Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

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!”