The Almanac Branch (24 page)

When Li Zhang called, Cutts answered the phone expecting to hear Grace's voice at the other end. She'd left hima note on the pegboard—another recent domestic addition to the aerie—saying she had to run an errand, and she'd be back in half an hour.

The windows in the studio were open, letting a fresh fluttery wind feed through. Cutts squinted into the distance. He'd never noticed how much the iron-embroidered fire escapes resembled the filigree in that ornate Iranian jewelry that Grace liked so much. Should he buy her a necklace, or some earrings, to celebrate this renaissance of the aerie? he wondered. He glanced down at his shoes. One of the laces had frayed, and looked as if it might break sometime soon. He was sure there was a shoe repair shop on the corner downstairs; he'd have to remember to stop in after they left.

“May I ask who's calling?”

Li Zhang told him his name.

To which Cutts responded, “She's busy right now. Can I ask what this is regarding?”

“You can ask,” Li Zhang said, not mysteriously, just flatly, and Cutts waited for him to go on, but when he didn't began to shift his attention from the shoelace to the tightening he sensed in his throat, so that when he repeated, “What is this regarding?” his voice had made a climb, and betrayed anxiety. Having heard the subtle change, Li said, “May I leave her a message, please.”

“All right.”

“Just tell her I called, would you please, and that she can call me whenever she gets a chance.”

Cutts maneuvered his voice back to timbre. “All right. What's the number?”

“She has the number.”

“I'll tell her you called,” attempting indifference.

“Thank you,” and he hung up.

What struck Cutts first about his own response to this call was how it bothered him that Li Zhang hadn't asked him his name. That Li was so blandly straightforward about giving his own name suggested to Cutts there wasnothing much amiss here, nothing to be suspicious of, though naturally he had to wonder how it was possible someone had the aerie number—unlisted—and obviously knew Grace, but whom Grace had never so much as mentioned in passing to him. Six months ago, when things between himself and Grace were rocky, that tickling tightness he'd felt gathering in his voice might have choked him, and would no doubt have sent him flying after Grace in a rage of questions. But now, aside from that brief, physiological tic in his throat, which he'd easily restrained, he didn't have a bit of rage available to fuel jealous questions. In fact, what he concluded, as he heard Grace's footsteps coming up the stairs outside, was not to tell her about the call. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. The only conclusion he could draw was that this guy was some kind of delivery person, or something—conceivably, this Li Zhang was instructed that if Cutts happened to answer the telephone he should not let on what he was calling about. Yes, Cutts had figured it out. Grace had bought him a present, and it was to be a surprise. Now for sure he'd have to go out and buy her those earrings.

Discreetly, Li waited several days before resigning himself to having to make another call. He tried at different times, day and night, but didn't get through until she answered late morning the week after he'd spoken with Cutts.

“What do you want?” she said, even before he had finished saying his name.

“Didn't your friend give you my message?”

“What message—I don't know what you're talking about.”

“The man who answered the phone, he said he'd tell you that I called—”(silence followed, and finding himself out on a limb he went on)“—I don't know what his name—but, look I, I was calling in part because I wanted to tell you that Can Xue died, she just fell asleep last week after our walk and didn't wake up again.”

Grace found it impossible to read the flatness of Li's vocal tone, and dipping into her hurt over the way he had treated her, she managed, “So what.”

A silence expanded through the white noise in the line.

She picked up, “No, I mean, I'm sorry to hear that, she was a nice dog and all, but I don't see what I'm supposed to say about it. What can I say? You and I have an awful lot of problems for two people who've only spent about an hour and a half together. I don't understand why you didn't call back. I don't understand why you left like that. I really don't understand who you think you are just calling me out of the blue and leaving your name with, with this man you don't even know who he is or whether it's going to affect—”

“I'm sorry. I couldn't call—okay?”

She considered hanging up. These telephones, weren't they invented for convenience and privacy in communication, and just look what they did—scuttle privacy and make life hard. Li didn't deserve the consideration she was giving him. “Oh, ah. You couldn't call,” she said, sardonic. “Well you seem to be able to now, don't you.”

“I had my reasons for what I did.”

“I suppose you had your reasons for leaving me in that ridiculous position, too, right?”

“You weren't, look, I had my reasons, I did what I did—it wasn't like you weren't able to get free.”

“Look, Li, I didn't mind what you did, okay. You don't have to make any explanations to me for what you did. It's what you didn't do that bothers me.”

“It's none of your business why I did or didn't do whatever. I've apologized once. That's it, now stop.”

Grace was surprised: leashlike words. Fair enough, she thought. He hadn't asked her to explain who Cutts was, after all. “So why the call, you want your book back?”

“What book, I don't care about any book. I want to see you.”

“No, I don't think so, Li.”

“I understand if you don't want to but I want you to know I do.”

“You understand?—you don't understand anything at all. I'm seeing someone, I can't do what I did with you, you hear me? I shouldn't have done it in the first place.”

Li Zhang was quiet. Grace sensed his nonresponse couldn't have been because he was upset that she had someone else; Li's was not a jealous temperament. “I don't get it.”

Grace almost said—and it would have been smooth repartee if she had, she knew—Well, Li, I don't get it either; but what she said was, “What's there to get? Look, I've got your phone number and what I think I'll do is I'll think about all this. I'm not saying no, but what I'll do is I'll call you if I feel like it. All right? If you want your book back—”

“Keep it, keep it.”

“—I can leave it downstairs or something but we better leave things where they were before you called.”

“Fine, Grace,” he said, so uninflectedly that there was no chance of deciphering what the words could have had as their emotional core. She began to construct an image of him in the room he was in, tried to decipher what his face must have looked like when he said “Fine,” and “Grace,” talking to her on the telephone—because he was saying something, and she wasn't listening—maybe now feeling some frustration at her not giving in to what he wanted. It was just then she wondered why was it she was at the same time so willing to believe that what Li Zhang wanted from her were things she wanted to give him, but didn't know how to give him, and yet she was always denying him, too? How did that work? Denying him the chance to go ahead and make love to her just as he pleased, after inviting him up to the aerie to let him have his way, in fact—denying him the chance to see her, after she had called him up and left all those transparently pleading messages on his machine. What did she want? Why would he bother to have anything to do with her? It seemed all so far beyond Shahrazad and Samantha and Jeannie and even beyond Can Xue, that she knew she couldn't rely on things she felt she understood. She'd have to risk exploring new ground, and felt for an instant a sense of extreme spiritual agoraphobia. A healthy dose of cynicism toward this line of self-inquiry might have been useful, but even when she muttered—maybe even aloud—“Right … fine,” to reduce Li Zhang to an ant or else anything, it hardly mattered what just so long as it was lowly, just to break him down the more for having ignored her, she found she couldn't summon that up either, and instead was cutting in on him, saying, “All right, when do you want, when are you free?” He said he was free now, and she said, “In an hour,” and just as they hung up Cutts's keys rattled at the door, and he came in, all smiles, and handed her a small box tied with a gaudy crimson ribbon.

What was wrong with me that I felt shot through with the most exhilarating combination of guilt, nervousness, and amusement when I put on the earrings he had given me, knowing that there was a strong chance that Li would be taking them off, or filliping them where they dangled loose flashing their little mercurial beaks (the earrings were stainless steel hummingbirds)—how had it happened that after all we had been through together I could so quickly have outgrown Cutts? I could locate in my heart not one bit of ambiguity with regard to this moral lassitude, this ethics-free brilliance I suddenly felt, kissing him good-bye, getting him out of the aerie so that I could be left alone for a few minutes before this other man was to arrive. I didn't feel empty, I felt indifferent. The desire to see Li Zhang must have been building up inside, I told myself, for it tohave gone like this, for it to have occurred both so suddenly and with such ease. And just when I thought I had gotten him—like Christians try to get the devil—behind me.

When Li Zhang turned up, however, I was conscious of a shift back toward Cutts-attachment; Zhang seemed very different without his dog with him. He seemed a little like an amputee. And, of course, he wouldn't have the leash with him today, which made me feel—and a ridiculous irony this was—less trusting toward him, less comfortable in his presence.

“That's too bad about Can,” I offered.

He frowned when I leaned away from his kiss. “I miss her,” he said.

I was grateful for the sound of a baby crying, and a mother yelling, in the distance, as it brought into the aerie a kind of sense of there being other people nearby. A silence began to get awkward, and I broke it saying, “Here's your book.”

“Grace?”

“What,” and I focused on his mouth. It was dry-brown, somewhat heavier than I remembered. He was wearing, I was pretty sure, the same clothes he wore last time, gray trousers, gray scarf, white shirt, the heavy aubergine boots; like a uniform.

“I'd like to start over,” he said, softly emphatic, eschewing the preliminaries—though, of course, we two had yet to bother with preliminaries—even as he proposed them. “Do you think that kind of thing is possible to do?”

“Very artificial.”

“That may be, but I'm willing to try.”

This sudden direct communicativeness, and its gentle tone, seemed discrepant with the uniform, the lips, and everything I recalled about the way he'd acted before. Why did I find it provocative rather than merely incoherent?“What do you do for a living, Li?” and sat down at the table—pressing on with the thought, All right, give him a chance to reveal himself, small talk, so what's to lose?

“Fold shirts.”

Insipid; why was I always asking myself, Who is this guy? why do I feel this way?“No, really—here you are telling me you want to start over again and then you fall back on some stupid racial humor, and that's how we're supposed to get to know each other?”

“What makes you think I want to get to know you?”

That was him, there he was. “I'm not asking you to get to know me, I'm asking you about yourself because I think it might be a good idea to know a few things about
you
.”

“There's nothing to know.”

“You think I should care that your dog died, care that you want to begin again whatever the hell that means, let you call me when you feel like it but not return my calls, not answer any questions—”

“I answered your question. I fold shirts, sometimes I deliver them when the regular kid is out sick.”

“Oh come on—”

“I don't know why you find that so hard to believe. Grace, I think you ought to stop with the questions. What I think is I think you ought to take your dress off.”

“We didn't need to take anything off last time.”

“Yes, but this time I want you to take it off.”

“Why should I?” now seeing how the uniform complemented orders.

“Because that's why you let me come over here.”

“I let you come over because I wanted to see why it was you were bothering me, I mean, why you were on my mind—but now I don't think I want to know.”

“I was on your mind because you liked what we were doing and probably you didn't do that before with anybody and you wanted to do it again.”

“Oh, listen to this. Who fled the instant things started to warm up? Not I, I can tell you.”

“I didn't say anything to the contrary. That's a different question. Women's minds always work in tangents.”

“Why did you leave like that?”

“I left because you were missing the point.”

Grace more or less laughed. “What point?”

“Take off your dress, Grace.”

“What?”

“You heard what I said—it's what you want me to say, I can tell. I think you ought to just do it.”

“What if I do?”

Li Zhang crossed his arms. He wished he had a cigarette, I could tell. He seemed bored, a fact that perturbed me enough that I got up and walked over toward the bed, saying, “There's no point to it, it's just—what's the point?”

“You had it—‘the point'—when we met, when we were walking along that day, and then you had it for a while here, and then you just lost it, you just reverted back to whatever it is you usually are which is what I was hearing on the phone machine and which is why I couldn't call you back, you weren't even the same person, how was I supposed to call you back and talk to you, I didn't even know who you were.”