Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘It was something,’ Walter agreed. He wasn’t looking at me.

‘Sort of third-world,’ Katherine said. ‘We didn’t expect it after the majesty of the tombs. These little boys kept plucking our sleeves and saying, “Hello, hello, lady hello, you buy?” and then pulling us over to their parents’ stalls. And then they had all this stuff, pottery replicas of the buried soldiers and horses, and lapel pins and embroidered runners and carved jade and shoulder bags. Some people were selling fruit, and someone had home-made Popsicles — instant hepatitis, if you ask me — and a few people had some silk, and they were willing to bargain.’

Dr Yu had taken the jacket off and was rolling a corner of it between her fingers. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘They would bargain. It’s a poor city.’

My chest was hurting again and so was my head. I wanted Katherine to shut up, get out of my room, get out of my life. She went on talking.

‘So anyway,’ she said, ‘Walter found this jacket and said it was just the thing for you, and so we bought it. And I bought one for myself, and then when we turned around we found Quentin surrounded by all these kids trying to sell him clay animals. He bought this whole flock before we could stop him. And then he had to leave them at the hotel because our baggage was overweight, which was too bad, really — they would have looked stunning on a mantelpiece.’

‘Oh, stunning,’ Quentin said sarcastically. On the mantelpiece in Uncle Owen’s house, the netsuke Dalton collected had been ranged in ordered rows.

Katherine paused to catch her breath, but it was easy to tell she had more to say, that she might go on forever. She spoke with the enthusiasm of someone just escaped from a cloistered life, as if everything she’d seen had printed itself on her eyes but hadn’t made its way to her brain or her heart. I wondered how she’d lived her life.

‘You had an adventure,’ Dr Yu said softly. Quentin laughed.

‘We did,’ Katherine said. ‘A real adventure.’

‘You really saw the country.’

‘We really did.’

‘I hope you like the jacket,’ Walter said. ‘And if there’s ever anything I can do for you …’

Rocky , I thought. I still hadn’t had a chance to look in my purse, which I’d spotted on the floor beneath the window ledge. ‘I am only glad I could help your wife,’ Dr Yu said. ‘And now I must go.’

‘So soon?’ Walter said. ‘Will we see you at the banquet?’

‘Perhaps.’ She backed out of the room, her face closed to all of us, and I felt a sudden panic. We were due to leave the country in four days, and I didn’t know how we’d manage to see each other again.

‘What banquet?’ I said. I moved toward Dr Yu.

‘Tomorrow night,’ said Quentin. ‘Most of the other scientists stayed here in the city while we went away. They’ve been visiting labs at the universities and seeing some of the sights. All of us, and all the Chinese scientists who participated in the conference, have been invited to a formal banquet at the Great Hall of the People.’

‘We rushed back to be here for it,’ Katherine said.

Dr Yu looked at Walter. ‘You rushed back for Grace, I think.’

‘Of course,’ Walter said. And then he looked at me again, really looked for the first time, and he said, ‘Grace. What happened to your hair?’

‘We had to cut it,’ Dr Yu said shortly. ‘Her fever weakened it.’ She nodded in my direction. ‘I will see you tomorrow night. With luck.’

I followed her into the hall and closed the door behind us, just in time to see her crush the silk jacket into a ragged ball. ‘That woman ,’ she said fiercely. ‘These people — how can you live?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Please come tomorrow — I’ll wait for you, we don’t even have to sit with Walter. And I’ll talk to him about your son, I promise. Something will happen.’

‘Something will,’ she said. ‘I have no doubt at all about that.’

THE SUMMER PALACE

If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself …

— Mao

THAT NIGHT WAS one of those nights that never ends. Katherine didn’t leave us — on and on, all the way through dinner, she regaled me with tales of their traveling hardships. ‘Roaches,’ she said. ‘Worms in the dumplings. Spiders the size of birds. We got sidetracked to Kunming, four hundred miles out of our way, because some general had to go there …’ And even after dinner, when I thought Walter and I might go to our room and talk, he walked me upstairs, touched my hand lightly, and left me behind while he rejoined Katherine and Quentin in the bar. I leaned over the railing, unable to think of the words that might have made him stay, and I watched him move through the central atrium, past the jade plants, the goldfish pool, the reception desk. His feet were light; he was happy to leave me. During a pause at dinner, when Katherine had turned to Quentin with some remark, I’d asked Walter how he’d managed to forget Dr Yu’s name. ‘Oh,’ he’d said lightly. ‘Half the people here have names that sound alike.’

I had told myself that that was Katherine talking, not him, but after he left me and went to the bar I was no longer sure. Our room was neat, sterile, sheltered; perfectly receptive and completely anonymous except for our few traces. Walter’s brown bag sat on the carpet like a dog. Some lecture notes from his trip were stacked on the table. Five pairs of my shoes — shoes were almost all I had left — stood neatly on the closet floor. My purse sat below the window ledge, where I had left it, and in Walter’s absence I dug through it and finally looked at Rocky’s drawings. My purse was enormous and the drawings were small and somehow they hadn’t been damaged; they were as beautiful as I’d remembered. Clean, precise, articulate, they spoke more about Rocky than anything he’d said, and I thought how, had the situation been different, Walter would have recognized their value instantly. But there was no way for Walter to see them without my explaining how I’d come by them.

Walter had once made me love him by crying out in his dreams, but I knew less about his dreams now than I ever had. I knew his work dreams and only those, and those were only his ambitions. He knew even less about me. If I wanted anything different for us I’d have to tell him about Hank, and about the years after Mumu had died, and then what had happened between Randy and me and why I’d had that abortion; and if I told him all that and he told me anything real in return, then I’d have to tell him about Rocky. I could blame it on the fever, my state of mind, the strangeness of a dark night in China, but none of that would help; there was no avoiding the mess my confessions would make and no predicting which would upset him most. I liked the parts of my life to be separate: one vase on a white table. One rug on a smooth wooden floor. My parents separate from Uncle Owen, my husbands separate from my family; I liked that, I needed that, and I was pretty sure that Walter did too. No one could have lived with me for six years and known so little of my real life without wanting not to know. There were reasons Walter sat downstairs, ignoring me; reasons he’d married me and then allowed our lives to move on parallel tracks, side by side but never intersecting except in small daily ways. I knew other couples who lived as if a fistula connected their separate skins, but nothing oozed like that between Walter and me. We had rules in our household: we said what we meant, we meant what we said, if we didn’t say it, it wasn’t so. If I never admitted what I’d done, I hadn’t done it. If Walter never said what he wanted, he didn’t want.