by John Irving
Had Danny been thinking as a father when he'd typed a one-page message to the hippie carpenter, and had driven out the back road to Westminster West in order to put the message in the asshole dog owner's mailbox, before driving to Brattleboro and his surprise dinner at Avellino? Was this what the writer would have wanted young Joe to do, if his son were to find himself in a similarly hostile situation?
"I am truly sorry your dog is dead," Danny had typed. "I was angry. You take no responsibility for your dogs, and you won't acknowledge that a public road is not your dogs' territory. But I should have held my temper better than I did. I'll run somewhere else. You've lost a dog; I'll give up my favorite run. Enough is enough, okay?"
It was just a plain piece of typing paper. The writer didn't include his name. If Armando was right--if the asshole was a writer carpenter, and/or one of Danny's former students at Windham--then of course the infuriating dog owner already knew that the runner with the squash-racquet handles was the writer Danny Angel. But Danny saw no reason to advertise this. He didn't put the piece of paper in an envelope, either; he'd just folded it twice and put it in the dog owner's mailbox, out where the driveway lined with dead vehicles met the road.
Now, as he sat writing in Avellino, Danny knew what Armando would say: "You don't try to make peace with assholes," or words to that effect. But Armando didn't have children. Did that make Armando more unafraid? The very idea of an altercation escalating out of control--well, wasn't that high on the list of things to protect your children from? (In the notebook, where Danny was scribbling to himself, the phrase "a nameless fear" stood out with an identifying awkwardness in several unfinished sentences.)
As a boy, and as a young man, Danny had always assumed that his dad and Ketchum were different, chiefly because his dad was a cook and Ketchum was a river driver--a logger, tougher than his caulk boots, an intemperate woodsman who would never back down from a fight.
But Ketchum was estranged from his children; he'd already lost them. It wasn't necessarily true that Ketchum was braver, or more bold, than the cook. Ketchum wasn't a father, not anymore; he didn't have as much to lose. Danny only now understood that his dad had been doing his best to look out for him. Leaving Twisted River had been a father's decision. And the cook and his son were both trying to look out for young Joe; their mutual fear for the boy had brought Danny and his dad closer together.
He'd felt close to his father in Iowa City, too, the writer was remembering. (Their Asian interlude, as Danny thought of Iowa that second time around.) His dad's steadiest girlfriend those years in Iowa City had been an ER nurse at Mercy Hospital--Yi-Yiing was Chinese. She was Danny's age--in her early thirties, almost twenty years younger than the cook--and she had a daughter, who was Joe's age, back in Hong Kong. Her husband had left her upon the daughter's birth--he'd wanted a son--and Yi-Yiing had trusted her mother and father to care for her child while she'd made a new life for herself in the Midwest. The nursing career had been a good choice, and so had Iowa City. The doctors at Mercy Hospital had declared that Yi-Yiing was indispensable. She had her green card and was on track to become a U.S. citizen.
Of course Yi-Yiing would hear the occasional gook word--the most common insult from a prejudiced patient in the emergency room, and from an unseen driver or passenger in a moving car. But it didn't faze her to be mistaken for the war bride of a Vietnam vet. She had a harder, uphill task ahead of her--namely, moving her daughter and her parents to the United States--but she was well on her way to unraveling the red tape that was involved. Yi-Yiing had her own reasons for remaining undistracted from achieving her goal. (She'd been assured it would be easier to bring her family to the United States once the war in Vietnam was over; it was "only a matter of time," a reliable authority had told her.)
What Yi-Yiing had said to Tony Angel was that it wasn't the time for her to be "romantically involved." Maybe this was music to his dad's ears, Danny had thought at the time. Quite possibly, given Yi-Yiing's heroic undertaking, the cook was a consoling and undemanding partner for her; with so much of his life lost to the past, Tony Angel wasn't exactly seeking so-called romantic involvement, either. Moreover, that the cook's grandson was the same age as Yi-Yiing's daughter gave the nurse a motherly affection for young Joe.
Danny and his dad always had to think about Joe before including new women in their lives. Danny had liked Yi-Yiing--no small part of the reason being how sincerely she'd paid attention to Joe--though it was awkward that Yi-Yiing was Danny's age, and that the writer was attracted to her.
In those three years, Danny and his dad had rented three different houses on Court Street in Iowa City--all from tenured faculty on sabbaticals. Court Street was tree-lined with large, three-story houses; it was a kind of residential faculty row. The street was also within safe walking distance of the Longfellow Elementary School, where Joe would attend second, third, and fourth grades. Court Street was somewhat removed from downtown Iowa City, and Danny never had to drive on Iowa Avenue, where he'd earlier lived with Katie--not, in any case, on his way to and from the English-Philosophy Building on the Iowa River. (The EPB, as it was called, was where Danny's office at the Writers' Workshop was.)
As big as the rental houses on Court Street were, Danny didn't write at home--largely because Yi-Yiing worked irregular hours in the ER at Mercy Hospital. She often slept in the cook's bedroom until midday, when she would come down to the kitchen and fix herself something to eat in her silk pajamas. When she wasn't working at the hospital, Yi-Yiing lived in her slinky Hong Kong pajamas.
Danny liked walking Joe to school, and then going to write at the English-Philosophy Building. When his office door was closed, his students and the other faculty knew not to bother him. (Yi-Yiing was small of stature, short but surprisingly heavyset, with a pretty face and long, coal-black hair. She had many pairs of the silk pajamas, in a variety of vibrant colors; as Danny recalled, even her black pajamas appeared to vibrate.) This parenthetical non sequitur, long after he'd begun his morning's writing--an alluring image of Yi-Yiing in her vibrating pajamas, asleep in his father's bed--was a lingering distraction. Yi-Yiing and her pajamas, or their enticing presence, traveled to the English-Philosophy Building with Danny.
"I don't know how you can write in such a sterile building," the writer Raymond Carver said of the EPB. Ray was a colleague of Danny Angel's at the workshop in those years.
"It's not as ... sterile as you may think," Danny said to Ray.
Another writer colleague, John Cheever, compared the EPB to a hotel--"one catering to conventioneers"--but Danny liked his fourth-floor office there. Most mornings, the offices and classrooms of the Writers' Workshop were deserted. No one but the workshop's administrative assistant was ever there, and she was good about taking messages and not putting through any phone calls--not unless there was a call from young Joe or Danny's dad.
The aesthetics of a given workplace notwithstanding, writers tend to love where they work well. For as much of the day as Joe was safe in school, Danny grew to love the EPB. The fourth floor was silent, a virtual sanctuary--provided he left by midafternoon.
Usually, writers don't confine their writing to the good things, do they? Danny Angel was thinking, as he scribbled away in his notebook at Avellino, where Iowa City was foremost on his mind. "The Baby in the Road," he had written--a chapter title, possibly, but there was more to it than that. He'd crossed out the The and had written, "A Baby in the Road," but neither article pleased him--he quickly crossed out the A, too. Above where he was writing, on the same page of the notebook, was more evidence of the writer's reluctance to use an article--"The Blue Mustang" had been revised to "Blue Mustang." (Maybe just "Baby in the Road" was the way to go?)
To anyone seeing the forty-one-year-old writer's expression, this exercise was both more meaningful and more painful than a mere title search. To Dot and May, the troubled-looking young author seemed strangely attractive and familiar; waiting for their food, they both watched him intently. In the absenc
e of signs to read out loud, May was at a momentary loss for words, but Dot whispered to her friend: "Whatever he's writin', he's not havin' any fun doin' it."
"I could give him some fun doin' it!" May whispered back, and both ladies commenced to cackling, in their inimitable fashion.
At this moment in time, it took a lot to distract Danny from his writing. The blue Mustang and the baby in the road had seized the writer's attention, almost completely; that one or the other might make a good title was immaterial. Both the blue Mustang and the baby in the road were triggers to Danny's imagination, and they meant much more to him than titles. Yet the distinctive cackles of the two old ladies caused Danny to look up from his notebook, whereupon Dot and May quickly looked away. They'd been staring at him--that much was clear to Danny, who would have sworn that he'd heard the fat women's indelible and derisive laughter before. But where, and when?
Too long ago for Danny to remember, obviously, seized as he was by those fresher, more memorable details, the speeding blue Mustang and that helpless baby in the road. Danny was a far distance from the twelve-year-old he'd been in the cookhouse kitchen, where (and when) Dot and May's cackling had once been as constant as punctuation. The writer returned his attention to his notebook; he was imagining Iowa City, but he was closer to that time in Twisted River than he could have known.
THEIR FIRST YEAR ON COURT STREET, Danny and his dad and Joe gradually grew used to sharing the house with Yi-Yiing and her vibrant pajamas. She'd arranged her schedule at the hospital so that she was usually in the house when Joe came home from school. This was before Joe's bike-riding began in earnest, and what girlfriends Danny had were transient; the writer's passing acquaintances rarely spent the night in the Court Street house. The cook left for the kitchen at Mao's every midafternoon--that is, when he wasn't driving to Lower Manhattan and back with Xiao Dee Cheng.
Those two nights a week when Tony Angel was on the road, Yi-Yiing didn't stay in the Court Street house. She'd kept her own apartment, near Mercy Hospital; maybe she knew all along that Danny was attracted to her--Yi-Yiing did nothing to encourage him. It was the cook and young Joe who received all her attention, though she'd been the first to speak to Danny when Joe started riding his bike to school. By then, they'd all moved into the second house on Court Street; it was nearer the commuter traffic on Muscatine Avenue, but there were only small backstreets between Court Street and the Longfellow Elementary School. Even so, Yi-Yiing told Danny that he should make Joe ride his bike on the sidewalk--and when the boy had to cross a street, he should walk his bike, she said.
"Kids on bikes get hit by cars all the time in this town," Yi-Yiing told Danny. He tried to overlook whichever pair of pajamas she was wearing at the moment; he knew he should focus on her experience as an emergency-room nurse. "I see them all the time--there was one in the ER last night," she said.
"Some kid was riding his bike at night?" Danny asked her.
"He got hit on Dodge Street when it was still daylight, but he was in the ER all night," Yi-Yiing said.
"Is he going to be all right?" Danny asked.
Yi-Yiing shook her head; she was making tea for herself in the kitchen of the second Court Street house, and a thin piece of toast dangled like a cigarette from her lower lip. Joe was home sick from school, and Danny had been writing at the kitchen table. "Just make Joe ride his bike on the sidewalk," Yi-Yiing said, "and if he wants to go downtown--or to the pool, or the zoo, in City Park--for God's sake, make him walk or take the bus."
"Okay," Danny told her. She sat down at the table with him, with her tea and the rest of her toast.
"What are you doing home?" Yi-Yiing asked him. "I'm here, aren't I? I'm awake. You should go write in your office. I'm a nurse, Danny--I can look after Joe."
"Okay," Danny said again. Just how safe could Joe get? the writer was wondering. The boy had an ER nurse taking care of him, not to mention two Japanese babysitters.
Most nights, both the cook and his emergency-room nurse were working; either Danny stayed home with Joe, or one of the Japanese twins looked after the boy. Sao and Kaori's parents were from Yokohama originally, but the twins had been born in San Francisco and they'd grown up there. One night the cook had brought them home from Mao's; he'd woken up Danny to introduce him to the twins, and he'd taken Sao and Kaori into Joe's room to allow them to observe the sleeping boy. "See?" Tony whispered to the twins, while Danny lay bewildered and barely awake in his bed. "This child is an angel--he's easy to look after."
The cook had disapproved of Danny asking his workshop students to babysit for Joe. Danny's students were writers--hence easily distracted, or preoccupied, in Tony Angel's opinion. Young writers lived in their imaginations, didn't they? the cook had asked his son. (Danny knew that his dad had always distrusted imagination.) Furthermore, these young writers were graduate students; many of them were older than the usual graduate students, too. "They're too old to be competent babysitters!" the cook had said. His dad's theory was new to Danny, but he liked Sao and Kaori, the identical twins--though he could never tell them apart. (Over time, Joe could, and wasn't that all that mattered?)
"The Yokohamas," as Danny thought of the twins--as if Yokohama were their family name--were undergraduates and part-time waitresses at Mao's. Therefore, Iowa City had a decidedly Asian flavor not only for the cook but for Danny and young Joe. The twins spoke Japanese to each other, which Joe loved but Danny found distracting. Most nights, when Sao worked at Mao's, Kaori was Joe's babysitter--or vice versa. (In which case, no Japanese was spoken.)
The Yokohamas had at first maintained a distant respect for Yi-Yiing, whose ER schedule did not often allow her to coincide in the house with either Sao or Kaori. They were more likely to run into one another at Mao's, where Yi-Yiing occasionally came late (and by herself) to dinner--though she preferred the all-night shift in the emergency room to working daytime hours.
One night, when Xiao Dee was the maitre d', he mistook Yi-Yiing for one of the waitresses who worked at Mao's. "You're late!" he told her.
"I'm a customer--I have a reservation," Yi-Yiing told Little Brother.
"Oh, shit--you're Tony's nurse!" Xiao Dee said.
"Tony's too young to need a nurse yet," Yi-Yiing replied.
Later, the cook tried to defend Xiao Dee. ("He's a good driver--he's just a shitty maitre d'.") But Yi-Yiing was sensitive.
"The Americans think I'm Vietnamese, and some Shanghai clown from Queens thinks I'm a waitress!" she told Tony.
Unfortunately, one of the Japanese twins, who was a waitress--at this moment, she was also young Joe's babysitter--overheard Yi-Yiing say this. "What's so bad about being a waitress?" Sao or Kaori asked the nurse.
The Japanese twins had also been mistaken for Vietnamese war brides in Iowa City. Most people in their native San Francisco, either Sao or Kaori had explained to Danny, could tell the Japanese and Vietnamese apart; apparently this was not the case in the Midwest. To this shameful lumping together, what could Danny truthfully say? After all, he still couldn't tell Sao and Kaori apart! (And, after Yi-Yiing used the waitress word as an epithet, the Yokohamas' formerly distant respect for the nurse from Hong Kong grew more distant.)
"We're all one happy family," Danny would later try to explain to one of his older workshop students. Youn was a writer from Seoul; she came into Danny's fiction workshop the second year he was back in Iowa City. There were some Vietnam vets among the workshop students in those years--they, too, were older. And there were a few women writers who'd interrupted their writing lives to get married and have children, and get divorced. These older graduate students had an advantage over the younger writers who'd come to the Writers' Workshop right out of college; the older ones had something to write about.
Youn certainly did. She'd been a slave to an arranged marriage in Seoul--"virtually arranged," was how she first described the marriage in the novel she was writing.
Danny had criticized the virtually. "Either it was an arranged marriage or it was
n't, right?" he'd asked Youn.
Her skin was as pale as milk. Her black hair was cut short, with bangs, under which her big dark-brown eyes made her appear waifish, though Youn was over thirty--she was exactly Danny's age--and her efforts to get her real-life husband to divorce her, so she wouldn't be dragged through "the Korean rigmarole" of trying to divorce him, gave her novel-in-progress a labyrinthine plot.
If you could believe either her actual story or her novel, the writer Danny Angel had thought. When he'd first met her, and had read the early chapters, Danny didn't know if he could trust her--either as a woman or as a writer. But he'd liked her from the beginning, and Danny's developing attraction to Youn at least alleviated his inappropriate fantasizing about his father's girlfriend in her countless pairs of pajamas.
"Well," the cook had said to his son, after Danny introduced him to Youn, "if there's a Chinese nurse and two Japanese girls in the house, why not a Korean writer, too?"
But they were all hiding something, weren't they? Certainly, the cook and his son were in hiding--they were fugitives. His dad's Chinese nurse gave Danny the impression that there was something she wasn't saying. As for Danny's Korean writer, he knew she exhibited a seemingly willful lack of clarity--he didn't mean only in her prose.
There was no fault to be found with the Japanese babysitters, whose affection for young Joe was genuine, and whose fondness for the cook stemmed from the camaraderie of them all working together in the ambitious chaos of Asian and French cuisine at Mao's.
Not that Yi-Yiing's rapt attention to Joe was insincere; the ER nurse was a truly good soul. It was her relationship with the cook that amounted to a compromise, perhaps to them both. But Tony Angel had long been wary of women, and he was used to hedging his bets; it was Yi-Yiing who shouldn't have tolerated Tony's short-term flings with those traveling women he met at the Writers' Workshop parties, but the nurse accepted even this from the cook. Yi-Yiing liked living with a young boy the same age as her missing daughter; she liked being a mother to someone. Being a part of the cook's all-male family may also have struck Yi-Yiing as a bohemian adventure--one she might not find so easy to slip into once her daughter and parents finally joined her in America.
