The Love Wife (29 page)

Why had she never complained? I glanced at her, half expecting to be met with
You see? What I put up with, you scurrilous landlord.
But she did not look up. Back straight, she addressed the computer with her whole being: her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her ears, her clavicles, her breasts. Her fingers hunted and pecked, pinkies aloft like the oars of a rowboat, levered out of the water. Her feet were planted on the floor as if to launch her directly into the program if necessary.

So this was Lan concentrating. She furrowed her brow, glancing up to the screen and back down to the keyboard. Up and down, up and down. She bit her lip. She itched her nose with the back of her hand. She tucked her hair behind her ear.

And again: that catching of her earlobe between her knuckles.

Just an odd habit, then.

Thinking thus, I almost missed how straightening her back, she continued the motion up through her smooth, long neck—a time-lapse film of a fiddlehead fern, she seemed, every moment less fiddlehead and more fern—until suddenly she seemed, impossibly, to be raising her head, turning and tilting it toward me; and still the motion upward; until her face was lifted too, and her eyebrows, and her gaze.

LAN / 
He was rich. American. Sexy. He seemed gentle, and perhaps loving. I had never had a man who was loving. Who made you shiver. And look how he had helped me already. He was kind. He was not short.

CARNEGIE / 
— Thank you, she said.

Her gaze was shiny and honest and slightly cross-eyed, her pupils black and enormous.

I could not speak.

— You do so much for me, she said. You should not.

LAN / 
I felt so grateful, in my heart, for his help.

CARNEGIE / 
She glanced down; then with a lyric lurch lifted her head once more, gaze lowered, as if to be kissed. Her throat pushed forward, long and vulnerable. I leaned down; tucked her hair behind her ear; traced the line of her jaw with my fingertips. She shivered. Then I put a finger on that soft lopsided smile, coaxed the laggard side up, and kissed her.

Just once.

Impossible, impossible.

If only I had not caught, in the white blank of a newly created file, our reflection.

These girls, you do not know.

Are they not beautiful?

I kid you not.

I drew back.

You have not lived.

My chest was so tight, I could hardly retrieve my left arm from her chin. Nor could I breathe.

They will do anything.

LAN / 
He looked so strange.

CARNEGIE / 
— Is this how things work in China? I asked finally. I had reclaimed my arm, but still my chest locked solid.

My nitroglycerin.

— Here too, I managed to say. Of course. Sometimes.

I rummaged in my pocket with my right hand as she searched my face furtively, quickly sweeping my eyes. One, the other, back. The computer screen lighting the corners of her eyes in one direction, but not the other.

— You don’t have to thank me, I said.

— I thank you one hundred percent, she insisted—so sincerely, I lost all desire to touch her, for shame.

— You deserve a different story, I said. I want you to have a different story.

She smiled uncertainly. Lopsidedly. Pressed her fingers together.

— Do you understand?

— No, she said.

— Could I have a glass of water?

LAN / 
Such a strange, kind man.

I thought perhaps he did not like me. I thought perhaps I was too old. Or perhaps he was afraid of Blondie.

CARNEGIE / 
— Thank you, I said, sweating.

With some effort, I reached out and took her wrist a moment, turning it to check the time on her watch.

— Time for me to go, I said.

— Of course, she said simply. You’re very busy.

The next week, she made a confession.

— I dream last night I am millionaire, she said, blinking a little.

We were in the kitchen, waiting for a delivery; Blondie had ordered a massage table for our bedroom.

— You haven’t even bought your first stock, I said.

— That was my dream.

— A millionaire, I mused. I’m trying to imagine you a millionaire. What about having plenty of nothing?

— It was a nightmare, she said. I woke up feel very afraid.

— Because?

— I was millionaire in America, she said. Not in China, I was millionaire in America.

— And could never go back.

She nodded.

— Why would you even want to go back? I asked. After all you’ve been through? People hated you in Shandong. Or would you try to settle in Suzhou?

She looked out the window.

— There’s opportunity here, you know, I said.

I expected her to ask what I meant by that. If I was suggesting that she might stay.

Instead she nodded obligingly, but then said: — In Shanghai, there is big opportunity now too. They say many Chinese people, even they are born here, now they are move to China because the opportunity is much better. And no racism.

— Racism, I said. Where did you hear about racism?

— Lizzy tell me. Also people at school say so.

— Well, it’s true. Though, you know, there’s racism in China too. It’s just not aimed at Han Chinese.

— So it is not such big problem then.

What to say to that? I cracked my knuckles, pondering.

— Americans believe all racism is a problem, I said finally. Or at least a lot of Americans. Some, obviously, don’t. Seeing as how they’re racist.

She seemed unperturbed by this news.

— Anyway, I have no green card, nothing to discuss, she said.

— It doesn’t sound like you would even want a green card.

She half smiled. I heard the delivery truck pull into the driveway.

— Or would a green card still be nice?

— There is no green card for me.

— But if there were?

— Of course, she said.

It was not clear she even knew what a millionaire was, exactly.

A few days later, though, in response to a new printer, she explained what being a millionaire meant to her.

— Everywhere you go, people treat you like big shot, she said. Instead of everybody make fun of my beautiful bicycle, and make me fix it at night, they come help me with their special tools. Look like I go to university, and have a degree.

She stopped. I thought she might begin to cry then, but she didn’t.

— Nobody, she said, treat you like a servant.

11

A Happy Family

BLONDIE / 
Her real eating began at McDonald’s. We rarely ate fast food, but one day our heat went out—old house, old heat—and we found ourselves there.

Lan ordered a Big Mac.

— Make me miss home, she said.

— We love Mickey D’s, said Wendy. We hate eating healthy.

WENDY / 
Lanlan eats the fries, and three of my McNuggets, and then drinks a big Coke. She has a whole apple turnover for dessert, and burps.

BLONDIE / 
After that we arranged takeout from McDonald’s once a week.

WENDY / 
She likes the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and the Filet-O-Fish sandwich too, but Big Macs are her favorite because of the special sauce.

BLONDIE / 
She began to eat other things. Puréed vegetables. Mashed potatoes. Ice cream. For a while she was eating much the way Bailey used to, before he got teeth. But then suddenly she was eating everything, so that it almost did not seem strange when, in April, about the time the late daffodils came out—we had a huge bank of white thalias—Lan announced she’d like to try cooking.

Might we yet bloom into one big happy family? Might we yet prove late bloomers? I did hope so.

CARNEGIE / 
Blondie took notes in a special notebook she had bought, whilst I stalked bugs with Bailey. The paper in the notebook was handmade, with ragged edges and flecks of dried vegetation. It looked like something produced by nomads on the steppe, but actually emanated from an atelier in New Jersey.

— What’s that? What’s that?

Blondie seemed bent on normalizing her relationship with Lan through foodstuffs. Her enthusiasm was real—Blondie was never not real—and yet she seemed to have turned herself up, as if on a cooking show. You half expected subtitling for the hearing-impaired to begin scrolling across the lower reaches of her sweater. It was never enough to write down the name of the ingredient in the notebook. First she had to pinch it and lift it to her nose, or prod it and roll it, or snap it and sniff it again, or dab it on her tongue. Five-spice powder, hmm. Dried shrimp, hmm. Tianjin vegetables. Mustard greens. She asked if the item was yin or yang. If it was smoked or pickled, she asked what it was like fresh. She asked where it came from, and how you knew best-quality from second-best.

LAN / 
I tried to teach her all kinds of dishes, but some Suzhou specialties too. Different kinds of shrimp, and cabbage hearts in chicken fat. Also
xian cai rou si mian
—
noodles with pickled vegetables and pork. Once we managed to find mandarin fish, in Chinatown, for
songshu guiyu
; also eel for
xiangyou shanhu
—
a kind of stewed shredded eel. But the family did not like the dishes with special ingredients. They liked dishes made with things they already knew. For example
xigua ji
—
a kind of chicken steamed with watermelon rind.

Of course, they would not say what they did or did not like. Still, I could guess. It was hard in the beginning, but little by little I began to understand American taste.

BLONDIE / 
She put sugar in everything. Lan said people in Suzhou liked sugar, in that way they were like people from Shanghai.

Probably she would have put sugar in Bailey’s milk if I’d let her.

I tried not to say anything. I tried to simply use a little less sugar myself—set a good example.

LAN / 
In Chinese we have a saying,
Ye Gong hao long.
Meaning a person like
Ye Gong,
who makes a big fuss about how much he loves dragons, but does not actually love dragons at all.

LIZZY / 
That was so true about Mom. Like you could give her the ugliest thing for Mother’s Day, and she would still say she loved it. She would still wear it all the time, and tell her friends how you gave it to her.

CARNEGIE / 
Blondie accompanied Lan to various grocery stores in Chinatown, returning with bag upon bag of food. There wasn’t enough room in the cupboards for everything they bought; they had to store cans on the ledge by the basement stairs. Of course, when moving coolers and patio furniture and whatnot, everyone tried to be cognizant of the danger of avalanche. Still cans cascaded down, causing near injury.

I watched Blondie hover over the stove as if over a newborn. I watched her do the rice the way Lan did, not measuring the water, but eyeballing it, and stirring it with her hand before putting it in the rice cooker. I watched her slice things with a butcher knife, her fingers curled under. I watched her tease the fat away from the meat, half frozen to make it easier to slice. She did not complain about how cold her hands got working with the frigid meat, though she did blow on her fingers every now and then, to warm them up. Across the grain, across the grain. Probably I could have helped her with that; my mother had taught me to chop in my urchin years.

Chinese people can always become cook. Never mind you know anything or not, you say you like to cook they say OK! But of course if you become cook, your mother will commit suicide. Even I am dead I will rise up out of my grave to kill myself.

Blondie peeled the broccoli stalks. Typically, we bought broccoli florets; Blondie had always felt vegetable preparation a waste of time. Why not steal those precious moments for the family? Bailey especially needed attention; he needed his mommy to chase him and make sure he didn’t hit anything, toddling around as he did with no brakes and no steering. He needed his mommy to take baths with him, and dance with him, and extract pesky foreign objects from his nose.

But cooking with Lan, she did things Lan’s way; and Lan’s way was to waste no food, no matter how much labor was involved. So Blondie gamely peeled not only broccoli stalks, but things like chestnuts too. The chestnuts involved dissecting out veins of brownish membrane from the little, ivory, brain-like nuts.

—Heave-ho, yo ho ho,
I hummed as I passed. A tune from
In the Hall of the Mountain King.

Blondie turned red.

—
Heave-ho, yo ho ho.

— Chicken with chestnuts is worth it, she insisted.

After the chestnuts came chicken. For all her farm roots, Blondie seemed reluctant to actually lay her hands in full, committed contact with the meat. She lacked too the brute butcher confidence needed to swing the big cleaver high enough in the air that she might whack down—
aiya!
—with the requisite murderousness.

— Think guillotine, I told her, passing by again. — Think decapitation.

I carried wriggling Bailey upside-down in my arms.

— Hello, Bailey, she cooed, buzzing his exposed belly. — He needs a sweater.

— Think so?

— Feel the back of his neck, she said. In the hall.

Whack. Whack.

The sweater was not in the hall, but in the mudroom. Still she insisted, upon our return, on asking: — Was it there in the hall?

BLONDIE / 
I thought it was in the hall.

CARNEGIE / 
Her chicken looked like something prepared by zoo interns for their midsized carnivores.

BLONDIE / 
Lan was an exacting master. As time went on, she seemed to expect the meat sliced thinner and thinner. Faster, too. Not that she ever said so. She simply took over the meat slicing if necessary and, in her elegant way, finished up in short order. Her slices were perfect. Even her discard heap of fat and gristle was humiliatingly exquisite, a shame to simply throw out.

CARNEGIE / 
Over time Blondie began sneakily angling her butcher block away from the kitchen. Partly so that she could look out at the yard as she worked, and partly to evade Lan’s scrutiny.

BLONDIE / 
There were still pockets of unmelted snow down by the woods, but the days were bright and warm, and the trees were in bud. The lawn, too, was strewn with petals from our early tulips. Some of these lay on their sides, but many had filled with the morning rain, so that they glimmered like miniature lakes. Each captured a bit of the sky; each reflected its partial truth about the heavens. Some were imbued with implacable blue, others with the restless white clouds.

And of course the tulip beds were all exposed pistils now, glistening and wanton, their pale parts lifted, skirtless, to the sky.

CARNEGIE / 
Lan produced heaps—of bamboo shoots, of ham cubes, of scallions. So unrelenting was her focus that though she was wearing an apron, it never got dirty. Her soy sauce never splashed, her cornstarch never rose in a pouf; to every step was meted the exact amount of energy required, no more. It wasn’t until she got close to needing Blondie’s meat that she stopped to study her apprentice, just at the moment that fluttery Blondie started talking, with a certain over-ardor, about feng shui. Her knife work slowed to a halt as she described the workshop she and Gabriela had gone to. How she didn’t really have the time for such things. But, well, how Gabriela had talked her into it, a half-day deal, and how glad she was, in the end, that she had gone if only because she had come to realize that the feng shui of Lan’s apartment was awful.

BLONDIE / 
—To be over a garage to begin with, I said. All that bad-luck empty space below you. I’m so sorry we didn’t look into this earlier. And how terrible those spiral stairs! The
qi
just spills right down them.

Lan set a duck to marinate in Coca-Cola—not my favorite recipe for Peking duck, but it did work.

— We used your apartment as a case study, I said. It has too many windows, doesn’t it? The instructor suggested we hang a crystal in some of them.

— That is feudal superstition, said Lan sweetly.

CARNEGIE / 
She turned to do something else, then paused to watch Blondie again, a frown rucking her forehead.

Blondie blushed.

Lan immediately smiled her half smile, and said: —Very good! You are my number-one student.

Still Blondie managed, with the next whack of her butcher knife, to slice neatly into her left thumb.

— Omigod, omigod! she cried. Omigod!

I rushed into the room even as Lan brought Blondie’s bleeding hand to the sink and washed the finger under the faucet. A flap of flesh was hanging completely loose; you could open and shut it like one of the new flip tops that had recently become de rigueur for everything from toothpaste to shampoo.

— Oh, Blondie, I said. Are you okay? Omigod is right. And here I thought tourniquets were mostly for Girl Scout badges. Are you okay? I do think they’ll be able to sew that back on. I mean if they can reconnect men’s penises in Thailand, right? After their wives have taken the butcher knife to them. Really, those cleavers are dangerous. Are you okay?

— You will be okay, said Lan decisively. And with surprising authority: — Don’t cry.

LAN / 
The finger was bleeding and bleeding, but I bandaged it up. Of course, the children were frightened, especially Bailey.

CARNEGIE / 
—If I hadn’t married you, it would be perfectly all right to be a fork, cried Blondie on the way to the hospital.

She held her hand up in the air, elevating it above her heart, as per the instructions in our medical-emergency handbook. Still blood soaked through the massive bandage, dyeing it red-brown.

— If I hadn’t married you, she cried, I’d be considered perfectly good-hearted just the way I am.

BLONDIE / 
We had for some time been trying to hold dinner conversations in Chinese. Generally we did this in the kitchen, but more recently we had moved to the dining room, which the girls found fun. Even Lizzy liked setting the table with place mats, and good chopsticks, and real silver. They liked lighting candles. And they liked thinking up little Chinese centerpieces—an arrangement of origami animals, a bouquet of colored incense sticks. A yin-yang design made of green and black tea leaves.

For Carnegie’s fortieth birthday, Wendy and Lizzy did an especially elaborate job, with place cards and napkin rings, and family pictures hanging from the chandelier. There were balloons and streamers, and party favors on each seat—the effect so lovely that I was sorry I had scheduled a surprise party of friends and neighbors for later in the evening. What an anticlimax that party was going to be, after this.

How happy Carnegie was! Sitting there at the head of the table, without one wrinkle or gray hair. I sat at the foot, from which spot I alone faced the big mirror that covered the wall behind him. We had inherited that mirror with the house; but it had always seemed out of keeping with everything else, saying ‘town’ the way it did, instead of ‘country.’ Of course, there had been other details like it, originally. But we had removed the fancy column casings that surrounded the rough-hewn posts. We had pulled up the wall-to-wall carpet blanketing the wide plank floors. As for the mirror, we’d always intended to take that down too, and probably would have, if we had known an original feature to lie beneath it.