by John Irving
Joe looked up at the brilliant blue of the fall sky. No descending angel was going to get him out of this predicament. "You never thought Lady Sky was an angel, did you?" the boy asked his dad.
"I believed her when she said she was an angel sometimes," Danny said.
The writer would drive all over Iowa City looking for the blue Mustang, but he wouldn't find it. The police would never spot the rogue car, either. But, back on Iowa Avenue, all Danny did was put his arm around the eight-year-old's shoulders. "Think of it this way," he said to his son. "That blue Mustang is still looking for you. Six years ago, when you stood in this street--with nothing but a diaper on--maybe the blue Mustang was stuck in traffic. It might have been several cars behind the white van; that blue Mustang might have been trying to get you even then."
"It's not really looking for me, is it?" Joe asked.
"You better believe it is," his dad told him. "The blue Mustang wants you--that's why you've got to be careful."
"Okay," the eight-year-old told his father.
"Do you know any two-year-olds?" Danny asked his son.
"No," the boy answered, "not that I can think of."
"Well, it would be good for you to meet one," his dad said, "just so you can see what you looked like in the road."
That was when the cook drove down Iowa Avenue, in the incoming lane, and pulled over to the curb, where the father and son were standing. "Get in, you two," Tony Angel told them. "I'll drop Joe at school, then I'll take you home," the cook said.
"Joe hasn't had any breakfast," Danny told his dad.
"I made him a big lunch--he can eat half of it on the way to school, Daniel. Get in," he repeated. "We have a ... situation."
"What's wrong, Pop?" the writer asked.
"It seems that Youn is still married," the cook replied, as Danny and Joe got into the car. "It seems that Youn has a two-year-old daughter, and that her husband and daughter have come to visit her--just to see how all the writing is going."
"They're at the house?" Danny asked.
"It's good that they came after Youn was up. She was already in her room--writing," the cook said.
Danny could imagine how she'd left their bedroom--meticulously, without a trace of herself remaining, just that pearl-gray nightie tucked under her pillow, or maybe it was the beige one. "Youn has a two-year-old?" Danny asked his dad. "I want Joe to see the daughter."
"Are you crazy?" the cook said to his son. "Joe should go to school."
"Youn is married?" Joe asked. "She has a kid?"
"It appears so," Danny said; he was thinking about the novel Youn was writing--how it was so exquisitely written but not everything added up. The usually limpid prose notwithstanding, something had always been unclear about the book.
"I think you should go to school, sweetie," Danny said. "You can meet a two-year-old another time."
"But you want me to meet one, right?" Joe asked.
"What's this about?" the cook inquired; he was driving to Joe's school, not waiting for contradictory directions.
"It's a long story," Danny told him. "What's the husband like? Is he a gangster?"
"He's a surgeon in Korea, he told me," Tony Angel replied. "He's attending a surgical conference in Chicago, but he brought his daughter along, and they thought they'd surprise Mommy--and let Youn look after the two-year-old for a couple of days, while Kyung is in meetings. Some surprise, huh?" the cook asked.
"His name is Kyung?" Danny said. In the book Youn was writing, the gangster husband was named Jinwoo; Danny guessed that wasn't the only element of her story she'd made up, and all along he'd thought her novel was too autobiographical!
"Her husband seems like a nice guy," Tony Angel said.
"So I'm going to meet Youn's two-year-old daughter?" Joe asked, as he was getting out of the car.
"Eat something," the cook told his grandson. "I already called the school and told them you were coming late."
"It sounds like you may meet the little girl, yes," Danny told the boy. "But what are you on the lookout for?" he asked Joe, as the boy opened his lunch box and peered inside.
"The blue Mustang," Joe answered, without hesitation.
"Smart boy," his father said.
They were almost back at the Court Street house before the cook told his son, "Yi-Yiing and I decided that it should appear you two are a couple."
"Why should Yi-Yiing and I be a couple?" Danny said.
"Because you're the same age. While the husband from Korea is around, you should just pretend that you're together. Not even a Korean surgeon is going to suspect that I'm sleeping with his wife," the cook said. "I'm too old."
"How do we pretend?" Danny asked his dad.
"Let Yi-Yiing do the pretending," his father said.
In retrospect, the writer was thinking, the pretending hadn't been the most difficult part of the impromptu deception. Yi-Yiing did a good job of acting as Danny's girlfriend--that is, while Youn's husband was there in the Court Street house. The surgeon from Seoul struck Danny as a sweet man, both proud of himself and embarrassed for "surprising" his writer wife. Youn, for her part, could not conceal how happy she was to see her daughter, Soo. The Korean writer's eyes had sought Danny for some reassurance, and Danny hoped he'd provided it; he felt relieved, actually, because he'd been looking ahead to their inevitable parting with more than the usual guilt.
Yes, he would definitely be in Iowa City through this academic year--he'd already asked the Writers' Workshop if he could stay another year after that--but Danny knew that he probably wouldn't be staying in town long enough for Youn to finish her novel. (And when Danny went back to Vermont, he had all along been assuming that Youn would go back to Seoul.)
The surgeon, who would be in Chicago for only a few days, kissed his wife and daughter good-bye. All the introductions and good-byes had happened in the Court Street kitchen, where the cook acted as if he owned the place, and Yi-Yiing had two or three times slipped behind Danny and encircled him with her arms--drawing him to her, once kissing the back of his neck. It being a warm fall day, the writer wore only a T-shirt and jeans, and he could feel Yi-Yiing's silky pajamas brushing against his back. These hugs conveyed a coziness between them, the writer supposed--not knowing what Youn might have made of this intimate contact, or if Yi-Yiing and the cook had informed the Korean adulteress of their plan that Danny and the Hong Kong nurse should "pretend" to be a couple.
The daughter, Soo, was a little jewel. "She's not wearing a diaper?" Danny asked the surgeon, remembering Joe at that age.
"Girls are toilet-trained before boys, honey," Yi-Yiing told him, with what struck the writer as an overacted emphasis on the honey word--but the cook had laughed, and so had Youn. Danny would wonder, later, if perhaps Youn had also been relieved that her relationship with her fiction teacher was so efficiently ended. (What need was there for any further explanation?)
The days when the Korean doctor was in Chicago were easy enough, and Joe could see with his own eyes how innocent a two-year-old really was--about dangers in the road, obviously, but about angels falling from the sky, too. The eight-year-old could observe for himself that little Soo was capable of believing anything.
The fragrant nightie under the pillow on Youn's side of the bed turned out to be the beige one, and Danny found a discreet moment to give it back to her. Now no evidence of her remained in his bedroom. Youn slept with her tiny daughter in her writing room; they were both small enough to fit in the bed in that extra bedroom, although Danny had suggested to Youn that she could put Soo in the extra extra bedroom. (He'd noticed that Youn's husband had slept in that room, alone.)
"A two-year-old shouldn't sleep unattended," Youn had told Danny, who realized that he'd misread the curiosity with which Youn had scrutinized Joe; she'd simply been wondering what changes to expect in her daughter between the ages of two and eight. (As for what she'd written about, and why, there would never be a satisfactory explanation, Danny supposed.)
When K
yung came back from Chicago, and the doctor soon left again with his little girl--they went home to Seoul together--Youn wasted no time in finding a place of her own to live, and by the next semester she had transferred to someone else's fiction workshop. Whether she ever finished her novel-in-progress was immaterial to the writer Danny Angel. Whether Youn would one day become a published novelist also mattered little to Danny, who knew firsthand that--in Youn's time in Iowa City--her fiction had been an almost complete success.
It was Yi-Yiing's success, at pretending to be Danny's girlfriend, that would linger a little longer. The ER nurse was not naturally flirtatious, but for months after the need to pretend she and Danny were a couple, Yi-Yiing would occasionally brush against the writer, or trail her fingers, or the back of her hand, against Danny's cheek. It seemed she had sincerely forgotten herself, for she would instinctively stop--as soon as she'd started something. Danny doubted that the cook ever saw her do this; if Joe saw, the eight-year-old took no notice.
"Would you prefer it if I dressed normally around the house?" Yi-Yiing would one day ask the writer. "I mean, maybe it's 'enough already' with the pajamas."
"But you're the Pajama Lady--that's just who you are," Danny told her evasively.
"You know what I mean," Yi-Yiing said to him.
She stopped wearing them--or, perhaps, she only slept in them. Her normal clothes were a safer barrier between them, and what had amounted to the occasional contact--the brush of her passing behind his back, the touch of her fingertips or the knuckles on her small hands--stopped soon after as well.
"I miss Yi-Yiing's pajamas," Joe said to his dad one morning, when they were walking to the boy's school.
"I do, too," Danny told him, but by then the writer was seeing someone else.
WITH YOUN GONE FROM their lives--especially later, in their last year in Iowa City, when they were living in the third house on Court Street--their regular habits resumed as if uninterrupted. The third house was on the other side of Court Street, near Summit, where Danny conducted a discreet daytime affair with an unhappy faculty wife whose husband was cheating on her. The back alley, where Joe had been tempted to pity himself--while he watched Max practice skids on his "backup" bike--was also gone from their lives, as was the possum. The Yokohamas, Sao and Kaori, still took turns babysitting for Joe, and everyone--all of them--gathered with a seemingly increasing need (or desperation) at Mao's.
The cook knew in advance how much he would miss the Cheng brothers--almost as much as he would miss Yi-Yiing. It was never knowing what it might have been like to be with the Hong Kong nurse that Danny would miss, though his return to Vermont was preceded by another kind of closure.
As their Iowa adventure was concluding, so was--at long last--the war in Vietnam. The mood at Mao's was not predisposed to a happy ending. "Operation Frequent Wind," as the helicopter evacuation of Saigon was called--"Operation More Bullshit," Ketchum had called it--turned out to be a devastating distraction from the dinnertime preparations at the Asian and French restaurant. The TV in the little kitchen off the Coralville strip proved to be a magnet for discontent.
April 1975 had been a bad month for business at Mao's. There were four drive-by brick-throwings--one of the restaurant's window-breakers was actually a chunk of cement the size of a cinder block, and one was a rock. "Fucking patriot farmers!" Xiao Dee had called the vandals. He and the cook had canceled a shopping trip to Chinatown because Xiao Dee was convinced that Mao's was under attack--or, as Saigon fell, the restaurant would come under heavier siege. Ah Gou was running short of his favorite ingredients. (With Tony Angel's help, there were a few more items from Italy on the menu than usual.)
All that year, the South Vietnamese soldiers were deserting in droves. The runaway soldiers had been rounding up their families and converging on Saigon, where they must have believed the Americans would help them escape the country. In the last two weeks of April, the U.S. had airlifted sixty thousand foreigners and South Vietnamese; hundreds of thousands more would soon be left to find their own way out. "It will be sheer chaos," Ketchum had predicted. ("What did we expect would happen?" the logger would say later.)
Did we care what would happen? Danny was thinking. He and Joe had a table to themselves at Mao's, and Yi-Yiing had joined them for dinner. She'd skipped her shift in the emergency room because she had a cold; she didn't want to make a lot of sick or injured people any worse, she'd told Danny and Joe. "I'm already going to make you two sick--you two and Pop," she said to them, smiling.
"Thanks a lot," Danny told her. Joe was laughing; he adored Yi-Yiing. The boy would miss having his own nurse when he was back in Vermont. (And I'll miss having a nurse for him, the writer was thinking.)
There were two couples at one table, and three businessmen types at another. It was a quiet night for Mao's, but it was still early. The boarded-up window didn't improve the looks of the front entrance, Danny was thinking, when one of the Yokohamas came out of the kitchen, her face as white as her apron and her lower lip trembling. "Your dad says you should see what's on television," the Japanese girl said to the writer. "The TV's in the kitchen."
Danny got up from the table, but when Joe tried to go with him, Yi-Yiing said, "Maybe you should stay with me, Joe."
"Yes, you stay!" Sao or Kaori told the boy. "You shouldn't see!"
"But I want to see what it is," Joe said.
"Do what Sao says, Joe--I'll be right back," his dad told him.
"I'm Kaori," the Japanese twin said to Danny. She burst into tears. "Why am I getting the feeling that all 'gooks' are the same to you Americans?"
"What's on the TV?" Yi-Yiing asked her.
The two couples had been laughing about something; they hadn't heard Kaori's outburst. But the businessmen types had frozen; the gooks word held them poised over their beers.
Ah Gou's smart girlfriend, Tzu-Min, was the maitre d' that night. Xiao Dee was too agitated by the brick-throwing patriot farmers to be safely allowed out of the kitchen.
"Go back in the kitchen, Kaori," Tzu-Min told the sobbing girl. "No crying permitted out here."
"What's on the TV?" Yi-Yiing asked the maitre d'.
"Joe shouldn't see it," Tzu-Min told her. Danny had already disappeared into the kitchen.
It was bedlam back there. Xiao Dee was shouting at the television. Sao, the other Japanese twin, was throwing up in the big sink--the one the dishwasher scrubbed the pots and pans in.
Ed, the dishwasher, stood aside; a recovering alcoholic, he was a World War II vet with several faded tattoos. The Cheng brothers had given Ed a job at a time when no one else would, and Ed felt loyal to them, though the small Coralville kitchen made him feel claustrophobic at times, and the political talk at Mao's was a foreign country to him. Ed had no use for foreign countries; that we were getting out of Vietnam was good enough for him. He'd been in the navy, in the Pacific. Now one of the Japanese twins was vomiting in his sink and the other one was in tears. (Ed might have been thinking that he had killed their relatives; if so, he was not sorry about it.)
"How's it going, Ed?" Danny said to the dishwasher.
"It's not going too good right now," Ed told him.
"Kissinger is a war criminal!" Xiao Dee was screaming. (Henry Kissinger had appeared, albeit briefly, on the television.) Ah Gou, who was chopping scallions, brandished his cleaver at the mere mention of the hated Kissinger, but now the TV returned to that image of enemy tanks rolling through the streets of Saigon; the tanks were closing in on the U.S. Embassy there, or so some nameless voice said. It was almost the end of April--these were the last airlifts, the day before Saigon surrendered. About seventy American helicopters had been shuttling between the walled-off courtyard of the embassy and the U.S. warships off the coast; as many as sixty-two hundred people were rescued that day. The last two helicopters to leave Saigon carried away the U.S. ambassador and the embassy's marine guards. Hours later, South Vietnam surrendered.
But that wasn't what was hard to watch on the l
ittle TV in the kitchen at Mao's. There were more people who wanted to leave Saigon than there were helicopters. Hundreds would be left behind in the embassy's courtyard. Dozens of Vietnamese clung to the skids of the last two helicopters to leave; they fell to their deaths as the choppers lifted away. The television just kept showing it. "Those poor people," the cook had said, seconds before Sao threw up in Ed's sink.
"They're not people, not to most Americans--they're gooks!" Xiao Dee was shouting.
Ah Gou was watching the TV instead of the scallions; he chopped the first digit off the index finger of his left hand. Kaori, still in tears, fainted; the cook dragged her away from the stove. Danny took a dish towel and began to twist it, tightly, around Ah Gou's upper arm. The tip of Big Brother's finger lay in a pool of blood with the chopped scallions.
"Go get Yi-Yiing," the cook said to Sao. Ed took a wet towel and wiped the girl's face. Sao was as insubstantial-looking as her fainted twin, but she had stopped throwing up, and, like a ghost, she drifted away to the dining room.
When the swinging door to the dining room opened, Danny heard one of the businessmen say, "What kind of crazy, fucked-up place is this, anyway?"
"Ah Gou cut off his finger," he heard Sao say to Yi-Yiing.
Then the door swung closed and Danny didn't hear how Sao or Tzu-Min or Yi-Yiing answered the businessman, or if any of the women had tried. (Mao's was a crazy, fucked-up place that night when Saigon was falling.)
The door to the dining room swung open again, and they all came into the kitchen--Yi-Yiing with young Joe, Tzu-Min and Sao. Danny was mildly surprised that the three businessmen types and the two couples weren't with them, though there was no room for anyone else in the chaotic kitchen.
"Thank God they all ordered the guinea hen," the cook was saying.
Kaori had sat up on the floor. "The two couples are having the guinea hen," she said. "The business guys ordered the ravioli."
"I just meant the couples," Tony Angel said. "I'm feeding them first."
"The business guys are ready to walk out--I'm warning you," Tzu-Min told them.
Yi-Yiing found the tip of Ah Gou's finger in the scallions. Xiao Dee wrapped his arms around Ah Gou while the cook poured vodka on the stump of his left index finger. Big Brother was still screaming when Yi-Yiing held out the fingertip, and Tony Angel poured more vodka on it; then she put the fingertip back where it belonged. "Just hold it on," she told Big Brother, "and stop screaming."
