At the Heart of the Universe (8 page)

“You'll do it, Daddy, I know you will. Love you too.” As she slips down the steep slope of sleep Katie remembers a girl she saw outside the Beijing Zoo.
She had a hurted
arm in a sling she looked real sad and hungry. That could have been me, if... if something else happened to me. Why was it me who was given up? Why me?

Clio feels Katie relax, turn over, and go out like a light. She doesn't feel sleepy. Her mind is going over and over what Katie has just said. Chinese but not Chinese. Chinese
American
? It's true. Watching her walk down the street here, you know she's not Chinese—she doesn't walk stiffly like they do, or gesture like they do, or cover her mouth when she laughs. What a relief, to have her see the
real
China. Katie's back, in sleep, molds against her front—like she herself used to mold against Pep, warm,
there
.



With Katie breathing deeply, Clio senses the sexual in the air. Even though they've had a lot of time alone on the trip, nothing has happened—they've both been strangely reluctant. When they first met, their attraction was immediate and intense.

Clio had been invited up from the city by her friend Carter for a charity event at Olana, the home of the great painter Frederick Church. Perched high on a hill just south of Columbia, it faced a glorious panorama overlooking the Hudson River with its glittering silver bracelet of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, and the granite Catskills. It was Victorian Day and Pep was working as a volunteer guide. A tall, red-haired, boyish man dressed in formal Victorian leisurewear: dark suit, white shirt and cravat, purple cape. He was standing in front of a ten-foot-tall Persian window, all done in amber—her favorite stone since a trip to Morocco with her family—with a hand-cut black stencil latticework of arches within arches like the Alhambra. She liked him at once, for the gentleness in his face.

She asked: “Is the window positioned there for the seasons?”

“Yes,” he said enthusiastically, as if happy to be asked a good question, “Church was often depressed—a lot of family tragedy—and he craved the light, for relief. The window is perfectly set to catch the most light, the whole year round. I admire that about him. He was a great artist, but marvelously practical.”

“And the amber?”

“He loved amber, the way it shines against the dark. My favorite painting is all amber—
The Entrance to Persepolis
—would you like to see it?” He led her to it: a view through the dark scalloped cliffs to the ruins. It took her breath away—a foreboding that gave way to the soft light on limestone, the Greek temple facade.

Pep went on, “I see it as his coming out of his depression over the death of his little son, finding a glimmer of light.”

“Wonderful. I've always wanted to go there.”

“To the light?”

She wondered if he was joking, but no. “Yes. But first, Persepolis.”

“Well then,” he said, gallantly crooking his arm for her to take. “Shall we? I'll change.”

It was so good-natured, he was so
with
her right then, she actually blushed.

They began. A new beginning for them both. She thirty-seven, he forty-three. To any new adventure, they said, “Yes!” Later, he told her that she had tipped him out of his middle-aged leaning into aloneness—into the dead history and expectations of his Mayflower family: his father Phillip Noble Macy, a rock of insurance and curiously
disinterested
in him, and his Boston-bred mother Faith Cabot Macy, fragile and cautious, cowed and fearful and early dead. Yes, she had tipped him out of all this shit into something new and exciting and sexy and fun and of great meaning—a leaning
into
life. Those were his words, “of great meaning, a leaning
into
life.” It
was
an adventure, one of meaning, which she too was ready for after wandering the tropics and then bucking the slithery and glib New York art scene. And the essence of their adventure was not the two of them alone, but their shared vision of a child with them.

The electricity of the romance led to a startling passion—they were a great match in making love. She loved his horizontal height on the bed, his strength, and his attentiveness to her. And his playfulness—as he put it, one long sensual afternoon, “There's nothing for endurance like a man who sells insurance.” Why have they had so much trouble getting back to lovemaking? When they do, it's still great. But they don't get there easily. She wonders, why not? Part of it is Katie, to be sure, always around—for years sleeping in their bed—and if not there in person, there all the time in her awareness. He resents it, but all her friends say that it's normal. The real crusher was the infertility—having to do what their doctor in Columbia, Orville Rose, called “work sex”—doing it at certain times no matter what, poor Pep feeling like a bull with a ring in his nose having to “get it up,” hoping that it would take and then each month—month after month of failure—the sorrow and rage when she got her period. And then the miscarriage. At one point Pep himself–despite his squeamishness—was giving her tightly scheduled hormone shots—running upstairs at a party, pulling up her dress and pulling down her panties and jabbing her in the butt.

But still, every month, bleeding. No explanation, no diagnosis, just that they were maybe too old. The trauma of having to see other women cradling their babies—she'd cross the street rather than meet one of them. One failure after another. And then, both of them depressed as hell, a profound and mostly unspoken sorrow eating away at the marriage, trying to try to drag themselves out of their exhausted desolation and get it up to
adopt
? More failures—they soon found out that they were either too old to adopt, or they hadn't been married long enough, so that when they
had
been married long enough they would be too old—every avenue they tried leading to a dead end.

They were ready to give up, to say no, until a trip to visit old friends in Vermont. The friends with a perfect house, a perfect garden, perfect jobs—and no children. And after that weekend, on the drive home she and he agreed that it all really was perfect, and absolutely sterile. That was his word, “sterile.” She said to him, “I can't give up.” He asked, why not? She said, “Because I just keep seeing that little face!” What little face? “I don't know, just a little face that needs us and that we need too. Just that little face.”

Two weeks later, the agency called and told them that China had opened up for adoption, and they could be among the first group to go. No age requirement, no marriage requirement. If they hurried with their documents, they could have a baby girl in eight weeks. After being so close to saying no, now they said, “Yes!”

“Peppie?” she says to him now, in a whisper so as not to wake Katie.

“Yes?”

“I've missed you.”

“And I you.”

“It's my fault.”

“Nope. It takes two, you know.”

She disengages carefully from Katie, and slips in beside him. Clio knows that he won't push her. She feels the familiar big body, and as she settles into the crook of his neck, she breathes in the comforting scent of his hair, his aftershave. They caress each other, she his chest, he her breasts.

Soon she hears him breathing deeply, asleep. Katie mumbles something from a dream. At once, Clio is attuned to her daughter's needs. She finds herself thinking once again that she's made a mistake in sending Katie to Spook Rock, an almost all-white school. She's the only Asian, one of only two kids of color, the other an African American boy named Nigel, who is driven to school every day in a limo. Year after year of school photos of white children but for those two faces. How much of Katie's growing isolation is from being Chinese? How much from being adopted?

Clio needs to be close to her, and slips out of Pep's bed into Katie's. She puts her arms around her again. Her mind is too awake for her body. She finds herself thinking of their first trip to the orphanage, ten years ago. From the moment she first saw her, when the Chinese woman in the long white coat came out of the one-story redbrick building into the slanting autumn sunlight of the concrete playground with two babies in her arms and called out, first, “Ying!” for the one who, just then, became Faith Ying Schenckberg, and then, “Chwin! Chwin-Chwin!” for Chun, Katie Chun Hale-Macy, she knew they'd done the right thing. The sight of her baby stunned her, enfolded all her senses into one sense, of awe. There she was—her black hair tinted red in the sun and sticking straight up on top of her head, her round face and plump cheeks and fair skin and lips a pink of roses. Beautiful big eyes like teardrops on their sides and pupils dark as history. Dark irises too, with a catch of blue—but maybe it was only the reflection of the dazzling late-October sky. She was swaddled tightly in a tattered purple sweater, and wrapped up and tied with plain twine. She had just awakened and looked at them sleepily but steadily, as if strangely
sure
. From the start her eyes were so alive! As if, Clio said to Pep, she had been so tightly swaddled for so long—three months in the orphanage—that her arms couldn't move and her fingers couldn't touch, and she had learned to touch everything with her eyes. Her hair grew out from two dark whorls, a “double crown,” which her caretaker said was a sign of great wisdom. The hair on the back of her head was rubbed off, showing bare scalp—Clio realized with a sense of horror she had been kept lying on her back, unmoving, for hours at a time. Her heart went out to her. She fell in love instantly. Pep was weeping.
In that one moment we went from two to three. Tomorrow we go back there again
.

Her mind floats this way and that over the incredible images of the day and settles on the vision of the woman at the police station in the white silk dress and blood-red sandals and umbrella and with the face of Katie at thirty. Again she watches her walk in, stare at her and Pep, disappear into a doorway and then into Changsha and seemingly off the face of the earth, this impossible possibility come on this tenth birthday, less an actual woman than an aura or a divine presence or even a sinister one, a breakaway spirit a rising and falling on a jasmine sea sure it's impossible but happens...

8

The next morning Katie decides to wear her best dress to the orphanage. It is bright red, with white flowers on sinewy vines. It fits her frame closely, making her look older, less a girl than a stunning young woman. She and Clio take care with her long hair—no ponytail today, but straight down on her shoulders, pulled back by a purple headband. Like Clio's.

The four bellboys in red with pillbox hats escort them out the great brass revolving door. A sudden heavy rain has started to fall. They turn around and go back to find hotel umbrellas, one of which shelters all three of them. Huddled together under the umbrella they tiptoe through the yellowish mud and screaming machinery widening the road, wading alongside a dozen barefoot men in tattered undershirts, who are digging more trench with pickaxes and shovels. Suddenly there it is, in the middle of a block of low shops being destroyed, the exact same red pagoda-like gatehouse. Clio looks up and sees, once again, the roof gods on the upcurved beams, the last in line “the man riding the chicken,” who, she knows from her study of Chinese art and architecture, is prevented from bedeviling the inhabitants of the building below because a man can't fly down there on a chicken. A sign, in Chinese and English:

CHANGSHA SOCIAL WELFARE CENTER NUMBER ONE

FAMILY PLANNING IS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS

The entrance is the same as they recall but for a uniformed guard who carefully checks identification, and a shiny new chest-high steel gate, which completely blocks the entrance. The guard swings the massive gate open.

Inside, everything has changed. To the right, the spot where the one-story redbrick building with the courtyard/playground once stood, the spot where they were handed Katie, is a pile of rubble and bricks. To the left, where the low recreation room was located, is a four-story building, the administrative offices. Nearby, where the room for the newborns and the schools for the older, special needs children used to be, is an eight-story concrete building looking like a new apartment house. Shocked at how the place has grown, they go into the administration building for their meeting with the new director.

Mr. Ma is about thirty-five, a chunky, handsome man with eyes that seem alert, humorless, and firm. He wears a robin's-egg-blue short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants. But for his face, Pep thinks, he could be a Columbian neighbor in high-summer garb—say, a golfer. He sits at the head of a boardroom-type table on a marble floor, with eight cushy leather high-backed chairs on rollers; standing up in a corner of the room is a ferocious air conditioner. Damp from the rain, they are soon chilled. The place gives a feel of being well funded.
Probably
, Pep thinks,
by grateful Westerners like us
.

Pep explains who they are and why they've come. Mr. Ma shows little reaction—it's hard to tell how good his English is. Pep speaks slowly and gestures every question, like charades. Has Mr. Ma gotten the photos they sent showing Katie in the arms of her nurses when they adopted her? No. Where are they? He doesn't know. He gets a lot of letters and photos, it is hard to keep track of them all. Pep asks to see whatever documents the orphanage has on Katie.