by Roy Kesey
She rubs her face.
–So?
–Well.
–You should meet him.
–Does he know about me?
–A little. Enough. How’s this—tomorrow we’ll be at the park.
–Okay.
Allison gets up, starts getting dressed, and I almost ask where she’s going.
I shower and shave, dig some old cologne out of the closet, splash on way too much, and it’s the cologne that does it. All those years, a shower and Drakkar Noir right after work, and off to the bar with Marie. I nearly make it to the park, but there’s this liquor store.
That thing about five years wasn’t a total lie, but there are always times. Once or twice a year, and it lasts a couple of days, or a week, or a month. This is how it goes: you never turn the television off. You call the liquor store, the one that delivers, every other day. And you know there are things out there, big things, but you can’t quite finish your sentences, not even in your head.
I finally wake up sour and don’t want it anymore. The radio says it’s Thursday. I decide on nothing but coffee and takeout until Saturday, and I make it that far. Barely, but I make it. So I try again. A shower and a shave, but no cologne. My best shoes even though it’s raining. By the time I get to the park my hair’s slicked back and my jeans are soaked.
There’s nobody around. I wait for an hour or two. The mallards are gone, probably huddled up under the far pier, so it’s just that canvasback hen paddling back and forth, and I don’t even know what she’s doing here. I’ve seen plenty of spring canvasbacks before, but always in the air, headed north for wherever.
The hen dives once, comes up empty, flies away. I go and sit in the gazebo and read the car magazine I brought, try to keep it out of the rain whenever the wind kicks up. Carburetors, carburetors. The hell with it.
I stop off at Belinda’s to warm up. She brings a cup of coffee and the creamers.
–Allison was asking about you.
–Really? What did she say?
–Nothing much. Just asking.
I stir in two creams, and ask if she knows where Allison lives.
–Up on Violet. That big corner house the Strattons used to own? I’d have thought you’d know that.
I don’t say anything, and Belinda walks away. I finish my coffee and ask for another cup. Belinda just looks at me. I shrug, put a couple of bucks under the mug and head back into the rain.
It’s a long walk up to the old Stratton place. I ring the doorbell and back off to the edge of the porch. After a while she opens the door.
–You ditched us, she says.
–No I didn’t.
–You never showed up.
–I tried.
–Not very hard.
–Okay. But I’m here now.
She waits, turns around, shuts the door, and I hear her calling the boy. The door opens again. The kid takes up most of the doorway. He steps onto the porch all surly and scared, hair hanging in his eyes, and Allison comes out behind him.
–Jared, this is Gerry. Gerry, Jared.
Nobody moves. Then I step forward and so does he. We shake hands. I smile. He looks down. So I smack him with the magazine.
He smiles a little, and punches me on the shoulder, hard but not too hard. I smack him again and he punches me a little harder. I smack him once more and he punches me so hard my arm comes loose. Allison says something sharp and I couldn’t tell you what it was but I already know the truth of it: done deal.
Body Asking Shadow
LIANG WENYUAN SLIPPED his key into the lock, opened the door to his apartment, and stopped to listen. The silence shimmered like snow. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard.
He removed his shoes and put on his slippers, stepped into the living room and closed the door behind him. Then he walked from room to room, unable to believe that the quiet would last. For the past two months he’d been avoiding his own home—mornings and afternoons spent at the university whether he had classes to teach or not, and evenings spent in the reading room of the clubhouse—to escape the hammering, drilling, sanding and sawing that roared down from the apartment above. But the building supervisor had promised him that the renovation would be done by this afternoon, and sure enough: silence.
Today had been his final day at the university. He had no more papers to grade, and no more committees or conferences. The dean of the history department had asked him to stay on for another year or two—he was only sixty, after all, and still a gifted lecturer—but Wenyuan’s sole interest now was research for a book he’d been planning in his head for years. He imagined it as an exploration of the relationships between the central virtues of the Tang Dynasty, and of ways in which these virtues might be reincorporated into modern life.
Loyalty, rectitude, equanimity, sensuality. Wenyuan doubted the book would sell many copies, but friends at the Ministry of Education had promised to sponsor it, so he wouldn’t have much trouble finding a publisher. And at any rate, after so many years writing dry articles and drier textbooks to secure promotions and his yearly teaching bonus, the very process of writing on something he loved would be reward enough.
Wenyuan stood at the window of his study, looking down at the clubhouse. On the roof there was a tennis court, now empty, and in front of the building there was a fountain; in the evening the carved dragon heads would spout arcs through the blue-green light of underwater lamps. Beside the fountain was a stone bench on which sat a young mother holding her sleeping infant. The sunlight rippled through the mother’s long straight black hair, and Wenyuan found the whole scene intensely irritating.
His research was not going well. Instead of clarifying his ideas, each text he read muddied them further. The silence still held, and he felt its weight against him. He thought of the previous upstairs tenants, an old, wealthy, bitter couple from Wuhan. He’d heard them only rarely—the occasional dropped book, voices raised in anger from time to time. Though they had not caused him any true problems, he did not miss the tense small talk of shared elevator rides, and had not been displeased to learn they were moving out.
He turned and walked to his library, thinking that perhaps a new text would guide him to clarity. His hand traced the spines of his books, along one shelf, the next, and nothing was quite right. He glanced at the weapon hung above the highest shelf—a Japanese officer’s sword, captured on the battlefield by his father on the very day Wenyuan was born, or so he’d been told. It had a dull brass hilt, and a wooden scabbard covered with old leather. He hadn’t removed the scabbard in years, had no idea if the blade was still bright.
His father hadn’t survived the Japanese counterattack against the airfield at Hengyang. He was shot in the stomach and succumbed to sepsis a week later, but just before he died he entrusted the sword to a friend. Keeping war spoils had been a crime, but the friend hid it to the end of that war, and through the second civil war as well. When he was able to return to Beijing, he presented the sword to Wenyuan as proof, he said, that his father had been a valiant man.
Wenyuan, seven years old at that point, had no trouble believing that the father he’d never known was a dashing, courageous war hero. Later, however, the image became difficult to reconcile with what few old photos remained, and with the stories told by his mother and uncles. His father, renowned as a gifted law scholar when the war drew him in, had apparently been a small, quiet, bookish man much like Wenyuan himself.
He wondered once again how his mother had managed to hide the sword through all of the madness that followed. Back in his study, he sat down and opened a drawer to look for a pen, and something caught his eye. He took it out and turned it in his hand: it was a small cricket cage, hand-woven bamboo, intricate and beautiful. It had belonged to Chongyi, his son, and Wenyuan couldn’t remember how that story had ended, if the cricket had died or escaped or for some reason been released. It occurred to him that singing crickets had first become popular as pets during the Tang empire, and perhaps a cricket
was exactly the sort of companion he needed, one that would take the edge off the silence without being too much of a distraction, one that might work as a talisman and maybe even sing him into work.
He caught a taxi to the pet market hidden behind Panjiayuan, and on the way he thought of his son. Chongyi worked so hard, and was so generous. Wenyuan only “wished he would visit a bit more often. It had been well over a year since Chongyi had made the trip up from Shanghai. Then Wenyuan thought of his wife, and allowed himself a brief surge of grief though she had been dead for more than thirty years.
He tried to stay patient as the taxi worked through the crowds of Panjiayuan tourists. There were often true antiques scattered amongst the refuse and replicas, but surely the tourists had no way of knowing which was which. The crowds thinned as the taxi left the flea market behind and approached the footbridge. Wenyuan paid the fare, thanked the driver and walked across.
To the left was a long row of dim shops full of aquatic plants in barrels, bins of colored gravel, huge tanks of black neons and glass tetras and albino tiger barbs; to the right were aisles of stands selling handmade birdcages, and the large area in the center was dedicated entirely to crickets. The tables there were very crowded, mainly old men who came only to look and chat. Wenyuan threaded through them, past stacks and stacks of cages—winter ones made of bone and tortoiseshell, summer ones of bamboo and gourd. Farther along were tables loaded with tiny glass arenas and brass prods for those interested in crickets that fought rather than sang. And at each corner there were card games set up between vendors, with dozens of people looking on.
He found the tables selling the kind of cricket he was looking for, and headed for the most crowded stand. He called out questions and nodded at the answers, pushed forward for a better look, took half a dozen in his hand before choosing, and worked through the pleasurable back-and-forth of arriving at a reasonable price. He took the bamboo cage from his shirt pocket and slipped his new pet inside. He nodded at the vendor, pushed out of the circle, smiled to himself, and then at a nearby table he saw a middle-aged woman, a foreigner, hairy and unpleasantly round.
What was she doing here? How had she even found this place? She spoke little Chinese, tried instead in her own language, whatever it was, English or German or Russian. They all sounded the same to Wenyuan: thick, throaty, meaningless. The vendor repeated over and over that the dull brown female he was holding—no good for singing, no good for fighting, no good for anything but making more crickets—was in fact a prime specimen of a very rare species, worth more than any other cricket in the market. He allowed the woman to talk him down to half his asking price, which was still a hundred times what the insect was worth. She overpaid for a cage as well, set smugly off for the footbridge, and Wenyuan smiled again.
Back home, he placed his pet on his shoulder and gave it a tour: the kitchen and living room, the library and study, his bedroom with its wide south-facing windows. It was a much bigger apartment than he needed, and far more expensive than he ever could have afforded, but his son had bought it for him. There had been no discussion, no advance warning, just a telephone call from Shanghai, Chongyi explaining what he had done, giving the address, promising that his father would never be uncomfortable again.
Wenyuan wasn’t sure what his son actually did in Shanghai. It had something to do with construction, he knew, and something to do with the local and regional governments. Regardless, for the past year he had lived in this beautiful space, big enough for a family of ten, and all for him.
He showed the cricket his books, the sword, his collection of old coins. He explained the historical significance of each of the jade statuettes lined on the shelves in his study. He put the cricket in the bamboo cage, stuck a slice of cucumber in through the slats, and placed the cage on the windowsill.
A few minutes later he was back in his library searching once again through his books, and the cricket began to sing. Wenyuan had thought it would take a day or two for the insect to feel comfortable in its new surroundings, but obviously it was pleased to be sharing his home. Then on the bottom shelf he noticed a book he hadn’t even thought about in years, Zhao Wenrun’s biography of the Tang empress Wu Zetian. He blew off the dust, took the book to his study and sat down to read.
Wenyuan snapped awake, found himself slumped in his chair, the Zhao text draped across his chest. He closed the book and set it on his desk. There had been a noise of some kind, something loud and percussive, but now the night was silent.
He glanced at the notepad on his desk, and on the top page was a single word: grace. The concept must have come up during his reading, but he couldn’t remember what had triggered it. The empress’ life was more a grisly pageant of deception and power-play than anything else, but examples of grace as understood by the Tang began to occur to him—porcelain from the Tongguan Kiln, the paintings of Chao Yen, so many lines from the poems of Li Bai—and perhaps this was another virtue he could add to the list, another chapter to write, maybe even the best place to start.
He circled the word and put his pen away. Grace: it had also been his wife’s way of addressing the world, and perhaps when he wrote it down he’d been thinking of her rather than the empress. He remembered a moment from their final months together, the evil of those years already circling them but not yet touching their lives, Chongyi almost three years old—they’d gone to a park, had seen a bird, a large bird, black and bright yellow. They watched as it rose from the branch, Chongyi’s uplifted face and his wife as she drew him close, and now he heard her whispering that she was pregnant again, that she felt sure it was a girl this time, and could they name her Xiaoying? How happy they had been, no matter how hard it would be to raise two children on his salary. A month later she had made the mistake of mentioning to one of her colleagues at the Institute of Art that in her opinion the recent criticisms of Wu Han’s play were harsher than the work warranted. Most likely nothing would have come of the accusations that followed if Wenyuan’s father had been alive to defend her, but the following week she was taken, and Wenyuan never saw her again. A few months after that, two students he had failed the semester before accused Wenyuan himself of rightist leanings, and the next nine years were ones he tried very hard not to remember.
Wenyuan went to his bedroom, changed into his pajamas and got in bed. He closed his eyes, felt sleep shifting over him, and again there was a noise. He sat straight up. It had sounded as though someone were running through his apartment, someone who stomped his feet as he ran, and didn’t know any better than to leave his shoes on indoors.
Suddenly he knew: the upstairs apartment, the renovation, and these were his new neighbors. He heard two low voices, then high-pitched laughing and shrieking, surely a child. And now the clomping headed in the opposite direction.
The noise began again around nine o’clock, and continued until noon. When he could take it no longer Wenyuan called the building supervisor.
–Yes, said the man, a young American family, a husband and wife and their daughter. They arrived late last night. I believe that the husband works with computers in some way.
–You must tell them that they cannot make so much noise.
–I will call them immediately. But know, too, how tired they must have been when they arrived. And think of the child, all those hours in airplanes. You too would have felt like running around.
–Yes, yes. But I would have taken my shoes off first. Could you at least ask them to do that?
–Certainly. Do not worry. Soon everything will be straightened out.
Wenyuan hung up, waited, heard the telephone trill upstairs. He listened to the muffled conversation, heard the father’s voice and the daughter’s defiant response. There was a bit more running, but it was quieter now. Apparently they had removed their shoes, and that was something.
Early in the afternoon there was a time of silence—the foreigners had gone to lunch or so it seemed—and as the cricket sang from its home on the windowsill, Wenyuan hur
ried through the rest of the biography, found nothing of interest amongst the betrayals and beheadings, and turned instead to Chang Heng’s description of the dancers of Huainan. Delicate snapping waists, he copied into his notebook. A glow of the lotus flower, shedding crimson flame. He felt his heart beating stronger, faster. Languid hesitant eyes. Yes, this was how he had imagined the source, and now it would all be so easy. Gauze sleeves whirl … gathered and held with combs … gowns of gossamer trail…
Then the Americans returned with their pounding and shrieking and crying, and the cricket fell silent. The crying was the worst of all, that and the girl’s shrill voice when she was happy, and it was one or the other, crying or laughter, all evening and well into the night.
The following morning Wenyuan called the supervisor again. He admitted that the foreigners weren’t wearing shoes, but insisted that the noise had barely abated, that he couldn’t read, couldn’t write, and something had to be done. The supervisor promised that the family would be quieter once they felt more at home, and asked Wenyuan to remember that the girl had a right to be only what she was, to act as a child, to be childlike.
Yes, thought Wenyuan. But not at my expense.
Over the next several days the noise got louder and louder. It appeared that the child’s bedroom was immediately over his study. The cricket hardly sang at all. There were times too when Wenyuan would hear footsteps overhead, though he was fairly certain that only moments before he had heard the whole family leave their apartment. He was not sure what to make of that.
He thought of writing a letter to his son hinting at the situation, implying that his help would be welcome, but surely Chongyi was very busy or he would call more often. Wenyuan also considered doing his research in the clubhouse reading room, but why should he let these people drive him from his home? And if he retreated now, the problem would never be solved.
He called the supervisor once a day at first, his complaints getting harsher and harsher. By the end of the following week he was calling two or three times a day. The periods of relative quiet after his complaints were getting shorter, and the phone conversations upstairs were growing angrier, as if the foreigners felt they had some right to be disrupting his life this way. He waited until one morning when the noise began particularly early—screaming and crying at five a.m.!—and called the supervisor at his home to insist that he come immediately. The young man did not want to, but Wenyuan insisted, shouted insults and threats and reproaches, and at last the supervisor agreed.
