The Foremost Good Fortune (29 page)

Lao Wu stops outside the red gates to the park, and we walk along the path to an old altar where they used to sacrifice animals. It’s circled by a high stone wall. There are gnarled willow trees and square stone tables where loud groups of men huddle smoking over card games. Tyler has a smile on his face. “China,” he says loudly for emphasis. “I’ve been imagining this country for a long time.” Then I remember that ever since I’ve known him, he’s been fascinated by Chinese culture—hoping to get over here, turning over an idea he has for a novel set in the Chinese countryside.

Lily stares at the altar. “How long ago did they stop murdering animals up there?” She laughs. “And are those bloodstains fresh?” The children climb up on the platform and jump down to the ground. We
stop at a restaurant inside the park and Tony orders the house specialty: platters of roast duck. They come with stacks of thin pancakes and saucers of sweet plum sauce. Thorne and Aidan show the girls how to wrap the duck up in the pancake and eat it like a small burrito. I smile at everyone. I’m so glad they’re here. But I’m also detached. I think it’s the fear that sometimes does this to me. I sit with my chopsticks in my hand, eating from a small bowl of rice, taking in each word everyone says, and then it’s with me again—electric blue and zinging. A kind of palpable dread. I can taste it. Not dread of cancer exactly, or the
R
word,
recurrence
, but of something else. As if I’ve done everything I could to keep the bad news at bay and I’m sitting in this restaurant eating duck to prove I’m okay, but I’m afraid the bad news is coming for me anyway. It’s nothing I can say. Not to Lily or Tyler. At least not on this, their first night in China. And I reach for my Tsingtao and lean back in my chair and try to listen to my friends talking.

In the morning we drive to the Confucius Temple in the hutong south of Houhai Lake. The grounds are empty, and the place feels like a beautiful urban secret. Ancient stone carvings dot the courtyard. Lily and Tyler and Tony and I stand in the temple where Confucius prayed daily. “It’s so quiet in here,” Lily says. “So calm.”

When we leave through the front gate, a short older man approaches us selling calligraphy scrolls. Tony says no thank you in Mandarin, but the man persists. He wears thick, Coke-bottle glasses. We gather around to look at his brushwork, and he invites us back to his house to see more.

“Lai, lai.”
Come
. He motions for us to follow him.

We have to hustle to keep up. “Guys,” I say, corralling the four kids in the alleyway. “We’ll need to be careful with our bodies in this man’s apartment.” His home sits inside a courtyard house in the hutong that’s been partitioned over the years into closet-sized rooms with enough space for a bed, a desk, and a chair. The children sit on his bed and the rest of us stand in the crowded doorway. There’s a white toothbrush and a bar of soap on the sill next to the door. The man walks in small circles trying to find the rest of his scrolls. He can’t stop grinning. There’s no heat, and he wears dark quilted pants and a Mao jacket buttoned to the top to stay warm. He explains to Tony that he was a teacher for thirty years at the middle school down the lane. He’s missing most of his teeth.

I remember what Hans said at dinner back in April—that Tony was inside the conversation here and the rest of us non–Chinese speakers were out. I’m glad again to be married to someone who’s in. Because this old man makes beautiful drawings, and what a gift it is to be asked inside his home. Tony buys two of the small scrolls for eight dollars apiece. One reads, “To long health and longevity.” The other characters spell out “double happiness.”

The next day we head to the Temple of Heaven to see the sundial where the harvest prayers were made to the gods. And then on to the Summer Palace. And then the Great Wall. Each day is epic like this—we go to a different piece of history in the city, and the sky stays remarkably blue. “I thought China would be so different. So much more Communist and bland,” Lily says on the fifth day while she and I eat dumplings alone at Din Tai Fung. Tony and Tyler have taken the kids to a swimming pool near the apartment. “It’s so complicated here,” she says. “So much history staring you in the face. We should have planned to stay longer. My God—the girls like it here so much, we should live here!”

For one moment I allow myself to imagine Lily staying in China. But then just as quickly I let the image go. I take a sip of tea and feel the separation again. I realize I’ve hoped Lily’s visit would spring something loose for me—something to shift the cancer balance. We sit in the crowded dumpling house and I see, perhaps for the first time, that no one is going to do that for me. Not Lily. Not Tony. I smile and say, “It’s confusing to feel alone while you’re here. It’s like I’m waiting for something to happen. Waiting for you to do one simple thing that is going to close the door on the cancer.” I can say anything to her, and this in itself should be freeing. She puts down her chopsticks and listens. “It’s weird,” I go on. “I don’t get it.”

“I do,” she says then. “You’re still figuring out the disease. I can watch your mind sometimes trying to solve it—”

“I feel like I’ve stalled out. Like I’ve taken some kind of long detour and I want you to understand, but I don’t have words for this separation. It’s like I’ve gotten lost.”

She nods her head. Then she says, “But you haven’t. You’re right here. And Tony and Thorne and Aidan are still at your side.”

On Saturday morning she and I drive in the van with Lao Wu to see
an acupuncturist. Britta has recommended Dr. Heng, and Lily comes because she wants to check things out. She’s never had acupuncture before. Neither have I. She says she’ll finish reading a novel she’s brought in her bag while I’m treated. When we step into the tiny lobby, I’m led to a room by a male assistant and asked to lie down in my sweater and jeans on a narrow cot. Dr. Heng enters then. He has a handsome face with alert eyes. He holds my wrist and listens to my pulse. Then he says, “Your body has had some great event.”

I nod at him and wonder how he’s discerned this from my heartbeat. I haven’t told him about my medical history. He goes on, “We have to tell your body it’s over now. We have to tell your body it’s okay to let go.”

Then he begins to chant a song that repeats the word
bodhisattva
over and over while he slips needles into my calves and my feet. The needles hurt more than I thought they would. I lie there and listen to the singing and feel the needles humming and wonder if things can get any weirder in China and if I am going to cry, and if this is the final thing I’ve been waiting for. The healing moment. When he’s done, I tell him I’ve been lifting weights with Marcus at the gym. “You are thin,” Dr. Heng warns. “You’re not meant to be lifting weights. Only swimming, yoga, and belly dancing.” I nod my head and try to imagine me and the belly dancing, but I can’t. Maybe this is not my moment and I should go.

Back in the lobby, Lily sits in a chair against the right wall, sobbing. “What’s wrong?” I ask, alarmed. “Are you okay?”

Then she laughs and says, “This book is so damn good. But God it’s sad. It’s about a father who doesn’t have a job or money for his wife and kids. He thinks he’s failing them. And he is. But then he stops himself. Just before he crashes out, he pulls it together.” I stare at her in wonder at her ability to be so moved by a book in this crowded little lobby. I would like some of that emotion. Can she just give me a scoop, please? I would like to feel connected like that again to a book. To a person. To an idea. “The ending is so real,” she says, and tears fill her eyes again. “It’s so believable.”

We walk outside and climb into the van to go home. Everyone is back from the swimming pool, and the kids play hide-and-seek in the bedrooms. Tony and Tyler sit with their feet up on the table, drinking green tea and planning the dumpling house they’re going to open back
in the States. They’ve been designing this restaurant for years. Tyler says, “We’d have to get Lily and Susan to work the front of the house for us. Seat people and pour the drinks.”

“Yeah, because we’d be out back working our asses off in the kitchen.” Tony nods and takes a sip of tea.

“That is a lot of dumplings to make every day,” I add and sit half on Tony’s lap.

“And just for the record,” Lily says, looking over at me, “Susan and I will
not
be going into the hostess business.”

“But don’t forget naps,” I say, standing up now. “Aren’t you people tired? See you in an hour.” Then I walk down the hall to my bedroom. We’re planning to go to a noodle-making class tonight with the kids. It’s at a cooking school Thorne’s art teacher opened in the hutong. I lie down on my bed and the phone rings. It’s Sebastian, our lawyer friend.

“Can you and Tony make it to a dinner tonight?” he asks. “There is an American senator in town.”

“Senator?” I say. I knew he had friends in high places.

“We’ll meet you guys at Li Qun Duck at six.”

“We have our own friends visiting,” I say. “Writers. We can’t come.” But a senator. The idea intrigues me.

“Bring them,” Sebastian says. “We’d love to meet your friends.”

I hang up and go stand in the hall and make an announcement. “Drop the noodle plans,” I yell. “I’m calling the babysitter. We’ll make noodles tomorrow. Tonight we’re meeting a U.S. senator at a duck house in the hutong behind Tiananmen.”

“We’re what?” Lily calls out from where she’s lying with Tyler on the air mattresses in the living room. She says the mattresses are surprisingly comfortable to sleep on, and I can’t tell if she’s lying.

“High-ranking,” I call to her, like it’s perfectly normal. “And her husband. We’re meeting them in two hours. Are you game?”

“How can I not be?” she yells. “It’s too good to pass up.”

Then I go lie back down on my bed. Sometimes it seems that since we left the United States, the country has actually begun to get smaller. So small, in fact, that on a Friday night we find ourselves headed to a quarter of the city known as Dongcheng with one of the senior members of the Foreign Intelligence Committee.

“What do you wear to meet a senator?” Tyler calls out before we leave. “I only brought jeans to China.”

“I’ll find you a shirt, man,” I can hear Tony say from the kitchen, where he’s making the kids popcorn. “Maybe a sweater. If we can find you a sweater you’ll be fine.”

Chloe arrives at five thirty and we head out in the van. Part of me wishes I could explain to Lao Wu who it is we’re going to see. I want him to know one of our leaders is here. That our two governments are talking. But I can’t think of a way to tell him that won’t sound self-important.

“We have to be careful about what we say,” Lily decides then. “How much can we talk about? How much Obama?”

“I’m going to ask her a lot about foreign policy,” Tyler jokes.

Tony grins back. “Yes. Let’s talk about two of our specialties, dumpling houses and the Monroe Doctrine.”

“Oh God,” Lily groans. She’s giggling now. “I know this will be hard for you to hear, Tyler, but the senator has not come to China to get badgered with your questions about the Iraq war. We have to be tactful.”

“And exactly what is our line of questioning?” I ask and begin laughing too.

“She’s come to meet with U.S. ambassadors and Chinese leaders, Tyler, not two writers from Yarmouth,” Lily adds. “Please, please promise that you’ll ask her politely.”

“Yes, please.” I repeat one more time. “Because Sebastian and Margaret are our friends. Sebastian hasn’t asked us out so we can embarrass him.”

“I’m on it,” Tyler says. “No worries. There are just a few things I’d like to say about the sale of our aircraft carriers to Taiwan.”

“Oh no,” I say.

“No worriers,” he repeats and smiles.

Lao Wu drops us off at the mouth of a long, unlit hutong alley. It’s windy and cold, and when we open the door to Li Qun it’s dark inside and crowded. When my eyes adjust I see dozens of dead ducks hanging by their necks on the back wall. The hallway is lined with pictures of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger. Plus a collage of lesser-known American senators, who’ve all eaten here. I spy Sebastian, talking to a waiter. There’s a petite woman standing next to him. I reach them and say, “Hello there.”

The senator leans toward me so we do an awkward half air kiss, half
embrace. I feel like I know her, and what a peculiar thing—this false intimacy she must try to convey. Or maybe it’s not false. Maybe this is how she acts all the time—warm and grounded. The round table we’re led to is in a small, tired private dining room. The walls are smudged with dirt, and the tablecloth is greasy. I get up and find the toilet out beyond the open kitchen where the ducks get roasted in a wood-oven fire. This bathroom is so much worse than most of the public ones I’ve been to in Beijing that I wonder what Sebastian is thinking bringing politicians here.

Back at the table, the senator says quietly that she’s just gotten back from a fact-finding mission in Kabul. I stare and try to nod like I’m right there with her, weighing the military options we have against the Taliban, but really I’m studying her hair. How does she keep it in place? I can’t pretend to have any expertise about the Taliban. I’m wondering when Tyler is going to jump in.

Sebastian is to my right. “I love this place,” he says to me. “Best duck in the city. I always come here.” I nod and try to clean my chopsticks off with the hem of my sweater. Why is it so dirty in here? We’re all a little nervous, I can tell. Then I look over at Tony. He’s smiling his widest grin—the kind I think are called shit-eating grins. He’s staring right at the senator, and I hear him ask her how her flight to China was. But her husband is the conversation master. He’s charming and funny and soon Lily is talking to him about the plot of her second novel.

The night really goes to Tyler, who in the end, after several beers, begins firing the questions he warned us he would. “Are you here to gauge China’s military buildup? And do you see the troops as an inherently bad thing?” Tyler persists. “Because I think too many people fear China when they should just learn more about it. Maybe ignorance breeds fear.”