Repeat After Me (29 page)

A knot formed in my throat.

“My mother and I are close,” I told Ms. Tritzen.

“Have you met his mother?” she asked me.

“His mother is dead,” I said, with none of the it’s-going-to-be-okay-when-you-apologize-inflection she expected.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, as coldly as possible “So are we.”

And that was the end of the meeting.

We traveled back to New York together shyly, not knowing if we’d passed, each unsure how much the other had actually meant. We were, of course, faking it, meaning to convince only Ms. Tritzen that we were in love. But it was tricky to keep that straight, at least for me. Da Ge said he had business in Chinatown, that we’d see each other later in the week. Bereft of him, I rode home and called Xiao Wang.

“I haven’t rented anything,” I told her, “but I have
The Graduate.
Could you please come watch it with me?”

“I will love to come,” she said. “I never saw that movie.”

I said nothing about Da Ge, just ordered Chinese food from Hunan Balcony and put the movie on. As soon as Dustin Hoffman got into bed with Anne Bancroft, Xiao Wang asked, “Why does this young guy love to be in bed with so old lady?

“She’s a sexy woman though, don’t you think?” I asked.

“It’s not common situation. Usually, old women never get this kind of romance, and just live the practical part of life, caring for children and husband.

“What about the husbands?”

“It’s easy for them to have younger love.”

“Don’t you think that’s outrageous?”

“Out races?”

“Outrageous—something that’s like, grossly unfair or offensive.”

“Maybe sometimes you’re not practical person.”

There was no denying that.

Ben Rosenbaum was standing at my classroom door when I arrived to teach the final week of class at Embassy in 1990.

“I hope your weekend was productive and fun,” he said.

I thought about how “How was your weekend?” would have opened up the conversation and given me a chance to speak, and how he never took those routes.

“I saw an impeccable performance of
Hamlet
,” he said. I nodded and walked to the front of the room, set down my books, and begin to write the Golden Rule on the board.

Ben surveyed it. “My philosophy is not to teach religion
or the trappings of its language as part of an ESL course,” he said.

“Religion or the trappings of its language?” I asked.

Unsure whether this was critical of him, Ben spent a rare moment reflecting. I headed back to the far end of the chalk-board and began listing phrasal verbs and their idioms:
bring the subject up, bring the house down, bring home the bacon, bring about change, bring out a new album, bring up your baby, bring it on
. I was wearing my wedding ring, watching it as my hand made chalk words. Ben walked back toward the door, and I turned to see Da Ge lingering there, the veins in his neck standing out again like the Incredible Hulk’s. When Ben went by, Da Ge said something so quietly under his breath that I couldn’t make it out. I couldn’t tell whether Ben had. I thought I didn’t care.

“Good morning, guys,” I said to the class, twisting the ring on my finger.

“And girl,” said Xiao Wang. I was happy she had stopped apologizing before she spoke, that we were friends, had a history, even if it mainly involved fictional characters.

“Yes,” I said, “good morning guys and girls. But it’s okay to call everyone ‘guys,’ too. It’s better for gender equality that way.”

“What is this?” she asked. Da Ge mumbled a word to her in Chinese. She lifted her chin, did not look at him. “What is this thing you say?” she asked me again.

“Gender equality. Justice for women—equal rights.”

She nodded vigorously. “In China, we say, ‘Women hold up half the sky.’”

Da Ge was watching her. I wondered, in a moment of fleeting panic, whether he’d told her we were married. If he had, I wished I had told her first.

Xiao Wang glanced at Da Ge, who looked away. “This guy,” she said to me, “the other teacher who come to class—”

“Who, Ben?” I asked. I immediately regretted saying his name, as if knowing it at all were an admission of some mutual interest between us.

She nodded. I wondered where she was going with this. Xiao Wang kept Da Ge in her peripheral vision. “I think he loves you,” she said, meaning Ben. Her voice was as crisp and unapologetic as I had ever heard it.

Now that I know Xiao Wang as well as I do, I’m certain that punishing Da Ge wasn’t her only reason for saying this, although that must have been part of it. She also said it because she thought it was true and that I would be flattered. She had to sacrifice a certain measure of personal restraint to blurt out what she thought was a compliment.

“You think so?” I asked, pitching my voice up to sound hopeful.

She pumped her head up and down.

“Yes, he loves you. And he’s—how do you say,
shuai
, handsome!”

Maybe that
handsome
flipped the switch, because the veins bulged back out in Da Ge’s neck, and he spoke Chinese to her, something curt, short, mean. Before she could react, I turned to him. “Da Ge,” I said, “Can you speak English, please?”

“Xiao Wang can translate,” he said. Her face was burning.

“Xiao Wang?” I asked, “Are you okay?”

“It’s too bad word,” she said. “I do not know that in English.”

Da Ge stood, turned on the heel of his shiny shoe, and walked out.

“What an asshole,” Chase said. Everyone waited.

“Good usage,” I said.

When school ended the last week of May, I wrote, “There is nothing so useless as a general maxim,” on the chalkboard, without joy. We had a good-bye party, everyone
except Da Ge, everyone proud of the dishes we’d brought, everyone speaking in English about how much we would miss each other. Then I never saw Russ or Chase again. I ran into Ingyum once grocery shopping at University Food Market on 115th, and another time on Broadway, and I built an entire life around Da Ge and Xiao Wang. As a sane person who contains her former crazy self, I can see both how bizarre that is and how, if I had a do-over, I might do it again. So there it is.

Summer came down that May in New York just as it has in Beijing this year, a hot towel over the city. The streets reeked of spoiled fruit. Buses blasted by, scorching everyone with exhaust. When Embassy classes ended, Da Ge and I languished in my apartment, taking baths and eating Popsicles. He was urgently unhappy. I did not ask about his last fight with Xiao Wang or where he went when he wasn’t with me. I kept the shades drawn, let him sleep for hours a day, and read in the dim light from a textbook he had discovered called
David and Helen Go to China
. The American protagonists travel to Beijing to study and experience culture shock. They can’t adjust to spicy Chinese food. They go running and are exhausted by the vast city. Finally, they meet Chinese friends in the dormitory, only to bestow upon them inappropriate gifts like green hats and clocks, which suggest cuckoldry and imminent death.

While Da Ge slept, I studied the vocabulary in
David and Helen Go to China
with a ferocity matched only by that of my Embassy students. When he was awake, Da Ge helped me, wrinkling his brow if I worked sloppily or added extra parts to a character.

“Don’t be American barbarian,” he teased. His mood would improve in those moments, and I’d feel hopeful as he closed his hand over mine on the pen, or rewrote the lines of
each character with a patience I never saw him demonstrate in any other situation. When it was light, he slept and slept. I woke him sometimes to ask if he wanted a meal, others to seduce him. He always said yes, but was somewhere else at my table, someone else in bed. I liked even the stranger version of him, quiet, agitated, with his eyes perpetually open. He watched me like a mirror, as if searching for a secret about himself. I hoped he’d find it, thought if I just waited, fed him, met his eyes, he’d be back.

I tried to learn Chinese so he’d feel at home. I wrote
ni hao
seven hundred times. I wrote
ni
and
wo
, you and I.
Wo men
. We, us. I wrote
Da
and
Ge
, filled pages with his name.

When I missed my period in late May, I did not tell anyone.

I was as giddy with this new secret as I had been with his proposal. I stopped taking my meds right away and waited to see what would happen in June. I stepped up the counting. “I-’m p-r-e-g-n-a-n-t” fits perfectly on ten fingers. I always spelled it that way, with “I’m” as a conjunction rather than “I am,” since that doesn’t fit. Maybe because I wanted to be pregnant. There are ways to spell whatever truth you want. Just add a “very” or a “really,” to even out the number of letters. I sometimes let myself believe Da Ge wanted a baby, too, since he never once asked whether we were avoiding one. Maybe he assumed I was on the pill. Or had a cultural aversion to condoms. At the time I spelled it out the way I wanted it: h-e w-a-n-t-s a b-a-b-y, t-o-o. It fit.

Dr. Meyers was not as easy to convince as I was. She did not believe me when I omitted, euphemized, said my life was fantastic. “You’re distant,” she said. “Are you racing? Doing okay with your meds?”

“I’m fabulous,” I said. “I think maybe I’m stabilizing.” This was a word I had learned from shrink books. She nodded politely, disbelieving. I told her I was learning Chinese,
how satisfying the characters were. I could count strokes endlessly.

She zeroed in. “Who’s teaching you?”

I could have said Xiao Wang, but didn’t. “I have a houseguest.”

“Have I heard of him before?”

“Not really.”

“He’s Chinese?”

“Yes.”

“How did you meet him?”

I ruled out telling her he was a student. “Um, through Xiao Wang,” I said.

“I hope you’ll tell me more about him at some point. I’d like to know who he is.”

“I hope you like him,” I told her, “but I have my doubts.”

“Do you like him?” She smiled kindly.

I swallowed. “A lot.” I looked away, signaling that I didn’t want to discuss it.

“Have you told your mom?” Dr. Meyers asked.

“No. I told Julia.”

Dr. Meyers was relieved to hear this, because we both knew that my appointments with her were suddenly filled with lies. Of course so were my dates with Julia.

She took me one night to a Paul Taylor concert, wanting to show off a dancer she’d been vaguely dating. We sat so close the beads of sweat stood out on his body and sprayed in a rainbow as he leapt and bent and twisted across the stage. His muscles looked especially animal, as if he might have been twitching and flicking flies off his haunches and calves. My right foot fell asleep and I stamped the needles out as we clapped for the dancers. “He’s great,” I said.

Afterwards Julia wanted to get coffee. We sat at a café, but coffee sounded oddly unappetizing. I wanted something white, ordered steamed milk.

“Steamed milk?” Julia said. She stared at me. “Are you sick?”

She waited, and I shrugged. “Milk? Are you pregnant?”

“Ha ha.”

She paused again, this time to see if I was actually joking. I won the stare-down.

“Is there a chance that you’re pregnant?” she asked.

I grinned. “Isn’t there always that chance?”

“Have you not used anything?”

“I had to get off the pill, remember?”

“Of course there are other possibilities.”

“But they suck,” I said.

“Are you using nothing?”

I shrugged.

“I don’t mean to judge, but maybe—”

I cut her off. “Let’s not talk about it right now.”

She took a sip of coffee. “Okay. How’s Dr. Meyers?”

I felt tired suddenly, deeply, terribly tired, as if my bone marrow were giving up on me. I couldn’t remember ever having felt this tired before. “Dr. Meyers is fine,” I said.

“Do you tell her more about the Chinese guy than you tell me?”

“She asked the same thing about you.”

“You don’t tell me much of anything anymore, Aysh. Should I be worried?”

“I’ve been spending a lot of time with Da Ge,” I admitted. She must have been worried. She had seen him drunk in my hallway, knew he’d been in the hospital and that I was potentially pregnant with his baby. It all sounded worse than it was, I thought. But that’s always how it feels when you’re the one on the inside of some very wrong thing.