Moon Palace (12 page)

“I know that,” I said. “I haven’t been very well. But I think I’m getting better now.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“If you like.”

“You can start by telling me about your weight.”

“I’ve had the flu. I caught one of those stomach things a couple of weeks ago and haven’t been able to eat.”

“How much weight have you lost?”

“I don’t know. Forty or fifty pounds, I think.”

“In two weeks?”

“No, it’s taken about two years. But most of it came off this summer.”

“Why was that?”

“Money, for one thing. I haven’t had enough money to buy food.”

“You don’t have a job?”

“No.”

“Have you been looking for one?”

“No.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me, son.”

“It’s a fairly complicated business. I don’t know if you’ll be able to understand.”

“Let me be the judge of that. Just tell me what happened and don’t worry about how it sounds. We’re not in any rush.”

For some reason, I felt an overpowering urge to pour out my story to this stranger. Nothing could have been more inappropriate,
but before I had a chance to stop myself, words were coming out of my mouth. I could feel my lips moving, but at the same time it was as though I was listening to someone else. I heard my voice rattling on about my mother, about Uncle Victor, about Central Park and Kitty Wu. The doctor nodded politely, but it was obvious that he had no idea what I was talking about. As I continued to explain the life I had lived for the past two years, I could see that he was actually becoming uncomfortable. This frustrated me, and the more his incomprehension showed, the more desperately I tried to make things clear to him. I felt that my humanity was somehow at stake. It didn’t matter that he was an army doctor; he was also a human being, and nothing was more important than getting through to him. “Our lives are determined by manifold contingencies,” I said, trying to be as succinct as possible, “and every day we struggle against these shocks and accidents in order to keep our balance. Two years ago, for reasons both personal and philosophical, I decided to give up the struggle. It wasn’t because I wanted to kill myself—you musn’t think that—but because I thought that by abandoning myself to the chaos of the world, the world might ultimately reveal some secret harmony to me, some form or pattern that would help me to penetrate myself. The point was to accept things as they were, to drift along with the flow of the universe. I’m not saying that I managed to do this very well. I failed miserably, in fact. But failure doesn’t vitiate the sincerity of the attempt. If I came close to dying, I nevertheless believe that I’m a better person for it.”

It was a horrible botch. My language became increasingly awkward and abstract, and eventually I could see that the doctor had stopped listening. He was staring at some invisible point above my head, his eyes clouded over in a mixture of confusion and pity. I don’t know how many minutes my monologue went on, but it lasted long enough for him to determine that I was a hopeless case—an authentically hopeless case, and not one of the spurious madmen he had been trained to detect. “That will do, son,” he finally said, cutting me off in midsentence. “I think I’m beginning
to get the picture.” For the next minute or two I sat silently in my chair, shaking and sweating as he scribbled a note on a piece of official stationery. He folded it in half and then handed it to me across the desk. “Take this to the commanding officer down the hall,” he said, “and tell the next person to come in on your way out.”

I remember walking down the hall with the note in my hand, struggling against the temptation to look at it. It was impossible not to feel that I was being watched, that there were people in the building who could read my thoughts. The commanding officer was a large man in full uniform with a jigsaw puzzle of medals and decorations on his chest. He looked up from a pile of papers on his desk and casually waved me in. I handed him the psychiatrist’s note. As soon as he glanced at it, he broke into a big toothy grin. “Thank goodness,” he said. “You just saved me a couple of days’ work.” Without any further explanation, he started tearing up the papers on his desk and throwing them into the trash basket. He seemed enormously satisfied. “I’m glad you flunked, Fogg,” he said. “We were going to have to do a full-scale investigation on you, but now that you’re unfit, we won’t have to bother.”

“Investigation?” I said.

“All those organizations you belonged to,” he said, almost merrily. “We can’t have pinko subversives and agitators in the army, can we? It’s not good for morale.”

I don’t remember the precise sequence of events after that, but a short time later I found myself sitting in a room along with the other misfits and rejects. There must have been a dozen of us in there, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more pathetic bunch of people gathered in one place. One boy, with hideous acne all over his face and back, sat trembling in a corner talking to himself. Another had a withered arm. Another, who weighed no less than three hundred pounds, stood against a wall making farting noises with his lips, laughing after each outburst like a troublesome seven-year-old. These were the simpletons, the grotesques, the young men who did not belong anywhere. I was almost unconscious
with fatigue by then and did not talk to any of them. I settled into a chair by the door and closed my eyes. The next time I opened them, an officer was shaking my arm and telling me to wake up. You can go home now, he said, it’s all over.

I walked across the street in the late-afternoon sun. Zimmer was waiting for me in the restaurant, just as he had promised.

I
gained weight rapidly after that. Within the next ten days or so, I believe I put on eighteen or twenty pounds, and by the end of the month I was beginning to resemble the person I had once been. Zimmer fed me conscientiously, stocking the refrigerator with all kinds of food, and when I seemed steady enough to venture out of the apartment again, he began taking me to a local bar every night, a dark and quiet place without much traffic, where we would drink beer and watch the ball games on TV. The grass was always blue on that TV, the bats were a fuzzy orange, and the players looked like clowns, but it was pleasant to be huddled there in our little booth, talking for hours on end about the things that lay before us. It was an exquisitely tranquil period in both our lives: a brief moment of standing still before moving on again.

It was during those talks that I began to learn something more about Kitty Wu. Zimmer found her remarkable, and it was hard not to hear the admiration in his voice when he spoke of her. Once, he even went so far as to say that if he hadn’t already been in love with someone else, he would have fallen head over heels for her. She was as close to perfection as any girl he had ever met, he said, and when it came copy down to it, the only thing that puzzled him about her was how she could have been attracted to such a dreary specimen as me.

“I don’t think she’s attracted to me,” I said. “She just has a good heart, that’s all. She took pity on me and did something about it—in the same way other people take pity on wounded dogs.”

“I saw her every day, M. S. Every day for almost three weeks. She couldn’t stop talking about you.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. The girl is madly in love with you.”

“Then why doesn’t she come to see me?”

“She’s busy. Her classes have started at Juilliard, and she has a part-time job as well.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Of course not. That’s because you don’t know anything. You lie around in bed all day, you visit the refrigerator, you read my books. Every once in a while, you take a stab at doing the dishes. How could you possibly know anything?”

“I’m gaining strength. In a few more days I’ll be back to normal.”

“Physically. But your mind still has a long way to go.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’ve got to look under the surface, M. S. You’ve got to use your imagination.”

“I always thought I did too much of that. I’m trying to be more realistic now, more down to earth.”

“With yourself, yes, but you can’t do that with other people. Why do you think Kitty’s backed off? Why do you think she doesn’t come around to see you anymore?”

“Because she’s busy. You just told me that.”

“That’s only part of it.”

“You’re going around in circles, David.”

“I’m just trying to show you that there’s more to it than you think.”

“All copy, then, what’s the other part?”

“Discretion.”

“That’s the last word I’d use to describe Kitty. She’s probably the most open and spontaneous person I’ve ever met.”

“That’s true. But underneath all that, there’s a tremendous reserve, a real delicacy of feeling.”

“She kissed me the first time I saw her, did you know that? Just as I was about to leave, she cut me off at the door, flung her arms around me, and planted a big kiss on my lips. That’s hardly what I would call delicate or reserved.”

“Was it a good kiss?”

“As a matter of fact, it was an extraordinary kiss. It was one of the best kisses I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience.”

“You see? That proves my point exactly.”

“It doesn’t prove anything. It was just one of those things that happens on the spur of the moment.”

“No, Kitty knew what she was doing. She’s someone who follows her impulses, but those impulses are also a form of knowledge.”

“You sound awfully sure of yourself.”

“Put yourself in her position. She falls in love with you, she kisses you on the lips, she drops everything to go out and find you. But what have you done for her? Not a thing. Not even the shadow of a thing. What separates Kitty from other people is that she’s willing to accept that. Just imagine it, Fogg. She saves your life, and yet you don’t owe her anything. She doesn’t expect gratitude from you. She doesn’t even expect friendship. She might wish for those things, but she’ll never ask for them. She has too much respect for other people to force them into doing things against their will. She’s open and spontaneous, but at the same time she’d rather die than have you feel she’s throwing herself at you. That’s where discretion comes into it. She’s gone far enough, and at this point she has no choice but to hold her ground and wait.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“That it’s up to you, Fogg. You’re the one who has to make the next move.”

According to what Kitty had told Zimmer, her father had been a Kuomintang general in pre-Revolutionary China. Back in the thirties, he had held the position of mayor or military governor of Peking. Although he was a member of Chiang Kai-shek’s inner
circle, he had once saved Chou En-lai’s life by offering him a safe conduct out of the city after Chiang had entrapped him there on the pretext of arranging a meeting between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Still, the general remained loyal to the Nationalist cause, and after the Revolution he made the move to Taiwan along with the rest of Chiang’s followers. The Wu household was enormous, consisting of an official wife, two concubines, five or six children, and a full staff of domestic servants. Kitty was born to the second concubine in February 1950, and sixteen months later, when General Wu was appointed ambassador to Japan, the family moved to Tokyo. This was undoubtedly a clever move on Chiang’s part: to honor the fractious, outspoken general with such an important post, and at the same time to remove him from the center of power in Taipei. General Wu was in his late sixties by then, and his days as a man of influence were apparently over.

Kitty spent her childhood in Tokyo, was sent to American schools, which accounted for her flawless English, and was given every advantage her privileged circumstances could offer: ballet lessons, American Christmas, chauffeur-driven cars. For all that, it was a lonely childhood. She was ten years younger than her nearest half-sister, and one of her brothers, a banker who lived in Switzerland, was a full thirty years older than she was. Worse than that, her mother’s position as second concubine left her with scarcely more power in the family hierarchy than one of the servants. The sixty-four-year-old wife and the fifty-two-year-old first concubine were jealous of Kitty’s young and attractive mother and did everything they could to weaken her status in the household. As Kitty explained it to Zimmer, it was a little like living in an imperial Chinese court, with all its attendant rivalries and factions, its secret machinations, its silent plots and false smiles. The general himself was rarely to be seen. When not occupied with his official duties, he spent most of his time cultivating the affections of various young women of less than reputable character. Tokyo was a city rich in temptation, and the opportunities for such dalliances were inexhaustible. Eventually, he took on a mistress, set her up
in a fashionable apartment, and spent lavish sums in order to keep her happy: shelling out for clothes, for jewelry, and finally a sports car. In the long run, however, these things were not enough, and not even a painful and expensive potency cure could reverse the tide. The mistress’s attentions began to wander, and one night, when the general walked in on her unannounced, he found her in the arms of a younger man. The battle that ensued was horrific: shrieking voices, sharp fingernails, a torn and bloody shirt. It was the last illusion of a foolish old man. The general went home, hung up his tattered shirt in the middle of his room, and attached a sheet of paper to it with the date of the incident: October 14, 1959. He kept it there for the rest of his life, relishing it as a monument to his destroyed vanity.

At some point, Kitty’s mother died, although Zimmer was unclear as to the causes or circumstances. The general was past eighty then and in failing health, but in a last flurry of concern for his youngest daughter, he arranged to have her sent to boarding school in America. Kitty was just fourteen when she arrived in Massachusetts to enter the freshman class of the Fielding Academy. Given who she was, it did not take her long to fit in and find a place for herself. She acted and danced, she made friends, she studied hard enough to get decent grades. By the time her four years there had ended, she knew that she would not be going back to Japan. Nor to Taiwan for that matter, or anywhere else. America had become her country, and by juggling the small inheritance she received after her father’s death, she had managed to cover the tuition costs at Juilliard and move to New York. She had been in the city for more than a year now and was just starting her second full year of classes.