Lucy was impressed. She had been taught that (non-crazy) people follow other people for one of two reasons: either they wish to know where the target is going and what she’s doing there, or they wish to find her in a vulnerable position, alone, for example, in the classic dark alley, and there do her mischief. In both cases, of course, the follower must be careful not to let the target know she is being followed, while the target should perform various maneuvers when she suspects she is, so as to break the follower from cover. This Lucy had just done, and the follower, spotted, had broken off his follow.
Or maybe not. Back on Broadway by this time, she waited until the light had just turned red against her and flew across the honking street and down into the Prince Street subway station. There she did the standard drill, waiting for a downtown train, boarding it, jumping off an instant before the doors closed. The platform was empty. She crossed to the other platform, waited for an uptown local, and took it to Eighth Street. From there she walked over to Washington Square and found a bench by the chess tables.
This park was, like many another in the city, a drug market and urban squalor demo. Around the noble arch, dingy and scrawled upon, a fake cake in the window of an unprosperous baker, bored Guatemalan nannies of bond trader/ad executives’ babies alternated with crack dealers, with their zoned-out clients, with bemused Asian architecture students, with kids from the Tisch School making videos about the collapse of civilization, the soundtrack provided by folk singers encouraging people to join the coal miners’ union, their warbles competing with a half dozen boom boxes blasting salsa, ska, punk, R amp;B, and heavy metal into the innocent green canopy, echoing back, mixing strangely, assaulting the ears of those who were not yet used to the love songs of the city, hardly disturbing the slumber of the bond trader/ad executives’ babies, as the Guatemalan nannies gently rocked them to whatever transient beat penetrated, their flat brown faces closed tight against America.
For Lucy, child of the city, all this was as a wheat field to a Kansas kid, an unremarkable background, against which only a few objects had any chance of standing out. A disheveled person holding an automatic weapon might engage her interest, for example, or the guy who had been following her. Meanwhile, she sat and read Claudine en Menage. It would be hard for anyone who has never been captivated by a fictional character to comprehend the depths of Lucy’s disappointment in Claudine, or to credit that the end of the second book in the series-in which Claudine agrees to marry a man old enough to be her father-had contributed considerably to the recent explosion with her mother. In one corner of her mind she had imagined (while understanding at some level the absurdity of the notion) that Claudine would marry Kim, and somehow combine a life of intimate sensuality with exotic adventures involving a large number of foreign languages.
Her devotion to the series was such, however, that she read grimly on, and after a while found some satisfaction in Claudine’s discovery that marriage to the old fart was not what she had expected, and increasing fascination in the prospect of her lesbian affair with the delicious Rezi. Naturally these juicy parts made her think of spinning it all out to her friends in the fur room, and the recollection that all that was lost forever, and probably her friends with it, pierced her heart anew, and the pages blurred.
She dabbed her eyes and then gasped, for standing right in front of her was the oriental man in the straw hat.
“You know,” he said in French, “it does little good to make your escape so brilliantly and then to come sit here all oblivious like an eggplant on a windowsill. Would you care for a peanut?”
She took one from the proffered bag, and he sat down next to her.
“How did you do that?” she asked grumpily. “I thought I got away clean on the subway.”
“So you did, but, as you are aware, my study of the secrets of the Orient has given me certain mystic powers far beyond your puny Western abilities.” With this he slitted his eyes mysteriously and waggled his thick eyebrows. This person, who called himself Tran Vinh Din, was a medium-sized Vietnamese of unprepossessing appearance, somewhat more than fifty years old, wiry of build, calm of demeanor. Except for the shallow dent in the side of his head and the scars on his hands and the oddly twisted fingernails, he looked like someone to whom nothing interesting had happened, a schoolteacher, say, or a cook in a noodle joint. In fact, he had been a schoolteacher and a cook in a noodle joint, but between those two occupations, in the years between 1954 and 1975, he had been a member, and eventually quite a senior member, of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, known inaccurately as the Viet Cong. After that he had been a political prisoner of the People’s Republic of Vietnam and after that a boat person and after that a fraudulent immigrant under his false name (a common enough story at the time in New York, save the Viet Cong part), and now was a sometime employee of Marlene Ciampi, as well as her daughter’s best friend over the age of thirteen.
“Merde,” responded Lucy with assurance and took a handful of nuts.
“So you respond with the word of Cambronne, and properly in this case. In fact, I meet you here entirely by accident, although you still should not have let me approach. I could have been two rough fellows with a big sack.”
“In full day in the middle of a crowded park?”
“Oh, yes, these chess players would have leaped to your defense, I have no doubt. Many unpleasant things may happen in the full light of day.”
She sighed, for this was familiar, and asked, “So, what are you doing here, Uncle Tran?”
He gestured with the bag. “I come for the peanuts. The man there on the corner sells freshly roasted ones, which I enjoy. So, truthfully, it was entirely happenstance that I found you here. What is that book in which you were so abandoned as to forget your caution? Hm! A fine writer, but with no political ideas, mere decadent sensuality; also, that is not her best work. Yet, in any case, it is better than condescending oriental fantasies by Kipling.”
“I like oriental fantasies, and I don’t care about condescending. Everyone condescends to someone. What I would really like is an oriental fantasy with decadent sensuality.”
“I’m sure, but then you would have something like Ouida, unreadable even by your deplorable standards. What is going on between you and your mother?”
An old interrogator’s trick, slipping the zinger in among trivialities, but it struck. Lucy flushed and said, “Nothing.”
“Not nothing,” said Tran, “a great deal, I think. Will you tell me about it? No? Then I will have to use my mystical oriental arts. First, you have been angry and sullen with your mother for some time. Americans tolerate this in their children, as I have observed on the television, and it is of no consequence-fireworks on Tet, as we say: boom, boom, and it passes, leaving everything as before. But today it is much worse. Your mother visited the Chens yesterday and was turned away, quite properly, but on hearing of it, you attack her with your tongue. Also, I find you alone and aimlessly wandering instead of plotting outrages with your two friends. The two events are connected, isn’t it so?”
“She ruined my life,” Lucy mumbled, staring down at a smear of old gum on the pavement between her sneakers. “I’ll never be able to go to the Chens anymore-”
“What, because you think your mother has lost face and you have to because she is your mother? This is absurd. You have done nothing improper, and in this case your duty is to go to them like a good foster child and offer support. As for what your mother did, it never happened. No one pays any attention to your mother, except as they do to a thunderstorm or an earthquake.”