Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  They walked out of the school, and he followed her through a gate, bedighted with rose vines in thorn, then along a footpath with ivy trailing upon it. Her part of the house was in back.

  She had wonderful, wonderful digs—flights of mobiles, windchimes, models (bottles and dry sunflowers) for still-lifes on tables and shelves, even the dishes on the drainboard arranged in a composition, cans of brushes, the smells of linseed oil and paint and patchouli, prisms turning in the east windows, madras India Import bedspreads for curtains and bed, spectrums of yellows and oranges, coat-hanger wire webbed with lavender and purple tissue paper over light bulbs, intricate old rugs (whose mazes you could lose yourself in when stoned, a kid again lining up armies of marbles). He could live here. He was itching to rummage, and to view life through her kaleidoscopes and prisms and magnifying glasses and scientific microscope. He went right over to her industrial-strength easel under the skylight; in its clamps was a sketch of a forest with pairs of points, the eyes of animals. There were smiles in the leaves. “You’re a painter,” he said. “I wish I were a painter, and always had something to show for it.” He spun a land-brown globe—Arabia Deserta, La Terra Inconoscivta, the Great American Desert, Red Cloud’s Country, the Unattached Territories, the Badlands, Barbaria, the Abode of Emptiness, the Sea of Darkness, sea serpents and mermaids abounding. “Strange beasts be here.” Nada ou Nouvel, whence the four winds blew. And she had a map of the universe—Hyperspace Barrier, areas of Giants, Supergiants, Dwarfs, Protogalaxies. She’s another one who knows how to live on her own, where she belongs in time and space.

  She went into the kitchen and boiled water, set up her drip system, ground her beans. Wittman wandered about.

  Toulouse-Lautrec’s Divan Japonais took up one wall; Taña had decorated to match that print—the furniture matte black like the man’s top hat and the woman’s dress, feathered hat, fan and long gloves; the madras picked up the orange hair and the yellow beard and cane. He slid open a box of kitchen matches—a bat, upright, cute face and wings akimbo, not alive. Vampiress? Taña also collected birds’ nests with blue and speckled eggshells, and downy nestling feathers, and a piniony quill. A set of false teeth had a reefer crutched in its grin. Tuning forks and magnets. A cabinet of good paper. A shelf of sketch books. Nudes. A roll of new canvas. Buckets of stretcher bars. He sat at the round table with the crystal ball and apples. There were also a set of brass gramweights as in a lab, a brown velvety cloth bunched around things, collages on boxes. Flows and layers of candle wax relief-mapped the courses of many evenings staying up with friends talking and sculpting. On a postcard of Seal Rock, she had drawn a few lines and dots, and you could see that seals are born out of rocks, and rocks come from seals.

  Taña brought over two cups of coffee, sat across from him, smoked. “Wittman,” she said, “Darling. I’ve been thinking: The next time I get it on with a man, I set ground rules.”

  “Yes? What is it, sweetheart?” She called me a man and a darling, and she wants to get it on. I’ve never called anyone Sweetheart before, never called anyone anything. “Go on.”

  “I may not be in love with you. Say, you’re the one I’m in love with, I won’t let you go. But, say, I meet him tomorrow, I’ll leave you. I’m being fair. You don’t love me either. We’re starting even. There was this guy named Edmund I was in love with when I was seventeen. I know what love feels like. I’m not in love with you. Maybe I cannot love again. But, say, I find him again, or another one like him, I’m going to have to get up and leave you. I don’t have an obsession over you, though I do want to make love with you. You don’t define my life. I just want you to know how I am before you decide to make it with me. Making love is my idea as well as yours. This isn’t just your idea, okay? You’re not going to say later that this was all my idea, or your idea. We can each of us cut out whenever we feel like it. If somebody that either of us can love comes along, why, we’re going to go, okay? As of yesterday we got along perfectly well without each other. And we’re not going to feel destroyed because I’m not in love with you and you’re not in love with me. So, tomorrow, if one of us wants to be by himself, nobody’s going to phone him up. But we could possibly go on forever not falling in love with somebody on the outside. We may get used to having each other around, and end up growing old together. Do you know Chekhov’s concept of dear friends? That’s what we can be to each other, dear friend.”

  Damn. She beat him to it. Outplayed again. He was the tough-eyed one who had been planning to let the next girl know point by point what she would be in for entangling with him. But he’d hesitated, what if she then wouldn’t want to be in for it? No girl but the one in his head sat still for a read-out of rules. He’d balked, and she’d taken his lines. Now what?

  Taña had been warming and softening wax in her hands and was molding it. Don’t go away, Taña. Does she know she looks winsome? Truth and Consequences. He was the loser. Consequences for him. “I think I could love you,” he said. “I think I do love you.”

  So they got it on, and they were graceful, just so much foreplay, just so much fervor and abandon and sweat, positions normal. Classic moves. Silently went at it. She didn’t say much, and he didn’t say much. Mouths against parts of the body, he did not make her blurt out, “I love you.” Well, it was a fuck where they were hardly acquainted, after all, and one didn’t want to turn off the other by seeming overly weirded out. Don’t grunt and groan repulsively. Be courtly. Be mannerly. And honest. Although who’s to know without having randomly made it with a large cross-section of the population—not the sampling of the one type that attracts you and is attracted by you—what’s abnormally passionate. The business-like way that most people walk around publicly conducting themselves, you would think nobody does anything sexual.

  Well, he was not like most people. “Hey,” he said. “Play with me. Taña. Tell me, tell me, what is it you like about my body?” He was up on his elbow beside her. She lay on her back with her white arms behind her head, her hair splaying, legs splaying too. All in the light of day.

  “I like your smooth bony chest,” she said, bringing her slow arms down and holding the flats of her hands against his chest. She put her cheek there too and listened to his heart. “And you’re thin. I can almost touch your bones, only skin between my fingers and your bones. And I like the way you look down at me haughty like that, looking over your cheekbones. I like your hair, thick and black. And your eyes have an expression, I don’t know what to call it. Your turn. You tell me what you like about me.”

  “You have pink nipples,” he said. Pink nipples have got to be more sensitive than brown nipples like his own.

  “And my face? What about my face?” she asked. “Tell me about my face.”

  “You’re lovely. Your face is lovely.” (Remember in Far from the Madding Crowd where, of her three suitors, Bathsheba Everdean chooses Sergeant Troy, “the one to tell her that she is beautiful.” Troy could also “take down Chinese in shorthand.”) “Beautiful.” He stroked her arm. The hairs stood up and moved back down. More so than the hair on her head, this light hair on the arms was to him Caucasian. “This arm hair is how I can tell you’re a white girl,” he said, aboveboard. “Your turn, beautiful Taña. Tell me what physical feature of mine makes me Chinese to you, and how it turns you on.”

  “Your eyes,” she said. “Mainly your eyes.”

  “And my skin?”

  “And your skin.” Which makes me Chinese all over. “You’re the same color as me, but a different tone.”

  Good. She did not tell him that she liked “yellow” skin or “slanty” eyes. She did not say he was “mysterious.” If she turns out to be a freak for orientalia, kick her out of bed. She’s not getting any mysterious East from me.

  “Is my nose too big?” she asked.

  “Everybody thinks their nose is too big,” he said, wisely. “Everybody thinks their own face has the most pores too. You have long eyelashes. Bat them against me.” She gave him butterfly kisse
s on his bony chest. She caressed the golden ecru of his flesh, and again he got on her, in her. Went in unto her. And again she enjoyed herself wordlessly. She’ll continue speaking after he recedes. Unstoppered. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the Japanese man listens and listens to the Frenchwoman talk. In Snow Country, the man does the talking.

  “What about my toes?” Wittman asked. “You notice my toes? I noticed your toes. Your toes were pushing against your Tijuana sandals, which strapped them tightly together. That was one of the first things I noticed about you.”

  “You have a thing for feet, do you?”

  “No, not me. Do you?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. I can’t stand the feeling of my toes sticking together, especially the two little ones at the end. Skin to skin. It’s always going on, but sometimes I think about it. Feeling them stick together drives me crazy. Especially when I have my shoes on and I’m somewhere where I can’t reach down to pull them apart. You have that? They’re doing it right now—look. Do you know what I mean? You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  “I can see if I start to think about it, I could work up an obsession. Toe skins. Yeah, I see what you mean. Lolita had that problem. Remember Humbert Humbert stuffing cotton between her toes? She’s sitting on the bed, and she holds up her feet. All her toes are separated with cotton wads.”

  “Wait a minute.” She was laughing. “Lolita didn’t have this toe sensitivity. Humbert Humbert was painting her toenails. He was saying, ‘Hold still.’ ”

  “Hey, don’t spoil Lolita for me. She and I are just like this.” He crossed his fingers—made kings.

  “I have it worse in my left toes.”

  “So you never heard the one about the difference between Chinese toes and Japanese toes?”

  “No, what’s that?”

  “What do you think? Take a look at my toes, and tell me if you see anything unusual.”

  Whenever you find a white person you can trust, get some inside answers to questions. Spy out specific racisms.

  “Is this a test to see how many men’s toes I’ve been looking at?” asked Taña.

  “I promise not to get jealous of you looking at other men’s toes.”

  “You have nice toes. Nice long, far-apart toes.”

  “I can spread them at will, and pick things up with them. I got monkey feet from going barefoot as a kid. Would you say my toes are too far apart?”

  “When you open them up like that, they’re unusually far apart. I guess you don’t have my problem feeling them smack against one another. Tell me the one about Chinese toes and Japanese toes.”

  “I shouldn’t give you a hang-up. There ought to be a rule not to give one another new hang-ups.”

  “There ought to be a rule when somebody starts to tell something, he has to finish it, no fair bringing up half a secret.”

  “You didn’t grab a peek at my toes to see whether I’m a chinaman or a jap?”

  “You can tell by the toes?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you. Comic books and Life magazine said that the way to tell a good Chinese from a bad jap is that the former has more space between the toes.”

  “Then I must be a Japanese, and you a Chinese.”

  He parted her sweet, suckable Japanese toes, and bent down and kissed one. Then he sucked each little piggy, and licked the tight spaces between them. He heard her sigh, “My toes are having orgasms.” Holding that sensitive foot against his chest and heart, he loved up the other one. “Wittman,” she called, and he looked up to see her face, which did not make him feel embarrassed. “You gave me an orgasm between all my toes,” she said. “Ten toes, eight orgasms. I didn’t know toes could do that.”

  “I didn’t either,” he said; “I think we’ve invented a new sex act.” He had not thought of toe love before suddenly doing it. Her feet were so beautiful and so human. He hoped that someday he would get to know her well enough to ask her to make love to and with his toes. Find out whether men can have orgasms down there too.

  She put on her X-L t-shirt to go to sleep. Every girl he ever made it with (two) wore t-shirts to bed. They only wear negligees in movies. They want you to make love to their real self and not their peignoir.

  Taña thought about complimenting Wittman on how nice and soft his penis was. But he was such a worrier over masculinity, he’d take it wrong. Men don’t understand that a penis is the loveliest softness to touch, more tender than a baby’s earlobe, softer than a woman’s breast. And after fucking is the best time to touch and touch, but you can’t do that for too long, or they feel bad they’re not getting hard. Wittman was not one you could praise for his softness. Taña saved up her acclaim.

  As they lay facing each other, forehead to forehead, and stared, owl eyes, she described what she saw: In another country, a path wound uphill through high waves of yellow grasses. Trumpet flowers on cactus vines blared on either side. On top of the hill there stood a house; it had never been completed, or someone was dismantling it for firewood. No windows and no doors in the frames. Wittman looked clear through to blue sky outlined by boards with driftwood grain and rusty nails. He wasn’t asleep and dreaming. On the contrary, he felt especially awake, and was seeing—was walking in—this other place. “I’m awake,” he said. “Taña. Taña? Do you see what I see?”

  “Yes.” He heard her voice beside him. “There’s a girl on the other side of the house.”

  “She’s dressed in a costume of a country that I can’t identify.”

  “Yes. Black and red with silver, and her hair is long and coiled.”

  They blinked at one another. What is this?

  Inside the house, every room opened to every other room and to the outdoors. The girl’s heel fleeted away past a doorway. A fair breeze blew on their skins and through their hair. The sun radiated through the rooms, radiated inside their heads. Wittman looked at her beside him. “You sent me that flash. It came from you to me.” She nodded yes. Just before the flash in his brainpan, he had seen it like a comet with tail whiz the short distance from her to him. His brain felt warm in one spot. “Whoa,” he said. “We ought to be documenting this. One of us, the sender—you—should write down what you’re about to send, and I write down what I receive. In sealed envelopes. And we get a third-party witness to open them. We ought to be scientific about this.”

  But E.S.P. has a quality of conviction—I am awake, more awake than ever—no doubt about it; proof feels beside the point, too slow. And it’s more fun to fly around a foreign place than to be in a lab counting hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades. What was causing this? Staying up all night? And not having dreamed? Oom-lette? A coincidence of true minds? Was this going to last forever between the two of them? Wittman added a tree to the hillside. Taña made clouds change shapes fast; strange winds were sculpting the clouds. The beyond mountains changed in a sequence: Pyramids. Glaciers. Volcanoes. Easter Island heads. Stone grandfathers of Cheju Island. Totem poles with ears. Windmills turning. Does this mean that he and she have seen the insides of each other’s heads, and he needn’t be scared of her? If she’s the only human being he’s ever encountered, perhaps ever going to encounter, with whom he can read minds, is she the one meant for him? He should never have taken drugs. Can’t tell the gods’ chimeras from freaks of my own.

  “Let’s find out if there’s a roadsign that will tell us where we are,” said Taña. They hiked down the palomino flank of the hill to the main road. A sign gave a traffic rule in international symbols. There was no name of a town or any advertising. There was no mood music.

  “Can you do this with anybody or just me?” asked Wittman.

  “Just you,” said Taña.

  They talked and saw more things and ate and made more love and fell asleep together. When they awoke, it was Sunday.

  “Do you want to go for a drive?” she asked. “Can I drive you home?”

  “Do you want to drive to the City?” he asked. No plans for the day. No job tomorrow. “I live in the City. I found
a tunnel I could show you. They were going to build a subway once.” He hadn’t meant to tell anyone about his secret tunnel, but blabbed, showing off that he knew deep San Francisco. Oh, well, a bomb shelter should be shared.

  She drove a Porsche Speedster, “1959. 1600 D,” she said. It was an ovoid, softly rounded like a tan nest egg. The wrap bumper was painted white, a curve of Easter egg icing. The upholstery was chocolatey leather, and you sat low to the street. “Wanta drive?” Taña offered him the keys, and got into the suicide seat. The engine started up noisily, high in the throat, an angry muffler. James Dean had been killed in a Porsche, a silver Spyder. It was a risk car, no protection—top down, no roll bar, next thing to a motorcycle.

  Showing Taña that he could talk and drive at the same time, Wittman said that she reminded him of his grandmother who dressed theater companies. When the opera costumes arrived from Hong Kong, she handed out the gorgeous raiment saying to the actors, “Treat it like shit.” That’s class. That’s the way Taña treats this car, letting him drive.

  “The windows go up and down in a Convertible D,” she said. “There are only thirteen hundred of these in California.”

  “When we pass one of those twelve hundred and ninety-nine, do I have to give him the Porsche owner’s wave? Do we flash the high sign at Karmann Ghias and M.G.s and T.R.3s? Or Porsches only? Hey, where’s my car cap?” He had to talk somewhat loud above the wind and the motor. Also she put him off having to tell him the windows go up and down.

  “You wave to anybody you like.” Said with the confidence of a white person. “I didn’t buy this car myself. I don’t make that much. My parents gave it to me. The deal was: either go to Stanford without a car or go to Cal, only sixty-seven dollars a semester, and with the savings buy a fine car, and live at home and commute.” So white parents also care that their kids go to a school that’s cheap and close to home. “I got the car, but went to Arts and Crafts.”