone at last," Yi-Yiing said to him. "I guess we're almost alone, anyway," she added. "It's just you and me and my damn cold."
The kettle had not yet come to boil, and Yi-Yiing folded her arms on her breasts and stared at him.
"What?" Danny asked her.
"You know what," she said to him. He was the first to lower his eyes.
"How's it going with that tricky business of moving your daughter and your parents here?" he asked her. Finally, she turned a
way.
"I'm very slowly changing my mind about that," Yi-Yiing told him.
Much later, the cook would hear that she'd gone back to Hong Kong; she was working as a nurse there. (None of them ever heard what happened to the Yokohamas, Kaori and Sao.)
That night the war ended, Yi-Yiing took her tea upstairs with her, leaving Danny alone in the kitchen. The temptation to turn on the TV was great, but Danny wandered outside to the Court Street sidewalk instead. It wasn't very late--not nearly midnight--but most of the houses on the street were dark, or the only lights that were on were in the upstairs of the houses. People reading in bed, or watching television, Danny imagined. From several of the nearby houses, Danny could recognize that sickly light from a TV set--an unnatural blue-green, blue-gray shimmer. There was something wrong with that color.
It was warm enough in Iowa at the end of April for some windows to be open, and while he couldn't make out the exact language on the television, Danny recognized the drone as the disembodied voice of the news--or so the writer imagined. (If someone had been watching a love story or another kind of movie, how would Danny have known?)
If the stars were out, Danny couldn't see them. He'd lived on Court Street for three years; there'd been nothing ominous about living there, except for the driverless blue Mustang, and now the writer and his family were about to go back to Vermont. "This asshole country--" Ketchum had started to say; he'd been too angry or too drunk, or both, to even finish his thought. Wasn't it too harsh an assessment, anyway? Danny hoped so.
"Please look after my dad and my little boy," the writer said aloud, but to what was he speaking--or to whom? The starless night above Iowa City? The one alert and restless soul on Court Street who might have heard him? (Yi-Yiing--if she was still awake--maybe.)
Danny stepped off the sidewalk and into the empty street, as if daring the blue Mustang to take notice of him. "Please don't hurt my father or my son," Danny said. "Hurt me, if you have to hurt someone," he said.
But who was out there, under the unseen heavens, to either look after them or hurt them? "Lady Sky?" the writer asked out loud, but Amy had never said she was a full-time angel, and he'd not seen her for eight years. There was no answer.
CHAPTER 11
HONEY
WHERE HAS MY MEMORY GONE? THE COOK WAS THINKING; he was almost sixty, his limp more pronounced. Tony Angel was trying to remember those markets Little Brother had taken him to in Chinatown. Kam Kuo was on Mott Street, Kam Man on the Bowery--or was it the other way around? It didn't matter, the cook concluded; he could still recall the more important things.
How Xiao Dee had hugged him when they'd said good-bye--how Ah Gou had twisted the reattached tip of his left index finger, to make himself cry. "She bu de!" Xiao Dee had shouted. (The Cheng brothers pronounced this SEH BOO DEH.)
"She bu de!" Ah Gou cried, bending that scarred and slightly crooked first digit.
Chinese immigrants said she bu de to one another, Xiao Dee had explained to the cook during one of their sixteen-hour marathons to or from Chinatown, somewhere out on I-80. You said she bu de when you were leaving your Chinese homeland, for New York or San Francisco--or for anywhere far away, where you might not see your childhood friends or members of your own family ever again. (Xiao Dee had told Tony Angel that she bu de meant something like "I can't bear to let go." You say it when you don't want to give up something you have.)
"She bu de," the cook whispered to himself in his cherished kitchen at Avellino.
"What's that, boss?" Greg, the sous chef, asked him.
"I was talking to my calamari," Tony told him. "The thing with squid, Greg, is either you cook it just a little or you cook it forever--anything in between, and it's rubber."
Greg had certainly heard this soliloquy on squid before. "Uh-huh," the sous chef said.
The calamari the cook was preparing for his son, Daniel, was the forever kind. Tony Angel slowly stewed it with canned tomatoes and tomato paste--and with garlic, basil, red pepper flakes, and black olives. The cook added the pine nuts and chopped parsley only at the end, and he served the squid over penne, with more chopped parsley on the side. (Never with Parmesan--not on calamari.) He would give Daniel just a small arugula salad after the pasta dish, maybe with a little goat cheese; he had a local Vermont chevre that was pretty good.
But right now the pepperoni pizzas were ready, and the cook pulled them from the oven of his Stanley woodstove. ("She bu de," he whispered to the old Irish stove, and Greg once more glanced in his direction.)
"You're crying again--you know that, don't you?" Celeste said to Tony. "You want to talk about it?"
"It must be the onions," the cook told her.
"Bullshit, Tony," she said. "Are those my two pepperonis for the old broads out there?" Without waiting for an answer, Celeste said: "They better be my pizzas. Those old girls are looking hungry enough to eat Danny for a first course."
"They're all yours," Tony Angel told Celeste. He'd already put the penne in the pot of boiling water, and he took one out with a slotted spoon and tasted it while he watched every step of Celeste's dramatic exit from the kitchen. Loretta was looking at him as if she were trying to decipher a code. "What?" the cook said to her.
"Mystery man," Loretta said. "Danny's a mystery man, too--isn't he?"
"You're as dramatic as your mother," the cook told her, smiling.
"Is the calamari ready, or are you telling it your life story?" Loretta asked him.
Out in the dining room, Dot exclaimed: "My, that's a thin-lookin' crust!"
"It's thin, all right," May said approvingly.
"Our cook makes great pizzas," Celeste told them. "His crusts are always thin."
"What's he put in the dough?" Dot asked the waitress.
"Yeah, what's his secret ingredient?" May asked Celeste.
"I don't know if he has one," Celeste said. "I'll ask him." The two old broads were digging in--they ignored her. "I hope you ladies are hungry," Celeste added, as she turned to go back to the kitchen. Dot and May just kept eating; this was no time to talk.
Danny watched the women eat with growing wonder. Where had he seen people eat like that? he was thinking. Surely not at Exeter, where table manners didn't matter but the food was awful. At Exeter, you picked over your food with the greatest suspicion--and you talked nonstop, if only to distract yourself from what you were eating.
The old women had been talking and whispering (and cackling) together (like a couple of crows); now there wasn't a word between them, and no eye contact, either. They rested their forearms on the table and bent over their plates, heads down. Their shoulders were hunched, as if to ward off an attack from behind, and Danny imagined that if he were closer to them, he might hear them emit an unconscious moan or growl--a sound so innately associated with eating that the women were unaware of it and had long ceased to hear it themselves.
No one in the North End had ever eaten that way, the writer was remembering. Food was a celebration at Vicino di Napoli, an event that inspired conversation; people were engaged with one another when they ate. At Mao's, too, you didn't just talk over a meal--you shouted. And you shared your food--whereas these two old broads appeared to be protecting their pizzas from each other. They wolfed their dinners down like dogs. Danny knew they wouldn't leave a scrap.
"The Red Sox just aren't reliable," Greg was saying, but the cook was concentrating on the surprise squid dish for his son; he'd missed what had happened in the game on the radio.
"Daniel likes a little extra parsley," he was saying to Loretta, just as Celeste came back into the kitchen.
"The two old broads want to know if there's a secret ingredient in your pizza dough, Tony," Celeste said to the cook.
"You bet there is--it's honey," Tony Angel told her.
"I would never have guessed that," Celeste said. "That's some secret, all right."
Out in the dining room, it suddenly came to the writer Danny Angel where he'd seen people eat as if they were animals, t
he way these two old women were eating their pizzas. The woodsmen and the sawmill workers had eaten like that--not only in the cookhouse in Twisted River, but also in those makeshift wanigans, where he and his father had once fed the loggers during a river drive. Those men ate without talking; sometimes even Ketchum hadn't spoken a word. But these tough-looking broads couldn't have been loggers, Danny was thinking, when Loretta interrupted his thoughts.
"Surprise!" the waitress said, as she put the squid dish in front of him.
"I was hoping it was going to be the calamari," Danny told her.
"Ha!" Loretta said. "I'll tell your dad."
May had finished her pepperoni pizza first, and anyone seeing the way she eyed the last piece on Dot's plate might have had reason to warn Dot that she should never entirely trust her old friend. "I guess I liked mine a little better than you're likin' yours," May said.
"I'm likin' mine just fine," Dot answered with her mouth full, her thumb and index finger quickly gripping the crust of that precious last slice.
May looked away. "That writer is finally eatin' somethin', and it looks pretty appetizin'," she observed. Dot just grunted, finishing her pizza.
"Would you say it's almost as good as Cookie's?" May asked.
"Nope," Dot said, wiping her mouth. "Nobody's pizza is as good as Cookie's."
"I said almost, Dot."
"Close, maybe," Dot told her.
"I hope you ladies left room for dessert," Celeste said. "It looks like those pizzas hit the spot."
"What's the secret ingredient?" May asked the waitress.
"You'll never guess," Celeste said.
"I'll bet it's honey," Dot said; both she and May cackled, but they stopped cackling when they saw how the waitress was staring at them. (It didn't happen often that Celeste was speechless.)
"Wait a minute," May said. "It is honey, isn't it?"
"That's what the cook said--he puts honey in his dough," Celeste told them.
"Yeah, and the next thing you're gonna tell us is that the cook limps," Dot said. That really cracked up the two old broads; Dot and May couldn't stop cackling over that one, not that they missed the message in Celeste's amazed expression. (The waitress might as well have told them outright. Yes, indeed, the cook limped. He limped up a storm!)