The Oriental Wife

by Evelyn Toynton

  When she got to his building, the doorman on duty was complaining about some unnamed person to a skinny, raddled-looking blonde with a dog under her arm; she waited until the woman had walked off before approaching him. This was the middle-aged man who had never acknowledged her in the months she had been going there—the younger ones said, hey, how ya doing, or winked at her as she went in and out. He let her deliver her whole prepared speech: how she worked for Mr. Eath, in 26D, who hadn’t shown up at the office that morning, or called in, who wasn’t answering his phone. “We’re very concerned about him,” she said primly, as though representing a whole army of Mr. Eath’s employees. “We wondered if someone could go check on him.”

  “I know who you are,” he said when she was finished, and then, his pale eyes full of malice, “Mr. Eath left for the airport early this morning. I got him a cab.”

  She backed away from him without a word; not until she was out on Sixty-fifth Street again, with the sun hot on her back, her jeans sticking to her legs—it was unseasonably warm, seventy-nine degrees and humid—did her brain begin catching up with what he had said. As she turned onto Broadway, she almost ran straight into a skinny boy wheeling a stroller, who yelled at her to watch where she was going. At Sixty-third Street a man on a scaffold shouted out, “How’d you like to sit on my face?” She kept going, kept going, noted green and red lights, stepped off curbs, crossed streets. Dimly, the sound of honking horns came through, and a man’s angry voice; she was standing in the middle of Columbus Circle; she couldn’t tell if the noises had been directed at her, but a middle-aged black man in a checked shirt took her arm and asked her if she was all right. “I’m fine,” she said automatically.

  “You sure?”

  She nodded.

  “No, you ain’t,” he said firmly, and guided her across the street.

  In a third-floor window on the corner of Fifty-eighth Street was a large, dirty-looking sign that said Irving Samson, DDS. She could go and pay Dr. Samson to drill her teeth, to silence the screaming in her head. She had not asked the doorman which airport Khim had gone to; it might be that he was only on his way to Rochester, to Montreal.

  Or he might be fleeing the agents of the Khmer Rouge, he might have gone to her apartment and be waiting for her, so that she could hide him. She began hurrying, faster, faster, sweat pouring from her. On Fifty-fifth Street she thought she saw him, ducking into a building, in a light-colored suit; on Forty-eighth he was there again, with gleaming hair; on Thirty-third a man with his shoulders and a flat brown face. But none of them had his stony grace.

  None of them looked back at her, either. It was the others who kept looking, the pale mad-eyed man in Times Square shouting about Jesus, a man with a cigar and a fat hairy neck in the garment district, a Puerto Rican messenger boy: she could feel their gazes on her face, her breasts, her legs, her hair, and moved faster and faster, skimming the pavement. It seemed to her she had never been the object of so much male attention as she was on that walk, with everything sticking to her: her hair and the crotch of her jeans and her green silk top—grown dark, she knew, with the sweat that dripped from her breasts.

  On her final sprint, heading east, she stopped in front of the Strand, where a book on the CIA was propped open in the window, and wondered if Khim could be a spy. If he was, she didn’t know which side he was spying for. She still clung to the thought that he had sought refuge at her apartment; she clung to it even when she reached her building and he wasn’t there, there was nothing in her mailbox, nobody in the vestibule. She wished the bum were hanging around, so she could ask him if anybody had rung her bell, but he had moved outside with the hot weather.

  When she could no longer bear looking out the window of her bedroom she headed for the office again, where the phone rang several times, and she grabbed the receiver only to hear someone asking for Mr. Eath. She took three messages, forcing herself to attend, to write the numbers down correctly, so that he would have nothing to blame her for. She went through the Rolodex; she read half a paragraph of a manuscript about the departure of the French from Phnom Penh; finally she went and searched through Khim’s entire desk, but there were only file folders, only contracts and printers’ invoices and pamphlets about educational reform, except for that piece of heavy paper in the top drawer.

  On Thursday, after lying on the floor all night with the radio next to her ear, arguing with herself about whether she existed, listening to people talk about their money problems and love problems and problems sleeping—she had discovered that she needed sound at all times—a letter arrived, not from Khim but from the offices of a foundation in Virginia whose name she could not remember hearing before. They regretted to inform her that the activities of the press would be suspended for the time being; she would be hearing from Mr. Eath himself shortly. In the meantime, they were prepared to give her a month’s salary, with thanks for her services and best wishes for her future. They regretted any inconvenience this termination of employment might cause.

  That was the first paragraph. The second one asked her to be at the office at ten on Monday, to meet with a Mr. Johnston, who would appreciate it if she could give him a list of authors to be notified and manuscripts to be returned. At that time, she could also give Mr. Johnston her key to the office. Once she had done so, the check would be sent to her within ten days.

  After she had read it several times she dialed Khim’s number again. Then she phoned Mr. Seng, whom she had not spoken to since Monday. She still thought he might know something she did not, that he might have some idea where Khim had gone. She had not considered that she would have to deal with Mr. Seng’s own distress. What would become of him, he wanted to know, what would become of his manuscript, how would he pay the rent on his apartment in Queens?

  Surely the Belling Foundation of Virginia would compensate him, she said, she would give him their address, so he could write them, but he was inconsolable. They might pay for the current manuscript, but what of his future, what was he to do, how to pay his rent, he would starve to death, what sort of work would anyone give him? He had been a professor, she remembered, he was an expert on the dancing Shiva, on the cult of Bhadeshvara. You must try the museums, she said desperately, you must try the Asia Society, but he hardly seemed to hear. Nor could she always understand what he was saying. It was true there were no very good job prospects for Mr. Seng, with his garbled English. He was sixty years old, he told her; he would wind up sweeping the floor in a grocery (at least she thought that was what he’d said). The small matter of a broken heart seemed minor in comparison, but she could not stop herself from asking him where he thought Khim might be. Immediately he broke into a fierce howl of outrage.

  “No knowing, no caring. Couldn’t caring less. I be there ten Monday morning.”

  On Saturday she went to her mother’s. It was raining out, which cooled the air and would also keep them indoors; she would be spared from making a circuit of the park with Louisa, who tended to slow down, even to stop entirely, for no apparent reason, at various points along the way, as though she had forgotten they were meant to be moving. And then the air itself would seem to hang motionless, closing in.

  Mrs. Rafferty ushered her into the front parlor, lowering her voice conspiratorially as she told her that Louisa had hardly been out that week, a recurring theme. But for once she was glad of Mrs. Rafferty’s presence; it was easier, when Louisa had been summoned, to sit back and let Mrs. Rafferty’s words roll over her. All that was demanded of her was an occasional nod, a murmur here and there. Mrs. Rafferty, growing expansive, harked back to her trip to Switzerland with her husband in 1938: how pure the air had been, how spanking clean the houses, and the lovely sound of the bells echoing in the valleys.

  But finally, well satisfied, she stood. Goodness, how she had been going on, she said as she gathered up their cups; she guessed Emma hadn’t come there to listen to her; she knew how precious their time together was.

  “So what have you been readin
g?” Emma asked, in an unnatural voice, when Mrs. Rafferty had gone. She had forgotten to prepare any stories for her mother, those humorous little anecdotes, tinged with absurdity, with which she usually set the tone on these visits.

  Louisa gave her an uneasy look. But she told Emma about her latest find at the Goodwill store, a historical novel about the mother of Richard III. “She was a very nice woman,” she said firmly, as though Emma might argue with that. When she was a child, Emma used to read such novels herself, on her visits to her mother; sometimes they would sit next to each other in the room upstairs, both of them with fat, slightly mildewed hardbacks on their laps. Emma had found the look of those yellowing pages, covered in dense print, soothing in themselves, even when she couldn’t keep track of who was intriguing against whom.

  “Is there news of your father?” Louisa asked now, in a frightened voice. She must have interpreted Emma’s odd demeanor as a sign that something bad had happened.

  No, no, Emma told her, he was fine, doing very well; he was going to be fitted for a prosthesis that week. After that she rose and said they might as well go upstairs.

  This was the room where Emma had been happiest as a child—where, in the days when Aunt May used to drop her off, she had sung at the top of her voice and whirled around and around and clutched her mother’s knees to steady herself. Then, when she was three, came the next phase, the era of Connie, when Aunt May was sent packing (Emma was forbidden further contact with her, because, Connie said, she had been rude and disrespectful to her, and dirty besides). After that it was her grandfather who fetched her and brought her to Mrs. Rafferty’s. By the time of the move to Connecticut, some years later, Emma was deemed old enough to take the train into New York by herself to spend the day with her mother.

  When she was ten, eleven, twelve, she used to plunder all Louisa’s treasures—her old dresses, her bits of jewelry, her shoes—in the sure knowledge that however she behaved, however bossy or disobedient or willful she was, her mother would do whatever she wanted. She would take Louisa’s green silk dress out of the closet and teeter around in the satin sandals she’d found in a box under the bed, while Louisa pleaded with her to be careful and she tossed her head to show she wasn’t scared; she would go into the tiny bathroom and smear her mother’s Woolworth’s lipstick all over her cheeks. Then, having tied an old silk scarf around her waist, she would fetch the photograph album from the cupboard and demand that her mother tell her stories about the people in its pages: there was the frail little boy she had taught in England, and his distinguished-looking parents, sitting on a sloping lawn with statues, rimmed by thick hedges. On another, flatter lawn young men in baggy trousers and girls in sleek belted dresses lolled beneath a rose-covered trellis. All of them, in those black-and-white photos, looked startlingly pale, while the bushes were dark and luxuriant; she’d had a sense, when she was a child, that in England the foliage was more vibrant than the people.

  But the stories she liked best were the ones from later on, when her father appeared, rescuing Louisa from mishaps involving overdrawn bank accounts, unwanted suitors, picnics drowned in muddy water. The man in those stories was ready to be coaxed into laughter, infinitely teasable, tolerant of others’ mistakes. She had sensed that her mother had not been so powerless back then as she was to become, that she had not been afraid of him, not at all.

  That afternoon she did not feel like mending the broken cup that stood on the little table, she did not feel like dusting the collection of objects on top of the dresser (despite her admiration for the Swiss, Mrs. Rafferty had never paid much attention to housekeeping). It was then that Emma remembered the photographs, which she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. “Let’s look at your pictures,” she said in a sprightly voice, going to the rickety pine cupboard in the corner. The album was on the bottom shelf, still in its peeling white-and-gold box with one broken corner. Some of the glue had gone brittle, and the tiny snapshots on the first few pages were loose. But there they all were, the young man named Julian featuring in the first four pictures, her mother’s blond, solemn young charge standing very upright next to a carved chair, in short pants and a sailor blouse. And there was Louisa herself, her hair tucked behind her ear on one side, her Botticelli mouth split wide into a tomboy’s grin, holding up her glass to the camera. She seemed, in retrospect, to have been courting disaster with that smile of hers—flaunting herself heedlessly before fate, unmindful of the dangers ahead.

  The pages that followed showed the apartment on Bogardus Place, some of its furniture familiar to her from her mother’s room at Mrs. Rafferty’s. Here there were more pictures of Louisa, less blurry than the English ones, as though they might have been taken with a better camera, and several of Otto, who still came from California once a year to visit her mother. But although the hallway of the apartment and the boxy kitchen and the cupboard from which she had just fetched the album were all carefully recorded in black and white, as though someone had wanted to document them for posterity, her father was absent, appearing only after several pages showing the living room from various angles. It was her parents’ wedding photograph; she could not remember ever seeing her father smile like that, as though about to levitate from sheer giddy happiness. Quickly, she turned the page to see what came next, but there was no next. The rest of the album was empty.

  Mr. Seng was waiting for her outside the building on Monday morning, a thickset, grizzled-looking man in a woman’s pink polyester blouse and baggy khaki trousers that didn’t quite cover his ankles. “I’m so sorry,” she said, holding out her hand. “Have you been waiting long?”

  He glared and told her yes, he had. Together they went upstairs, she in front, he following closely behind. This is the last time I will climb these stairs, she thought. I’ll never see the Giotto print again, or the velvet sofa.

  Then she remembered the piece of paper in the top drawer, the one with the beautiful calligraphy. As soon as she opened the door she went to fetch it from Khim’s office. Meanwhile Mr. Seng was standing by her desk in the alcove, scowling at the bookshelves, with their neat rows of the press’s English books, all bound in blue and white. He took down a volume on the Cambodian legal system, the first manuscript she had worked on for the press, and made a disgusted face as he read the name of the author. “Who getting this man write such book?”

  “I really don’t know. I suppose it was Mr. Eath.” She thrust the heavy sheet of paper at him. “Can you tell me what this says?”

  He took it from her and began reading. Then he looked up. “Where you find this?” he asked sternly.

  “In Mr. Eath’s desk. I thought maybe it would explain things.”

  Without a word, he carried it into Khim’s office, replacing it in the top drawer and slamming it shut. Then he returned to the alcove. “Private. No should reading.”

  “But if it’s private, mightn’t it tell us something about where Mr. Eath has gone? That’s why I wanted you to read it.”

  He shook his head decisively. “Nothing where gone. Private.” Before she could stop herself, she seized him by the wrist, shouting at him that he had to tell her, she had to know.

  He shook her off, and for one strangely intimate moment they stood glaring at each other, until understanding dawned in his face. She could feel herself blushing; it seemed the final humiliation that Mr. Seng should pity her. “I’d better check the files,” she muttered, turning away and opening the cabinet in the corner. A little later Mr. Johnston arrived.

  He was trim and tan and imperturbable, keeping up a constant flow of talk that allowed for no interruption: about his journey, about the heat, the government, what a pleasure it had been to read the press’s publication. Of course he remembered Mr. Seng, he had read his work with great interest, and as for Emma, he had heard excellent reports of her, clearly she had been an invaluable contributor to the important work they were doing. But unfortunately he was in something of a rush; he would have liked to spend more time with them, but he had an elev
en o’clock appointment uptown—“Fellow I’m going to see will chew my ear off, but he’s a fine man, a little lonely, I’m afraid, retired now and not much to occupy him. Used to be quite a muck-a-muck.” So if she’d turn over the keys, he’d just lock up and be on his way.

  Meanwhile he was looking around Khim’s office, nodding to himself. Didn’t he want the files? she asked, and he told her a colleague of his would probably be coming in the next week or so to clear things out. “I’m just what you might call the advance man,” he said genially. He looked at his watch. “I’m afraid I really must get going.”

  But Mr. Seng was not so easily deterred. He blocked Mr. Johnston’s path. “Must be paying me,” he said. “I coming here to get what earned for books.”

  Mr. Johnston looked from him to Emma and back again. “Now, I’m really not the fellow you need to talk to,” he said, slightly less genially. “I’m not the man who signs the checks.” Mr. Seng began talking again, loudly and indignantly, and Mr. Johnston held up his hand. “If you’ll just give me your details, I’ll make sure you’re paid whatever you’re owed. The last thing we want to do is cheat anyone.”

  Mr. Seng looked at Emma, who told him, “He wants your address. He’s going to send you money.” She went to the battered Rolodex on her desk. “I’ve got it here,” she said, and flipped through the cards until she found it. Then she removed it and handed it to Mr. Johnston, who put it in his pocket without looking at it. “How will you know how much he’s owed, if you don’t take the files?”

  “I’ll ask my colleague to look into it.” He went to the door and stood back, waiting for them. Silently, they left the office and waited as he locked up. Only then did it occur to Emma that this was the one person who might know where Khim had gone.