The Natural Laws of Good Luck (29 page)

“Zhong-hua, you have to give them the key.”

“Yes, this probably true.” I wished I could push this white church into a hole and bury it, but Zhong-hua seemed incapable of accepting the finality of a bad situation. His years as chief negotiator at the steel company had made him always ready to roll up his sleeves and work at friendly relations across the table. He seemed as baffled at the church's unwillingness to do this as he had often been by the rigid faces of certain barter-impaired homeowners selling tools from their garages—but much more deeply perturbed. He took a handful of pills containing a Chinese herbal preparation and went to sleep.

Sometimes his skin felt like silk beneath my fingertips. Our bodies fit together like persuadable tools–finger hammer tapping a knobby knee, a curved palm sanding block traveling an already
smooth thigh, an adjustable thumb and forefinger wrench around a pulsing wrist—tools with no intent but to try themselves tenderly on surfaces of the other. At other times his skin felt like hot, sticky flypaper. Since his surgery, he frequently had chills and night sweats. All I could do was touch and recoil. My beloved lay like an old stump that snorted and blew wind through its knotholes. I fantasized about giving it a shove right off the bed into a creek. I tried gently shaking him, rolling him side to side like a sea lion, and even holding my hand over his mouth. Nothing worked. His snoring was like the sound of an electric blender full of walnuts; it was the sound of someone eating his own nose from the inside out. I tried massaging his breastbone in small circles, but this delayed the uproar only a few seconds.

Sometimes the exhale was a blessedly soft
puff, puff, puff
. I could float my mind almost restfully on the brief exhales, like sliding weightlessly through powdery snow. But then he would stop breathing altogether. At those moments I leaned over him in alarm, holding my breath, too, then calling sharply “Zhong-hua! Zhong-hua!” He gasped for air without waking. His stomach and small intestine rumbled and gurgled. Gas putted out the handcrafted rectum. Quieter rivulets tinkled through our copper pipes and cast-iron radiators as faintly soothing background noise. I vowed to set up a pup tent in the pasture; I longed for stillness broken only by owls calling and wind in the trees. But the silky-thighed god always returned to me, resurrected out of flypaper nights, breathing softly through his nose and pulling me close.

A friend told us about a spa where they might need a Tai Chi teacher. We checked, and they did. For a reference, the spa's director called the church lady, who told her Zhong-hua hadn't paid his fee for a long time. The church lady didn't mention that he had been ill for a year while she had him on her books or that we had offered to pay for the missed months. The spa lady didn't want to listen to explanations, and why should she? Business was business. But American business wasn't Chinese business. In China it was
OK to say, “I'll pay you when he pays me, after the other guy pays him, which will be when the other guy gets paid.” Even I was incredulous that such an honor system actually worked.

In China favors are always repaid, except by the immoral, even if it takes years. This kind of elastic time frame and strategic trust is part of
guanxi
, a complex tradition of building social effectiveness through long-term loyalty and integrity. The concept cannot be translated to one word in English, and it was painful to see that its practice could not be translated to my husband's life in America.

We had created this bad situation ourselves, but I still felt punched in the stomach. It pained me greatly that I had neglected to act as intermediary between the world and my husband, with the result that complete strangers thought badly of him. I knew if I had stayed in charge, this would not have happened, and I knew I couldn't have stayed in charge. Not only did my job take me away from home, but I still hadn't forgotten the time Zhong-hua accused me of wanting “to fix him like a teapot.” I had tried to step back, let him handle things himself, not wanting us to become a three-legged act. The spa lady e-mailed: “I am certainly not going to open my doors, give out a key or a code to my building to a complete stranger with a bad reputation. As far as I am concerned, we are
not
doing business, your husband is
not
allowed on or near my property.”

I answered politely and felt very sorry. Later, I heard Zhong-hua on the phone telling “over-the-mountain-old-man” apologetically that he needed to take a break for a few weeks and would call him when the class started again. The internal stress of this situation Zhong-hua could not take in stride because he felt he had done wrong.

I felt bad that Zhong-hua spent every day alone on the old farm. I also envied him because home is where I wanted to be. He disappeared into the forest to gather firewood on the garden tractor. He filled in potholes in the driveway with gravel and unclogged the pipe from the spring that fed the pond. He sat on the plastic milk
crate. After teaching a one-hour Tai Chi class to Blenny on Saturday, he needed to rest for the remainder of the day and all of Sunday. I didn't understand this. Dr. Mayer had said the surgery would cure him. That was a year and a half ago.

Zhong-hua kept house according to his own rationale. A de-ordering principle flourished in his wake. The result was not chaos but an alternate universe. I peered into closets and cupboards I had once been mistress of and saw that everywhere he had redefined the contents, disturbing the labels in my mind and replacing them with families of things having nothing in common: neatly baled dishrags tied up with string and compacted into the bread box with three flashlights, a set of socket wrenches, and a bag of ginseng root.

The Chinese astrologers proved right about bad decisions and falling debris. Zhong-hua called me at work to tell me that a piece of firewood had fallen from the top of the pile onto his head. He said, “Not too much blood. Maybe OK.” I knew that if he had picked up the phone to call me, it was probably not OK. He needed twenty-five stitches. The falling wood was a shock, a chunky clap of thunder to the head. It started to occur to me that my husband was not altogether unlike my father, who had once run over his own foot with the lawn mower, another time cut off the end of his finger with a band saw, and—not once but three times—backed out of the garage without remembering to open the door.

The spa debacle compounded Zhong-hua's mortification about the church and left him withdrawn and quiet. With no way to resolve things, we both suffered internally the heartache of erasure. I sat down in front of the television with him and watched an uneven boxing match. The shorter guy was backed up against the ropes with his hands covering his face. The other guy had no discernible method but was nevertheless pummeling him. Zhong-hua was eating a huge bowl of butter pecan ice cream mixed with chopped tomatoes. He was in the habit of rounding up all the food that was about to “get broken,” dumping it together, and eating it
up so that nothing went to waste. He often made soup of hot water poured over stale heels of bread or boiled milk over rock-hard bean cakes. They were into the third round, and the pummeler wasn't letting up. The ref stopped the fight.

Zhong-hua said this short guy was like him, “always fail.” He said it with a kind of matter-of-fact embarrassment, between spoonfuls of tomato ice cream. I had never heard him use this term before, never heard him utter a single word of defeat. How could the world not want this person? How could he be judged by ordinary standards, a person who, shuffling about in faded pajamas having barely eluded death, dipped a brush made of wolf and wild boar hairs in black ink and, by touching it to rice paper, created mountains shrouded in mist, cascading waterfalls, and a teahouse perched on the cliff above where monks conversed? I found myself leaning close to listen to the whispering of the sages while the rice paper fluttered with birds and blossomed with red and yellow.

When you have no idea what to do, it is best to do nothing with a kind of blank reverence. The trick is to do nothing without becoming edgy. Our dear neighbors, Dave and Flippy, for example, did nothing very well. They watched the leaves grow and listened to tree trunks creak. They fed the chickadees. Every night they built a campfire in their yard and watched that. “There's always something interesting to see,” said Dave, “like bear droppings.” But they were retired. I did nothing the way a praying mantis does nothing. Mine was feigned reverence with a grasping reflex.

On Friday someone at work gave me a three-month supply of unwanted nicotine patches. I brought them home, thinking I'd give them to a friend. I didn't think to offer them to Zhong-hua since he had once mentioned that in China men who don't smoke are looked upon suspiciously, as if they were not real men. Zhong-hua stayed up half the night reassembling the lawn mower.

Saturday morning, without eating breakfast, Zhong-hua began scraping and painting the house. I looked around inside at the gray pall that had settled over everything during Zhong-hua's illness
untouched by the dazzling April sunlight outside. I scrubbed the walls and the ceilings, wiped away spiderwebs from high corners, and vacuumed dead flies from the windowsills. I laid the braided rug my mother had made of old clothes in the bathtub and climbed in to slosh the suds with my bare feet. The foot sloshing unbraided the mother rug, and I hung the woolen remnants on the porch rail. I climbed on the toilet and wiped the ceiling with Clorox. I couldn't stop washing, even after I was exhausted. Darkness steeped in the din of tree frogs. I pulled the stove from the wall and stared down at the mammalian dirt that had birthed a half-dozen ballpoint pens, some hair clips, and a toothbrush. Zhong-hua was outside on the ladder with a bucket of yellow paint, making a graceful comeback against a sapphire sky as owls called and bats veered away from his head. He was wearing a nicotine patch on his arm.

That weekend I went along to help Zhong-hua teach the Chinese brush-painting class at the art center, which had filled up to capacity again. Six months earlier, when he had taught the first class, students had complained that they couldn't understand his English. This time my job was to demystify any statements he made to students and elaborate on the answers he gave to their questions, such as, “Mr. Lu, what exactly are those green circles all over the rocks?”

“Yeah, this is green stuff.”

“Mr. Lu, I am having such a hard time. I cannot make a nice-looking tree.”

“Yeah, this is because you paint no good. You not understand how to paint tree. Need go home plastic a lot.”

“Practice,” I corrected.

I soon abandoned all efforts to ameliorate his blunt style. The students' faces registered only momentary blankness; they quickly recovered to carry on zealously with ink and brush, much less inclined to distract themselves with inquiry. The class was a onetime gig, so we continued with the job search. He answered ads for metalworkers, cashiers, janitors, and cooks.

Someone at work heard about an opening for an overnight counselor at the drug rehabilitation residence and said Zhong-hua should try for it. The interviewer asked what he would do if someone was determined at 3:00
AM
to go out to buy drugs. Zhong-hua said he would talk to them, “let them do another thing.” The word
let
in Chinese is
rang
and is energetically coercive, more like twisting someone's arm behind their back. He thought maybe this was the wrong answer.

For both my husband's and my own sake, I preferred to depend on inner resources rather than social finesse. I believed that if a person gave his or her best thing, then the world would at least let the person subsist, if not flourish. I didn't allow myself to dwell on what would happen if the best thing was also the worst thing. Triscari's office was dark, so I went ahead and cut up the scrolls of brush paintings so that Zhong-hua could sell them at the street festival. This was the best I could do to set him up in international business. He sold one for a reduced price and gave one away.

Still trying to recycle the past and avoid having to rebirth ourselves, I told my husband he could tell me the stories of his schoolteacher days and we could write a book. First he gave the traditional “Good idea!” answer and then shook his head: “No good.”

“Why not?”

“In my teenage times, I was very crazy person. Very strong. Very fire. One time I really want to write down book. After Mao dead, village officials tell me, ‘You can go home. Schoolteacher job end.' I walk back forty miles to my home city. My neighbor, one old man, talk to me I must be write down the stories of my people, my country, he say, because I have special experience and have tell-story gift that is sometime, somewhere very shining, very bright. I want to! For three years, I never see movie, talk to any girl, go to dancing or to drinking with friends. Three years, I every night hurry home from factory job, write down, write down, write down. Sleep just a little, then go back to factory. As soon as I
finish fifty pages, I show my neighbor. He say, ‘Good! Keep going!' Three years, I all day think about, all night write down. Then, suddenly, neighbor seems not happy. He say, ‘This part you write down too well. This stuff you write down very dangerous for you. You need put in garbage. Yes, this is garbage. One day you will get a lot of trouble. Family get a lot of trouble. You need stop right now.'

“One whole week I think about, then decide. I agree with old man. I throw book in fire and all burn. All garbage. Forget. This work done. Never think about again.”

The next day Zhong-hua announced, “I want to write down one book.”

“What book?”

“Title of book,
Men Have Men
.”

“What does this mean,
Men Have Men
?”

“You cannot understand this. Translation not too easy. Women, you know, have babies. Men cannot have babies. Men have men.”

“OK.”