Moon Palace (14 page)

“Who’s that?” I said, pretending I didn’t know.

“It’s the Dragon Lady,” Kitty said. “She’s coming to get you.”

I took hold of her hands, trying not to tremble as I felt the smoothness of her skin. “I think she’s got me already,” I said.

There was a slight pause, and then Kitty tightened her grip around my waist. “You do like me a little bit, don’t you?”

“More than a little bit. You know that. A lot more than a little bit.”

“I don’t know anything. I’ve been waiting too long to know anything.”

The whole scene had an imaginary quality to it. I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before. My desires were very strong, overpowering in fact, but it was only because of Kitty that they were given a chance to express themselves. Everything hinged on her responses, the subtle promptings and knowledge of her gestures, her lack of hesitation. Kitty was not afraid of herself, and she lived inside her body without embarrassment or second thoughts. Perhaps it had something to do with her being a dancer, but more than likely it was the other way around. Because she took pleasure in her body, it was possible for her to dance.

We made love for several hours in the fading afternoon light of Zimmer’s apartment. Without question, it was one of the most memorable things that had ever happened to me, and in the end I believe I was fundamentally altered by it. I am not just talking about sex or the permutations of desire, but some dramatic crumbling of inner walls, an earthquake in the heart of my solitude. I had become so accustomed to being alone that I did not think such a thing could ever happen. I had resigned myself to a certain kind of life, and then, for reasons that were totally obscure, this beautiful
Chinese girl had dropped down in front of me, descending like an angel from another world. It would have been impossible not to fall in love with her, impossible not to be swept away by the simple fact that she was there.

A
fter that, the days became more crowded for me. I worked on the translation in the morning and afternoon, and in the evening I would go off to meet Kitty, usually in the Columbia-Juilliard neighborhood uptown. If there was any difficulty, it was only because we didn’t have much chance to be by ourselves. Kitty lived in a dormitory room that she shared with another student, and there was no door in Zimmer’s apartment to shut off the bedroom from the living room. Even if there had been a door, it would have been unthinkable to take Kitty back there with me. Given the circumstances of Zimmer’s love life at the moment, I wouldn’t have had the heart to do it: inflicting the sounds of our lovemaking on him, forcing him to listen to our groans and sighs as he sat there in the next room. Once or twice, the Juilliard roommate went out for the evening, and we took advantage of her absence to stake out a claim to Kitty’s narrow bed. On a number of other occasions, we had trysts in empty apartments. Kitty was the one who worked out the details of these meetings, contacting friends and the friends of friends to ask them for the use of a bedroom for several hours. There was something frustrating about all this, but at the same time it was thrilling, a source of excitation that added an element of danger and uncertainty to our passion. We took chances with each other that strike me as impossible now, outrageous risks that easily could have led to the most embarrassing kind of trouble. Once, for example, we stopped an elevator between floors, and as the angry tenants of the building yelled and pounded because of the delay, I pulled down Kitty’s jeans and panties and brought her to an orgasm with my tongue. Another time, we did it on the bathroom floor at a party, locking the
door behind us and paying no attention to the people who were lined up in the hall, waiting their turn to use the john. It was erotic mysticism, a secret religion restricted to just two members. All through that early period of our affair, we had only to look at each other to become aroused. The moment Kitty came near me, I would start to think about sex. I found it impossible to keep my hands off her, and the more familiar her body became to me, the more I wanted to touch it. Once, we even went so far as to make love after one of Kitty’s dance rehearsals, copy in the dressing room after the others had left. She was scheduled to be in a performance the following month, and I tried to go to the evening rehearsals whenever I could. Watching Kitty dance was the next best thing to holding her, and I would follow her body around the stage with a kind of delirious concentration. I loved it, but at the same time I did not understand it. Dancing was utterly foreign to me, a thing that stood beyond the grasp of words, and I was left with no choice but to sit there in silence, abandoning myself to the spectacle of pure motion.

I finished the translation at the end of October. Zimmer collected the money from his friend a few days later, and that night Kitty and I joined him for a meal at the Moon Palace. I was the one who chose the restaurant, more for its symbolic value than the quality of its food, but we ate well in spite of that, since Kitty spoke Mandarin to the waiters and was able to order dishes that were not on the menu. Zimmer was in good form that night, rattling on about Trotsky, Mao, and the theory of permanent revolution, and I remember how at a certain point Kitty put her head on my shoulder, smiling a languorous and beautiful smile, and how the two of us then leaned back against the cushions of the booth and let David run on with his monologue, nodding in agreement as he resolved the dilemmas of human existence. It was a superb moment for me, a moment of astonishing joy and equilibrium, as though my friends had gathered there to celebrate my return to the land of the living. Once the dishes had been cleared
away, we all opened our fortune cookies and analyzed them with mock solemnity. Oddly enough, I can remember mine as though I were still holding it in my hands. It read: “The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.” As it turned out, I was to encounter this enigmatic phrase again, which in retrospect made it seem that my chance discovery of it in the Moon Palace had been fraught with a weird and premonitory truth. For reasons I did not examine at the time, I stuck the little slip of paper into my wallet and carried it around with me for the next nine months, holding onto it long after I had forgotten it was there.

In the morning, I started looking for a job. Nothing came of it that day, and the next day drew a similar blank. Realizing that the newspapers were not going to get me anywhere, I decided to go uptown to Columbia and try my luck at the student employment office. As an alumnus of the university, I was entitled to use this service, and since there were no fees to pay if they found you a job, it seemed like a sensible place to begin. Within ten minutes of entering Dodge Hall, I saw the answer to my problems typed out on an index card fastened to the lower left-hand corner of the bulletin board. The job description read as follows: “Elderly gentleman in wheelchair requires young man to serve as live-in companion. Daily walks, light secretarial duties. $50 per week plus room and board.” This last detail was what clinched it for me. Not only could I start earning some money for myself, but I would be able to leave Zimmer’s apartment at last. Even better, I would be moving to West End Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street, which meant that I would be much closer to Kitty. It seemed perfect. The job itself was not much to write home about, but the fact was that I had no home to write to anyway.

I called for an interview on the spot, afraid that someone else would beat me out for the position. Within two hours, I was sitting with my prospective employer in his living room, and by eight o’clock that night he called me at Zimmer’s to tell me I had the job. He made it sound as though it had been a difficult decision
for him and that I had been chosen over several other worthy candidates. In the long run, I doubt that it would have changed anything, but if I had known that he was lying then, I might have had a better idea of what I was getting into. For the truth was that there were no other candidates. I was the only person who had applied for the job.

T
he first time I set eyes on Thomas Effing, he struck me as the frailest person I had ever seen. All bones and trembling flesh, he sat in his wheelchair covered in plaid blankets, his body slumped to one side like some minuscule broken bird. He was eighty-six years old, but he looked older than that, a hundred or more, if that is possible, an age beyond counting. Everything about him was walled off, remote, sphinxlike in its impenetrability. Two gnarled, liver-spotted hands gripped the armrests of the chair and occasionally fluttered into movement, but that was the only sign of conscious life. You could not even make visual contact with him, for Effing was blind, or at least he pretended to be blind, and on the day I went to his house for the interview, he was wearing two black patches over his eyes. As I look back on this beginning now, it seems appropriate that it should have taken place on November first. November first: the Day of the Dead, the day when unknown saints and martyrs are remembered.

It was a woman who answered the door to the apartment. She was a dowdy, heavyset person of indeterminate middle age, dressed in a billowy house frock decorated with pink and green flowers. Once she was quite certain that I was the Mr. Fogg who had called for an appointment at one o’clock, she extended her
hand to me and announced that she was Rita Hume, Mr. Effing’s nurse and housekeeper of the past nine years. As she did so, she looked me over thoroughly, studying me with the unabashed curiosity of a woman meeting her mail-order husband for the first time. There was something so forthcopy and amiable about these stares, however, that I did not take offense. It would have been hard to dislike Mrs. Hume, with her broad and doughy face, her powerful shoulders, and her two gigantic breasts, breasts so large that they seemed to be made of cement. She hauled around this cargo with an expansive, waddling sort of stride, and as she led me down the hallway toward the living room, I could hear her breath whistling in and out of her nostrils.

It was one of those enormous West Side apartments with long corridors, sliding oak partitions between rooms, and ornate moldings on the walls. There was a dense, Victorian clutter about the place, and I found it difficult to absorb the sudden plenitude of objects around me: the books and pictures and little tables, the jumble of carpets, the hodgepodge of woody dimness. Halfway down the hall, Mrs. Hume took hold of my arm and whispered into my ear. “Don’t be put off if he acts a little strange,” she said. “He often gets carried away, but it doesn’t really mean anything. He’s had a rough time of it these past few weeks. The man who took care of him for thirty years died in September, and it’s been hard for him to adjust.”

I felt I had an ally in this woman, and that served as a kind of protection against whatever strange thing was about to happen. The living room was inordinately large, with windows that looked out onto the Hudson and the New Jersey Palisades beyond. Effing was sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of the room, positioned across from a sofa with a low table in between. Perhaps my initial impression of him was caused by the fact that he did not respond to us when we entered the room. Mrs. Hume announced that I had arrived, that “Mr. M. S. Fogg is here for the interview,” but he did not say a word to her, did not even stir a muscle. It was a supernatural inertness, and my first reaction was to think he was
dead. Mrs. Hume merely smiled at me, however, and gestured for me to take a seat on the sofa. Then she was gone, and I found myself alone with Effing, waiting for him to break the silence.

It took a long time, but when it finally came, his voiced filled the room with surprising force. It did not seem possible that his body could emit such sounds. The words crackled out of his windpipe with a furious, rasping kind of energy, and all of a sudden it was as if some radio had been switched on, tuned to one of those distant stations you sometimes capture in the middle of the night. It was totally unexpected. A chance synapse of electrons was carrying this voice to me from a thousand miles away, and the clarity of it stunned my ears. For a moment or two, I actually wondered if a ventriloquist wasn’t hiding somewhere in the room.

“Emmett Fogg,” the old man said, spitting out the words with contempt. “What kind of sissy name is that?”

“M. S. Fogg,” I replied. “The
M
stands for Marco, the
S
is for Stanley.”

“That’s no better. If anything, it’s worse. What are you going to do about it, boy?”

“I’m not going to do anything about it. My name and I have been through a lot together, and I’ve grown rather fond of it over the years.”

Effing snorted at this, an ornery kind of laugh that seemed to dismiss the subject once and for all. Immediately after that he straightened himself up in his chair. It was remarkable how quickly this transformed his appearance. He was no longer a comatose semi-corpse lost in a twilight reverie; he had become all sinew and attention, a seething little mass of resurrected strength. As I even-tually learned, this was the real Effing, if real is a word that can be used in talking about him. So much of his character was built on falsehood and deception, it was nearly impossible to know when he was telling the truth. He loved to trick the world with his sudden experiments and inspirations, and of all the stunts he pulled, the one he liked best was playing dead.

He leaned forward in his chair, as if to tell me the interview
was about to begin in earnest. In spite of the black patches over his eyes, his gaze was directed straight at me. “Answer me, Mr. Fogg,” he said. “Are you a man of vision?”

“I used to think I was, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

“When you see a thing before your eyes, are you able to identify it?”

“More often than not, yes. But there are times when it becomes rather difficult.”

“For example.”

“For example, I sometimes have trouble distinguishing men from women in the street. So many people have long hair now, a quick glance doesn’t always tell you enough. Especially when you find yourself looking at a feminine man or a masculine woman. The signals can get quite confused.”