Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Forrest’s interviewee had hit the water in the only way that allowed for the remote possibility of survival: feet first, with a slightly angled entry. And he was rescued almost immediately thereafter.

The interview, combined with the facts and figures assembled for the newspaper piece, opened Forrest’s eyes to the drawbacks of this popular form of suicide. But none of that mattered to him now.

Ying had seen him in this state. During her weekly visits, she had watched him as he grew more and more emotionally distant. She had wondered how his parents could be so oblivious to their son’s pain.

Ying left the house in a great hurry, clutching the note in her tremulous hand. He had said that he would walk. This was to her advantage. She would take the bus.

It being a beautiful, fogless day, there were clumps of tourists moving up and down the pedestrian walkway. They were snapping pictures of Angel Island, of Alcatraz, of Treasure Island in the distance, and taking panoramic shots of the colorfully cluttered, contoured hills of San Francisco. Ying chose a spot where she would wait. And pace. At one point a bridge worker approached her. She couldn’t believe what he said: “You’re not thinking of— you know .” He made a diving motion with his hand.

“No, I’m not,” said Ying brusquely, after she had collected herself. “I’m waiting for someone.”

The bridge worker nodded, though there was skepticism in his look. Recently, there had been a rash of suicides. There was a campaign underway to put up a safety barrier, but it would be expensive, and there were engineering and aesthetic challenges. Most people didn’t want it. “If we stop them here, they’ll just find some other place to do themselves in,” was the general refrain. “After all, there’s always the Bay Bridge. Ugly as sin, but quite serviceable.”

An hour went by. Ying began to think that Forrest had changed his mind entirely. Now there existed the possibility that he wouldn’t be coming at all. She relaxed. She took in the view. She snapped pictures for those who handed her their cameras: tourists wishing visual records of their visit to one of the best-known bridges in the world.

Then, after letting her guard down, she noticed him. He walked slowly. He didn’t see her — not from a distance, nor even, finally, up close. Was she invisible to him?

Having no other recourse, as he came close enough for her to reach out and touch him, she spoke his name. Startled, Forrest stopped and turned.

“Ying?”

She nodded. “There was no one?” she asked. “Not a single person who smiled at you?”

“You read my note?”

“How could I miss it? Your room — it was very much in need of a cleaning.”

“I thought that a girl was smiling at me, down there, at the end of the bridge. But I was wrong. She was smiling at her friends and I happened to get in the way. The smiles of the young are frivolous and inconsequential, anyway. Why are you here?”

“To keep you from jumping off this bridge.”

“Why do you care?”

“Life is precious.”

Forrest didn’t answer. He was looking over the rail. He was looking down at the water far below. Four seconds is a long time to fall, he thought to himself. When he turned his head to look at Ying again, she was smiling. It was a big smile — almost cartoon-like. It was the picture of the woman in the dictionary next to the word “smile.”

“What are you so happy about?” he asked.

“I’m not happy. I am smiling to keep you from jumping into this bay. Or does my smile not count either?”

In a soft voice, almost a whisper: “It counts. Of course it counts.”

“Then I can stop smiling now? I look foolish.”

Forrest nodded. The two started down the walkway, heading south, back to San Francisco.

“I lost my father and brother in the 228 Massacre. In 1947. Do you know of it?”

“The Tawainese uprising.”

“Yes. The White Terror. I lost many other family members and friends then. They said we were Communists, but we weren’t. We were proud Tawainese who protested too loudly what the Mainland Chinese were doing to our land and our people.”

“You came to this country to escape all of that?”

Ying nodded. The two passed a gaggle of Japanese tourists taking pictures of each other taking pictures. She lowered her voice. “Life was better under the Japanese occupation.” She paused. “But all life is precious. Mr. Forrest Wilton, you put too little value on your own life.”

They walked on in silence. As they were leaving the bridge Forrest said, “I’m hungry. My feet hurt. I have money for a taxi.”

Forrest was about to direct the driver to his parents’ house when Ying made a suggestion: her cousin’s restaurant in Chinatown.

“You’ll like it,” she said to Forrest. “All the waiters smile.”

“We have a whole house full of books. My husband and our two kids are big readers.” This is what Josephine heard the woman say — the woman whose house this apparently was. And there was no reason to doubt her; half of the items for sale in the driveway or overflowing upon the lawn were either books or magazines. There were full sets of Childcraft and Colliers encyclopedias and the usual stacks of non-sequential National Geographics . Josephine, who was an amateur chef, was most interested in the small cache of cookbooks she discovered in a box that sat appropriately upon a child’s miniature play oven. The woman of the house casually leaned against the oven, almost touching Josephine with her shoulder as she and a female neighbor talked about the yard sale.

“Lyman said the beginning of May was too early in the season for a yard sale. He was afraid that people wouldn’t come out if the weather was nippy. But we really didn’t have a choice. It was either this or Goodwill. I think this is a good turnout, don’t you?”

The neighbor nodded. “I was thinking you might lose some customers from all the foofaraw about yesterday’s flight, but it doesn’t look like it’s kept too many people away.”

The two women weren’t the only ones talking about what Derry’s native son Alan Shepard had accomplished just the day before. There were two men, standing among boxes of tools and other hardware, who appeared to be discussing the details of Shepard’s historic flight into space. The younger of the two, whom Josephine assumed to be the husband of the first woman (he was drinking coffee from a kitchen cup and wearing bedroom slippers) was making arching gestures with the plane of his hand as if demonstrating the trajectory of the Mercury astronaut’s spacecraft.

The man’s wife noticed Josephine looking through the box of cookbooks. She pointed to the box and said, “Do you like to cook? I’m a terrible cook. I haven’t even opened half of these.”

“I do like to cook,” said Josephine. She picked up an early edition of The Joy of Cooking . “This could be a first edition,” she said.

“I couldn’t possibly care,” said the woman flippantly. “I just want them all out of here. Lyman and I are moving to Portsmouth. I refuse to cart all this stuff with us.”

Josephine nodded and smiled. “To quote Thoreau, you are ‘driving life into a corner and reducing it to its lowest terms.’”

“To quote who?”

Josephine’s guess that her purchase might be a rare first edition was confirmed a couple of days later. The book was actually quite valuable — one of only three thousand copies self-published by Irma S. Rombauer, a St. Louis mother and housewife, back in 1931. Mrs. Rombauer’s husband had committed suicide the year before and left her struggling to make ends meet. The author had taken the unusual publishing route of engaging the printing services of a company that made labels for Listerine mouthwash.