Beautiful as Yesterday

by Fan Wu

  “At least you’ve tried them all,” Ingrid says.

  Matthew glances at the two books at Ingrid’s elbow. Noticing his bewilderment, she explains that they are translation projects she has just received, not something she buys or reads for pleasure.

  “It pays my rent,” she tells him and holds up the investment book. “And this one”—she takes up the other, about sex—“pays for my food, clothes, car insurance, and all the other stuff.”

  Matthew nods sympathetically. “When I quit teaching, I did various odd jobs. I painted houses, and for a few summers I played cartoon characters for an amusement park. That was a terrible job, wearing hairy clothes on a hot day. By the end of the show I thought I’d die from heat and dehydration. But it’s a piece of cake compared with the job one of my friends has. He works at a cemetery, carrying bodies and digging graves. The pay is pretty good. Random House just bought his suspense novel, which I have read already. The protagonist works at a cemetery, and most scenes take place between midnight and four o’clock in the morning, inside the cemetery. I had goose bumps reading it. My friend called me a few days ago, saying he was quitting his job to write full-time and asking me if I wanted to work at his cemetery, to get some fun experience.”

  “Then you might write a suspense novel too. Or a thriller.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But I don’t mind working at a small press right now. I get a chance to talk with literary agents. Before taking the job, I sent many pitch letters to them but never heard anything back. I thought they were gods, really. Now I call them for coffee or lunch. Maybe one of them will represent me someday, who knows? Having connections doesn’t hurt. Also, I get books for free. Of course, I have to read a lot of junky manuscripts. But unless I complete a novel, my boss won’t be interested in me as a writer. He pays me to edit other people’s writing, not to write my own books.”

  “We Chinese say that reading ten thousand books is like traveling ten thousand miles. You must have accumulated pretty good mileage. Not enough to cross the U.S., but enough to cover the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles.”

  “Aha, that’s a wise saying,” Matthew responds, then asks Ingrid if she has thought about writing a novel.

  Instead of telling him the truth, she says, “I’m thinking about starting one.” She just doesn’t think she can say she’s working on a novel if she isn’t sure about the ending.

  “I have no problem starting. My problem is finishing,” he says. “Oh, I’ve forgotten why I’m here. My boss asked me to find books with multicultural themes, especially memoirs. Are you interested?”

  Ingrid leans back. “I can’t write a memoir. Last year, I met an agent in New York, and she asked me to write a memoir about the Cultural Revolution, saying those kinds of books were hot. I told her I was only seven when it ended. Also, aren’t there many overseas Chinese writing memoirs about that period already? They are the people who went through it, being Red Guards or Intellectual Youth, exiled to labor farms or put in jail.”

  “You’re right. But memoirs do sell better than novels.” He pauses. “I don’t know what made me want to write fiction; it just feels good to invent characters and see how they develop, you know. After spending years on a book, you have to find an agent, then the agent needs to find a publisher. You can bet it’s much easier to find a husband or a wife. But my press is quite good, and we publish literary novels that don’t make money or make little money. My boss loves money, but he loves good books more. Of course we must make a profit or we can’t stay in business. If we went under, I’d have to update my résumé, changing ‘inexperienced editor’ to ‘homeless editor.’”

  “Think about your friend’s offer of working at a cemetery,” Ingrid says jokingly.

  “You never know. I might take the job. Also, being a janitor or a night watchman may not be bad, either. Raymond Carver used to work as a janitor and a deliveryman. I believe he painted houses too.”

  “Good for you. It looks like you have something lined up.”

  “We’ll see. One thing I can tell you is that I don’t fancy a life of eating dry bread and drinking beer. I’ve had enough of those days.” He glances at his stomach. “I don’t lose weight easily. Even if I only drank water every day, I doubt I’d shrink much. I’m the opposite of you Asians. No matter how much you eat, you don’t gain weight. Just look at the old people in Chinatown. It seems to me that they eat many meals a day, but they’re skinny. I bet that if they stood on eggs, the eggs wouldn’t break. But it’s not bad to be a little fat in San Francisco, you know. If there were an earthquake and I got stuck in my room, my fat might save my life.”

  Ingrid laughs at his self-deprecation; she has realized that Matthew isn’t the kind of authoritative editor she had agonized about but a wannabe writer just like herself.

  “You Chinese writers exist in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, while we Jewish writers live in the nightmare of the Holocaust,” Matthew remarks. “In fact, both my grandparents managed to escape the Holocaust, and none of my relatives died unnaturally. Still, somehow I get the feeling from my writer friends that I’d better write a book about the Holocaust if I’m serious about writing; they even get jealous of me because they have no holocausts to write about.”

  “When so many people write about the same theme, they could ruin the theme or make it seem less important, don’t you think? Mass production, it sounds like to me,” Ingrid says. “Reminds me of IKEA furniture.”

  Matthew agrees, then begins to talk about writers he likes, mainly contemporary ones, including those his age. Though Ingrid has heard of most of them, she is not familiar with their work. In the end she has to interrupt him and tells him that the writers she typically reads are from the eighteenth or nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth. She explains that her reading habits reflect the fact that she was slow reading English the first few years she was in the United States, so she tried to read the classics first. “The list is long, so I’m still working through them,” she says. She also explains that, influenced by her Mexican roommate in New York, she has been reading several Latino writers.

  “Do you read only the masters? Or writers who are dead?” Matthew asks. “One of my friends is like that. He calls it ‘digging out treasures from the dead.’ He says those masters are his spiritual friends. One day, we had barely sat down at a restaurant when he told me that Nabokov was on his way to his apartment to discuss one of his characters with him. Then he just took off, leaving me there. To learn from the masters, he copied their writing for an hour in longhand every day. He said it was important not to write with a computer or you wouldn’t be able to enter the masters’ brains. I once read a short story he wrote. The plot, structure, and tone totally copied Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog.’ My friend wrote about a married farmer in Napa meeting an illiterate prostitute during his vacation in San Diego. That kind of feigned melancholy almost killed me. After reading his story, I had to eat lobster for dinner to make up for my suffering.”

  “Ha-ha, you were quite mean. Does your friend still write?”

  “He still copies the masters’ books in longhand now and then, waiting for inspiration.”

  “Do you read the classics?”

  “I used to, when I was in college. But they require patience, don’t they? A lot of them are slow and boring. Fifty or one hundred years ago, people had time to read big books like War and Peace, Jean-Christophe, or Crime and Punishment. Nowadays we have distractions from TV, radio, the Internet, movies, piles of newspapers and magazines, not to mention a full-time job and a messy apartment waiting to be cleaned—not by a maid, that’s for sure. You’ve probably heard that some of the classics’ publishers are doing compact editions, meaning abridged editions, of some classics.”

  “That’s too bad. That’s like fast food to me.”

  “I don’t like the practice, either, but I understand why they do it. At least the readers get a chance to read something intelligent. I can tell you’v
e read a lot of classics from your blog. I liked how you inserted certain scenes or dialogues from a classic novel into your description of a tourist attraction. You know what? Forget about memoirs. I think you should do a travel book. Travel books sell big-time. And after you have money, you can write as you please. Like Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, who once wrote porn stories for a dollar a page for an old man in Oklahoma to supplement their income so they could write what they wanted. As for me, since I don’t want to have anything to do with the Holocaust, at least not now, all I can write about is coming of age, friendship, divorce, homicide, adultery, or family conflicts. Just last night, I was wondering how to make a hard-core Roman Catholic widow with three little kids in Montana fall in love with an ambitious young atheist politician.”

  “What’s the time period?”

  “The early nineties? Or maybe earlier.”

  “Hmm, that widow must have been bored with her unromantic and undramatic life.”

  “Do you think that a young politician could fall in love with the widow?”

  “Why not? In his social circle, all the women are politicians, attorneys, businesswomen, or others who are just as ambitious as he is. That widow’s unconditional motherly love and care and her submissiveness are just what he needs when he comes home from a tiring day. But their relationship won’t last. The young man will soon seek a new mistress who can help him rise in the world and challenge his manhood.”

  “What do you say about making the politician a married man and a father? That would make the plot more intricate.”

  “It’s better if he’s single. A young, ambitious bachelor, intelligent, passionate, a good lover. If he had a family, he’d worry about the media and wouldn’t dare get involved with the widow. Just look at our previous president to see how powerful and omnipotent the media are nowadays. In my opinion…” Ingrid pauses deliberately.

  “Go on!” Matthew looks engrossed, almost impatient.

  “How about making the widow a traditional, religious, high-class woman whose husband is a boring business guru? To make the husband donate to his campaign, the young politician approaches the wife and seduces her, only to realize later that he has fallen in love with her. But, for his future, he must choose another woman with more social status. He meets such a woman: stunningly beautiful yet too naïve and girlish for his taste. But it doesn’t matter; all he cares about is his career.”

  “Wow, it’s getting more and more interesting. How will you end the story?”

  “Let me think…” Seeing Matthew take the bait, Ingrid can barely contain her laughter. She picks up her lukewarm latte and sips it with a thoughtful expression. “Hmm, it’s a moot question.”

  Matthew grasps his iced-tea cup with one hand and lifts it to his lips, his eyes fixed on Ingrid, but instead of drinking he puts the cup down: he too is thinking about the fate of this forbidden love.

  “I’ve got an idea!” Ingrid wipes her mouth with her napkin. “He’s afraid that the widow will publicize their affair and ruin his political career, so he decides to kill her. Of course he isn’t so stupid as to hire a mafia hit man or professional assassin to do it—these people always come back to threaten you later, you know. Also, he’s arrogant and proud: if he starts something, no matter whether it went well or poorly, he faces the consequences and finishes it himself. His campaign for governor will be officially launched in two weeks, and he has to kill her before that. His decision is timely because the widow is planning to expose their affair to the media. In her despair and depression, she has confessed to her priest about her adultery, and her priest has urged her to publicize her affair, to humiliate the candidate. In fiction, priests always like meddling in others’ business. Isn’t that so? If you haven’t read E. L. Voynich’s The Gadfly, you should check it out. That book used to be extremely popular in China and Russia, read by millions of people. There is a famous priest in the book. Anyway, the widow hasn’t wanted to damage her young lover, nor has she been paid either by the media or the politician’s rivals. She loves the man dearly and only wishes him well, however heartbroken she is by his betrayal.”

  “I like the idea to have a priest in the book. I can write plenty about them. One of my uncles is a priest.”

  Ingrid continues. “One evening, this young man—he’s not that young anymore, but still very good-looking—invites the widow to meet him at a secret place on a mountain where they used to make love, saying he’s been missing her. When they meet, he shoots her. In his haste, he doesn’t kill her, though he thinks he did. When he gets home, he’s tortured by guilt; after all, he still loves her. He doesn’t dare read the newspapers or watch TV, afraid that he’ll see her body. He locks himself up in his country house, responding to neither his new mistress nor his aides. In the end, nearly losing his mind, he turns himself in. A bit like Rodion Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Only then does he realize that she is still alive, bedridden in a hospital, and she hasn’t said a word to the police about him. He’s overjoyed, realizing that his true love is the widow. I know little about American law. It’s up to you what kind of sentence he’ll serve. I think he’ll commit suicide over his career failure and his guilt toward the widow. As for the widow, I’ll let you decide her fate.”

  Matthew nods, sighs, smiles, all the while looking at Ingrid with a sense of wonder. Ingrid cannot hold in her amusement any longer; she buries her head in her arms to muffle her laughter. Matthew’s smile turns into a puzzled frown.

  “The story I just told you,” she confesses at last, “is just a variation of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir—The Red and the Black. The politician is the recalcitrant Julien Sorel, the widow is Madame de Rênal. Didn’t you say that classic novels are boring and out of date?”

  Matthew blushes. He clenches his right hand into a fist and waves it at Ingrid, pretending to be angry, but then he laughs. “Okay, you won this time. It looks like I have to kiss my Montana widow good-bye for a while until I figure out what to do with her.”

  Matthew looks at his watch and says he must go to another café, not far away, to meet several volunteers from the International Action Center office. He is one of the organizers for a pro-gay rally in April.

  “Since Bush began to campaign for the presidency, I’ve been volunteering with several activist groups,” Matthew says. “I’d thought he wouldn’t have stood a chance to get elected. If not for his old man, he wouldn’t even have been a governor. My friends and I had planned a big celebration. But…anyway, we got very drunk when the returns came in. If we hadn’t, we’d have gone out and vandalized cars and stores. In the past few months I’ve helped organize a dozen demonstrations and conferences, supporting equal marriage rights and immigrants’ rights, and protesting against the Bush administration. Did you notice that Bush Street here was renamed Puppet Street on Inauguration Eve? I didn’t do it. I wish I had.” He looks happy about this prank. “Oh, I forgot to ask you. Are you an American citizen? You didn’t vote for Bush, did you?”

  Seeing Ingrid shake her head, he is relieved, assuming she was replying to his second question. “Call me up if you want to volunteer. There are a lot of things we can affect. The world won’t get better if we just sit around letting politicians abuse our trust.”

  His big eyes are filled with enthusiasm—Ingrid sees herself, her younger self, in his face. Since coming to the United States, she hasn’t participated in any political events—she just cannot bring herself to be passionate about American politics, about which she knows little to begin with. Moreover, she has deliberately stayed away from parades, rallies, or other big gatherings, which somehow always lead to an unpleasant memory. In San Francisco, New York, or other places, whenever she came across such an event, she walked away, going to a mall or a restaurant where people seemed utterly ignorant of what was happening on the street. Is the past so present in her mind that she’s forever caught in this bind? she asks herself. To hide her unease she says, with a faint smile, “I didn’t know you are so into politics
.”

  “It’s not politics. It’s just exercising our rights as citizens. It’s in the First Amendment. By the way, there is an anti-Bush rally outside the Civic Center right now. I’ll be there after the meeting. If you have time, stop by.” Matthew rises and finishes his iced tea in a few gulps, not noticing that it has dripped on the front of his jacket. “Also, when you’re ready to write your novel, let me know.”

  Though Matthew keeps telling Ingrid that he’s running late for his meeting, he doesn’t get going. Finally, he says good-bye, only to return a moment later, asking her for her phone number.

  After he leaves, Ingrid sits at the café a little longer, then walks out and goes into a gallery at the intersection of Grant and Sutter, where expensive paintings and lithographs by Miró, Chagall, Dalí, and Picasso are displayed artfully in a high-ceilinged and well-lighted space. She admires Miró, an artist who in her opinion never abandoned innocence and conscience. How peaceful it is to be in a gallery! She thinks of the husband character in her novel, an ink-and-brush painter who locks himself up in his studio to paint whenever he hears bad news from the teahouse he frequents—that’s his way to deny the real world, struck by endless wars and injustices. One day his studio is bombed, and when he wakes up alone in the hospital, he no longer remembers who he is. The only thing he does remember is that he is married and his wife is pregnant. Then he is forced into service by a local warlord and sent to a battle far from home.

  What’s next for him? Ingrid thinks. What should she write in the fourth chapter and those that follow? Of course, he will look for his wife, but how can she advance the plot? And she doesn’t know how to end it, either, a terrible mistake according to Susan, her workshop teacher. Writing a novel, Susan once said in class, is like climbing a mountain—your goal is the peak and you know where you’re heading all the way—while writing a poem is like picking wildflowers in an open prairie—you stop wherever you feel like. Though Ingrid doesn’t believe in rules in creative writing, she has to agree with Susan on this one. Without knowing the direction of her novel, she cannot seem to develop the characters and the plot. Or maybe it’s just her; she cannot write like Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac.