Repeat After Me (31 page)

“Now I am mostly painting my bird, because I’m an old man and old men love birds,” Hong Yue said.

I laughed. He was thirty-five, the age I am now, and I often tease him for having made it seem like the edge of death.

“But you don’t want to hear about this, do you?” he asked, squinting up into a flash of sudden sun that had burned through cloud sheer. “Let’s talk about Da Ge.”

“I would love to,” I said. “I didn’t know if—”

“I’m as
zhishuai
as an American,” Hong Yue said, as
straight to the point of what
, as Da Ge had put it. “You can ask me anything.”

“What was he like?”

I looked over at Julia Too, who had abandoned her puppet parade in favor of a snail she’d found on the ground. She was turning it over in her open palm, listening to us.

“
Tian
,” Hong Yue said, my God. He continued in Chinese: “Da Ge was difficult. We burned his father’s house down once, smoking. He refused to apologize, and his father was furious, made him pay. Da Ge used to beat the shit out of people when we were young, including me. Maybe because of, you know, the business with his mother. But he was quiet, too, I guess. He read. He was always giving me books I hated.”

“He beat you up?”

Now Hong Yue looked at Julia Too. She was absorbed, studying the snail.

“Da Ge could be a son of a bitch.”

“Why did he beat you up?”

“Over a girl.”

“Oh. Why do you say it was because of his mother?”

Hong Yue looked me over, perhaps trying to determine how I could possibly know so little about a person I had once married.

“Maybe the way she died was—well, in China, it was embarrassing,” he said.

“Oh.”

“So if people brought it up. You know. He was angry.”

“Right.”

“Sometimes he was angry at me, too, because my life seemed easier, maybe.”

“Was it?”

He smiled kindly. “No one’s life feels easy to the one living it. But my mother was okay, and that was enough.”

“Enough to make him feel bad, you mean?”

“Enough to make my life seem easy. Then again, I was poor, really poor, and he used to steal money from his father
to ‘buy my paintings.’ Then he’d leave them here ‘accidentally’ so I could sell them to other people. Except for one. He had a favorite, one I painted right before the Tiananmen business, right before he left for America. I don’t know what happened to it. He paid me ten times what it was worth.”

He stopped and looked over at me as if he were trying to remember who I was, where we had met, why we were having this conversation. I weathered the pause, spelled p-l-e-a-s-e t-e-l-l m-e s-o-m-e m-o-r-e. It worked.

“Da Ge used to steal food when we were kids,” Hong Yue said. “Everyone was poor as hell then, even his big-shot old man. But Da Ge gave shit away, down to the final grain. He could be sweet, even though that’s not how people thought of him.”

Julia Too had put the snail down and was turning somersaults in the grass.

“How
did
people think of him?”

Hong Yue shrugged. “Once I got busted for drawing on the wall outside the gym at school. Da Ge told the officials he’d done it. I would have had to do self-criticisms, which were a nightmare and would have conflicted with the only art class I had in those days. So he did them for me. For eleven fucking months. Every day.” Hong Yue grinned.

“What was it you drew by the gym?”

At this, he laughed like a trumpet. “My name,” he said, “in big, red characters.”

“Your name? How did—”

“Da Ge said he’d framed me—as a practical joke. He practiced imitating my writing so he could prove his own guilt. But he didn’t even need to. I mean, he was always in deep shit at school, so they were happy to believe him. Eleven months of my self-criticism and humiliation.”

He poured more tea. Julia Too stopped somersaulting, retrieved her snail, and trotted over with it. She handed it to
me, and I looked at the brown whorls on its shell.

“Very nice one, sweetie. But maybe he likes to live in the grass, and we should put him back.”

“It’s a girl.”

“I see. Maybe we should put her back.”

“I can make a fort for her in the grass.”

“Good idea!”

“But I need a shovel.”

“Do you have a shovel?” I asked Hong Yue.

“A what?”

Julia Too asked him in Chinese, and he went to get her a shovel. When he came back, he said, “Maybe you can tell me about Da Ge’s New York life. Because when he left, he was out of his fucking mind. I was glad his old man sent him off. I thought if he went somewhere else, he might get over what had happened. I mean, I thought if he stayed here, he would do wild shit and we would lose him. Of course—well,” he cut himself off, started over. “Were there good things about his time in New York? Happy moments?” He smiled at me warmly. “There must have been, married to you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I hope there were. I took him ice skating once. And we went to Central Park, to the zoo. He cooked, showed me movies. He wrote brilliant, funny things about American culture.”

Hong Yue leaned back, stretched his arms behind his head as if it made sense that it had taken me three years to come find him, as if we had forever to remember Da Ge together while Julia Too dug up the courtyard, burying snails. I was so grateful.

“I have that painting, the one you mentioned,” I said finally. “I don’t know why I waited to say that—sorry. I guess I was scared you would ask for it back. Anyway, it was in his apartment in New York, and I took it. It’s here, at our place.”

“No shit!” Hong Yue said, “That painting came back to China! That is crazy, beautiful news.”

It’s funny he should have used those words. The painting is the craziest, most beautiful thing I own, even now, even though I’ve bought one of Hong Yue’s paintings every year since I met him. I plan to continue that pattern, even if I live to be a hundred and they keep getting more expensive. I’ll be one of those batty New Yorkers whose belongings topple over and kill her, just transplanted so that instead of junk mail and decades’ worth of
National Geographic
s, the clutter that crushes me will be dead letters from the love of my life, and modern Chinese art.

Da Ge and I took the train from New York to Garden City the night before our citizenship interview and stayed in a shack of a hotel, watching porn, each expressing polite surprise that the other liked it. This is one of several ways porn works, I think. Everyone likes porn. But part of the appeal for guys is the false truism that girls dislike it, which allows for the titillating revelation that we’re dirty enough to watch it, too. Part of the appeal for girls is getting to scandalize guys with that discovery. Fun all around.

The next morning was less sexy. In a nondescript, government-issue building, we went through security, handed our “invitation” to an exhausted bureaucrat behind a bullet-proof window, and then waited for three hours on round-backed plastic chairs. There were thirty other couples in the room. Eventually, a blonde woman appeared from behind a door, and asked ten of the couples to form a line. Da Ge and I got in place with the nine other couples and followed her like obedient ducklings down a long hallway, up a staircase of ten stairs, to another waiting room. Six of the couples had lawyers with them, and I wondered if we were in trouble. Various “officers” began to appear from the doorway and
call people in. I studied each one, hoped the young black guy would do our interview. But we got a middle-aged white woman named Ms. Tritzen.

Right away she asked me: “Have you been to visit China?”

I lit up with a smile and pinched Da Ge’s leg. “We’re going this summer,” I lied.

He nodded. We had agreed that I would say nothing about myself, and he was to say nothing about himself. We would each talk only about the other, and that way we wouldn’t contradict or appear not to know each other. Maybe we’d even seem smitten. I tried to think of shallow, chatty subjects.

“I’m already used to Chinese food because Da Ge is such a good cook,” I tried.

“What does he make?” Ms. Tritzen asked me, unsmiling.

“Tiger food!”

We both said this at the same time. Da Ge couldn’t resist smiling. Even Ms. Tritzen seemed to soften a bit. “What’s that?”

“It’s cucumber, cilantro, and peppers mixed with sesame and hot oil,” I told her.

“And scallion,” Da Ge said. I shot him a look, so he put his hand on my leg.

“What does Da Ge like?” she asked me.

I considered possible responses.

“Spaghetti.”

“Do you two have any photos?”

I took the album out of my bag. We had cobbled it together, pasting in ticket stubs from plays, movies, and concerts I’d been to with Adam or Julia, menus from cafes where I ate with my mother, and blank postcards with pictures of China on them. Our scanty zoo and picnic photos were scattered throughout. The “Thank you to Aysha” note
with Da Ge’s characters at the bottom was featured on the last page.

Ms. Tritzen asked, “What does that note say in Chinese?”

“It’s the characters for Da Ge’s name.”

“What were you thanking her for?” She turned to him bodily, punctuating the fact that she didn’t want me to interrupt. I was nervous that he might fuck this up.

He collected words.

“She took me out,” he said. “I think it’s polite to thank her for this.”

I stared at him, thinking I adored him, unsure whether it was an act or not.

“Where did he leave the note?” she asked me. Before I could answer, she said, “Write it down,” and passed me a sheet of paper. Who divides and conquers married couples? I hated her.

I wrote “sofa,” on my note, worried he wouldn’t know the word “futon.”

He wrote “futon” on his.

Ms. Tritzen pushed her chair back slightly. “Da Ge,” she said, “I’m going to ask you to leave the room for a few minutes.” He got up. I tried to catch his eye as he left, hoping to impart something, although I didn’t know what. I wondered if Ms. Tritzen would be less formal now that he was gone. She wasn’t.

“Draw a map of your bedroom,” she instructed me.

“A what?”

A diagram of where things are placed in your bedroom.”

“What things?”

She glared at me and slid a piece of paper across the desk. On it, I drew a two-dimensional bed with stick figures spooning across on it. I wanted to ask “Do you like it?” but thought better of it. I thought we needed her not to fail us on this test.

“Is there any furniture in your bedroom?” she asked me.

I drew in the dressing table and saw it, wooden in the corner with its mirror backed up to the wall. I drew a jewelry box on top. A tube of lipstick.

“You need to mark obvious things,” said Ms. Tritzen, annoyed. “Please put an X where the closet and door are.”

When I had finished my art project, she asked me to let Da Ge back in the room and to wait out in the hall. I stood up dizzily and walked to the door. I knocked before opening it, thinking he might have his ear pressed to the outside. But there was no response, so I pushed it open and peered out into the fluorescent hallway. Da Ge was leaning forward on a plastic chair, and I thought of him the first night he’d been in my house, sitting on the edge of the futon backlit by streetlight. He jolted when he saw me, as if he associated me with Ms. Tritzen now that she and I had been alone in that room.

“You can go back in,” I said.

“But for you?”

I smiled. “I have to wait out here now.”

“What will she do?”

“Hello?” Ms. Tritzen called out from the room. I thought of recesses and hall passes. Did she think we were making out? Cheating? Da Ge dragged back in, and Ms. Tritzen told him to close the door.

The hall seemed to me to be liquid, blurring in and out. I felt nauseated by the lights and the bumpy walls, had a dizzy sense that a cement truck had turned sideways and poured them vertically.

Ms. Tritzen’s door opened, and Da Ge gestured to me to come back in. We both sat. I looked at the desk and saw Da Ge’s drawing of my room.

“When did you know you loved Aysha?” Ms. Tritzen asked him.

How dare she.

“In the beginning,” said Da Ge.

She wasn’t buying this.

“The beginning of what?”

“She buy a Chinese dictionary,” he said. “And I see her with her mother.”

“What does this mean?” she asked me. In spite of my feeling that she was racist to exclude him by asking me what he meant, I was aware that it was something I might have done, too.

“I bought a Chinese dictionary after we met so that I could look up his name.” These words felt hard and sharp. I wondered what he would think. I looked over, but his expression hadn’t changed.

“And that’s when you fell in love with her?” Ms. Tritzen asked him. I wondered if she was married and going by Ms. Tritzen anyway.

“When I see her with her mother,” he said, “I can tell about her love.”

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.