The Almanac Branch

by Bradford Morrow

  Discreetly, Li waited several days before resigning himself to having to make another call. He tried at different times, day and night, but didn’t get through until she answered late morning the week after he’d spoken with Cutts.

  “What do you want?” she said, even before he had finished saying his name.

  “Didn’t your friend give you my message?”

  “What message—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The man who answered the phone, he said he’d tell you that I called—”(silence followed, and finding himself out on a limb he went on)“—I don’t know what his name—but, look I, I was calling in part because I wanted to tell you that Can Xue died, she just fell asleep last week after our walk and didn’t wake up again.”

  Grace found it impossible to read the flatness of Li’s vocal tone, and dipping into her hurt over the way he had treated her, she managed, “So what.”

  A silence expanded through the white noise in the line.

  She picked up, “No, I mean, I’m sorry to hear that, she was a nice dog and all, but I don’t see what I’m supposed to say about it. What can I say? You and I have an awful lot of problems for two people who’ve only spent about an hour and a half together. I don’t understand why you didn’t call back. I don’t understand why you left like that. I really don’t understand who you think you are just calling me out of the blue and leaving your name with, with this man you don’t even know who he is or whether it’s going to affect—”

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t call—okay?”

  She considered hanging up. These telephones, weren’t they invented for convenience and privacy in communication, and just look what they did—scuttle privacy and make life hard. Li didn’t deserve the consideration she was giving him. “Oh, ah. You couldn’t call,” she said, sardonic. “Well you seem to be able to now, don’t you.”

  “I had my reasons for what I did.”

  “I suppose you had your reasons for leaving me in that ridiculous position, too, right?”

  “You weren’t, look, I had my reasons, I did what I did—it wasn’t like you weren’t able to get free.”

  “Look, Li, I didn’t mind what you did, okay. You don’t have to make any explanations to me for what you did. It’s what you didn’t do that bothers me.”

  “It’s none of your business why I did or didn’t do whatever. I’ve apologized once. That’s it, now stop.”

  Grace was surprised: leashlike words. Fair enough, she thought. He hadn’t asked her to explain who Cutts was, after all. “So why the call, you want your book back?”

  “What book, I don’t care about any book. I want to see you.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Li.”

  “I understand if you don’t want to but I want you to know I do.”

  “You understand?—you don’t understand anything at all. I’m seeing someone, I can’t do what I did with you, you hear me? I shouldn’t have done it in the first place.”

  Li Zhang was quiet. Grace sensed his nonresponse couldn’t have been because he was upset that she had someone else; Li’s was not a jealous temperament. “I don’t get it.”

  Grace almost said—and it would have been smooth repartee if she had, she knew—Well, Li, I don’t get it either; but what she said was, “What’s there to get? Look, I’ve got your phone number and what I think I’ll do is I’ll think about all this. I’m not saying no, but what I’ll do is I’ll call you if I feel like it. All right? If you want your book back—”

  “Keep it, keep it.”

  “—I can leave it downstairs or something but we better leave things where they were before you called.”

  “Fine, Grace,” he said, so uninflectedly that there was no chance of deciphering what the words could have had as their emotional core. She began to construct an image of him in the room he was in, tried to decipher what his face must have looked like when he said “Fine,” and “Grace,” talking to her on the telephone—because he was saying something, and she wasn’t listening—maybe now feeling some frustration at her not giving in to what he wanted. It was just then she wondered why was it she was at the same time so willing to believe that what Li Zhang wanted from her were things she wanted to give him, but didn’t know how to give him, and yet she was always denying him, too? How did that work? Denying him the chance to go ahead and make love to her just as he pleased, after inviting him up to the aerie to let him have his way, in fact—denying him the chance to see her, after she had called him up and left all those transparently pleading messages on his machine. What did she want? Why would he bother to have anything to do with her? It seemed all so far beyond Shahrazad and Samantha and Jeannie and even beyond Can Xue, that she knew she couldn’t rely on things she felt she understood. She’d have to risk exploring new ground, and felt for an instant a sense of extreme spiritual agoraphobia. A healthy dose of cynicism toward this line of self-inquiry might have been useful, but even when she muttered—maybe even aloud—“Right … fine,” to reduce Li Zhang to an ant or else anything, it hardly mattered what just so long as it was lowly, just to break him down the more for having ignored her, she found she couldn’t summon that up either, and instead was cutting in on him, saying, “All right, when do you want, when are you free?” He said he was free now, and she said, “In an hour,” and just as they hung up Cutts’s keys rattled at the door, and he came in, all smiles, and handed her a small box tied with a gaudy crimson ribbon.

  What was wrong with me that I felt shot through with the most exhilarating combination of guilt, nervousness, and amusement when I put on the earrings he had given me, knowing that there was a strong chance that Li would be taking them off, or filliping them where they dangled loose flashing their little mercurial beaks (the earrings were stainless steel hummingbirds)—how had it happened that after all we had been through together I could so quickly have outgrown Cutts? I could locate in my heart not one bit of ambiguity with regard to this moral lassitude, this ethics-free brilliance I suddenly felt, kissing him good-bye, getting him out of the aerie so that I could be left alone for a few minutes before this other man was to arrive. I didn’t feel empty, I felt indifferent. The desire to see Li Zhang must have been building up inside, I told myself, for it tohave gone like this, for it to have occurred both so suddenly and with such ease. And just when I thought I had gotten him—like Christians try to get the devil—behind me.

  When Li Zhang turned up, however, I was conscious of a shift back toward Cutts-attachment; Zhang seemed very different without his dog with him. He seemed a little like an amputee. And, of course, he wouldn’t have the leash with him today, which made me feel—and a ridiculous irony this was—less trusting toward him, less comfortable in his presence.

  “That’s too bad about Can,” I offered.

  He frowned when I leaned away from his kiss. “I miss her,” he said.

  I was grateful for the sound of a baby crying, and a mother yelling, in the distance, as it brought into the aerie a kind of sense of there being other people nearby. A silence began to get awkward, and I broke it saying, “Here’s your book.”

  “Grace?”

  “What,” and I focused on his mouth. It was dry-brown, somewhat heavier than I remembered. He was wearing, I was pretty sure, the same clothes he wore last time, gray trousers, gray scarf, white shirt, the heavy aubergine boots; like a uniform.

  “I’d like to start over,” he said, softly emphatic, eschewing the preliminaries—though, of course, we two had yet to bother with preliminaries—even as he proposed them. “Do you think that kind of thing is possible to do?”

  “Very artificial.”

  “That may be, but I’m willing to try.”

  This sudden direct communicativeness, and its gentle tone, seemed discrepant with the uniform, the lips, and everything I recalled about the way he’d acted before. Why did I find it provocative rather than merely incoherent?“What do you do for a living, Li?” and sat down at the table—pressing on with
the thought, All right, give him a chance to reveal himself, small talk, so what’s to lose?

  “Fold shirts.”

  Insipid; why was I always asking myself, Who is this guy? why do I feel this way?“No, really—here you are telling me you want to start over again and then you fall back on some stupid racial humor, and that’s how we’re supposed to get to know each other?”

  “What makes you think I want to get to know you?”

  That was him, there he was. “I’m not asking you to get to know me, I’m asking you about yourself because I think it might be a good idea to know a few things about you.”

  “There’s nothing to know.”

  “You think I should care that your dog died, care that you want to begin again whatever the hell that means, let you call me when you feel like it but not return my calls, not answer any questions—”

  “I answered your question. I fold shirts, sometimes I deliver them when the regular kid is out sick.”

  “Oh come on—”

  “I don’t know why you find that so hard to believe. Grace, I think you ought to stop with the questions. What I think is I think you ought to take your dress off.”

  “We didn’t need to take anything off last time.”

  “Yes, but this time I want you to take it off.”

  “Why should I?” now seeing how the uniform complemented orders.

  “Because that’s why you let me come over here.”

  “I let you come over because I wanted to see why it was you were bothering me, I mean, why you were on my mind—but now I don’t think I want to know.”

  “I was on your mind because you liked what we were doing and probably you didn’t do that before with anybody and you wanted to do it again.”

  “Oh, listen to this. Who fled the instant things started to warm up? Not I, I can tell you.”

  “I didn’t say anything to the contrary. That’s a different question. Women’s minds always work in tangents.”

  “Why did you leave like that?”

  “I left because you were missing the point.”

  Grace more or less laughed. “What point?”

  “Take off your dress, Grace.”

  “What?”

  “You heard what I said—it’s what you want me to say, I can tell. I think you ought to just do it.”

  “What if I do?”

  Li Zhang crossed his arms. He wished he had a cigarette, I could tell. He seemed bored, a fact that perturbed me enough that I got up and walked over toward the bed, saying, “There’s no point to it, it’s just—what’s the point?”

  “You had it—‘the point’—when we met, when we were walking along that day, and then you had it for a while here, and then you just lost it, you just reverted back to whatever it is you usually are which is what I was hearing on the phone machine and which is why I couldn’t call you back, you weren’t even the same person, how was I supposed to call you back and talk to you, I didn’t even know who you were.”

  Li Zhang I didn’t much like I now began to know, but I thought that for all his cheerless rhetoric he was close to, indeed, identifying something that might be valuable to me, not with regard to any relationship with him—which in any case I now knew for certain I wouldn’t want, wouldn’t allow—but having to do with myself, or Cutts, or maybe even Desmond, who knew? I tried to deliberate but found myself undoing the catch at the back of my dress. Curiosity.

  This time, he didn’t bother to tie me up. I didn’t require restraint. I lay there, face down, my cheek resting on the back of my hand, and let him fuck me. He didn’t kiss me, and he didn’t make a sound when he came—having withdrawn—on the sheets. I had internalized and narrowed my concentration so that I didn’t much notice him as he cleaned the sheets with a dampened paper towel. I could sense Li hovering over me and knew him just well enough to understand that if I didn’t turn over and say somethingto him—anything, disparaging, affectionate, anything—he would probably now remain silent. It was my theory that behind his need for this impersonal sex, this conceit of making love only in the most distant manner possible, was just another person to whom intimacy was terrifying, literally, beyond words. I would have felt sorry for him if I didn’t know better than to bother. What I was beginning to feel then was a remote kindof gratitude hazed a bit by the sense of how deplorable, how squalid and dreary was all this behavior. The gratitude was what I found most interesting. Yes, I was grateful, not for the introduction to this mild sort of sadomasochism he took it upon himself to practice on me—mild,to be sure, given that I, in my childish imagination, had conjured far more potent, more violent and abnormal scenes with Desmond’s ghost than anything Li could conceive of; no, it was this: I had begun to feel grateful toward Li Zhang because he seemed to have broken my bond with Cutts. There was some part of me, I would be a liar not to admit, a part that I may never understand that liked the feeling of helpless pleasure. It’s taken me a long time to admit that to myself. But the sense that I might have achieved an unexpected severance from Cutts through it was overwhelming. Zhang’s love was an instance of plain, unalloyed immoral activity making the way for another chance at finding a life in which there might be some fresh ethic. I was reminded of how sometimes out at sea on those huge oil platforms—I had never seen one except on the news on television, burning vividly on the screen—the only way to extinguish a fire raging hot down in the well was to deprive it of oxygen by detonating an explosive that would itself create more fire than there was air to feed it.

  This dominator—it made me scowl to know that I should laugh at having been so gullible, or so needy as to be able to allow for someone like Li to undertake such a role—had left a note. “I’ll call,” it read. He’d taken the book, which was fine by me because the first thing I didwhen I pushed myself up off the bed and stood up in the aerie, head twinkling with adolescent, if painless, fireflylike lights, was to call the telephone company and give them a disconnect order. I dressed—taking my time, for there was no need to hurry—and left the aerie, knowing I would never come back here again. I didn’t bother to make up the bed, it didn’t matter. I didn’t bother to lock the door because there wasn’t a single object inside the place that I would want to have—except for my favorite starfish, a flare-man pink example with only four legs, a rather pathetic little mutilated fellow, which I slipped into my pocket for good luck, and maybe as a cautionary memento. If a burglar removed the entire contents of the aerie it would only save me the trouble of having to hire someone to go in and remove everything down to the street.

  By the end of the week, who knew where that charming Dutch idyll would hang. Would it lend its warmth to some other preposterous hearth, or wind up as tinder in a Bowery can fire, where it might keep some ruined soul warm?

  To me it was all the same. Let to it happen whatever would happen, was how I viewed it, let it all come down.

  Part IV

  The Almanac Branch

  WE COME TO the crisis now, or rather it comes to us. It had been, I know, imminent for years, but the first frightening glimpse I had of it was in the eyes of that man who showed up at the door a few weeks ago. I shouldn’t have let him in. But he seemed serious, with his serge suit, his rain-blue tie, his immaculate pomaded black hair all bespeaking some deep, sincere purpose, and he said he was from the National Council of Churches, and there was something about him that suggested to me he had come to help us, or at least act kindly toward us. So I invited him in, and he accepted coffee, and asked whether it would be too much trouble to put some cinnamon in it.

  Like any observer, I could claim that none of what he wanted to discuss had anything to do with me. Still I wonder how I can have been a presence in the lives of my father and brother and not have had any influential say in the decisions they’ve made. The three of us are linked—through blood, through shared experiences, through an unholy labyrinth of contractual papers—and yet we have operated as if we were individuals, knowing nevertheless that nothing one of us does ca
n fail to have at least some effect on the other.

  Clues there have been, of course; if I had truly wanted to understand how Geiger worked, and asked, with insistence, direct questions of Faw and Berg, I might have come to some of this earlier. Not that either of them would have been able—call that willing—to articulate the pertinent truths about Geiger’s phony church.

  I can’t help but think I’d have been able to protect them from themselves, and from others, if I had known. The little girl running over the dunes in an overlarge bear suit that reeked of urine and mothballs, whose brother chasedher with his primitive camera, his recording eye, regretting she was not as wild and strong as he was, and who looked down on her sensitivity as weakness all those years, is the same person who now may have to find the strength to hold our lives together. If this man in the serge suit asked me to come up with a metaphor for where Berg and I stood—tableaux vivants in some museum of late-twentieth-century American hybrids—now, almost two decades later, I’d have no quarrel with letting that image from our childhood stand. Except that now I would follow Berg. And rather than him threatening me I would threaten to bring his sprint to an end. A couple of calls, that would be it, from what I can tell. What he has concocted with these Trust monies deserves to be brought to an end, no doubt. He has learned too well from Faw’s dark side, and in his efforts to grow up, and be absolved of having been his father’s son, he has ended up baptizing himself in dirty water. He can take his cameras, far more sophisticated than any he ever dreamed of as a child, down to the orchard and over the dunes now where the tide is rising, but what he hopes to find there is gone. I’m not the person he thinks I am, in the same way I wasn’t the girl he thought I was. I would challenge the value of any history he might want to try to wrap me, or any of us, up in. His Almanacbranches from strange roots—and it is not so much that he has been using the money to finance pornography. It’s that he’s been using the money to make more money. That is what they don’t like. And the years he spent dancing in the shadows of Faw, in some ways emulating him, in other ways just manipulating him right back, what use were they, if in his one big attempt at liberation he has only—ironically, and pathetically—brought himself deeper into his father’s orbit?