The Middle Kingdom (25 page)

Walter was waiting for us when we returned. We walked into the hotel room and there he was: shoes off, feet on the bed, looking happier than he'd looked in years. I smiled at him; I had so much to say. But we were not alone.

Lou, the CAST guide I thought we'd shed a week ago, stood near the doorway and nodded coolly when we came in. He seemed unhappy that Dr Yu was with me; he placed his hand on her elbow and started whispering fiercely to her in Mandarin. She pulled her arm away and glared at him, all the good humor she'd gained on the mountain vanishing from her face. The hotel manager stood behind Lou, listening to the conversation and grinning in embarrassment. In the soft tan chairs Dr Yu had admired sat the people with whom Walter had traveled: Katherine Olmand and a fair young man with a bushy gold moustache, whom I had seen often during the conference but never met. Someone had opened the windows and the smell of flowers filled the room.

‘Grace,' Walter said. ‘Welcome back. This is Quentin Bradley, the limnologist we've been traveling with.'

I caught the ‘we,' and my smile faded as I tried to read what was going on in that room. Something; something that had to do with Katherine and Quentin and Walter traveling for seven days without me. I was tasting the air and the taste was sharp and strong.

Walter didn't rise to greet me and Katherine stared at me, frankly curious, which made me wonder what Walter had told her. For an instant I saw myself through her eyes, heard how Walter might describe me in an unguarded moment. My
wife doesn't understand me
; the old plaint of married men.
We used to work together, but now she doesn't even know what I do. She's let herself go. She's not interested in me. Once she bit a colleague's hand.
He wouldn't have told her how, during our early years, we had driven to New Hampshire and North Carolina and the Blue Ridge Mountains, bound by the plants and animals we examined into something which was, if not love, at least a pleasant companionship. He and I had parted on distinctly bad terms, and he might have told Katherine anything. Had, probably; but I was just as guilty as him. I had told Dr Yu things that would have shamed him, and the fact that I'd done so in my sleep was no excuse.

I reminded myself that Walter had no way of knowing what had happened to me or how I was feeling now, and I forced myself to smile at him and to greet Katherine and Quentin. Then I turned to Lou, who was still snapping at Dr Yu. ‘What's the problem?' I asked.

Lou bit off his last phrase and then looked at me, his face completely expressionless. ‘This esteemed scientist and her husband have been most thoughtful,' he said. ‘Supervising your care. But now you are well, and returned to your husband. It is preferred that she leave now.'

Dr Yu and I looked at each other and I picked up the stack of pink soaps that she'd left on the table earlier. ‘Preferred by whom?' I said. The hotel manager shifted uneasily and fixed his eyes on the floor.

Lou lowered his eyes. ‘Simply … preferred,' he said. ‘Her work duties no doubt are calling.'

‘No doubt yours are as well,' I said. I had had enough of Lou; I filled his hands with the bars of soap and eased him toward the door. ‘For your family,' I said, when he stared at the soaps in surprise. ‘Thank you for all your help. Dr Yu has scientific matters to discuss with my husband, and she'll be staying here for a while. Thank you for your concern.'

I shut the door behind him and turned back to the company. No one was smiling except Dr Yu. ‘See what I mean?' she said, and then she shrugged and moved closer to Walter and welcomed him back from his trip. This was the first time they'd spoken face to face since their disastrous meeting at the banquet, and I was impressed by her calmness and poise. She waited politely for Walter to introduce her to his friends, and Walter flashed me the signal we'd used for years at cocktail parties: left forefinger rubbed on the skin just in front of his left ear.
Help
, that meant.
Help me out here.

I couldn't believe he'd forgotten. He'd met Dr Yu at the banquet; he'd left me in her care. Now he couldn't remember her given name. ‘Dr Olmand,' I said, as smoothly as I could. ‘Dr Bradley. Let me introduce a colleague of yours – Dr Yu Xiaomin, lake ecologist from Qinghua University.'

Walter's face relaxed. ‘Dr Yu and her husband took care of Grace while she was sick,' he said. ‘Her husband's on the staff at the main hospital here. They've been very generous.'

‘It was nothing,' Dr Yu said. She looked at the floor when Katherine and Quentin praised her kindness, and she changed the subject as quickly as she could. ‘I heard your presentation,' she said to Katherine, and then she turned toward Quentin. ‘But not yours, I am sorry. What is your field of special interest?'

Quentin answered her and then asked about her own work. As she described her research, Walter and Katherine listened as well, and for a few minutes Dr Yu basked in everyone's attention. ‘It was a small study,' she said modestly. ‘Money and equipment are limited, so I designed this to rely on human labor. I tried to take advantage of what we have. We analyzed the stomach contents of many fish, from samples taken over fifteen years …'

While she talked, the hotel manager sidled up to me. ‘Our washing machines your clothes have destroyed,' he whispered. ‘No one of us understands how. We offer largest apologies, and arrangings for compensations of the future will occur.' He held an empty laundry bag in his hands.

‘Can we fix them?' I asked. ‘Patch them up, somehow?' I had given him almost everything I had.

‘Oh, completely not,' he assured me. ‘Completely, they are destroyed to bits.'

He pleated the bag in his hands until it was no bigger than a belt, and I thought of the way my mother used to stand in front of the closet she shared with my father, coldly fingering the clothes she bought off-season in bargain basements.
A belt
, she'd say.
If I just had one good belt to tie this outfit together
… There was a broom closet off the kitchen, where a lightbulb hung over a metal chair, and when my mother was disgusted with all of us she'd retreat to that paneled box and browse through stacks of old
Vogues
with a cold, unblinking eye.

‘You will be reporting this incident?' the manager said anxiously.

‘Of course not,' I said. ‘Please don't worry about it. The clothes wouldn't fit me now anyway. I lost some weight in the hospital.'

He broke into a radiant smile. ‘Oh, absolutely,' he said. ‘Anyone this could see. You have great kindness. My wife, my children, will all have gratefulness – this job only has been in my possession for several months.' He looked over at Dr Yu and his face darkened again. ‘But your friend …'

‘Why would she care?' I asked. He dropped his eyes and I looked at him sharply. ‘Did
you
call Lou?' I said. ‘Did you tell him Dr Yu was here with me?'

‘Oh, no,
no
,' he said in dismay. ‘You guide, he alerts himself. I am complete discreetness.'

He wrung his hands and apologized again and then he left, murmuring a few words to Dr Yu as he passed her. The day was unraveling around me faster than I could knit it up again. My clothes were destroyed, my hair was gone, Dr Yu had been insulted; a suitcase I didn't recognize sat next to Walter's brown leather bag, which we had bought together in Vermont. Walter's friends talked on and on and didn't seem to understand that they should go. Katherine had somehow turned the conversation to her family's long involvement with China.

‘My grandfather made a famous translation of the
Book of Changes
,' she told Dr Yu. ‘And he translated many of the works of Li Po and the other Tang poets. And also many of the classics of Chinese traditional medicine – he used to drive my grandmother crazy, cooking up potions in the kitchen of their summer home. Boiled licorice root and scallions, dried lotus buds and dogwood and orange peel and ginger …' She laughed musically. ‘He was such a crank,' she said fondly. ‘Yin and yang, hot and cold, wet and dry – he had arthritis. What he needed was an aspirin. And then my father studied Chinese history – his specialty was the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion. And two of my uncles – my family has been involved with China for years, but none of them ever made it here. I'm the first.'

She said a few phrases in Mandarin, with an accent so pure that I felt a pang of jealousy. Dr Yu complimented her on her pronunciation.

‘My father taught me a little,' Katherine said modestly, her face lit up with pleasure. ‘But you know, it's the strangest thing – since we got here, I've discovered that I can't understand what anyone's saying. I can't seem to distinguish any words. Everyone speaks so fast, and with such an accent – all I can hear is noise.'

‘Well,' Dr Yu said, ‘no doubt we sound different than your family who taught you. Since they learned only from books, since they never came here …'

Everyone paused at the same time. ‘The laundry destroyed my clothes,' I announced.

Quentin smiled and moved his sneakered foot away from Katherine's brown pump. ‘We know,' he said. ‘The manager was just telling us when you walked in.'

Katherine frowned and tapped Quentin on the arm, and in that instant I thought I understood the tension in the room. Katherine and Quentin must be sleeping together, or they had, or they would – they had that slyness about them, and that set of shared gestures. I moved toward Walter. I had so much to say to him – everything that had happened while he was away, everything I'd thought about. All our history, which suddenly seemed worth preserving. ‘Dr Yu and her husband took such good care of me,' I said. ‘I had this fever …'

Walter smiled and nodded but made no move to touch me. ‘I heard,' he said. ‘I called the hospital every day.' He turned toward Dr Yu and said, ‘Really – I'm so grateful for your help.' Katherine dug in the suitcase I didn't recognize and passed a small package to Walter, which he offered to Dr Yu. ‘Please accept this token of my thanks,' he said.

Dr Yu moved forward reluctantly. ‘There is no need,' she said. ‘Your wife has been my close friend.'

‘Please,' Walter said. I was proud of him then, proud of his thoughtfulness. I prayed that he'd brought something useful and good – a cassette player, perhaps, or even something for Dr Yu's lab, a pH meter or a micropipette.

Dr Yu unwrapped the package slowly. Inside lay a black silk Qing-style jacket, with a mandarin collar closed by a red frog. The silk was coarse, the embroidery rough; the style was a crude imitation of an American's idea of imperial elegance. I had seen work like this at home, in shops that aped Uncle Owen's Oriental taste but couldn't tell good work from bad. Tired peddlers had hawked trays of these jackets to us at every tourist spot I'd been dragged to my first week.

‘Thank you,' Dr Yu said slowly. ‘That is most kind.'

‘Try it on,' Katherine said. Her voice was high and clipped.
Cream?
I could imagine her saying.
Weak or strong?
I saw her pouring at a proper tea, ironing sheets and storing them with lavender sachets. Her shoes were excellent, sturdy and expensive.

Dr Yu put the jacket on. The sleeves hung four inches below her fingers, and a chain of small white holes dotted the shoulder seam.

‘A little big,' Katherine said brightly. ‘But surely the sleeves can be hemmed. Any good seamstress …'

Dr Yu and I looked at each other, trying to shut out Katherine's voice. But Katherine seemed compelled to tell us how the jacket had been bought.

‘Xian,' she said. ‘What a place. Our hosts took us to the tomb of Qin Shihuang – you know the famous emperor? The one who built the Great Wall and buried all the pottery armies around him?'

Dr Yu and I nodded politely. Everyone had heard of the Xian tombs. Even us.

‘After we left the museum we got funneled through this market set up outside the exit. Two rows of stalls, us forced down the middle …' She smiled at Walter and Walter smiled back. Quentin made a face at his shoes. ‘Wasn't it amazing?' she said.

‘It was something,' Walter agreed. He wasn't looking at me.

‘Sort of third-world,' Katherine said. ‘We didn't expect it after the majesty of the tombs. These little boys kept plucking our sleeves and saying, “Hello, hello, lady hello, you buy?” and then pulling us over to their parents' stalls. And then they had all this stuff, pottery replicas of the buried soldiers and horses, and lapel pins and embroidered runners and carved jade and shoulder bags. Some people were selling fruit, and someone had home-made Popsicles – instant hepatitis, if you ask me – and a few people had some silk, and they were willing to bargain.'

Dr Yu had taken the jacket off and was rolling a corner of it between her fingers. ‘Yes,' she said quietly. ‘They would bargain. It's a poor city.'

My chest was hurting again and so was my head. I wanted Katherine to shut up, get out of my room, get out of my life. She went on talking.

‘So anyway,' she said, ‘Walter found this jacket and said it was just the thing for you, and so we bought it. And I bought one for myself, and then when we turned around we found Quentin surrounded by all these kids trying to sell him clay animals. He bought this whole flock before we could stop him. And then he had to leave them at the hotel because our baggage was overweight, which was too bad, really – they would have looked stunning on a mantelpiece.'

‘Oh, stunning,' Quentin said sarcastically. On the mantelpiece in Uncle Owen's house, the
netsuke
Dalton collected had been ranged in ordered rows.

Katherine paused to catch her breath, but it was easy to tell she had more to say, that she might go on forever. She spoke with the enthusiasm of someone just escaped from a cloistered life, as if everything she'd seen had printed itself on her eyes but hadn't made its way to her brain or her heart. I wondered how she'd lived her life.