Typical American (17 page)

the door when she heard him sneeze. Why did he call? Before he made that call, he would have said he was a man who aspired to peace, and rest. Before he made it, he would have said that he yearned for a larger tenure than any department could grant; to go with his professional tenure, a sort of life tenure. He wanted simply to stay put. No more scrambling! He wanted to laze away the afternoon at a dumpling house, sip plum juice by a green pond flickering with orange-and-white carp. Or, well, he would have settled for iced tea, anyway, by a crabgrass-free lawn with a sprinkler leaning one direction, then the other, charmingly indecisive. Hadn't he once wished, achingly, ardently, only that no revolution should ever take his wife from him?

But then he took his own wife, his own family, his job, his house, and gambled as though they were nothing to him, as though his whole life were nothing to him — as though, indeed, his whole life weren't his. What sort of thing was that for his father's son to do? So reckless! He hadn't done anything so completely wrong since he fell in love with Cammy; didn't that seem like a lifetime ago now. And yet, that lifetime was a kind of scale model for what followed. He saw that. He saw how then, as later, he strode away from his family, only to discover that he could not return. He saw how he had hated his father and sister both. If only he had known how to at once hate and love them! If only he had been capable of more than nostalgia!

A chastened man, an older man, he remembered:

All summer, to begin with, he felt elated. The department had approved his tenure, the College of Engineering had approved it, the university had approved it. He took the family to a picnic of the Society of Chinese Engineers — something he'd always avoided before — and ate tea eggs. He played horseshoes. He laughed at the jokes and swore at the mosquitoes and liked everyone. Everyone! Some people talked of nothing but China; others of nothing but America. Some had houses, some didn't. Some spoke Shanghainese. Ralph listened to them all whether he understood their dialect or not.

Then he went on vacation. It was the first vacation he had

taken since coming to America, and he felt as though he had discovered the whole idea of an earth that from time to time nestled closer to the sun, as though the pleasures of a cottage, a seafood shack, a bluff high above the water, of children flapping their ball-and-stick arms at curtain-winged gulls, all began in him, all grew out of his tremendous accomplishment. He felt a secret kinship with the ocean. Mornings, he would stand mid-thigh in the surf and feel he understood its power, that he understood greatness — that he was neither fooled by its easy majesty nor afraid of its violence. He still did not know how to swim, but that summer he taught himself how to float on his back; he spent so much time rocking in the water, feeling the swells pass under him like wheels in endless travel, rolling and rolling, that he turned brown as a peasant. On just one side — Helen and Theresa, huddled in long-sleeved shirts and polka-dot sun hats under the additional shade of a beach umbrella, laughed at him. They called him half-cooked, half-black, half-and-half. A mix-up. An open-faced sandwich. He didn't mind. He taught Mona and Callie to float too; all three of them bobbed out there like rafts, together. Also he taught the girls how to make their sand castles more realistic (down along the moats they put in windows for a boiler room), and when he got home he announced he was going to teach Helen and Theresa to drive.

"To drive?" At first they didn't know what to think. Then they were excited and anxious to prove fast learners.

"Don't watch the houses/' Ralph told Helen. "Pay attention to where you're headed."

"Stay in your lane," he lectured Theresa. "Watch you don't get yourself killed."

He taught proudly, like a great professor, a professor everyone agreed deserved his tenure. When they did well, he praised them. When they did poorly, he encouraged them to do better. That summer he taught a neighbor how to change the stresses on his garage frame so the door wouldn't stick. He taught the newspaper boy a way of folding the paper so that it wouldn't unroll

when he threw it. He taught Callie that when she added, she should stack the numbers one on top of the other. He taught Mona that she should always hold books right side up.

Then September, time to teach some more. His very first class with tenure, due to a shortage of space, was in a tower. A tiny room, with exposed pipes. How could it be? So high up, and yet the room was like a basement. Halfway through his opening remarks, he found himself figuring from the way the pipes ran that there was a bathroom upstairs. A bathroom in a tower? An odd design, a bad design. And at the end of class, more bad design — he discovered that it was hard to get out of the tower. The stairs were so narrow, that with more students coming up, his had to file down one at a time. They waited patiently in the doorway, like a pool of backed-up water. It seemed to Ralph that there was no air in the room. And wasn't it hot? He wanted to ask one of the students, a pallid twitch of a boy, if it was hot. But instead he asked, "Are you on so-called engineering track?" If you are, get off! he wanted to say. Of course, he didn't. He mopped his brow as he signed the boy's slip. Another slip. Humid too, he thought. Wasn't it? As the professor, he was the last one down the stairs. How glad to escape! How relieved to see the open (if stony) sky! And how chagrined to discover, squinting at his schedule in the breezeway, that for his next class he had that same room again. What a semester it was going to be! All he could think of, as he headed back in, was what his father used to say about people lost in narrow, deadend specialties — that they had crawled into the tip of a bull's horn.

Now he stared once again at the pale green pipes. He stared at the students; this fresh batch looked suspiciously like the one that had just left. Doubts thronged him. Should he have gone into space research after all? Maybe he should have gone to work for a firm. He heard himself droning. The first day of a new school year, and already everything seemed old.

The pipes, he noticed, shaded to powdery gray on top — dust.

"Excuse me, Professor Chang, could you repeat your office hours?"

Professor Chang. That still gave him a lift. He, Ralph Chang, a professor! And now, with tenure. He obligingly repeated his office hours, throwing in his office address for good measure, as a way of reminding himself that he had a nice new half office, with a window. Tenure. What a pulse-quickening idea to the nontenured! Too bad, though, that he was going to have to live down the hall from Old Chao for the rest of his life. Clear from China they'd come, a whole country to settle in; who could believe they'd find themselves sharing a soda machine? Every time Ralph saw Old Chao, he seemed to be orbiting the halls over his ever more significant findings. Maybe he was just trying to steer the conversation away from Theresa. Still — while Old Chao worked on turbulence, Ralph lectured on about all that had been exciting and important and new in the nineteenth century. Gears. Stresses. Torques.

"Excuse me, Professor Chang? Could you repeat..."

Could he. A good question. And how many times?

Dust on the pipes!

On the way home, although the sky had sobered to a duty-stiff gray, Ralph decided to put the top of his car down. As he hadn't done this in a long while (the mechanism had grown cranky with age), it excited him. The street busde excited him too, as he drove, and though he could feel the damp grit of the city lodging in his skin and clothes — mister, it was great to be out and around! If his job was the dead-end tip of a bull's horn, the city was the bull. So giant! So clangorous — such screeching, rumbling, blaring, banging! Such hiss! Everything buzzed, in a blink things changed, the mind boggled at the striving that went on in a single block. So much ambition! No equation could begin to describe it all. So many people, aiming to do so many things besides lecture about crack stress to blinking undergraduates, that after five minutes he found himself gratefully focusing on

the red light in front of him, a headache coming on. He helmeted himself in abstractions. The greatness of America! he thought. Freedom and justice for all! The light changed. It began to drizzle. Now he noticed how bedraggled some of the men looked up close. Some of the women too, but mostly he noticed the men, how they hunched their shoulders, how they stood their short collars against the fine lines of rain. One tattered fellow collapsed in a doorway. He had a brown knit cap pulled all the way down over his eyes and nose; his jaws chattered uncontrollably.

Ralph drove on, feeling his good fortune. Freedom and justice for all, the greatness of America, but a man living in a country sending satellites into space could still land up a heap in a doorway. How was that? He genuinely wondered, even as he estimated himself to fall in the top twenty percent of the general population, careerwise. He felt himself to know things that other people didn't, that he could tell just by looking who was going up, who was going down, who was suffering through. At each stoplight, his gaze would light on someone — a brooding beatnik, a determined shopper — and he would have to fight down an urge to shout that he saw them. He saw them! The fine lines of rain had thickened, but he didn't want to stop to put the roof up; and so he didn't, even when his car hood began to drum loudly. Afraid of a little water? Not him.

A downpour. Still he drove. People on the sidewalks were holding newspapers over their heads, like little roofs. He turned onto the highway, speeding away from the city. Though his clothes were soaking through, though water whipped the back of his neck, though his face dripped, he continued his escape from the classroom out to the suburbs, land of greater promise.

Only to discover, as he approached, that the towns seemed box-like, and overtidy. He disliked their small-change sense of order. When he slowed, he saw that people took notice of him driving in the rain with the top down. This made him uncomfortable enough that finally, before he came to the many-eyed

cluster of shops closest to his house, he stopped by the reservoir to put the top back up. How wet everything was! The seats were soggy; his leather briefcase had dulled and darkened; there was a pool in each of the four footwells of the floor. He yanked at the roof. Water piped out from the accordion folds. The mechanism was stiff; between the wet vinyl and his raw hands, he could only get it to straighten halfway before it stuck. Struggling, he pinched a finger, which bled pink in the rain. He gave up. But then he couldn't get the roof to fold back down, either. Pull as he might, it remained a luminous rising in the twilit air, like a stairway to nowhere, or the headless incarnation of a jack-in-the-box.

Could he drive the car like that? Would the wind snap the roof off? What Ralph needed was an oil can — which, of course, if he did things the right way, he would have. Anyway, he decided to walk home and get one; it wasn't far, if he cut through the woods. He was wearing his good shoes, it was true, but he didn't care. So he reported to class in ruined shoes, so what? What would Old Chao do if he saw them, hit the roof on his way into outer space?

Though it was almost dark, he could see pretty well by the light reflected off the reservoir. When he turned away from the water, though, he was surprised how much darker it got.

Creaking.

He'd taken the girls on this path before. Buddied up to the other side of the reservoir was a small hill, where children went sledding in the winter. But how different the path was without snow! With snow, it was level. Now it was treacherous with tree roots. His feet turned capricious, slipping off at odd angles. Sometimes a heel would touch ground first, other times it would be a toe, or an arch. His weight was always in the wrong place, every step such a jolt that after a while he found himself feeling his way forward, not picking his feet up at all. He told himself, They're opportunities, those trees, every one of them. Opportunities for what, though? Paper. Houses. It was such hard work

to imagine houses here that the idea of them became itself a kind of roof, with walls. How dangerous could these woods be, anyway? He was no more than a quarter of a mile from the road, he figured; it only seemed more. How had it gotten so black out? His own two hands at arm's length looked menacing. He tried to remember what he'd heard, once, about attacks in these woods.

Attacks of what?

Heart attacks, he joked to himself.

Was that a rustle?

He stopped. In the distance he could hear the whhuz-whhuz of cars; nearer in, the pt-pt-pt of the rain. The rain was abating. Good, he'd had enough of being undaunted by water. He started moving again.

That was a rustle.

He froze.

He never did find out what it was, that black swaying in the all-but-black path. It might have been a dog, or a raccoon, or an opossum, or a skunk, or a porcupine, or it might have been something more dangerous. Whatever it was, it stopped dead silent in front of him. Ralph pictured teeth. His heart kicked. What now? A breeze picked up; burdened leaves poured their watery hearts out to him as he tried to xiang banfa — to think of a way out of his predicament.

Another rusde.

He considered climbing a tree.

Above him, the sky seemed to lighten.

Then, as the animal lumbered away, a sudden white glare switched on full in his face, shocking as a blow; the moon loomed so low and large that it almost seemed to have abandoned the sky for a roll on the field just ahead of him. He dazedly blinked. Before him now lay the path, illumined; and when he turned, he saw that the world that had been darkness was returned to him, magnificent in deep blues and grays and black, streaked gold. Enormous clouds were blowing by, a spectral procession.

What had he done, to be delivered out of every trouble? No matter. In the elegant way of innocent men, he accepted his gift graciously. He felt how his suit hung on him, sodden and heavy; still, he was happy. Stars were coming out — now one, now two, now three — for him. He remembered: If you don't get out for a spin every now and then, you forget all about them. Anything is possible. A man is what he makes up his mind to be.