Once on a tiger’s back, it is hard to alight.
So we’re moving our little opera to the city of Shi. We’re canceling the Philippines and committing ourselves to Cherry and Company. One little glitch: Before we can install Larry in this hospital, we have to return Jade to BJ, check out of our hotels there, then scoot on back. Should be a snap-in our minds we’ve already moved.
Round-trip, however, is going to require two separate journeys.
Our faithful cabbie’s waiting outside the hospital when our party returns from KFC. He’s used the hour to play games on his cell phone rather than catch up on sleep. Making our farewells, Jade, Larry, and I exit the city the same way we entered, via a series of medieval ramps and pulleys, but things look different this time. When we arrived in sunlight, Shi appeared bleak and grimy, a grim town of harsh angles. But with darkness it’s transformed itself into a neon wonderland: sprays and spoutings of illuminated fluorescents. Sidewalk trees, storefronts, and a bonanza of billboards are adazzle with flashing bulbs. I can’t say for sure, because my one remaining contact lens is smeary, but there even seems to be a nighttime amusement area not far from the hospital, where a series of colored fountains provides a blinking liquid backdrop to a promenade on which couples seem to be…figure-skating? Whirling each other round and round?
I’m a sucker for neon, especially when it’s in a language I can’t decipher, and am cheered by its fluid warmth. But a few blocks on, Larry thinks he reads messages in the garish squiggles.
“Did you notice all the massage parlors in this town, Dan?”
“Where?”
“There! There! We just passed another one! You’re going to have a good time in this town.”
It’s like a Rorschach test, I think. He’s managing to read into these foreign graphics every kind of fantasy vision. And just like Larry to use such a grandmotherly word as “parlor.” Well, I suppose there’s something to it. If I squint, I can see some of those letters looking vaguely like a woman’s legs. Or hips. Wiggling hips, because the neon’s moving. Wait a minute-those are breasts being advertised there! The target of neon squirts and spumes. Larry’s right: There are massage parlors all over the joint! With real-life hostesses in ankle-length gowns beckoning real-life customers, all washed in vivid, reflected color.
“Let’s just call it Massage Central,” Larry suggests. “The real city name is too hard to pronounce anyway.”
Larry is still coming off the high of mealtime. The attention of so many female medical residents at dinner has apparently made him feel munificent toward womankind. He directs his attention to Jade in the front seat. “What do you do, dear? Dan tells me you’re a grad student. What are you studying?”
“Foreign relations.”
“From what I can see, I’d say you’re already very successful at foreign relations,” he tells her. “As Dan may have already told you, I am a professor. Here I’m just a poor schmuck of a patient, but at home, if I ever manage to get back there, they call me sir.”
“What you professor of?”
“Customarily I teach negotiation, which I can tell Dan thinks is just a fancy term for haggling. I also teach mediation from time to time and as such am called upon to mediate complex legal cases. High-status people from the top echelons of society come to me for advice.”
“Is that true?” I ask.
“Moderately,” he says. “Have you ever been to America, dear?”
“I have never been on a plane,” she offers.
The more we drive, the more Larry’s good mood drains off. Soon munificence gives up the ghost. He has cycled through many moods in the hours since Mary left, trying to find equilibrium, and now he has to add fatigue to the mix, as well as nervousness about moving into the darker reaches of China. He’s finally allowing it to hit him that Mary’s gone.
“I don’t feel very well,” he says, commencing a series of wet hiccups. “Usually I would go to bed after exerting myself as I have today. I don’t take a car ride like this ordinarily.”
“No one takes a car ride like this ordinarily,” I say.
It’s rush hour now, so the breakdown lane also contains shards of cinder block, wrecked dishwashers, and the occasional vehicle driving the wrong way. We seem to have mistakenly gotten onto a secondary truck route, a dusty road with a red light every half mile or so, squashingly full of thirty-six-wheelers, none of which keeps our driver from nodding off for four and five seconds at a stretch. In order to find the correct highway, for a time we’re the ones driving the wrong way in the breakdown lane. Eventually we find the right road, but this presents us with a new issue.
“May I ask why they’re erecting tents in the breakdown lane, with women standing by them waving flags?” Larry asks.
“Overnight restaurants,” Jade says. “Not very clean.”
“Do tell,” Larry says, bringing his palm to his brow. He now has a migraine on top of everything else. “You have no idea how bad this feels,” he reports.” Everything itches. Feel right here,” he says, offering the raised scar on his forearm, the fistula.
I make a conscious decision to suspend my policy of not touching him in order to put my index fingertip on the glazed lump. I get a buzz like a soft version of those shockers you conceal in your palm.
“Aches like hell,” he says.
Jade frowns with sympathy for his pain. “Larry is biting bullets,” she says, reaching around and taking his hand.
“I’ve had a lot of bad moments in my life, but this is the worst I’ve ever felt,” he says, chewing on a handful of anti-nausea pills. “This has me thrown, I have to say. This is the most nervous I’ve ever been.”
“Look, all you have to do is get through tomorrow and you’ll be in one of the best hospitals in China,” I remind him. “Movie stars. Saudi royalty. Maybe they’ll fix you up with some Chinese herbs.”
“No thanks. I’m a purist: straight pharmaceuticals for me.” His effort at a smile dies on his face. Between the driving conditions and being abandoned by Mary, he’s not far from having a panic attack.
“More and more bullets he bites,” Jade says, squeezing his hand.
“Oh, I miss my mutha. I miss my sister,” he says, rocking with anxiety.
To take his mind off the present situation and remind him what he’s accomplished in life, I try to get him talking again. “Jade, this is a guy with a heart a mile wide. Wait till you hear his saga about how he saved his twin sister from epilepsy.”
“I don’t know if I can rise to the occasion,” he says, taking little sips of air.
“Give us a treat, champ,” I say. “I’ve never actually heard the whole thing from soup to nuts.”
With a valiant effort, Larry lifts himself from his hunched position and begins to speak.
“The year is 2002. Judy has had epilepsy since she was born, sedatives to keep her down and amphetamines to bring her back up. As a result she never developed any interpersonal skills and limited herself to working more or less full-time at the DMV, then coming back to my condo, where she lived, then locking the door and chatting by phone with our mutha until she fell asleep in front of the TV. Three shows:
I Love Lucy. The Price Is Right. Little House on the Prairie. Occasionally she would break routine and go to dinner with some old people who considered her ‘pretty.’”
“Really?” I ask. It slips out, interrupting the narrative.
“After a certain age, anyone under forty looks okay,” Larry explains.
This strikes me as profound enough for me to shut up. But not for long. “What’d she spend her salary on?”
“Bathing suits, mostly. She found a shop that had bathing suits marked medium that were really extra-large. But she kept buying them, pretending she was a medium and therefore could keep on eating her fruit-and-nut chocolate bars. Only fruit she ever ate, incidentally. I think the store knew what they were doing and mislabeled all their ugliest stuff they couldn’t get rid of.”
“What’d she need bathing suits for anyway, when she had a water phobia?”
“Exactly,” Larry says. “So there we were living in Florida with all its physicians, and our mutha, Rivie, living outside Boston, the medical capital of the country with an arsenal of Harvard-trained doctors, and nuffing was being done. I decided I was going to do something about it. I got on the horn in my condo-nice two-bedroom with private balcony overlooking mini-golf course; I’m still upset that you never visited, Dan-and I did nuffing for two days but make phone calls. Long story short, eventually I’m in touch with a Dr. Finkelstein at NIH, Finkelsteiner, something like that. He finds Judy’s case interesting over the phone, would like to see her in D.C. in three to four months. Much too long. I call Cousin Burton-”
“Wait, you call Cousin Burton?”
“Dan, you gonna let me tell my saga? Burton was a good guy then,” Larry says with a mild expression, as serenely unconflicted as Mona Lisa. “By the way, thank you for not objecting to my going in and out of present tense. It makes the telling easier, plus my mind is misoriented. I don’t always remember what’s past and what’s now.”
“You’re welcome. Good to resume?”
“Good to resume. Long story short, when Finkleheimer gets a call from Burton, we’re good to go in ten days. But now of course Judy doesn’t want to proceed. Trufe is, she’s used to her disease, she’s fond of her disease, her disease serves her. She doesn’t have to apply herself. I say, ‘Judy cut the crap. I know you’re scared, but we’re going.’ Soon as she sees the place, twelve-hundred-acre campus, she does a hundred-and-eighty-degree change. Plus, she’ll be the star there. She likes nuffing better than to be the star of her little medical dramas. That makes her special. In no other arena in life is Judy special except through her medical condition. Bottom line, she goes. Comes time for the surgery, she’s in ten, twelve hours. Chatting the whole time. Most of the surgery, they’re mapping her brain. Only ten, fifteen minutes of actual cutting.”
Larry starts looking out the window, counting the restaurants in the breakdown lane. The babbling has helped: He’s seeming somewhat revived…but the story’s left hanging.
“And?” I say.
“And what?”
“And what was the outcome?”
“Oh! Never had another seizure. From the day of the surgery on. And by the way, just for the record, I appreciate how no one in the family ever referred to us as Punch and Judy, at least to the best of my knowledge, despite our occasional knock-down-drag-outs. That goes to the family’s credit, which is a very short category in my mind, but give the devil his due.”
“So, Larry, stay on track here. You changed your sister’s life!”
“But not necessarily for the better,” he’s quick to point out. “Because suddenly after the operation, she had no crutch. Her epilepsy had been the central component of her life around which everything else was structured. Everyone started telling her, ‘Oh, Judy, now you can go get your driver’s license, you don’t have to work at the DMV, maybe you can even get a boyfriend.’ All this terrified Judy. She didn’t want any of it. She just wanted to be babied by our mutha.”
“And then your mutha, I mean mother, dies.”
“Exactly. And no one came to the funeral, which I can never, ever, ever forgive the family for. That goes deep, Dan.”
“But, Larry, you could never decide on a date for the funeral. If you’d just chosen a date, I’m sure everyone would have come.”
“That remains to be seen, which it never will, will it? I’m still too upset to talk about it. Getting back on track, as you say, things took a downturn after our mutha’s death. Judy’s worked by this time nineteen and a half years, she quits six months before she would have qualified for pension. That would have given her a measure of independence, which was the last thing she wanted. She took to chatting with our deceased mutha on the phone and falling asleep in a chair, since our mutha had died lying down and Judy didn’t want the same thing to happen to her. Long story short, one day after a four-day weekend with no activity from her locked room, I grow suspicious. I punch the door down with my shoulder and find her expired in her La-Z-Boy, pills all over her lap, dressed in a black Speedo.”
“Why a black Speedo?”
“Trying to be the alluring dame in death she never was in life? Beats me. But I can tell you that she did not look good at all. In fact, I almost vomited. Never saw her in it before, I would have told her to throw it out. Judy did not exercise. At the end she weighed, I’m guessing two seventy-five, may she rest in peace.”
I don’t bother letting a silence surround this thought. I’m too mad at Judy for not donating her kidney to her twin.
“But you did what you could. Larry, you did a heroic thing.”
“Thank you, Dan. I rarely hear words like that. My need for external validation is bottomless-that’s why I got the three radio ham licenses, three state real-estate brokerage licenses, a pilot’s license, and I took the commercial airline pilot’s license test just to see how I’d do and got a ninety-two, which isn’t great for a professional pilot but not bad for a civilian-”
“Hush, Larry. Settle down. I’m giving you those words. You did good.”
Pause. He inhales a tiny space for himself. “Thank you, Dan,” he says. I hear his breathing become less raggedy, time it against my own. He is settling down.
The driving continues without letup. Jade in the front seat has her head tilted back, letting all this talk flow through her. It’s a comfort to me that she’s here for moral support. Larry sighs a few times to himself, then speaks again with a memorial tone.
“She was the most unhappy person I ever knew, Judy was,” he says. “She was unhappy not having her seizures. She missed them and what they did for her. And she was selfish, insofar as letting her kidney die with her instead of giving it to me. Yet I don’t blame her, poor thing. I blame her mental state. And I miss her. I still wake up and forget that she’s dead sometimes. I wake up and think I have to tell her something, but then I remember that she’s dead. And I think about my dad. Him I remember is dead.”
“Hush, Larry…”
“I got a short straw when I drew my dad. You know his sole advice to me when I tried to play Little League baseball? ‘Never swing, maybe you’ll get a walk.’ That was basically his attitude. Don’t try, maybe you’ll get by. If that isn’t the most pathetic advice a father ever imparted to a son, I don’t know what is.”
His words are beyond bitter-they’re just sad. “Hush, Larry,” I say…but he can’t stop.
“He never gave me any help in any way. So when my students want my help, I go out of my way to do everything I can. Black, white, Chinese, it doesn’t matter. That’s why I’m glad I teach at a second-tier school. Harvard students don’t need my help.”
“So something good came of your relationship. You were able to see him for what he was and rise above-”
“Sam I always saw for who he was. Maybe that’s why I always called him ‘Sam’ and never ‘Dad.’ From the age of four, I knew this was a very limited person. Sam came from an immigrant family, all he was was basically a manservant to his older brother, Irving, who owned the garage Sam worked in and who treated him badly. Gave him a hundred dollars a week and a box of chocolates for New Year’s. And Sam went along with it, thinking that was his function in life, to prop up his older brother and be subservient. One of my first memories was my mutha yelling ‘Yoo-hoo, Irving, see? I’m putting a dime here, only taking a warm Coke from the rack, not one of the cold ones from the cooler.’ I was only four, but I knew this was not right.”
He hardly draws a breath. These words are coming without air going in or out. The memories are so deep that the words are anaerobic.
“Sam never let anyone read in the house, you know why? Because he himself couldn’t read. He had the opportunity to learn many times, but he never bothered to. That’s what I don’t forgive. He didn’t have to be that way. He chose to be that way. The last time he tried to beat me with his belt, I was twelve. I said, ‘Do it! Do it in front of all these people!’ I was scared of a lot of people, but never of him. He never earned my fear.”
“Do you have any happy stories about your father?”
“I’ll try, see where they take us. Here goes: Low as my futha’s branch of the family was, there were a few sparks of glory. One of the cousins, Max, grew up to become professor emeritus of Harvard. Another cousin, Benny, started a famous perfume empire. Another cousin, Lenny, grew up to become the legendary Leonard Bernstein, maybe you’ve heard the name, though he was considered such an obnoxious little prick at fourteen that he got his face punched in and was thrown down some stairs. They still laugh at that one in that branch of Sam’s family, at the expression on little Lenny’s bloody face, obnoxious little know-it-all.”
Larry takes time out to swipe his nose with a hankie that may have been starched once, years ago. “There, was that happy? I can’t even tell anymore,” he says. “But you’ll notice that I use curse words very seldom, if you call ‘prick’ a curse word, so I guess all this is dredging up some pretty emotional material for me.”
“Umm, I’ve heard happier,” I admit. “Any others? What about the Little League you mentioned? Wasn’t your father a sponsor or something?”
“To a degree,” Larry says. “What happened was, Sam never did anything with me, but one day he gets the idea in his head that he wants to sponsor a Little League team. This enabled him to have the words ‘Sam Feldman and Son’ printed on the backs of our Cleveland Indians shirts and watch us parade around the field, making him inordinately proud even though there was no such entity as Sam Feldman and Son. He took pictures, you wouldn’t believe how many. But because he was a sponsor, I had to join the team. Hated every minute of it. I couldn’t bat and I couldn’t catch. Though there was one bright spot: The catcher grew up to become the drummer for the band Boston, which got pretty big in the late seventies, used to get me free tickets, which I’d scalp, made a little pocket change.”
“What about fishing?” I ask. “Didn’t you two like to go deep-sea fishing together?”
“True to an extent,” Larry concedes. “One thing we bofe loved to do was fish. So one day Sam tells me he’s going to take me out in a half-share boat out of Gloucester, that’s two of us and two rented out to some strangers. I’m a little kid, I’m looking forward to it. We get up early, before the sun’s up, drive to Gloucester, he’s got to go to breakfast at his favorite diner where he always goes, sits there telling his jokes, they don’t want to hear them again, but Sam doesn’t care, finally breakfast is over, we go to the pier, sign says boat left half an hour ago.”
I’m silent. I don’t know what to say. So Larry says it for me.
“A professor,” he says. “It’s hard for me to believe how far I’ve come sometimes. I haul out my CV sometimes and say, ‘Who’s that?’ It’s pretty impressive, I have to say. Problem is, I still see myself as my futha’s son.”
“You are your father’s son,” I say. “But you’re also more. You have to accept yourself as the accomplished grown-up you’ve become. You have to let go of the way he used to see you. It’s no longer valid.”
“It was never valid.”
“But to the extent that it was, you have to surrender the old picture you have of yourself.”
“I don’t do surrender, Dan.”
“Maybe that should be next on your to-do list. Saves a lot of wear and tear.”
Larry thinks about this as we find ourselves inside a traffic jam, locked among massive smoke-belching trucks. A tiny old lady on a bicycle weaves in front of us with a fishing pole in her teeth.
“Thank you for helping me, Dan. In case I haven’t told you. I’ll make it up to you.”
“You don’t have to, cuz.”
“But I want to prove I’m not a schnorrer, taking more than I’m entitled to.”
“Larry, you know what this sounds like? This sounds like your mother yelling, ‘Yoo-hoo, Irving, I’m only taking a warm Coke.’ Larry: Take everything you need. You’re entitled.”
“Thank you, Dan. Oh, that calms me down. Oh, you have no idea. You’re like my consigliere. I still want to figure out what it was you said into the mike at my bar mitzvah, I’m getting compulsive now, I know it’s in my mind somewhere-”
“Shh, now,” says Jade, reaching back and taking his hand again. And like that he closes his eyes and falls asleep. Maybe it’s the visual overload, maybe it’s the sleep deprivation or the heat, but he’s been laboring through his moods at such a dizzying rate, from despair to pirate cheer, struggling to keep himself afloat, that he’s worn himself out. Like magic, the talking ceases.
Jade and I look in each other’s eyes. We’re each a little shy at having witnessed these words of his.
“Torrible,” she says quietly.
“Yes, it is,” I say. With blurry vision I look at the diminished hulk of Larry, not snoring, barely breathing. I look back in Jade’s eyes that emit no light, infinitely grateful she’s shared this ride with us.
“Do you have anything to snack on?” I ask her quietly. “Mooncakes?”
“I am very very sick of mooncakes in my entire life,” she replies. “Please I give you some jum?”
“Okay, but only if you promise never to pronounce it ‘jum.’”
Studiously to herself she practices her hard g while she unsnaps her purse and takes out a piece of Trident, extending it to me gingerly, like feeding a deer through the fence at a petting zoo. “Sugarless, good strawberry!” she says, but she says it quietly, with sadness.
We watch our charge dozing, almost like he’s our child, our brutal spawn, something we’re caring for together, a tender beast hiccupping in his sleep, adjusting his position every now and then to alleviate his back spasm.
“Were you able to understand most of what he was saying?” I ask her.
“Some of it. When he is talking, I am thinking of my futha,” she says-it’s peculiar how her Chinese accent sounds like Larry’s speech impediment; his is a handicap and hers is an intonation, but it all levels out-“he always say, ‘Do not pity! Be strong!’”
Her eyes bulge for a second, turn shiny. With a little darting gesture, she reaches back into her purse for a tissue and apologetically dabs her eyes. “Sorry,” she says. “Miss my parents.”
I pat her hand, let it go.
“Were they affectionate with you when you were growing up? You know, stroke you and sing you songs? Affectionate?”
“You spell?”
“A-f-f-e-c-”
Slowly she spells it out in the air, and then quickly her face lights up, before dimming again. “No, is different in China. My futha no show affectionate, only this: ‘Stahdy! Stahdy hart!’”
She mimics her father’s harsh voice so well I can hear it-his worry for her, his dreams for her. For a minute I even think I glimpse Larry’s father, Sam, on her features, but it goes away as swiftly as it comes.
“He wants you to study hard and make something of yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Do your parents ever tell you they love you?”
“No!” She’s taken aback. “In China not considered polite.”
“What about your grandparents?”
“No!” She’s even more scandalized by this thought. If she didn’t trust me as a friend, I think this question would be giving her doubts about me. “But in their heart, very deep, no words for it.” She is dabbing again. “My futha-”
“Yes?”
“He says I am naïve.”
The word comes out perfectly pronounced. Naïve.
“Of course you’re naïve,” I say. “If naïve means tending to feel simply for people, and to simply forgive, I’m naïve too, in that sense. Just so long as you don’t let people take advantage of you, it’s a blessing to be naïve. It’s something you should try to always be.”
She nods, naïvely, dabbing her eyes. We nod back and forth, with great naïveté that we wish to hold on to. It is almost like a vow between this Chinese daughter and her adopted American father. Again I feel this impulse to protect her, to safeguard the passage of moods on her face like the phases of the moon in fast motion. Together we look over the brute slumped in the seat, a spot of moisture locked into the corner of his twitching eyeball.
“I am in torment about Larry tears,” she says.
“Me, too,” I say.