Equal Love

by Peter Ho Davies

  “Your luck is lousy,” Pang told him, less with sympathy than with approval. “Only natural.”

  Lim played on, but his concentration was poor. He was restless, thinking about reopening his father’s office, the huge rolls of white paper waiting for ink. He didn’t mind that he was losing. He had taken a kind of pride in spending money on the funeral arrangements. The mourners had done a good job, and he told himself he would think of his losses as a tip, but after a while he grew bored. He had such bad cards the game held no interest. He folded again and got up to stretch his legs.

  The others played on—Pang was betting hard and winning, mostly at his son’s expense—while Lim walked slowly over to his father’s casket. He ran his finger along the rich teak and sat for a moment in the chair, listening to the bets being called from the table. The ginger fish was cold and congealed. He picked up his father’s spectacles from the table beside him and slipped them over his own ears as he had as a child. He blinked, dizzied by the blurred images through the thick glass. Over the lenses, he saw that the cigarette in its jade ashtray was out, and he tapped another from the pack and put it between his lips and lit it. His father had smoked to the end, but Lim had not had a cigarette for years. He took the smoke into his lungs and held it for a long moment before exhaling. He rested the cigarette on the ashtray. The smell reminded him of his father. He watched the smoke swim upward and thought of Old Lim inhaling in heaven. He picked up the glass and watched the brandy cling to its sides as he swirled it around. The rich sweet smell filled his nostrils as he held it close to his nose. He took a deep breath, as if for a dive, and before he knew it he’d put the glass to his lips. He held the brandy in his mouth for a second and swallowed. It was good. He set the glass down and refilled it carefully from the bottle and went back to the game.

  They were playing five-card draw now, and Lim threw in his ante. His cards were poor, but out of decency he stayed in, made a flush on his last card, and won his first hand of the night. The others seemed surprised. They looked at the cards he had laid down, and he waited a moment before pulling the pot toward him.

  “Luck,” he said, shrugging.

  After that he began to play with more care and found himself drawing better cards. He played out a few more hands and won two or three in a row. The pile of notes in front of him began to grow. He felt pleased, but a little embarrassed. These men were gambling with money he had paid them, and he was taking it back. The grocer and the butcher looked away now when he won and would not meet his eyes. After a while he noticed the silence, and to break it he asked the mourners about their work.

  “It must be hard,” he said. “Mourning for someone you never knew.”

  “My father taught me a little,” Pang said. “When I was young he never let me cry. He used to threaten me with a cane. When a pet died or when a toy broke, he told me to laugh. That way mourners saved up their tears for when they needed them.”

  “And does it work?” Lim asked. He found it hard to imagine Pang as a child with a father. He took two cards. He was working, skeptically, on a low straight, thinking if he made it he would win; if he didn’t, he could give back some of the money he’d taken.

  “For me,” Pang said. He drew one card. “I’ve known others taught to wail and scream as children to build their strength.” He shrugged, and Lim decided, almost with relief, that he had made a flush or a full house. “Your bet.”

  Lim threw in money and the bet was seen until it came round to Pang, who raised it with a small flourish. The light glinted off his glasses as he dipped his head to study his hand. His son looked at the crumpled notes still in front of him—he had lost almost all his earnings from the mourning—and scattered them over the center of the table. But at the next raise, he folded out of turn.

  Pang gave a little snort and laid down a fifty.

  Lim saw the bet and after a moment raised. What did it matter? he thought. His father was dead. Losing was nothing. He welcomed it. Dawn was breaking over the curving palms, and the gulls, clustered on the telephone lines, were waking.

  The bet revolved until Pang raised it once more. He looked around the table confidently and the old men folded wearily, one after the other, until only Lim remained. He could have called—should have—but instead he raised again. Pang studied him closely, and Lim looked back at the cards fanned in his hand, suddenly ashamed of his recklessness, embarrassed by his play.

  “You’re wasting your money, I think,” Pang said. He raised again.

  Lim looked at his cards, looked at the pile of notes by his elbow, but all he could think of was the trace of emphasis Pang had placed on the word your. He felt something pressing him on, and he slid the cash into the center of the table. He regretted it immediately, hunched his shoulders and covered his cards, but when he glanced up he caught a look of fear on Pang’s face and felt a kind of thrill.

  Pang gathered together his own stack of remaining notes, counted them slowly from one hand to the other, straightened them into a neat bundle.

  “Call,” he said at length. “With this”—he pushed the money forward—“and I refund you for the grave goods, yes?”

  Lim stared at him, and Pang nodded fiercely.

  “The funeral,” he whispered. “For free.”

  Lim rested his cards on edge against the table for a second, tapped them once, finally let them fall open. He’d made his low straight, but the cards in their whiteness seemed so insubstantial to him. He stared at a small crease across the corner of one of them. Just paper after all, he thought. There must have been nine hundred dollars on the table. Lim shuddered a little in the morning chill.

  Opposite him, Pang’s son sat very still. But Pang himself just shook his head and started to laugh. “Take it,” he said, smiling crookedly at the money. “Take it. It’s yours.”

  Lim looked at him and began to smile too. He saw the flicker of distaste on the faces of the older mourners, but that too seemed funny. He was still smiling as he drew the money into his arms, like an embrace.

  …

  The funeral took place in the old Chinese cemetery at Colma. Lim dimly recalled a festival day years earlier: white ash like snow, rising from every part of the dark graveyard. Now he watched the paper Mercedes burn. He stared into the leaping, dancing fire, letting the heat wash over him until he felt his eyes begin to smart and finally prick with tears. Pang had told him that it took almost thirty hours to build such a car, the house another twenty, and each piece of paper furniture at least three or four. Lim saw the flames eat them, lighting them like festive lanterns before stripping the paper from the bamboo skeletons. He stepped forward to lay one of the empty paper suits on the smoldering coals, but it fluttered in the smoke and he had to hold it until it flared. He felt the hairs on his knuckles shrink and pull tight. The heat caused an updraft, and the smoke and ashes ascended almost vertically. With them went the wails of the mourners, their voices cracking in the parched air, and Lim marveled with a new appreciation at their art.

  He caught Pang’s eye, and as the older man paused to fill his lungs, Lim bent and threw another bundle of spirit money into the brazier at the foot of the grave. He watched as the notes turned white and scattered in the wind of the flames. The scorched breeze flickered over him, plucking at his sleeve, his lapel, as if it might swirl him away with the ashes falling softly into the sky above. And for a moment he felt himself rise up with them—light as paper, buoyant with heat—until the cries of the mourners sounded only faintly below him.

  Small World

  IS IT CHEATING? Wilson asks himself, watching her sprinkle salt on the bridge of skin between her thumb and index finger. Is it cheating to sleep with an ex-girlfriend? The question forms slowly, hangs there. He’s been drinking all night. They’ve been drinking all night. First the grown-up drinks: martinis before dinner, a nice merlot with, a cognac after. And now, at the bar, shots. Against the cold, she says, nodding at the snow falling past the neon lattice of a Guinness sign in the window.
For old times’ sake.

  He takes the salt shaker from her and makes a small pile of crystals on his own hand. Stray grains bounce and scatter on the bar. She lowers her head, glances up at him from under her brows, and he dips his own face, reaches out his tongue, draws it through the salt.

  He is aware of her head tipping back beside him as he throws his own shot down.

  Well, is it? he asks himself, eyes watering. With an ex?

  He supposes so. Technically. But surely, the casuist inside him, the Jesuit schoolboy, wonders, surely there’s some dispensation. After all, it’s not someone new. It’s someone old. Someone who pre-dates your wife. Someone you’ve cheated on already (so you owe her) or who’s cheated on you (so you’re owed). Not cheated on in the conventional sense, maybe, while you were still together, a couple, an item, but cheated on in a primordial sense. That moment of guilt, of memory, of comparison between the last fuck and the latest.

  He bites down on the lime.

  That moment.

  He blinks the tears from his eyes, and sees she is laughing at him.

  “You used to be a better drinker,” she says. There’s a rime of salt on her lower lip, and in reflex he licks his own.

  “Out of practice,” he tells her, but not why. Apart from rare nights sitting up alone in front of the tube with a glass of Bushmills, he’s sworn off, to make it easier for his wife to go without during her pregnancy.

  “A regular churchgoer,” she teases, but he shakes his head. “You infidel.”

  …

  In the Back Bay everything has changed. The Big Dig seems to have buried everything Wilson remembers. On Atlantic he doesn’t recognize any of the stores. Near Fenway a bar he thought he recalled going to with his father is a sub shop. He’s in actuarial research, an underwriter of new risks—next-generation chips, satellites, freak weather patterns—attending a conference on risk assessment at BU. When he tries to take two Berkeley mathematicians to dinner, nothing is where it’s supposed to be. “I thought you grew up here,” one of them says, laughing, and he tells him sharply, “Somerville. Not Boston.” Finally, freezing, they go to the Pru, to the Top of the Hub, like any fucking tourists. And so he sits there, surrounded by the conference crowd, looking down on the city he grew up in. He can see the John Hancock building, the light on top red for snow. He can see the Citgo sign. He can see the river. He looks down on his childhood from behind double glazing.

  Later, at the hotel, he calls his wife. He wants the reassurance of talking to someone who knows him. But she’s not home yet. It’s eight o’clock in California. She’s in patent law, and he remembers she planned to work late while he was away. He calls her office, but she’s not there either. In transit, then.

  Bored, he glances at the price list for the minibar, flicks through the phone book. On a whim he looks for his own name. There it is, a string of them, like a list of descendants, but none of the initials are his, or his father’s. The last memory he has of Somerville is the family kitchen, in ’76. He’d known it was coming, and he was ready for them with his anger. His mother told him the divorce wouldn’t change the way they felt about him: “We both still love you just the same.” His father nodded, but Wilson said he didn’t believe it. “You used to say you loved each other,” he sneered. She tried to explain that it was different, what they felt for him and what they felt for each other, but he told her, “It’s love, isn’t it? It’s all love.” And something about the way he said it, how he looked at her, the bitterness, the anger, as if it were her fault that she was being cheated on, reduced her to tears for the first time in the whole sorry business. She jerked back from the table and went up to her bedroom—hers alone now—not wanting his father to see her tears. And they’d been left alone, he and his old man, who hadn’t been home for a week, who was only there now for this last family meeting.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” his father said, and Wilson laughed bitterly. Slowly, ruefully, his dad smiled too, recognizing that he’d lost the power to make his son feel guilty. Because Wilson didn’t feel guilty—not then, at least, although later guilt would be almost all he felt—just frustrated. It wasn’t that he thought his mother was lying. He didn’t distrust her, or even his father, when they said they loved him. He simply didn’t trust their capacity for love, which was even worse.

  “What can I say?” his father asked, but Wilson just looked away. His father got up, poured himself a shot, said, “Listen,” and told Wilson about his birth. How Wilson had been a preemie, how the doctors had put him in the ICN, in an incubator, and his parents had watched him through a plate glass window, his mother from a wheelchair. “You were a marvel,” his father said. “So small. So pink. Curled up, with your tiny fists to your chest.”

  “Spare me,” Wilson said, but his father pushed on.

  “We loved you that much. We both felt it—we expected it, of course, but it still surprised us, hey, how intense it was.”

  He stopped for a moment and glanced at Wilson, who said flatly, “So what?”

  “So,” his father replied a little roughly, “so afterwards, after we brought you home and we got to thinking about how much we loved you, we realized that what we’d felt before, what we thought was love, for each other, it wasn’t the same thing.”

  He paused, and Wilson looked over and saw that he was staring at him.

  “Does that explain it any better?”

  And Wilson nodded, unable to speak, because it did; he did understand. He understood that his parents loved him and he understood that he’d driven them apart.

  He tries his wife again, punching in the calling-card numbers deliberately, but hangs up before the machine cuts in. In the phone book, he looks for old friends. Dick Keane. Ryan Lynch. No listings. Dan Murphy could be any one of a dozen D. Murphys. The thought of calling them all makes Wilson feel tired. Dan, he thinks. Got Angela Quinn, the redhead, pregnant at sixteen, married her, dropped out. He looks for a listing of D. and A. Murphy. Nothing. Even the high school dropouts are gone. And because he has given up hope, he looks idly, flicking through the pages, just trying to remember names and faces. That’s how he finds Joyce’s name. J. Limerick. It has to be her. Joyce, he thinks. Still going by her own name. Limerick. He writes the number down, the hotel pen on the hotel pad. He’ll never use it, after all. After all these years. He remembers getting her old number, the first time. The piece of paper he kept it on, soft and fuzzy from being folded and unfolded, tucked in a wallet for years, long after he’d moved away, long after he could have still called her.

  And in the middle of it all the phone rings, as if he’s willed it, and he jumps because he doesn’t believe in such things.

  “Hello?” he says.

  “Hello yourself,” his wife says.

  She asks him what he’s doing and he tells her, “Nothing. Debating whether to break into my minibar.”

  “Too sad,” she says. “You don’t want to be drinking alone.”

  “Vodka, Scotch, tiny tequilas. That’s pretty good company. A whole miniature world of booze.”

  “Not to mention those ten-dollar macadamias,” she says. “Whoever invented those things must have made a killing.”

  “Unless the legend is true and they were once free,” he tells her. “Now all that’s left is the vestigial free mint on the pillow.”

  She laughs with relief. They’ve fought. She didn’t want him to take this trip. So now she says she loves him. “We miss you.” And it takes him a moment to understand she means herself and the baby. She asks him to hold on a second, and the line goes quiet. He wonders where she’s gone, and then she’s back. “Could you hear her?” And he realizes she’s been holding the phone to her belly. “Say something,” she tells him, and the line goes quiet again. “Like what?” he asks. “Hello?” And then he falls silent, listening. He imagines her lying back on the sofa, dress unbuttoned, pressing the receiver to her stomach, round as a globe. It reminds him of the nurse running the ultrasound wand over her goos
eflesh, the sonar pulse of the baby’s heart and the grainy pixelated image he keeps in his wallet of the tucked, clenched form, a smudged question mark curled inside her. All he can hear now, very faintly, is the sea, waves, like in a shell. He thinks it’s the rubbing of the plastic on his wife’s belly, the tiny slap and suck of her skin.

  Afterward he sits in bed, chewing his chocolate mint, reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The compressor of the minibar cuts out with a shiver of glass.

  His wife is in her third trimester, and they haven’t had sex in a long time. At first he was too protective of her, then she was too sick in the mornings, now she’s just too big. It’s uncomfortable, impossible. When he’s in the mood, she fears for the baby. When he’s not, she says he doesn’t find her attractive anymore. He tells her she’s paranoid; she tells him he missed his chance.

  Instead, he’s taken to masturbating, for the first time in years, in the shower or when she goes out for groceries. The A&P has never sounded so sexy to him. It makes him feel furtive, caught halfway between infidelity and adolescence, by turns ashamed and angry. Tonight, still on West Coast time, he can’t sleep, touches himself, stops. He realizes with dismay that he misses the risk of being caught, wants her to catch him. At least, he tells himself, he doesn’t do it to images of her. But when he finally sleeps he dreams of sex with her on top, her hard, heavy belly held over him, pinning him down, forcing the air from his chest, and when he wakes it is on the verge of a wet dream. He stumbles into the arctic whiteness of the bathroom, squinting against the fluorescent glare of his own reflection. In the morning, before he leaves, he puts the piece of hotel notepaper with the phone number in his pocket.

  He carries it around all day at the conference. At lunch he tells the mathematicians from the night before, trying to sound casual but trying to prove he’s from here, and regrets it at once. They give him shit, and it’s like being back in high school. For dinner they want to go to the Bull and Finch and he blows them off, thinking, Geeks! Instead, he drives his rental car along the river: Storrow to the Longfellow Bridge with its salt-and-pepper pots, Mem. Drive, Mass. Ave to Central, Harvard Square, and finally to Johnny D’s in Davis Square. After he parks he just walks for a while, slipping in the snow, until it feels like the roads are the same, the sidewalks, the gradients. He sees the streets of chainlink fences. He see the statues of the Virgin in every third yard. Mary on the half-shell, he remembers, grinning. Slummerville. It’s coming back. He returns to the bar. Orders a beer. Asks for the phone.