The Foreigner (12 page)

"But I’m not a food critic."

She sighed. "You’re not writing for Miche
lin
. You eat; you leave."

"Seventy-thirty?"

"Listen, boy, you want the job or not?"

Annoyed at my indecision, she began walking away. I thought of the Remada, the chipped paint and starched, hard-won history to be put on the block if Little P took it over.

"All right! All right!"

She turned back calmly, looking smug. "Next Friday." She wrote down the address and stuffed it in my breast pocket. "Now what do you say to the nice lady who gives you a job?"

"Thank you," I said, thoroughly beaten. "Wait!"—as she started walking off again. "About Atticus."

"Yeah?" She glanced back at me.

"Have you known him long?"

She shrugged. "Couple years."

"Is he…" The right question was hard to compose. My friend, his depth of peace and calm marred by flashes of darkness, his warnings about Little P. "Is he someone you would trust?"

She laughed sharply.

"What?"

"Nothing." She laughed again, clearly amused.

"What’s so funny?"

She shook her head. "Let’s just say this: I wouldn’t trust him farther than I could throw him." She grinned. "But I’m also pretty strong. Next Friday!"—pointing both forefingers at me. Then she resumed walking toward the park exit, still laughing and shaking her head.

I
HADN’T EXPECTED ANY OVERTURES OF FRIENDSHIP
from Little P, so I was surprised when he called, the next day, and asked if I wanted to join him and Uncle for a spa.

"A what?"

"
Spa
. You know, a public bath."

I pictured mud, oils, big-hammed German women cracking my spine. Nothing could have seemed less manly, or less appealing. But I had to take what opportunities I had with him; he sounded, if not happy, then at least less remote, and I hurried to the sundries store on the corner to buy a pair of trunks.

The spa was on the ninth floor of an old building east of the train station. Little P met me in the dim green corridor just outside the entrance. He cracked his knuckles mechanically. He did not smile, but he held the door for me, and the attendants—mostly bent old men in gray jackets—nodded deferentially, as if they had been told who I was. Certainly they seemed to know Little P and Uncle. In the locker room, they were helping Uncle out of his tracksuit, his sad, fat breasts quivering as he stepped hesitantly out of his pants.

I followed Little P into the bathing area, a huge gray-tiled gymnasium with windows cut high up in the walls. Shapes milled about in the close steam—heavy, surly souls tattooed along fat backs and arms, a purgatorium of men soaking in the sulfurous waters. Stone benches lined the perimeter of the spa, figures lying prone and sprawling across them, at rest between takings of the cure. High above the pool, a dragon head of mottled jade jutted out from the back wall, its expression glum as it spat water in a weak arc over the heads of bathers. Little P halted suddenly.

"
Oof
. What?" I asked, stumbling into him. His skinny body was rigid, tense as wire, and tuned, seemingly, to the lounge area to our right, where more naked bathers rested, smoked. A tall, pensive man sat on a stone bench facing the water, notable at first glance only for his height and stillness as he surveyed the water. There was something odd about his eyes. A cigarillo dangled from his lip.

"Know him?"

Little P stared. The man had closed his eyes, apparently dozing. You felt that he was mindful of everything about him, whether he saw it or not, like a spider on its web. As we watched, his eyes opened again. His gaze flickered over me, held briefly, and I saw what was so strange: he had a walleye, one pupil focused, the other cocked dreamily toward the other end of the spa.

"Nah." Little P moved toward the edge of the pool, though with some circumspection. "He just looks like someone."

"Did we have to meet here?" I asked as Little P settled himself into a far corner of the pool. I dipped a toe in the scalding water. An attendant had tugged at my trunks as I left the locker room, indicating that I could not wear them into the pool. Poolside, another attendant presented me with a tray of individual cigarettes like hors d’oeuvres at a wedding. I waved him away.

"Emerson." Little P had taken a cigarette; he blew the smoke up toward the ceiling. "You keep standing there looking around, people are going to think you’re a fairy. Get in."

I slid into the water, mainly to cover myself. I could make out Uncle a little way down the edge of the pool. The cigarette smoke drifted up, mixing with the steam in a mute, wispy exchange. Bathers crossed the water like shadows of huge fish, or birds; Little P watched them cagily, sunk low.

"You call the lawyer yet?" he asked, after a silent interval.

"…No."

He eyed me. "What’s the problem?"

It was my turn not to say anything. I’d been obligated to leave my glasses behind, and in my wavering vision, Little P gradually receded, became a voice. The sulfurous tinge in the air stung my throat.

"I see," he said slowly. "I see how it is. How much of a cut you want? We can work something out."

"I don’t want any cash from the sale of the motel," I said, coughing.

"Well, what then?" He spread his hands. "Shares? Favors? Name it."

"I’m not trying to
profit
off her death. I don’t know why you can’t understand that."

He sighed. "Listen, you don’t have to keep up the front, okay? She’s
dead
." He knocked his knuckles loudly against the tiles of the pool. "She can’t hear you posing as Jesus anymore."

I splashed water over my shoulders to keep them warm, for a chill had settled in my chest. Little P shifted in the water, seeming to lean closer in, and spoke softly; with the steam, it felt as if we were in a private chamber, a room of the mind.

"I don’t blame you," he said. "Sanctimony is the best defense for people like you. It stings, doesn’t it? Mama’s boy does his thing, day in and day out, and all the immortality he gets is a good night’s sleep. You always did buy that crap from Mother. The Chinko-American dream. Family, respect, diligence, prestige. Shit." He brooded, letting his arms and legs drift.

"It’s not shit," I said. "I’ve made something of my life."

The assertion sounded hollow, even before Little P laughed, harsh, disbelieving. Again shadows crossed the pool, dark wings cutting the surface of the water.

"Don’t fool yourself," he said. "You and me, we’re nothing. Both of us. Don’t think I don’t know that. I’m not going to leave any monuments behind, and neither are you. But at least I’ve gotten to the bottom of something in my life. At least I’ve seen the thing."

Someone had really cranked up the steam. I couldn’t see him at all anymore. Blindly, I swiped a hand in his direction and came up with nothing. "Bottom of what thing? Seen what?"

Silence.

"Knowledge," he muttered cryptically. "Forget it. You wouldn’t understand."

"Little P, you haven’t even tried to explain."

"You’re not a human being, you’re a fucking saint, you know that? So patient, so innocent. Can’t get a smudge on you, ever. You just sit back in judgment, you and Mother, fucking Siamese twins. Does it make you feel
good,
Emerson, to look down on the world? Does it make you feel powerful?

"You know what your problem is?" He splashed water over his head and blew his nose in his fingers. "You never learned to fuck."

"Who told you that?" I whispered, paralyzed. His tirade had grated but not scored too closely to this point, but now, here was my deepest shame, my deepest secret exposed. Not even my mother knew, and Little P was laying it bare in public, like an accusation. The steam had cleared, and I could see him distinctly, tensed with a ferocity that must have been bottled up for years. "What are you talking about? How do you
know
?"

He glanced at me, thrown off.

"What are
you
talking about?" He splashed his head again, stopped. "Don’t tell me… you’ve never… ?"

I stared him down, face blazing.

His fire was doused by the intimacy of confession. "Well, why the hell not? You had the whole motel to do it in. You lived alone in Boston for a year."

"I don’t know." I splashed my chest halfheartedly. "I never found the…
appropriate
woman, I guess." True enough, with all the implications of the word
appropriate
: propriety, usury. And how J had used me; how shameful the attempt to play at love had been. I shook it off.

Little P was saying, "…right downstairs. Let me do this for you, brother. Cheap cunt, bad boobs, but you get what you pay for. Sometimes you get lucky, you get a real prize, a young one with tits like milk and lips like sugar, if you know what I mean." He considered. "I guess you wouldn’t."

"A prostitute, you mean."

"Yeah."

"I said I was—"

"Yeah, yeah." He waved this away. "It’s not the Holy Grail, just tits and ass. Really, that’s all it is." He shook his head. "No wonder you’re still a virgin. So, are you game?"

"No."

"Come on."

"No. I don’t have anything to prove to you."

I turned away, stung, shaken, and splashed water mechanically on my chest. Why was it wrong to hope for love? Why was it wrong to honor my mother—respect the idea of her, even if the reality was flawed?

"Who is that girl?" I asked slowly.

Little P didn’t say anything.

"Who’s the girl?" I said. "Stop hiding from me. Stop lying. If you want me to call the lawyer, I have to know what’s going on. Why exactly do you need the money, anyway? What’s the debt?"

The trickling from the dragon’s mouth seemed suddenly very loud. I turned back. Little P was gone—vanished, the spot where he had been sitting empty.

I looked about. The same slow, dyspeptic movement of men ranged through the fog, as if nothing had happened. "Little P?"

Uncle had edged closer, looking at me. I got out of the pool and circled the perimeter. Shadows turned to me in the gloom, faceless, indistinct. I pushed past a couple of stocky bathers, thinking I saw my brother at the other end of the gymnasium, but it was an old man rubbing his hollow chest with a towel, sightless, decrepit.

No sign of Little P in the bathrooms, in the corridors. The walleyed man on the bench was gone.

As I came back out into the pool area, I bumped into another man who seemed faintly, unpleasantly familiar. I wouldn’t have recognized him without his clothes on, but a pall of cherry flavoring hung around him, thick as honey.

"I’ll kill you," I said. "I swear to God, if you have anything to do with this…"

Poison surveyed me lazily, fanning himself with a newspaper. "Ah, Mr. Eight-oh-oh-oh." He looked me up and down and sniggered.

"You little… turd. Not a cent, I told you. And I will… screw you up if something’s happened to Little P."

"Not understand." He grinned and sucked his Life Saver insolently. "The English not so good."

"Motherfucker."

"What you say?" His eyes narrowed sharply; all at once he wasn’t playing anymore. Big One appeared. Uncle had come up from the pool. He was muttering, agitated but incomprehensible, and as I looked at him, I finally grasped what it was that had been gnawing at me: a flash of knowingness and intelligence beneath the paralyzed exterior—the stroke and paralysis nothing but an act.

In my worry and nakedness, my nerves seemed to be shutting down. As I looked from one face to another, they seemed to blend together; even the faces of the attendants seemed dark and conspiratorial, with their sloe eyes and half lids and their solicitous deference, the way they conferred with each other in slurry Hokkien and then turned to present a united front against me. The spa now seemed full of eyes, foreign, evasive, all inscrutable in their hidden aims. I pushed past Poison and hurried to gather up my clothes.

ATTICUS ANSWERED
the door slowly, the latches clicking without his customary decisiveness. He blinked at me in the corridor, pale and worn against his blue silk pajamas and robe, thinned hair frowsy and on end. It was very late, past midnight. I apologized as he stood back to let me in.

"I’ve checked the Palace, his apartment, all the shops up and down Tongan," I said. "Even the river park and the night market." That last had been an ordeal, combing through the crowds of students pushing violently among the boiling vats and steamers, the cast-iron griddles spitting oil under the strings of lights illuminating the alley. "I don’t know what else to do."

Atticus rubbed his neck as if it ached and considered, his eyes cast pensively downward. "And you have not call the police yet?"

"No."

"Good."

He rubbed the back of his neck again, an uncharacteristic motion. He seemed confused, disoriented.

"I am sorry, Emerson. It is very unexpected for you to show up this way, at this time. I mean only that it is good you have come to me. The police are not so reliable as you might want; you do not know who to trust. It is getting better, but it is not impossible to find yourself in the hands of the
hei shehui,
even now."

"So that’s it? No police report? No search?"

"He has not been gone more than twelve hours, Xiao Chang. Give things a little time."

"There isn’t any time. I keep thinking…"

I closed my eyes briefly, but I could not shut out the creeping sense of doubt.
Wouldn’t trust him farther than I could throw him
.

Atticus was leaning on the side table.

"You seem very sure about my brother," I said.

"I have know him much better, for a long time," said Atticus, but he was taken aback, blinking owlishly, clutching at the gap in his pajama front. The slip in his grammar too seemed a telltale sign.

"Well enough to know where he goes each day?" I asked. "Where to find him, if someone wanted to find him? Just what has he gotten himself into?"

Atticus looked down. He had picked up one of the shapeless black rocks that lay next to the helmets on the sideboard and turned it over silently in his hands.