Lying in Bed (17 page)

He laughs. His laugh is deep. I would have expected a giggle from so slight a boy. “Not
Queens. Chinese.
It doesn't rhyme with
release or geese
the way you said it. It rhymes with
ease
or
cheese
or
freeze
. Chinese.”

“Ease or cheese or freeze,” I repeat. And then, to
befuddle him in order to cover my own embarrassment at my apparent mispronunciation, I ask, “Is that
freeze
or
frieze
?”

“Is that what or what?”

“Is that
freeze
or
frieze
?”

“Yeah, it's freeze or frieze. Or freeze and frieze. Or just plain freeze. Or just plain frieze. Like I'm just plain Chinese.”

“From Queens,” I say.

“From Queens,” he reiterates.

“They're homophones,” I tell him.

“They're what?”

“Homophones.”

“What're homophones?”

“
Freeze
and
frieze
, naturally.”

“What are homophones? I assume we're not talking Nynex here.”

Now I laugh. “No, we're not talking Nynex, though what an interesting name that would be for a new language. The language spoken over the phone. I don't use the phone much myself, but I'm sure it has, in certain subtle ways, a language all its own, a rhetoric, a rhythm, an etiquette.”

I think of Clara and that implicit sexual play on
homophone
she concocted—my mind is playing word games of its own—that night of the day we met and only moments before she raised her legs and removed her tights and socks.

“What's the matter?” he asks me.

“Why?”

“Your lips were moving and you weren't saying anything.”

I clap my hand to my mouth. “Really?”

“It was peculiar, man.” He puts his delicate hand to his own mouth to try to quell his amusement.

“Homophones,” I explain, “are words that are spelled differently but are pronounced the same and mean different things.
Freeze
and
frieze
, for example.”

What greater antidote against laughter than pedagogy? Now he just nods his head in a pretense of interest.

How am I going to keep him here? I'm in no hurry to get the violin for him. Then he'll just take it and leave. I can't even force him to play it for me.

“Sit down.” I lead the way to the sprawling leather couches in the middle of the loft, but I don't know if he follows. He steps so lightly in his homely sneakers. He makes no sound. I cannot feel him through the floor.

But when I turn, he's there, and when I sit, he sits. I am filled with great comfort. Across from me, he nearly disappears into the supple skin. He is becoming a part of the room.

“How did you get to Queens?” I ask, hoping that autobiography will long-wind him.

“Subway.”

“That's not what I meant,” I reply sharply.

“I know.”

He is playing with me. I don't care. Just to have him here. I have never known this loneliness before. It's so much worse to be left alone than simply to be alone.

We sit in silence. As long as he doesn't leave. We look at each other. Or I look at him. I cannot tell what he looks at or sees. His eyes are withdrawn like a snake's.

“I'm third generation.” His voice itself seems part of the silence we have created. I am soothed by it. “American. My grandparents came over here from Taiwan. On both sides. Years ago. My father's family is from Taipei. My
mother's parents came from Taichung. Do you know anything about Taichung?”

“Nothing.” I am grateful.

“It's up among the lakes. The Sun-Moon region. They told me it is the most beautiful place on earth. More beautiful than the Vale of Kashmir. More beautiful than Queens.” He laughs. “That's all I heard about when I was little and they were still alive. Sun-Moon. That's what they called me. Sun-Moon. And that became Sonny.”

“What is that in Chinese?” I take care to pronounce it correctly.

“English,” he says contemptuously. “That's what they called me in English.”

“It's a good name,” I compliment him. “Night and day.”

“Day and night,” he corrects me.

“What's your real name?” I ask.

“One Gone Jew.”

I must look surprised. “What did you expect, Henry Ding-Dong?”

I shake my head. “Will you spell your name for me.”

“W-u-n G-o-n J-e-w. Jew is a common Chinese name. And yet few Chinese are Jewish.”

“I don't imagine so,” I respond.

“It's a
joke
.” He's not laughing now. He seems angry with me.

I still don't get his joke, and I ask him, “Are you Jewish?”

Now he laughs, deeply, almost uncontrollably. I wait for him to stop. At first his laughter hurts me. But then I realize he thinks I've made a joke and clearly a brilliant one at that.

“Buddhist,” he says when he can speak again. He actually bows his head slightly when he says the word, in a
rather enviable gesture of humility.

“I don't know much about it,” I say, “except that George Steiner wrote about the Buddhist belief that the soul becomes purified through silence. He named that book
Language and Silence
, so I gravitated to it like a seed to an egg. It was very comforting to me to read that at the time I did. What do you believe?”

He looks up at me over his glasses. “Believe,” he asks, “or believe in?”

“There's no difference.”

His eyes narrow. “If I had to believe in the things I believe, I'd die. It's the difference between faith and resignation.”

I am unconvinced by his philosophizing, but I don't want to argue with him, out of fear that he will stop talking. So I concede: “What do you believe
in
then?”

“Salvation.” He seems to like the idea of it. He smiles contentedly. “In this life. Not in the next. Not like you Christians.” I listen for some echo of contempt, but all I hear is the dullness of fact.

“What saves you?” I try to guess. Music. Sex. No longer for me knowledge of anything that comes in through the mind. Rather the breathing of one's beloved in the sable warmth of sleep.

“Enlightenment,” he answers. “Through the spirit. We say the body is like froth. A mirage. Accept that, and you'll never see the king of death.”

“I was dead once.”

“Really,” he replies. I can't tell if it's a question.

“Are you married?” I ask.

Nothing seems to surprise this man. It's as if his mind is working like my own, has attached itself to my own. He shakes his head. He smiles. “I'm pure,” he answers.

I don't understand this. I shake my head.

He leans toward me. “We believe that the suffering in life is caused by desire, and the only way to end your suffering is through self-purification.”

“Oh,” I say, “ascesis.”

Now it's he who's puzzled. “What?”

“Ascesis. That's what I've practiced my whole life. Someone once even called me an ascetic priest. Saint Johnny of Ascesis.”

He nods now. He understands what I'm talking about. “In the Dhammapada it says that if you hold a blade of grass wrong, it cuts your hand, and if you practice asceticism wrong, you go to hell.”

“That's where I am now.”

I expect him to mock such hyperbole, but he is somber when he says, “I can tell. You seem so … so …” For the first time, he falters in his speech. He can't find the word he's looking for. His face grows foreign.

“Weak?” I say.

“Fragile.”

He gets up. I'm afraid he is going to leave. But he goes not toward the door; he comes toward me.

He sits down with me on the couch. He takes my hand. His is dry, almost cold.

“What's the matter?” he asks.

It is such a touching question. It seems the perfect formulation of words.

“My wife is gone.”

He pushes his glasses atop his tiny nose and gazes at me through them. It must be how he reads.

“Marriage.” He looks to either side of me as if to imagine her there. But he cannot see her any more than can I. We are alone together here. “She left you?”

Not in the way he means. “No.”

“Oh. Gone.” He looks stricken, almost ashamed. I am learning to read through the indecipherability of his face. “She's dead?”

I have no words to answer that. I shake my head.

“Another man?”

I laugh.

He drops my hand. He thinks I'm laughing at him, his naïveté or cynicism or whatever it might be that would cause him to suspect one's wife would be with another man, when all I was laughing at was the redundancy of it.

“I deliver things,” he says emphatically.

“I'm afraid I don't …” But then I realize what he means. I picture him in his business, riding up on his bike, carting his greasy food up stairs, let in, paid, and every once in a while, rarely, perhaps, but sometimes, surely, told he's wanted, told in one way or another, a word, a wink, a gesture, a raising of a skirt and a spreading of legs. I know this goes on in the world. I know it exists somewhere else outside my head. I can see him with Clara, entering her from above, his silver buttocks swimming through the air, her hands alight like sconces on his shoulder blades as she smiles at me from where her head nestles in his neck and calls out to both of us, “Fuck me, Johnny.”

Wun Gon Jew says, “The Hindus say that the fiend of lust takes advantage of solitude.”

“You don't have to explain,” I answer. “I'm not as naïve as I may look. I knew what you were referring to. When you say you deliver things, you mean you come upon women who want you to fuck them.” I swell proudly over my use of such Paphian language.

“Men.”

“What?”

“Men,” he repeats. “It's usually men.”

“They want you to fuck their wives?”

He looks at me as if I can hardly be the man who only moments before was grieving over the absence of his wife. He is shocked. He has seen into my mind and misunderstood completely what I have been picturing there.

“They want to fuck me.”

“The wives?”

“The
men
.” His impatience is manifest, but it is balanced between humor and exasperation.

Life is far worse than I have thought it. His life. Even mine. I had pictured him some ruptuary, nameless, faceless, speechless, come to me with food, and he turns out to know a thing or two, to be able to say, “Shostakovich,” and to take my hand when I am suffering.

Now it is I who takes his hand.

“Please,” he says.

“Please what?”

“Please let go.”

I do. “Sonny, I'm sorry.”

He stands up. He says nothing, yet I know he is leaving. But he is not sure how to make his exit. I remember from my days in the world how hard it was to make exits. Meeting was awkward enough, but how to separate bodies or gazes or even voices on the phone once contact had been made remained a mystery to me. It was probably one of the reasons I went into retreat. I have never learned how to suffer with grace the shock of departure.

“I'll get your violin now.”

That stops him. He seems either to have forgotten about it or not to have believed me in the first place.

I go into my closet. I know where to find the violin because I know where to find anything at all in my closet.
But it takes me some time, for the violin is not so much hidden as buried away. Its associations are, to say the least, painful.

I worry that he won't be there when I emerge. I worry that he will have left and taken with him absolutely nothing.

But when I come out into the vast room holding the violin in its case with one hand and the bow in its sheath with the other, he is still there, though he's moved and in fact is moving still, walking along the far wall and looking up at it with his chin in his hand and his glasses down at the end of his nose like someone in an art gallery.

He becomes aware of my presence and turns around and says, “These quilts are beautiful. My grandmothers were seamstresses. They worked machines in the sweatshops. But they would have loved this stitching. It's so unbelievably intricate. It's like looking at a score for the first time. I wish they could have seen these things. They went to their graves saying that nothing beautiful had ever been made by American fingers.”

I put down the violin case and bow on one of the Seymour brothers' Federal worktables and am drawn to where he stands, though whether by him or by the quilts themselves I cannot say. We stand together silently beneath them. We are directly before the Sunshine and Shadow quilt that Clara bought on a trip we took to Pennsylvania. I look into the spread of its irradiating diamonds of light and color until I become dizzy and have to close my eyes. This has never happened to me before. I grasp his arm and speak.

“This is all Clara's. All this beauty. She has the most amazing eye.” I keep my own eyes closed. “Everything about me is internal—words, sounds, images of things I
can't even manage to see. I'm a self-indulgent impressionist. That's what Santayana called Nietzsche. That's what he called himself. In a letter to a Mrs. Toy. T-o-y. Perhaps she was Chinese. Clara is not like me. There's a reality to her. Her body is the only thing I've ever been able to hold onto on this earth. Even that violin I couldn't … She has the most remarkable physical presence. That's what I'm trying to say. I wish she would just come home. I wish she would just walk through that door over there and you could meet her and we could listen to music together. Shostakovich. Steppenwolf. I don't care.”

As I'm talking, I realize I probably sound like a lunatic going on about my wife and expect to feel Wun Gon Jew pulling out of my grasp to run toward the door toward which I am pointing. But he doesn't move at all, except to quiver in my hand, and when I open my eyes I find him trying to suppress laughter.