The Almanac Branch (21 page)

It was over. His flesh, which had dwindled between her legs, he withdrew, snapping his hips back. He dismounted, and dressed.

Grace felt as if she should somehow apologize, should speak now, say something, recreate the word-water they'd floated in before with such pure ease, break up the atmosphere that all their silences had fostered, but she wasn't exactly sure what she'd done to earn this rebuke from Li Zhang. Since she didn't want to bring on any further enmity from him, she lay motionless, breathing as softly as she was able, holding back further tears by concentrating on—of all things—the label on Cutts's underwear through squinted eyes, and she pictured the television commercial where the fat men were all dressed up like grapes and oranges and lemons, and the little old matron who was the head of their peculiar brood stood folding their underpants, commenting on how strong the elastic waistbands were, and how long they would last, and how happy were all her fruit-boys—those poor failed actors who back in school might never have imagined that all their struggles to memorize
A Midsummer Night's Dream
would result in the pathetic calamity of green grease-paint and selling smiles—and then she imagined Bea at the store buying these very products for her husband to wear, daydreaming perhaps under the fluorescent lights in the department store, lulled into a half-sleep by the raspy buzz the long bulbs gave off from above. Then she came back from her own meandering, because the door to the aerie opened. For an instant she knew it could have been Cutts walking in. Then the door shut, and she heard Can Xue's nails scuttering on the landing outside.

When Li Zhang left, he left her tied up—which Grace thought rather strange of him. She got free fairly easily. Had he gotten suddenly stung with paranoia that she would want to follow him and therefore thought to get a jump on her by leaving her there to fight with the scarves? Or else, well, what had happened? She felt immensely flustered. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, just to see whether her face was there or not, see whether it had been subjected to one of the auras she'd experienced as a girl. But it wasn't megrim that had been with her. Similar hurt, similar high, yet her face was there in the glass, eyes gazing back at her, composed, sad, wanting to look defiant, but unable.

Can Xue—the writer, not her namesake—wrote a story about a young woman who lived with her father, Old Guan, in a wooden hut that was subject to whatever devastation nature chose to visit upon it. When the wind blew, the crumbly tiles on the roof were blasted with mulberriesthat fell from the tree that grew over it. When it rained, as so often it did, the roots of the rosebushes surrounding the hut rotted, and the rose petals soured to a deathly white. Moreover, the hut flooded, and the young woman found it difficult to sleep, lying in the water as she must beside her father in the small bedroom in the hut. Old Guan was in a state of decline and decay, just as was his house, and whenever he munched on some crackers, which he dearly loved to do, especially as a snack in the night when sleep failed to come and take him into its gentle arms and lift him away from his widower's existence for a few starry hours, his teeth began to hurt, and he became convinced that the field mice ran in and out of his mouth, frolicking like mad through the black crevices they found there.

Old Guan prattled day in and day out about the state of his several teeth, and was moved to think many sentimental thoughts about this cracker and that, idly picking his nose as he curled into a corner of their common bed, while the rain dripped into the room and collected in the oil tarp they had spread over the bed in the hope of staying dry. But, as he did, the young woman mentioned something she had begun to notice lately: an ox, which circled the hut, free as it pleased.

The ox was not, of course, just any ox—not in such a black and blurry landscape as this that the father Guan and his daughter strove to pass their lives in. This ox raised cold sweat on the skin of the girl, as it walked lazily round the hut, its ass (which was the only part of the ox's anatomy Old Guan's daughter ever in fact saw, aside from its horn, which it occasionally drove through the wall, butting and bumping it) giving off a purple glow that pulsed, blindingly, and shimmered blue as a blister in the drizzle. We also learn, toward the end of the story, that the girl's mother, Old Guan's wife, had been a sort of minor thief, and having stolen her husband's sleeping pills (understandably, the insomniac hungers for something besides thesame old dry crackers in the middle of his night) she ate them all herself so that she never had to worry about waking up anymore.

After all that, what finally happened was that Guan decided, in the wisdom of his years, to poison those nasty field mice that leaped and scurried through the vast cavities in his teeth, with some arsenic, which he planted in generous quantities on his tongue. Only after he did that did his daughter notice that the ox had fallen into the nearby river, to drown. Still, in its death throes, it managed to send up spectacular plumes of black smoke out of its nostrils, as it raised a hammer to smash the mirror on the wall in which Guan's girl habitually stared at herself.

Grace liked the story. In it, things happened unexpectedly, just as they did in Shahrazad's tales—just as they sometimes did in her own life. In the evening light, the steam escaped from vents and chimneys on the roofs and took on a thick, palpable presence, reminding her of the spumes that the suicide ox gave off as he went for his dip. It was funny—was she supposed to feel happy or sad about that ox drowning? How could it raise a hammer to smash a mirror in the hut at the same time as it had fallen, drowning, into a nearby river? What kind of life was Old Guan's daughter going to have there in the hut now that her crazy father and the obsessed bull were gone?

Deep down she must have loved them both, or else why would she have continued to live like that in the hut? She must have found comfort of sorts in her father's prattle; she must have been flattered by the doting ox that had courted her faithfully until he killed himself after finally understanding that his love for her was a big fat waste of time, because she was only in love with herself.

Unless I called him, I would never know whether Li had left behind the book of Can Xue's stories by mistake ordesign. I found it on the black and white tile under the sink in the bathroom. When I opened it, there they were, as I might have predicted, his name, and his number. Subtle perhaps, but maybe just pedestrian, this bit of leaving a possession behind in order to create an excuse to get back in touch. Oldest trick in the, well yes, book—and yet, admittedly, a wise one, in that the temptation, the thread, was strong and drew me more quickly than I might have anticipated toward the desire to call.

What would he expect me to say? Tell him that what we had done was something I would never do with him again? Plead with him to give me a chance to try once more to get it right (but, of course, what was right?)—or apologize again for having so willfully spat out the cloth he'd placed in my mouth, and cried like some hapless puppy?

Maybe he really had forgotten the book in his anxiousness to leave. I changed the bed in the aerie, washed, and sat by the window, in a state of sudden, inexplicable contentedness. I thumbed through the book, which was well-worn from Li's readings. Or else from Li's readings and from those of all the other women he'd done this with … no, that made no sense, or I didn't want it to make sense, because how could he have retrieved the thing each time? As I was reading the story about the ox, the hut, the girl, the father, and the spectacular purple glow (lights seem constantly to be attracted to such sex-magnetized situations) I knew I'd be willing to try again with Li Zhang if he would give me another chance.

I dialed his number, no answer. The glass of wine, which I wasn't all that fond of drinking, seemed like a good idea, just to give myself a sense of what it must have been like to be Li Zhang with the wine in him. I folded up the scarves and put them away. I considered going out and simply depositing the book in a trash bin as I walked along toward home, but I wasn't ready to face Faw just yet—I was far too skittish and shaken for that. So, I phoned Zhang once more, and this time a woman, in her fifties or sixties, answered.

“Is Li there?”

“Yes. What?”

“Is Li Zhang there, please?”

“Who is calling.”

Why not, why not tell her, after everything that had happened, I thought, and anyway Li knew where he could find me if he wanted to, so there was no possibility of anonymity left to me. “Grace Brush,” I said.

“Hold on,” the woman told me, and I slowed my breath as I studied the purple-blue bruise bracelet that had begun to appear around my right wrist and listened hard into the telephone, and wondered why the skin around my knuckles was marred blue, too. I couldn't remember him touching me there—a sympathy bruise. Was it exciting or not that a man whom I essentially didn't know and who had made these marks on my skin was about to speak to me?

Yes it was, no it wasn't. It was exciting yes because he'd given me the freedom to say to him whatever I liked. I could scream, I could demur, and he couldn't legitimately protest. He relinquished his right to withhold my freedom by having carried out his violence on me only to abandon it so abruptly just because I was—yes—enjoying it. Shame on him for having proposed such a thing and not shown the discipline to carry it out. He had just turned everything we were doing into a bunch of sexual amphigory, a burlesque, was what I began to think.

Exciting no (or was this a yes, too?) because no matter how hard I tried to convince myself otherwise, Li Zhang was, indeed, frightening, and I knew that for all my sudden interest in pushing out and out and away from what I felt to be the confines of my life, what Li'd gotten me to do, and all within a matter of minutes really, was unnerving.

Maybe I was unfit for such irredeemable acts, maybe deep down I was still a jittery little girl who preferred to keep this kind of behavior locked behind veils of fantasy, lodged in the mind where though it wasn't safe it wassomehow controllable. Naturally, I hated that idea; no one likes to feel overprotected, to feel weak and unadventurous—we all want to feel as if we're stars, strong, vibrant, and irrepressible. And it wasn't the case, anyhow, I reminded myself. It was Li who got a sudden fit of cold feet, Li who ran, impenitent and possibly even scared. I peered around the corner into the bathroom mirror to see if there was a bruise on my neck, assuming a violet line where the leash had embraced me might have begun to appear. The skin was lightly flushed with emotions or wine, but there was no evidence there that I'd been bridled like an untamed and ridiculous pet. It occurred to me that it was Can Xue's leash that had encircled and held me tight, its worn-smooth snaky length responding so personally to me as Li Zhang and I made love. Li had refrained from caressing or embracing me, I noticed. But the leather leash he had set down so kindly on the small of my back had comforted me while he sat there breathing, unmoving and unmovable, to give me just enough time to worry what he might do next.

Did he elect to remove the leash, to dress, and to disappear precisely because he sensed no fear coming from me? It seemed very possible that this might explain what he did. Can Xue, who had waited patiently in one corner of the room, curled up like a mink toque, had scrabbled on her dry old nails across the parquet to reclaim her leash. She could hardly wait to go. Hard call: maybe it's true, they were both just bored by me.

At the other end of the line I could hear hollow sounds now, voices talking, something muffled—again, I couldn't make out what was being said—and, after the voices stopped I was sure I heard footsteps and I cleared my throat and tried to get it straight in my head just what I was going to say to Li when he answered.

I needn't have troubled myself thinking about it, because what I heard next was the dial tone, which I listened to as if it were a meditator's mantra, an
omm
,for a while, thinking back to Can Xue's story and then musing what a drowning ox's bellowings must sound like under the ripply surface of a river.

Berg, who had always assumed his sister's life was less eventful than his own, or rather believed that whatever adventures she struck out upon were confined to her imagination, was in fact leading a life that could be seen as less engaged than hers. Having given up the characters (mythical, fantastical, whatever they were) of her childhood—or, having been abandoned by them might be the more accurate way of putting it, since they drifted into a distance, and became less accessible to her as time passed, until they would not come to her no matter how much she might have wanted them to return—Grace now had moved into a life of the flesh; her encounter with Li Zhang might or might not have been more frightening in some of its elements, but it was more demonstrably “real.” The way she knew this was easy: if, indeed, Li Zhang had got it in his head to try some of the things Desmond had done, he would probably have had to kill her to actualize the idea. And though it hadn't worked out, she didn't regret having given marriage a whirl, superficial as it was. Though she still lived at home—which Berg found kind of sad, deplorable even—she did have secret lives and secret places in which she led them. But Berg, could he make the same claims?

He had never married. Massachusetts had been for him a place of stunning boredom, made tolerable only by the alcohol he smuggled into his room on campus. He was considered rather an odd bird by his classmates. While they were busy growing their hair and flooding their lungs with hash and lazy pot, he declared himself an ascetic, didn't believe in smoking, concentrated on drinking clear alcohols—gin, vodka, certain blonde tequilas and rums. He wore his hair cropped tight to his skull, and carried a smallpair of scissors sheathed in a leather pouch with him wherever he went, in order that he might trim it wherever he was. He lost his virginity not in college, but when he returned to the city on visits, to crash around on the Lower East Side; it hardly mattered to him one way or another.