The Love Wife (14 page)

Neither relative had ever met Carnegie’s father or grandparents, though one did know Carnegie’s grandfather’s brother, and the other Carnegie’s grandfather’s stepson.

CARNEGIE / 
Both went through the ritual of trying to explain which generation they were, and what their generation names were, and who their fathers were, et cetera, all of which information glommed together in such a mass that if someone had scanned my brain after dinner, it would no doubt have appeared a mystery lumpen mash such as could be used to stuff mooncakes.

The third relative we met was a bourgeois intellectual who had spent twelve years in a labor camp either for translating William Burroughs or for practicing Catholicism; we could not ascertain which. A tiny man with a long wispy beard, he had an asymmetry to his neck motion such that he continually addressed his right. An old injury, he said, something to do with being hit with a shovel by a Red Guard. Happier to relate was how he had once met my grandparents. My grandfather, he said, in careful English, had been a scholar, and my grandmother a great beauty.

— In United States, you maybe call her Miss Sichuan, he said. But also she is smart. Your grandfather taught her to read and write many things.

— Was she a lot younger than him? I asked.

— Eh? Your grandmother can also sing and play instrument.

— What kind of instrument?

— Eh? She has just one child, that is your father. Unfortunately, then she die. But people say, at least she had a boy, she is good wife. Only your grandfather say he wish she had a girl, maybe a girl can look like her. Remind him of your grandma, he love her so much. That is true story. After that your grandfather have a couple more wives, but none of them he ever love so much. Every one of them has something wrong.

BLONDIE / 
Carnegie cried.

We vowed to come back another time.

The relatives were all amazed that Carnegie did not speak Chinese, and that I did, a little, though this seemed to explain his marrying a
da bizi
—a big nose. They all volunteered too that our children would be smart, because mixed children were smart. When we explained that Lizzy was adopted, and that we were about to adopt a second child, they laughed uncomfortably and asked if Lizzy was Japanese.

— What is Japanese? she asked. Why do people keep saying that?

— It’s a compliment, we told her. Because they can see how well dressed you are. They think you must be rich.

But though that might have been true for an older person, we were not actually sure how to take it in this case.

Two of the relatives liked our gifts, but the Party member seemed disappointed we didn’t bring something bigger. All three hinted that they wouldn’t mind being sponsored to come to the United States for study. Or how about their son?

CARNEGIE / 
We took rolls and rolls of pictures, as if making images of ourselves meeting was the point of meeting. Which perhaps it was. Certainly the picture taking was the most natural part of our interaction, the ritual with the smoothest choreography. Everyone knew his part. It was like playing in a chamber group.

There was supposed to be one more relative, on my mother’s side, a woman living in Shandong. My mother’s father-in-law’s sister-in-law’s great-niece. We did not contact her, not knowing quite how. Also our Beijing window was so small; there simply wasn’t time.

In the meanwhile, how omnivorous our Blondie! Always she had claimed herself a timorous creature, full of trepidation, compared to that fearless friend with whom she had trekked around Hong Kong in her student days. But now: move over, Linda!

BLONDIE / 
People said there were two types of visitors, forks and chopsticks. In college, I had proved a fork—truly. I wasn’t as bad as the Clarks, who produced PB&J at every meal. But I was, unmistakably, a fork.

Now, though—how I hoped to prove better. How I hoped to prove, finally, truly, chopsticks.

CARNEGIE / 
She closed her eyes and bravely ate and only later discovered that she had eaten snake, or eel, or rabbit’s ears. Things, intruth, that I myself was not wild about. Were her efforts misguided?

Anyway, I applauded them.

How we all loved our adventure! Even if it was hot. How we all adored China, dammit.

BLONDIE / 
We were still in Wuji, still in Wuji, we had been there for weeks. We all had diarrhea. We were all on Lomotil, even Lizzy, from time to time; she cried so from the cramps. She was beginning to refuse tea. Dehydration, we explained. You have to drink. If only we were not out of Pedialyte! But we were; and we had stopped accepting the occasional precious ice cube, for who knew if it had been made with boiled water. That left only verifiably boiled water, which could be cooled but was never cold. And of course tea; and soda, also warm.

Should we have taken prophylactic Pepto-Bismol, even if it made your tongue turn black? Anyway, it was too late. We stayed close to the hotel; the public squat toilets just made us feel sicker.

Making the best of our situation, I found two Chinese tutors—one to work with me, one with Carnegie and Lizzy. Both came for a few hours each afternoon, giving us something to do.

We made surprising progress.

CARNEGIE / 
And their rates; such a bargain.

BLONDIE / 
What was happening with the baby? Nothing was clear except why the rich Chinese of old used to build their compounds behind walls.

CARNEGIE / 
People, people, people. Dust, heat, dirt, heat. There was a reason the natives did their strolling at night. They squatted in the alleys in their underclothes, fanning themselves.

BLONDIE / 
Everything needed cleaning.

CARNEGIE / 
We had seen all the sights.

BLONDIE / 
I dreamed of Independence Island—that cool pond water. I used to swim right out to its middle, and float there—tilting my head back until I could see the upside-down mountains. Now in the afternoons I rested with my head back too, a cold compress on my forehead—my upside-down view of the barred windows.

Carnegie and Lizzy did not overheat the way I did. They were bothered instead by the mosquitoes.

The mosquitoes left me alone—too tough, apparently.

I translated more and more when we were out. My translating was two parts guessing to every one part knowledge. Still it felt good.

— Never before, said Carnegie, have I so completely understood the word ‘respite.’

— Do you mean you hate it here? asked Lizzy.

CARNEGIE / 
Such a charming walk we were on, at the time. The path was broken concrete; the air, muggy and fetid. The lakewater beside us shone opaque as one-coat-covers-all paint.

BLONDIE / 
But at least there was shade. At least there were trees, and a trickle of slow-pedaled bicycles, as opposed to a sea.

CARNEGIE / 
— You hate it, said Lizzy.

— Please do not put words in my mouth, I said. They don’t taste good.

BLONDIE / 
He opened and shut his lips like a fish.

— But you hate a lot of it, said Lizzy.

— I don’t hate any of it, he said. It’s just nice to have a break. One needs a break from everything, after a while. From work. From friends. From family.

I gave him a warning look.

— In this family, we take a dim view of complaining, I observed. You know how some people do nothing but complain?

CARNEGIE / 
— It’s hot, Lizzy complained.

— We have an air-conditioned room and an air-conditioned car, young lady, said Blondie, strolling on. —Those are great luxuries around here.

— Yeah, but it doesn’t get cold.

— It does, I said; supporting Blondie, she would say, for once.

— I am, like,
hot
hot, Lizzy said. I’m
burning.
I hate China.

She stopped short. A bicyclist
brrring!
ed and swerved by, so close his handlebar caught a strand of Lizzy’s hair and sent it flying. She nonchalantly caught it back.

— Didn’t you like the Great Wall? asked Blondie.

— The Great Wall was cool. But everything else is boring.

— Boring! I said.

— Boring! she shouted. Boring!

On the lake, the rowboaters looked up.

— Waiting like this is hard, said Blondie then, stopping.

A familiar small bewilderment came over me, as I tried to fathom why she had changed tacks.

— I’m hot hot, said Lizzy, sticking her tongue out at the rowboaters. — I’m like a volcano that can melt everything in the whole wide world.

Said Blondie: — I’m hot too.

— Didn’t you like anything besides the Great Wall? I asked stupidly. There must have been something else.

— It’s lonely here, said Lizzy.

— Even with us here, it’s lonely? said Blondie.

— And hot.

— Of course it’s hot, it’s China, I said. Also you need to learn how to deal with boredom, if you are bored, which you shouldn’t be. Ever to be bored means you have no inner resources; remember that. You’re lucky to be here.

— Why, because you adopted me?

— Not just that, but you are definitely lucky. As are we.

— If you’re so lucky, how come you had to come here to get another kid? If you’re so lucky, how come I do nothing but complain?

— You do things besides complain, said Blondie.

— No I don’t! shouted Lizzy, stomping off. — I’m hot and all I do is complain! She started to cry. — And I mean it!

BLONDIE / 
The baby was sick; that was our guess. Why else the unexplained delay? At the welcoming banquet Director Wu had looked at two other couples in our group and said,
Your baby looks like you.
Only to us had she said,
Your baby is waiting.

What did that mean?

— Don’t fret, she is thinking of you already, said Director Wu.

CARNEGIE / 
Director Wu was a dedicated woman shaped like a haystack. She had short hair and glasses, and referred to her charges as sprogs.

BLONDIE / 
The Clarks, short and round, were matched with the fattest baby imaginable. The Fonarovs, tall and thin, were matched with a red wiry thing.

Everyone cried. The enormity of the moment! Whole lives joined together by luck, and fate. What faith to have taken this step, to have allowed—to have willed—lives to change, just like that. Such were the enormities that Carnegie and Lizzy and I cried too, overwhelmed for our friends—reliving what it was to take Lizzy into our lives.

How frustrating to still be waiting!

CARNEGIE / 
Unlike the Clarks and the Fonarovs, who had been put in a local university, we had been inexplicably parked, first in an Overseas Chinese Hotel (an experience), and then, thankfully, in a foreigners’ hotel with private baths and sit-down toilets and cleaning personnel. All along we had listened with envy to our friends’ Belgian-professor stories, the university being for some reason popular with Belgian professors. And how friendly the Chinese on campus too! Knocking on the doors of the Americans at all hours, to practice English and to bring gifts. The Clarks and Fonarovs had made rafts of friends. They had never known such goodwill.

But when we inquired as to whether we might move to the campus now that our friends had left, the answer was a decided,
We’ll see.
As for the reason:
Not convenient.

BLONDIE / 
Everywhere people gawked at me. Even in Beijing, I had aroused interest. In Wuji, I had to keep moving if I didn’t want to find myself mobbed. Carnegie and Lizzy had to walk on ahead, pretending not to know me.

Was it possible to have people stare all day, and not see oneself differently at night? In bed, by the fluorescent ceiling light, I stared too, sometimes. At myself, in the mirror. At Carnegie. At my hand touching his hand, at my feet touching his feet.

The mosquito coil dropped its ash. The table fan rotated toward us, away, toward us, away. It was far enough from the mosquito coil not to disturb the ash, but close enough to make the tip of the coil flare and darken, flare and darken.

Carnegie, normally so sensitive, looked perfectly comfortable on the coarse sheets. He was wearing boxer shorts he had bought here—more comfortable in the heat, he said. He had powdered under his arms and behind his knees, as had Lizzy and I. What a great invention, talcum powder, we agreed.

I got up to check on Lizzy—gingerly inserting my sticky feet into the hotel plastic sandals. I did not like these but wore them to avoid stepping on the mildewed rug.

Carnegie, when I returned, was exactly the same. His smooth-skinned self, relaxed and sweat-free.

— We’re going to look so different when we’re old, I said. You’re going to age so beautifully, and I’m going to look so wrinkly. My upper lip is going to look like a vertical blind.

— Not true, he said.

— I see these women on the street, and not one of them is baggy. They’re like gymnasts. Even the old ones are like gymnasts.

— I’ve seen fat ones.

— But none of them is voluminous.

How foreign that polysyllabic word, after weeks of Chinese. How amorphous itself. Even when speaking English, I realized, we had taken to speaking in a more succinct way than we did at home.

— What about Director Wu?

— We’re going to look even less natural together than we do now, I said. I’m going to look ten years your senior and pasty. Like your third-grade teacher, following you around.

— Is all this because people stare at you?

— No, I said.

— I’ll hold your hand so people stare at me too, offered Carnegie, reaching and squeezing, as if in demonstration.

— All right, I said.

Holding hands, sure enough, produced a stir everywhere, but was worth it.

— We might as well be a person married to a camel, I said.

— I always wanted to marry a camel, said Carnegie.

CARNEGIE / 
We broached with Director Wu the minor matter that was our employment. Vacation policies, we explained. Deadlines. No iron rice bowl, we said. We could get fired. Americans were rich, we explained, except for Americans without jobs.