Typical American (4 page)

Ralph moved again, this time to a building with fleas. Then he moved once more, to a former hotel, after a tall man started walking a dog on his block; and yet again, after a dream about Mr. Fitt poisoning his water with lead. And now what about these phone calls? He had of course stopped using the phone, as his Chinese friends all knew; his landladies too he'd instructed never to admit they'd ever heard of him, much less that they knew where he lived, or how he could be reached. Yet someone had called twice, asking for him by name.

"So I sez go blow." This was Mrs. Ritter, his current landlady. "I sez, I don't rent to no Chinks. So far's I'm concerned they bring bugs."

Ralph moved. Ten days later, the calls started again.

"Listen," said Mrs. Bellini. "I don't care what kinda trouble you in, no funny business in my house, or I kill you."

they could sit for a quarter hour at a time in complete silence. This, with all their friends to draw on for conversation. Something was just not right. Ralph would eat and play with his hat. Litde Lou would watch, blank.

And yet Ralph appreciated his visits. They were something solid to stand on, anyway. Respite. They were a breakwater against some black undertow in himself that could any moment snatch him away to its killing home. He felt himself to be small, barefoot, lacking friction. Nearsighted. Everyday events seemed magnified another power. Little Lou's dropping by became the concern of a boddhisatva. A pigeon corpse on his doorstep was Ralph's true self come to rot at his feet. Everything signified, everything blared and reverberated as though some adjustment was off, some knob turned all the way up. Exhausted, that's what he was. Gone out. Looking to the future, he saw no future; and who doesn't hurt when he sees his life fizzling, his life that should have climbed and burst, blooming, a fire-flower in the sky? Once Ralph could imagine his parents watching, breathless, amazed, but now ...

And then there was another pain too, quieter, weightier, its roots in what everybody knows — that one day a person looks back more than forward, that one day he'll have achieved as much as he was going to, loved as much as he was going to, been as happy as it was granted him to be. And that day, won't he have to wonder — was it enough, what he's lived? Can he call that a life and be satisfied?

So it was that Ralph felt not only his future to have failed, but with it his past, the twin engine that might have sustained him. He missed his home, missed having a place that was home. Home! And yet his life there, no; it didn't begin to fill the measure of his hopes for a life. It was no golden time. He might gild it, but in truth it was lacking. Lacking what? Something, everything, he didn't know exactly. But he did know this — that the world he had lost had waxed valuable in the losing, like an unwon love. How perfect Cammy had become in his memory, how much

more desirable for having stepped behind a locked door! He saw all of this now, with the terrible lucidity of a strained mind; and seeing it, wondered what there was to live for. His new job?

His new job. Being Chinese, he had thought the safest place to work would be in the Chinese restaurants scattered like toys in around the legs of the el on 125th Street. Weren't people needed to wash dishes, wait table, make noodles? Ralph had no experience, it was true, but everyone started with no experience.

And as it turned out, his lack of experience didn't matter.

"Please, may I speak to your boss/' he'd say in Mandarin.

"What you say?" the answer would come back; or at least that's what he guessed, not understanding a word of Cantonese. "Whaatr

Once or twice he tried asking in English, but it was no use. Talking wrong, he might as well have been a barbarian invader; the town gates were closed. Still he knocked, until finally a tiny girl perched on a stool in the fresh-killed meat store said, "Yes?"

In perfect English, this was. Off the stool she barely cleared the countertop, but she knew where her father was, and her father — also American-born, it seemed, a gum chewer — guessed Yeah, he could use someone. Sure.

Ralph's non-life began. At dawn he would get up, wash, put on his bloody clothes, and walk to the store basement, where by the light of a yellow forty-watt bulb, crates of animals surrounding him — pigs and rabbits against one wall, pigeons and snakes against another — he would kill and clean and pluck hours upon hours of chickens. The first week he vomited daily from the stench of the feces and offal and rotting meat. But the second week he only blanched, and by the third he worked as though indigenous to this world. Instinct — first the most sickly or troublesome of the birds. A practiced look through the ranks; he'd snap the victim's neck, bare its jugular, slit it. Into the barrel, still kicking, to drain. Later, a roll in hot water, to loosen the feathers. Then he would pluck and dress the body, working with such speed and authority that his boss no longer came muttering

down the stairs, but only shouted from the landing for a count.

That meant, most of the time, that some restaurant was ready for a pickup. The times it didn't mean that were a disappointment. The times it did, the animals would nose at their wire walls. Ralph would wash his hands, a ritual. Scraping noises; and then, like the gates of the Western Paradise, the trap door would open, lowering into the basement an almost intolerable beam of light. The rabbits would freeze, eyes glowing red; the pigs would squeal. Ralph would compose himself, at the ready. A figure would appear — shadow, penumbra; and Ralph like a priest would proffer up through the unearthly shaft, through the snow of sun-spangled dust, his mute communication to the outside world — placing carefully in the hands of another human being, stooped down to receive them, these — his chickens, his doing.

Then the door would clang shut, and he would sit back down to work, seeing nothing — spinning halos, that was, spots of light, shapes — until his eyes readjusted.

How long did this go on? He couldn't have said. Ages. Until one evening Little Lou came to visit with news. Pinkus had been named chairman of the department.

"Go," he advised.

Now Ralph knew better than to let his hopes swell but still they surged like a rain-drunk river. He got his books out, studied a few days, called. Pinkus agreed to see him. Ralph dressed carefully for the visit, in clean clothes. He was there, on campus, an hour early. How beautiful it was! He had forgotten. He admired the columned buildings, august even in the rain. He admired the herringbone brick paths. He admired the sycamores, rising like important ideas from pedestrian plots of short grass. He admired the statue in front of the engineering building, though it was not of an engineer, but only a miner, with something that looked like a washcloth on his head.

Still he was early. He tried to relax.

Until he was late. Why hadn't he worn his watch?

A clean-shaven Pinkus glanced at his; but when he saw that Ralph noticed, said, "So you're a few minutes late, forget it. What are we, railroad trains, we have to run on time?"

He said this quickly, though, like a man on a schedule.

Ralph stared at Pinkus's new office, twice the size of his old one, with five big windows spread over two walls.

"So is there something I can help you with?" Pinkus said.

Over his head hung a clock.

Pinkus tried again. "Is there something you'd like to ask me? Something you'd like to tell me?"

What could Ralph have said then? He shook his head, shamed.

"What is this, twenty questions?"

"I like," managed Ralph, "finish my Ph.D."

"You'd like to finish your Ph.D."

"I ... I ... "

"But your visa. How'd I know that? Your visa, right?"

"Visa."

"Please explain to me one thing," said Pinkus. "Please explain to me how this happened, with your visa."

Ralph shook his head.

"You don't know?"

"Don't know."

"You don't know, or you won't say?"

"Don't know."

Pinkus scratched his chin. "I tell you who to call. The Foreign Student Office ..."

"Cannot do."

"You've asked them already?"

Ralph hesitated. "Yes."

"You've asked them?"

"Yes."

"And they said what?"

When Ralph couldn't answer, Pinkus swivelled in his chair and looked out each of his five windows, one after another, right to left. Then again, left to right.

"Listen," he said finally, slower now. "I don't like to tell lies and, excuse me, neither do I like to hear them. Let me tell you something. The best way to handle your problem is the honest way. I know, in China, everything's through the back door. You think I don't know? I have ears, I listen, I know. But China is China, this is America, and you see?" He waved his hand at his windows, his desk, his shelves of books. "Through the front door. Listen to me. You want to get somewhere, don't sneak around. And don't ask other people to sneak around for you." He looked thoughtful. "I don't mean I don't want to help."

Ralph didn't know what to say.

"You're a good man. I'm going to help you."

Ralph nodded.

"What I'm going to do is call up the Foreign Student Office."

Ralph said nothing.

"What I'm going to do is call up George Fitt and get him to straighten you out."

"Don't like me," managed Ralph.

"Who doesn't like you?"

"Mr. Fitt."

"George? Doesn't like you?" Pinkus looked out the window. "George is a man, he doesn't like a lot of people."

Ralph nodded.

"Give me some time, I'll give him a call. Not today, today is ..." He looked at his watch. "But tomorrow, I'll give him a call, I'll get back to you."

Ralph hesitated. Should he risk it? "No phone."

"No phone? Then give me your address."

Against his better judgment, Ralph dictated.

"You reading the newspaper like I told you?"

"Sure," lied Ralph.

"Good," said Pinkus.

Every day Ralph ran to his mailbox, only to find it empty. Sometimes after he looked, he'd lift up the metal flap and feel

inside, to be sure he hadn't missed anything; but all he ever felt were the heads of screws. In one way, he wasn't surprised. Pinkus had a big office, but Mr. Fitt was still Mr. Fitt. How could Pinkus stand up to him?

Yet still, each day, Ralph found his hope rising. In his mind he'd replay the scene, Pinkus's office growing larger and larger. At work he'd see signs of his luck turning — a run of placid chickens, a mistake in his wages to his favor — every time something new to fuel him. And each day he'd come away from the mailbox disheartened. This went on for one week, two weeks.

Finally, he stopped running. Little Lou thought he ought to go see Pinkus again, but Ralph knew it was no use. This was what happened when a son left his family in the hands of barbarians. It was what a skirt chaser deserved.

Or so he said. When the phone calls started again, though — again — he looked in the phone book, found out where Pinkus lived, and took a room as nearby as he could afford.

"Only six blocks away!" he told Little Lou.

Pinkus, Pinkus, Pinkus. When Ralph thought about him now, it was in a kind of fever. Sometimes at work, he'd see Pinkus step out from behind the chicken crates, apologetic. He'd see Pinkus kneel down beside him, offer to help with the plucking.

No, Ralph would insist. No, no, no. You're a professor, this sort of work isn't for you.

But there Pinkus was, rolling up his sleeves, watching Ralph's hands. So show me.

And now Ralph spent whole evenings admiring Pinkus's house, a handsome three-window-wide brownstone on a clean street. A big lit globe shone on either side of the doorway, above twin frost-tipped yews, which in turn set off a short, wide staircase. Up and down this tripped three teenaged children; a well-fed-looking wife; and Pinkus himself, who, Ralph discovered, carried an ivory-handled walking stick.

He tried to muster the nerve to go up to Pinkus, but he might

as well have been asking him for a date. Perhaps he should approach one of the children, Ralph thought. They seemed less intimidating, particularly the youngest, a plain girl with bed-springs of bright orange hair. But though he followed her home a few times, he never said anything, thinking he could be arrested for that, and then he would be deported. No, it had to be Pinkus himself. Once he trailed Pinkus to the cleaners, once to the grocery store; and once he got so far as to start casually down the sidewalk when he saw Pinkus round the corner at the far end of the block. This would have brought them face to face if, five doorways from his goal, Ralph hadn't crossed the street.

Above him, the moon hid bright-faced in the trees.

He took another loop around Pinkus's neighborhood. He peered through the windows. Some people, he noticed, had taken their Christmas trees down, others still had them up. He took another turn around. And then, partly to warm up, partly to avoid seeing a certain policeman for a third time, he ducked into a bar.

Now this was a daring thing, almost enough to make up for his earlier lapse of nerve. He had always known about bars — Shanghai was full of them — but he had never actually been inside one before. Ralph shook his head. So many people in so little space that everyone had to stand up, with nothing to eat but peanuts and pretzels. And why didn't they turn some more lights on? Pressed against the radiator, he eyed a man banging his forehead against the rim of his empty glass. Once, twice. Was he crying? Ralph winced, turned his attention to another man, a man drawing a woman over to his stool. She gave him one of her bracelets to play with; he tried to put his hand through it; she kissed him, right there, for a long time.

Ralph stared, for a long time.

Saddened, he wriggled his slow way back to the door, where he almost bumped into a man with a walking stick.

"Hello?" said Ralph.

Pinkus looked down.

"I'm Ralph. Ralph Chang." Ralph's mouth seemed to be talking by itself.

"Of course," said Pinkus. "What, you think I don't know who you are?" He stepped aside to let someone through.

For the first time in months, Ralph smiled. "Hello," he said. "Hello!"