John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“Smart boy,” his father said.

They were almost back at the Court Street house before the cook told his son, “Yi-Yiing and I decided that it should appear you two are a couple.”

“Why should Yi-Yiing and I be a couple?” Danny said.

“Because you’re the same age. While the husband from Korea is around, you should just pretend that you’re together . Not even a Korean surgeon is going to suspect that I’m sleeping with his wife,” the cook said. “I’m too old.”

“How do we pretend?” Danny asked his dad.

“Let Yi-Yiing do the pretending,” his father said.

In retrospect, the writer was thinking, the pretending hadn’t been the most difficult part of the impromptu deception. Yi-Yiing did a good job of acting as Danny’s girlfriend-that is, while Youn’s husband was there in the Court Street house. The surgeon from Seoul struck Danny as a sweet man, both proud of himself and embarrassed for “surprising” his writer wife. Youn, for her part, could not conceal how happy she was to see her daughter, Soo. The Korean writer’s eyes had sought Danny for some reassurance, and Danny hoped he’d provided it; he felt relieved, actually, because he’d been looking ahead to their inevitable parting with more than the usual guilt.

Yes, he would definitely be in Iowa City through this academic year-he’d already asked the Writers’ Workshop if he could stay another year after that-but Danny knew that he probably wouldn’t be staying in town long enough for Youn to finish her novel. (And when Danny went back to Vermont, he had all along been assuming that Youn would go back to Seoul.)

The surgeon, who would be in Chicago for only a few days, kissed his wife and daughter good-bye. All the introductions and good-byes had happened in the Court Street kitchen, where the cook acted as if he owned the place, and Yi-Yiing had two or three times slipped behind Danny and encircled him with her arms-drawing him to her, once kissing the back of his neck. It being a warm fall day, the writer wore only a T-shirt and jeans, and he could feel Yi-Yiing’s silky pajamas brushing against his back. These hugs conveyed a coziness between them, the writer supposed-not knowing what Youn might have made of this intimate contact, or if Yi-Yiing and the cook had informed the Korean adulteress of their plan that Danny and the Hong Kong nurse should “pretend” to be a couple.

The daughter, Soo, was a little jewel. “She’s not wearing a diaper?” Danny asked the surgeon, remembering Joe at that age.

“Girls are toilet-trained before boys, honey ,” Yi-Yiing told him, with what struck the writer as an overacted emphasis on the honey word-but the cook had laughed, and so had Youn. Danny would wonder, later, if perhaps Youn had also been relieved that her relationship with her fiction teacher was so efficiently ended. (What need was there for any further explanation?)

The days when the Korean doctor was in Chicago were easy enough, and Joe could see with his own eyes how innocent a two-year-old really was-about dangers in the road, obviously, but about angels falling from the sky, too. The eight-year-old could observe for himself that little Soo was capable of believing anything.

The fragrant nightie under the pillow on Youn’s side of the bed turned out to be the beige one, and Danny found a discreet moment to give it back to her. Now no evidence of her remained in his bedroom. Youn slept with her tiny daughter in her writing room; they were both small enough to fit in the bed in that extra bedroom, although Danny had suggested to Youn that she could put Soo in the extra extra bedroom. (He’d noticed that Youn’s husband had slept in that room, alone.)

“A two-year-old shouldn’t sleep unattended,” Youn had told Danny, who realized that he’d misread the curiosity with which Youn had scrutinized Joe; she’d simply been wondering what changes to expect in her daughter between the ages of two and eight. (As for what she’d written about, and why, there would never be a satisfactory explanation, Danny supposed.)

When Kyung came back from Chicago, and the doctor soon left again with his little girl-they went home to Seoul together-Youn wasted no time in finding a place of her own to live, and by the next semester she had transferred to someone else’s fiction workshop. Whether she ever finished her novel-in-progress was immaterial to the writer Danny Angel. Whether Youn would one day become a published novelist also mattered little to Danny, who knew firsthand that-in Youn’s time in Iowa City -her fiction had been an almost complete success.

It was Yi-Yiing’s success, at pretending to be Danny’s girlfriend, that would linger a little longer. The ER nurse was not naturally flirtatious, but for months after the need to pretend she and Danny were a couple, Yi-Yiing would occasionally brush against the writer, or trail her fingers, or the back of her hand, against Danny’s cheek. It seemed she had sincerely forgotten herself, for she would instinctively stop-as soon as she’d started something. Danny doubted that the cook ever saw her do this; if Joe saw, the eight-year-old took no notice.

“Would you prefer it if I dressed normally around the house?” Yi-Yiing would one day ask the writer. “I mean, maybe it’s ‘enough already’ with the pajamas.”

“But you’re the Pajama Lady-that’s just who you are,” Danny told her evasively.

“You know what I mean,” Yi-Yiing said to him.

She stopped wearing them-or, perhaps, she only slept in them. Her normal clothes were a safer barrier between them, and what had amounted to the occasional contact-the brush of her passing behind his back, the touch of her fingertips or the knuckles on her small hands-stopped soon after as well.

“I miss Yi-Yiing’s pajamas,” Joe said to his dad one morning, when they were walking to the boy’s school.

“I do, too,” Danny told him, but by then the writer was seeing someone else.

WITH YOUN GONE FROM their lives-especially later, in their last year in Iowa City, when they were living in the third house on Court Street-their regular habits resumed as if uninterrupted. The third house was on the other side of Court Street, near Summit, where Danny conducted a discreet daytime affair with an unhappy faculty wife whose husband was cheating on her. The back alley, where Joe had been tempted to pity himself-while he watched Max practice skids on his “backup” bike-was also gone from their lives, as was the possum. The Yokohamas, Sao and Kaori, still took turns babysitting for Joe, and everyone-all of them-gathered with a seemingly increasing need (or desperation) at Mao’s.

The cook knew in advance how much he would miss the Cheng brothers-almost as much as he would miss Yi-Yiing. It was never knowing what it might have been like to be with the Hong Kong nurse that Danny would miss, though his return to Vermont was preceded by another kind of closure.

As their Iowa adventure was concluding, so was-at long last-the war in Vietnam. The mood at Mao’s was not predisposed to a happy ending. “Operation Frequent Wind,” as the helicopter evacuation of Saigon was called-“Operation More Bullshit,” Ketchum had called it-turned out to be a devastating distraction from the dinnertime preparations at the Asian and French restaurant. The TV in the little kitchen off the Coralville strip proved to be a magnet for discontent.

April 1975 had been a bad month for business at Mao’s. There were four drive-by brick-throwings-one of the restaurant’s window-breakers was actually a chunk of cement the size of a cinder block, and one was a rock. “Fucking patriot farmers!” Xiao Dee had called the vandals. He and the cook had canceled a shopping trip to Chinatown because Xiao Dee was convinced that Mao’s was under attack-or, as Saigon fell, the restaurant would come under heavier siege. Ah Gou was running short of his favorite ingredients. (With Tony Angel’s help, there were a few more items from Italy on the menu than usual.)