Waxwings

by Unknown

  “Don’t like the TV. He teacher, he have to read his fuck books.”

  “The wife, she take the TVs, all that good stuff. Now he got nothing.”

  “He got house—”

  “He got mortgage. He got kid.” Lázaro laughed. “Wife got the money. She go to Vegas, man. Spend, Spend! Hundred-dollar slots!”

  “He got money,” Chick said.

  “That VW he drive is piece of shit. Wife got Buick Park Avenue 2000, and loaded!”

  Chick knew otherwise. The ATM slip he’d found on the bathroom floor said, “Current Balance: $41, 389.17.” That the American could leave such personal secrets lying around the house could only mean he was very rich. Everything about the American intrigued him. A whole family—maybe twenty, twenty-five people—should be living in his house, but it was just him, sometimes the boy, sometimes not. Chick couldn’t figure it out—no family, no friends, no noise, no nothing, except for books, and Chick had never seen so many books. A man would go blind reading them.

  He said he was a teacher, but he never went to school.

  He was so large and clumsy that he couldn’t even ride a bicycle, tottering all over the road like a decapitated chicken. It made Chick laugh.

  But he had the money.

  The American possessed one skill, so far as Chick could see: he talked beautifully on the telephone. When he got going at that, he was a champion. Chick sometimes hung out on the stairs that led to the top of the house just to hear him talk. He used long words—learned from his books—and every word was different from the others. He’d lean back in his chair, look up at the ceiling, and the words would come rumbling out of him, all hooked together like boxcars in a train that seemed to have no end to it. It was impossible to understand what he was talking about, but to Chick’s ear every word rang like money.

  And what he’d found in the American’s garbage! Seven eggs in a carton made for twelve; a whole bunch of bananas, their skins lightly freckled; purple grape-wine in a green bottle, nearly full, with a cork in it; a tube of toothpaste, barely squeezed; a loaf of sliced bread in a bag; a wedge of cheese, half a kilo, maybe; and tomatoes, sausages that tasted of chicken, chocolate wrapped in foil, red-and-white-striped candies, and a whole box, unopened, of a breakfast food named Apple Jacks.

  Only a rich man would toss such things out, yet the American’s toes poked through holes in his socks when he walked around the house without shoes. Seeing him in his wrinkly pants, with little clumps of unmown stubble under his chin, you’d think he lived in the encampment under the bridge. He was rich and he was poor—like a hologram you tilt under the light and see now one, now the other, but never both at once.

  When Chick reflected on his fascination with the American, he remembered the gweilos who paid money—big money—to see the bamboo bear. He’d laughed, in his other life, about how they’d go up into the mountains and spend whole weeks looking out for bamboo bears. It rained all the time. If they got lucky, they’d see a bear eating bamboo shoots. Mostly, all they ever saw was piles of old bamboo-bear shit— thousands of dollars, U.S., just to look at shit. Shooting a bear would be something, every skin worth 2 million yuan. But for looking only?

  The American is my bamboo bear, Chick thought. I stare at his shit, like a stupid gweilo.

  The truck was stopped at a red light. Lázaro said: “Drop you same place?”

  “Yeah, same place good.”

  “You get in trouble, man—”

  “Is okay. Nobody see nothing.”

  Lázaro whistled in disbelief as he stepped on the gas-pedal. Half a mile later, he let Chick out of the cab. In the darkness and rain, all that was visible was his blue coat, sailing away down the sidewalk. Lázaro wound down the window and shouted to the coat, “Las Vegas!”

  “I see you’ve joined the shadow economy.” Beth had to raise her voice to make herself heard through the racket of construction coming from above. “I doubt they’ve got a single Social Security number between them, but they look like they’re doing a fairly good job. Considering.”

  “They’re surprisingly reasonable,” Tom said.

  “Just remember Zoë Baird.” Beth laughed. “And what’s with the gay Chinese guy?”

  “What makes you think he’s gay?”

  “Everything. The Castro look.”

  “He doesn’t look like Castro.”

  “The Castro. The San Francisco Castro.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know what he said? He was sitting on the porch steps with Finn and said, ‘We chew the bleeze.’ He was feeding him candy.”

  “I’ll have a word with him.”

  “I already did. Is Squashy Bear in the backpack?”

  Finn came into the kitchen, dragging a ragged bundle of roofing-felt behind him on a length of string. “I like Chick,” he announced. “I really like Chick. He gave me this dog. His name’s Anthony.”

  Beth looked across at Tom; an any-wife-to-any-husband telegram that read, WHAT DID I SAY? Its tone was threatful. To Finn, she said: “Cool, pumpkin.”

  “He killed a cat. He ripped its insides out. Then he ate them.”

  “Finn!”

  “Anthony hates cats. He chases them up trees. Sometimes he kills them. He’s a German shepherd. He’s only got one eye.” Finn wandered out of the kitchen toward the open front door, trailing his killer hound.

  “Well,” Tom said, “I’ve been giving him his blue-green algae,” rolling the r in “green” to get a rise out of Beth.

  “You’re still telling him those Mister Wicked stories?”

  “Are you still letting him watch the Cartoon Network?”

  Warming to the now-familiar exercise, they began to row in earnest.

  Chick liked the sound of hammers. The forestlike silence of the city set his nerves on edge—like people were watching and waiting for something real bad. When the Mexican boys got going, tacking down the plywood sheeting and the felt, he was comforted by their homely noise. The five men fell into a rhythm like some Beijing rock band like Cui Jian: wah-da-da-da-da, wah-da-da-da-da. Chick conducted with his fists and feet, grunting in time to the hammers as they fell in sequence. Heavy metal!

  Tom relocated to the kitchen. He stuffed his ears with cotton wool, turned up the volume of the stereo and played Mahler’s Fifth. That didn’t work, so he tried the Britten “War Requiem,” then the “Ride of the Valkyries,” but the hammers smashed the music into a chaotic rubble of disconnected noises. Fleeing the house, he drove out to the university campus, where the underground parking lot beneath Red Square had been emptied by the holidays. His office was cold; the few books on the shelves—Strunk & White, a College Webster’s, Sister Carrie, The Pushcart Prize XIX —had the random air of titles abandoned to a garage-sale. He turned on the frigid radiator below the window; as the water knocked and rattled in the pipes of the antique heating system, Tom heard a tiny gang of undocumented Mexicans banging away with hammers.

  His office took an age to unfreeze. He sat at the black metal desk in his old Burberry tweed overcoat, trying to think of entertaining things to say, within the space of four minutes and forty seconds, about aliens in America.

  For Beth, the idea of life after Tom had always included—in a woozy, abstract sort of way—dating. When she thought about it, which wasn’t very often, she saw a waterfront restaurant, floating votive lights on the tables, the menu hard to read in the near-darkness (she’d go with the sea bass), and candid, ardent talk between grown-ups, untainted by the niggling, evasive ironies that made real conversation with Tom impossible. And afterwards? Well, that would have to take care of itself, though there would obviously be an afterwards.

  But it looked as if thinking about it would be as near to dating as she’d ever get. Most of the men she knew were boys, like Robert, in baggy cargo pants and over-engineered running shoes. The rest were married, gay, or neuter. On the evenings when she didn’t have Finn, she found herself hanging out with Debra, eating take-out Chinese one night, take-out Th
ai the next. One night, they went to the Crocodile Cafe to listen to a new band, but they both needed to be up at the crack, and had to leave before the music started.

  Five days after the company Christmas party, a David Ziegler called her at the office. Though everyone on the boat had worn name-tags, she couldn’t place him. Was he that stooping, spindly Californian from the ad agency who’d gone on about the miseries of the Seattle winter? Or the bald, pugnacious attorney who’d gone to college with Steve, and wanted to talk boating? To David Ziegler, she said that of course she remembered him, and that she hadn’t seen the new Woody Allen yet.

  They agreed on the next night, which suited her parenting schedule. At six o’clock, at Von’s, he was already sitting at a table and signaling to her as she walked through the door, and she immediately remembered him—or at least his glasses, which were oversized, with rainbow frames. She associated nothing off-putting with these whimsical specs, though she couldn’t recall a word of what had passed between her and the trim, pink, fortyish Mr. Ziegler.

  The waiter arrived at the table just as she did. Mr. Z.—white teeth, thin lips—gave a brisk, compact smile and gestured for her to order first. She asked for a Dirty Martini, on the rocks, with a twist. He told the waiter to bring him a Perrier, which made her wonder why he’d suggested Von’s, where the air itself, foggy with the smoke of several packs of Marlboro Lights, had sufficient alcohol content to fail the Breathalyzer. Presumably, he’d assumed that this was the sort of place that she liked, which it wasn’t. She cast her mind back uneasily to the party, where, she now remembered, her champagne glass had been kept topped-up by an over-attentive flunky from the caterers. He must’ve thought she was a lush. Oh, god. She made a point of ignoring the Martini when it came, and in the twenty minutes before they had to leave for the movie theater she tried to artfully draw out Mr. Z.—no, David—on the question of who he was, and why he’d asked her out on a date.

  He’d retired this summer from the licensing division of “the big M” and since then had been setting up a non-profit. Steve Litvinof was on his board.

  “Our aim,” he said, as if this was a public meeting, “is to span the digital divide and put new technology into the hands of the underprivileged.” Relaxing only slightly, he described a pilot project that was already up and running in the Central District. He was getting black kids online, giving computers to grade schools and youth organizations, and establishing a film co-op so the kids could make documentaries about their neighborhood.

  So he was the compassionate type, if a bit stiff—or maybe that was just shyness in her company. Smiling, she took a swig of her olive-brine-flavored Martini. If drink was meant to be her weakness, it might be a good idea to show a little now. She seized on the film co-op as the most promising item in the package, and asked if the kids had started shooting yet, how much adult supervision they were being given, whether any local film-makers were involved.

  “You’d have to talk to my project manager about that. I’m just the meat-and-potatoes man. You know, funding.”

  Oh. Yet if David Ziegler seemed on the surface to be colorless, his teasing rainbow glasses seemed to promise that something more fun lay beneath the surface. She asked what had drawn him to the Central District. He appeared to be momentarily puzzled by the question.

  “Well, I have a house in Leschi, so I drive through it most days. On Yesler. It was an obvious market niche. If the program works out there, I’m planning on moving into other cities. Oakland . . . South Central L.A.”

  Like Steve, restless for territory. “East St Louis? Roxbury? Harlem?” Beth said.

  “That kind of thing.”

  As they crossed the street to the theater, he said, “We’re calling it TechReachZ.” Inside the cinema he took stock of the rows of empty seats and said, “Woody’s turning into a nonprofit too.”

  Beth laughed, rather too loudly, feeling that at last, in the kindly half-dark, the rainbow specs were beginning to come into their own.

  The movie was slight but pretty to watch, with Sean Penn as the second-best jazz guitarist in the world. Set in the sepia-colored age of the Great Depression, it had gangsters, vintage automobiles, and swing music that sounded good on the Dolby sound system. Beth tapped her foot to “Sweet Sue” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Though the script was a bit short of really funny lines, she noticed that she and David laughed at the same moments. Penn, in the role of artist-as-engaging-jerk, was upstaged by an actress who played an adoring mute; Beth had never seen her before, but thought, Take note, Soon Yi. Halfway through, she felt the distinct pressure of David’s shoulder against her own, and without turning her head from the screen she swiveled her eyes sharply to the right, but saw that he was only digging into his trouser pocket for a handkerchief.

  When it was over, he remarked, “It’s a mystery to me how he always gets these big-name stars. How much do you think a movie like that would gross? Ten million? Fifteen?”

  “I liked it,” Beth said. “Do you know the name of the woman who played Hattie? I didn’t recognize her.”

  “Samantha Morton. She’s a Brit. Maybe that’s why she got to play a mute.”

  Thinking of Tom, Beth giggled, but wasn’t about to explain the joke. David had booked a table at Wild Ginger, on Western. The night was dry and mild, and they walked the half-dozen blocks down towards the waterfront. Between the old brick and stucco buildings that flanked Union Street, a departing ferry showed like a suspended jack-o’-lantern. On the corner of Second, four black boys, in black-and-silver parkas and matching Raiders caps, barely into their teens, stood leaning against the wall, smoking.

  “My clients,” David said when they were safely past.

  “Do you have children of your own?”

  “No,” he said—in the same tone, she thought, he might’ve used if asked if he had herpes.

  She felt that she ought to make her status plain. “I have one.”

  “Yeah, Steve said.”

  So he’d been doing some research—which meant that Steve must also know that she and Tom had separated, which meant in turn that—

  “A boy, right? Philip?”

  “Finn.”

  “As in Huckleberry.”

  Again David Ziegler seemed to know more than he ought to. Finn’s name had been Tom’s idea; she’d thought the literary allusion pretentious, but eventually went along with his enthusiasm.“Actually, no,” she said, “I’m half-Irish. It’s a family name.” Which was half-true.

  Her unease deepened when they stepped inside the restaurant and the maitre d’ smiled at David and said, “Your usual,” then showed them to a corner window-table. So she sat down in the cane chair assigned to all his dates—weeks and months and maybe years of women taken to the movies before a dinner interview. She wondered what percentage of her predecessors in this seat had ended up in his bed.

  But a date was a date, and—rusty at the exercise, long out of practice—she played along. Looking over the long menu, she said, “Do you want to share things?”

  He glanced up and smiled. He had a good smile. “Okay,” he said. Then, “I eat vegetarian.”

  Giving the sea bass a regretful miss, she settled for squash-and-sweet-potato soup, the satay of sweet onions and Chinese eggplant, asparagus and black-bean sauce, tomato and tofu, and Sichuan green beans. When she asked for a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, David said, “I’ll have the same,” which pleased her to a degree she found faintly embarrassing.

  “Even when he isn’t acting in them,” David said, “all his movies are really about Woody.”

  “Yes!” Beth said, surprised by the crispness of his judgement, and feeling encouraged to talk about this Samantha woman’s performance, which to her seemed to project all of Allen’s misogynistic fantasies.

  David nodded as she spoke. “It’s essentially about a self-absorbed artist whose shabby treatment of women can be excused because he’s got more important things on his mind.”

  And she’d thought
him colorless. She gazed at him across the table, censuring herself for her recklessly premature judgement, and David caught her gaze, his pink face further pinkening. For a couple of seconds, their eyes locked, and Beth felt a heady rush of affection.

  “Well,” he said, “at least that’s what it said in the New York Sunday Times. Kind of.”

  She masked her disappointment as best she could.

  Over the soup, he talked about how he was living in a rented loft above Pioneer Square while his house was being remodeled—gutted and rebuilt, it sounded like. His architect was named Julian, his contractor Emerson, which put Beth in mind of Tom’s ragged crew of illegals, whom she spun into a story. Laughing, she told of the crazy scaffolding, the hysterical Chinese guy on the roof, the sad-sack Mexicans, and conjured a picture of extravagant destruction, in which a bunch of inept roofers transformed an entire house into a pile of smoking dust. Referring to Tom, she said “my ex”—a phrase she’d never used before but which suddenly seemed to define him.