The Price of Silence (10 page)

“Are the copies for new art work?” She must have used up half a ream.

“I want to fix my face, to pin it down like a butterfly, to see the inside. Self-portraits are so hard. I must learn, take more classes. My face betrays me. It says I am Chinese, but if I go back to China they will not accept me. I am marked by the white ghost, the Westerner. There is something different about a Chinese raised here. Amy Tan says so. In China they know.”

“But you weren’t raised here.”

Her face shuttered down. She didn’t like being corrected. She would have been a difficult student, I had come to realize.“I’m no longer Chinese; I’m not American. I am
wy
gwo ren
, an outside country person. In this new state, I am like bamboo in a strong wind. I have no signs of my past, of my ancestry, to mark the road for me. I’m like the lion cubs that are thrown down the valley. Only the strong ones make it back up the mountain and deserve to be king of the beasts.”

I looked around at the other passengers in our subway car. Her disorientation, her sense of loss,were shared by a lot of them, I wanted to tell her—but I remembered my own stubbornness in my suffering, my need to feel that what I was going through was unique in this world, how friends’ attempts to point out other people’s similar suffering had seemed to diminish my own and brought no comfort at all.

It was freezing in the subway car. An-ling’s arms were covered in goosebumps. I wrapped my jacket around her. “You’re Chinese-American the way I’m Italian-American,” I said.“To have two cultures is something to be proud of.”

“Hyphens divide, hyphens unite. I don’t care. The most important thing is,”—she raised an arm, fingers spread high, a player shooting for the basket—“the important thing is I am making it up the mountain!”

Her optimism delighted me. I had no doubts that she would reach her goals.

Her apartment was on a Queens street filled with two-story warehouses. No grocery store, no laundry, nothing that would indicate it was a residential neighborhood. Mid-block, An-ling unlocked a large metal door which opened onto a loading dock. Inside, we made our way through a maze of sealed cartons to a metal staircase.

“What’s inside these?” I asked.

“My staying here is not legal.I ask no questions.”We walked up to the second floor. At the end of a narrow hallway she unlocked a padlock. I followed her into a small windowless kitchen.A deep double-sink—the kind found in the laundry rooms of century-old houses—took up half of one wall.Next to it,a table held a hot plate.An outsized refrigerator filled most of the rest of the room.

“A photographer used to work here,” she said.

The kitchen opened into a tight rectangle at the end of which a grimy window smacked against the brick wall of the next building. On the concrete floor under the window there was a futon and a stool with a lamp on it.There was no other furniture in the room. The walls were covered with paintings whose subject matter I couldn’t make out.At one o’clock on a summer afternoon the room was too dark, with no ceiling light. In one wall, a door stood open, revealing a closet-sized room that contained a toilet and nothing else.The air in the apartment was stale, filled with the smell of paint. My heart shriveled to see how An-ling lived.

“Turn on the lamp. I want to see your paintings.” I used my cheerful teacher’s voice, which didn’t fool her.

“It’s a matter of perspective,” An-ling said. “The kitchen has running water. I have a toilet I can flush. New York is outside my window, the ocean not very far away.” She removed the lamp and offered me the stool to sit on.

Through the window I glimpsed an inch-wide sliver of sunlit street.

An-ling sat cross-legged on the futon. “On my tenth birthday my mother took me to the South China Sea. It was not far, two hours on the bus.When we got to the beach, my mother held my head and made me look out as far as I could see.

“‘A frog in a well cannot imagine the size of the ocean,’ she said. ‘The ocean is a gift. See. Listen. Smell. Tie the ocean with a ribbon and hide it in your head. When you are in the dark, you will open your gift and the ocean will keep you company.’

“She knew about the dark, sewing soles on shoes for eighteen hours a day, six days a week. She knew also I would end up in this room.

“It’s small and dark like the bottom of a well, but the rain doesn’t come in and the floor is large enough for my futon.

The wall is my easel and in my head I have the ocean wrapped in a ribbon.”

It’s too dark, I wanted to tell her.You can’t paint here.

I left the stool, snapped on the lamp and peered at the large canvases within the reach of its light.The strokes were sure, the oil paint thick, with none of the delicacy and meticulousness I’d seen in old Asian paintings. She painted everyday objects, both Chinese and Western, piled high like mountains. A turquoise fan with dancing girls on it thrown on top of a pile of envelopes addressed in script next to a man’s belt coiled in a nest of silk scarves below a wide-necked blue vase filled with brightly colored women’s high-heeled shoes. Another painting was dedicated to the kitchen: pots, pans, a wok, chopsticks, a cleaver, Brillo pads, cellophane-wrapped Chinese noodles spilling out of a basket. I let out a laugh of surprise when I recognized the green-lidded jar I use to store my tea. Each painting depicted a human body part: a hand holding the fan, a nose peeking out of a glass, an elbow resting in the middle of the man’s belt.

“These paintings are wonderful, full of humor,” I said. Her face opened up with pleasure. “Thank you. Until the last century, oil painting was not accepted in China, but it’s more powerful than watercolor or ink, and it doesn’t wash away.”

“You have so much talent, An-ling.You should make the rounds of galleries.”

She stood up. “Stay here, I will make tea.”

I watched her silently glide across the floor in her bare feet. I wanted more than anything else to give An-ling shelter, but she was like a deer, full of grace, poised to flee at the least movement of possession.

She rested against the door jamb as we waited for the water to boil.“There’s a legend that says that Chinese painting was invented by a woman. One day, Fu Li saw that her favorite songbird had flown away from its cage. She waited every day for it to come back, sent her servants out to look for it in the vast gardens of the palace.

“Shun, her brother, the great ruler, offered Fu Li the best songbirds in the province, but she wanted her favorite songbird back, no other. Shun asked his scribes to write amusing stories to cheer his sister up.” Her voice was sure, level. It was a story she knew well.

“When the first scroll arrived, its ink was still wet. The scribe had been in a great hurry to get it ready before nightfall. Instead of reading it, Fu Li cried and cried and her tears smeared the ink.” The tea kettle whistled. An-ling disappeared, raising her voice.

“In the smear Fu Li saw the wing of a bird and with a wet finger she pushed the ink this way and that way and soon enough she had painted the image of her beloved songbird.To the end of her days she kept her ink bird near her, swearing she could hear it sing.”

An-ling crossed the floor with two cups of dense black tea.

“I like that story. It’s optimistic.” I took a sip.The tea was too strong, bitter.“Bringing back a loved one with tears and a little ink.”

Carefully balancing her cup,An-ling lowered herself onto the futon. “My grandmother told me that story after she sold my father’s paintings. The story was meant to honor women painters, but my grandmother liked it because it showed how foolish girls can be with their imagination, with their need to see something for what it isn’t. She had no use for painting. ‘You cannot eat it,’ she liked to say. ‘It will not keep you warm in the winter.’

“I told her she was the foolish one.My father’s paintings fed her.”An-ling drew her knees to her chest.“I have something else to show you.”

She opened a sketchbook that had been under her futon and dropped a black-and-white photograph in my lap. It fit easily in the palm of my hand. A little girl, standing next to a stone lion three times her size, peered at the camera. She wore a fancy light-colored jacket and pants ringed with dark bands. Her hair was in a long ribboned braid on one side of her head.

“That is me at the Moon Festival. It’s our Thanksgiving.”

The picture was yellowed, faded, grainy, as if taken with a dirty camera lens.“How old are you here?”

“Five. My mother took the photo. I ate so many cakes that night I threw up on my outfit and Mama was very angry with me, but she didn’t hit me. She was too educated.” I heard immense pride in her voice.

“You must miss her terribly.”

“It’s the only photo I have of me in China.” She showed me another photo. “This is my mother.”

The eight-by-ten portrait of a young woman with a square jaw and a tight mouth reminded me of the unsmiling photos of subway supervisors posted near the token booths.“She doesn’t look like you.”

“That is a photo from the factory where she made shoes for Chairman Mao. She was pretty when she was happy.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, the most useless words in the English language, but that is what I genuinely felt: sorrow for her, for her losses.“Thank you for showing me these photos.” I glanced at her wrists, sheathed as always in the beaded bracelets. “An-ling, if there is anything more you want to tell me, I’m here to listen.”

She slipped the photos back into the sketchbook and unhooked a bracelet.“For you.” She held it close to my face. I saw now that it was new, covered with whirls of tiny pink and purple glass beads, not a family heirloom at all.

“I can’t accept it.”

“You’re always staring at my bracelets. I think you want them. Come on, it’s Canal Street cheap.We’ll share. One for me one for you.” There was something provocative in the way she spoke. I wondered if she knew I’d seen what the bracelet hid.

“Thank you,An-ling, but no.Your bracelets are very pretty and they look wonderful on you.”Where did the desperation come from, I wanted to ask? But there are invisible boundaries in all friendships that shouldn’t be crossed. My desperation, hers. Off limits.

An-ling hooked the bracelet, obviously glad the moment was over, the matter dropped. “I quit Feldy. It’s very stupid work pulling faces.”

I laughed with relief at this good news, at the hurdle we’d just crossed.“That’s great.You should be painting every day, taking more classes. Do you want a part-time job? Maybe I can help you find one.”

“You are always too good to me. I have money saved. When I need more I’ll model for the art schools, maybe get a permit to sell paintings in front of the museums.”

“If I can help, please—”

An-ling pressed a strand of her yellow hair against my mouth.

“Be my friend.That is all I need.”

On the way home, I stopped at Paragon and bought Josh his home gym.

SEVEN

Subj: Fairytales and fantasies
Date: 04-08-05 17:02:00 EST
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

In China a man is born, grows up and dies in the same house. He never has to leave his home or his parents. A woman leaves family and home. When her husband-to-be comes to her family house to take her to the marriage ceremony, her father throws a bucket of water on the path her feet have just left. The hard earth receives the water with a loud slap, separates it, runs it off into streams that stretch thin until they disappear. You cannot take back thrown-away water. It’s gone forever. So it is with a daughter.

You were my new home. That was my hope.

It was Josh who told me about Amy, what he knew from his grandmother. I came early for dinner. You weren’t home from school yet. Tom I guess was at work. Josh took me down to the basement to show me his drums. I told him that during the mid-autumn festival the drums get beaten to hurry up the blooming of the flowers. We started playing a game from the festival. The drummer beats the drum. When he stops, who holds the wine cup must drink. Josh opened the bottle of Italian wine meant for you with his Swiss Army knife and we took turns drinking, beating the drum. He told me about his sister. I thought he was going to cry and I hugged him. He smelled more of chewing gum than wine.

This is true. All of what I’m writing to you is true. It’s too late for lies.

A-l

Tom

Eight months after Amy’s death, Emma announced she was pregnant. Before I could express my happiness at the wonderful news, she cut me off cold.“I’m having an abortion.”

“I’ll never agree to it.”

“I don’t need your permission.”

“It’s my child, too.”

“Then you carry it. Scream your head off when it splits you in two.Then nurse your baby, love her so much it takes your breath away and then when she dies, what will you do then,Tom? Go for one more? Why not, have another one like you have another Scotch!”

“You can’t do this to us, Emma.”

“I’ll go crazy if I don’t. The date is set. I will not have another child. Ever.”

I accused her of wanting to be miserable, of wearing suffering like a halo, of feeling virtuous because of it. “All you need is a palm frond in your hand and you’d be the perfect martyr!”

I brought Father Caputi home to ram some piety into her. “Amy’s death was our personal original sin,” she told him,“something we have to expiate for the rest of our lives.

There’s no place for a new birth or even our rebirth.”

Nothing he could say would change her mind.

I threatened divorce, believing my role as husband, partner, still had leveraging power. I stuffed all of Amy’s belongings into black garbage bags and drove them to the town dump. I scraped off the striped wallpaper in her room, the bunny rabbit border. Emma looked down at the green strips covering the carpet and said she felt flayed.

“God damn it, Emma, I want that baby.We’re being given another chance!”

Ten days later I came home from teaching and she had changed her mind. I didn’t risk asking why.

This time there was no miscarriage, no six weeks in bed. The baby was born after less than an hour of labor. Before Emma came home from the hospital I removed all of the pictures of Amy from the house and told her I had burned them. I was trying to help Emma direct her love to the future, to our son. I chose the name Joshua; Emma agreed. I even bought him a trumpet, foolishly thinking his birth would crumble Emma’s wall of grief.