by John Irving
To those bold young doctors at Mercy Hospital who would inquire as to her status--was she married, or did she have a boyfriend? they wanted to know--Yi-Yiing always said, to their surprise, "I live with the writer Danny Angel." She must have liked saying this, for reasons beyond it being a conversation-stopper, because it was only to her closer friends and acquaintances that Yi-Yiing would bother to add: "Well, actually, I'm dating Danny's father. He's a cook at Mao's--not the Chinese one." But the cook understood that it was complicated for Yi-Yiing--a woman in her thirties with an unsettled life, living so far away from her native land, and with a daughter she knew only from photographs.
Once, at a party, someone who worked at Mercy Hospital said to Danny, "Oh, I know your girlfriend."
"What girlfriend?" Danny had asked; this was before Youn came into his fiction workshop, and (before long) had moved into the second house on Court Street.
"Yi-Yiing--she's Chinese, a nurse at--"
"She's my dad's girlfriend," the writer quickly said.
"Oh--"
"What's going on with Yi-Yiing?" Danny had later asked his father. "Some people think she's living with me."
"I don't question Yi-Yiing, Daniel. She doesn't question me," the cook pointed out. "And isn't she terrific with Joe?" his dad asked him. Both of them knew very well that this was the same point Danny had made to his father about his former Windham College student Franky, back in Vermont--yet it was strange, nonetheless, Danny thought. Was the cook, who was turning fifty, more of a bohemian than his writer son (at least until Youn moved into that second Court Street house)?
And what was it that was wrong about that house? It had been big enough for them all; that wasn't it. There were enough bedrooms so that everyone could have slept separately; Youn used one of the extra bedrooms as a place to write, and for all her things. For a woman over thirty who'd had no children and endured an incomprehensible Korean divorce--at least it was "incomprehensible" in her novel-in-progress, or so Danny thought--Youn had remarkably few things. Had she left everything behind in Seoul, not just her truly terrifying-sounding former husband?
"I'm a student," she'd said to Danny. "That is what is so liberating about being a student again--I don't have any things." It was a smart answer, the writer thought, but Danny didn't know if he believed her.
IN THE FALL OF '73, when Joe was starting third grade, the cook kept a crate of apples on the back porch of their Iowa City house. The porch overlooked a narrow, paved alley; it ran the length of the long row of houses that fronted Court Street. The alley didn't appear to be used for anything, except for picking up garbage. Only an occasional slow-moving car passed, and--more often, even constantly--kids on bicycles. There was some loose sand or gravel on the little-used pavement, which meant the kids could practice skids on their bikes. Joe had fallen off his bike in that back alley. Yi-Yiing had cleaned the scrape on the boy's knee.
A porch, off the kitchen, faced the alley, and something was eating the apples that the cook left out on the porch--a raccoon, Danny at first suspected, but it was a possum, actually, and one early evening when young Joe went out on the porch to fetch an apple for himself, he put his hand in the crate and the possum scared him. It growled or hissed or snarled; the boy was so scared that he couldn't even say for sure if the primitive-looking animal had bitten him.
All Danny kept asking was, "Did it bite you?" (He couldn't stop examining Joe's arms and hands for bite marks.)
"I don't know!" the boy wailed. "It was white and pink--it looked awful! What was it?"
"A possum," Danny kept repeating; he'd seen it slink away. Possums were ugly-looking creatures.
That night, when Joe fell asleep, Danny went into the boy's bedroom and examined him all over. He wished Yi-Yiing was home, but she was working in the ER. She would know if possums were occasionally rabid--in Vermont, raccoons often were--and the good nurse would know what to do if Joe had been bitten, but Danny couldn't find a bite mark anywhere on his son's perfect body.
Youn had stood in the open doorway of the boy's bedroom; she'd watched Danny looking for any indication of an animal bite. "Wouldn't Joe know if he was bitten?" she asked.
"He was too startled and too scared to know," Danny answered her. Youn was staring at the sleeping boy as if he were a wild or unknown animal to her, and Danny realized that she often looked at Joe with this puzzled, from-another-world fascination. If Yi-Yiing doted on Joe because she longed to be with her daughter of that same age, Youn looked at Joe with what appeared to be incomprehension; it was as if she'd never been around children of any age before.
Then again, if one could believe her story (or her novel), her success in obtaining a divorce from her husband--most important, in getting him to initiate the allegedly complicated procedure--was due to her failure to get pregnant and have a child. That was her novel's tortuous plot: how her husband presumed she was trying to get pregnant, when all along she'd been taking birth-control pills and using a diaphragm--she was doing all she could not to get pregnant, and to never have a child.
Youn was writing her novel in English, not Korean, and her English was excellent, Danny thought; her writing was good, though certain Korean elements remained mystifying. (What was Korean divorce law, anyway? Why was the charade of pretending to try to get pregnant necessary? And, according to Youn, she'd hated taking birth-control pills.)
The husband--ultimately, Danny assumed, the ex-husband--in Youn's novel was a kind of gangster businessman. Perhaps he was a well-paid assassin, or he hired lesser hit men to do his dirty work; in Danny's reading of Youn's novel-in-progress, this wasn't clear. That the husband was dangerous--in both Youn's real life and her novel--seemed obvious. Danny could only wonder about the sexual detail. There was something sympathetic about the husband, despite Youn's efforts to demonize him; the poor man imagined it was his fault that his scheming wife couldn't get pregnant.
It didn't help that, in bed at night, Youn told Danny the worst details of her miserable marriage--her husband's tireless need for sex included. (But he was trying to get you pregnant, wasn't he? Danny wanted to ask, though he didn't. Maybe sex had felt like a duty to Youn's unfortunate husband and to Youn. The things she told Danny in the dark and the details of her novels were becoming blurred--or were they interchangeable?)
Shouldn't the fictional husband, the cold-blooded-killer executive in her novel, have a different name from her actual ex-husband? Danny had asked Youn. What if her former husband ever read her novel? (Assuming she could get it published.) Wouldn't he then know how she'd deceived him--by deliberately trying not to get pregnant when they were married?
"My previous life is over," Youn answered him darkly. She did not seem to associate sex with duty now, though Danny couldn't help but wonder about that, too.
Youn was extraordinarily neat with her few belongings. She even kept her toilet articles in the small bathroom attached to the unused bedroom where she wrote. Her clothes were in the closet of that bedroom, or in the lone chest of drawers that was there. Once, when Youn was out, Danny had looked in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom she used. He saw her birth-control pills--it was an Iowa City prescription.
Danny always used a condom. It was an old habit--and, given his history of occasionally having more than one sexual partner, not a bad one. But Youn had said to him one time, almost casually, "Thank you for using a condom. I've taken a lifetime of birth-control pills. I don't ever want to take them again."
But she was taking them, wasn't she? Well, if Danny's dad didn't question Yi-Yiing, why should Danny expect answers to everything from Youn? Hadn't her life been complicated, too?
It was into this careless world of unasked or unanswered questions--not only of an Asian variety, but including some longstanding secrets between the cook and his writer son--that a blue Mustang brought them all to their senses (albeit only momentarily) regarding the fragile, unpredictable nature of things.
ON SATURDAY MORNINGS in the fall, when there was an Iowa h
ome football game, Danny could hear the Iowa band playing--he never knew where. If the band had been practicing in Kinnick Stadium, across the Iowa River and up the hill, could he have heard the music so far away, on Court Street, on the eastern side of town?
That Saturday it was bright and fair, and Danny had tickets to take Joe to the football game. He'd gotten up early and had made the boy pancakes. Friday had been a late night for the cook at Mao's, and the Saturday night following a home football game would be later. That morning, Danny's dad was still in bed; so was Yi-Yiing, who'd finished her usual night shift at Mercy Hospital. Danny didn't expect to see the Pajama Lady before noon. It was Joe's neighborhood friend Max, an Iowa faculty kid in Joe's third-grade class at Longfellow Elementary, who'd first referred to Yi-Yiing as the Pajama Lady. (The eight-year-old couldn't remember Yi-Yiing's name.)
Danny was washing his and Joe's breakfast dishes while Joe was playing outside with Max. They were riding their bicycles in the back alley again; they'd taken some apples from the crate on the porch, but not to eat them. The boys were using the apples as slalom gates, Danny would later realize. He liked Max, but the kid rode his bike all over town; it was a source of some friction between Danny and Joe that Joe wasn't allowed to do this.
Max was a fanatical collector of posters, stickers, and sew-on insignia, all advertising brands of beer. The kid had given dozens of these to Joe, who had Yi-Yiing sew the various insignia on his jean jacket; the stickers were plastered to the fridge, and the posters hung in Joe's bedroom. It was funny, Danny thought, and totally innocent; after all, the eight-year-olds weren't drinking the beer.
What Danny would remember foremost about the car was the sudden screech of tires; he saw only a blue blur pass by the kitchen window. The writer ran out on the back porch, where he'd previously thought the only threat to his son was a possum. "Joe!" Danny called, but there was no answer--only the sound of the blue car hitting some trash barrels at the farthest end of the alley.
"Mr. Angel!" Danny heard Max calling; the boy was almost never off his bike, but this time Danny saw him running.
Several of the apples, placed as slalom gates, had been squashed flat in the alley. Danny saw that both boys' bikes were lying on their sides, off the pavement; Joe lay curled up in a fetal position next to his bike.
Danny could see that Joe was conscious, and he appeared more frightened than hurt. "Did it hit you? Did the car hit you?" he asked his son. The boy quickly shook his head but otherwise wouldn't move; he just stayed in a tight ball.
"We crashed, trying to get out of the way--the Mustang was coming right at us," Max said. "It was the blue Mustang--it always goes too fast," Max told Danny. "It's gotta be a customized job--it's a funny blue."
"You've seen the car before?" Danny asked. (Clearly, Max knew cars.)
"Yeah, but not here--not in the alley," the boy said.
"Go get the Pajama Lady, Max," Danny told the kid. "You can find her. She's upstairs, with my pop." Danny had never called his dad a "pop" before; where the word came from must have had something to do with the fright of the moment. He knelt beside Joe, almost afraid to touch him, while the boy shivered. He was like a fetus willing himself back to the womb, or trying to, the writer thought. "Joe?" his father said. "Does anything hurt? Is anything broken? Can you move?"
"I couldn't see a driver. It was just a car," the boy said--still not moving, except for the shivering. Probably the sunlight had been reflecting off the windshield, Danny thought.
"Some teenager, I'll bet," Danny said.
"There was no driver," Joe insisted. Later Max would claim to have never seen the driver, though he'd seen the speeding blue Mustang in the neighborhood before.
"Pajama Lady!" Danny heard Max calling. "Pop!"
The cook had sat up in bed beside the drowsy Yi-Yiing. "Who's 'Pop,' do you suppose?" he asked her.
"I'm guessing that I'm the Pajama Lady," Yi-Yiing answered sleepily. "You must be Pop."
Quite a commotion ensued when Yi-Yiing and the cook learned that Joe had fallen off his bike and there'd been a car involved. Max would probably take to his grave the image of how fast the Pajama Lady ran barefoot to the scene of the accident, where Joe was now sitting up--rocking back and forth in his father's arms. The cook, with his limp, was slower to arrive; by then, Youn had interrupted her novel-in-progress to see what was the matter.
The elegantly dressed dame at the farthest end of the alley--her trash barrels had been knocked over by the vanishing blue Mustang--approached fearfully. She was elderly and frail, but she wanted to see if the boys on their bicycles were all right. Like Max, the regal old woman had seen the blue Mustang in the neighborhood before--but never the driver.
"What kind of blue?" Danny asked her.
"Not a common blue--it's too blue," the old dame said.
"It's a customized job, Mr. Angel--I told you," Max said.
"You're all right, you're all right," Yi-Yiing kept saying to Joe; she was feeling the boy all over. "You never hit your head, did you?" she asked him; he shook his head. Then she began to tickle him, maybe to relieve them both. Her Hong Kong pajamas this morning were an iridescent fish-scale green.
"Everything's fine, isn't it?" Youn asked Danny. The Korean divorcee probably wanted to get back to her writing.
No, everything isn't "fine," the writer Danny Angel was thinking--not with the driverless blue Mustang on the loose--but he smiled at her (Youn was also barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and jeans) and at his worried-looking father. The cook must have limped naked into the upstairs hall before he realized he lacked clothes, because he was wearing just a pair of Danny's running shorts; Danny had left them on the railing at the top of the stairs.
"Are you taking a run, Pop?" Danny asked his dad, the new word seeming strangely natural to them both--as if a bullet dodged marked a turning point, or a new beginning, in both their lives and young Joe's. Maybe it did.
COLBY WAS THE COP'S NAME. "Officer Colby," the cook kept calling him, in the kitchen of the Court Street house--perhaps in mock respect of that other, long-ago policeman in his life. Except for the bad haircut, the young Iowa City cop in no way resembled Carl. Colby was fair-skinned with Scandinavian-blue eyes and a neatly trimmed blond mustache; he apologized for not responding sooner to Danny's call about the dangerous driver, but those weekends when the Iowa football team played at home kept the local police busy. The policeman's demeanor was at once friendly and earnest--Danny liked him immediately. (The writer could not help but observe how observant the policeman was; Colby had an eye for small details, such as those beer stickers on the fridge.) Officer Colby told Danny and his dad that he'd received previous reports of a blue Mustang; as Max had said, the car was probably a customized job, but there were some inconsistencies in the various sightings.
The hood ornament was either the original mustang or--according to a hysterical housewife in the parking lot of a supermarket near Fairchild and Dodge--an obscene version of a centaur. Other witnesses identified a nonspecific but clearly out-of-state license plate, while a university student who'd been run off Dubuque Street on his motorcycle said that the blue Mustang definitely had Iowa plates. As Officer Colby told the cook and his writer son, there were no descriptions of the driver.
"The boys will be home from school any minute," Danny said to the cop, who'd politely glanced at his watch. "You can talk to them. I saw nothing but an unusual shade of blue."
"May I see your son's room?" the officer asked.
A curious request, Danny thought, but he saw no reason to object. It took only a minute, and Colby made no comment on the beer posters; the three men returned to the kitchen to wait for the kids. As for the back alley, where the blue Mustang had almost hit the boys on their bikes, Officer Colby pronounced it safe for bike-riding "under normal circumstances." However, the officer seemed to share Yi-Yiing's overall feelings about kids on bicycles in Iowa City. It was better for the kids to walk, or take the bus--certainly they should avoid riding their bike
s downtown. There were more and more students driving, many of them newcomers to the university town--not to mention the out-of-towners on the big sports weekends.
"Joe doesn't ride his bike downtown--only in this neighborhood--and he always walks his bike across the street," Danny told the policeman, who looked as if he doubted this. "No, really," the writer said. "I'm not so sure about Max, our neighbor's eight-year-old. I think Max's parents are more liberal--I mean concerning where Max can ride his bike."
"Here they are," the cook said; he'd been watching the back alley for Joe and Max to appear on their bicycles.
The eight-year-olds seemed surprised to see Officer Colby in the kitchen; like the third graders they were, and almost as if they were passing a secret message in class, they looked quickly at each other and then stared at the kitchen floor.
"The beer-truck boys," Colby said. "Maybe you boys should keep in mind that the blue Mustang has been seen all over town." The officer turned his attention to Danny and his dad. "They're good kids, but they like getting beer stickers and posters and those sew-on badges from the beer-truck drivers. I see these boys at the bars downtown. I just remind them that they can't go inside the bars, and I occasionally have to tell them not to follow the beer trucks from bar to bar--not on their bikes. Clinton and Burlington streets are particularly bad for bikes."
Joe couldn't look at his dad or grandfather. "The beer-truck boys," the cook repeated.
"I gotta go home," Max said; he was that quickly gone.
"When I see these boys in City Park," Colby went on, "I tell them I hope they're not riding their bikes on Dubuque Street. It's safer to take the footbridge behind the student union, and ride their bikes along the Hancher side of the river. But I suppose it takes you longer to get to the park or the zoo that way--doesn't it?" Officer Colby asked Joe. The boy just nodded his head; he knew he'd been busted.
Very early the next morning, when Youn was sound asleep and Yi-Yiing hadn't yet come home from her night shift at Mercy Hospital, Danny went into Joe's bedroom and observed the eight-year-old asleep in what amounted to a shrine to various brands of beer. "Wake up," he said to his son, shaking him gently.