The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  “Chinaman dink Chinabee-uh,” he said.

  “You’re hilarious,” Olivia said. “Really.”

  Emily giggled. “I could deal with a beer.”

  “Take one,” said Olivia. “We can go outside after we make our smoothies.”

  “Watch out,” Max said. “The beer will make the smoothie explode in your stomach. Like one of those baking soda volcanoes.”

  “I remember those!” Emily said. “From science.” She opened the fridge and bent over to look for the beer. Emily was the kind of natural blonde you found mostly in Scandinavia; perhaps she was of Swedish origin? (That would explain the toplessness.) Sweden was supposed to have the most beautiful women in the world, and Phil had never been there. He would probably never go either—not unless he and Aubrey got married and decided to go on a honeymoon to Sweden. How ironic that the only way he could think of to see the most beautiful women in the world was to make a promise that he would never, ever try to sleep with one of them again.

  Emily stood up and looked at Phil for the first time: “You have the thing?”

  “The—sorry—what?”

  Max leaned forward and tossed Emily the bottle opener.

  Phil looked at his nephew with admiration. Max was the kind of kid who would eventually find his way to Sweden.

  Max groaned suddenly.

  “What?” said Phil, but just then he heard the front door open.

  “Hello?” Gordon called.

  Everyone in the kitchen was quiet, as if by prior arrangement. Phil had a pleasant, nostalgic feeling of being caught doing something he shouldn’t. He felt the urge to put his finger to his lips—they could scare the shit out of Gordon—until he remembered he was hanging out with his nephew and niece (and his niece’s friend), all of whom were more than twenty years younger than himself.

  “Hello?” Phil called, but just then the three-tone signal sounded all over the house: Gordon had gotten on the intercom in the living room and was efficiently notifying everyone of his presence.

  “Hello, hello. Anybody home?”

  “Wow,” said Emily, in a theatrically puzzled tone that also expressed her complete scorn. It was brilliant.

  “Children, children,” Gordon called over the intercom: “Calling all children.”

  “Oh God,” said Olivia, with poignant frustration.

  “Maxwell?” blared the intercom. “You have a visitor.”

  Max leapt up, grabbing his camera, and rushed out of the kitchen, nearly colliding with his father and Jasmine, coming in through the dining room. Phil had just enough time to grasp Max’s half-finished beer, moving it over in front of his blueberry muffin.

  “Here you are,” said Gordon. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear,” Olivia said.

  “That’s an amazing system,” said Phil.

  His brother looked pleased. “I had all the phones replaced six months ago. These are great. You can use the All button to hit every room at the same time, or intercom locally with the numbers: you’re number one, in the pool house; two is the kitchen; three, the living room; four’s the study—I mean Cece’s study, not my office—that’s number seven; six is the den; and eight is the deck of the pool. Then upstairs—”

  “Thanks,” Phil said. “I guess I’ll just use the All.”

  “Dad?” said Olivia sternly. “This is my friend Emily.”

  “Emily!” said Gordon. “We’ve heard so much about you.”

  It was something their own father used to do, whether or not he had heard anything about the person he was meeting. It had usually been accompanied by his idea of a joke: “We’ve heard so much about you…but we promise not to hold it against you!” It was always particularly bad if you brought home someone of the opposite sex. Gordon and Joan had hated it too; how could his brother have forgotten it?

  “Nice to meet you, Dr. Travers,” Emily said.

  “You’re the French speaker, if I remember correctly?”

  “Je passais mon enfance en Europe.”

  Gordon smiled at Emily. “Ma fille ne pratique pas jamais. Peut-être vous pouvez l’encourager?”

  “Are you a French professor?” Emily asked coyly.

  “That’s very flattering,” Gordon said. “I’m a psychiatrist. With a hobby in French—well, a hobby for which I’m required to use a great deal of French.”

  “I told you that,” Olivia said to Emily, but Emily ignored her.

  “What’s your hobby?”

  Olivia sighed: Phil felt sorry for her. Max got to be the black sheep, but Olivia was clearly not the white sheep. In their family Phil and Gordon had taken those roles automatically, and Joan had been somewhere in the middle, a shade of gray. Maybe Olivia was a gray sheep too? It was strange to think that a couple like Cece and Gordon wouldn’t have managed to produce even one white sheep.

  “Genealogy is like a drug,” his brother was saying. “I begin after dinner and often when I look up at the clock—suddenly it’s two or three in the morning.”

  In the dining room, Max was holding a whispered conference with his girlfriend, who was wearing an extremely abbreviated denim miniskirt. Had Aubrey known that his quest for financial stability would send him into this den of half-naked teenagers, she might have had second thoughts.

  “Dad?” Max said, but Gordon was explaining about his search for their crossing ancestor, and one particularly exciting dead end: a lone Travers, a bachelor, who had expired on the Mayflower, and been tossed to a watery grave.

  “A burial at sea,” Emily said. “That’s so romantic.”

  “What would it be in French, I wonder?” Gordon mused: “Enterrement à mer is somewhat etymologically contradictory.”

  “Dad!”

  “Yes, Maxwell?”

  Olivia and her brother exchanged a look, the most sympathetic look Phil had seen pass between them yet. It gave him hope, not only for Olivia and Max, but for relationships between siblings everywhere.

  “Could you give us a ride to the mural?”

  “We’ll take him,” Olivia said immediately.

  “Most kids want to go to the mall,” Gordon told Phil. “My son wants to go to the mural.”

  Max started to say something, and stopped.

  “But do you normally go on Thursdays?” Gordon continued.

  Max wasn’t looking at Phil, but it was the kind of studious not-looking that was stronger than a stare. Phil felt frozen under it. His nephew murmured a sound that had the inflection of “yes,” without in fact being that word.

  “Dad,” said Olivia suddenly. “You’re so out of it.”

  “Why am I out of it?” Gordon put down his racquet and headed for the refrigerator. “Pardon, mademoiselle,” he said to Emily.

  “Of course they go on Thursdays. Why else would Jasmine be here?”

  Gordon held up his hands. “OK, OK. As long as it’s fine with your mother.” He looked around. “Has anyone seen your mother?”

  “She took Mr. Yuan to the library,” Max said.

  “We’ll see you later,” Olivia said.

  “Where are we going?” Emily asked.

  “We’ll drop them off at community ser vice, and then—whatever. We have the car,” Olivia added, lowering her voice. Phil glanced at Gordon, but his brother’s head was in the refrigerator, and he did not appear to hear her.

  “Bye,” Phil said.

  But Olivia was herding the other kids out of the kitchen without so much as a glance at him. Nor did his nephew, whom he’d rescued twice over—from his mother’s grounding and his father’s strictures regarding morning alcohol consumption—even turn around. It was clear, no matter how loyal he was, that from now on he would be playing on the grown ups’ team. The thought was deeply depressing.

  33.

  “DO YOU WANT SOME JUICE?” HIS BROTHER HELD UP AN ARMFUL OF ORANGES, grinning. There was a dark tongue of sweat down the front of his polo shirt, which had a little pair of crossed racquets in place of the alligator.
r />   “You’re in a good mood,” Phil said. “Did you win?”

  Gordon smiled and deposited the oranges on the counter in front of Phil. “I was annihilated. Six-one, six-oh.” He took a knife from a wooden block, impeccably organized according to size, and began slicing oranges. “We were going to play a third set—but what’s the point?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Phil.

  “Did you ever read The Inner Game of Tennis?”

  “I don’t think so.” Phil listened while his brother explained how he had once been focused on winning to a counterproductive extent. The book had allowed him to change his head game, and replace that results-oriented approach with a method of playing inside each point.

  “I’ve been able to apply that lesson off the court as well. I’m enjoying life now, for the first time in a long time.” As if to illustrate his point, Gordon selected a second muffin from the baking sheet, broke into it with the knife, and inserted a large pat of butter. “Like you,” he said, eyeing Phil’s beer.

  “This is a special circumstance,” Phil said, but of course he couldn’t explain.

  “So when do they start shooting your movie?” Gordon asked. “I hope we’re going to be invited to the set.”

  “We’re nowhere near that point,” Phil said quickly. “The whole thing needs to be rewritten first.” He tried to sound as if he were in daily contact with the film production company, an integral member of the team. He certainly didn’t want to tell Gordon that since arriving in Los Angeles, he’d received only one telephone call from his agent, giving him the phone numbers of his “writing partners,” whom he had immediately contacted and who had failed to contact him back.

  “That’s a shame,” Gordon said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been on a film set.”

  “Really?” said Phil, who had never been on a film set either. He could not, in fact, imagine his play (which had two sets: a therapist’s office and a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan) as a film. The whole thing was basically just a series of conversations. While he was writing it, he had often thought of his sister Joan, whose stories sometimes didn’t contain any dialogue at all. The characters remembered and considered and worried and planned. As soon as they finally did something, the story was over.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like Joan’s stories. (In fact, he liked them a little more than he was willing to admit.) The problem with doing that kind of writing was having to imagine what other people thought. It was easy enough to guess what your characters might say, but how could you know what they were thinking? Who knew why other people did things? Phil often felt he didn’t know why he did things himself.

  “Well, you’ll have to keep us posted,” Gordon said. “At least this alleviates your financial worries. Cece told me you got quite a nice chunk of change.”

  “I haven’t been paid yet,” Phil said.

  “She says you’re thinking of getting married,” Gordon said.

  “What?”

  “She says you’re thinking of marrying Audrey.”

  “Aubrey,” said Phil. “But I’m not. At least not any more than before. I think Cece might have misunderstood.”

  “Aubrey.” Gordon said her name as if it were a new kind of French cheese. He seemed to savor it. “Tell me what she does again.”

  “She’s a lawyer,” Phil said.

  “Corporate or…”

  “She’s a litigator.”

  Gordon whistled.

  “She’s very busy.”

  “She sounds like a catch,” Gordon said.

  “Aubrey and I aren’t getting married,” Phil repeated. “I’m not sure we’re even going to stay together.”

  Gordon was frowning at the newspaper. “Look at this,” he said, passing Phil the Metro section of the Los Angeles Times. “Seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kids.”

  Phil looked at the paper: someone had been shot in Watts. He thought of Max, and wondered whether he ought to have intervened. Why hadn’t he at least found out where they were going? But his brother had been right there. If anyone was to blame, it was certainly Gordon.

  Gordon was apparently not thinking of Max. “These gangs are a real problem,” he said, taking the paper back from Phil. “Anyway, Aubrey sounds fantastic. I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”

  They were sitting on designer barstools; if he braced himself on the counter, Phil could simply have knocked his brother down. Additionally there was the knife lying on the counter in front of him—not the butter knife that Gordon had used on the muffin, which he was now loudly masticating, but a small Japanese paring knife (the kind that never needed to be sharpened), lying among the juice and seeds and pulp of the eviscerated oranges. He had once seen a French movie about a girls’ reform school in which one student stabbed another with an ordinary kitchen fork, pinning her hand to the table in a black pool of blood.

  “Hello?” Cece said. “I’m home.”

  He had meant to be in his pool house, to give the sleeping excuse more currency. How could he have slept through Max’s departure, if he was sitting here eating muffins with Gordon?

  “There you are,” Gordon said. “How was tennis?”

  “You played tennis,” Cece said. “I took Mr. Yuan to the library. Is Max still asleep?”

  “I know I played tennis,” Gordon said. “I thought today was the day you played with Pamela and Liz and—”

  “Carol—no, that’s Tuesday.” Cece was acting strangely, moving around the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator door, checked the temperature, and then closed it. She put her handbag down on a chair and then snatched it up again. She took out a small pair of scissors, frowned at them, and put them in a drawer. Then she looked at Phil for the first time:

  “Where’s Max?”

  “They went to community ser vice,” Gordon said.

  Phil looked at his beer.

  “Who went to community ser vice?”

  “Jasmine came to get him,” Gordon explained.

  “Jasmine was driving?”

  “If you’ll let me finish,” Gordon said calmly. “Jasmine was dropped off—presumably by some authority figure—”

  Cece made a kind of choking sound.

  “—and then Olivia and Emily drove the two of them to the mural.”

  “You let Max and Jasmine go off with Olivia and Emily?”

  Gordon nodded. “I finally met the famous Emily. She’s very well spoken. That’s the accent I was hoping Olivia would pick up in Paris.”

  “How could you let them go?”

  “I just told you. Olivia offered to drive them, and since I hadn’t had my breakfast—” He indicated the plate. “These were delicious, by the way.”

  “Did you forget that he was grounded?” Cece’s voice was deceptively calm. “Because I thought we discussed that in detail.”

  “I didn’t forget,” Gordon said. “I thought we made an exception for the community ser vice. I mean he’s required to do it, isn’t he?”

  Phil got up and started walking toward the screen door. If he could just leave unobtrusively, as if he were giving them their privacy, he might escape altogether. Cece had a way of storing up her fury, to be released only when something had threatened one of her children. Probably many women were like that—but how could you know until it was too late?

  “You knew,” Cece said, and even though his back was turned, he knew she was talking to him. “Just the way I knew.”

  “Knew what?” his brother asked.

  Phil turned around. “OK,” he said.

  “OK, what?” Cece asked, ignoring Gordon. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Peer pressure,” Phil said. Both Gordon and Cece looked at him. He rephrased: “They were pressuring me; I felt like I would be betraying them if I told Gordon.”

  “Told me what?”

  Cece whirled around: “That there’s no community ser vice today! They’re finished with community ser vice!”

  “I don’t have his schedu
le memorized,” Gordon said. “If in the future you would like me to keep track of it—”

  But Cece had picked up her purse and gone out the back. A moment later they heard the car start in the driveway: she was going to look for Max.

  His brother looked at him and held up his hands in a gesture that could mean either, “See what I mean,” or “What can you do?”

  You stupid putz, Phil thought. If you’re not going to do anything, then I will.

  34.

  I HAD AN APPOINTMENT TO MEET THE PRINCIPAL AT TWO O’CLOCK ON my first day at St. Anselm’s, but I had been at school only a few hours before I encountered her. Ms. McCoy was a blond and powerful woman, with the manner of someone accustomed to doing several things at the same time. I had been dreading a conversation in which she would demand to see my references, and perhaps a set of lesson plans for the semester, but the principal only tilted her head to the side and gave me a curious look.

  “Professor Yuan,” she said. “Walk and talk, will you?”

  I knew that to an American the correct application of titles was not quite so important as it was in China, but I felt awkward being called “Professor.” When I first starting studying English with my mother after school, she would criticize me for “listening in Chinese.” “When you speak English,” she said, “you have to listen in English. When you speak Chinese, you use your Chinese ear. Why do you think you have two of them?” I had never thought of it that way, and when I was alone in my bedroom I would practice: covering one ear at a time while experimenting with different phrases, trying to determine which was which.

  “I’m not officially a professor,” I corrected her, but Ms. McCoy did not seem interested in the distinction. Rather, she wanted to know whether I’d had a chance to examine the still lifes hanging in the Marian Caldwell Memorial Gallery.

  “How would they compare with a similar class in China?”

  “Their work is very interesting,” I said. In fact I had been shocked by the sloppiness of many of the drawings, some of which were unfinished.