“Where are you calling from?” I closed my eyes and managed to slide my body down into a sitting position on the floor, my back resting against the under-the-sink cabinet.
“Home. Listen, Sa”—lowering her voice—“I have to ask you a favor.”
“Would you please speak up?”
“I’ll try, but Ma’s out in the hall and I don’t want her to hear.”
“Okay, okay, what.”
“Can you lend me some money?”
“How much?”
“A thousand.”
“No way.”
“Please, Sa. It’s just to help me put down a security deposit and the first month’s rent. I’ll pay you back by the end of this year, I promise.”
“What happened to Dennis?”
“Are you going to lend me the money or not?”
“I can’t think now, Mar, I’m sick. Could you please call back later?”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Just later.” I hung up, opened the refrigerator, and got out a bottle of club soda, which I finished off in one gulp. My stomach roiled. I forced myself to my feet and hung over the sink, waiting. Nothing. Finally I went back to bed.
My sister had never hit me up like that before, she must be desperate. Maybe I’d give her five hundred. It was all I could spare, and not even that really. Why hadn’t she asked Ma for a loan? I’d call her tomorrow, when I felt human.
I lay back and shut my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. I remembered Carey’s arm around me. Fran rubbing my back in the bathroom. Valeric doing the same in the emergency room.
This was my dream: I was skiing with Carey, or rather, he was doing the skiing, and I was following behind him, no poles, my arms wrapped around his waist, as if we were on a motorcycle. My ex-husband’s body shielded me from the wind and snow. There were no decisions to make, nothing to do but follow. After a while I realized that we were going to crash and I tried to extricate myself, but it was as if my arms were glued in place. Don’t, I tried to say, but I couldn’t speak, and we kept going, down, down. Then the dream changed. I was a little girl in Monterey, walking around the grass in the backyard. I kept falling. Every time I did, someone would pick me up by the shoulders, setting me back on my feet. All around us was the smell of jasmine.
25
The fallout from the party was not as bad as I’d expected. Fran called that evening from Boston to make sure I was okay, and told me that Charlie had asked Alicia for my phone number. Later in the week I got a message from Carey saying it had been good to see me, why didn’t we meet for drinks at the Brown Club sometime. I thought this was a good idea. There was a lot we needed to talk about.
My hangover lasted for two days. There are lots of things you can’t do well when you have a hangover, but painting isn’t one of them. Artist friends of mine tell me they sometimes do their best work when physically compromised—with a fever, for instance. It’s like the defenses are down. On the second day I got up and opened all my reds—cadmium, crimson, scarlet, rose madder, burgundy, geranium, ruby. I flipped through my sketchbook and studied the automatic drawings I had done in the hospital and St. Pete, and then I started to work.
Like my drawing at Willowbridge it came out fast and completely abstract. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. The background a silver-gray wash and on top of that incomprehensible graffiti that spelled out nothing, not even letters, most of the strokes slashing diagonally down, so that your heart would go the same direction when you looked. I’d been taught to be careful with red. The color called attention to itself, eclipsed all others, so that you had to use it sparingly. I wasn’t sparing. I tacked up a second canvas and tried again, without the background, for the shock of it on bright cool white.
I would have used my own blood if it weren’t for the limited supply and the fact that it did not dry true to color.
By the end of the day my studio looked like a massacre had taken place. I had to turn the canvases to the wall so that I could sleep.
“Aunty Winnie says she looks forward to see you at wedding,” my mother said on the phone.
“I don’t know if I’m going.”
“How come you don’t go? Such an old childhood friend.”
“Look, I’ll think about it, okay?”
And I did. Sitting on the floor of my studio with the sun pouring in, I decided, what the hell. But first I had to get back into my life. Slowly, Sally, I told myself.
“Why do you think she keeps calling you?” Valerie asked.
“Control, of course. She wants to keep tabs on me now.”
“Why now?”
“Before I wasn’t dangerous. Now she knows I could hurt her. I could tell everyone the truth about my father.”
“And?”
“If I tell the truth about Monkey King, I tell the truth about her.”
“And what truth is that?”
“She let it happen.”
“Yes. She let it happen.” Valerie leaned forward, her chin in her hands.
“She was a failure,” I said.
“As what?”
“As a mother.”
“What else?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What else was she a failure at?”
“Is this a trick question?”
“Wasn’t she a failure as a wife?”
“Oh.”
“Think about it.”
Why was everyone always telling me to think about things? “I guess so,” I said. “But why did she stay with him then?”
“Why do you think?”
“She thinks the ancestors will curse you if you get a divorce. She was afraid, I guess.”
I wrote out a check for five hundred dollars to my sister, put “Loan” in the memo section, and mailed it to Woodside Avenue, with MS. MARTHA WANG in block letters so Ma wouldn’t open the envelope. I didn’t know why I did it. It wasn’t like I owed her anything. But she was my sister, after all.
A few days later Marty called. She didn’t mention the money.
“I’m coming into the city tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s have lunch. My treat.”
“Where?”
“You live near Chinatown, don’t you?”
“Fine with me.”
“Good,” she said, sounding like a little kid. “We’ll have bao zi.”
I went down early so I could stop at Pearl Paint beforehand. Since I’d gotten back I’d been deliberately avoiding it, but Pearl was the best and cheapest in Manhattan for art supplies, so I guessed sooner was better than later. I was apprehensive. What if back in February they’d caught me on tape walking out of the store with a bulge in my parka, or worse, actually slipping the tubes of paint into my pocket? When it came right down to it, I didn’t have my sister’s nerve. I put on the largest sunglasses I owned and the red lipstick I’d bought for pool nights, tied my hair up in an uncharacteristically high pony-tail. We all have our ways of courting luck, although maybe this was more of a disguise.
I needed brushes, not beautiful calligraphy ones like my uncle and aunt had given me, but the cheapest kind of oil brushes, which I could abuse and leave paint on overnight. I was going through a sloppy stage, working until the small hours of the morning, when I was too exhausted to clean up. There were piles of red-stained rags all over my studio, and it seemed I could never get my hands completely clean. By then there was no doubt in my mind that what I was doing was calligraphy. Sometimes when I squinted my eyes I could make out familiar characters from Chinese class I thought I had forgotten. The stocky pitchfork strokes of the word for mountain, the delicate voluptuous curves of the word for heart.
Nothing happened at Pearl. I just walked in and up those precarious stairs like millions of others before me, chose my brushes, paid, and left. The saleswoman didn’t even meet my eyes. The whole time my pulse was rabbiting as crazily as it had the last time I’d been there. As soon as I got outside I felt my knees buckle, and I had to go into a coffee shop so I could sit down and have a cup of tea.