Across a Green Ocean (27 page)

Michael found some calcified takeout in the refrigerator and ate it for dinner while standing up, looking through Emily’s and Julian’s things. The bookshelves contained various law textbooks and massive tomes on film theory, as well as a secondhand copy of
The Kama Sutra
. He flipped through it briefly, trying to get himself worked up, but the couples in the diagrams were maddeningly straight; plus, the poses looked like some form of torture.

When he replaced the book, he knocked it against something in the back, like a loose tooth. It was, he discovered, a jewelry box that contained a diamond so enormous that it seemed like it sucked in the little light that was in the room and refracted it like a giant mirror ball. So Julian was planning to propose to Emily—although obviously not this weekend, unless he’d forgotten the ring. They were what, only twenty-three? Who in their right minds got married that young? His sister’s life was truly foreign to him. At the rate he was going, Michael would be lucky if he had a boyfriend by that age.

He was planning to achieve a kind of milestone for himself that night, though. He showered, put on Emily’s deodorant, slicked back his hair, and dressed in what he thought of as his smartest outfit: a dark, close-fitting shirt and jeans, which Amy said made him look like an Asian greaser from the fifties, if that wasn’t an oxymoron. He made sure he had his fake ID and hit the streets.

Michael knew of the famous pick-up spots, the Ramble in Central Park, certain movie theaters in Chelsea, but he had spent years listening to his mother’s warnings about getting, mugged and he didn’t want to go somewhere that was too dark. Bars and clubs were a better alternative, but he wasn’t comfortable going in there alone. So instead he went to a video store in the Village and loitered in the back section, where you had to be eighteen to enter. Occasionally, the ponytailed man up front would look his way, but then other customers came in and he got distracted.

Michael didn’t have to wait long. After about fifteen minutes, a man whose beard hid his age sidled up to him and asked, “Excuse me, have you seen this?” He was holding a video entitled
Anchors Assway,
accompanied by the picture of three sailors in white caps and nothing else, holding anchors over their privates.

“Oh, yeah,” Michael replied. “That one’s really funny.”

“I was thinking,” the man said, “maybe you’d want to come home with me and watch it?”

“Sure.”

The man said his name was Alex, and that he was a computer programmer. Michael said he was an NYU student in bioengineering. Alex’s apartment was only a few blocks away from Emily and Julian’s, which Michael considered a good sign. If things went bad, he could just leave and walk home.

Alex’s apartment was in a high-rise and did not seem like the residence of a serial killer. Michael had snuck a peek at the stack of mail on the dining room table when they came in, and Alex seemed to be telling the truth about his name. Michael had given his name as Carl Cheung, which was the name of a kid from church.

Alex told Michael to make himself comfortable on the couch and put in the video, and for a second, Michael thought that Alex really meant for them to just watch it. Before the opening credits finished, he turned to Alex, eager to get started.

“Doesn’t take much to get you hard, does it?” Alex said, looking at the crotch of Michael’s pants and grinning.

Michael wasn’t even sure if he found Alex attractive; he was just anxious to get it over with. Alex’s beard was scratchy against his mouth, and when Alex removed his shirt, the hair covering his body proved to be equally scratchy. Michael would bet that he’d be covered by a rash by the time they were done. He tried to think about that rather than the fact that Alex must be twice as old as he was, which was more evident when he was unclothed, by the graying hairs on his chest and the sag in his belly.

Michael came almost immediately when Alex took him into his mouth, and he was afraid Alex would guess that he had never done this before, but Alex just wiped his lips, grinned again, and said, “My turn now.”

Alex pushed his head down, and Michael realized, at the same time that it was happening, that he was actually doing it—he had a man’s penis in his mouth, and it tasted salty and sour, like regurgitated salt water. Alex grasped him by the sides of the head, tightly but not unkindly, and pushed his face closer. Michael kept his eyes shut and pretended he was sucking on a metal spigot. He couldn’t help gagging toward the end.

“You okay, kid?” Alex asked after he was done.

Michael nodded, although he supposed he must have looked rather dazed. Alex handed him a towel to wipe himself off with.

Then Michael said faintly, “I guess I should go.”

“Okay,” Alex said. “Glad you came over.”

He didn’t bother to walk Michael to the door, and when Michael looked back, Alex had resumed playing the video.

On the way back to Emily and Julian’s apartment, Michael felt oddly light. As sordid as the episode was when he replayed it in his head later, as he was swigging Emily’s mouthwash, trying to rid the taste from his mouth, the truth was that he was no longer a complete virgin when it came to sex. He wasn’t sure if he would tell anyone about it, not even Amy, but for now, it made him feel pretty damn good.

When he went to college, this became a funny story he would tell, usually while half drunk or half stoned: the story of the hairy man who gave him his first blow job. The girls would feel sorry for him while the boys would be grossed out. Occasionally, with the right boy, it would get him laid.

When he told David a few weeks into their relationship, David said, “So I wasn’t the first person who tried to pick you up.”

“No,” Michael said. “And you probably won’t be the last.”

 

In his hotel room, Michael sits on the bed with the ugly orange coverlet, trying to process recent events. It seems like it’s been days since he went downstairs to meet Liao and Ben. In the time that Michael has been away, someone has come in and made his bed, and straightened out his few belongings on the luggage rack.

This is his last night in Xining. The next day he’ll catch a train and take another seemingly interminable twenty-four-hour ride in a hard sleeper to Beijing. When he arrives, he’ll need to stay a night there before taking the plane back to New York. Fortunately, his flight leaves late in the day, giving him enough time to check out one last place, whose directions he’d gotten from Liao Weishu before he left. His entire trip in China will have taken a week, and most of it will have been spent on a train.

Michael wonders if anyone back home will have noticed that he’s been gone for so long. Since he isn’t working, there’s no employer to keep tabs on him. His mother calls sometimes, but she’s used to Michael taking a few days to respond to her messages. His sister rarely checks up on him. David, of course, will be concerned since Michael didn’t return any of his messages. He’s probably used his key to enter Michael’s apartment and discovered his note by now. But even David is accustomed to Michael taking time off from their relationship. Maybe this time he’s pushed David so close to the brink that David has given up on him. Michael doesn’t want to think of that possibility yet. The fact that it’s quite likely no one will have cared that he’s been away makes him feel a little uncomfortable, even forlorn. He wouldn’t be surprised if things were exactly the same when he returned, with no one being the wiser about where he’d gone or what he’d learned.

Michael isn’t sure if he’s going to tell Liao’s story to his mother and sister, at least not yet. He’s not sure if it’s even something they need to hear. His mother and sister undoubtedly have questions about his father too, but they’ll be different questions, ones that will have to be answered some other way. He knows he will have to eventually tell them, but there are so many much more important things that he hasn’t told them. Such as the fact that he’s gay.

David had found it unbelievable that Michael’s family didn’t know. This had come up a couple of months after they had known each other, when David had wanted to introduce Michael to his parents. The Wheelers were in town to see some art exhibit, and Michael couldn’t stomach the thought of walking from one white, well-lit room to another in the company of two strangers who already knew so much about him, including that his father had recently passed away. There would be nowhere to hide from their good intentions.

Besides, Michael knew that he could never reciprocate by asking David to meet his mother and sister. After putting him off with some unconvincing excuses, he’d finally admitted to David that his family knew very little about his personal life.

“Are you serious?” David had said. “What about high school? Didn’t they wonder why you weren’t dating anyone?”

Michael had explained that Emily hadn’t been allowed to date when she was in high school, and neither had the kids of his mother’s church friends, so that issue had never come up. There had also been his friendship with Amy, which his mother regarded with suspicion. However, he was sure his mother had never figured out the reason why he never took Amy to the prom or brought home more girls from college.

“I’m sure she never knew. If she did, she’d be telling everyone in church. She can’t keep a secret to save her life.”

“How about your dad, then?” David asked.

At this point, Michael could have told David what had happened with his father, but he felt strangely protective, especially after his father passed away. He didn’t want David to think that his father was a bigot, lumped in with any old Christian fundamentalist you could see railing away on cable TV.

“He doesn’t know either,” he’d assured David. “It’s not that I don’t think my family can take the truth, I just don’t want them to have another reason to be disappointed in me.”

Of course, by saying that, he was dealing David the biggest disappointment of all.

Any reasonable person would have given up after that, but David resolutely stayed with him. Again, Michael wonders with a prickle of apprehension whether this latest stunt of his is the last straw. Suddenly, he wants to know what David has said in his voicemail messages. Maybe he’s already dumped Michael, and Michael doesn’t know it yet.

Michael picks up the phone by his bed and follows the poorly worded English directions on the accompanying placard to place what must be an astronomically expensive international call to his voice messaging system. The sound of David’s voice unexpectedly makes his breath catch, although maybe it’s hearing a familiar sound after being in a foreign country for so long. The first couple of messages are apologetic and cajoling—these must have been right after Michael had walked out of his apartment.
It was a joke,
David says once, sounding like it was anything but.

David’s next few messages are angry, then pleading, asking Michael to call him back; it’s as if he’s going through the stages of grief. Michael knows he should call David. But even more than that, he needs to call his mother and, even if he’s not quite ready yet to tell her about David, he has to tell her the truth about himself. He knows it’s the cowardly way, on the phone instead of face-to-face, from another country altogether, but he knows that if he doesn’t do it now, he might lose his nerve.

Looking at the clock, Michael sees that it’s past one in the morning, meaning that it’s past noon of the same day in New York. His mother should be home from church by now. As the phone rings, he imagines her hurrying into the kitchen to answer it.

“Hello?” comes her voice, distant yet comforting in its familiarity.

“Mom?”

“Michael!” his mother exclaims. “Where are you? Are you in China? Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m in China and I’m fine.” He takes a deep breath. “Mom, I have something I need to tell you.”

L
ing had picked up the phone, expecting it to be Beatrice Ma or Pastor Liu on the other end, but when she heard her son’s voice, she almost dropped the receiver. Then she had been so flooded with relief upon learning that he was safe that she almost didn’t hear the rest of what he had to say. When she finally understood what he was trying to tell her, she blurted out, without thinking how insensitive it must sound, “I know.”

“How?” Michael exclaimed. Even through the long-distance hum, his disappointment was clear. Ling knew she should have had a different reaction, maybe pretended she was hearing it for the first time, but it was too late.

“Julian said it, so he must have heard it from Emily.”

“But how does Emily know? I never told her anything.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ling soothed. “What matters is that you’re okay.”

“Are you? Now that you know?”

Ling’s mind raced. To be honest, ever since Julian had spoken the truth, she had kept herself from thinking about the implications of her son’s sexual orientation, what it meant for him and what it meant for her prospect of ever having any grandchildren.

She decided to sidestep the question. “Are you in Qinghai, like Emily says?”

“God, how come Emily suddenly knows everything?”

“I think she met your . . .”
Roommate? Boyfriend?

“Emily met
David?
”

That was his name. “Yes, she met your David.”

“But David didn’t know I was going to China. Do you know how they met?”

“At your apartment, I think.”

“Hope she didn’t mess with my stuff.”

Ling smiled to herself, remembering how when they were children, Michael would always warn his older sister about going into his room and moving things around. She would prefer that they still had that relationship, with its immature squabbles, rather than nothing at all.

“I have something else to tell you,” Michael continued, and Ling felt her heart constrict a little at what else he could possibly reveal. “I was laid off from my job earlier this summer. But I’m fine. I mean, I might have to dip into the money Dad left—”

“That’s what it’s there for,” Ling assured him.

“Just don’t tell Emily, okay? I’ll talk to her myself.”

“If you had called a little earlier, you would have been able to speak to her,” Ling said. “She was here for the weekend.”

She could tell that on the other end of the phone, Michael was pondering this, exactly what it meant for Emily to be visiting home. “What’s been going on since I’ve been away?”

Well, Ling thought, to begin with, your sister has left her husband, and your mother is in some kind of relationship with her pastor. But that would involve too much explanation, and she was mindful of the international call’s cost. “Nothing is going on. How is your trip?”

“It’s . . . educational. Everything’s really different. I mean, China is different, but this place out west is like twenty years behind the rest of the country or something. People herd
yaks
. I was in a monastery today with sculptures made out of
yak butter
.”

“Did you go to Qinghai because of your dad’s letter?”

“Guess you know all about that too.”

“Not all. I remembered it from when it came in the mail to your dad.”

“You never asked him about it?”

Ling felt like she was being interrogated all over again, like with Emily. “No, I didn’t ask him about it. There are a lot of things I should have asked your father, but I never did.” She paused, thinking there were things she should have asked her son, too. “Who was the letter from?”

“An old friend of Dad’s. I met him and his family yesterday. . . . It’s a long story. I’ll tell you when I get back.”

Ling went on to ask Michael what time it was there and if he had eaten yet, then warned him not to try street food and to be careful of pickpockets (“Too late,” he interjected). Then she reminded him that the call must be expensive, but just before they hung up, he said, “Wait. I really need to know that you’re okay with what I told you.”

“Of course I am,” she said automatically. “And if your father was alive . . .” She stopped, uncertain of how to continue. “Well, I don’t know how your father would feel about it.”

“I’m okay with that,” Michael replied quickly. “What I want to know is how you feel.”

Ling nodded for a few seconds before she realized no one could see her. “Yes,” she said. “I’m fine.”

After making Michael promise to call her when he got back to the States—
from the moment he landed at the airport
—she hung up the phone. Now that she knew for certain where her son was and that he was safe, she thought she would feel her anxiety lift like a yoke from her shoulders. But instead a nagging worry persisted, just like that night ten years ago when she and Han had gone to dinner at his old boss’s house and Michael had disappeared. She’d been so glad to have him back home the next morning that she’d ignored the signs that anything else might have been wrong, especially with her husband. She thought about Michael’s second, easier-to-digest revelation, about being laid off from his job.
Like father, like son,
she thought.

One evening about a month after that dinner, Han came home early from work. Ling heard the thump of his briefcase in the hall, and when he came into the kitchen, she thought from the look on his face that someone had passed away.

“Sit down,” she said, and he did so, the grooves in his face long. Still, she had the presence of mind to turn off all the burners on the stove and wipe her hands dry before taking a seat across from him at the kitchen table. “What happened?”

“I must be honest with you,” Han said.

Immediately, a flurry of possibilities flew through Ling’s mind; that her husband was seriously ill, that he was having an affair, that he was leaving her (but
I
stayed, she couldn’t help protesting). A small, unforgiveable part of her even wished for the first alternative, that he was sick, because that would mean there was something for the both of them to face together.

“I lost my job,” Han said. He said this in Mandarin Chinese, the language that both of them used to talk about serious matters, even after the children were no longer around to hear.

“Oh.”
That was it?
“When?”

“Four weeks ago.”

That made Ling’s mind skip a beat. She thought of his briefcase in the hallway and wondered if she’d imagined hearing it make contact with the floor. “What have you been doing all this time?”

“Walking around. Going to the park. The library. Sitting in the car.”

The thought of her husband sitting on a bench in the park or in the library almost made Ling laugh out loud. But looking at the quiet storm of his face, she knew it wasn’t funny.

“Do you remember the night at the Averys’ house?” That was his boss. Ling nodded. “He told me then. Didn’t want me to hear it from someone else there. I guess everyone knew but me.”

Her husband sat at the table like a forlorn little boy, his hands folded, his head bent as if the weight of it were too much to carry. Ling almost reached out to touch him, but sensed that if she did, their relationship would never be the same. It was enough that he was allowing her to see this much of his weakness.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said at last.

His voice was so low that she almost couldn’t hear it. But she thought he said, “I can’t fail anyone else.”

At first Ling thought he meant his boss, which didn’t make sense, and then that he was referring to herself and the children. This thoroughly confused her, because as far as she knew, Han was an exemplary husband and father, the kind that provided and supported without complaint. Then it occurred to her that he might be talking about his family on the mainland, of which she knew little about; only that he’d had to leave them behind in the mid-seventies. But compared to whatever must have happened then, this must have been miniscule, a thread in the fabric of history.

In that instant she realized that this was what her husband was most afraid of, what made him so strict with her and the children, this driving fear that they could somehow end up lost to him as well. With this knowledge also came the understanding of just how that she could be stronger than her husband, at this moment and in the future.

“You won’t,” she said to him. “You haven’t. It’ll be all right. We don’t need to tell anyone else, not even the children.”

So they didn’t. In the morning, Han left the house before Michael got up to go to school and came home for dinner, although by that time Michael was usually in his room or at the next-door neighbor’s. They made the mortgage and car payments, sent in the check for Emily’s tuition on time. By the end of the following month, Han had found a new job at a pharmaceuticals company in Trenton, and the next ten years, Ling realized now, were as untroubled as she could have ever hoped for.

Looking at the overgrown backyard from her kitchen window, Ling thought she saw a shadow slink along the fence. Like a ghost, or maybe the white cat that belonged to their neighbor, Mr. Albertson, the one twelve-year-old Emily had mistaken for a stray. That cat couldn’t be alive anymore; if so, it would be over twenty years old, and might as well be a ghost. Ling remembered Mr. Albertson calling out the cat’s name, Genevieve, and how she had thought he had been calling his wife instead. From what Ling could tell, Genevieve Albertson had been a tough old lady when she was alive, but the thought that her husband yearned for her so had turned her into a romantic figure. At the time, Ling hadn’t wondered why Mr. Albertson would draw the neighbors’ attention to himself in such a dramatic fashion. But of course a husband would grieve for his wife in this way.

What had Ling done to grieve for her own husband? She gazed at the lawn, the stalks of grass hypnotic as they nodded in the breeze. How silly she was, thinking that if she didn’t cut the grass, it would bring her husband back. All through the fall and winter of last year, as the blades had turned brown and snow had fallen in a sweeping white plane, she had looked forward to spring, to when the tender young shoots would break through the crust, indicating a renewal of hope. Of course, what had happened was that the grass had come in quickly and without restraint, and soon it would grow dry and brittle with the coming of fall, and the cycle would start all over again. Unless she did something to alter it.

Ling went upstairs to the bedroom, where in the back of the closet she had kept some of Han’s old clothes. Emily and Michael had thought she’d gotten rid of most of their father’s things and put the rest in the basement, but there were things that she had forgotten. These clothes of Han’s, two patched shirts and a worn pair of khakis, had been at the bottom of a laundry basket that Ling had neglected to empty for weeks. When she’d found them, she’d pressed them to her face. The only scent was a hint of laundry detergent. She couldn’t smell her husband at all, which had disappointed her; she didn’t even have that to remember him by. So she’d stuffed the clothes as far back into the closet as she could.

Now, Ling drew on one of the shirts and buttoned it, so that the tails hung down to her knees, like a smock. She told herself she was doing it for practical reasons, because she didn’t own any proper gardening clothes. After some more digging in her closet, she found a sun hat, probably last used when the family had gone to Florida years ago. Properly armored, she went outside.

In the garage she located the hand mower underneath some gardening tools and dragged it, like a pile of creaky bones, out to the lawn. But where to start? She tried clipping a patch and was amazed at how easily the long blades fell before her. Looking over her shoulder, she saw how crooked the swath was, and remembered how Han always made sure his lines were straight. It was like the way he cut Emily’s hair when she was a child. She’d sit on a chair in the kitchen, the bottoms of her bare feet black from the newsprint spread on the floor, while Han cut carefully, stopping often to make sure each side matched in length. Emily would look up, completely trusting, from beneath her bangs.

As Ling pushed the hand mower more confidently through the grass, she understood what Han might have liked about this kind of work. It was slow, methodical, contemplative. She could feel the pull and stretch of the muscles in her shoulders and her calves. At her feet, the blade whirred with purpose. When sweat from her forehead ran into her eyes, she didn’t pause to wipe it away. Everything blended together, then and now, the past and present. Here, she was mowing across the sunny patch on the lawn where Emily liked to lay out when she was a teenager, reading and working on her tan, even though Ling told her she’d turn as dark as a peasant. There was the spot where they’d buried Michael’s goldfish, the only pet he’d ever been allowed to have and which had died shortly after he turned six. Emily had made a big deal out of it for her little brother, constructing a little cardboard casket and writing a eulogy.

She almost missed the stump of a tree that was hidden in the grass. It took her a moment to remember what it was: a crape myrtle that they’d had for a few years and had blossomed predictably, pink and fluffy like a showgirl. Then last summer it had withered and died, and one afternoon, when Michael was visiting, he and Han had uprooted it while Ling was away at the store. She’d come back to see a peculiarly shaped black trash bag out on the curb, like a hunched old woman. When she’d gone into the backyard, she felt like something was missing but couldn’t think of what, as if a trick were being played on her. To confuse her further, her husband and her son were sitting on the porch, not speaking, as was their habit, but at least they were spending some time together. Then, two weeks later, Han had passed away.

When she was done mowing the lawn, Ling stood at its edge and surveyed the work she’d done. She’d had to backtrack in some spots, but for the most part the grass was evenly cropped. She had a blister on the palm of her right hand, and she knew her joints would ache the next day, but for now, she felt like she’d achieved something. This was how, she realized, things were going to be for her from now on, taking pride in small accomplishments.