Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.
“Can you believe it?” I explode once our taxi is safely speeding off. “We’re on our way to a healthy kidney!”
“Where!? Now?!” Jade asks.
“No, right now we’re taking what’s called a joyride,” I explain from the front passenger seat. “We’re celebrating the meeting with Dr. X by driving-anywhere, fast-doesn’t even matter where. Whee!”
“Joy die!” Jade says. “Whee!”
No whee from Larry. Of the three passengers in the cab, only Larry isn’t happy, protecting himself from happiness lest it turn on him, like a high-schooler going to the prom but sitting on his carnation accidentally on purpose.
“This good development,” Jade confirms as neon lights flash past outside. “Everything coming up like roses.”
“So the surgeon definitely means what he says?” I ask Jade. “We can count on him?”
“Oh, yes,” Jade says cheerfully. “In my judgment he kill prisoner in two weeks.”
That’s putting it a bit starkly, but it damages my mood only slightly. It’s the equivalent of seeing a baby calf frolicking in a field and realizing it’s this evening’s veal piccata. I’m not quite ready to resume humming “Danny Boy” till I square away a few things.
“And we’re sure it’s a real criminal and not someone who voted against the mah-jongg commissioner or something?” I ask.
“Of course that,” Jade says. “You see how much passion Dr. X was. Chinese generally hide their feelings. But he turn red, voice shake with anger. ‘Kill hundred time!’ Only because it is bad-bad criminal.”
“What’d he say to you in Chinese when I was taking your picture?”
“He ask me, ‘He really the cousin?’ He want to make sure you are not journalist wanting story, or maybe double-oh-seven, like me!”
“Oh, right, I forgot you’re Mata Hari,” I say. “But seriously, how careful do we have to be about that stuff? I’ve gotten a strange vibe from Cherry.”
“Cherry, no!” Jade scoffs. “In my opinion always good to keep eyes open. But Cherry I believe no threat.”
This completes my good humor. I’m in a triumphant mood that nothing can wreck. Yes, the triumph has a twist to it: a bit of heartlessness mixed in with my high spirits, knowing that someone else is to die for Larry to live. But I’m relieved that the donor is a bad-bad criminal…and I’m fairly confident that the recipient is not a bad-bad criminal…so it’s a trade-off, the survivor’s dilemma. We pass the Red Guards waltzing on the terrace near the Old Faithful fountains, but we’re going so fast that my shiver’s only momentary.
Mostly what I am is ravenous. “What say we celebrate by chowing down,” I suggest. “Where shall we eat? Larry, your choice.”
Maybe he feels the mix of emotions, too? He’s acting more than usually subdued, sitting like a lump of concrete in the back with Jade. Or maybe it’s just his baseline moroseness. “Let’s have a change of pace,” he says without enthusiasm. “I’m in the mood for something authentic. How about Friday’s?”
“You mean the New York chain? They have a franchise here?”
“I saw a flyer when I went for my stroll the other day,” he says. “Good to get a little variety in my diet.”
I turn to the cabbie beside me in the front. Aside from being a speedy driver, she’s what you’d call a full-figured gal: a Chinese Queen Latifah, complete with freckles and a chesty laugh from smoking or just exuberant living. “You know Friday’s?” I ask her. “We go Friday’s?”
“Friday’s!” she whoops, picking up on my mood. “We go Friday’s!”
“Friday’s!” I whoop back at her. After weeks of Chinese food, the prospect of bloodred American beef at a New York-style restaurant is making me drool. “Friday’s, yeehaw!”
“Friday’s, yahoo!” she bellows.
“I’m trying to remember an old expression,” I tell her. “Yong yay, mong mee or mong may, something like that…”
“Give it up!” laughs Jade from the backseat.
And suddenly it comes to me. In a flash, I’ve got it back, fully formed. I try it tentatively at first, sounding it out:
“Jong may yo yee wan-su-aee.”
The cabbie’s the first to hear it. “Wan-su-aee?” she asks, her freckles blinking at me.
“Yes,” I say. “They used to compliment my pronunciation, twenty-five years ago.” I try it out again, a little more confidently. “Jong may yo yee wan-su-aee.”
The cabbie looks startled, then very happy. “Jong may yo yee wan-su aee,” she confirms.
“Yes,” I say, “long live the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples!”
Jade in the back is bouncing up and down in her seat. “Jong may yo yee wan-su-aee,” she booms.
“Long live!” cries the cabby, honking her horn and weaving in and out of traffic. “Long, long live!”
It’s mine again, in a flash. “Unbelievable!” I say. “It just came back to me!”
The cabbie’s as excited as I am, exulting something similar. “La-la believable!” she shouts, beeping the horn in jubilation. “Jong may yo yee wan-su-aee!”
Our joyride delivers us to Friday’s-which turns out to be half American chain restaurant knockoff, half traditional Chinese kitchen. Jade’s never been inside an American eatery before, and she looks amazed. Is it the concept of silverware? Or the photo of the monster mushroom-bacon burger on the plastic menu, along with the Chinese specialties? I feel guilty even considering a burger, as though I’d be doing my stomach no favor after weeks of lighter Chinese fare.
“I want cock no ice,” Jade orders sweetly.
“Make that three Cokes no ice,” I amend. But am overruled by Larry, halfheartedly trying not to be a party pooper.
“No soft drink for you, dear,” he tells Jade. “You’re getting a genuine American cocktail.”
To the waitress he says, “ONE COCK FOR DAN,” not noticing that he’s adopted Jade’s pronunciation. “ONE STRAWBERRY SCHNAPPS FOR THE LADY, WITH A COUPLE OF EXTRA CHERRIES ON TOP. SAME FOR ME,” he adds, explaining, “I need to live a little.”
His words contain so little life, however, that when the drinks come, about thirty seconds later, I try to lift his spirits by pointing my index finger at him in victory.
“You’re getting your Princess!” I tell him. “Your Princess, a kidney!”
He doesn’t seem to grasp my meaning and grasps my finger instead, not letting go.
“You’re getting your surgery within two weeks,” I say, lifting my glass. “Toast to Chairman Larry!”
“To a soon surgery!” Jade echoes. She takes her first sip of schnapps, which, by evidence of her face, is a revelation.
“Let the record show that I continue to have a very bad premonition about it, however,” Larry reminds me.
“Nothing can wreck my mood right now,” I tell Larry. “Not even having my pointer finger mauled by you.”
He seems embarrassed that he’s still grasping my finger, lets it go, and takes his first cautious sip of his drink, coughing at its strength. “Do you think Dr. X took it all in?” he asks. “Those references to Paul Volcker may have been a little much.”
“What references to Paul Volcker?”
“I feel confident he got my gist, though,” he says. “And just so you know, that was a conscious decision on my part not to tell him about all the nineteen-year-old girls from Appalachia who board those cruise ships five to a room in the hope of bagging someone good. I calculated it would be overkill. Because forget coeds-a girl from the mountains will commit acts at sea she wouldn’t dream of doing ashore. Are you kidding? With an American professor in a balcony penthouse? I make out like a bandit.”
“So everything’s great,” I say. “Why the long face? You having second thoughts about your donor?”
“I’m delighted with my donor,” he says. “What’s not to like? He’s thirty-one.”
Count on Larry to cut to the chase. He’s right-the donor’s youth is a plus. I guess it’s too much to expect moral hair-splitting from Larry; I should just be relieved he didn’t try to make a deal for the other kidneys-the six kidneys of the donor’s murder victims-for him to scalp outside Dolphin Stadium.
Rather than lightening his mood, however, the schnapps seems to be readying him for his next set of problems.
“I couldn’t help noticing there was no mention of price,” he says. “Did he say how much discount he was willing to give us?”
“I didn’t hear the word ‘discount’ at all,” I say.
“I continue to have the feeling I’m being set up for a stupendous fall.” He fixes his cinder-block gaze on his drink, takes another sip. Meanwhile Jade’s exploring the miracle of her American cocktail, like a hummingbird at a feeder of sugar water. “Unless my ears deceived me,” Larry says, “I’m pretty certain he said he would try to keep expenses down.”
“I didn’t hear that either, but let’s hope so.”
“Well, let’s do more than hope,” Larry says, leveling a placid gaze on me, “because it’s only fair to tell you that I won’t go through with this if the price is too high.”
I assume he’s kidding. “That raises an interesting question, though,” I say. “What price do you put on saving your own life? Is fifty grand appropriate for an extra few decades? Is sixty? Seventy?”
“If it doesn’t come in under fifty, I’m jumping ship,” Larry declares.
I give it a beat. “Sure you will,” I say, laughing. I examine his face for any sign of levity and start to get a sour feeling.
“I’m serious, Dan. I’m very concerned about cost. I can always start over again and negotiate a better deal in some other country.”
I have to be mishearing him. I look helplessly at Jade. “Take it easy on that drink,” I advise her, because she goes back for additional sips every few seconds, less like a hummingbird now than one of those plastic bird toys that clips to the rim of a glass and ducks its beak up and down, up and down.
Back to looking at Larry. I’m hoping the intervening seconds will have erased his dangerous thought process.
“You’re not telling me,” I say slowly, rationing out my words, “that after coming all this way, after all the people who’ve put themselves on the line for us, that you’ll leave everyone hanging if the price comes in too high.”
“You’re the one who’s always telling me to watch my pennies,” he says. “And I agree: A penny over fifty and I’m on the next plane outta here.”
After a while I exhale. “You know what?” I say. “I’m going to pretend you’re not here, that you’re back in the hospital suite, not really saying what you’re saying.”
It works, temporarily. It’s like holding my breath and ducking under the water to swim away from a sea monster. I turn my attention to Jade, who’s counting the beads of condensation on the outside of her glass. A harelipped boy wanders by hawking pink balloons. I startle to see three Westerners across the room, just as the natives always startle when they see me. They’re our mirror image: two women and a man, and they’re all laughing together, the best of friends. The man and I raise glasses to each other. This whole scene could be jolly if there weren’t a death-radiating killjoy breathing moistly at my elbow.
We order some standard American dishes. Jade is inspecting the rice inside the salt shaker, holding it upside down without realizing it’s emptying onto her place mat. Wearing an expression that makes me suspect that the strawberry schnapps has loosened her tongue, she raises her hand with an important announcement.
“Yes, you with the bubbles in your teeth.”
“I don’t care for McDonna,” she says.
“Really!” I say, scandalized to my core. “Well! And what is it exactly you don’t like about Madonna?”
“She too sexy in a bad way.”
“Okay, I’ll accept that as the statement of a tipsy, tipsy woman. Any Americans you do happen to favor?”
She picks up her swizzle stick with two hands and begins to turn it like a tiny corncob, nibbling its maraschino cherry all around. “I like Benjamin Franklin very much. He is like chairman of American history.”
“Okay, one vote for Ben Franklin,” I say, opening my large illustrated menu for the first time, even though we’ve already ordered. “You know what I’ve been meaning to ask you, though? Where’s the ‘chicken without sexual life’? I used to love that twenty-five years ago.”
“They rename. Now call ‘spring chicken.’”
“Tell me it ain’t so! What about ‘bean curd made by pockmarked woman’?”
“Now call ‘stir-fried tofu in hot sauce.’”
“Is nothing sacred? Why would they mess with a proven crowd-pleaser?”
Jade skillfully gnaws around the cherry until there’s only a spot of red left. “It so Olympic tourist don’t get wrong idea. All menus scrubbed clean of so-so names.”
Larry watches over us judgmentally, severe as a Spanish duenna, cracking his knuckles. I know the warning signs for when to desist, and the echo of distant ballistics is one of them. But I don’t care if his disgruntlement is ethical, intestinal, or whatever. Let him stew. Serves him right.
“So,” I ask Jade, running my finger down the menu. “You like the cow stomach?”
“It is very milled,” she says, meaning “mild.” I’m not clear whether this is a good thing or bad, in her book.
“What about pig’s heart fried with pickled peppers or pig’s intestines sautéed with black bean sauce?”
“I like,” she says.
All this organ talk is driving Larry deeper into his funk, which is fine by me. “How’s about kidney?”
“Um, good roasted!” she says enthusiastically.
“Which one’s best: the black kidney in this picture or the redder one?”
“I like everything in the menu,” she says. “The bitter pig’s nails. The spicy chicken’s ear. The stewed soft turtle feet.”
“And what’s this beautiful item on the back page?”
“I do not know how to speak this,” Jade says after a short struggle. “Maybe it is like floor of dog? No, not dog. My error. Collie, floor of collie-”
“Collie-floor?”
“Cauliflower!” she exults. She takes another hit of her strawberry schnapps, then guffaws with a new thought. “So now we know what you think is beautiful: cauliflower!”
I decide to see if I can get Jade to open up in a new way. “Well, there are all kinds of beautiful. For instance, cauliflower’s not beautiful,” I say, “in quite the way you are.”
As if struck in the face by a flower, Jade swiftly lowers her gaze to her drink.
“What, you don’t think you’re beautiful?” I pursue.
Jade breathes strangely, something between a gasp and a sigh. Her eyes look porous, like charcoal.
“Come on,” I coax.
She takes one last long draw on her straw and-open sesame!-gives us all she’s got, a blue streak special complete with parentheticals she must have picked up from some rhetorical master somewhere.
“Only middle level,” she says. “Okay, maybe upper middle. (But not like Koreans in magazine, so stylish! I do not prejudice against Koreans, for they are a mother lode of TV stars.)”
I ask how she compares to, say, Cherry.
“Cherry is very pleasant, capable person,” she says. “Definitely not spy, in my belief. But Cherry does not always smell, is her only problem. I always try to smell. Wait, do I say this right? Smeil. Yes, smile.”
The food arrives. Larry takes one bite of his baby back ribs but loses interest and gestures that we should help ourselves from his plate. Jade turns her fork and spoon upside down to use as chopsticks for her mac ’n’ cheese and keeps chattering.
“Mao is genius, I think. If she come back now, not dead, she be very happy, because we Chinese are so strong and so rich! (Oh, sorry for saying ‘she.’ In China we have no different word for the man and woman. It all one word. So I say ‘he, she’-sorry!)”
“And would Ms. Mao allow Tibet to go free?” I ask, taking my knife to stab! stab! stab! through the bright glaze of Larry’s baby backs.
“Of course no, for it belong to us!” Jade exclaims, also gorging herself from my cousin’s plate, her face burning bright from this carnivore’s feast. “It’s not I think, it’s I know: a fact. I am feeling strongly about this! I stick to my gun!”
“Just one big happy family, eh?” I ask, savoring Larry’s bloody sauce, stuck to my front teeth.
“Is true, Chinese people are like my friendly relatives,” she says. “I call any old man ‘uncle’ or old lady ‘grandmother,’ because we are one family. It too bad you have nothing like this in your country! Are you sad?”
But in fact I’m not sad. It’s been a great day. We’ve established a rough timetable for Larry’s surgery. We’re on track for a new Princess. Larry’s wrapped Dr. X around his little finger. I’ve gotten out from under Larry’s thumb. My banquet toast of twenty-five years ago has come back to me intact. Nothing can wreck my mood: not even the news that it’s time to take Jade back to the train station.
“But so soon?” I protest. “The round-trip is longer than the time you stayed!”
“I schlep again soon. Bullet train so fast I come and go many quickies!” She looks around bewildered. “So where is evidence for this meal?”
I hold up the bill. She tries to snatch it but misses.
“My treat,” I say.
“Nice thought, but don’t even think it,” Larry says, snagging it from my fingers like one of those frogs with a lightning-fast tongue. It’s the first thing he’s said in an hour.
At the station I’m still not sad. I’ll see Jade again soon. Larry will somehow come around to springing for the surgery, whatever the cost. Everything seems doable, even the notion of transplanting a living organ from one human body into another. What’s the big deal? You slice it out of one person and you stitch it into another person. “Danny Boy” seems the right thing to hum as Larry and I walk Jade to her track.
“Thank you again,” I tell her.
“Don’t always say ‘sank you,’” she says with impatience. “Normally in my country, if you are friends or you are family, you do not say.”
“Oh, it’s understood, like ‘I love you,’” I say.
“Yes, too stupid to say.”
I stand corrected. Not to say reprimanded. But nothing can wreck my mood. I push her shoulder slightly. “I nudge you,” I say.
“Exactly!” she says, looking pleased as she pushes my shoulder slightly back. Emboldened suddenly, she reaches her fingertips to my chin. “I do?” she asks, touching my goatee experimentally. It’s the first time she’s dared to touch my face, but she must feel safe, because we’re well chaperoned by our Spanish duenna. “So like wire,” she says and shivers slightly. “I think this night I will have sweet dreams,” she says.
I do not answer this. It’s in my wedding vows.
From an invisible distance, trains chug, firecrackers ignite.
Down the lonely platform, we see a fuzzy figure all by herself, swaggering under many pieces of luggage. The poor thing must have missed her train or be lost or something. But now the figure is waving, making noises, all but yodeling to us. Let’s listen:
“Larry-Mary! Mary-Larry!”
I rub my eyes. Am I dreaming? Swaying under her baggage, sweating like a rhino in Larry’s mother’s fur coat, it’s Mary, returned from her open pit of a city near the Korean border, back to her beloved. “I bring you mashed!” she says, waving a bag of KFC.
“Huwwo, Mary,” Larry says evenly as he accepts a hug without emotion. “I thought not till next week. Any case, thank you for coming.”
We wave Jade off on her train. We bring Mary back with us in a cab.
One woman out, one woman in.
“Danny Boy” dies in my throat. I was wrong. There was something that could wreck my mood.