Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

I tried to listen to him the way I’d listened to Dr Yu, and when I did his words made me feel all we’d failed to build together. ‘There’s so much stuff I never told you,’ I said.

‘You think I don’t know? It used to hurt me, the way you’d never tell me anything.’

We stared at each other for a minute. I’d tried not to take anything from my mother but I saw now that I had, without meaning to or even understanding what it was: I’d assumed her desperate gentility, which had made me see my family as crude, coarse, impossible; something to be left behind. And having done that, I’d learned to leave my other lives behind me like larval skins.

I had never mentioned Zillah to Walter, or my old friends, Chuck and Mark. I had never let Walter see more of my family than the bare outlines, the hard facts: if I hadn’t been forced to on our first Christmas, I wouldn’t have let him see even that. It was my fault, at least in part, that he didn’t understand me. I’d given him nothing to work with but smoke.

‘I could tell you now,’ I said.

‘What would it change?’ he asked.

We were silent for a minute, listening to the steady flow of traffic down the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Cars and bicycles slipped past the gate to the Forbidden City, and I felt such a pull that I could hardly keep from leaping up and running toward the street and blending into the flow of bodies moving through the night. Let go of the house , I heard Zillah say, as clearly as if she were sitting in Walter’s place. Let go of the house, let go of the yard. Let go of the blue satin drapes, the old pine table, the Persian rugs; let go of the trellis planted with purple flowers and the white picket fence. Let it go.

I crumpled my fingers into my palm and uncurled them slowly. All the things in our house and yard were Walter’s.

‘She keeps these notebooks,’ I heard Walter say shyly.

‘She binds them herself, in different fabrics, and she keeps notes about everything she sees in them. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

He looked good when he said that, he looked young. For a minute I thought of telling him that I could keep notebooks too, that I could work with him side by side at the Quabbin Reservoir. But it wouldn’t have been what either of us wanted. I let him go.

That’s good , Zillah said.

‘So do you want to marry her?’ I asked. He ducked his head. ‘I might.’

‘So we’ll get a divorce. I’ll make things easy,’ I said. ‘And I won’t ask for anything, if you’ll do me a couple of favors.’

He looked up expectantly. In the dim, kind light, he might have been thirty-four.

‘First,’ I said, ‘first, you pull all the strings you can and get me an extension on my visa and whatever other papers I need to stay here. I’m going to stay. I’m going to work here.’

Walter looked at me blankly.

‘Second,’ I continued, ‘Dr Yu has a son who’s an excellent scientific illustrator. Hire him to work in your lab and take care of fixing his papers and getting him to the States.’

‘This part’s a joke,’ Walter said. ‘Right? This is the kid who dropped you off at the hotel, the one with the funny T-shirt? I don’t even know him.’

‘He’s nice,’ I said. ‘He’s bright and talented and his English is good, and he’s never going to be able to do what he wants here. He needs a break.’ I dug in my purse and came up with Rocky’s drawings, knowing as I showed them to Walter that I was giving Rocky away. But he’d never been mine; that night in the cab had only been a night in a cab, a dark place, two lost people. I needed to stay and he needed to go. ‘Look at these,’ I said to Walter. ‘No joke.’

He squinted at the drawings, tilting them into the glow of the dim lamps. ‘These are good,’ he finally said. ‘These really are.’

‘So hire him. If you and Katherine go to work on the Quabbin again, you’ll need someone to do what I used to. Draw the dissections, make the graphs, do the illustrations for the papers. And Katherine’s not going to do that — she’s not like I used to be.’

Walter took a deep breath. ‘I can try,’ he said. ‘I guess. Jesus, Grace. What are we doing?’ He wrapped a long arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.

‘What you want,’ I said. ‘What I want.’ I eased away. ‘You take Rocky and Katherine back home, and go back to your reservoir and write your papers. I’ll stay here.’

‘What will you live on?’

‘On what I earn. Dr Yu said she can get me some work teaching English. And if I need more money, I can always sell some of my things back home.’

As soon as I said that, I knew I wouldn’t. Let go of the antiques , I heard Zillah say. All of them had come from China; Uncle Owen had just about stolen them. I’d leave them to Rocky, who could sell them or keep them as he saw fit.

‘So that’s it?’ Walter said. ‘Just like that?’

‘That’s it,’ I said, and I felt my lungs swell as if I’d filled them with air for the first time. I could let everything go. Let go of the swamp , Zillah said, and that was right too. That was the last thing, the largest thing, the mistakes I’d made there all that were tying me down.

‘You know,’ I said to Walter, ‘nothing ever happened between me and Hank. I was just being crazy.’

He pulled his eyes back from the monument in front of us. ‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘I figured that out while you were sick. Once I got away from you, I was able to think over what had happened. Then I realized Hank had been telling me the truth, and that he never touched you. Did you make that up just to hurt me?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was mad at you. At him too. I was mad at everybody.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘For whatever it was I did to make you that way.’

‘I’m sorry, too,’ I said. ‘For everything.’

Dr Yu opened the door and came down the steps to us. ‘The banquet is over,’ she said gently. ‘They are making the final toasts. They would like to toast Dr Hoff-er-meierr one last time.’

Walter stood and looked at me before he left. I gave him a little push, the last time I’d ever touch him, and then I watched as he galloped up the steps two at a time.

‘You are all right?’ Dr Yu said.

‘Better than that. I’m staying. He’s going. He’s taking Katherine home. And he’s taking Rocky — Zaofan — with him. He’s going to give him a job.’

Dr Yu smiled and pressed her hand to her chest. ‘This is true?’

I nodded.

‘Will you work for me?’ she said. ‘My laboratory assistant is leaving, and I would like for you to have her job. Will you accept?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Then we have much to celebrate. Do you dance?’

‘I love to dance,’ I said.

Across Tiananmen Square, down one of the large avenues and past two others, through a maze of hutongs and a forest of small buildings, was the cellar Dr Yu had in mind. Inside the unmarked door was a white room with a low ceiling and an old mirror ball and a scattering of faded paper decorations on the walls. One step up from the floor, on a wooden platform, a small band played a mixture of American show tunes, Chinese folk songs, and pop music imported from Hong Kong. Rows of wooden chairs stood before the platform, but all of them were empty; some of the guests stood against the walls but most of them moved gravely across the floor, dancing dances I hadn’t seen in years. Not the Loyalty Dance, not the Planting Dance, but the waltz, the foxtrot, the mambo, the rumba, the conga. Dances Uncle Owen had once taught me. Perhaps he’d learned them here, in those strained times just before Liberation. Or perhaps he’d taught some of these people, who waltzed gracefully past a sign on the wall that read: