The Love Wife (23 page)

I wished now more than ever that I had known him. He was not a desperate refugee like my mother; he was also from Sichuan, but he had come to America in the forties, before the war, for graduate work. On a fellowship. He had, in fact, had his choice of fellowships, my mother used to say, offers from all the number-one schools. If he had lived, I might have grown up a faculty brat; as I tried to imagine sometimes. Sometimes I tried to imagine a whole different life—the grad-student baby-sitters, the department scandals, everyone knowing your name and IQ.

Instead I grew up my mother’s son.
Of course I was worry about those sharks,
she admitted.
But in my heart, I know they will leave me alone.
She was just lucky that both her basketballs kept their air until the end of her swim, and that she happened to have that cousin to help her once she reached Hong Kong. As for why she had to leave:
I ate so many chili peppers when I was little. Make me too spicy for those Communists. A spicy girl.

Was she too spicy for my father? Was he too bland for her?

— Your father had Ph.D., she told me once. He was scholar. Also he was citizen.

— Is that why you married him? I asked.

— I could see he was going to be success, she said. Many man are citizens, but not all are the success type.

— And what did he think about that?

— He didn’t care why I loved him, she laughed. So long as I married him and not someone else.

— Was there someone else?

— He wanted me to marry him, she said. That’s all.

— He loved you.

— He loved me, yes. It was as if he opened a book, and there was my name. Period. He liked my cooking. Remind him of home.

— And you? Did you have a book like that?

She laughed again.

— Me! I never care too much about what is inside book. If you ask me, a book is just someone make joke. Write everything one way. In fact, life is all kind of way. Not just one way. If you ask me, did I marry him, sure. But can I marry someone else? If you ask me, my answer is again, sure.

Now I studied the pictures and thought I could see, in that picture of the two of them, how he was pulling her arm in toward him. Maybe it meant nothing that he not only clenched his right elbow to his side, locking her forearm against his body, but grasped her wrist with his free hand as if to make absolutely sure she would not slip away. Her arm, caught though it was below the elbow, was hardly bent; her body too swung away from him, as did the wrinkly mass of her hair, and her gaze. She looked as though she was trying to glimpse something just around the corner. Maybe it meant nothing. Still I could not help but notice that this was the one picture in which my father did not look as if triumph was once again his.

— I wouldn’t make too much of it, said Blondie. It’s only one picture.

But she also said: — It really is too bad you don’t have a brother or a sister or an aunt or uncle to ask.

And: — You never trusted her, did you.

— No, no, I did, I said. Of course I did.

But another day I had something else to show her—how many new clothes my mother had bought but never worn. Slacks, shirts, cashmere sweaters. As if she was saving them for something, or thinking about returning them. She typically pinned the receipt to the inside of the garment.

— I felt that way sometimes, I said. Like something that might just get returned.

— And here I feel that way too, said Blondie. What a coincidence.

BLONDIE / 
In the beginning he received much sympathy. Is there a word for the satisfaction of a pain people understand? His misery connected him, in the beginning, to others.

As the months wore on, though, he was more and more alone.

CARNEGIE / 
The world buzzed; deals were struck; other people died. I became a death bore. Mr. Memento Mori.
You too,
I wanted to say.
You, and I, and everyone. Everyone.
The world, which not long ago had seemed divided between those who had kids and those who did not, was now obviously divided between those who had lost a parent and those who had not. And what had I to say, really, to those who had not? I could not converse with them.

You don’t know. You don’t know.

You can’t know.

You, and I, and everyone.

I took more family time now. I helped Wendy build an igloo, a wigwam. I learned to distinguish between butterflies and moths, alligators and crocodiles, sea lions and seals. I went on a camping trip with her class and pulled a kid out of a stream.

I helped Lizzy memorize Shakespeare.
The quality of mercy is not strained.
We went bowling. Took up Rollerblading. Looked up countries in the news in an atlas. How far off China seemed! Much farther than I’d realized. How I wished I had gone back to China with my mother while she could go; I vowed to at least take the kids again sometime.

I spent time with Bailey. Getting up with him at night, so that Blondie could sleep. Playing earthquake with him. Taking him for walks in his Snugli. I gave him massages. Brushed up on my lullabies. Kept Kodak in business. Every day he seemed to do something new. Learned to hold his head up. Reared up on his arms like a lion. Rolled over from his back to his stomach. Babbled, babbled, babbled.

How much we had to say to each other!

I tried to live so I would have no more regrets. Daily, I asked myself,
Is this living? Am I alive?

Outside of the nursery, I ceased singing. To the relief of all around me.

I agreed to go into couples therapy. One might not think it would cost one hundred dollars an hour to rid me of the idea that I had killed my mother by taking a day off. However, it did. My other theory was that I had killed her by sending Blondie. That was expensive too, as was Blondie’s idea that she’d killed my mother by closing her eyes.

— I miss things, she said. It runs in the family.

I took up Chinese. I didn’t have the wherewithal to take a class, but I did locate some great software. I vowed to memorize five characters a night, beginning with my name:
Guangfu
—Vast Riches. Blondie helped me copy the characters when I had questions about the stroke order and, though it wasn’t my focus, insisted I learn to pronounce the words I was learning.
Tian
—sky.
Da
—big.

— Let’s get a tutor. We can study together, she said. You can learn, I can review.

We embarked on a search. In the meanwhile I began checking in with a number of sites on the Internet, and was surprised how Chinese this made me feel.

— There’s Han Chinese, I said. Hong Kong Chinese. Mainland Chinese. Overseas Chinese. And now, ladies and gentlemen: Internet Chinese.

— Dad, said Lizzy, replenishing the printer paper. — There is not!

— Ah, but look at me, I said. Exhibit A. Descended from the noble Hypertext family, which dates back—scout’s honor—to the late twentieth century.

— You’re hogging the computer, complained Wendy.

— You’re being funny, complained Lizzy.

— I’m getting in touch with my heritage, I said. The question is, How does anyone get in touch with himself without the computer?

— I hope that’s rhetorical, said Lizzy.

I pulled Chinese poems off a poetry site:

And after you’re gone, nothing left to do,

I go back and sweep the fishing pier.

I was surprised by the purity and beauty of the lines and considered putting some on Mama Wong’s tombstone:

Spring now green, you lie in empty woods,

still sound asleep under a midday sun.

My mother, though, was not Internet Chinese. She was a Sichuanese businesswoman who always got a good return on her dollar. I decided not to put poetry on her gravestone, given that she’d probably have preferred a copy of her tax return from the year of her highest net income.

Poetry has no use, that I can tell you.

Still I felt a connection to the Chinese words I found hard to express. All that suggestion. All that reticence, and economy, and melancholy.

What kind of person look like suddenly China-crazy? Not Chinese people. Not real Chinese.

I pulled poems up all the same. Western poetry too, poems I remembered from my romantic youth:

Mother, your master-bedroom

Looked away from the ocean.

And:

It happens that I am tired of my feet and my nails

and my hair and my shadow.

And:

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

But it was the Chinese poetry that spoke to me, somehow.

As if read Chinese poetry make you Chinese!

BLONDIE / 
How I loved seeing him interested in poetry again! As at odds as it seemed with his ironic grown-up self.

A replacement for his singing, perhaps?

He read me things sometimes.

— Beautiful, I would say. Beautiful. Read me more.

Then one day I said: — I feel a kinship to it, too.

— Do you, he said.

— I love how it makes you slow down. How it puts you in the moment.

— How it puts you in the moment, he said.

— I know that sounds New Age.

— It may put you in the moment, he said. But I know this whole way of thinking. I recognize it.

CARNEGIE / 
I could hear my voice rise with an impatience and insistence that surprised me.

Said Blondie slowly, then: — It’s in your blood.

— Yes.

— Well, she said. And suddenly she sounded like her father: 
— So then what does this mean? In your view?

I found a new batch of photos one day. The people in these pictures mostly wore Chinese dress, but a few of the younger men wore Western. They had shiny hair and shiny faces, and a certain swagger. Who was who? I tried to remember things my mother had said over the years, but all I could recall was that most of her family was dead. That she had lost all three of her brothers—or were they half brothers?—in the War Against the Japanese. Were they the swaggerers? I recalled too that her father had died early—was he one of the older, gowned men?—and that though the women in her mother’s family used to live to be a hundred, her own mother—one of the women?—had died young too, of grief and poverty. She was not even my grandfather’s wife, exactly, but a love wife—a concubine—his favorite. I remembered too that my grandfather was a scholar turned chile merchant, and that once he died his family turned my grandmother out of the house. But more than that I could not remember.

Blondie said that if I had been a girl, I would know everything, and who knew but that she was right. Much as I hated all things New Age, I began in any case to meditate, at her suggestion, to see if that would help my recall. I kept a small notebook by the side of the bed at night, and carried another around in the daytime, in case things came back to me.

Omm. Omm.

This did seem to help, slightly. Only what came back were not stories about my family in China so much as images of my childhood here: Of my mother, young and preoccupied. Of the powdered milk we drank, not being able to afford fresh. I remembered the peaches my mother brought home for us one day—two beautiful, enormous peaches, not one for her and one for me, but both to share, one that day and one the next. One had a bruise; she insisted on eating that part. I remembered the taut give of their fuzzy skin; I remembered their thick smell and their juicy flesh and, inside, those strange red-ridged cups that had held the rutted pits. So close had they grown, the pits and the flesh, so completely had they fit themselves to each other; and yet look how they came apart, just like that, there on our melamine cup saucers. The saucers my mother had bought cheap to use as small plates, and were still in good shape. They weren’t like our larger plates which, having doubled as cutting boards, sported dark brown cross-hatching in their centers. Across the table our gray metal fan turned and turned its head, like the radar on a warship. How hot the apartment we lived in! In the summer of course, but in the winter too. It was because we lived on the top floor, my mother always said. Anyway, it was better to be too hot than too cold, and how lucky we were to have a window. We left it open until the heat was turned off in the spring, never imagining how cold a house we would someday live in, when finally we were rich enough to buy a house, but not rich enough to take our eye off the gas meter.

Every day was full of struggle, but it was struggle with a purpose. My mother beat me, it was true—with rulers or with belts, she was flexible that way—but that too gave a meaning to things. Made me part of the plan.

Or so I tried to explain to Blondie. I tried to convey to her the long days into evenings my mother worked keeping books—she had to, having two jobs. I tried to convey how anxiously I waited, alone in the apartment after school. How I leapt to my feet when I heard her marching up the steps. Even at eleven o’clock at night she would march up as if she were just starting her day; and then it was time for one more accounting. She beat me if I had dropped by a certain friend’s house, say, and lied about it. She beat me if I had been caught stealing candy. She beat me if I had handed my homework in late, or gotten a B in math.

— Oh, honey, said Blondie.

My mother never talked about her day, or her past, or my father, I explained. We never wondered what life was, or if we were happy. The apartment was too hot; that’s what we knew. We were tired of listening to our neighbors fight. We desired a whole peach each.

— Of course you did, said Blondie.

— In a way we were lucky, though.
This is a big life,
my mother once said, after we moved. She walked around the house counting the windows, and said,
So many people have no story; we have a story. A big life, a big story. Every day going up up up! In a way we are very lucky.

Blondie was quiet a moment, then said: — Those were holy days.

— Not to romanticize, I said.

— Still. They were holy.

— We were making money.