Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

by Daniel Asa Rose

  Towering over him, Mary is waiting on him hand and foot. “Professor…pillow?” she asks, plumping it behind his back while also clicking the sound on again with her own remote.

  “Bless your heart, that’s ever so much better,” he says, using the locutions he picked up from his elderly immigrant parents. He clicks off the sound. She clicks it back on. “So how’re you making out?” he asks me.

  “The street sweepers are pretty much in agreement that there are no kidneys to be had, but I still have a few construction workers on the case,” I tell him. “Meanwhile we’re coming down to the wire. If we don’t find something in the next forty-eight hours, it’s Philippines here we come.”

  “You’re kidding about the street sweepers, right?”

  “Only a little,” I say. “The bushes are being beaten for you, man.”

  Click. Counterclick. I still can’t locate the source of that subtle piney scent.

  “I’m glad to see that Mary has a mind of her own,” I add.

  “Oh, she has a strong spirit,” he says, closing his eyes. “Though I must say I admire the concept more than the execution.”

  “So how’s the courtship going?” I ask.

  He starts ticking off on his fingertips. “I know she means well, but I generally like a little more conversation with my partners,” he says. “She’s surprisingly guarded about herself. Matter fact, it took me two days to get the weather forecast out of her. Plus, she keeps forcing flower tea on me to enhance my yin. Tell me honestly, Dan, do I strike you as someone who wants his yin enhanced? On the other hand, I can blather and blather and she doesn’t mind. It’s better than being with my therapist.”

  “You really have a therapist? When’d you decide they weren’t all narcs out to bust you?”

  He doesn’t bother answering me, opening his eyes to squirm upright on the slippery chaise. “In summation, Mary and I have a real rapport,” he says, “though it may be a while before she’s cooking gefilte fish and stuffed cabbage.”

  Well, it’s obvious something is making him feel good. He’s smiling more than he has on this entire trip. I can even confirm how many teef he’s lost due to kidney disease. Precisely two.

  “She seems to like you well enough,” I note.

  “And, Dan, not to sound stuck up, because I’m really not, but she’s not the only one,” he says, raising his boxy shades to glance at me. “You should see the receptionists at the front desk making goo-goo eyes whenever I walk by. I mean, when did I suddenly become so attractive to Chinese women? Maybe it’s one of those deals where foreign women find dumpy-looking Americans hot because they don’t know any better.”

  “Or maybe you’re handsomer than you think, Larry.”

  “Thanks, but I know what I am. I’m penetrating. I’m pithy. I’m down to earth in a good way-but handsome? No, that’s not me.”

  “Maybe you’re handsomer than you look,” I suggest.

  Click. Counterclick.

  “That’s deep, Dan. I’ll think about that. I always think about what you say. But, to be frank, I’ve never experienced anything like it. It’s as if Mary worships the ground I walk on.”

  “Or maybe she worships your passport.”

  “Pffft!” Mary has opened another Coke can for Larry. The miracle of carbonation seems to catch her by surprise every time.

  “That’s certainly a possibility,” Larry says, taking a sip. “I’m not so vain that I’m not weighing that as an active possibility. In fact, I’d like you to help me weigh that, if you wouldn’t mind. I could use an extra set of judgments.”

  But now, as though she’s caught the tenor of our conversation, Mary wants to put in some comments of her own. “Professor no eat!” she tells me, a complaint and a question all at once.

  “I’m eating, dear,” Larry says. “I’m not eating sea cucumbers, it’s true, but I’m eating a balanced diet of shortbread cookies with lemon icing and shortbread cookies dipped in fudge. Maybe it’s not your idea of a balanced diet, but I’m a big boy. You don’t need to mutha me.”

  Where have I heard this affectionate brand of squabbling before? It comes to me: in the kitchen of Larry’s parents, Rivie and Sam, back in Lynn, Massachusetts -the same mix of exasperated fondness. They would chuckle for the benefit of any onlookers as they sparred.

  Click. Counterclick.

  I think I figure out where the piney scent is coming from. I’m not positive, but does Mary have one of those Little Tree Air Fresheners hanging around her neck for a pendant?

  Scrunching forward so that he resembles the wrinkled old elephant in Babar, Larry offers me the box of Girl Scout cookies. Again I decline. But again Larry dislikes having his generosity stymied. “Here, take some cab fare, then. Who knows how much you’re putting out racing all over town? Mary, will you give Dan some bills from my wallet? And help yourself to some more while you’re at it,” he tells her.

  She’s become very familiar with his wallet in the past two days, I note. I refrain from saying anything. It’s his money; he can do what he wants, especially with that quarter-million-dollar icicle/truck settlement.

  Larry settles back on his chaise, disappointed that I keep refusing his money. My failure to press the advantages life affords me has always been a source of chagrin to him, a symptom of my white-glove upbringing.

  Mary leans forward with her air freshener dangling and starts probing me for hard data about her affianced. After all, it’s a two-way street, this marriage thing. She has a checklist to satisfy, too.

  “He big-ah boss, yes?”

  “I’m not a big boss,” says Larry, who seems to have less trouble understanding her than I do, maybe because of his own speech issues. “It’s just that she has to know that what I say goes. Like, if I say we go breakfast, we go breakfast. She has to do it my way. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, do you?”

  “He-ah very big professor?” she tries again.

  “They don’t come any bigger,” I confirm. “In fact, forget professor, he’s a commissioner! Back in Florida he’s like the world commissioner of pool chairs! He’s practically chairman of his condo association, and that’s one nasty campaign to engage in, am I right, Larry?”

  Larry cracks his knuckles. “I’m thinking of maybe running sometime,” he allows.

  “What’d I tell you?” I crow. “Chairman Larry!”

  “Chairman Larry,” Mary says, satisfied. She seems to admire the sound of this very much.

  “Hope you don’t mind a little ribbing,” I say to Larry as an aside.

  “It’s your nickel, you’re entitled,” he says, cracking his knuckles again, an activity that sounds a little like muffled gunfire.

  As if reading my mind, Larry embarks on a fond reminiscence of the weaponry he used to carry. I don’t listen to a lot of it, because, again, I don’t want to get sucked in. I can be of most assistance to him if I maintain my distance. When I tune back in, he’s talking about the gun he used to have that was in the shape of a wallet. If a perp demanded your wallet, you pulled it out like you were complying, and then you shot him dead.

  “I really miss my firearms,” he says, sighing, as though talking about an offspring who left for college in Hawaii. “I carried a gun for eighteen years. I feel very naked without a weapon. In particular I miss my.25-caliber jet fire Beretta. Very small, fit inside my palm. It was so highly concealable I used to take it to bar mitzvahs and weddings.”

  “You’re telling me you took a revolver to bar mitzvahs and weddings?”

  “No, you misheard me.”

  “Good! For a minute I thought you said-”

  “I said I took my Beretta to bar mitzvahs and weddings. My revolver I reserved for brises.”

  Picturing Larry in a yarmulke and semiautomatic…

  Then: Ow my God, yarmulke, it’s Friday, I forgot I’m supposed to go to Friday-night Shabbat services. I make my good-byes while I hurriedly gather my stuff.

  “I didn’t bother making a reservation for you, assuming
you wouldn’t be interested in going,” I tell him.

  “Why the hell are you going, you don’t mind my asking.”

  “I’m meeting my one contact from home-friend of a friend at the embassy here named Izzy somebody.”

  “Have you already told me who he is? I can’t think of it right now.”

  “Do you remember the first season of Survivor?” I ask him. “That sleazebag Richard Hatch who walked off with a mil?”

  “No, but that’s okay. I don’t do popular culture.”

  “Anyway, my friend is the federal prosecutor who convicted Hatch afterward for not paying taxes on his winnings,” I tell him. “I went to the case. Did a brilliant job. Nailed the guy for procuring a second passport and plotting to skip the country with his Argentine boyfriend.”

  “And this prosecutor’s friend at the embassy can help us how?”

  “Not sure yet,” I say. “I’m just following any leads I have.”

  “And how do you happen to be friends with this particular prosecutor?”

  I decide not to tell him that it was his connection, in a way. After Larry tried and failed to get me in hot water with the FBI years ago, I bumped into a guy at a party who would have been the one to prosecute me, if the FBI had found me suspicious in any way. The guy and I bonded over dinner, joking about it the rest of the evening, and now we go kayaking together. But why should I bother Larry with details? I can play mysterious, too. I look over his white shoulders and chest, innocent as heavy cream.

  “You might want to consider using some kind of sunscreen,” I reply.

  I hand the cabbie the Chinese directions Izzy faxed me and soon am weaving crosstown. Four dollars or forty-five minutes later, I’m let out in front of an old-fashioned student union-more cement than glass-but the receptionist in the rotunda indicates that the makeshift synagogue is at the other end of campus. Rather than give me directions in Chinese, she takes me by the sleeve and tugs me along through about a hundred yards of corridors into a courtyard, around some statuary, and up three floors of another building. Okay, this is more like it for an expat Jewish service-a couple of threadbare rooms off a college library.

  Three senses immediately tell me it’s the right place: 1. Sound. “You had your baby!” says an Australian-accented, glamorous older woman in leopard-print scarf who’s bear-hugging another woman. 2. Sight. A couple of well-dressed gentlemen are pointing at the sky outside the window, quarreling about whether the sun has officially set. 3. Smell. Burning toast. Who overdid the bagels?

  Yes, it’s my people, all right. I feel like Yuh-vonne throwing her arms wide and saying, I love you, Jewish!

  I’ve never gone to services in sandals and panama hat before, but what the hell. No one stands on ceremony when you’re on the road. At least I operate as if no one does. If I were going to be self-conscious, I might as well have stayed home.

  Izzy is apparently not here yet, but as people trickle in, I mill around making friends among clusters of Western Jews, mostly Americans and English, stationed in Beijing: a short, elegant gent from Baltimore, wearing bow tie and owlish glasses, who turns out to be the dean at this institute; his opera-singer boyfriend, who’s on sabbatical here from the Sorbonne; the Beijing bureau chief for an international news service; plus architects, bankers, and so forth. Everyone is witty, affable, competitive. It’s like old home week except with an edge, the sort of edge cultivated by brainy people who’ve cut their teeth in combative academies, sparring for fun but not entirely for fun. I travel from cluster to cluster, meeting an attractive young New York reporter who sizes me up to see if I’m a threat, and a Chicago judge passing through town who knows my lawyer brother-in-law and says to tell him “no hard feelings,” which I pretend not to hear, deciding it’s the kind of message that will do no one any good. I’m either going to have to tread these shoals very carefully or just shoot the moon.

  “A nondenominational service, I take it?” I ask. “Hopefully, not too much responsive reading?”

  This line helps me pass muster. The dean with bow tie smiles at me complicatedly.

  “Where are you from originally?” I ask a man with the American Foreign Service who wears a black yarmulke with gold Chinese characters.

  “I’ve been away so long I’m not from anywhere anymore,” he says-a boast that contains a bit of one-upmanship, I feel. “No one who comes to Beijing now has any idea how it used to be before the reforms,” he adds.

  “So true,” I say, meeting his challenge. “When I was here last in ’84, I could never stop and talk to ordinary people in Tiananmen the way I did yesterday.”

  “You trying to get yourself thrown in jail?” he pursues belligerently.

  Another man in steel wire-rims comes to my defense. “He’d have to try harder than that to get thrown in jail; he’d have to unfurl a ‘Free Tibet’ banner or something.”

  “Speaking of Tibet, do any of you ever find yourself swayed by the Chinese case for dominion?” I ask.

  “I was once shown a three-hundred-year-old document from some Chinese functionary or other,” the man in wire-rims replies, “in which he extended sovereignty over Tibet, but that’s a little like the governor of Texas saying he extends sovereignty over Mexico. Do they have a case?” he asks rhetorically, adjusting his spectacles. “On the basis of various particulars, you could say so, but it doesn’t add up to any compelling narrative.”

  “Harvard or Princeton?” I ask him.

  He adjusts his wire-rims again, too briskly to be nonchalant. “Harvard,” he admits sheepishly. “What was the telltale sign?”

  “The terminology of that last clause,” I say. “The giveaway was the word ‘narrative.’”

  “It couldn’t have been Yale?” he asks.

  “Certainly not!” I exclaim, using a mock-aghast tone.

  A chuckle circles the group. That clinches it. We’re meshpuchah, all but a few holdouts. I feel like Schindler at that banquet early in the movie, working the room so that by the time he left he was a pal of all the bigwigs. But I’m still wondering how to make my move. I decide to go for broke.

  “So does anyone happen to have a spare kidney lying around?” I ask.

  Expressions of amusement and surprise.

  “I beg your pardon?” says the black-and-gold-yarmulke man, who still needs warming up.

  “I’m in town scoping out a kidney for my cousin,” I say. “That’s why I’ve been eyeing your midsection somewhat lasciviously, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I had noticed,” he says a little icily. “You’re kind of cavalier about this, aren’t you?”

  “The riskier the situation, the more cavalier I try to be,” I say. “Keeps me from clutching.”

  “Maybe clutching’s not such a bad thing under the circumstances,” he rejoins.

  “I don’t know, haven’t you ever heard the ancient Chinese saying ‘When skating on thin ice, flash those blades’?”

  “Which dynasty would that be from?” he pursues with tightened lips.

  Time for others to step in. “Lighten up, Saul,” says the dean with bow tie. “Just because you have the best-looking yarmulke in the room, that doesn’t give you the right to foist your opinions on everyone.”

  But Mr. Black-and-Gold won’t let it go. “Have you even bothered to learn a word of the language?” he asks me.

  I smile at him. “This may sound weird, but I always try not to learn the language of the countries I visit,” I say. “I find I can pick up more sensory information without it, like how a blind person develops other skills to compensate. Have to stay more alert to signals from my environment without the crutch of language.”

  The others rally to my defense. “Why are you on his case, Saul?”

  “I’m just against checkbook medical tourism,” he declaims flatly. “There are two million people waiting for organs in China. It’s repugnant for cowboys to come in and try to jump ahead of them.”

  “I’ll meet your statistic and raise you one,” I say. �
�How’s this: Seventeen Americans die each day waiting for an organ of one sort or another.”

  “I’ll leave the American medical community to voice my position,” he counters. “I’m sure they have good reasons for loathing the practice.”

  “Yet even for them it’s not cut and dried,” I say. “I’ll tell you what my cousin’s nurses said. When my cousin was still undecided about going abroad, they agreed with the doctors, that he should sit still and be patient. But when my cousin’s mind was made up to go, they all said, ‘Good for you.’”

  “Hmmph!” says Black-and-Gold, half protest and half something else.

  “All I’m saying is that under ordinary circumstances I might be tempted to be dogmatic, too,” I tell the man. “But when it’s your own relative’s life on the line, you tend to see a few more shades of gray.”

  By now the others are nodding so much on my behalf that Black-and-Gold is finally forced to cut me some slack. “Well, in that case you might want to talk to Antonia over there,” he says. “She owns SER Global.”

  “What’s SER Global?”

  “Only the principal manufacturer of surgical instruments in the world.”

  She’s the glamorous Aussie who said “You had your baby!” when I walked in. She’s taking her seat in the front row beside the news bureau chief, who turns out to be her brother. Good, he’s already in my posse. But I have to plot my approach judiciously. If I approach her directly, it’ll be a one-shot deal and she’ll either cooperate or not. But if I give her room to approach me, I lose nothing if she doesn’t and still retain the option of pursuing her privately later if need be. Sound like a plan? But how am I going to pull it off?

  The service begins. I take my seat dead center, and a guy who looks like he could be named Izzy enters the room to take a seat behind me. We give each other the thumbs-up. It’s an energetic ceremony, full of the bellowing of songs and waving of arms to welcome in the Sabbath. The tunes are ones a child might make up in a playground by himself: simple and flowing. The rabbi is an enthusiastic twenty-something woman in Birkenstocks, cracking wise. I find myself thinking that she’s an example of someone who should be a little less comfortable with public speaking, but then decide that’s an uncharitable thought, the result of my being the product of a combative academy myself.