Июнь Ли - Where Reasons End

Seeing is by intuition. It doesn’t take as much time as looking, I said.

How preposterous.

I’m only stating a fact about myself.

You can’t understand poetry if you don’t know how to look, he said.

That I agree with you, I said. I’m reading poetry these days. Isn’t it interesting that I’ve begun to understand poetry now that I’ve begun to learn how to look?

Only you would find it interesting, he said. It’s like someone saying, I only realize today eating is not a chore.

I laughed. Once upon a time I had been a careless cook. When Nikolai began to bake I gave up abstract-mindedness when making food. I used to think eating was a chore, he said to me after. Now you cook so well I understand why people like eating.

I’m rather dense, I said. Gormless, you know.

Dense and gormless were the favorite adjectives Nikolai and his brother used to describe me.

Do you really believe that?

Why not, I said.

How I always hate your hypocrisy, he said.

Oh, I said. I was taken aback. I was surprised that I had forgotten this: He had often called me a hypocrite when angry with me. I had never asked him what he meant by it.

You put on such an annoying act, he said.

Oh, what kind of act? I said.

Being dense and gormless.

What if I am? I said. I’ve told you, have I, that the character who resembles me the best is Winnie-the-Pooh.

That’s called wishful thinking, he said.

What’s wrong, I thought, with acting slow and dull if that makes people look away, or even, if they look, they can’t see me, or only see me as a hapless bear with very little brain?

What’s wrong with being sharp and bright? Nikolai said.

The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It’s good to avoid suffering when one can.

So you play a dumb version of yourself, he said. Are you suffering any less?

Suffering, I thought, was a word that no longer held a definition in my dictionary.

But you, I said, you suffer more because you insist on being bright and sharp.

I suffer more because you want to do what the world does, to dim the bright and to blunt the sharp.

Why, Nikolai said after a long pause, you’re quiet again.

Anything I say would sound defensive, I said.

Say it in any case, he said.

Had I been your age and had I been your friend I would have been bright and sharp with you. And I truly wish we had been friends. I love you so much but I can only love you as your mother. Sometimes a mother becomes the worst enemy because she can’t be the best friend.

I love you so so much too, he said. I wish I didn’t hurt you.

Oh, I said. I wouldn’t say that at all. What’s hurtful is life.

And it doesn’t work when you act dense or gormless with life, does it?

No, I said. It blunts the sharp and the dull equally; it dims the bright but only makes the dim dimmer.

No need to act then? Nikolai asked.

Not anymore, I said.

5

Catchers in the Rain

Today’s weather, I said, you would really like it.

Was there still weather for him, did he still feel it? It didn’t matter. We used to often talk about weather, not as a substitute for real conversation, as weather was easily abused. Anything we had would continue to be ours.

Rainy? Nikolai said.

And gray and cold. Gloomy.

Precisely the weather I love, he said. I wish I could bake something.

A pumpkin pie would be perfect, I said. I didn’t want to pause in case he and I both noticed that he had chosen the word wish. “To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect”—I had once shown him the line Jane Austen used to describe the folly of two women.

Pumpkin pie? Too prosaic, he said. I would rather make pumpkin mochi.

Sounds like haiku, I said. I had forgotten the pumpkin mochi, which some of his friends, I now remembered him telling me, had looked at with suspicion at first but had relished after all. Baking had been a triumph of Nikolai’s life when the results had been shared with friends. No matter how many batches of cookies and brownies and how many pies and cakes had been baked, someone would ask for more. Many of his friends had written to me, all of them mentioning his baking. Children are hungry on school days, I thought.

How patronizing, he said.

Oh, only because I just taught a story and I liked its title, “Children Are Bored on Sundays.”

Children hate to be called children, he said. Besides, it’s not about feeling hungry. The joy of baking and the joy of being baked for, you’ll never understand.

I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.

Fine, Nikolai said. You don’t care to understand—how about that? Good enough for you?

I used to get nervous on the days when he baked. Rarely was perfection achieved. A few times I had suggested that perhaps cooking would serve as a better—more forgiving—hobby. He had pointed out rightly that he couldn’t possibly bring a platter of something that had had to sit overnight to the English class where they read Wilfred Owen or W. S. Merwin together.

Someone just sent a Merwin poem to me, I said. Since Nikolai’s death I had asked people to send poems. They came like birds from different lands, each carrying its own mourning notes.

So?

I wondered if he still liked poetry.

Grownups make the same mistake over and over, he said. You like W. S. Merwin? What a coincidence—I just read a poem by him. You went to China this past summer? I did too, in 1987. Do you play any instrument? Oboe, how interesting, is that the instrument that looks like the other? Ah yes, clarinet! How wonderful you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Nikolai had a dislike for people who mistook the oboe for the clarinet. Not knowing is okay, he had once said, but pretending to know is not. How about I talk back and say, How interesting, sir, you must be Jones or Smith because you also have a head and four limbs.

I laughed. Critical as ever, I said.

I used to have this fear that when I grew up I would be like you, he said. I vowed to myself that I would never forget what it felt like to be a child.

You as me, your mother, or you as us, grownups?

Grownups as a species, he said. You’re better than most.

Thank you.

That doesn’t make you fundamentally different.

Disappointing all the same?

No offense, but yes.

I remembered my mother used to say: The salt a parent has eaten weighs more than the rice a child has eaten. Having lived longer…I said, not knowing where my thought was going.

Means little in the big scheme of things, Nikolai said.

I concur, I said. I had been listening to a song the day before—he had saved all his music on my phone, enough to last me days. And don’t you see I want my life to be something more than long, I sang.

Sometimes you do make sense, he said.

It was silly how it made me happy, that little praise. We moved, I said, bringing up the topic I had not known how to broach with him. A week earlier we had moved out of the place we had rented temporarily and into a house with which Nikolai had fallen in love. Everything is good, except we miss you dearly, I said.

He became quiet. I realized that our exchange, however willfully sustained, was mere words. If he shed tears for us I would not have known. Tears we shed would be like weather to him, intelligible because they were concrete memories.

The kitchen is all set up and running, I said. It’s warm and bright. It has the kind of oven you like. Perhaps I should start learning to bake.