The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  There were about fifteen or twenty people in the room: I recognized Fang, who waved, and X’s girlfriend Lulu, who ignored me. The atmosphere was excited but tense, as if everyone were waiting for something to happen. The spectators were clustered in the warm half of the room. They stared at the red centers of the heating units, which were seductive in the same way that coals are; or perhaps they were avoiding looking at X, whose eyes were glazed and tearing. I could not help noticing that my cousin’s uncomfortable, retracted penis was larger than mine in its normal state.

  X became more alert when the photographers began packing up their gear: there were still three Chinese and one foreign woman (a Canadian, with a red-and-white maple leaf sewn onto her camera case). They went out silently without making eye contact, as if they were leaving a memorial. Perhaps even the foreigners were nervous about what they had seen?

  X waited a few moments after they had gone, and then opened his mouth. No sound came out; immediately, Fang and two other men hurried to untie him. Two of the taller men supported him as he climbed down: he couldn’t stand on his own. They wrapped him in a blanket, and someone started to clap. Then everyone else joined in.

  “Amazing.”

  “Fried up like a squid—did you see?”

  “He’ll catch cold for sure.”

  “Or something worse.”

  No one seemed to want to leave. A few people were passing around a thermos of tea. X was in the corner with Fang and Lulu. Suddenly Lulu turned to face the remainder of the crowd:

  “Please can I ask you all to leave now?” she said crisply. “This performance has taken a lot out of him, of course. Anyone who would like to discuss it is welcome to come to the art lunch on Wednesday, at Cash’s place.”

  X made a pathetic sound, which only Fang seemed to understand.

  “He says there’s nothing to discuss,” Fang repeated. “Because what you saw today wasn’t art.”

  At this everyone began to clap again. Then, under Lulu’s stern gaze, they reluctantly started filing out. I lingered in the doorway.

  “Please leave us now,” Lulu said to me. “He’s tired.”

  “He can stay,” X said suddenly. His voice was exhausted but clear. “It’s just Xiao Pangzi.”

  Fang grinned, and Lulu looked me over critically. “I didn’t recognize you.” Immediately I understood that my army jacket and cravat had been a mistake, that I would have been received much more favorably in my ordinary school shirt and trousers.

  “Where’s your girlfriend?” X asked.

  “She couldn’t come today,” I said. “We have a test next week.”

  “We must’ve scared her the other day.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “She’s interested in art.”

  “Is she? Tell her next time we promise to keep our clothes on.”

  “You shouldn’t talk too much,” said a serious-looking young man, who was standing against the wall. “You’ll get sick.”

  “Have you met everyone?” X asked. “This is Cash, our local rock ’n’ roll god…” I nodded at Cash, who was wearing sunglasses, along with a pair of imitation leather pants and a silver chain belt.

  “And this is Yuchen, my doctor.”

  Yuchen’s worried manner first made me think he was older than the others, but in fact he was only twenty-five. He was tall and skinny, with a high forehead and an elegant, feminine neck; he wore thick glasses with brown plastic frames, and a gray nylon jacket not warm enough for the weather.

  “I’m not really a doctor,” he told me.

  “My name isn’t really Little Fatty,” I said.

  Fang laughed, and even Lulu smiled a little. “My cousin must think I’m still eight years old.”

  “Well, then, you need a new name.” My cousin thought for a minute. “I baptize you Longxia Shanren,” he said. “‘Lobster’ because you used to like to paint them, and ‘Hermit,’ since you stayed away so long.”

  That was how I got my East Village nickname, which caught on after my new friends saw me drink for the first time. I much preferred it to Xiao Pangzi, and it pleased me that my cousin remembered the childish drawings I’d shown him so many years ago.

  “You used to draw birds too,” X continued. “Do you remember that day I took you to the park in Harbin?”

  “I remember you taught me how to fly kites.”

  X frowned. “I didn’t have a kite, and yours were at home. We only watched.”

  He was wrong, but I didn’t want to contradict him. It was possible that the endurance required for his project had taxed his memory.

  “That was incredible, by the way,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me.”

  “It was incredibly dangerous,” Lulu said. “And for what?”

  “For nothing.” X smiled at me, and I’m embarrassed to say that I smiled back knowingly, as if I understood exactly what my cousin’s project was about. “That was the point.”

  “The point was that there was no point?” Lulu demanded, looking from one to the other of us.

  “I’d like to invite you to my house for lunch on Wednesday,” Cash interrupted. “If you have free time, that is.” His politeness contrasted with his fierce costume. “Nothing fancy—we do it every Wednesday, to talk about art.”

  “Or gossip about each other,” Lulu said.

  “Come over here about noon,” X said, ignoring her. “We’ll walk there together. Can you find it again?”

  I nodded excitedly, no longer trying to conceal my enthusiasm. “I’ll be here. Can I bring Meiling?”

  X smiled. “If she promises not to be shocked. We may be looking at pictures of our work.”

  I thought of how that comment would annoy Meiling. I would have to put the invitation very differently, in order for her to accept. Even apart from my romantic hopes, Meiling was the first true friend I’d made in college. I wanted her to get along with my cousin, in part because I already knew that I would spend as much time as possible in the East Village. That dump on the edge of the city suddenly seemed to me the most exciting place in Beijing.

  When I left X’s house it was already dark, and I was glad for the light on my new bicycle. Two more tiny lights glowed in the doorway of the house opposite; when my eyes adjusted, I could see a pair of men standing in front of the house, smoking. I wondered why they were outside on such a cold night. I nodded in their direction, but like the old man with the junk cart, they stared without acknowledging me.

  I pumped hard and fast out of the East Village, trying to keep warm. I was exhilarated, but not afraid: I didn’t know that experimental performances like the one I’d seen that evening were illegal. Instead I felt as if I’d crossed over into a foreign country where I couldn’t distinguish good from bad, where everything was equally strange. Maybe what my cousin did that night wasn’t really art, but it had an effect on me: as I bicycled into the sharp winter wind, my whole long, safe childhood seemed to recede further and further into the past, until it was only a high, bright dot, like a kite.

  41.

  I DIDN’T EXPECT JUNE TO SHOW UP AT THE END OF THE DAY, AND I WAS locking up my desk (resolving never to let either key out of my sight again) when I heard her clomping toward my classroom in her regulation saddle shoes. She did not have a light step, I noted. I decided to begin a mental list of her shortcomings, but couldn’t immediately come up with any others.

  June had not only changed her shoes, but was wearing the entire uniform in its most uncomfortable incarnation: a pleated gray flannel skirt (unhemmed, as if straight off the rack) and a starched white blouse with a collar. Even the red rhinestone stud had been removed from her left nostril. Her eyes looked tired, and I wondered how early she had gotten to school in order to pull off her little stunt.

  “You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Do you have your homework?”

  June looked genuinely surprised. “That was it.” She pointed to the whiteboard, where you could still make out the J.W. design in red marker. “Didn’t you see my si
gnature?”

  “Do you feel you’ve fulfilled the assignment?”

  June smiled. “What do you mean?”

  “What is art?” I began rhetorically; however, June Wang never allowed me to be rhetorical. She took a pocket dictionary out of her bag and flipped though it, running her finger down the page. We were alone in the studio, still smelling faintly of fish.

  “Art,” June read. “Old and modern French from Latin (art, ars) from a base meaning, ‘to put together, join, fit.’ The application of skill according to aesthetic principles—”

  “You’ve made an olfactory installation,” I interrupted. “Not particularly interesting, compared with your other work, but still art.” I thought I saw June suppress a smile, but she continued with her dictionary:

  “—especially in the production of visible works of imagination, imitation, or design (painting, sculpture, architecture, etc.). Visible,” she repeated for my benefit.

  “Especially,” I said; “not always.”

  “A pursuit or occupation in which skill is directed towards the production of a work of imagination, imitation, or design,” June continued, tilting her head slightly in the direction of our big table, where the various attempts of the rest of the class lay scattered: “cool-lottes,” an unfinished portrait of Emily Alderman, and Laika the Russian space dog. “Or toward the gratification of the aesthetic senses.”

  “I would say ‘stimulation’ rather than gratification,” I told June.

  “An acquired faculty,” June shot back. “A knack.”

  “You have that,” I said. “There’s no question.”

  June sighed. “I only did it to bug you. Because you wouldn’t help me.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “By coming to meet my grandmother,” June said. “Next Thursday would be convenient.”

  “Why do you want me to meet your grandmother?”

  June hesitated. Obviously she was thinking of the answer that might make me agree to come, rather than the truthful one. I added “not particularly honest” to my mental list of June’s faults.

  “She needs someone to talk to—I mean, someone from China.”

  “Doesn’t she have Chinese friends?”

  “Yeah,” June admitted. “But she’s happy I have a Chinese professor. She wants to honor you.”

  “I’m not a professor.”

  June shrugged. “My teacher, then.”

  I had a strange feeling: there was a part of me that wanted to sit June down and tell her my life story, right here in the classroom, with no exaggerations or omissions.

  “In China I’m not even an art teacher.”

  “I didn’t say you were my art teacher.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That you were my business teacher.”

  “Business!”

  June nodded calmly. “My grandmother doesn’t like art.”

  “How am I supposed to pretend to be a business teacher? I don’t know anything about business.” This was not strictly true, but I would never have told June about the lazy, part-time job in my father’s office.

  “My grandmother doesn’t know about business either,” June assured me. “You’ll be fine.”

  But I was not convinced. It was not business, but this business of pretending, that was making me sick to my stomach.

  42.

  THE BUSH BABY WAS GONE. THEY HAD COMBED THE HUTCH, AND LEFT appetizing bits of food around the garden as a lure. They had tried to determine how she’d escaped—a broken latch, or a tunnel under the wire—but the hutch was secure. Fionnula had simply vanished.

  “I asked the children if they had noticed anything,” Cece told Phil. “Any changes in her behavior—but of course they don’t pay any attention. I even asked Mr. Yuan.”

  “What did he say?” Phil asked.

  Cece felt terrible. Fionnula could not have been cheap, nor could it have been easy to transport her. Now the bush baby was loose somewhere in the neighborhood, vulnerable to legions of sharp-nosed neighborhood pets. She was a wild animal, but she’d been raised in a cage; would she be able to find food for herself? Even if some kind person were to find her, and call Animal Rescue, how would they know what she was? It had never occurred to Cece to put a tag on her.

  “I just don’t understand it. How could she have gotten out of the cage?”

  “Someone had to open it,” Phil said. They had been standing in the foyer, and he was on his way out. She wondered where he went in the afternoons, but she didn’t like to ask. If there was one thing that made him skittish, it was excessive curiosity.

  “Maybe she was stolen.”

  “Stolen—Phil—who would steal her?”

  “She’s relatively valuable,” Phil said. “Or maybe the Chinaman ate her.”

  “Phil!” Cece said. She hadn’t heard Max coming downstairs behind them, but when Phil said that, her son laughed. Cece turned around.

  “That’s not funny,” she told the two of them. But it was hard to stay angry at Phil. He was so often angry at himself that she tried to avoid compounding it. He was also more thoughtful than he used to be; for example, he was the only one who’d noticed that Cece wasn’t sleeping again. He didn’t say anything, but he left a bottle of Ambien for her to discover in the glove compartment of her car. He had tied a red ribbon around it. Cece put the bottle in the medicine cabinet, next to Gordon’s Lipitor.

  “Did Dr. Plotkin give you those?” Gordon asked that night, when they were brushing their teeth.

  She wondered if he really thought that Dr. Plotkin had given her an unlabeled bottle, with the name of the drug in permanent marker across the cap. Why would Dr. Plotkin tie a red ribbon around a prescription? She might have said they had come from Pam or Carol, or even the nurse at St. Anselm’s—but she decided not to bother.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Gordon replaced the pills and closed the medicine cabinet. “Be conservative,” he advised.

  “I think you were right,” she told her husband one evening after dinner, when they were cleaning up the kitchen.

  “About the garage door openers? I’m glad, because these new ones won’t run out of batteries until the year 2020.”

  “About Phil,” Cece said.

  Gordon was consolidating the kitchen and the pantry trash. His voice took on the faintly amused tone he always used to talk about his brother: “What wisdom did I dispense about Phil?”

  “About how he’s a bad influence on Max and Olivia. The crazy thing is—it’s because he wants them to like him. He can’t say no to anybody. That’s his problem.”

  Her husband was giving her his therapist smile.

  “That’s the problem for his girlfriend too,” Cece continued. “She thinks he’s going to marry her. She’s thirty-seven, and she wants a baby. Did you know that? Phil doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t really say no. He’s willing to ruin a person’s life in order to keep her from being angry at him.”

  “Did I say a bad influence?” Gordon asked.

  Cece glanced out at the pool house. The lights were on, and Phil hadn’t bothered to draw the shades: she could see him pacing back and forth, probably talking to Aubrey on the phone. She wondered how necessary it had been for him to come to L.A. to rewrite his script; he hadn’t even met with his writing partners yet. She hoped it hadn’t simply been a way to avoid confronting what ever problems he was having in New York.

  “When did I say that?”

  Gordon was not a liar. Once, when she had asked him what was the worst lie he’d ever told, Gordon had looked at her blankly and said, “I don’t lie.”

  “But I mean, ever,” she had said. “Your whole life.” This had been in the early years of their marriage, before Olivia, when she was still working as an assistant account executive at the ad agency downtown. She had imagined that their connection would grow deeper and deeper over the years. At work during the day, she would think of things she wanted to ask him. She had thought that when she happened up
on the right question, Gordon would suddenly confess all kinds of things that he’d been keeping from her until then.

  “I don’t tell lies,” Gordon had said impatiently. “I have no need.”

  Not I believe in telling the truth, or Lying to your loved ones is wrong, but simply: “I have no need.”

  “You don’t remember,” Cece said now. “When we went to see Dr. Plotkin?”

  “I remember seeing your therapist, yes.” Gordon was standing with the garbage held gingerly away from his body. Cece had a strange urge to laugh. Spock pranced in from the dining room to investigate the soggy bottom of the bag.

  “You don’t remember when you said Phil was a bad influence on the children?”

  “That was ten years ago,” Gordon said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember every single thing I said ten years ago.”

  “Not every single thing,” Cece said. “But just—”

  Gordon lifted the bag up away from the dog. “I should take this out.”

  “Go,” Cece said.

  She was not upset. She felt that something had been settled. It was as if she’d been attempting for years to solve a particularly difficult puzzle, and someone had told her it wasn’t necessary—wasn’t even possible. She was released. It was a light, almost giddy feeling.