Typical American (16 page)

Instead what occurred to him were ways of telling people off. It may seem to you that others are transfixed by the clarity of

your mind, but actually we are just afraid if you don't get your way you will cry. He liked that one. More often, though, the ideas that flocked to him lacked real sting. Your mother would be ashamed to see how mean you've become. Or, So you voted no, you have the brains of a dung fly, and what's more, you have no manners. It was less than satisfying; and yet as his due date neared he kept on, sometimes all night.

In your next life, I hope you are a sea clam.

For a break, he analyzed. At four in the morning, hunched over the kitchen table, he made lists. He listed all of his papers. He listed all of his papers graded as he thought the various committee members would grade them; he listed all of his papers with the grades they properly deserved. He listed the various committee members and what they thought of him. He listed the various committee members and what he thought of them. He listed which committee members he would've voted yes on if he had sat on their committees, noting that this list was remarkably similar to the list of committee members he had guessed would vote in his favor. He listed how many of those people were working feverishly on space. Sputnik! What trouble the Russians had made for him. And all this nonsense now about monkeys and rocket-powered airplanes. Weather satellites. Everyone was in love with the moon. Moon rockets! He wished he were a doctor, like his sister. What had happened in medicine since the polio vaccine? Nothing! He listed how many people knew anything about machine tools.

Why should I listen to you, with all that hair in your nose?

In the daytime, he continued to teach, and to grace meetings with his most authoritative manner, and to hold office hours. He continued to smile and nod agreeably when people spoke. "You're right! I agree one hundred percent." He strove to appear sure he would get tenure. When people asked how he thought the decision would go, he answered, "What decision ?" He was surprised how easy this was. He tried not to avoid any members of the committee, even if he thought they were going to vote

no. If anything, he was friendliest to them. How were their children, he asked, their wives?

No children? Not married?

Such stumbling was rare. Except that the world buzzed and that he shook all the time, he thought he was doing remarkably well. Who else could hear the world buzzing, after all? Every now and then, he would ask, casually, "Do you hear a buzz?" No one else could hear it. (Ting bu jian!) As for the shaking, he simply kept stones in his pockets — a rough one in the right pocket, a smooth one in the left. These he grasped, loads to dampen the vibration. He thought they must be working. No one said to him, "Ralph, you're shaking." They said only, "You must be nervous, with your decision coming up."

"What decision?"

May. Helen was deadheading the rhododendrons. Time to present his file to the department. At home, he was alarmed, picking it up, at how light it seemed — bodiless. He imagined the committee gathered around a scale, shaking their heads. Outside, though, as he loaded it into the car, he was surprised to feel a sudden surge of confidence. Maybe it was only that he had worried himself out. In any case, he felt the morning flow into his mind through his ears and nose and mouth, even through his eyes; and when he considered his box — that same too-light box of just minutes before — he believed, Yes, it would indeed be returned to him with congratulations. He could not lose his job, and with it, this solid house, with its ever-growing lawn and maturing ornamental shrubbery. He would not imagine it. What he imagined instead was handing his file to Old Chao, who told him, Don't worry. You'll get it.

Really?

Everyone agrees. We might not even bother to vote. The feeling's that unanimous.

Really?

But at school, Old Chao's office door was closed. Ralph could hear Old Chao talking to someone inside. He put his free hand

in his coat pocket, to weigh it down with the stone. Dampen the vibration. He decided to come back later.

No sooner had he settled into his own office, though, than he heard Old Chao's steps in the hall — a firm patter, deliberate, squeaky. He jumped up. Old Chao had just turned the corner at the far end of the corridor. Ralph hurried after him. As Old Chao was walking briskly himself, Ralph was not gaining ground. Should he run? Unprofessional. File in arms, Ralph chased Old Chao down another hall, then another, then another. They crossed a wing that the chemistry department had recently abandoned and headed toward a seldom-used lounge.

"An affair!" Ralph told Helen.

"Impossible" she said. "Chinese people don't do such things."

"Then Old Chao isn't Chinese anymore"

"You're surer

"I saw them"

"What did she look like*"

"Chinese."

"You're sure it wasn't Janisf"

"Skinnier. I couldn't quite see because the door swung shut. Also, I was so shocked, I dropped my file box."

"On the floor?"

"Papers everywhere."

"Ohhh-noo." Helen shook her head. "Were they doing any-thing?"

"Eating lunch. I saw them opening brown bags."

"I should tell Janis."

" 'Better to do nothing than to overdo,'" quoted Ralph. "Don't make trouble." He started a new list, What Old Chao's Affair Means.

i. May be preoccupied.

2. May be doing many things other people don't know.

3. May not be chairman forever.

May not be chairman forever. Was it possible? The very idea felt like a revelation of sorts.

"A Chinese woman" mused Helen.

Ralph started another list, What It Would Mean If Old Chao Were To Have To Resign In Shame.

i. Would never have to see Old Chao again.

What a prospect! Ralph felt so exhilarated that he immediately started a third list, What I Would Do If I Never Had To See Old Chao Again.

Miss him, Ralph thought, but he couldn't write that. "Someone Chinese!" Helen shook her head.

By the day of the decision, Ralph had talked himself out of wanting to be a professor anyway. First of all, he was not interested in engineering. Secondly, he was not interested in research. Thirdly, he was not interested in teaching. So why should he be a scholar? Just because Old Chao was? He decided that he would rather be a fireman. A funeral director, Anything that didn't require books, or a slide rule. What he'd give never to have to see a slide rule again for the rest of his life!

"You got it!"

Ralph was so surprised to hear Old Chao shout that he almost couldn't understand what his friend was saying.

"You got it! You got it!"

"Tenure f" The phone waves seemed to be generating a harmonic in his stomach.

"Tenure! You got it! Congratulations! With everyone going over to space, we really did need someone in straight mechanics."

Helen invited Old Chao and Janis over to celebrate.

"You know what Ym going to buy?" she told Ralph. "Cham : „ pagne!"

"What fun!" he enthused. "Great idea!"

The only wet firecracker was that Theresa couldn't come.

"Department dinner," she explained, as she and Helen put away dishes.

"So last-minute" Helen said.

Theresa fussed with a dish. "Well, you know" she said. "Typical American no-consideration-for-other-people."

"Maybe we can move the date. It's rude, hut — "

"Oh, nonono. Don't worry about it." Being tall, Theresa was in charge of the high shelves. Now she stretched, trying to make room for a large Pyrex casserole.

"I don't know if that's going to go," Helen warned.

"We//, it has to." Theresa tried to maneuver it in.

"We'll find another place for it."

"No, no. It'll go. It will."

"Don't worry about it."

Theresa set her jaw. "It'll go."

Helen peered at her carefully. "Are you tired?"

"Tired?"

"You seem a little

Theresa reorganized some other dishes.

"Just found out today, huh. About the meeting."

"That's right. Today."

"You didn't know until today?" asked Helen again.

"Why do you ask?" Theresa countered — casually, she hoped.

But as she spoke, the casserole tipped out of the cabinet and plummeted to the floor.

thing to keep to herself. Her hearing sharpened. A neighbor's screen door opened and clacked shut. A police car radio cackled raucously. Crickets. The month had been unusually wet; certain pools of water had reappeared so often on the driveway that Theresa actually recognized them now. Three larger ones, one smaller.

Ten-forty-five. Finally she snuck around to the front of the house, feet sinking in the soft dirt. Trying not to disturb the azaleas, she peeked in the dining room window. There they all were, a little round of people. Two couples, each half of a group. There being only four of them, the china matched. The chandelier glittered, its crystal teardrops like small golden suns. Would she never sit at a table like that? Everyone was leaning forward, toward one another; even Old Chao seemed to be enjoying himself hugely. Listening closely, Theresa could just make out his words as, his face bright with liquor, he repeated a joke she'd told him that afternoon. She waited for the punch line, her shoes growing soggy.

She ate lunch with Old Chao in the lounge. "They think we're having an affair."

He stroked her hand with his thumb. Back and forth.

"A rotten egg, my brother called me, to my face. 'Chinese people don't do such things/ he said."

"Did you tell them the truth?"

"I tried." She regarded her feet. "Anyway. What others think makes no difference to me one way or another. 'True gold does not fear fire/ right?"

So she said. And yet after three weeks of reprehension — Helen was short, Ralph cool, even the girls seemed wary of her — she began to feel her attitude weakening. Perceptions shaped her; proving her only human, a social being. She was disappointed to be misperceived, and more angered than ever — this time she could not box herself up — and these emotions opened others. Curiosity. Recklessness. For these she would not atone.

The censure of her family was like a hard shell under which she found a certain freedom. One day — after how long? — she finally let Old Chao kiss her. This brought pleasure. And with pleasure, its on-and-off companion, regret. All her years, it seemed to her now, she had stood against life. She had studied it; she had made forays into it; but mostly she had stood by while others braved the field. Did she love Old Chao? She didn't know how to love anyone — though she did believe he loved her, that he found her a doctor for his many ailments, both those he could name and those he could not. She believed he would go on as they had, indefinitely. Yet now, in repayment for his love, in hope of finding a return love for him, she allowed him more. Then more still, surprised at how soft his lips were as he pressed them up and down her neck. She was surprised that the wet point of his tongue at her ear could make her whole body shiver, as though with fever. The firmness of his touch surprised her too, and how many parts of her body could be cupped, and what bursting tenderness was this in her nipples? She found she liked roughness and gentleness both, and that kissing back made her tingle more; and that when the time to stop came, she ached. One day he eased her back until she was leaning on the arm of the sofa, and then he scooped her ankles up. She stiffened, afraid he was going to rape her. But he didn't rape her. He simply lay down, clothed, on top of her. She could feel his legs along the length of hers, how his continued on. He was heavy; she had to push her lungs to breathe. She filled her lungs, filled her lungs, and in her concentration, almost didn't notice that Old Chao had begun moving according to the rhythm she'd set. She would not part her legs; still he thrust, a throb against her, but pushing into bone. Was this desire? She felt his, but less of her own than she had sitting up; until, almost as she thought that, he eased his body lower. He wasn't moving against bone any more. Now she could feel him, a bulge like a pear. She relaxed, knowing it wrong to go on, but knowing it wrong, too, to stop him, to stop this rocking, rocking. She relaxed more, separating her legs ever

so slightly — allowing him. Now they fit together, now they were moving together, her whole body tightening, arching.

"What are you watching?" he whispered. "Don't watch."

"Am I watching?"

"You don't have to watch," he urged. "Nothing to watch."

She closed her eyes.

count so heavily that to say something has no relationship in Chinese — met guanxi — is to mean, often as not, it doesn't matter. In spread-out America, though, this loose-knit country, where one could do as one pleased, a person had need of a different understanding. Ralph needed to know what his limits were, and his impulses, what evil and what good he had it in his soul and hands to fashion.

Instead, he got mystery for his pains, more and more mystery. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. How could his own motoring heart, with its valves and pressure systems, turn out an unknowable thing? He had always understood the world to be only part engineering; he'd always understood there to be another, murkier sphere. But he had always pictured them as somehow adjoining. Organized. Earth and heaven. Down below, verities; up above, mist. How could it be that bright fact and cloudy mystery were actually all mixed up, helter-skelter, together? And in him! Even in his own breast, his own brain, just as in the chaotic world outside. Some days he saw mystery everywhere, in earthworms and holly trees and basset hounds, and the inexplicability of even the simplest life so angered and stupefied him that he almost resented any balancing elucidation. He did not care to know how many female holly trees a single male could bring to berry. He did not care to know the odds of a basset hound developing swayback, or by what process part of an earthworm could make itself whole.

Still, of their own accord — mysteriously! — certain realizations emerged, as if they too had a life, a schedule urging them into the realm of conscious knowledge. For instance, Ralph realized that if he had not called Grover, if he had not remembered the number, if no one had answered, he probably would not have landed up a pondering sort of person. If Helen or Theresa had walked into the room as he was talking, so that he had had to hang up, he probably would sit around less. His daughters would never have presented him with a copy of Calorie Counters, the 1-2-3 Way to an All-New You. If the telephone had not yet been invented, his sister would still be knocking at