At lunchtime my aunt would take over. I’d pack a beach bag and go sit on the front curb to wait for Mel. The second time we’d snuck into the Don Ce Sar they’d really given us the hairy eyeball, so we’d started going to the public beach farther down the coast. We’d sun for an hour or two and then hightail it to the condo, grabbing a bite on the way—Denny’s, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, it didn’t matter to us—and spend the afternoon in bed. Each time I came it was like a little of Monkey King was blotted away. Something that had never happened with Carey. “What was it like with your husband?” Mel asked me, and I had to answer: “He was rough.”
“No wonder,” Mel said.
“I wasn’t really there,” I said.
Mel was very good at me, but I did my own studying. The first time I made him come in my mouth his fingernails on my wrist drew blood. The feeling of power this gave me was unexpected, and I was careful with it, as I would have been with any new responsibility.
At dusk we’d get up to take the friend’s canoe out on the lagoon. There were alligator warnings posted, and though it seemed to me that they must be more day creatures than night, I avoided trailing my fingers in the still water. Worse than possible alligators was the real presence of gnats and mosquitoes, which had mutated to monster proportions in this climate, as well as those strange squishy bugs I’d noticed when I was mowing the lawn. At the Cumberland Farms next to the gas station we purchased Deep Woods Off! and rubbed it all over each other’s exposed parts.
Mel and I took turns steering. It was easy to catch a paddle in the murky weeds, or run aground in unexpected shallows, especially when dark had fallen completely and we were traveling only by starlight and moonlight, but we weren’t headed anywhere in particular, and since there was no current, there was no danger. Mostly we just drifted, drinking the bottled Cokes we’d gotten addicted to—I could swear Coke was sweeter in the South—and talk and smoke. Sometimes we’d mix rum in with the Coke.
“You have the sexiest fingers,” Mel said once, when we were passing the bottle.
“My piano teacher used to say I had the widest hand span of any child she’d ever taught.”
“I didn’t know you played the piano.”
“Badly.”
I told him about the after-dinner recitals where Mimi sang Chinese love songs in a piercing falsetto. Xiao Lu, who was studying the violin, had a repertoire of fancy pieces, starting with “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” which I suspected he played much more slowly than he was supposed to, so he would be sure not to make any mistakes. A lot of the music was modern, so that it was hard to tell if he was making a mistake at all if you didn’t watch Aunty Winnie’s face.
I never played as well as I did when I was alone, and I didn’t dare look up for fear of meeting the frozen polite expressions of the guests. What were they really thinking? Unlike Xiao Lu, I played faster than I was supposed to, to get it over with. Afterward there was always a surprised silence, as if the audience hadn’t really expected it to end. “So good, so good,” the grown-ups would murmur, and my mother’s voice would rise over them all—“Oh, no, she’s terrible, really.”
After me came my sister, the comic relief. She’d announce her piece—“Indian War Dance”—and then pound it out as forcefully as possible. The applause for her was more enthusiastic. “She doesn’t practice” was my mother’s only comment on Marty, as if that were the only reason she wasn’t a musical genius.
The only guest who seemed to prefer my playing to Marty’s was Mr. Lin, a friend of Daddy’s who lived by himself in the top floor of a rickety house in a bad neighborhood downtown. Mr. Lin was an artist who had been chased out by the Communists. Ma said he was too sad to paint anymore.
Once Mr. Lin took our family to an exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting at Yale. “Which one you like best?” he asked my sister and me. Marty chose a cat chasing a butterfly. I looked awhile, and then selected a very long horizontal painting of grasses bent by the wind. “Why you like?” he asked me.
“It looks like writing.”
“Pau-yu, your elder daughter has the heart of the philosophers,” Mr. Lin said.
One afternoon Mel said he was going to make me lasagna with white sauce. “White?” I asked.
“Northern,” he told me. “At my dad’s restaurant they don’t serve anything else.”
We went to the Winn-Dixie and Mel fretted over their selection of olive oils and ricotta. Then he banned me from the kitchen and I curled up on the brown dog-smelling couch to sip Chianti and watch the six o’clock local news, which had replaced talk shows as my new addiction.
“God, that’s so much food,” I said when it was all laid out.
“Well, you ought to eat. My mom would faint if she saw you.”
Besides lasagna, there was pompano fried in beautiful little crisps and risotto and a salad with three kinds of lettuce and, of course, garlic bread. Zabaglione for dessert. Espresso, black and unnervingly strong.
Mel came over to my side of the table, knelt down, and lifted up my shirt. “Hmm. Looks like an expansion of at least three belt holes.”
“That tickles.”
“What are the chances of your staying the night?”
“I don’t know. I think I better go back.”
“You sure?”
“Don’t you think we should do the dishes? Or maybe I should, since you cooked.”
“Should you?” He slid his hand up the leg of my shorts and stroked. “Did you know that garlic is considered an aphrodisiac?”
On the stereo Eric Clapton was playing the blues.
I thought of plausible lies to tell Aunty Mabel.
We stuck one of the candles we’d bought at the Winn-Dixie into the empty Chianti bottle. It was a cliche, but like many cliches I’d never had a chance to try it.
“It isn’t going to work, you know,” I said to Mel. He was inside me but we weren’t moving, he was blowing on the little hairs that grew along my temples, the ones Marty used to call sideburns when she was making fun of me.
“Who said anything about work? We’re screwing, honey.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, okay, I know what you mean.”
“What about your girlfriend? The one with the rabbit coat?”
“Bethie? She’s history.”
“But there must be others.”
“Christ, Sally, you really know how to kill a mood.”
“Sorry.”
“And you’re not concentrating. Concentrate on this.” He began again, and I forgot what more I was going to say.
Afterward he whispered, “I’ll miss you, you know.”
“That’s what you said at Willowridge. That time in the kitchen.”
“Well it was true then. And it’s true now.”
I didn’t tell him that what had kicked me into coming this time was my father’s face above me in the dark, his straining Monkey King scowl. And he stayed, that ghost, in the bed with us. As Mel twitched into sleep I lay there counting each breath in, each breath out.
I was awake at dawn and drawing. I hadn’t brought my pad with me but managed to find an old composition book in a desk drawer and took the liberty of ripping out several blank pages. Mel found me at the kitchen table bearing down so hard I’d torn holes in the paper.
“Hey, hey,” he said, his voice husky with sleep.
I stopped and looked down at what I was doing. It was stupid and crude. “Okay,” I said and ripped the page up into the smallest pieces I could and brushed them off the table so they snowed onto the linoleum. The gesture was familiar but I couldn’t remember why.