A Free Life (44 page)

"Why? She will grow up speak English like American."

"But Chinese is her heritage. We ought to help her keep it."

"I have idea. Why don't you hire Chinese babysitter? Hailee can learn the language with her easily?"

"No. According to the experience of some adoptive parents, that's the last thing you should do."

"Why? It's good way to learn Chinese, I'm sure."

"You know, the adoption of a child is actually mutual. Hailee has also adopted us, so Dave and I must also try to adjust. Dave wants to learn some Chinese too. From now on we'll celebrate the Moon Day and the Spring Festival."

Pingping didn't know how to respond to that. Later the Wus talked between themselves about the idea of "mutual adoption," and Nan believed that the Mitchells were right, though he doubted if they could ever speak Chinese, not to mention read and write the ideograms, which were almost impossible for non-native speakers to master.

ON THE NIGHT of July Fourth the Gold Wok was closed. Some people in the neighborhood went downtown to watch fireworks in spite of the overcast sky. The Wus stayed home, glad to have a break. Nan was lying in bed reading Frost's poetry. He was moved by the wise ending of the poem "Provide, Provide" and was contemplating how truthful the phrase "boughten friendship" was. Suddenly Ping-ping burst in and threw a sheet of brittle paper on his face. He sat up with a start and asked, "What's this about?"

"About you and your sweetheart. Disgusting!" Her mouth twisted as she was speaking. Then she spun around, marched out, and slammed the door shut.

Nan glanced at the paper and recognized it was a letter from Beina. He had kept it in the unabridged Webster's and had almost forgotten it. What must have maddened Pingping was that the letter was dated on November 12 without a year, as if it had been written recently. In it Beina asked him to help her with the application fees at three American graduate schools. He had paid $140 for her but hadn't heard a word from her afterward.

He went into the living room, where his wife, lying on a sofa, had been singing in English repeatedly, "I love you. You love me. We're a happy family!" Though she covered her face with a towel that had just come out of the dryer, her voice was sharp and crazed. Nan stepped over and touched her upper arm, shaded by downy hair that he always liked to caress. He said, "Come now, don't be so paranoid. That's an old letter. I haven't heard from her for almost eight years."

She paused to stare at him. He kept on, "I really have no contact with her."

"But you tried to bring her to America!" Pingping raged, dropping the towel to the floor. "Who knows? You're a big liar. Maybe you're still thick with her like before. You always do things behind my back."

"Honestly, I'm not in touch with her and have no idea where she is."

"Leave me alone! You spent our sweat money on that heartless woman. If she were good to you, I wouldn't complain. You're just bewitched by that fox spirit."

"Like I said, this was before you came to America."

"I see, you really meant to bring her here. If I hadn't come and joined you, you would've lived with her instead."

"This is crazy. She just used me."

"But you like being used by her and always miss her. You're so cheap that the worse she treats you, the nicer you'll be to her."

Their son stepped into the living room and listened to them. Nan told Taotao to go away, but the boy wouldn't leave. Nan begged Ping-ping, "Don't be so nasty. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have kept the letter."

"Why not? That's your receipt for the favor she owes you. She'll do something in return one of these days. But why didn't you hide it in a secret place? I don't care what you do on the sly as long as you don't let me know."

"Honestly, I'm not carrying on with her."

"Go away! I don't want to see your face."

Wordlessly Nan flounced toward the door while Pingping resumed singing behind him, "I love you. You love me. We're a happy family!… "

Nan wandered away from their house, alone with his numb heart. On occasion when he and Pingping quarreled, he'd get away awhile. His absence from home often enraged her more, but today she had chased him out. If only there were a place where he could stay a few days when his house got too raucous and too maddening. If only there were a friend to whom he could unburden himself. Dick Harrison lived fifteen miles away in Buckhead, but Nan felt Dick might be bored and look down on him if he went to him for consolation, which was the last thing he'd do. Every time after he and Pingping fought, he'd go either to the town library or to a bookstore for an hour, or just work off his anger in the kitchen of the Gold Wok. But this evening he had nowhere to go, so he walked along the lakeside alone. In the air hovered the effluvium of skunks, which had grown more intense as the summer deepened. Insects were shrieking explosively as if a large battle were in full swing, and time and again some waterfowl let out a sleepy cry from the dark woods of the other shore. Fortunately, the air was damp and few mosquitoes were flying about. In the southern sky a helicopter was ticking faintly, now buried in the clouds and now flickering like a drifting lantern.

Nan 's mind was teeming with thoughts. Deep inside he knew he was at fault. Pingping had lashed out at him not so much because of the money he had spent on Beina as because he had kept her letter as a kind of memento. Before they married, she had let him read all the love letters the naval officer, her former boyfriend, had written her, and then she burned them all in his presence. Oddly enough, he didn't have any letter from Beina at that time and couldn't convince his bride-to-be that there had been no correspondence between him and his former girlfriend since they had lived in the same city. To make her believe him, he showed her a photo of that woman, then dropped it into a stove. Now his wife must have thought he had been in touch with Beina all these years and that from the very beginning he hadn't leveled with her. To her, he was a double-faced man.

It took him almost an hour to walk around the lake, which should have taken at most half the time. Approaching his house, he wondered if he should enter it now. All the lights were off in there, and the windowpanes kept reflecting the slashes of the lightning in the north, where the sky was beginning to jump a little. It threatened rain, the oak leaves fluttering in the gathering wind, so he decided to go in.

As he stepped into the living room, a pair of arms wrapped around him and Pingping's hot face came against his cheek. She whispered, " Nan, forgive me. I can see the letter is old, the edges of the paper already yellowed. I was nasty just now. Can you…?" Her words were muffled as he pressed his lips on her mouth. In response, she began kissing him as hard as if she wanted to breathe with his lungs. He could feel her heart knocking against his half-numbed chest. He touched her breasts, which were warm and heaving. A knot of feeling was quickly unfolding in him, and his hand slipped behind her to unbutton her dress.

"Don't. Taotao can hear us," she said.

He stopped and went into their son's room. The boy was dozing on his bed, his feet rested on the floor and his face toward the ceiling. Nan covered Taotao's stomach with a shirt, closed the door, and returned to Pingping. "He's sleeping. I'll be careful," he said, and his hands resumed caressing her.

She slid down to the floor, pulling him down with her. Then they started peeling off each other's clothes.

Soon she began panting and trembling a little. A few tears welled out of her eyes. Instead of being rough with her, he licked her wet cheeks, and her tears tasted a bit tangy, reminding him of the bitter-melon soup they'd eaten two days before. He adjusted her body to make her lie comfortably so that he could stay in her for a long time.

"Don't cry," he murmured. "Just relax and imagine we're on our honeymoon."

At those words she broke into smothered sobs, which startled him. He regretted having said that because never had they honeymooned anywhere and his words must have caused her to feel sad about their life. He said, "Forgive me for saying that."

"Make me happy."

He nuzzled her neck and nibbled her ear.

DESPITE their reconciliation, Pingping's furious response to that letter brought the memories of Beina back to Nan. For two days he couldn't stop thinking about his ex-girlfriend. He tried to sidetrack his mind, yet somehow it couldn't help but stray to that woman, the fountainhead of his misery. Every remembered detail-a peculiar frown of hers or an indolent gesture or a petulant pout-seemed pregnant with meanings he hadn't thought of before, and whenever he was unoccupied he'd attempt to decipher those hidden messages as if they had really been there all along but he had overlooked them. One incident still stung his heart whenever he thought of it. Three months after Beina declared she'd washed her hands of him, Nan had run into her one morning in a park, where she and her new boyfriend were walking, her hand on his arm. It was windy and the ground was frozen, cobblestones glazed with ice on the path leading to a white building beyond a grove of trees. Nan turned away, pretending he hadn't seen them. But suddenly he slipped and his legs buckled; he stretched out his hand and grabbed a birch sapling to break his fall. Yet his copy of Friedrich Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State dropped on the ground, and the author's bushy beard on the front page kept fluttering, ruffled by the wind. From behind came that woman's ringing laughter, silvery and icy, which pierced his heart. He picked up the book and dashed away, sending flocks of crows and pigeons into explosive flight. He ran, ran, and ran until he could hardly breathe, until his heart was about to burst.

He was unsure whether she had laughed out loud to make him mad so as to bring him back to her or just to wound him. He'd prefer to believe it was just another wile of hers.

A few weeks before, he had burned the notebook containing the poetry he had written for her. He declared to her face that he had gotten rid of all the silly poems. Yet there still remained one piece that he had never shown her, known only to himself. He wrapped it into the jacket of his copy of Book of Songs, an ancient poetry anthology compiled by Confucius. He brought the book to America and had kept the poem in it all these years.

One night after his wife and son had gone to bed, he took out the poem and read it again. It went:

The Last Lesson

Again the ferryboat was canceled,

you told me on the phone.

This time the captain didn't grab a passenger

and get his own face smashed.

The boat was really falling apart,

docked for an emergency overhaul.

On the beach my shadow has doubled in length.

The life ring I just bought lies nearby,

half withered in the afternoon sun.

Alone, I'm sitting on an apple crate

and watching youngsters diving

in the shallows to compete for

the championship of holding breath.

What an idiot! Why volunteer

to teach you how to swim

while I myself can hardly keep my head

above the whirlpools you randomly spin?

He smiled after reading the poem, which he couldn't say he still liked and which was probably sappy and unfinished. But it was something that had once been close to his heart, and he wanted to keep it. He wrapped it back into the jacket of the book and put it on the shelf beside his desk.

Lying on his bed, again he wondered whether he had been too impatient with Beina. For example, after she hadn't shown up at the beach, he had simply stopped offering her swimming lessons. Then came another breakup of theirs. Although tough in appearance, he couldn't really disentangle himself from her. One day he even went to the cafeteria near her dorm, just to look at her. She caught sight of him but pretended not to have seen him and kept talking loudly with the man in front of her in the mess line. Now and again she tossed a glance at Nan. When she had bought her lunch, she turned around and headed in his direction, but her eyes looked away. As she was drawing near, he spun around and rushed out of the dining hall.

If he had spoken to her, probably he could have resumed teaching her how to swim the next summer. That would have given him an opportunity for more physical contact with her. Sure, she wouldn't change much, but he could take her willfulness and caprice with aplomb to show he had a large heart. Eventually he might have gained the upper hand with her. Yet he was bitter and too proud of himself. It was his silly self-pride that gradually cemented the barrier between them. If only he'd had thicker skin; if only he had played fast and loose with her; if only he could have made her suffer.

"What sickness, sickness…" With those words on his lips, he drifted off to sleep. The fluorescent tube remained on until daybreak.

HEIDI MASEFIELD called the Gold Wok and asked Pingping whether she had heard from Livia recently. The girl had run away from home, and for days her mother had been looking for her. Shocked, Pingping wondered if Taotao was still in touch with the girl despite his agreeing to stop e-mailing her. She told Heidi that she'd talk to her son and find out whether Taotao knew Livia's whereabouts. "I will call you tonight, Heidi," she said.

"Please do. I don't know why she did this to me."

"I hope she is not with someone."

"How do you mean?"

"Did you tell police?"

"Not yet. She disappeared three days ago. I thought she might have gone to her grandparents' or a friend's home." "Maybe you should let police know."

"If I still haven't heard from her by this evening, I'll do that."

Pingping didn't ask her why Livia had run away. Neither would she express her fear that Livia might have fallen into a molester's hands. From the brief conversation she guessed that the girl and her mother had quarreled over a boy who could be a bad influence. Livia was just thirteen and seemed already entangled with a number of boys. On the phone Heidi had revealed that recently Livia had often "played hooky." Pingping had almost gasped at that, not knowing the exact meaning of the idiom, and assumed it had something to do with "hookers." She went into the kitchen to tell Nan about the phone call. The radio was on in there, sitting on a shelf, and Nan was listening to Car Talk. He enjoyed the show, especially the hacking laugh of Tom, the older of the Magliozzi brothers. Tom's wild laughter was contagious and often made Nan chuckle or giggle when he was cooking. It was boring in the kitchen, so every Saturday he'd listen to Car Talk from beginning to end. He liked the seemingly casual way Tom and Ray treated their callers-teasing them a little so that everyone could have a good laugh. He often wished he could crack up like Tom, who would ha-ha-ha with total abandon and from the depths of his gut. Pingping, who liked Tom's laughter too but felt he cackled way too much, came in and turned down the radio, saying, "Heidi just called. Livia ran away from home."