The Almanac Branch (23 page)

In this story the reader was led to believe one thing only to later discover it was another. At first I thought Old Jiang was going to be the girl's father, but later on I found out that he was her husband. By then, it seemed a fine point, hardly worth considering too deeply.

Old Jiang started up with his tricks long before the sun rose, assuming that the young woman would fail to notice his absence, as she seemed to be asleep still. Yet, none of us is ever as asleep as we'd like to be, or, in this instance, as asleep as others would like us to be. So when Jiang climbed up a ladder into the tree outside the house and started chopping away at it with his ax, he might have been sure she didn't hear him, but he was mistaken. Industriously, he wrapped up the severed limbs of the tree in torn sheets and, having swept up the chips of wood scattered at its base in order to conceal any evidence of his activities, he proceeded through the rest of his day happy as a lark in the knowledge that he'd done just as he pleased without anyone's knowing about it.

For her part, joining with him in his merry behavior, she shot him again with her air gun, this time wounding him in the ear. Guns are so hard to aim, aren't they? Try as you may try as you might to focus on your target, when it comes time to pull the trigger you can never be sure where the pellet will make its path. I began to like this story after all.

In a feeble attempt to complain about what had happened, Old Jiang mumbled, “One should have an accurate estimation of oneself,” which struck me as a statement born out of the most advanced sort of senility, the sort that gave rise to the same kind of senile thought that Socrates, that old poseur, had worked up—Know thyself, dotty mole … like know they preferred hole, boy, and go go go. This is where, still at the beginning of the story, I didn't know whether it was my being tired, or being upset, but I beganto feel that knowing oneself was a pretty silly accomplishment, since it was hardly possible, was it, given that every day you could do something that would make you who might have been knowable before utterly incomprehensible now. And moreover, I knew I was less and less interested in Grace Brush than I was in Cutts and Bea and Li and Faw and Berg and just about anybody else other than myself.

But back to the story. I started to skim it. I learned things about Jiang, that he had a long neck that he would crane to see things outside the window from the bed, that he had the wandering fingers of a lecherous idiot, which he let crawl over the backs of dancing partners. I made some coffee. The story was beginning to have on me the same claustrophobic effect that Can Xue's leash had had, but what was the promise of satisfaction?

The story came to the fall season. The sky was dark and the nights seemed longer than the longest days of the summer. In town there was a man who went from door to door, knocking with a bamboo pole. Old Jiang had an idea about how he and the young woman ought to respond to this threat: he proposed that the two of them sit back to back and try their best to dream of tree toads in the rain.

The young woman was unable to do it, though, to dream of the toads. She dreamed of black holes in the wall of her room. She heard seas flashing against pebbly shores outside and in her dream forgot how to walk, falling into soft mud and nearly breaking her bones. The story got stranger—so strange and unreliable that I skipped ahead. In the second part of the story, the needs and behavior of a woman named Ru-shu and “Old Thing”(which was what she called him) were just as unusual as those of the earlier couple. Ru-shu enjoyed crushing white worms between her fingers. When she and Old Thing strolled along together, discussing how they might rearrange their bedroom so that it would be free of all vulgarity, he noticed that her jacket pocket was bulging. She told him that it was because she'd gathered roses,and yet he knew that her pocket was full of the corpses of worms.

At the end of the tale my eye fixed on the line, “Whenever I touch the scissors, I cut out an endless chain of high mountains.” Li Zhang had underlined the sentence.

It made me smile to wonder whether Zhang knew the game that Desmond and I had loved to play as children—Scissors, paper, rock. One … two, we would count with our fists, and when we both shouted “three!” we would form our hands to make paper (fingers out flat), rock (a fist of stone), or scissors (index and middle fingers snip-snipping). Paper you could wrap around rock, so paper beat rock; rock could smash scissors; scissors could cut paper. It was such a fun game. We played for hours, never tiring of it. And here it was, scissors cutting paper to produce endless ranges of rock. Now which of the three could be declared the victor in
that
round of scissors, paper, rock?

After the encounter with Li, I started to get more and more restless. Seeing Cutts midday for an hour or two, and maybe once during the afternoon on weekends, had seemed in our first few months such a blessing—not that I wouldn't have wanted to see him more often, because I would have been happy, or so I told myself, to be with him all the time, day and night, to live with him and be the wife he now and then told me he felt I was. The steadiness of the relationship had become addicting, despite my inherent disgust toward complacency. I had to admit that the mere fact I was able to be with him at all made me feel grateful at first. But, more and more I'd come to recognize that Li Zhang and Can Xue—the writer—weighed against the balance of what Cutts and I had built in the aerie. Can Xue's houses whose roofs always leaked and whose walls were constantly in danger of being undermined, punched through, began to color the way in which I saw the place. What kindof refuge was it, finally? And, by extension, what kind of osprey was I—a clawless, hopeless, flightless beast?

To complicate matters, I began to notice that not a day went by without my thinking about Li. I couldn't remember what he looked like. I remembered that his eyes were wide-set and that his eyelashes were very long. I remembered thinking his voice was earthy and low, which seemed unusual for a Chinese. I must have been wrong about that detail, I thought. I remembered spitting the gag, and remembered how full he seemed inside me. And I could remember how cold the room felt when he'd laid the warm leash on my back and just sat there, saying nothing, slowly withdrawing. That was all, and it might have been a lot, in fact, but it seemed like nothing. I couldn't remember, for example, what he'd been wearing.

Most of all I found myself dwelling on Li's refusal to speak with me on the telephone. I began to turn it around and around in my head, and wondered what really could have happened that one brief time we were together to so revolt him he never would want to have anything to do with me again. I tried the number, a week later, at first thinking that perhaps it hadn't been Li's home I'd reached the first time. I was willing to doubt what I thought I knew as fact, because it wasn't as if I had spoken with Li himself, or would have even been able to swear without a doubt that his was among those muffled voices I heard in the room that first time I called, before I was cut off. When I tried again, however, there was no question I had reached Li—he never announced his name, but the throaty, cadenced words of the message on the phone machine were from his mouth (though it was so unlike Li Zhang to have put such bland and orthodox instructions on the tape: “Thank you for calling, no one's here right now to take your call, so if you'll leave your name, telephone number, and any brief message”).

I left my name and number. Then, some days later, having heard nothing, I left my name and number and the message, “I'd like to see you.”

I stayed in the aerie for hours, alone, not wanting to miss his call. All I could do was hope that he wouldn't phone me when Cutts was there. He didn't—he didn't call at all. Some days later, I told his tape, “Li, it's Grace, I don't know why you're not calling me back, I can't get into the details about how I don't think it's such a big deal that I did that little thing I did, I mean how am I supposed to know?—that is, this is ridiculous, I don't even know who's hearing this, but, well … okay.” And I hung up, and then called right back, adding rather maliciously—malicious in the sense that if he had a wife she would at least take him to task, make him explain who this madwoman was, and if nothing else perhaps that would provoke him into response—“Oh, it's Grace again. What I wanted to let you know was that I have your book here, the Can Xue, and I wanted to get it back to you. I read it. I hope your dog's okay. Let me know where I should send it, the book.” And, as an afterthought to the afterthought, I added, in the full knowledge that whatever reserve I had previously had available to me was now utterly lost, “Your earliest attention to this matter will be most appreciated.”

I wished I had never said a word—it was a good example substantiating one of Faw's cardinal rules in practicing business: Always sleep on it. If they offer you the world, tell them you'll have to sleep on it, that you'll get back to them; if they offer you shit, tell them you'll sleep on it, and what you do is, rather than sleep on shit, buy a little time to figure out how best to make them eat it themselves. It reminded me of one of Faw's most impressive moments, and how I wished I had been savvy enough to have used the same line (though in my father's case, no doubt some sizable deal was in the balance). He was on the phone, at home. One of the principals on the line said something threatening to him, who knows now what he could havesaid to evince this gem: “You kick my cat, I'll kill your dog.”

And moreover, Li Zhang was no fool. He would see through the operettalike sarcasm of my “your earliest attention” line with ease. No, here was a missed opportunity, and I knew I couldn't call again, that the time for editing my pronouncements was past.

Li Zhang never returned any of my calls, and in the absence of a response I found myself growing more and more in need of being in touch with him. One afternoon in May, two months after our encounter, I got the piece of paper out from its hiding place, intending to try him one last time, to say to the machine that it was an anniversary of sorts, to say that I would leave the book in the foyer of the building so that he could pick it up whenever he felt like it, and without having to bother to see me, of course. But what I did, after running my finger round the rotary, is I began to cry. How ridiculous, and I saw that my tears had fallen onto the paper and caused some of the numbers and letters there to run. “Just ridiculous,” I said aloud, and crushed the paper in my fist. I made it to the bathroom and dropped it in the bowl of the toilet, pushed hard on the lever. I had to flush more than once to coax it down into the miles of subterranean pipes where all the waste of the city flowed along, a pitch of twisting mire in which strange albino animals winnowed about and mated and nibbled. Okay, I decided, I'll keep the Can Xue. Enough was enough. If I left it in the foyer, Li would never turn up to retrieve it, someone would take it home with them and put it in their bookcase, or else use it under the leg of a wobbling table.

I read from the flap copy that Can Xue was a woman my own age, in her middle thirties; I found myself wondering what Can Xue's house was like—did she write at night or in the morning? did she sit in a chair or on a mat? what color ink would someone use ideally when writing talessuch as these? No, no—given the calm unkindness of Li Zhang's silence, I knew that Can Xue was mine now.

More weeks passed. The sun pulled back up into the expanses of sky overhead. I felt the warmth amassing in the new leaves of the trees and could hear it rising in the birds' songs, and through the course of those weeks in which spring gave itself over to history, I gave up that odd need to feel myself connected to, in possession of, Li Zhang. As the days pushed Li further and further back into the past, I began to realize the obvious: that I wasn't going to be able in the least to hurt Li by taking some sort of emotional possession of Can Xue and her stories. He didn't care. I wasn't proving anything to anyone.

And yet, despite a renewal of my commitment to Cutts, which I newly promised myself I would protect and nurture, I did notice that for no particular reason I'd grown more friendly toward people, mostly strangers, mostly men, than I could remember myself ever having been before. This amicability, this benign fondness for everyone, was (was it possible it all came down to such a frivolous little word like) fun. But, yes, the little world around me became fresh, and its confines seemed to fall away. Who was I to complain about that?

So, there was a shift, and like the broken shards of transparent rock tumbling in the chamber of a kaleidoscope, everything shifted with me. I was positive and expansive, and more loving than ever toward Cutts; I helped Bea with her (late) spring cleaning—a putative adventure for each of us, since neither of us really minded clutter or dust or the faint patina of mildewed air—and we spent an afternoon drinking pots of coffee until we were giddy, careful not to throw away anything that might be useful to someone else, setting out sweaters gone at the elbows on the stoop foranyone who might want to have them—and not once did I think any of my bad thoughts about Cutts, and how he had two women and shouldn't; not once did I allow jealousy toward Bea to crowd in upon me. I came very close to telling Bea about Li Zhang, and what had happened, but caught myself before I'd made the mistake. My guard was down, and it felt good. It was one of those idyllic moments when I found myself wondering why we couldn't just all come out and tell each other the truth about what was going on among us, and take the decision to live somehow together with one another. I held on to the sensation as long as I could, without testing my conclusion that it would never work.

Post-Zhang, I was determined to behave the opposite of Can Xue's women, who were all so tormented, a condition into which I imagined Li perhaps would enjoy having thrown me. I would spit out the gag more than once now, in a manner of speaking, since he refused to tell me why I shouldn't. I would make it my business to live with a bright heart, just as had Mother all those years ago when we moved out to Scrub Farm—except that where Mother had failed, I assured myself I would succeed. So I decided to fix up the aerie—what a shame Bea couldn't be with me, given what a time we would have!—and hung a painting of a pretty Rhineland valley autumn scene, with cattle under trees and curlings of smoke trailing up from cottages in the village like so many green bracelets into the clouds. I laid a colorful rag rug on the floor and I brought some of my favorite clothes from Faw's to give the empty closet some life, some sense of home. I asked Cutts to help me paint the place, and the hours we spent doing it were among the best we ever had together since we'd become lovers.