The Almanac Branch (20 page)

“What's so funny?” she said. She looked at Cutts's face, and realized that she didn't want to let him go, in fact, couldn't let go of him, not just yet. Maybe she did love him, she thought. Maybe there were ways to keep on making this thing work.

“Nothing,” he said.

The first time Grace brought Li Zhang up the stairs and into the aerie, what was implicit in his mind was more or less just what was in hers. Which was very coincidental, and had something to do with the fact that at the edges of what few words they spoke was the sort of disturbance that can come from a profound expectancy, the kind of expectancy that registers not in thoughts but in the viscera, the flesh of the heart.

It was March, winter was about to surrender to the equinox; it was warmer than it had been in recent weeks. Down in the streets crystal mounds of blackened snow stood forth by the garbage cans and wrought-iron railings, each pile of cold dappled with debris and stained by a film of soot and fumes and filth, looking like ridiculous snow-omens that Grace—later that same night—would come to think she ought to have been able to read. Wherever the sun had sent down its bald light through spaces between the buildings and scraggly ginkgo trees, which rose here and there like exhausted skeletons, the snow had melted, making those clumps of the stuff that remained all the more peculiar. She should have been looking at the bits of rubbish in themounds, because then she might have gained a little insight into what was going to happen with Li, who'd seemed so nice when they met about an hour before, walking his old mother dachshund, whose chubby back sloped and breast sagged so with age that her coat was almost completely worn away from scraping along on the pavement, her hair replaced by thick liver-colored callus. But Grace just stepped over the grimy snow, talking and walking along with Li and Can Xue (the dachshund was named in honor of the writer Can Xue—i.e., Deng Xiao-hua—whom Li, along with some other disenchanted and idealistic students, met once, having made the pilgrimage to her humble house in Changsha).

At first, Grace and Li Zhang hadn't been walking anywhere in particular. That is, they'd entered into a conversation much in the same way a bather enters the sea, directionless, reading the waves, just going out and out, and Can Xue tugged at her leash, for she was an insistent little beast, Li explained, and then Grace found it impossible to finish the thought, whatever it had been—it seemed drowned in an undertow of words that just swam and swam through and around it now—and she'd picked up Li's discourse and his direction and while, no, she wasn't laughing much at the things they were saying, because Li didn't finally have a very good sense of humor, didn't so much as try to entertain her or make her smile, she was caught up in it all. This man, Li Zhang, seemed to be so engaged, to be so right-there-with-her, and yet it seemed he was simultaneously indefinite about everything.

A siren heard, in the near distance, as a willingly drowning swimmer might hear the cries of her companions back on the beach, awakened her briefly from this word-sleep she felt she was going into, and rather than save her—if that was what the sound, within its metaphor, was supposed to have done—it only made her the more content to keep floating away from it.

When Can Xue paused by one of the ginkgo trees andshivered as she passed her urine down her blackish legs onto the frozen quarry stones that were arranged around the bole, Grace did say, “Well, see you later.”

That was the Grace who wasn't interested in drowning yet, the swimmer Grace who didn't get off on the risk of icy waves and undertows and clasping kelp. She said it of course knowing that it wasn't likely she would ever see him again since she'd never seen him around the neighborhood before, and Li Zhang didn't insist that she stay there and continue talking with him, but instead he continued with whatever it was they'd been talking about.

He was mentioning the stuff about the camphor trees in Formosa and China and how his grandmother took the bark and steamed it over a fire, distilled it—had she ever smelled camphor?—and how his grandmother took it and made soap, and varnish, and perfume from it. Talk about your stream of consciousness, there wasn't even a camphor tree in the city, but that was Li, just flowing along, letting Can Xue's nose dictate the direction, all of which would have led Grace to believe that Li wasn't a willful sort of person, being unconcerned with where his feet carried him; but if that was what she'd thought while they strolled along together, she had been mistaken. For instance, this was not Li's neighborhood at all, Grace discovered, after having expressed surprise that she hadn't seen him and Can Xue before.

No, he lived in Chinatown—“I have the good sense to live where I'm supposed to live, you probably live where you're supposed to live, too,” to which she replied, “I live in two places, one with my father, and the other with my lover”—and not taking up the thread, which she sensed he'd thought unnecessary, even gauche, he went on about his dog and how unless she was ailing or tired he took her in a canvas bag onto the subway, rode to a stop chosen at random, and emerged up in the streets where he let her take off down whatever sidewalk she wanted to explore. Li told Grace that at one time or another he and Can Xue hadprobably been down every block in New York, not that he'd really be able to remember, since just as it was exercise-time for her it was thinking-time for him, and when you are thinking you're not seeing. When Grace glanced over at him, she was struck by how deep the wrinkles around his eyes ran—smile-lines she always called them, though she doubted that Li Zhang had smiled enough in his life to produce them; and then she wondered how old he might be, and realized that he wasn't necessarily younger than she, as she'd first imagined, that indeed he could be much older. She looked at his hand, which held the leash, knowing that hands often tell a person's age better than any other feature, but they were delicate and rather expressionless, and betrayed nothing. The eyes behind his rimless glasses were black, his hair was black and straight and cut tight across his forehead, his clothing was well-tailored and had a homemade look to it—the gray worsted trousers, the gray scarf with purple piping, even the soft green-black leather jacket. And what did he think about when he was walking aimlessly through the cold brick gorges of the city?

She might have asked had she not realized he was now returning her stare (funny how this whole experience seemed as if played out in a fit of exhaustion, how given over to it she felt, just as when in a bad dream you come to understand that you are not going to be able to escape your nightmare-ghoul, and you begin to ease up and accept that the evil your imagination has worked up for you will prevail, at least until you awaken); when she looked into his eyes Grace suddenly lost interest in asking what he thought about while he walked, because she sensed she already knew. Li's quick smile—like an acknowledgment it was—did seem awkward on his lips. That was when she knew she wanted him to come with her up to the aerie.

Now, while neither of them had any particular expectations of what would happen between them alone in the room—a man and a woman who didn't know each other, as such—nor even had the time to formulate specific hopesor desires, or intentions (Li Zhang's behavior in this regard might be seen, in a later light, as harder to explain than Grace's), both experienced an exhilaration.

Both breathed faster, shallower. Both knew clearly what they could do, if they chose, and it is a commonplace that knowing what you can do is the first step toward doing it. The way Can Xue made herself comfortable, turning around in place three times, and then lying down with a warm yawn, only helped them more toward understanding they would probably act on these emerging feelings. People sense what they are going to do, and most especially when they try to convince themselves that they are entering into an episode from which they will emerge not knowing what they might have had in mind (that is, they say, What was I doing, for god sakes?)—though neither asked the other any questions.

Anyway, what sort of question would Li Zhang have asked, before he took the three or four steps he took toward Grace, and ran his palm over her cheek before placing it on her shoulder and drawing her into him? There was nothing to say. There certainly was nothing to ask. He didn't even smile, because when he moved his lips through the shroud of hair and began to kiss her ear, he knew by the way her back curved into him and her fingers clutched into the furrow of his thin neck that there wasn't a need to smile.

She told herself, as she drew the cord that let the blinds down, that it wasn't meant to have been a seduction. After all, the aerie belonged half to Cutts, even if she paid its bills. It just was what it was; it was going to take place, there was nothing to stop it, and no reason for it not to go on. Cutts's absence was of his own choosing. Good choice, given what he'd make of this. It wasn't her choice that Cutts always had to be drinking wine when he was in the aerie—the same wine Li now reluctantly accepted and drank. Grace never told Cutts he had to have wine here. And the scarves of Grace's that Li used to tie her wrists and ankles to the bedposts—Li accomplished all this with such delicacy anddetermination—had been gifts from Cutts. But she never asked for presents from Cutts. She never much liked the presents he gave her anyway, although they were nice presents (the scarves were silk and colorful). They indicated to Grace more that Cutts felt guilty toward Bea than that he felt generous toward Grace. The scarves were more sacrificial offerings than true gifts. So, all right. Let's make a sacrifice with them.

“You struggle with fate you hurt yourself”—who had said that? It sounded like something Faw would come up with, but though she'd forgotten the source of the statement, Grace had had years of studying that lesson, hadn't she? Of course, any truism was like a trap, a padlock—no matter how unassailable, how finely wrought, how sophisticated, none existed but that it could be escaped or picked. Whether she struggled with fate or not it seemed inevitable that she, or someone, was going to be hurt, so she chose to follow the maxim along its surface, knowing however that she had discovered how to take it to pieces and could easily reduce it, if she wished, to a heap of worthless metaphoric tumblers and cylinders and jaws.

Still, as she lay there, fully clothed and face down on the bed, she wondered how it was possible she felt not the slightest sense of remorse that Cutts's presents were finding such novel use in the dying afternoon.

This would make him furious to say the least. She tried to imagine his fury and how it would feel to see him so angry with her. She closed her eyes and felt nothing, really, except that she liked this sense of being down here in her own darkness, alone and inexplicably strong even while she was being rendered powerless, and as she splayed her arms and legs under the urgings of his hands, her interest in conjuring Cutts waned. What interested her was a stirring, visceral trust she began to feel under Li Zhang's kisses, which were like a cat's, or the graze of emery.

Once Li finished securing her limbs, he asked, “Would you mind if I had a little more wine?” and seeing shecouldn't answer, because he had gagged her (the fresh-laundered, bleach-scented men's briefs Li found in the drawer of the nightstand seemed suitable to the task), he poured another glass and drank it off as quickly as he had the first.

“Do you mind if I—” he muttered, politely, as he raised the clacking wooden blinds.

She answered, No, with a deep tongueless “Oh,” down in her throat. Let him see me, she thought, under the late winter light that now filled the aerie with its thin glow, Let anybody who wants to see, see.

“Don't worry,” he suggested—“dawn wooree be haw-pee,” the song passed through her head, and kept going through the next few minutes there was no stopping it until he removed Can Xue's leash from the collar and, climbing on to the bed, gently slipped it under her neck, threading the clip end through the loop of the handle, and drawing it tight. As he was loving her he straddled his knees over her thighs and now and then, quite rhythmically and with ineffable tenderness, yanked her head back a bit with the leash, as he thrust into her more deeply. He had not bothered to do more than push her skirt up and lift her panties aside so that he could have access to what interested him. Or else, given that maybe it didn't so much interest him, where he had to go.

Neither of them made any sound during the fifteen or twenty minutes he spent riding her, his helpless white mare, but as Grace came to orgasm, she pushed the gag out of her mouth with her tongue—reminding them both, at a crucial moment, that her bondage was more gestural than actual—and she began to moan, to which his response was to cease moving.

He laid the leash on her back and sat over her, and said, “What do you think you're doing?” She tried to see his face but he was distorted in her peripheral field, which began to haze up with tears. She arched her hips up, driving her stomach into the sheets, hoping to communicate to himthat she wanted to continue, but Li Zhang was not, it became obvious to Grace, going to continue fucking a woman who would come.

The disgust that he exhibited toward her she could feel through the coldness of his fingertips on her back, where he let them rest after emphatically pushing her hips back down onto the bed. Wasn't hatred only for the weak? Li Zhang had already shown himself not to be that; hatred surely was beneath him. So thinking that their lovemaking might still be going on, and that maybe she ought to be more patient than she was being, she took the full dose of his silence and told herself that what he might have been feeling toward her was pity. Yeah, well pity was appropriate, she thought. But then he breathed out hard and she heard resignation in the way he did it. No, she'd screwed up. He continued to rest his hands on her back, and after sitting like dead weight on her thighs for a while, he ceremoniously—anything performed in absolute silence seems ceremonious, doesn't it?—slid the leash through its loop and removed it from around her neck. “Okay,” he whispered.