The Foreigner (23 page)

"Angel."
I twitched. "Would you stop?"

"It’s just a joke," she snapped.

"I’m not in the mood."

"Screw you. Everyone loves that joke."

The whole day had been like this: a little vulgarity, a little irritation, recriminations, and silence. After leaving Grace’s apartment around dawn, I had slept a small, fitful sleep, broken by a dream of a little plastic vial being shaken at me. When I opened it, Little P looked up at me from the bottom, battered and bruised. I had closed the cap and thrown him into the sea.

The shame of that dream still clung to me when Angel arrived later. Sick, sore, bleary, I had been dragged from shop to stall, forced to sample a procession of uncomplementary foods over the course of the day:
unagi don
in Gongguan; hot, sweetened
douhua;
greasy fried beef and pepper cakes cooked in an old oil drum on the street. Ruth’s Chris Steak House was the last stop on Angel’s list of places to review. It was meant to be a treat for both of us, but sadness and guilt remained with me, vestiges of the dream, and of the previous night with Grace, whom I would not see again.

"Bread?"

I shook my head. Vaguely I noted that Angel had dressed up in anticipation of the fancy dinner, her hair twisted into a French knot, her dress gauzy, her plump face made up with surprising skill. I had not told her about Poison’s newest threat, which seemed empty now, theatrical.

The waiter shifted and coughed in an excess of attentive service. The luxury of the leather chairs and good wine seemed wrong somehow. I picked up my wineglass; in the distorted surface of merlot I saw my mother looking back at me again, old and worn and haunted by her sons.

A glow like a pilot light flickered up eerily behind the elegant paper partition. It drifted slowly out from behind the screen and floated across the murky dining room at a slow, measured pace. Between the half bottle of wine I’d consumed and the dimness, I had the brief, crazed impression that I was seeing my mother at last in her final form: light, cosmic light, warm, but with a detached, formal grace that kept me from reaching out to hold her, and burning my fingers on the flame.

Then I saw more clearly that it was a cake, a huge white cake with piped rosettes and candles stuck unevenly all over the frosted surface. The waiter balanced it carefully to our table and placed it in front of me with a flourish as Angel began a quavery solo—"Happy birthday to you"—and sang the whole thing through in a brave, thin a cappella.

I looked down in bewilderment. The cake, with all its crinolines and puffs of bloppy frosting, had been decorated by an amateur hand.

"What—?"

Angel whipped out a brown paper envelope and presented it to me across the table. Dubious, I broke the flap with a finger. A little brown booklet embossed with gold fell out. I turned it over and flipped open the front cover.

The laminated first page showed a head shot of me in black and white. Angel had snapped the picture on the street and cropped it down to size. The face was familiar enough—me looking straight into the camera, a little windblown, mouth slightly open in protest. But the information was all wrong. Name: Jorge Santa Ana. Citizenship: Philippines. I fingered the facts dumbly, not quite understanding. Angel nudged the cake toward me.

"But my birthday was in July."

"No way! Let me see." She leaned over, put her finger on the page, on the birth date line: October 1, 1976. I would be twenty-eight.

"You’re free now." Anxiety edged her voice as she scanned my face for gratitude, delight. "You can go anywhere you want again." She hesitated when I didn’t respond. "I know it’s not perfect. I couldn’t get my hands on a U.S. passport. Philippines is easier."

Silent, I flipped through the document, page after blank page.

"Emerson, you never look at me," Angel burst out.

The candles, unheeded, were burning down to a soft, melty mass. She had finished off her steak, but in the myopic light she still looked hungry.

"You never look at me that
way
." She sniffed. "When I… the fact is, I like you. You must know that."

"But Angel," I said, at a loss. I put down the passport. "I just… I never thought about it."

Even as I said it, my mind worked backward over the weeks: the high heels, the makeup, the phone calls. She had come with me to the ossuary; put me up in her bed; given me money, the cake, now the passport. There was something blind at work, if I had missed all the signs, or chalked them up to mere friendship. No, not blind. I had simply not wanted to see.

She threw down her napkin and left. The waiter’s eyes popped as I went after her, leaving the enormous bill behind. His shouts dwindled as I chased Angel down the dim, elegant stretch of Minquan.

Hobbled by her shoes, she could not get very far. Abruptly, she veered into a side alley, ran a short length, stopped, ran, stopped. Her shoulders trembled with an effort not to cry, or perhaps she was crying already, I could not tell. A broken streetlight popped and sparked, then went out. Her face was turned to a wall. I stood some paces behind her, looking at the curve of her back.

"I’m sorry. There’s no excuse."

She picked at a chip of paint, which came off in her hand.

I came closer, hesitant. "What can I do?"

In answer, she whirled around and pressed her mouth fiercely against mine, arms wrapped around me like a vise, willing me to passion. I stirred but did not put my arms around her; I could not.

She withdrew, hurt, humiliated.

"I’m too old for you, Angel," I said gently—but that wasn’t it, not exactly. Her dress had slipped a little off her shoulder; the makeup had softened the shine on her nose. She looked, in the darkness, like a vision of a future self: beautiful, witty, generous; her judgments tempered by the memory of impetuousness in her youth. The revelation saddened me, for the dress was pretty, but I missed the army fatigues and combat boots, the way her jaw hardened when she was set on some preposterous idea; missed her foul mouth, her calling me "boyee."

"You’re my best friend," I said. "My only real friend. But you deserve to be with someone who loves you from the start. Not some middle-aged sack like me."

"Who said anything about love?" she said unexpectedly. "I’m not asking you to love me." She wiped her nose on her wrist and turned to me, defiant. "Not at the start. But maybe you would after a while? Couldn’t you? Could you really not fall in love with me?"

"Angel," I said and put my arm around her—a mistake, because she took this to mean submission and turned her wet face against my neck. Her hand came up to cup my jaw in a clumsy motion of tenderness and affection. I pushed it away.

"I can’t," I said. The proximity made me dizzy.
That’s all it is, Emerson. That’s all it is
. "Not like this. Not without it being right."

"What’s ’right’?" she asked.

"I don’t know!" I said, suddenly angry. "I just don’t want to do it in some shoddy, sordid little way! Not the first time!"

She was staring at me now. "You mean…"

I clamped my mouth shut and spoke through my teeth. "Nobody puts a premium on loyalty anymore. On promises," I said tightly. "If I won’t… go home with you… you should be grateful that I’m man enough to say no from the beginning."

"And I’m not man enough to say no? You make me sound like some pathetic little whore!"

"I wasn’t referring to—"

"Screw you!" she shouted. "I don’t
need
your patriarchal oppression! And I don’t need your charity. Go to hell, you bastard—you and your criminal-ass brother."

"What?" I snatched at her. "What about my brother?"

But she had fled, tripping down the alley.

I looked after her. Rain began to fall, little smatterings at first, then beating a steady tattoo on the tin roofs. Automatically I pulled the ashes closer, but the gesture seemed to be just that—a gesture.

Angel’s mention of Little P had alarmed me, but for once I was too tired to consider the prospect of immediate danger. It was the older, deeper, more lasting vein of trouble she had called up that tugged at me now—not urgent but pushed down, repressed, muffled for so long that it had the force of an underground tap. Incense burned in a little shop nearby; the smell of consecration, of devotion. J, standing at the balcony of the apartment I had rented, overlooking the Charles. I had stopped sending money home to my mother just so I could afford that little, light-filled bower for the two of us. She had been happy, or so I’d believed. She hung pictures, painted the walls, tended her dusky autumn garden on the balcony, calling to me to come, help her with the late tomatoes she coaxed from the vine. Perhaps it had been only a kind of fiction to her, a return to old, innocent childhood impressions of home that, twice divorced, she already knew were not to last. I refused to share a bed, always putting her off and putting her off—that too taken from the page of childhood for her: love without sex. I never made a move, afraid to spoil the majesty of anticipation with the fact itself. My mother called, cried, said she would cut me off, but her tears and threats were like distant explosions, unable to penetrate the idyll. Eventually the calls stopped altogether.

I could have lived like that forever, suspended in the sweetness of time and hope, but not J. I could still see clearly the gray, chipped paint of the front door that afternoon, putting my key in the lock—strange what insignificant details disillusionment would hold on to. Candles in the living room, a trail of smoke, a glass of wine. In the bedroom, a kind of domestic tableau: J in her robe, the man murmuring to her. Worse, somehow, than catching them in the act, for the scene had an intimacy about it, a closeness that stung.

"Do you love him?" I asked when he was gone.

"For God’s sake." Both prayerful and biting at once. "Did you hear a word I just said? Love, love." She yanked the sheet from the bed and threw it to the ground. "It’s all I ever hear from you. What does that have to do with anything? I don’t even know what you mean when you say love."

I reached out, grabbed her arm, kissed her roughly.

"Ow.
Stop
it! Not like this."

"You said there was no right time."

"I’m trying to
help
you."

I laughed.

"Fine." Her green eyes blazing. "All right. If this is what you want."

Into the living room and onto the couch, stripping off my shirt. The atmosphere was bright and harsh, without any of the mystery I had always imagined. My touch betrayed me: anxious, hesitant. The shock of contact, her warmth beneath her robe. Instinctively I put out a hand, as if to ward off a blow, but she would not stop. A kiss, ungentle, with a brutishness tinged with a taste of stale wine. Her robe came off. Skin, damp, the wet-tipped push of her heavy breasts; the smell of moist soil, a shiver, the white light of the Remada bathroom, looking down at my mother’s head. Her hand pressed me, broad, flat strokes, and all at once the harshness and images and dreadful pleasure swam together, too fast.

"Wait!" I begged, trying to push her away. But it was too late. A jolt of dark, agonized bliss—and then it was over.

"Already?" The voice was taunting, but tears, inexplicable, ran down her cheeks.

"You see?" Almost gently. "That’s all it is, Emerson. That’s all love is."

Rain battened down my collar. I had reached the bright, luminous arcade of Ren Ai Road and ducked under the portico of the Citizen Hotel. As I shook water from my jacket, the passport fell out of the pocket in the lining. I picked it up.

Brown, instead of blue. Jorge Santa Ana, from the Philippines. He would be twenty-eight years old today. I knew it was only temporary, but somehow the document had its own kind of power, quite apart from the reality. However much I knew that I was Emerson Chang, in an official capacity I was Jorge Santa Ana, and that little bit of confirmation stole from me, made me a little less Emerson, a little more Jorge. How easy it would be, in fact, to switch nations, to switch alliances. I had, after all, cut my mother off all those years ago, without a second thought, and for what? For a fantasy of J, a false bliss, a future that was only a chimera, dissolving the moment I put my hand to it.

I riffled through the blank, unfamiliar pages of the booklet again, the tanned, treated paper instead of solid blue laminate. I had thought I would be an American all my life, but when I looked closely, I found I had no objective reason to believe this. America was a contract, based on reason, not blood—and a contract of the will could be broken more easily. Perhaps that was why my mother had never been comfortable in America. She put great store in dynasties, in the pedigrees. She had, I realized now, a great fear of the void—of disorder and mess, of broken lines, of darkness, of individual destinies that in their wanderings destroyed the immortality of the whole. America, in its best days, smashed that immortality, cut its memory short and diluted it with the waves of new immigrants, year after year. At its shining best, it kept itself immortal not through the shadow of threat or empire but through a kind of republic of the spirit. My mother could never understand. She had not believed in heaven, not in any way that other people did. Immortality was only in me, and in Little P; it was only our fidelity to her that would keep her alive in any meaningful sense. I saw Little P in my dream, broken, beaten at the bottom of that vial, and knew that I couldn’t let him go.

A
FTER WANDERING UNDER THE ASHY STREETLIGHTS
for a few hours, I hailed a cab to Tongan Street. The streets looked deserted, loose garbage tumbling in the gutters, the convenience stores like remote white beacons in the chaotic dark.

I had not come here since that first visit to Little P, back in August, in the innocence of early grief and late summer. The apartment building was darkened, and the messy, angry red graffito on the doors had faded and tarnished so that it seemed to be an ancient word, a rune whose meaning had long since been forgotten. I did not ring Little P’s bell but instead went up the way I had that first time. At his door, I knocked, and the sound reverberated through the hall and the apartment beyond.