“I’m sorry, Aunty Mabel.”
“Sorry? Why be sorry? True, she’s not like my baby sister anymore. Doesn’t need me now. Your Nai-nai comes up from San Diego on the bus. A lot of hair, she says. It’s a good sign. But I am so stupid, I almost lost my job. I got back to the house and remember I must call New York, my boss. So I do. My boss asks me, How is your mother? and I say everything is all right, my mother is going to live, we are all very happy.”
Uncle Richard came to the airport to see me off, sitting by himself in the backseat like the wooden laughing Buddha my parents had brought back from Taiwan, making comments on the roads, how all the repair work they’d been doing hadn’t helped the traffic any. We were barely in time, and as we rushed toward the boarding gate, my uncle pressed something folded into my palm. “For good luck, eh? No, no, don’t open now.” I tucked it into the pocket of my jeans, having already caught a glimpse of Ben Franklin.
“G’bye, Slim,” my uncle said, laughing at his own joke. “I think I start calling your aunt that too.”
All of a sudden I couldn’t think of anything to say, and there was no more time. “Xie xie,” I said. “Zai jen.” Not adieu, but au revoir, see you again. All languages make that distinction.
“You hear,” Uncle Richard said to my aunt. “She has northern accent, just like her ba-ba.”
Part Four
23
At La Guardia I decided to treat myself to a cab, although I had hardly any luggage, just the black bag. I contemplated what I was returning to: clustering traffic, glowering skyline, the nervy discontented hum of the city and its denizens. How had my Aunty Mabel felt, landing here alone for the first time, the phone number of a friend of Nai-nai’s tucked into the flap of her purse, on her way to Penn Station to take the train to Long Island for her job interview? I could feel my own adrenaline as we pulled onto the FDR Drive.
My street was deserted and creepy, I’d forgotten the cracked sidewalks, the stairwell of my building shabbier than I’d remembered, with its worn marble steps and peeling black-and-white honeycomb wallpaper. I could smell acrylic fumes from the loft of the other artist, a sculptor, who lived on the first floor. When I’d undone all three of my locks, including the police one, and swung open the heavy steel door, I saw a space that was plain, even homely, smaller than I’d remembered, but in some ineffable way soothing to my soul. I’d painted the walls of my studio stark white and hung them with only Japanese prints and a blotchy green and violet painting I’d been working on before I left. Somewhere in the still, stale air, beyond the first whiff, I could smell that blend of turpentine and linseed oil that used to intoxicate me.
I walked over to the north bank of windows, lifted away the dusty sheet, and looped it around the nail I’d fixed to the wall for that purpose. Across the street two men were in a huddle in front of the candy store. A young Hispanic woman strolled by in heels and purple spandex, walking an old English sheepdog, and they both turned to look. I shoved one of the windows up as far as it would go and New York blew in. Exhaust, warm pavement, and weeds from Tompkins Square Park.
There were three phone messages. The first one was from my old boss—“Sally, please call me as soon as possible, I have an offer I think you’d be interested in.” The second was from my sister. “Sa, are you there? Call me, I’m at home.” The tinny girl voice on the last message I didn’t recognize right away. “Hey there. Thought I’d give you a try. I’m out in the real world, sort of, at the place I was last winter. Things are going okay, though I wouldn’t wish my last stay at State on my worst enemy. Although I’m the first to admit that I might be my own worst enemy. Okay, guess you’re not there. I’ll try you again sometime.” She didn’t leave a number. I wonder if Mel had beat me up north, as he’d boasted he would, whether he had dropped by to see her on his way home. On the tape Lillith sounded almost normal, as she had on her best days in the hospital.
I took one of the jam jars out of my bag and went downstairs and knocked on the door of the sculptor, whom I’d asked to collect my mail while I was gone. “You been to the Caribbean or something?” he asked, referring to my tan. I told him Florida. “Well, your timing was good,” he said. “At the end of March they turned the heat off for two weeks and of course we had that record cold spell. And the water pressure’s been completely fucked up, although at least it’s hot now.” I could tell he wanted to get back to work and I didn’t exactly feel like having a long conversation so I asked him for my mail. He handed me a shopping bag of what looked like mostly junk. I gave him the jam as a thank-you and went back upstairs.
The water pressure, as the sculptor had warned me, was not what it used to be, and while I waited for the rust to run out of the kitchen tap I put on a tape of Chopin scherzos. Fran used to say that the scherzos reminded her of cats chasing each other over a bare floor. She wasn’t too fond of the recording I had, according to her the pianist was a little too showy, but I had always loved it. I put on water for tea and lay down on my floor mattress and listened until the kettle shrilled.
I’d left when it was bitter cold, and now I needed to figure out where I’d stored my fans. As I drank my tea without honey I noticed a sheet of memo paper taped to the refrigerator. I had to squint to make out my tiny sick scrawclass="underline"
join gym
eat better
find out specs for group show
call Reik center and get therapist?
I had accomplished none of these things. I ripped the paper off the fridge, turned it over, and made a new list in bold handwriting:
call people
call work
groceries
drugstore
My mail contained threatening notices from Con Ed and the phone company, but nothing from my landlord—I’d kept up with my rent at least. There was an enormous square envelope of heavy stationery that looked like a valentine—I could see that the card inside was red. It was, of all things, a wedding invitation. Silver curlicues on crimson:
Mr. and Mrs. Winston Woo request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Grace Loo-yi to Mr. Jian Lu.
Good God, Xiao Lu was getting married. Wimpy Xiao Lu who had once eaten an inchworm and two ants under the threat of being hung upside down by his ankles from the top bar of our swing set. Who was this girl who was willing to spend the rest of her life with him? A sweet one, for sure. Sweet as pie. One who wouldn’t laugh when he screwed up his face before bursting into tears, that is, if he still burst into tears.
I felt a pang of jealousy.
Marty wasn’t home. “She go back to New York for a couple of days,” Ma told me, but when I called the old number, there was no answer. “When you coming to New Haven?” my mother asked, and I told her I’d be there for my appointment with Valeric the day after tomorrow. “Good,” Ma said. “You come over afterward. I make special birthday dinner for you and your sister.”
On the phone I told my boss a little about what had happened, using the term nervous breakdown, although I didn’t mention Willowridge. She asked me how I felt now.
“Better,” I said.
“Well, since you left things have been exploding around here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t talk. Let’s meet for lunch.”
At O’Neal’s, two blocks from the office and exactly the kind of cavernous noisy New York restaurant I hated, she told me that the agency was in the process of being acquired yet again. She had decided to leave and start her own company. “I found a space in SoHo. Two thousand square feet, northeastern light, all the fixtures in. I already have a couple of accounts lined up.” She told me what they were and I knew I was meant to be impressed, so I said I was. The truth was I felt distanced from all that shop talk. Why was she persisting in treating me as if I were still Sally Wang-Acheson, senior art director? That person she thinks she’s talking to must have been good, I thought. She must have been something.