The Wangs vs. the World(95)
“Not since ni men left New Orleans. Ta jen de yao live there ma? Grace gen wo shuo.”
“Ta fa fong le.”
“Maybe he’s really in love with her.”
“Daddy just want everyone to be all together.”
“Oh yeah, I know.” Instead of meeting her gaze, he stared at the titles on the shelf then took a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe a nonexistent layer of dust from their spines.
“Baba . . . I’m sorry.”
He looked startled. “Wei she me?”
“Because of the article. And the other article. You . . . you must be embarrassed. I didn’t know that was going to happen. And then Grayson and, Baba, he had a baby with that other girl, and even that was in a stupid newspaper.”
He tucked the handkerchief back in his pocket, deliberately. “What is there to be embarrassed about? I have a daughter who makes a very interesting life, so interesting that everybody want to know what she is doing. Embarrassing for them, that their lives are so boring! Not for you. Not for me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really. Mucho really! Zwei really de.”
“Okay, then.”
“Dou shi okay de.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“But . . . really?”
He looked at her, nodding.
“Thank you, Baba.”
“Bu yao xie.”
That night in bed, Saina picked up the magazine. She pictured her friends—and worse, all those people who thought that knowing her work meant knowing her—reading this article and felt an unsettling hatred towards Billy. She didn’t want to let that in with her family here, with the three travelers so strangely buoyant and solicitous of one another. Better to let them think that she was unaffected by it. And maybe she was. Maybe she was even pleased. Now that the dreaded thing had happened, it turned out that it was only one of many dreaded things, and perhaps not even that. She unfolded the note that came with the magazine, knowing it was from Billy.
On it, he’d written Call it a comeback?
Without thinking about it much, Saina took out her phone and texted a response. I’ve been gone for years.
四十
Helios, NY
CLOUDS. FAT AND PUFFY. A roller-coaster highway that looped through the air. She and Charles, in the backseat of a driverless car, speeding from side to side as she yelled and tried to climb into the front seat, reaching for the brakes with her foot. Every time she got close, she’d look down and realize that her foot was a tiny, bound hoof stuffed inside a beautiful embroidered slipper, royal blue, just a toe’s length too short to stop the car. Charles wasn’t helping because he was on the phone, a big, bright-yellow cordless phone, talking in a language she couldn’t understand. Barbra knew that if she could just reach the brake Charles would put the phone down and take her in his arms. Even now he had one hand on her bottom, cupping it, making sure that she didn’t fall out the window.
Barbra woke up, eyes still closed, and Charles was on the phone, whispering in Mandarin.
“How can that be? How can that be??”
She lay very still, listening.
“But why would they let him?”
Sensing that he was sitting in the far corner of the room, facing away from her, Barbra opened her eyes.
“So he is there now? Right now?”
Charles sat in a shaft of light, like a nightmare in a children’s book.
“No, don’t contact him. Don’t give him time to run away. I will go. Have you found a number? Does he live in the old house still?”
He took a small notebook out of his pocket and wrote something in it, then stopped abruptly.
“He did? That fool!” A brief pause, and then he said, “It is not your place to tell me what I should do,” almost spitting in the receiver. After putting the phone down on his lap, he sat, suspended. Barbra didn’t move either; she wasn’t yet ready to invest in the reality of this moment. If only she could go back to the dream and find her way to the brake, bound foot or not.
Charles stood up and unzipped one of his suitcases, digging in the side pocket. He pulled out some things she couldn’t see and zippered them into a pouch that she’d gotten for him at Louis Vuitton for his birthday four years ago. There was no indication that he knew she was awake. Barbra was about to whisper to him when he picked up a clean pair of boxers and headed to the shower.
A photograph of Charles’s mother. A plastic Ziploc bag, with ten stacks of twenty-dollar bills. His father’s factory identification card. A sheaf of thin, crinkled papers, handwritten, imprinted all over with fading red marks from official chops. A white jade chop, one of the biggest ones she’d ever seen, in the shape of a mountain with just Charles’s surname carved into the base. A piece of something that looked like bone. A worn leather wallet with Charles’s National Taiwan University identification card and, hiding behind it, her own fresh-faced high school identification card, which she hadn’t seen since she’d lost it in the university cafeteria where her father worked, where she’d first laid eyes on Wang Da Qian more than thirty years ago.
Just then, the blow dryer in the hall bathroom switched off, and a moment later Charles walked in to see the contents of his valise spread out over their bed. Barbra held up her young face.