“She’s afraid of him,” Maggie countered. “More than she should be, I think, but she is. She’s taken that fear in. She’s holding it dear.” Like I did, with my grief, all last year. “She can’t approach him. Somebody needs to intervene.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“You telling him what’s up with his responsibilities, that’s what. Only a man can do it. And a lawyer. In twenty minutes you could talk some sense into his head.”
“I’m still not sure it’s our province.”
“If I pay you by the hour and ask you to do it, will it be our province?”
He raised his hands. “Okay. I get it. Okay.”
She and Zinnia traded glances of satisfaction.
“But get the test back. Okay? Call me. Call anytime.” Then he gave his wicked smile. “Because as you know I’m up until all hours.”
At lunchtime Maggie stopped at a Chongqing-style Sichuan restaurant, and ordered savory, chewy strips of eel fillet cooked with pungent shreds of pepper and soft whole braised garlic cloves. As soon as she tasted it she knew she would not be able to stop eating it, and so she continued to pluck up the succulent bits until she had eaten most of what was on the plate. While she ate, she let her mind go. She thought about what had been wrong in her life, what had been right. Matt had been right. She still felt that way, even now, after Gao Lan. So he had slipped. She also knew he must have suffered for it. Nothing burdened Matt more than a confession unmade. Poor soul. She suddenly wished that he had told her while he was alive so she could have forgiven him. She would have forgiven him, just as she forgave him now. Their love had been greater than one mistake.
She remembered the day a month or two before he died when they were both getting ready to leave again on their trips. Usually they looked forward to their travel. On this day, though, she woke up knowing that she did not want to be away from him. She did not feel the customary pull to her freedom, to their separation, to a quiet, private house or a hotel room. She wished they could both stay home.
There were no presentiments. She had not the remotest inkling of the fate that would take him a few weeks later. She only knew at that moment that she loved him differently, that she did not want him to leave. She thought about this as she ate the bag of candy corn he’d left for her on the bureau.
That night she knocked on Sam’s red gate precisely at six and over the wall heard the now-familiar phit-phit of his cloth shoes as he crossed the court to open it. She saw the anxious sheen of sweat on his cheekbones.
“Big night,” she said softly. His apron was already marked, and sweat was gathering on his T-shirt underneath. She wanted to hug him, just a quick squeeze of sustenance, but she stood her ground and let her support show in her eyes. It would not be right to step across that line and put her arms around him. Nothing should upset his equilibrium tonight. Besides, she was doing a story on him. And she still had that last, all-important paragraph left to write, the one about tonight.
“We’re on schedule, at least.”
“I’m glad.” They walked around the screen and she noticed her spiral evergreen, appealingly placed near a small stone table with four stone stools. She felt a surge of warmth. “I know it’s going to be great. I can feel it.”
“Your lips to my kitchen gods.” They walked up the porch steps to the dining room, and he pulled back the door for her.
“I keep thinking about your father,” she said, “that he came. Is he going to come up to Beijing now?”
“He says he will. He may get here tonight. We’re not sure. Everybody’s so sick with sadness about Xie.”
“I hope you can set it aside.”
“We’re trying.”
“Does he like being back, your father?”
“He loves it! You should have heard him go on. How the Zhejiang Food and Restaurant Association met him with flowers – just because he was a Liang. I told him he deserved it. Look what I did in here.”
She followed him across the dining room, lit with silk lotus-shaped lamps, set with one exquisite table for the panel. “Beautiful,” she said. The room was not bare, as it had been before, but warm with purpose. There were enormous candles in tall stands, which she knew he would light later. Divans were built into the walls. Doors closed off small private rooms. The outside world had fallen away. She had the strange sense that they could be standing here at almost any time in history.
The kitchen was different from the serene dining room, shouting, chaotic. On every surface were bowls and baskets and plates of fresh ingredients, every sort of vegetable and herb and paste, chopped and minced and mixed. There were freshly killed chickens and ducks. One of Sam’s old uncles – these were the other two, the ones she had not met – groomed one of the birds, turning the warm, fresh carcass around in his lap.
“Do you know my Second Uncle Tan?” Sam said.
“Ni hao.” Tan dipped his head.
“And this is Jiang, First Uncle,” said Sam.
“Hello.”
“The writer!” said Jiang in English. “Very good. Come in!”
“I’m only going to watch,” she said. “And please know I’m sorry for your loss.” Sam translated this, and both uncles thanked her. “They’re your assistants?” she said to Sam.
“Each chef is actually allowed three assistants. I’m using only two. As you know, my Third Uncle couldn’t travel. These two have been terrific.”
“I’m sure,” she said, and surveyed the room, the brilliant sheaves of chives and greens and shoots, pale mounds of cabbage, glistening white bricks of tofu. A blue-and-white bowl held raw fish heads, pink flesh, silver skin, brilliant shiny eyes. Oh, the soup, she thought, excitement picking up. From Hangzhou.
Sam was packing a round mold in front of her. In the bottom went a geometric slab of dark-brown braised pork, upside down on its fat and skin. Around the pork he pressed rice mixed with ginkgo nuts, dates, lotus buds, silver fungus, pine nuts.
“Eight-treasure dongpo pork,” he said. “My version of a classic.” He pressed foil around it, whip-tight. “I’m going to steam it two hours. The brown sauce suffuses everything. I am going to drain off some of the fat before I serve it, though – and you wait. You’ll see. We’ll have an argument over it.”
Across the room Tan had finished with the chicken and was now preparing to carve vegetables, turnips and large, pale daikon radishes. “He’s great with a knife,” Sam said, looking at his uncle. “He taught me. Now watch this.”
Sam picked up Tan’s warm, fresh chicken and positioned it on his chopping block. He applied a small, sharp knife to the rim of the chicken’s body cavity, working his way in. He separated the skin from the carcass with love, one millimeter at a time, teasing the two apart without creating the slightest nick or tear. She barely breathed. In a minute he had the entire skin off the chicken, in one piece, and he held it up, grinning.
“Oh, bravo,” she said.
“How about it?” He was proud of himself.
“You should have been a surgeon.”
“No! I should have been this, just what I am. Okay. We call this the chicken’s pajamas.” He laid it aside. “You watch. You’re going to see it later.”
“Can they take the skin off like that?” She looked at the uncles.
“No,” Sam said. “They can’t do it. Neither of them. Not many chefs can. You have to be able to feel it.” He switched to Chinese and shouted something to Uncle Jiang, who was at the next station mincing ingredients Sam would combine to stuff into the chicken skin: cabbage, exotic dried mushrooms, tofu skins, chives, and minced salt-cured ham from Yunnan.
“You should add rice to the stuffing,” Jiang said in Chinese.
“No,” Sam insisted. “No rice until the end.” Because then there would be the glutinous rice in the pork mold, profound with the rich mahogany sauce and its eight treasures, and the dongpo pork itself. That was rice enough.