As Max Saw It (6 page)

Max, you wicked snoop, boomed the voice thus distracted from architectural history, which one of my incantations has summoned you here, with such mischievously delayed effect? All my invitations declined, offers to visit ignored, and yet here you are, in the one place where I would have
thought Toby and I could be tête-à-tête! Or is it tit for tat, since we find you in a pleasantly delicate situation with this young lady?

He laughed generously at his own joke.

Genuine pedagogic pleasure, Charlie, nothing more. I was congratulating Miss Wang on the road map we have just worked out for her future legal studies! She is a student in the seminar I am leading, the best interpreter in China, and my true friend.

I did not think that Charlie measured the consequences of joking, even in this empty corner of the Imperial Palace, about a “delicate situation” between this poor child and a guest of the Chinese government’s to whom she had been assigned as a guide; the disparity between the risk to her and my achieving an unexpectedly clearer understanding of the nature of his feelings for Toby was enormous. I now think that my habitual caution led me to exaggerate, but at the time I truly believed that nothing in China concerning foreign “friends” went unobserved. I resolved to remind Charlie not to joke about Miss Wang and me if we met again, and not to mention the incident, even if he kept back her name, in anecdotes with which he might wish to titillate his Chinese contacts.

The object of my worry seemed unconcerned by the conversation and, in fact, glad to meet these two men, one of whom was near to her in age. Glancing at me as though to see whether I would object, she proposed that we continue the visit together.

Splendid! decreed Charlie, let’s go to the eunuchs’ quarters. They are a great curiosity. Toby will be amused.

I interjected mildly that they were, on a diagonal, at the opposite end of the Forbidden City, and that by the time we had gotten there, looked around, and returned to the East Gate, where Miss Wang had told the driver to meet us, the poor man would be in a state of anxiety and the hotel kitchen closed. I could think of no other place we might have lunch. Charlie brushed these worries aside, saying that his car was waiting at Coal Hill, only a few minutes from where he proposed to go. We would then have plenty of time, both to rescue my driver and to have lunch. It turned out that he and Toby were also at the Beijing Hotel. And so we set off, passing the great ceremonial reception halls and the very small palace where the emperors actually lived, and then turned toward the quarters of the empress, the concubines, and the eunuchs. Charlie was well informed about the palace and had the sort of eye one would expect in an architect for tricks of perspective, vistas that suddenly appeared in the moonlike opening in a wall, and the effects of occasional asymmetry in these marvelously repetitious groupings of buildings and open spaces. He resumed with brio the lecture to Toby the encounter with us had interrupted—the chance to address a larger audience may have acted as a stimulus—sometimes pulling on the boy’s sleeve when he thought his attention flagged or taking hold of his ear to make sure his head was turned in the direction of the medallion or other detail of decoration he wanted him to notice.

We reached the melancholy dwelling place of the eunuchs: a square space of marble, formed by four low buildings containing cells with vaulted ceilings. Their doors opened on the courtyard. Standing at the balustrade of the
adjacent terrace, one looked down on the dull roofs. The place could have served as a stable. Ghostly presences—this was where memories of a lost world seemed to me most present, almost physically, as though some acrid scent had lingered undisturbed in the still air.

Society was turned upside down here, announced Charlie. The perversity of its structure will entertain and instruct you. No comradeship of men. The emperor alone with his sons and women lived in the Imperial Palace, and the sons only while they were small children. Afterward, they were moved out, away from the Forbidden City, until the son who had been selected to succeed returned to ascend the Peacock Throne. It was the fear of assassination: where two males meet, one will try to kill the other. For that same reason, the choice of the heir remained occult; should it become known, his envious brothers or their mothers might assassinate him. So within the walls of this enclave no one but the emperors’ women—wives, concubines, women servants, and, of course, eunuchs. Men who had stopped being men. The women the emperor fucked each had her name inscribed on an ivory marker. Like your backgammon pieces! In the evening, an important eunuch presented all the markers to the emperor and he chose one. Then the eunuchs went to the woman’s house, stripped her so that she had no place to conceal a knife or a vial of poison, and brought her, wrapped in a blanket, to the imperial bed.

Why only one a night, Miss Wang? he asked abruptly. Why not many? After all, it’s said that they hardly ever came, you know, ejaculated, just wanted to bathe the member as much as possible in a woman’s juices. Absorb them through
the rigid phallus. Juices bringing health and longevity, like vitamins! Do you know the answer? I may be wrong: perhaps every night they brought one woman after another!

I am so very sorry, it isn’t mentioned in the guidebooks I have studied.

Having delivered this standard reply of a well-trained guide to most questions about Chinese history before liberation, Miss Wang giggled very hard.

How curious what guidebooks will omit, Miss Wang. And what is the present position with regard to women’s juices? Do you know that?

Now Toby was giggling as well, besides having turned beet red, while I wondered whether each time I met Charlie it would be necessary to think of braining him.

I needn’t have bothered. Miss Wang could take care of herself. It can’t matter, Mr. Swan, she replied, family planning is obligatory in China, as you probably know, and it requires Chinese men to use contraceptive devices.

Quite right, I should have thought of that myself. And a good reason for substituting the pill! But we must get on with our eunuchs. These were volunteers, Toby, often married and fathers of families! I don’t know that there was a competitive examination, as with other offices in China. Men who applied for the position, and were lucky enough to be accepted, sat down on a stool rather like a
chaise percée
, and someone underneath went snip. The testicles were placed on a shelf, in an individual jar marked with the owner’s name. That way the eunuchs could be buried with their balls and be complete again, a matter of crucial importance for the Chinese, right Miss Wang?

Charlie had not noticed that he had lost the indigenous part of his public. Miss Wang had apparently decided to walk ahead of us. He raised his eyebrows in what could have been a sign of disappointment and continued.

The superstition led to a comical scene when the last emperor fled and this establishment was shut down. The old eunuchs all departed, a suitcase full of spare pajamas in one hand and the jar containing the balls in the other. What a ball!

Balls, said Toby, why is this stuff supposed to entertain or instruct me? It’s disgusting from beginning to end.

That’s the point, baby, that’s the point. A woman is a hole filled with juice that starts to smell like fish upon contact with air. Happiness, comradeship, cannot be built upon the cult of the hole.

Here Charlie threw his arms wide open and shouted to the empty space:

And looking around him with great satisfaction, because his memory had served him well, he repeated: Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah!

Afterward we had lunch, all four of us, in the restaurant in my part of the hotel, which was really quite decent and available to clients paying cash and to state guests whose sponsoring organizations had taken a deep breath and decided to register them there, notwithstanding the higher price,
rather than in the greasy spoon at the Canadian-built annex. I had been so registered; moreover, on the advice of Miss Wang, at the very beginning of my stay I presented to the maître d’hôtel, who was a young woman probably from the north of China, she was so tall, a silk scarf printed with some flowers. This simple gesture had lifted me to a pedestal of importance I had never enjoyed either at Cronin’s or the Faculty Club, the eateries with which the Beijing Hotel restaurant was now tied for first place in my affections. The quality of the welcome I received, and the news I sprang on Charlie that I lived in the old building—he admitted sourly that he and Toby had checked into the Russian horror, a place of cockroaches and thirty-watt lightbulbs—left Charlie temporarily with nothing specific to patronize me about. I relished the moment. The food came in a rush of dishes slammed on the table; prodded by Charlie, we had ordered too much. Miss Wang would have plunged her chopsticks into the platters like a surgeon who questions a wound, delivering to our plates sea cucumbers, noodles, or whatever else was most slippery without a drop of sauce lost in transit, but Charlie, instinctively the paterfamilias, would have none of it. Under his ministrations the tablecloth soon turned into a gloomy, brown Jackson Pollock, the impasto of drippings richest near his own plate. Again, he was pushing food, particularly rice, with his fingers. I averted my eyes and asked Toby, who had spoken only in monosyllables since we left the Forbidden City, whether he had already graduated from college.

I never went.

And what have you been up to?

I’ve been working on a design for Charlie’s New York office.

Oh.

The answer chilled me. I thought about it during lunch, which ended only when the waiters, impatient to close, gathered in a silent circle around our table, and while Miss Wang and I strolled from the Dongsi mosque through the alleys leading to a maze of hutons that had survived the zeal of the Liberation, peeking into secret and hostile courtyards and admiring an occasional sculpted gate or a roof decorated with dragons, and much later, when I rested in my room. Charlie and Toby had been unable to come with us on the walk because there were drawings Charlie needed to review. He was making a presentation to his clients, colossally rich overseas Chinese planning to build a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Beijing. They had invited him to China. We were to have a drink, though, before dinner, Charlie, Toby, and I.

I
WAITED FOR THEM
downstairs, in that part of the lobby which doubled as a bar. All foreigners of any note who blew into town—businessmen, journalists, government officials, do-gooders like me, and an occasional fancy tourist—passed through it, as well as a great many members of the Chinese
nomenklatura
and the sort of gilded youth that had begun to be visible in Beijing: children of high officials equipped with one or two items of apparel not conforming to the proletarian dress code, and sometimes looking downright expensive. Cowboy boots, belted trench coats, sweaters that might have just walked out of the Paul Stuart window; they wore them like identification badges. But the background was made up
of a less interesting fauna. Sprawled out in 1930s armchairs upholstered with green or brown plush, their legs and feet a menace to passersby, with bottles of beer, cans of peanuts, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts on the coffee tables before them, these were the Westerners whose principal occupation was waiting. Men. Overweight, guts spilling over their belts. Engineers and salesmen. They waited for the restaurant to open, the bar to close, for the arrival of the ministry employee who was to meet them there or who might convey them to an appointment outside, for a telephone call from Hong Kong, or the hour when it would be right (according to what rules?) to go upstairs to sleep. In the four months I spent going in and out of that place, I do not think I ever saw one of these recumbent figures open a book. Girlie magazines were forbidden in China. I suppose they did their reading in bed.

Charlie showed up alone.

Il fanciullo
is indisposed, he said. Headache; might be the grippe; anyway, he has decided to stay in the room. We must be here another ten days, so let us pray to St. Anthony of Padua that it is only a headache. The embassy fellow who met us at the airport claims that the hospital for foreigners is like a morgue. Friendship Hospital! How I wish something here was openly unfriendly!

I offered to mix a martini for him with my own supply of gin and vermouth. Having already consumed one myself, I felt more “openly unfriendly” than usual. In any case, I was tired of Charlie’s setting the direction each time we talked. Therefore, as soon as the concoction I had prepared was cradled in his hand—we were drinking out of water glasses—I
let him have it: Don’t you think it more likely that he is upset by our meeting here, and the lecture on smegma and eunuchs’ testicles? He may prefer not to see me a second time today.

Evidently, this attempt to avoid my customary circumlocutions did not impress Charlie. He stirred the martini with his median finger, drank it, and made another one. Remembering his taste for the stuff, I began to wonder whether I had brought enough gin from my room.

You mean that Toby is embarrassed because you have found us out and, in consequence, is hiding? he asked, an immense smile spreading over his face. What a pity you’ve been playing hard to get—I don’t mean it that way, you ass, oops, these aren’t words a queer should use—it’s just that if you had come to visit me from time to time I would have shown you something of the world that lies outside Cambridge. On second thought, everything you need to know can also be learned in Cambridge, I mean that which was not imparted to you at the Law School and wherever in Rhode Island it was that your mommy brought you up. All you need is a mentor like me. Toby doesn’t give a hoot; in New York, Toby is a hot date! It’s you, baby, who are embarrassed. And you know why? It’s because you don’t know how to act with a queer. Possibly you are even a teensy-weensy bit afraid. After all, at your age you are unmarried, you are an intellectual and a part-time aesthete. The profile of a homo! Suppose someone you know who knows about me or who can spot a queer sees us together—or you with the boy!—what will they think? Naughty, naughty! Or suppose, now that I know that you know, I make a pass. Or even better, the delectable
Toby tries one—have you thought of that? And suppose you like it: What happens then? A big pile of emotional
merde
for the respectable, slightly fey law professor! Explosion! Propelled out of the closet he didn’t even know he was in! I am a little bit embarrassed too, but for you, because although I suffer fools I don’t suffer them gladly. Let’s face it, baby, I like you. No, don’t worry, not that way!