Lost In Place

by Mark Salzman

  The touch that made all of this so entertaining was the contrast between Mrs. Li’s dignified appearance and her outlandish clowning; if you can imagine Grace Kelly teaching a beginning dance class by acting out Buster Keaton routines, you’ll get the picture. The other thing was that she somehow managed to shower individual attention on every student. If you sneezed in class, Mrs. Li gave you a tissue, Sudafed tablets and a glass of water; if you coughed, she gave you cough drops and a scarf to wear home. If you did well on a test, Mrs. Li led a one-woman parade around the classroom in your honor; if you did poorly, she tutored you privately until you improved. Every student was smitten with her, and Mrs. Li’s most impressive gift of all was the ability to make each of us think that we were really her favorite. I chose all the rest of my classes around this one.

  From that day on I loved college. I loved the classes, I loved the homework, I loved the starchy food, and I loved introducing myself as Holden Young’s roommate. “Really?” people would ask, their faces inevitably brightening. The boys would follow this with, “Holden Young? The soccer player? Cool,” while the women would glance from side to side to make sure no one was eavesdropping on the conversation, then say, “He’s the most gorgeous Asian guy on campus.” My association with him became the foundation of my social life, which was fine with me. One might imagine that it would have been torturous for me, five foot seven, skinny, a Chinese-studies nerd and full-time secretary of the Mrs. Li Fan Club, to have to live with such a monumental stud, but what redeemed Holden entirely was that he was not a playboy at all; he was even more shy around women than I was. He would stare at the freshman directory with one hand on the telephone and stay frozen that way until it came time either to eat, sleep or go to class. He ended up having one relationship during his whole college career, whereas I had two. By my calculations that makes me twice as virile as Holden Young, a statistic that gives me pleasure to this day.

  17

  My freshman year of college brought me the longest uninterrupted stretch of happiness that I’d known since the year my parents brought home our first used color-television set. My mind was almost constantly occupied, so time lost its usual meaning. I no longer measured time in hours, as I had at work, or in minutes, as I had while practicing the cello, or in seconds, as I had during algebra class or school dances. Now I seemed aware only of days and weeks. Every teacher I had was clearly passionate about his or her subject, and they gave the impression during their lectures of stretching their own minds to their limits, which I found highly contagious. Most of the students at Yale were passionate about something as well, although not necessarily academics. Many of them took their interests to the same extremes that I had, if not further. One fellow, known as the Morse Monocle Man because he lived in Morse residential college, was so interested in turn-of-the-century European history that he wore period clothes, a period haircut, refused to go out in bright sunlight without a period hat and wore a monocle even when he showered. The first time I saw him was in Sterling Library hunched over a book; I thought he was a wax-museum figure set up as part of an Oscar Wilde exhibit. At the other end of the spectrum was a woman whose legal name was Bird of the Phoenix Movement; I’m not sure what her interests were, but she wore ponchos, beads and floppy hats, and dyed the fur of her enormously popular dog (nontoxic edible dye, I’m sure) a different color every month. For the first time in my life I was a comparatively normal member of a community; I could have worn my baldhead wig if I’d wanted to.

  Most of all, though, I loved the work. It was like preparing for the Ch’ing Game all over again, only this time all of my professors were as enthusiastic as Mr. Rowland, all of them stayed long enough to finish their courses, and I got to play the Game at the end, which at Yale was to write a long paper with lots of footnotes, and to take the final exam in a historic auditorium. And this time everybody around me was preparing for the Game, too. I felt like Steve Martin in The Jerk when he finally bids farewell to his adoptive black family, moves into a white community, and discovers that he’s not alone after all, that there is a whole world of people out there who crave Twinkies and tap their feet to Lawrence Welk tunes just as he does. Yale was a nerd’s paradise.

  Once I had become an aspiring China scholar again, it was only a matter of time before I got the urge to dust off my kung fu uniform and throw a few dragon punches and tiger-tail kicks. By spring I was practicing on and off again in the steam tunnels under the dormitory. Holden came back to the room from soccer practice one day with a flyer advertising a martial arts competition that weekend—the Yale Open—and suggested I try competing. I had nothing to lose, so on the day of the competition I showed up and began filling out the form. Then I realized I had to choose a rank for myself. Sensei had always insisted that his ranks bore no resemblance to the ranks any other schools in Connecticut were giving, so I wasn’t sure where I stood. If I chose too low a rank it would look bad; everybody hates it at karate competitions when someone who should be a brown belt competes as a yellow belt just to get a trophy. I looked at the categories: white belt, yellow belt, green belt, brown belt, black belt. Oh, what the hell, I thought, and checked the box next to black belt.

  From a certain point of view, I could feel proud of the result: I took first place in forms and second place in fighting. From another point of view, however, it was a limited success, as there were only two competitors in the black-belt division. My opponent was a young assistant professor who was very serious about karate, however, so it was not a completely meaningless exercise, and our sparring bout in the finals, which was also our elimination bout, was exciting. If only Sensei O’Keefe were here to see this, I thought as the chief judge hung the medals around my neck—but then I changed my mind when I remembered that he would have beaten me within an inch of my life for the unforgivable sin of awarding myself a black belt without first having dealt with Auggie Doggie or Doggie Daddy.

  My experience at the tournament inspired me to start practicing every day, but a few weeks later an event occurred that forced me to rethink my commitment to martial arts yet again. For several days I had been exchanging glances with a young woman who usually studied just across a long wooden table from me in the library. (Annette and I had broken up just after Christmas. When you’re seventeen and have no car, a separation of fifty miles makes it a long-distance-relationship, and I failed the long-distance-relationship test.) The woman in the library and I gradually started saying hello to each other, then making small talk, and one afternoon she surprised me by asking if I wanted to take a break and have a walk around the library with her.

  We strolled around the campus, which was particularly beautiful, as the young leaves were finally appearing on the trees and the spring flowers were in full bloom. From where we walked we could see a row of blossoming trees in the old cemetery near the library, and she suggested that we have a closer look.

  In the cemetery we paused to sit on an unmarked sarcophagus and were in the middle of a conversation about what papers we had to write when a young black man wearing a leather trench coat appeared from behind a tree and approached us. Something about the way he walked toward us looked wrong. Then I remembered a bit of advice that a representative of the campus police had given us at one of the orientation ceremonies: Never hang out in the cemetery. When the man got close he said, “Hey, any of you got a match?”

  “No, sorry.”

  Then he opened the trench coat to reveal a lead pipe in his right hand.

  “Gimme all your money or I’ll split both your heads open,” he ordered, waving the lead pipe close to his leg.

  The way he was standing with it, all I had to do was rush him and hit him hard once in the face and he would have been done for. A kick to the balls would have worked. Hell, the woman I was with could have pushed him and he would have stumbled backward, fallen over a gravestone and been knocked out. But that’s not what happened.

  What happened was that I was so shocked, so utterly terrified, so transported
beyond any level of fear that I had ever known before, that I hallucinated. Everything suddenly became perfectly calm, perfectly quiet and perfectly all right. I felt happy! He didn’t seem like such a bad guy. I handed him my wallet without any feeling of anger or resentment at all. When the woman I was with extended her purse toward him, the man said, “No, not you. Just him.” He was a gentleman! I liked him more and more.

  “You got anything else?” he asked me.

  I remembered that one of the secretaries in Greenwich had given me a watch as a farewell present but that I didn’t like the feel of it on my wrist, so I always carried it in my pocket. Of course!

  “Yes!” I answered cheerfully, and handed it over. Then he said, “I’ll be watching you,” backed away from us, turned and disappeared among the gravestones. I was smiling; I thought it was a rather nice encounter. The woman I was with grabbed onto my arm and held it tightly. When I turned to face her, she let go of my arm and hugged me hard, chest to chest. Wherever you are, I thought to the man with the lead pipe, thank you.

  About halfway back to the library, however, I started to come back to reality. My hands started to shake, my legs felt weak, and then it occurred to me what a total, hands-down, pathetic, world-class coward I was. Not only did I not prevent that criminal from getting away with robbery and threatened assault, not only did I not avoid becoming a victim, not only did I not take advantage of the man’s ridiculously vulnerable posture, but I didn’t even think of martial arts until ten minutes after it had happened. Being reasonable, as most women are when it comes to matters of violence, my companion was relieved that neither of us had gotten hurt, and she reassured me that she was glad I had not tried anything foolish or heroic.

  But I was deeply troubled. I don’t mean just upset; I mean that for the next solid two weeks I couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to read or write a sentence, much less work on my final papers. All I could think of was that Sensei O’Keefe had been right all along. Sure, he was an asshole, but he was right: I was a pathological sissy. I saw that man with the lead pipe standing in front of me all day long. I relived the encounter thousands of times. Down in the steam tunnels I demolished him, I destroyed him, I maimed him, I bit him, I crippled him, I disemboweled him, I tore his eyes out, I knocked every one of his teeth out and made a necklace with them, and I delivered impassioned speeches over his dead body, with the president of Yale and the mayor of New Haven standing behind me waiting to give me the Town/Gown Joint Medal of Honor. But each one of these imagined victories faded, and I was left with the sickening memory of how completely vulnerable I had been. If he had said, “Kneel down now so I can split your head open,” I probably would have done it without realizing what I was doing. My only consolation—and it was precious little—was that at least my dad’s prediction about how I would cope with danger hadn’t come entirely true: I hadn’t shit my pants.

  My excruciating shame let up just enough for me to finish my work for the semester. Of course I stopped practicing kung fu in the steam tunnels; what a waste of time that had turned out to be. One morning I noticed a poster for the Yale Karate Club taped to the bulletin board of the East Asian languages building. It showed a cartoon of a tough-looking bulldog wearing a karate suit, below which a line boasted, “Walk in confidence!” Walk in confidence, my ass. Breaking the taboo against defacing property, I took a Magic Marker and altered it to read, “Walk in false confidence.”

  When the semester ended I went home and returned to my job in Greenwich. It wasn’t the same, though; once I had gotten hooked on the pressure and rewards of academic life, I found it hard to go back to sorting mail with the same Zen-like enthusiasm. Also there wasn’t anything for me to do at night, since I wasn’t seeing Annette or playing the cello, and all of my other friends had moved away. It was even harder to talk with my dad than it had been before. I had the impression that once I had made it safely to college, he felt that the bulk of his mission as my father had more or less been completed and there wasn’t much left for him to do. He seemed not to want to be a burden to me, which was hardly how I saw it. It was a long, dull summer, and I counted the days until I could go back to New Haven.

  The fall semester of sophomore year was somehow even more enjoyable than my freshman year had been. The more advanced the courses got and the heavier the workload, the more turned on I got. Also, the more deeply I got into studying Chinese, the more tempted I became to have another look at Chinese philosophy. Maybe, I thought, if I could read it in the original language, it might make more sense. Whenever I discussed this with anyone in the Chinese department, they inevitably said the same thing: You need to talk to Tungli Shen. He was a poet and Chinese teacher at Yale, born in Canton and raised in Peking, who had learned most of the classical Chinese literary canon from his father, a graduate of the imperial examinations. Tungli Shen didn’t just know Chinese literature, everyone told me; he could recite it from memory. They weren’t kidding; scholars from all branches of Chinese studies came to him with literary queries, and the Smithsonian Institution, recognizing Mr. Shen as one of the few people alive who could recite T’ang poetry in the form of ancient chants, flew him to Washington to do a series of recordings for them. Everyone agreed that he was the living embodiment of the Chinese scholar/artist/philosopher ideal. But I didn’t go to see him right away; I wanted to wait until I was better prepared.

  In October I received an envelope in the mail with no return address. Inside was a newspaper clipping from my hometown paper announcing that Michael Dempsey had been promoted to black belt by Sensei Timothy P. O’Keefe. Accompanying the article was a photo of Michael flying through the air, planting his foot on his brother Frank’s throat. He looked great.

  He’d done it! He’d stuck it out for the long haul, and now he wore the black belt, just as Sensei had predicted. In fact, Michael was the only one of us from that 1974 group to get his black belt, also as Sensei had predicted. I felt proud of him. Even though martial arts hadn’t worked out for me, I smiled inside thinking that someday some asshole might try to rob Michael in a cemetery, and, hoo boy, what a surprise that fellow would get. Several times I thought of calling him, but I didn’t. I did fold up the article and keep it in my wallet, however.

  During Christmas break I was home in Ridgefield when I got a call from Scott, my fellow State of Whoa traveler. There was going to be a big party on the other side of town and a lot of the old gang would be there. Did I want to come?

  Did I want to come? I’d been watching Gilligan’s Island, Lost in Space and Star Trek reruns all day, and had no other plans for that night except to watch All in the Family followed by The Mary Tyler Moore Show, followed by The Bob Newhart Show. I was there, man.

  I drove over in the old VW bus. The poor Karmann Ghia, after getting repaired following my accident, had run well for a year and a half, but then my brother got his driver’s license and had his turn at it. When he totaled it, it couldn’t be fixed. Served him right, too, after spoiling my agricultural experiment the year before with that sneaky World Book ploy.

  The party was in a big house that a group of guys from Western Connecticut State College were renting for the year. Scott and Lenny, the guy who drove the Triumph into the swamp, were there, and we had a good time reminiscing about our adventures, all of which seemed to have occurred many lifetimes ago. I mentioned that I’d heard that Michael had gotten his black belt.

  “Oh, yeah,” Scott said. Something about the way he said it made me curious.

  “What? Have you seen him?”

  “Sure. He’s in the bathroom.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. He’s getting kind of out of control.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, man, he’s into some heavy shit lately.”

  “What? What did he do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Ask him yourself—you know him better than I do. I think he’s headed for trouble soon. Go take a look at him.”

  Lenny laughed. “Don’t b
e a fucking mom! Dempsey’s cool, man. He’ll be fine.”

  My curiosity was unbearable now. I went into the bathroom, but didn’t see anyone. As I was leaving I heard a voice say, “Don’t forget to close the door.” It was Michael’s voice, but where was he?

  I pulled the shower curtain aside and there he was, lying on his back in the tub with all of his clothes on, covered with vomit.

  “Barabbas!” he said warmly. He looked terrible—overweight, puffy-faced, pale and obviously exhausted. “How the fuck are you? I heard you’re a nine-to-five chump now.”

  “Are you all right down there?”

  “Fuck you! I could still kick your ass. I’m just … hanging out for a while, checking things out. Taking a break.”

  “Hey, congratulations on the black belt.”

  “Thanks. Did you hear about my test?”

  “No. How was it?”

  His eyes, already half closed throughout our conversation, closed all the way and he shook his head groggily. “Intense, man. You shoulda been there.”

  “If you’d told me about it, I’d have come to watch.”

  “No, you asshole! I mean you shoulda been there. You should never have cradded lessons, man. I’m gonna take a break now. Catch you later, Barabbas.”

  His head lolled around, then his chin rested on his chest and he nodded off. When I returned to the party I said, “Shouldn’t we be keeping an eye on him? He looks pretty bad.”

  “Aw, he’ll be OK. He was speeding all day, so he took a downer to come down. He just needs some rest.”

  Back at school I was having a ball. I was too much of a nerd to worry that I spent most of my Friday and Saturday nights in the library, but part of the charm of Yale was that a whole network of adults had been hired by the university to worry about students’ social life on their behalf. Early in the spring semester our residential college master threw a dinner party at her house on campus, and all members of the college were invited. But the invitation read “Jacket required.” For most events like dances and mixers Holden happily lent me suitable clothes, even though they were all too big for me—he even taught me how to dance—and he would have been glad to outfit me this time, but when I mentioned the dinner party to my dad on the phone he said, “You don’t have a real jacket, do you?”