by Wendy Lee
An elderly woman’s voice—not Jin’s—called out something in muffled Cantonese. Then, when I didn’t answer, she asked in Mandarin Chinese, “Ni yao shui?” Who do you want?
I gave Jin’s name, then waited a few minutes before locks rattled on the other side of the door and it opened, revealing not an old crone, but my wife. We gazed at each other through the metal gate. Even though she was backlit, Jin’s face was dearly familiar. She looked the same as when she’d left, healthy even, and for a moment I thought she wasn’t really sick, it was something she had just told her sister to get away from me.
“It’s you,” she finally said in English.
“Yes, it’s me,” was my lame reply.
Another voice, this time that of an elderly man, asked a question, and Jin opened the gate to allow me to enter. Inside, within a small living room dominated by a huge television set, sat Jin’s parents. Her mother appeared to be in her sixties, and her father in his seventies, both frailer than I expected. It was almost as if Jin had returned to take care of them instead of the other way around. Again, a spark of hope kindled in my heart.
Jin spoke in Mandarin Chinese for my benefit. “This is Liu Qingwu from New York. He is my . . . husband.”
At her hesitation, I realized that Jin had never told her parents she had gotten married. To their credit, her parents seemed to readily accept this news. Perhaps they didn’t think getting married in America was legitimate. I should have brought them presents like a proper son-in-law, like cigarettes from a bodega for her father, perfume from a discount store for her mother. But Jin would have taken one look at these items and known what cheap places they had come from.
Her father said something in Cantonese, and Jin told me, “He insists you stay here as our guest.”
I noticed Jin herself was not insisting on anything. She spoke to her parents, then suggested to me that we go take a walk outside, for privacy. As she closed the front door behind her, I heard the door of the apartment opposite hastily click shut behind its metal gate. The neighbors were listening in. I had no doubt rumors would be spreading in the building the next day about who Jin’s late-night visitor was.
The street outside the apartment building was relatively quiet, but once we rounded the corner, late-night food stalls and vendors selling electronics and cheap clothing sprung up in droves. Jin and I were just another one of the couples weaving among them, enjoying the relative coolness of the night air.
“I’m guessing my sister told you where I was,” Jin finally said.
“Don’t blame her, she held out for a long time. I had to go to her house in person to get her to talk.” I paused. “How are you feeling?” I half-hoped she would reveal to me that her illness was a lie.
She sighed. “I have some good days, some bad days.”
“You look the same.” But even as I said that, watching her sideways as we walked, I could see a slowness in the way she moved, a new hollowness in the bones of her face. “Are you seeing a doctor?”
“I go to a doctor in my father’s village every weekend. He prescribes me some herbs for the week, and my mother brews them. It tastes awful, of course. But maybe it does something.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?”
She gave me a half smile. “What good would it do? We didn’t have the money for any kind of treatment, Western or Eastern.”
“I could have found a better job—”
Jin stilled me with a hand on my arm. “You are fifty years old. How can you start over? Who would hire you?”
“I’d think of something. I am your husband—”
“That has nothing to do with whether you can take care of me. I have to take care of myself. Do you understand that?” She turned her luminous eyes to me, and I had to nod. “Now,” she said briskly, indicating that we were not going to talk about her illness any more, “tell me about Hong. How is she doing? How are my nieces?”
When we got back to the apartment, Jin’s parents had gone to bed. Jin slept in a small, separate bedroom of her childhood, and I was to sleep on the fake leather couch in the shadow of the enormous television. Jin quickly and efficiently made up the bed, and showed me the concrete-lined bathroom located off the living room. We formally wished each other good night, and I lay in the dark, unable to go to sleep, distracted by the strange sounds of a Chinese city instead of a Queens neighborhood coming through the open windows.
The following day was a Saturday, and Jin’s scheduled visit to the village healer. I asked if I could go with her and her father, and she agreed. Her father collected and sold used electronic parts that he transported in his van. He and Jin sat up front in the vehicle, while I clung to the rickety backseat surrounded by broken-down computers, refrigerators, and other appliances I couldn’t identify. This was Jin’s father’s job in retirement; before that he had owned a nearby electronics store. Although I wasn’t able to communicate with him directly, given our language barrier, my impression was that he was a practical, hardworking man, the kind a family could depend on.
We drove about two hours from Guangzhou to the outskirts of Taishan, a coastal city in Guangdong Province best known for being where most Cantonese-speaking immigrants in the world come from. Then, instead of entering the city itself, we turned onto a road that wound among palms and banana trees, rice paddies and ponds that reflected the green mountains in the distance. Gradually the road diminished into a muddy track, and we had to park and proceed the rest of the way on foot, picking through pools of water left by a recent storm.
Jin’s father’s ancestral village was like stepping back two hundred years or more. The gray stone houses with their dark-tiled roofs were virtually deserted, many crumbling into the reddish earth. More than a few had trees growing unchecked in the front yards, or through the walls and roofs. Peering through broken or missing front doors, I could see chickens wandering through the empty rooms.
Once we got closer to what seemed to be the village center, the infrastructure seemed to improve, with electrical wires crisscrossing the path overhead and a few shops selling vegetables. Motorbikes were parked along the street; apparently they were able to navigate the washed-out roads more easily than cars. It being close to the middle of the day, almost no one was outside in the sunny, humid weather, although I spotted through an open door several people gathered around a television, watching a soccer match.
Through Jin, I asked her father where everyone was.
“It’s xiuxi time,” she replied. Siesta.
“I mean, where are the people who live in this village?”
“Most of them have immigrated to other countries or to larger cities like Guangzhou. Anyone still here is too old or poor to leave.”
The healer whom Jin had been seeing ever since she’d arrived seemed to fall into the first type of person. He looked to be about the age of Jin’s father, and the two knew each other well. When I was introduced as a family friend, the healer smiled and nodded at me and pumped my hand.
He said something in the local dialect, and Jin unexpectedly laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“He says you’re looking somewhat listless and could use one of his tonics.”
I was about to retort that I had just flown over half the continent, but desisted. It was nice to hear Jin’s laugh again, even if it was at my expense.
Jin’s father excused himself to wait outside, or perhaps down the street with the men watching soccer. Jin allowed me to go into the examination room with her, if it could be called that. It was simply a small alcove with a twin bed surrounded by a mosquito net, now drawn back, that she sat on. She waited patiently as the healer felt the sides of her neck, moved her head and limbs this way and that.
“He says everything is the same as last week,” she reported. “That’s good news.”
I did not want to bring down her spirits so I said nothing. But although I knew nothing about medicine, this hardly seemed like a legitimate examination to me.
&n
bsp; Jin’s father reappeared, and the healer handed him—not Jin, I noticed—a plastic bag filled with what looked like herbs and bark. In return, Jin’s father handed him a few crumpled bills—no more than three hundred yuan, I guessed, or fifty dollars, but still a lot to pay for what was likely useless. But it was not my place to protest.
“We will have lunch now,” Jin told me.
Where? I wondered. Not only was it still nap time, but I hadn’t seen any place that remotely resembled a restaurant. But Jin’s father took us to a sundries store, where an old woman carried out a round folding table and three camp stools and set them up underneath the awning. Within ten minutes she brought out three bowls of dumplings that I had to admit were better than any I’d tasted in Chinatown. The three of us did not say anything to each other but simply slurped away. Then Jin’s father leaned back, belched, and said something to Jin.
“He is going to visit the family altar now,” she said. “He’ll meet us there. Let’s go take a walk in the meantime.”
“You don’t want to pay your respects?”
She shrugged. “I’ll be joining them soon enough.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed at her macabre comment. When I looked up, I saw her noting my response with sly amusement. I didn’t know how she could maintain a sense of humor about her condition. Maybe it was all she could do.
Before we left, her father again pulled out some bills. I wondered if I should offer to pay for lunch, but it seemed pointless compared to what had been spent on Jin’s medication.
Her father went in one direction and Jin and I went in another, heading out of town. The path wound through fields in which water buffalo grazed, tails idly switching. Although the heat was oppressive, the green surrounding us gave the illusion of coolness. We crested a hill and faced a landscape dominated in the distance by a mountain that appeared oddly familiar to me. Then I identified it. Although we were several hundred miles south, this was the mountain from my childhood, the mountain from my mind. Here it was, all this time.
Jin searched my face as I stood still, but I was unable to explain my vision to her. I had never thought when, or if, I saw that mountain again, it would be in the company of someone I loved and whom I was about to lose.
“How long are you planning to stay?” she asked, in her usual, blunt way. “I need to let my parents know.”
It was only my second day in China, and she was already pushing me away. I had to be honest. “As long as I have the money.”
“Where did you get it?”
I told her about Caroline Lowry, how she’d approached me one afternoon at my stall in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, how I’d thought she was interested in my work when she was really looking for someone to forge a painting for her.
“She asked you to commit a crime?”
“Well.” I hesitated. “I didn’t know what she was going to do with the painting. She never told me she was intending to sell it as the real thing, just that she was selling it to a client from Taiwan.”
“But what do you think she did?”
“She probably sold it as the actual painting,” I admitted.
“You should have asked for more money.”
“I wasn’t sure if I could do the job.”
Jin made an impatient sound. “You’ve always underestimated yourself. What happens when your money runs out here? What will you do?”
“I’ll teach art classes, English classes. I’ll help your father with his scrap collection.”
The ghost of a smile hovered around her mouth. “He’d like that. But why do you want to stay?”
There was no artifice between us anymore. “Because you are here. Because if I can’t help you in the way you don’t want to be helped, I just want to be here with you. Until the end.”
Jin shaded her eyes, looking off into the distance. “It won’t be easy.”
“I know.”
She didn’t say anything, just slipped her hand into mine. Turning our backs on the mountain and the landscape beyond, we walked back to her father’s village.
Chapter 13
Although he doesn’t like to admit it, Andrew Cantrell is glad he moved from the city out to East Hampton. He especially likes the sympathy he receives from his artist friends, who believe his wife, Naomi, made them set up residence at her family’s summer home to get him away from Hazel Lowry. Only he and Hazel know their relationship ended years before, even though they continued to attend gallery openings and other events together. For him, it was good for publicity and kept Naomi on her toes. What Hazel got out of it, he wasn’t too sure.
Hazel called him on Friday when he was in the city, staying at the home of his friend Mark Finnegan. She said she wanted to see him out in East Hampton.
Why not here? he asked.
I need somewhere private to speak to you, was all she said.
He didn’t think she needed to go all the way out to the tip of Long Island for privacy, but she insisted that she wanted to get away for the weekend, so he agreed to meet up with her that Saturday night, when he knew Naomi was going to be at a charity event in the city.
He doesn’t blame Hazel for wanting to leave the city, as in the summer it’s intolerable; the very concrete seems to seep with sweat and other unmentionable fluids. Driving down Sunrise Highway late Saturday afternoon, he wonders how he thrived on it, the long, sticky nights, whether he was in the company of someone else or alone working. He turns off onto a side road, past houses that increase in size and opulence until, almost at the ocean, he pulls into a small lane that leads to a modest farmhouse weathered gray by the salt and wind.
Almost everyone who comes to visit him and Naomi is surprised that this is her family’s summer home, left over from the days when it was surrounded by farmland. He remembers the first time he laid eyes on the place, when he was courting Naomi. That is, as much courting as he was able to do with his lack of funds, which Naomi didn’t seem to mind. She considered herself a cultured person and him as her entrée into a world where her kind was regarded with suspicion. Later, when they were settled in their quiet, domestic country life, it occurred to him that Naomi looked upon him as her family looked upon their summer home—a bit run-down but worth preserving, if just for the badge of authenticity it bestowed.
Naomi lured him there with the promise of turning the barn, just down the hill from the farmhouse, into a studio. He thought he’d do his greatest work within those walls, but once he ensconced himself there, he found himself uninspired. For most of his career, he’d been extraordinarily lucky, especially compared to some of his friends—like Mark Finnegan, who couldn’t convince his dentist to take a painting in lieu of payment for a root canal. By the age of thirty-five Cantrell had a piece in the Museum of Modern Art. Then a few years later he painted Elegy, for which a private collector—a woman who’d made her fortune in Texas oil—had offered two million dollars.
Naomi made the connection through her family, and he would have seriously considered the offer, except Hazel wouldn’t let him. His refusal to sell had been a humiliation of sorts for Naomi, but he couldn’t explain to his wife the real reason he had to listen to Hazel, that Hazel had told him under no circumstances could he sell this painting.
Instead, he told the private collector that his work was worth more than two million dollars, and the art world took notice. The media attention culminated in a splashy photo spread for Life magazine, which impressed Naomi and did much to alleviate her resentment toward him. She spent days preparing for the photographer, rearranging the furniture at proper angles, accentuating the rustic charms of the place with carefully chosen antiques. She unearthed a tea set from somewhere, and he had to laugh at the resultant photo of her carrying it while wearing an apron, as if she were an ordinary housewife. Which was, he suspected, exactly the image she wanted to present—the wife of an artist who had once painted a work someone thought was worth two million dollars, even though she herself was worth much more than that in family mo
ney, and without her he was worth nothing.
Naomi had known about Hazel from the beginning. She orchestrated overly theatrical moves like hiring a private detective or barging in on him and Hazel at a restaurant and slapping Hazel in the face. Privately, he thought Naomi loved the drama; this was part of what she had signed up for by marrying so beneath her. Hazel, too, made the best of the negative attention and turned it into publicity for her gallery and his work.
Then, on a rainy day about a month before he painted Elegy, Hazel confronted him in his studio, which was located around the block from his and Naomi’s apartment in the East Village. The humidity had turned her red hair into a frizzy aureole around her face, reminding him of a painting by Gustav Klimt, the one entitled Hope. He was admiring the effect of her silhouette against the light when Hazel told him she was pregnant.
Well? she asked, and he realized he was taking too long to answer.
Please, sit down. He hastened to clear a chair for her.
Do I look like I need to sit down? I’m not that pregnant yet, she snapped.
So what are you going to do? he asked, at a loss for what to say.
It depends on Naomi. Hazel wavered for a moment, as if she was going to take the chair he’d offered her, but then she straightened her spine. I want you to leave her.
I can’t do that. It was an automatic response, and she knew it.
You’ve never tried. In all these years I’ve never asked you for anything, but I’m asking you now. The look on her face was almost stern, and he knew this was the closest she would come to pleading with him.
I’ll speak to her, was all he could say.
After she left, he turned his attention back to the painting he was working on, but his concentration was shot. Instead he looked out the grimy window of his studio to the uninspiring view of an air shaft through which dim sunlight and the faint cooing of pigeons streamed. What would a life with Hazel be like? Would they run the gallery together, would he be free to pursue his work? And there would be a child. He had almost forgotten that part.
