Authors: Francine Prose
“When we move to Malibu,” says Lowell, “we’ll be bagging this stuff off the deck.”
The street’s
full
of lovers, pressed together so tightly they could be running a three-legged race. Vera thinks of herself and Lowell in another Chinatown: San Francisco, where for months Chinese food was the only thing that could lure them out of bed. Perhaps such memories are why Vera so hates the sight of the newly-in-love. But not tonight. Tonight she and Lowell and Rosie are linked just as tight. They’ve got it all over new lovers, they’re lovers who’ve lasted long enough to have a ten-year-old kid. And though she knows it’s New York, where chances are better than average that a child old enough to walk and talk is the child of a previous marriage, people seem to know Rosie’s theirs. A surprising number of lovers smile at them—or, really, at some happy future vision of themselves. And despite all her present happiness, Vera still wants to grab them as they walk by and say, Wait! Let me tell you about the ten years in between!
Turning the corner onto Bayard, Lowell pulls them into the kind of touristy gift shop you normally pass without seeing. Tonight it’s full of treasures. They want, exclaim over, everything. The kid at the register isn’t much older than Rosie. Watching them, he starts grinning, though it’s hard to tell if he’s laughing at them or if their enthusiasm is contagious. Rosie buys a mechanical toy, a green metal egg attached to a kind of plunger that, when pushed, makes the egg spin and open, revealing a bright plush spinning bird. Lowell buys a kite in the shape of a mythical beast: tiger, dragon, pelican. Vera buys a pack of flash cards designed to help Chinese children to read, lovely little paintings titled in Chinese and English: Chair. Table. House. Mouth. She doesn’t know why, she just wants it. “For when I get Alzheimer’s,” she tells Lowell. “I’ll put these up to remind me.” She leafs through the deck till she finds the one that says Ear and holds it to her ear.
“Do it now,” says Lowell. “Don’t wait till you forget where to put them.”
Their favorite restaurant is downstairs, below street level. The something something rice shop. The waiter who directs them to their table looks at them like he’s sizing up cats for the sweet-and-sour pork. That’s all right; it’s atmosphere; it makes the food taste better. The unexpectedness—that someone with such contempt for you could serve you something so delicious.
Only half the tables are filled, but they’re all in the same half of the room. Consider it a spiritual exercise, thinks Vera, some discipline the Buddha might put you through: learning to ignore what people next to you in Chinese restaurants say. The ordering of the dishes, the jockeying to include everyone’s favorite. The etiquette! There’s always the expert, and with him the novice who makes timid suggestions—egg rolls, chop suey—that the expert pretends not to hear, and who gets, instead of chop suey, a free lecture on Chinese cuisine lasting the length of the meal. Or what’s worse: the first dates who can’t eat because they’re so busy confessing, can’t taste because they’ve still got their teeth in that messy divorce, still worrying it like a bone. What Vera can’t understand is why so many first dates seem to take place in Chinese restaurants. You’d think sharing food from a common plate was an intimacy you’d want to save till you knew a person better. Once Vera heard a girl tell her date how she’d gotten herpes from a guy who believed that the way to get rid of it was to give it to someone else.
But tonight their luck holds even in this. At the table behind Lowell and facing Vera are two good-looking, freckle-faced kids from someplace like Fordham or St. John’s.
“If the nuns had told me to cut my leg off, I would’ve done it,” the boy’s saying. “But you know when it all ended? When I got my license and saw how bad nuns drove.”
“In their little station wagons,” says the girl. “Used to be a time, every Halloween party you went to, there’d be three pregnant nuns.”
“Always guys,” the boy says.
“This beef chow fun is great,” she says. “I had this dream last night, I dreamed I was at Liza Minnelli’s wedding, and she was wearing a long, white dress and a crown of little stars like the Queen of Heaven.”
“The ones I hate,” he says, “are those dreams where friends you haven’t seen in fifteen years come back. I don’t know why. I just hate them.”
“Fifteen years,” says the girl. “Mary Walesko, my best friend. She was dumpy and wore these little funny glasses, and when her family moved away, I wanted to kill myself. I don’t know what it would be like to run into her now. I guess you just hope the other person’s not more successful or perfect or anything.”
Vera can’t believe so much wisdom and honesty can exist in an eighteen-year-old brain. The girl’s date can’t, either. “Want some more tea?” he says. He sounds surprised at himself, as if it’s the first time he’s ever offered to pour anything for anyone. Vera so wants to keep listening that she has to make herself talk.
“Know what?” she says. “
Wonton
spelled backwards is
not now
.” As soon as she says it, she knows it’s Solomon’s joke. She just can’t remember if Rosie was there when he told it.
“You order,” says Lowell, and Vera looks up to see the same surly waiter slapping impatiently at his thigh.
Picking the dishes she wants feels like shopping in thrift stores on days when silk shirts and gabardine jackets beckon to her from seas of polyester; the choices couldn’t be more obvious. Before the waiter stalks off, Vera asks Rosie if she can pick the pieces of meat out of her food or if they should order another vegetable dish. “No way,” Rosie says. “I’m eating
everything
.”
Behind them the girl with the Liza Minnelli dreams is telling her date how her cousin’s husband turned out to be a three-time bigamist. “Thrigamist?” says the boy. Vera could listen all night. But just then the waiter slams a metal tureen on their table: House Special Soup. Vera ladles out slabs of duck, pork, snow peas, wonton stuffed with spicy Chinese sausage. Vera and Rosie have two bowls apiece; Lowell has three. They’re feeling pretty stuffed themselves when the waiter brings on dinner.
Dish follows dish; has she ordered too much? Vera flattens herself against the booth as the waiter shoves plates around to make room. Prawns with oyster mushrooms in a golden sauce; twelve-flavor chicken; mussels steamed with sesame paste and scallions; squares of fried bean curd with pork; beef with orange; a whole bass braised with carrot bits and tree ears—the colors, the textures, the sheen of cornstarch and oil drive Vera and Rosie and Lowell into a feeding frenzy. They lean close to their bowls so their chopsticks have less far to travel. What has Vera been eating? She’s forgotten how food tastes. Now each mouthful maps new possibilities, a whole geography of places for her and Lowell and Rosie to eat. Hushed Japanese inns where they’ll slip off their shoes and tiptoe in to eat sushi. Greek cafés where men even handsomer than Vinnie will carve slices of lamb off rotating spits. They’ll eat linguine with calamari while little Sicilians play mandolins and out-of-work divas sing their hearts out, chow down pork chops and corn bread brought by beautiful black women who’ll call them sugar, honey child, baby.
“Guy goes into a Chinese restaurant,” says Lowell.
“Shh,” says Vera. “If this is going to be some horrible flied lice joke, don’t tell it.”
“All right,” says Lowell. “I’ll tell another one.”
“I’ve got one,” says Rosie. “This guy’s eating dinner in a Chinese restaurant. ‘Waiter,’ he says. ‘What’s this fly doing in my soup—’”
“The backstroke,” says Lowell.
“You ruined it,” says Rosie.
“Sorry,” says Lowell. “I heard that one in fourth grade.”
“
I’m
in the fourth grade,” Rosie says.
“See,” says Lowell. “I’ll bet those dinosaurs were telling it in the fourth grade. All right, here’s one.” He opens his mouth, then shuts it again. “Problem is, all the jokes I know are too dirty for the ladies.”
Even this embarrasses Rosie. She goes back to eating, staring down at her plate. Then suddenly she starts screaming, grabbing her throat and jerking around in her seat. It’s the moment Vera’s feared all Rosie’s life. What flashes through her mind in the seconds before she can act is that her life is about to be destroyed forever by yet another obvious irony: Rosie
knew
she shouldn’t eat meat. “She’s choking!” she yells at Lowell, who says, “When you’re choking, you don’t scream.” He grabs Rosie’s arm and murmurs soothing nonsense to her until she calms down.
“Gross!” she sputters, picking something out of her food with chopsticks and laying it on the table. Dead and heavily sauced as it is, it’s still got its carapace, its antennae. Sweet-and-sour Gregor Samsa.
“Life imitates old jokes,” says Lowell. “Except I think this one’s doing the crawl.”
By now the waiter’s come over. Rosie picks the bug up with her chopsticks again and waves it at him, a gesture of such purity only a ten-year-old could make it. Any adult would have left it on the table and pointed.
The waiter looks at the roach, then at them—a look of such utter scorn you’d think they’d brought it with them. Then he takes out the check pad and, pointing to the bottom of the column, says, “No tax. No tax.”
When he leaves, all three of them burst out laughing. “What did he mean?” says Rosie. “No tax on the cockroach?”
“I think he means no tax on the whole bill,” says Vera. “It’s his way of making it up to us when he couldn’t really bring himself to not charge us at all.” Though Vera can’t quite say why, she’s enormously cheered by all this. It seems like an omen, a sign that destiny has decided to entertain her instead of just messing her up. The waiter brings cookies and, sure enough: all three of their fortunes promise long life, happiness, and friends bringing unexpected good news.
“I feel light-headed,” says Vera.
“That’s the MSG,” says Lowell.
When the check comes, Lowell grabs it. “All right,” says Vera. “I’ll spring for the cab ride home.”
Riding over the bridge in the dark, watching the twinkly lights on the Brooklyn side, Lowell asks the cabby if he’s ever walked across.
“Are you kidding?” he says. “The only guys nutty enough to walk across are the ones who go halfway out and jump.”
The cab picks up speed, and they’re thrown against the back of the seat. Vera feels rag-doll languorous and decides that their sum-total elegance is far more than one might expect from a pair of pink platform wedgies, a tie with naked ladies on it, and a black satin Vietnam-era jacket. They should be heading out to West Egg, to a party at Jay Gatsby’s. Puttin’ on the Ritz.
Rosie’s asleep by the time they get home. Lowell carries her upstairs. Snuggling into her bed, she wakes up enough to kiss Lowell, then Vera.
Lowell and Vera go into the living room and sit in the dark for a while, listening to cats yowling in the back alley. She almost tells him about the Washington Wild Boy, but she’s saving it for a moment when she wants to say something interesting. Right now the lust they’re feeling and not yet acknowledging is interesting enough. Not long ago she saw a French movie in which two about-to-be-lovers heard cats making similar sounds. “Fighting,” said the man. “No,” said the woman. “Making love.” At least that’s what the subtitles said. Vera can think of several terms for what cats do, but making love isn’t one of them.
“You know what they’re complaining about?” says Lowell. “That was their friend Fritz we ate in the sweet-and-sour pork.”
“We didn’t have sweet-and-sour pork,” says Vera, embarrassed to hear herself sound like those Chinese-food experts.
“Excuse me,” says Lowell. “The twelve-flavor chicken, then. One of the twelve was Purina.”
Vera considers what depths of racism and primitive fear must lie beneath these stories of Chinese cooks serving various unappealing animals with your fried rice. Oh, the smoldering passion of dietary taboo. She’s heard that’s how riots start in India: Muslims suspecting Hindus of passing off rendered pork fat as vegetable oil; Hindus accusing Muslims of disguising beef as mutton.
BENGALI BARBEQUE: CALCUTTA BUTCHERS BURNED.
It’s the first time she’s thought of her job in hours; now the fact that she’s lost it seems somehow less surprising than that she’s gone so long without remembering. Maybe everything balances out: one kiss from Rosie makes her happier than writing the front-page headline every week.
Lowell’s begun to sing. “Cats do it, dogs do it, even educated frogs do it, let’s do it, let’s fall in love.” He pulls her to him and waltzes her around the living room, crooning in her ear. He’s trying to achieve a mellow, sophisticated, Fred Astaire quality, but can’t seem to lose that moony country twang. His version of “Let’s Fall in Love” might as well be “All My Good-time Friends are Gone.”
“Let’s do it,” he whispers, kissing her very gently. Then, in the midst of an embrace that leaves Vera’s knees weak, Lowell breaks off and says, “Here’s a fact: ‘Let’s do it’ were Gary Gilmore’s last words.” And though Vera knows it’s perverse to be pleased that a man on his way to bed with her is quoting a mad-dog killer bound for the firing squad, she can’t help it.
Afterward, Lowell holds her head in the crook of his arm and points out the window. “Look,” he says. “UFOs.”
“In Brooklyn?” says Vera.
“Everywhere,” says Lowell. “Aliens are among us.” Then he tells her how, after they’ve made their fortune writing screenplays, they’ll take a piece of it and buy a mansion on the Hudson or a ranch up in Northern California—anywhere private. Then they’ll clear some land, string up some lights: a landing strip for UFOs. First couple of times they’ll just get the Martians to take them for rides, buzz Rosie’s elementary school. Then they’ll ask their alien hosts for a souvenir, a kind of goodwill present, a bit of the treasure the Mayans took with them when they hitched a ride on a UFO and sailed up past the Milky Way and off into outer space.
A
T BREAKFAST LOWELL CAN’T
look at Vera. She has to sneak up on him from behind. When she puts her arms around him, his voice gets husky as if his toast’s gone down wrong and he says, “Maybe we should go back to bed.”