The Almanac Branch

by Bradford Morrow

  No, he lived in Chinatown—“I have the good sense to live where I’m supposed to live, you probably live where you’re supposed to live, too,” to which she replied, “I live in two places, one with my father, and the other with my lover”—and not taking up the thread, which she sensed he’d thought unnecessary, even gauche, he went on about his dog and how unless she was ailing or tired he took her in a canvas bag onto the subway, rode to a stop chosen at random, and emerged up in the streets where he let her take off down whatever sidewalk she wanted to explore. Li told Grace that at one time or another he and Can Xue hadprobably been down every block in New York, not that he’d really be able to remember, since just as it was exercise-time for her it was thinking-time for him, and when you are thinking you’re not seeing. When Grace glanced over at him, she was struck by how deep the wrinkles around his eyes ran—smile-lines she always called them, though she doubted that Li Zhang had smiled enough in his life to produce them; and then she wondered how old he might be, and realized that he wasn’t necessarily younger than she, as she’d first imagined, that indeed he could be much older. She looked at his hand, which held the leash, knowing that hands often tell a person’s age better than any other feature, but they were delicate and rather expressionless, and betrayed nothing. The eyes behind his rimless glasses were black, his hair was black and straight and cut tight across his forehead, his clothing was well-tailored and had a homemade look to it—the gray worsted trousers, the gray scarf with purple piping, even the soft green-black leather jacket. And what did he think about when he was walking aimlessly through the cold brick gorges of the city?

  She might have asked had she not realized he was now returning her stare (funny how this whole experience seemed as if played out in a fit of exhaustion, how given over to it she felt, just as when in a bad dream you come to understand that you are not going to be able to escape your nightmare-ghoul, and you begin to ease up and accept that the evil your imagination has worked up for you will prevail, at least until you awaken); when she looked into his eyes Grace suddenly lost interest in asking what he thought about while he walked, because she sensed she already knew. Li’s quick smile—like an acknowledgment it was—did seem awkward on his lips. That was when she knew she wanted him to come with her up to the aerie.

  Now, while neither of them had any particular expectations of what would happen between them alone in the room—a man and a woman who didn’t know each other, as such—nor even had the time to formulate specific hopesor desires, or intentions (Li Zhang’s behavior in this regard might be seen, in a later light, as harder to explain than Grace’s), both experienced an exhilaration.

  Both breathed faster, shallower. Both knew clearly what they could do, if they chose, and it is a commonplace that knowing what you can do is the first step toward doing it. The way Can Xue made herself comfortable, turning around in place three times, and then lying down with a warm yawn, only helped them more toward understanding they would probably act on these emerging feelings. People sense what they are going to do, and most especially when they try to convince themselves that they are entering into an episode from which they will emerge not knowing what they might have had in mind (that is, they say, What was I doing, for god sakes?)—though neither asked the other any questions.

  Anyway, what sort of question would Li Zhang have asked, before he took the three or four steps he took toward Grace, and ran his palm over her cheek before placing it on her shoulder and drawing her into him? There was nothing to say. There certainly was nothing to ask. He didn’t even smile, because when he moved his lips through the shroud of hair and began to kiss her ear, he knew by the way her back curved into him and her fingers clutched into the furrow of his thin neck that there wasn’t a need to smile.

  She told herself, as she drew the cord that let the blinds down, that it wasn’t meant to have been a seduction. After all, the aerie belonged half to Cutts, even if she paid its bills. It just was what it was; it was going to take place, there was nothing to stop it, and no reason for it not to go on. Cutts’s absence was of his own choosing. Good choice, given what he’d make of this. It wasn’t her choice that Cutts always had to be drinking wine when he was in the aerie—the same wine Li now reluctantly accepted and drank. Grace never told Cutts he had to have wine here. And the scarves of Grace’s that Li used to tie her wrists and ankles to the bedposts—Li accomplished all this with such delicacy anddetermination—had been gifts from Cutts. But she never asked for presents from Cutts. She never much liked the presents he gave her anyway, although they were nice presents (the scarves were silk and colorful). They indicated to Grace more that Cutts felt guilty toward Bea than that he felt generous toward Grace. The scarves were more sacrificial offerings than true gifts. So, all right. Let’s make a sacrifice with them.

  “You struggle with fate you hurt yourself”—who had said that? It sounded like something Faw would come up with, but though she’d forgotten the source of the statement, Grace had had years of studying that lesson, hadn’t she? Of course, any truism was like a trap, a padlock—no matter how unassailable, how finely wrought, how sophisticated, none existed but that it could be escaped or picked. Whether she struggled with fate or not it seemed inevitable that she, or someone, was going to be hurt, so she chose to follow the maxim along its surface, knowing however that she had discovered how to take it to pieces and could easily reduce it, if she wished, to a heap of worthless metaphoric tumblers and cylinders and jaws.

  Still, as she lay there, fully clothed and face down on the bed, she wondered how it was possible she felt not the slightest sense of remorse that Cutts’s presents were finding such novel use in the dying afternoon.

  This would make him furious to say the least. She tried to imagine his fury and how it would feel to see him so angry with her. She closed her eyes and felt nothing, really, except that she liked this sense of being down here in her own darkness, alone and inexplicably strong even while she was being rendered powerless, and as she splayed her arms and legs under the urgings of his hands, her interest in conjuring Cutts waned. What interested her was a stirring, visceral trust she began to feel under Li Zhang’s kisses, which were like a cat’s, or the graze of emery.

  Once Li finished securing her limbs, he asked, “Would you mind if I had a little more wine?” and seeing shecouldn’t answer, because he had gagged her (the fresh-laundered, bleach-scented men’s briefs Li found in the drawer of the nightstand seemed suitable to the task), he poured another glass and drank it off as quickly as he had the first.

  “Do you mind if I—” he muttered, politely, as he raised the clacking wooden blinds.

  She answered, No, with a deep tongueless “Oh,” down in her throat. Let him see me, she thought, under the late winter light that now filled the aerie with its thin glow, Let anybody who wants to see, see.

  “Don’t worry,” he suggested—“dawn wooree be haw-pee,” the song passed through her head, and kept going through the next few minutes there was no stopping it until he removed Can Xue’s leash from the collar and, climbing on to the bed, gently slipped it under her neck, threading the clip end through the loop of the handle, and drawing it tight. As he was loving her he straddled his knees over her thighs and now and then, quite rhythmically and with ineffable tenderness, yanked her head back a bit with the leash, as he thrust into her more deeply. He had not bothered to do more than push her skirt up and lift her panties aside so that he could have access to what interested him. Or else, given that maybe it didn’t so much interest him, where he had to go.

  Neither of them made any sound during the fifteen or twenty minutes he spent riding her, his helpless white mare, but as Grace came to orgasm, she pushed the gag out of her mouth with her tongue—reminding them both, at a crucial moment, that her bondage was more gestural than actual—and she began to moan, to which his response was to cease moving.

  He laid the leash on her back and sat over her, and said, “What do you think you’re doing?” She
tried to see his face but he was distorted in her peripheral field, which began to haze up with tears. She arched her hips up, driving her stomach into the sheets, hoping to communicate to himthat she wanted to continue, but Li Zhang was not, it became obvious to Grace, going to continue fucking a woman who would come.

  The disgust that he exhibited toward her she could feel through the coldness of his fingertips on her back, where he let them rest after emphatically pushing her hips back down onto the bed. Wasn’t hatred only for the weak? Li Zhang had already shown himself not to be that; hatred surely was beneath him. So thinking that their lovemaking might still be going on, and that maybe she ought to be more patient than she was being, she took the full dose of his silence and told herself that what he might have been feeling toward her was pity. Yeah, well pity was appropriate, she thought. But then he breathed out hard and she heard resignation in the way he did it. No, she’d screwed up. He continued to rest his hands on her back, and after sitting like dead weight on her thighs for a while, he ceremoniously—anything performed in absolute silence seems ceremonious, doesn’t it?—slid the leash through its loop and removed it from around her neck. “Okay,” he whispered.

  It was over. His flesh, which had dwindled between her legs, he withdrew, snapping his hips back. He dismounted, and dressed.

  Grace felt as if she should somehow apologize, should speak now, say something, recreate the word-water they’d floated in before with such pure ease, break up the atmosphere that all their silences had fostered, but she wasn’t exactly sure what she’d done to earn this rebuke from Li Zhang. Since she didn’t want to bring on any further enmity from him, she lay motionless, breathing as softly as she was able, holding back further tears by concentrating on—of all things—the label on Cutts’s underwear through squinted eyes, and she pictured the television commercial where the fat men were all dressed up like grapes and oranges and lemons, and the little old matron who was the head of their peculiar brood stood folding their underpants, commenting on how strong the elastic waistbands were, and how long they would last, and how happy were all her fruit-boys—those poor failed actors who back in school might never have imagined that all their struggles to memorize A Midsummer Night’s Dreamwould result in the pathetic calamity of green grease-paint and selling smiles—and then she imagined Bea at the store buying these very products for her husband to wear, daydreaming perhaps under the fluorescent lights in the department store, lulled into a half-sleep by the raspy buzz the long bulbs gave off from above. Then she came back from her own meandering, because the door to the aerie opened. For an instant she knew it could have been Cutts walking in. Then the door shut, and she heard Can Xue’s nails scuttering on the landing outside.

  When Li Zhang left, he left her tied up—which Grace thought rather strange of him. She got free fairly easily. Had he gotten suddenly stung with paranoia that she would want to follow him and therefore thought to get a jump on her by leaving her there to fight with the scarves? Or else, well, what had happened? She felt immensely flustered. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, just to see whether her face was there or not, see whether it had been subjected to one of the auras she’d experienced as a girl. But it wasn’t megrim that had been with her. Similar hurt, similar high, yet her face was there in the glass, eyes gazing back at her, composed, sad, wanting to look defiant, but unable.

  Can Xue—the writer, not her namesake—wrote a story about a young woman who lived with her father, Old Guan, in a wooden hut that was subject to whatever devastation nature chose to visit upon it. When the wind blew, the crumbly tiles on the roof were blasted with mulberriesthat fell from the tree that grew over it. When it rained, as so often it did, the roots of the rosebushes surrounding the hut rotted, and the rose petals soured to a deathly white. Moreover, the hut flooded, and the young woman found it difficult to sleep, lying in the water as she must beside her father in the small bedroom in the hut. Old Guan was in a state of decline and decay, just as was his house, and whenever he munched on some crackers, which he dearly loved to do, especially as a snack in the night when sleep failed to come and take him into its gentle arms and lift him away from his widower’s existence for a few starry hours, his teeth began to hurt, and he became convinced that the field mice ran in and out of his mouth, frolicking like mad through the black crevices they found there.

  Old Guan prattled day in and day out about the state of his several teeth, and was moved to think many sentimental thoughts about this cracker and that, idly picking his nose as he curled into a corner of their common bed, while the rain dripped into the room and collected in the oil tarp they had spread over the bed in the hope of staying dry. But, as he did, the young woman mentioned something she had begun to notice lately: an ox, which circled the hut, free as it pleased.

  The ox was not, of course, just any ox—not in such a black and blurry landscape as this that the father Guan and his daughter strove to pass their lives in. This ox raised cold sweat on the skin of the girl, as it walked lazily round the hut, its ass (which was the only part of the ox’s anatomy Old Guan’s daughter ever in fact saw, aside from its horn, which it occasionally drove through the wall, butting and bumping it) giving off a purple glow that pulsed, blindingly, and shimmered blue as a blister in the drizzle. We also learn, toward the end of the story, that the girl’s mother, Old Guan’s wife, had been a sort of minor thief, and having stolen her husband’s sleeping pills (understandably, the insomniac hungers for something besides thesame old dry crackers in the middle of his night) she ate them all herself so that she never had to worry about waking up anymore.

  After all that, what finally happened was that Guan decided, in the wisdom of his years, to poison those nasty field mice that leaped and scurried through the vast cavities in his teeth, with some arsenic, which he planted in generous quantities on his tongue. Only after he did that did his daughter notice that the ox had fallen into the nearby river, to drown. Still, in its death throes, it managed to send up spectacular plumes of black smoke out of its nostrils, as it raised a hammer to smash the mirror on the wall in which Guan’s girl habitually stared at herself.

  Grace liked the story. In it, things happened unexpectedly, just as they did in Shahrazad’s tales—just as they sometimes did in her own life. In the evening light, the steam escaped from vents and chimneys on the roofs and took on a thick, palpable presence, reminding her of the spumes that the suicide ox gave off as he went for his dip. It was funny—was she supposed to feel happy or sad about that ox drowning? How could it raise a hammer to smash a mirror in the hut at the same time as it had fallen, drowning, into a nearby river? What kind of life was Old Guan’s daughter going to have there in the hut now that her crazy father and the obsessed bull were gone?

  Deep down she must have loved them both, or else why would she have continued to live like that in the hut? She must have found comfort of sorts in her father’s prattle; she must have been flattered by the doting ox that had courted her faithfully until he killed himself after finally understanding that his love for her was a big fat waste of time, because she was only in love with herself.

  Unless I called him, I would never know whether Li had left behind the book of Can Xue’s stories by mistake ordesign. I found it on the black and white tile under the sink in the bathroom. When I opened it, there they were, as I might have predicted, his name, and his number. Subtle perhaps, but maybe just pedestrian, this bit of leaving a possession behind in order to create an excuse to get back in touch. Oldest trick in the, well yes, book—and yet, admittedly, a wise one, in that the temptation, the thread, was strong and drew me more quickly than I might have anticipated toward the desire to call.

  What would he expect me to say? Tell him that what we had done was something I would never do with him again? Plead with him to give me a chance to try once more to get it right (but, of course, what was right?)—or apologize again for having so willfully spat out the cloth he’d placed in my mouth, and cried like some hapless
puppy?

  Maybe he really had forgotten the book in his anxiousness to leave. I changed the bed in the aerie, washed, and sat by the window, in a state of sudden, inexplicable contentedness. I thumbed through the book, which was well-worn from Li’s readings. Or else from Li’s readings and from those of all the other women he’d done this with … no, that made no sense, or I didn’t want it to make sense, because how could he have retrieved the thing each time? As I was reading the story about the ox, the hut, the girl, the father, and the spectacular purple glow (lights seem constantly to be attracted to such sex-magnetized situations) I knew I’d be willing to try again with Li Zhang if he would give me another chance.

  I dialed his number, no answer. The glass of wine, which I wasn’t all that fond of drinking, seemed like a good idea, just to give myself a sense of what it must have been like to be Li Zhang with the wine in him. I folded up the scarves and put them away. I considered going out and simply depositing the book in a trash bin as I walked along toward home, but I wasn’t ready to face Faw just yet—I was far too skittish and shaken for that. So, I phoned Zhang once more, and this time a woman, in her fifties or sixties, answered.

  “Is Li there?”

  “Yes. What?”

  “Is Li Zhang there, please?”

  “Who is calling.”

  Why not, why not tell her, after everything that had happened, I thought, and anyway Li knew where he could find me if he wanted to, so there was no possibility of anonymity left to me. “Grace Brush,” I said.

  “Hold on,” the woman told me, and I slowed my breath as I studied the purple-blue bruise bracelet that had begun to appear around my right wrist and listened hard into the telephone, and wondered why the skin around my knuckles was marred blue, too. I couldn’t remember him touching me there—a sympathy bruise. Was it exciting or not that a man whom I essentially didn’t know and who had made these marks on my skin was about to speak to me?