The Almanac Branch (22 page)

Alphabet City—the precincts between Avenues A and C—was the perfect place for him after he finished school, he felt, and the short hair reinforced his air of asceticism, as did, in its way, the slow drunk calm that most often was evident in his manner and response toward what few responsibilities he agreed to undertake on behalf of his father's businesses, whose sundry accounts he sometimes milked as it suited his particular needs. His father knew more or less what he was up to. He knew that the checks made out to unaccountable payees, or drawn for cash, went toward the support of some small mischief. It could have been anything. It didn't matter to Charles much because Berg had turned out so much better than he had ever had reason to hope; let him do whatever pleases him, so long as it remains under control, was Charles's tack.

Berg moved around. His home seemed naturally to be on the road. This habit of Berg's, which resembled his father's, began more and more to take him out of the city; it seemed logical to do a little troubleshooting for the Sprawl in exchange for fare and wage, which was what Charles offered. Berg appreciated the way Charles handled their dealings. It reminded him a little of
Mission Impossible
in that his father had someone else get in touch about what needed to be done and where, in that Berg always had the option to blow it off if he so chose, and in that there occasionally seemed to be a secretive element—Don't mention this to anyone, was a standard tag line, and in a way, whether he chose to admit it to himself or not, he liked that he was being trusted. The “missions” were usually not just possible, but quite easy. Given the itinerary mattered less to Berg than the need to be itinerant, to be on the roam, this father and son symbiosis worked well.

Grace and Faw were interdependent, too, but in a far more familial way. Grace did daughterly things, she coddled her father. Faw reciprocated. Like some lover off at war, he sent her things, flowers, notes, exotica from his travels, a blanket he found in the Southwest that he thought she might like, a Liberty scarf from London, some lace from France. They went through periods where they talked on the telephone nearly every day, just catching up.

While Berg kept in touch with Erin and Segredo, Grace remained distant. She wished she shared Berg's willingness to forgive, but still held them responsible for Desmond. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all. But that anger was in her. She hoped that one day she would be able to release it, knowing it for the curse it was.

So, was that the beginning and end of Li Zhang?

Possibly it was and if so why wouldn't I see it as an obvious blessing since, after all, I wasn't used to that sort of lovemaking, call it lovemaking, call it anger, or man-killing-woman hatred, even. Still, I wondered why I would come (because I did) like that, and, by Li Zhang's unspoken rules of the game, come too soon, come vocally, come without adhering to whatever thought he might have had of maintaining dignity, keeping to my role of relinquishment. I almost understood, and in understanding where I'd failed found that I was aroused again, was interested—what a sublime invalidation of the will, with all of the world's cranky and stupid mores to which it must answer, this kind of love could, if understood and practiced, mean. The heat from my ankles and wrists was exhilarating, I couldn't deny. Felt hot as a summer sunburn on Rams Island, and Li Zhang's refusal to keep it up after I broke the spell, even that could be viewed as a turn-on in the right context. He would say, You must, and I would say, Maybe I will and maybe I won't. It was a perfect game of sex, was the unexpected answer to questions I remembered asking myself as a child, about Samantha and Jeannie. Their men were such prudes, so lobotomized by their heritage and their work, so smoothed out by their upbringings that they were hardly there—I wondered if, behind their bedroom doors, anything at all ever went on. I couldn't imagine it possible. When I got married, myself, didn't Warne in a way turn out to be just exactly one of those men, an all too easily blown like a leaf Darrin? They were, each of these men, spiritual castrati, and nothing and no one could revivify them, given that they had never been enlivened in the first place. Well, I was different, by god, even though I knew that dominance is not the final key to vitality in a man toward a woman. Desmond's ghost had enlivened me, and now I was visited upon again—but who was Desmond's ghost if not Grace Brush? It was, in fact, not weird or cruel or in any way wrong, but the only thing to do, what I'd done with Li. It was the only way for us to find our balance. I felt sure I'd at least glimpsed what he had been after. Here had been a chance at obedience, a strong womanly willful obedience, a kind of obedience that emerges into a personality of strength beyond anger, and I'd blown it. I would do everything possible to get Li Zhang to give the thing another chance.

I decided to keep Li's Can Xue at the aerie. If it turned out that I couldn't get him back it would serve as a kind of remembrance. If, on the other hand, Li Zhang did sometime decide he wanted to meet me again, I would be able to make him a present of something he already owned. As neatly as I could, I tore out the front endsheet of the book, and hid the leaf of paper, with his address and number, between the mattress and boxspring of the bed. I locked up and went outside, trying my best not to look around at fellow pedestrians as I did, feeling myself to be the worst sort of conventional woman, unworthy of some of my idols, genies and witches, the most normal, stock, traditional, regulated and standard person on earth. Did the cabdriver recognize a schoolgirl's guilt in my eyes, and the tone of my voice when I gave him the address to go home to Faw? What did he care. All of a sudden I was shot through with wistfulness. Wistful in kind was the twilight sky, which gave off a thoroughly disheartened ox-purple glow at every horizon and up into the stars.

Cutts had no patience with women who were afraid of being alone. Men, he told Bea, men had to spend so much time by themselves, and here it was that women were always the ones who got away with turning the phrase around, saying that men were the ones who couldn't ever stand to be alone! While women slept soundly at night, who was up, alone, pacing around, visiting the refrigerator, looking at anything the television had to offer, finding themselves caught up in the most mind-dulling adventures like the one where the lady whale was swept into the shallow lagoon up in Nova Scotia, and the nice American family out on their sailboat trying to have their vacation was also swept by the storm into this place where there was a town full of redneck fishermen who had nothing better to do than insult the family and shoot their rifles at the stranded whale. It's men at night who find themselves caught up in the drama of the lady doctor who lived among all those rednecks, in a beautifully decorated house, and the drama of the father of the family, who found himself more and more involved in trying to save the whale, so involved that he found himself falling in love with the whale and swimming with her, looking into her brown and human eye as he tried to do everything in his power to protect her (Richard Widmark tried to help him help the whale, but his ornery sons were far more powerful than he, and pushed for selling the whale to the captain of the pirate whaler anchored offshore), but not in the least understanding that while he was no longer in love with his wife, who complained about the abject conditions of the room in which they were put up until the parts came from the mainland so their sailboat could be repaired and they could go back home to Connecticut or wherever, he shouldn't be wasting his time falling in love with the whale, but should be considering how ecology-minded and desirable the lady doctor was—if he'd seen how lazy and boring was his wife, and how enamored of the local girls the two boys, their children, were, he might have begun to think about making a new life for himself with the doctor, and have even offered his wife the chance to stay on with them all in some sort of capacity, perhaps as a nurse or something. Or maybe they could be mature about it and remain good friends. But this whale stood in the way.

That kind of thing, that was what men, in their aloneness, were destined to suffer, Cutts thought, not without a little humor, of course, but not without some seriousness, either. So when he asked Grace how her weekend had gone, and she shrugged it off, he took it to mean that she'd been lonely and was trying not to make him feel guilty about having passed the holiday surrounded by family.

“Did you miss me?” was a brash bit of hubris but he thought he'd try it out on her anyway.

“You know what we've never done?” she said.

That was quite a deflection, and Cutts thought, best not to press it, and answered, “There's a lot of things we've never done, but if you mean spend a holiday together—”

“I don't care whether we spend a holiday together, I never liked holidays anyhow. Holidays are like killing fields for businessmen predators to pluck a little more money out of pockets that are already emptied.”

“Uh, Grace—?”

“But what I was talking about was that we've never done like, I was thinking, there's things in bed, you know, that well, we've never tried.”

Cutts was relieved that she wasn't going to complain about how his marriage kept them apart, but was disquieted at the prospect of discussing sex with her. Sex was like loneliness, agendas non grata, you didn't hold colloquies about it, it was just something you did, and—“Look, there's nothing I don't like about what we do, I like everything about you, I think we have a really great—”

“You know, when we make love we always kind of do it like, well, look right now. You've got your wine, how come you always have to have that?”

“Because I need to wind down, Grace, I mean for christsakes it's one-thirty in the afternoon—”

“That's not my fault.”

“Oh, here we go.”

“No, no, let me go on, I'm not complaining is all I'm saying about the fact that it's in the day, I like that even, that doesn't bother me. What I'm saying is look how you're all comfortable there in bed, your clothes are on the floor there—”

“Let me get this. You would prefer it to fuck standing up with all our clothes on.”

“That's a thought, but what I'm saying is don't you think we ought to try different things out, like I mean who's going to stop us, and we might learn things about each other.”

“Grace. I don't know what you are referring to. You're going to have to get specific.”

“Ah-oh, see? Now you're going to call me Grace, whenever you call me—”

“—Grace, why do you want to be starting something.”

“I'm not starting anything, I mean, not in the bad sense.”

“Well, what are you doing, then?”

“I'm just trying to talk.”

“You're complaining.”

“What complaining goddamnit I'm not complaining.”

“Well, you're going to, listen to you I know this tone of voice, I know where you're headed here.”

“This has nothing to do with Bea if that's what you mean.”

“Of course it does, everything always comes back to that.”

“Would you mind if I got an idea in here, it's hard enough as it is to try to talk about these things, but you've got me way off track. You're probably doing it on purpose because you don't want to listen to what I have to say because it might be something you don't want to hear.”

“I'm all ears,” he said, his voice trailing down toward its sarcastic flourish.

Who was this person? Grace thought for an instant, then said, “What I was going to say can wait,” and while Cutts insisted that she finish her thought, even apologized, she decided to slip into bed with him without saying another word so that if he were going to be inside her he would have to get there through the fortress of all her clothing. At one point while he was kissing her he asked, “Aren't you too warm,” and she answered no she wasn't, go on, go ahead, and she wrapped her fingers tightly around the cool iron filigree of the bed and pretended it gripped her back with equal strength, as Li Zhang's penis entered her body again in the guise of Cutts.

After she and Cutts had said good-bye to each other that day, she realized he hadn't noticed either her wrists or her ankles, which had darkened to a cinnamon blue, the tantalizing and arrogant color of a fox's tail, which shoots like a flash of fire into a hedge of equally haughty and same-brown bramble.

And Grace thought, Li … listen, what happened?

Even as Bea, who brought her knife down through the faint green strings of celery, and noticed as she did how muscled her wrists had gotten (and thought, how'd that come about?—she'd always had the most delicate, wispiest of wrists)… even as she smiled at her vanity over something as silly as the delicacy of wrists and then went on with herknife … even as she tried to persuade herself to think that she shouldn't let her worries about this stuff take over her mind, Cutts walked along the street and listened to the first defiant birds of spring proudly calling out in the still-bare trees and was himself thinking, from his different vantage, just the same thought. No one has methods when caught in such deceit, he reasoned. No one has all the answers when caught in the midst of a refractory confusion, reasoned Bea. Everything ran in all directions at once, unlike this celery. Everything was cross-grained and restive and uncooperative, unlike this celery, which offered itself up into squat crescents in the most pleasant and unargumentative manner. Knives do talk a strong language, thought Bea. No messing around with a good sharp knife. Even these wrists, as substantial and muscular as they are …

There was in the book a dream, which was the dream of the yellow chrysanthemum, and this story had in it another old man, an odd old fellow named Old Jiang. Maybe I was tired when I read it, perhaps I was confused by the story because I was upset with both Cutts and Li, knowing all the while that my anger was unavailing, and unfair, but the story seemed to be even more mysterious than the one I had read the day before, after Li left. Today, Cutts said good-bye to me, like he always did, and I stayed on for an hour, as was my habit, and tidied the bed and fussed about. I hadn't made the same effort to hide the book as I had to hide its flyleaf. It wouldn't have mattered, since Cutts hadn't noticed it on the bathroom sill. Was I right to be angry with him? I hardly knew. I had no more right to be upset with either of them than the young woman who told the story of the dream of the yellow chrysanthemum had the need to be embarrassed when she accidentally shot Old Jiang in the arm with a steel pellet from an air gun. After all, hadn't she, the young Chinese girl, been shooting at a helpless littlesparrow who had on its belly not a length of meat worth eating?