You cannot push a cow’s head down unless it is drinking water by its own will.
First order of business is getting Larry back on his dialysis routine. No time to waste: Without a working kidney, it’s imperative that he be hooked up to a blood-cleaning machine at once to keep him alive till we can locate a replacement kidney. Bright and early next morning, Mary leads Larry off to hook up with her uncle, who’s made an appointment for him at a dialysis clinic. This frees me to begin the process of procuring a kidney, but before I can start, I have to do some remedial work-locating not only the luggage but also the passport Larry’s managed to misplace, both a drain of precious time when we’ve allotted ourselves only a week in-country. Yuh-vonne pitches in, taking me to the airport where we find the luggage, manning the phone with her little rhinestone headset from my hotel suite to find the right offices to replace his passport so that he can legally be here.
Noontime finds Yuh-vonne and me sitting on a hard wooden bench with the rest of China, in a gleaming but ill-lit hallway at a police station where we hope to get the forms to get the forms to pay the five-hundred-dollar U.S. penalty and replace his passport. How can the insides of China be so gleaming when the outsides are so dusty? Maybe it has something to do with those brooms everyone is always wielding that look like something snapped off a tree. It’s a mystery that makes my eyes droop, and soon I’m dozing in and out of sleep while Yuh-vonne passes the time by translating aloud from the binder she claims is my fact file.
“‘Beautiful lady smooth bottom of he shirt’…”
It’s an interesting translation.
“‘She take fingertips and stroke he belt’…”
“Wait a minute, it says this in my fact file?”
“No fact file!” she informs me. “Chinese chicken-choking book!”
So I see. Chinese porn is hidden inside the binder. Should I take umbrage that she’s defiling my dossier? Yuh-vonne smiles with her little bitten lips and continues reading.
“‘With great skill her fingertips undo the latch on belt, the key on belt’-what you call the handle that attach?” She looks at me brazenly.
“Buckle?” I say.
“Yes, buckle! ‘And then she does zippery part’-what called the zippery…?”
“The fly?”
“No fly!” She looks vaguely offended.
I peer down at the page, all those lovely squiggles. “Yes, fly, I’m sorry, that’s what we call it…”
Satisfied, Yuh-vonne coyly covers her smile with her hand and continues. “‘He gorge is’-how you say, like a desert?”
“Dry? His throat is dry?”
“‘Then she put mouth on he…deek…’”
Suddenly my cell phone rings. Was I daydreaming just now? I scramble to fetch it and hear a semifamiliar voice.
“Ah, Dan, Professor is frighten.”
“What do you mean, Mary? Is he all right? Can you put Professor on the phone?”
“Put. Professor?”
“Yes, can you put him on the phone?”
After a few minutes of negotiation, Larry takes the line. “Larry, are you okay?”
“Not really, Dan. I’m upset, I’m confused, I can’t even read the street signs.”
“That’s because they’re in Chinese, Larry. We’ll get this all straightened out when we get you a new organ. Where are you? I’ll come meet you.”
“I have no clue, Dan.”
“Okay, can Mary say it to me phonetically?”
Mary gets back on the phone. “Hello, Mary. What is the name of the hospital where you are?”
“Hos-ip-it-al…”
“Yes, the hospital, or clinic, or wherever you are. Its name. What is its name?”
“Okay! Close Beijing.”
“Not in Beijing ”?
“No Beijing -close!”
“What’s the name of the town? The name of-”
“Sank you, sank you very much,” she says, hanging up.
“Yuh-vonne, I have to go see my cousin,” I tell her.
With the aid of a rhinestone hand mirror, she’s applying coral-colored lipstick to clash with the highlights in her hair. “He is eunuch?”
“No. What makes you ask that?”
“On phone-you say he need new organ.”
“Not that kind. A kidney organ. Can you help me find him?”
“I do. Everything!” she reminds me with a happy smile.
“That’s really sweet,” I say. “Can you ask our driver if he’s willing to go?”
“No ask driver.”
“Why not?”
She leans to whisper in my ear. “Maybe he garment spy,” she says.
All right, once again: the issue of “government spies.” Let’s get into this topic a little deeper. Twenty-five years ago, almost everyone in China was a government spy. In fact, it was risible how almost everyone was a government spy. They were paranoid, and with good reason: When Mao formed his first government in 1949, it was later discovered to be half filled with Soviet spies. And the Soviets were his allies! In Chinese society, spying for the motherland was traditionally considered a sacred duty. Keeping tabs on friend and foe alike was in the air they breathed, and had been for eons. But for a culture that codified its espionage in the sixth century B.C., the cloak-and-dagger stuff was so primitive as to be borderline funny. One evening twenty-five years ago, I came back from a banquet early to use my bathroom and actually caught a sweating hotel clerk with his hands in my luggage, feverishly planting a bugging device. Later he tried to gain my good graces by giving me a bottle of sticky-sweet Shandong wine. I was so taken with his grade school antics that it worked: He did gain my good graces, even though from then on, my luggage clicked like a Geiger counter whenever I got near a railway station. I was embarrassed for them, the way one is embarrassed for a slow classmate who so obviously copies from your spelling test that you move your elbow to let him see better.
But then, of course, that slow classmate had the power to lock you up and throw away the key.
Ah, the precious antics of police states…comedy on the cusp of terror. Staring into the abyss for three hours, last time I was here, was so nauseating that the only proper response was laughter.
Yuh-vonne leans in again. “Also for secretive purposes, we refer to kidney as other name. Say ‘Princess,’” she suggests.
“You really think it’s necessary?”
“I think.”
Calling Mary back, Yuh-vonne gets directions to the dialysis clinic outside the city limits. We dismiss our limo driver and hop a bus to the burbs, which are distinctly un-Kryptonopolis-like. There are oxcarts and rice paddies and the smell of gunpowder from fireworks going off at random. We take a bumpy taxi ride several hazy blocks to a clinic that looks like a low-level government building, with decals for soda pop on the windows and a junior-size billboard in the courtyard advertising foot powder.
When we finally locate Larry, he’s inside a circle of people-slumped forward in the backseat of a minicab parked inside a second inner courtyard, looking like a guy who’s made up his mind to do something everyone else disagrees with. He may be frightened, as Mary diagnosed, but it comes out as stubbornness. He refuses to have his dialysis treatment. Why not? He objects on principle to being ordered around. Even if it’s for his own good? He doesn’t care. He hates this hospital, he hates this country, and he hates Mary.
“You hate Mary?”
“Probably only temporarily. I’ve been up since seven o’clock with certain things I said I wanted to do, and Mary, whose real name turns out to be Ma-ah or something like that, she stalled and stalled-first we had to go here, then we had to go there, and then we had to go to a restaurant where I paid for lunch for everyone.”
“Who’s ‘everyone’?”
“These people. The doctor, the translator, and so forth.”
“That’s who these people are?”
“Yes. I’m too tired to explain. Also the taxi driver and the old man.”
“Who’s the old man?”
“Dan, you know what? I don’t want to make introductions right now. I just want to go back to my hotel.”
I turn to nod hello to everyone. They grin at me helplessly, with worry in their eyes. The woman doctor looks concerned and kind. The old man has his chin in his hands and is assessing everything as he steps thoughtfully about, never looking at anything in particular. I take a seat in the taxi, which is rich with a loamy scent, and turn back to Larry, who manages to lift his gaze to me with a pirate glint and say, “On the other hand, I like your girlfriend.”
“She’s my guide, Larry.”
This would be the time for Larry to come up with some sort of crude joke about her guiding me to a rooftop, shtupping my money’s worth, something like that. What constantly surprises me in these instances, however, is that Larry’s not that type of person. Despite his rough appearance, he’s made of finer stuff. “I always envied your taste in women,” is all he says.
I look over at Yuh-vonne and wonder again whether the T-shirt she’s wearing, with the slogan I AM IN MY PRIME, is the most appropriate choice to wear while visiting police stations this morning. “She’s pretty bright,” I say.
“She’s like the Chinese equivalent of a California girl,” he says, warming to the subject. “Not a Valley girl-she seems too articulate-but a starlet, very enthusiastic, someone who-”
“Larry,” I interrupt, “if you don’t have dialysis, you could die.”
“So I die. I don’t care anymore. I’m sick of treading water.”
“Larry, you haven’t treaded water in China. It’s different here.”
“Dan, all due respect, but water is water, and I can’t back down now after saying I wouldn’t. It would signal weakness.”
A memory comes to me-Larry as the little boy refusing to blow out his birthday candles. He’d sit there with his chunky arms crossed under his pointy birthday cap, insisting that if he blew them out, it would mean that the party was over. And now as an adult, the mix of 100 percent obstinacy and perhaps 60 percent disability is a potent one. Nor is physically forcing him an option: Not only would he be as unmovable as a tree stump, he’d probably punch me in the kidneys. Then we’d have two of us needing new organs.
And so Larry the diva of dialysis sits in the back of his Chinese cablet, choosing instead to relate his first memory.
“Maybe not actually my first,” he says, “but top two or three anyway. My mutha says we have to go see the doctor. I don’t want to go see the doctor. Okay, we’re not going to see the doctor, my mutha says, we’re going to see Aunt Esther. Goody, I like Aunt Esther. But after we go see Aunt Esther, guess where we go next? The doctor’s. It was a stupid lie, but it opened my eyes.”
“Maybe that’s when you started taking a different path from your twin,” I say. “Judy continued to believe in your mother’s system, but you took a more skeptical approach.”
“It taught me that if something didn’t make sense to me, I’d say no. So when you tell me things, no offense, Dan, no matter how much sense they might make to you, I’m going to go with my gut. Hasn’t lied to me yet.”
“But right now your gut is injured, Larry!”
“Sorry,” he says with a shrug. “My kidney tells me, ‘No dialysis today.’”
“About that word,” I say. “Yuh-vonne thinks it would be better if we don’t say ‘kidney.’ The walls have ears, apparently. She suggests the word ‘Princess.’”
“Fine. I need a new Princess. But the old Princess doesn’t want dialysis.” He coughs into his hand, a surprisingly delicate maneuver. “I am just not in the mood to be exsanguinated.”
“Don’t be dark, Larry. You’re not being exsanguinated, you’re having your blood cleansed.”
“I thought you’d appreciate the word, though,” he says with a hint of pride.
In addition to his personal entourage, we’re providing entertainment for a crowd of maybe ten people in the courtyard: three teenage girls, a barefoot man smoking in a wheelchair, a beggar urinating on the clinic steps, and half a dozen faces at various open windows in the whitewashed clinic, all staring at us impassively.
“But you could die without dialysis!” I remind him.
“Actually, I’ve skipped them before and was surprisingly okay. I figure if I can cut out one every other week, I can save myself a couple hundred bucks a month.”
This calculus reminds me of the husband in childbirth class who asked if he could get money back for forgoing the episiotomy. I refrain from telling him so. “And Mary?”
“She can keep the gifts. I’m not asking for them back.”
“Have you given her more gifts?”
“Just a used laptop, about a year ago. I couldn’t believe how easy it was with PayPal. I wired her three hundred and fifty dollars, she picked up a Dell, I think she said.”
“Don’t you think that was overly generous of you, before you’d even met?”
“Dan, she had to go out in forty-below weather to e-mail me! Do I want her to freeze, just to talk to me? That’s why I brought her my mother’s mink coat.”
“I thought you brought her the warmest coat that L. L. Bean sells?”
“That was for Labor Day. The mink is for Memorial Day. Or vice versa. Trying to keep those holidays straight is a sucker’s game.”
“You carried your mother’s mink coat over from Florida?”
“I had it compressed. They do a very good job of compressing things like that. It doesn’t cut down on the weight, but it takes up surprisingly little space.”
“I can’t believe you gave her your mother’s mink coat when you’re not even sure you want to stay with this woman.”
“She liked it very much. She was posing for me, I took pictures. It looked almost as good on her as on a stripper of my acquaintance. Nice way to say ‘hooker,’ incidentally.”
It occurs to me that I could learn a thing or two from Larry’s open-handedness. But now’s not the time to explore this question. Now’s the time for a decision.
“Larry, you’re not thinking straight.”
“Welcome to my world,” he says, pointing to his head as though it’s a third party to these proceedings. “My question is, am I misoriented permanently from the icicle, or just temporarily from the dialysis? I can only hope it’s the former.”
“You mean you can only hope it’s the latter,” I say.
“That’s what I said,” he says.
I don’t bother correcting him that it was his mother the icicle hit. “Let’s get him back to his hotel,” I tell the crowd. “We can make sure he gets his dialysis tomorrow, hopefully.”
The crowd murmurs troubled assent. The kindly woman doctor retreats into the clinic. The translator piles in the front seat of the mini-cab with the driver, and Mary piles in with Larry in back. The tiny car heaves and bounces off. The old man sticks around, still with his chin in his hands and pacing slowly to and fro, looking at nothing but assessing everything.
The smog respires with a life of its own, back and forth, like cloud banks of vaporized Frappuccino, quite tasty.
“So that’s my cousin,” I tell Yuh-vonne, inviting her to sit next to me on a cinder-block bench. “What’s your honest opinion of everybody?”
The black pupils of her eyes dart from side to side, twitching as in REM sleep. She’s hard at work, figuring how much tact to filter in with how much candor.
“Your brother Laurie’s accent I can’t understand,” she says carefully.
“He has traces of a speech impediment left over from having his tonsils taken out too late,” I say defensively. “Or maybe they mangled the surgery. Anyway, his tongue sometimes has a habit of staying in the back of his froat.”
“He sound a little Chinese,” she says.
“Hmmm. And what do you make of his mail-order bride, though Larry doesn’t like us to refer to her that way?”
Again with the REM movement. “Ah, she is not good educated.”
“No?”
“Because her voice doesn’t look beautiful.”
“So there’s no way she could be a college professor, as she claimed?”
“Definitely not! High school maybe. In the distant countryside. Her education basement is very low.”
“I’ll level with you, Yuh-vonne. See, I’m not sure I can trust Mary. Maybe she just wants an American husband to get out of the country, take his money, and then ditch him. I need to figure out if she’s good for him.”
“Ah, maybe just concubine to play with Laurie,” she says, “only to play and not be serious, so to catch better opportunity for herself.”
“We call that a gold digger, where I come from.”
Yuh-vonne thinks a minute, nibbling little dents into her lips. “But maybe Laurie have golden heart,” she says at last. “Maybe they have golden heart together. A relationship between human beings is the hardest thing there is.”
Which gives me something to think about while the old man paces nearby, his chin in his hands.
“It is hard to find person you can trust,” she says at last. “Mary is brave lady. She came to Beijing only to make friends with Laurie. This take a lot of courage. But as for emotional item, I’m not sure,” she says. “Maybe Mary not love Laurie so much.”
“Okay, that’s what I’m wondering.”
“All she worry about is if he dangerous.”
“Larry? He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Unless maybe you were a cousin who got on his bad side.”
“That all she worry about, not how is Laurie doing, only is he dangerous. Also why he never marry before.”
“He’s come close a couple times, but it never worked out.”
“Not because he gayboy?”
“Nah-he likes the ladies, and the ladies like him.”
Yuh-vonne nods. “Mary is not stupid, and she is clever. She knows what she wants. Also, all these people around Laurie, they are her peeps, I think. Three to one. Four to one. Who know how many, their purpose only to chase the money.”
“You think they’re all in collusion?”
“And the taxi driver, too, in my opinion.” Yuh-vonne stands and extends a hand to pull me up. “So now we go back to our hotel?”
Despite myself, I love how she calls it “our” hotel. But suddenly the old man takes a step closer and addresses some sentences in Chinese to Yuh-vonne, who nods and says “Are! Are! Are!” like a toy poodle with its vocal cords cut.
“What was that about?” I ask when it’s over.
“Ow my God, this man is the uncle,” she tells me.
“All this time? While we were talking about Mary?” I ask, as the old man takes a thoughtful step away to give us room to discuss. “Could he understand us speaking in English?”
“Impossible to know,” Yuh-vonne says. “He play cards very close to chest. But also maybe he decipher your party language.”
“Body language?”
“Maybe?”
“How do you do,” I exclaim, grabbing the old man’s hand. He smiles wanly, allowing his limp hand to be pumped but still looking at nothing, certainly not at me.
“Sank you very much,” he murmurs deferentially.
“Well, time to go back to our hotel!” I announce to everyone-teenage girls, urinating beggar; it’s not quite loud enough for the people in the open windows, but I trust they can read my party language.
“Not so fast, homey,” Yuh-vonne says. “Uncle say wait here for Laurie.”
“Why wait here? Larry went back to the hotel.”
“He say Laurie only went for gifts in taxi.”
“But that makes no sense! Why would Larry want to get gifts for the clinic he’s refusing to have treatment in?”
Yuh-vonne gives a shrug as if to say, He’s your brother. But he’s not, of course. She keeps calling him my brother because she can’t fathom why I’d do this for a cousin.
Just then the taxi comes toodling back into the dusty courtyard. Everyone tumbles out but Larry. The taxi driver waddles into the hospital bearing an armload of hastily wrapped presents.
“You got gifts for the clinic you’re rejecting?” I ask Larry.
“That’s how I am, Dan,” Larry explains, patiently cracking his knuckles in the backseat. “I’m a people person. I like to give. Plus, I want to stay on their good side, in case I find myself needing their services at some future date. Just because I’m ill, don’t ask me to change how I do business, please.”
I switch tactics. “So the old man turns out to be the uncle.”
“Yes, and some sort of godfather in the government, I gather. He arranged this clinic. He arranged the taxi. Any case, I suggest we go back to my hotel. I need a pillow very critically.”
I turn to Yuh-vonne. “You want to go back to their hotel with them?” I ask her.
“I am at your service night and day,” Yuh-vonne confirms.
“Can we squeeze in your taxi?” I ask Larry.
“Why not? Save a few bucks.”
This taxi is not like the Red Flag limo with leather seats. It’s more like a circus car trying to accommodate a serious number of misfits. We say good-bye to the uncle and the translator, and soon Larry and I are pressed up together in the ratty backseat, thigh length to thigh length. In all the years we’ve known each other, this is the closest we’ve ever been. He radiates an inordinate amount of body heat.
“I like the uncle, he’s connected,” Larry says. “I’m going to send him a Cross pen-and-pencil set. Something to show honor. If I can work with him, I think we can make a mint together. I can set him up in Vegas, I know croupiers, I know the sheriff, I know the head of the Chamber. Or forget Vegas, I can fix him up with Sheldon Adelson, who’s only doing the biggest casino in the world in Macau as we speak. My mutha went to grade school with him back in Roxbury-Dorchester. All we need is one percent of his casino. Is one percent too much to ask? With Mary at my side and the uncle in my pocket, we can score big time.”
Yuh-vonne exchanges a few sentences with Mary in the front seat, then clears her throat to get our attention. “Yes, but you see, just now Mary tells me she will leave Laurie,” she says.
I’m shocked. “What? You mean for good?” I ask.
“Sorry to inform,” Yuh-vonne says. “She do not like fiasco at clinic.”
Larry’s self-defense mechanisms are more practiced than mine are. “So she leaves,” is what he says, cracking his knuckles.
“But…but,” I sputter. I’m taking this hard. I’m protective of my cousin and don’t want to see him left high and dry. But I’m also a cheap-skate. “What about the mink coat?” is the first thing I can formulate.
“I’m good for it,” Larry says. “I gave it to her with no conditions. It’s her property.”
“But-”
“She’s free to go if she wishes,” Larry says. “I make no claim on anyone.”
I’m so stunned on his behalf that I feel a little carsick. I look at Yuh-vonne, who looks back at me. We’re sad together on either side of Larry, and a little guilty. While she and I were checking out Mary, Mary was checking us out and deciding it wasn’t worth it.
We ride in silence for a kilometer or two, bumping. The taxi has no shock absorbers or muffler, and we rattle around noisily. After a while I reach in front and squeeze Mary’s right shoulder. This seems to relieve the tension, reminding her that we’re not enemies. She inhales and pats my hand. Yuh-vonne says something to her that sounds to my overeager ears like, “Watch ’em, guam show.” Is it okay for me to hear English in the sounds she makes? The last thing I want to do is dis these people who’re going to such lengths for us. Finally I decide it’s just my brain doing the best it can, and I let it be. “Saudi sandwich way too low,” Mary responds, shuddering with a couple of small sobs and dabbing at her eyes. I can’t tell if I see tears or not. Maybe the way her skin is constructed, it soaks them up before they have a chance to roll down?
“What’re you thinking?” I ask Larry.
He shoots me one of his Mona Lisa smiles. “I could clean up in this country with a coupla Midas shops.”
When we get to Larry’s hotel, Mary’s still dabbing at her eyes, but she seems fine. Larry’s unhappy but taking the blow in stride.
“Where are we?” Larry asks, standing in front of the lobby. “Oh, I didn’t recognize it for a minute. I apologize, everybody.”
We clamber upstairs, each according to his or her capabilities. Various people help various people. As we walk down the corridor-Mary who is not Mary, Yuh-vonne who is not Yuh-vonne, my brother Laurie who is actually my cousin Larry, and the taxi driver who for some reason has come with us-I lag behind to examine a trapdoor in the wall that has captured my attention. When I get it open, it reveals a primitive fire extinguisher inside.
“Curious man,” Yuh-vonne whispers to me with a lewd wink, “always curious man.”
Mary busily fidgets at the room key, an oversize woman always fidgeting with undersize things. Once inside the room, she marches into the bathroom and huffily plucks frilly panties off the shower-curtain rod like Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl. The taxi driver makes himself at home on Larry’s bed, sitting cross-legged on the pillow to work the remote for the TV across the room. Larry plops himself down on the foot of the bed and removes his Businessman’s Running Shoes from his swollen feet. I don’t want him to remove his Businessman’s Running Shoes. Even less do I want him to remove his Freakishly Thin Business Socks, but that’s what he does. Wearing a sphinxlike expression, he rubs his bare toes with both hands. They must be soggy and odoriferous, I think. At this moment I should kick-start a negotiation between the estranged parties, but I’m too busy trying to cover my nose and take tiny surreptitious inhalations, yoga-like.
With me in this handicapped state, Yuh-vonne initiates the conversation. “Mary, do you want to say something to Laurie?” she begins.
Yes, she does. Mary plucks and plucks, Larry rubs and rubs, I cover and cover. With Yuh-vonne interpreting, here’s what it is:
“Mary say she feel very sorry, but to be honest she did everything according to her mind. It all just a mistake.”
“So she’s really leaving?” I blurt, ruining my yoga breath. “Just like that, after corresponding on e-mail for two years?”
My plaintive tone seems to mobilize Larry.
“Did I ever hit her?” he asks, dropping his sphinxlike expression. “I know I was angry today, but I never came close to hitting her. Surely she has to realize that.”
“Larry, do you want her to stay?” I say.
“I don’t want her to leave,” he says, as if making a great concession. His pride’s at stake, and he didn’t get where he is in life by begging.
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere!” I say optimistically. I surrender to the situation, uncovering my nose. “Hear that, Mary? Larry doesn’t want you to leave.”
Mary comes out of the bathroom and wipes her eyes against the black lacy bra in her hands. She turns to Yuh-vonne, snuffling. What should I do? is the question she obviously puts to her in Chinese.
Everything’s in Yuh-vonne’s court for a minute. She launches into heartfelt negotiations with Mary while Larry continues to rub his feet and look indifferent. On the muted TV, a Chinese shopping channel is hawking a lime green Barcalounger knockoff that’s the spitting image of the one I’m sitting on. I’m not sure whether I should feel vaguely famous because of this.
“I don’t like her,” Larry says, rubbing his feet.
“Who? Mary?”
“Mary I like again. And Yuh-vonne I have great respect for.”
“Then who don’t you like?” I ask.
“The taxi driver,” Larry says. “Why does she have to be in on this?”
“The taxi driver’s a woman?” I ask.
“That is my judgment, yes,” Larry says. “And a very expensive one, too. She charged me eight hundred RMB for the use of her cab today. That’s more than a hundred bucks.”
“I thought the uncle was picking up the tab,” I say.
“As did I.”
I look at the cabbie with new respect. “You wouldn’t happen to know of any black-market connections for a kidney, would you?” I ask her.
“King tizzy, shoe can go,” the cabbie says, waving no.
On TV they’re now pitching some kind of bird poison that makes unwanted birds keel over almost immediately. You can rid the whole neighborhood of pesky, noisy birds! At last Yuh-vonne comes out of her huddle with Mary.
“What’s the verdict?” I ask.
“Mary say if Larry take dialysis tomorrow, she will stay three days.”
Despite himself Larry betrays a look of immense relief. “Deal,” he says.
“Our work here is done,” I say, standing up. I feel chastened, realizing how tentative the situation is, not just Larry’s health but everything. I don’t know who anyone is, what anyone knows or doesn’t know, when or where the next shoe will drop. “We go to our hotel now.”
Yuh-vonne hugs Mary in a mutual ballet move, the women patting each other’s shoulders ritualistically. Yuh-vonne kneels to hug Larry, her “Prime” T-shirt riding a third of the way up her bare backside. “Thank you, dear,” Larry says to her, and means it.
Yuh-vonne gives him a lingering look of fondness. “I hope you be happy every day,” she tells him.
Yuh-vonne wants to collect the headset she left in my hotel suite, and in a few minutes she’s back there with me, casually shuffling through my yoga CDs. “Yoga give you the soft bones?” she asks.
Is it a rebuke? A challenge? “No, yoga does not give me the soft bones,” I say.
“You mind if I smoke?” she asks.
Ordinarily I would. I would stop her both for general health reasons and because it must be smoke that has stained the backs of her teeth brown, where she’s forgotten to whiten them. Also because it’s getting late. But right now I’m too fatigued from the day’s machinations to object. Besides, it’s amazing to see her smoke, and with a rhinestone cigarette holder yet. Blue curlicues waft from her nose like in a movie from the 1940s.
“I am at your service,” she reminds me, stroking the back of my head.
“So this means what, exactly?” I say.
She answers the question sideways. “I see fortune-teller,” she says, taking her hand away to fetch her iPod from within her purse. “Fortune-teller say I marry two times.”
“What happens to the first husband?”
“Die,” she says with a smile. If that statement’s meant to woo me, it’s the strangest woo I’ve ever heard. She turns on her iPod and holds it up so I can hear the song: “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” by Air Supply.
“We go rooftop now?”
I’m a curious man. But mostly I’m a married man. Bye-bye, Batgirl.