Mulberry and Peach (28 page)

‘This is my territory! I feel at ease here. And have everything: booze, sex, entertainment, dope, even violence!' Betty laughed, pointed to the confrontation of the police and rioters on the TV screen.

 

 

Upstairs, I-po roared with laughter. The Golden Voice was singing a love song.

‘Bill's
never been down here in the basement. I call him the upstairs Chinese; he calls me the underground American,' Betty said.

‘I call him the empty man,' I said.

Betty smiled darkly and drew closer. ‘That is why he can't leave me: I give him freedom to live his vacuum life. If he were willing to leave me, he would have left a long time ago. When I met him, he was working hard on his Ph.D. At that time he wasn't interested in anything Chinese, he didn't even have Chinese friends. But now, it's just the opposite! Anything Chinese is good! Chinese culture, Chinese literature, Chinese food, Chinese style clothes, Chinese women! He especially likes young Chinese women.' Betty got up to open a cupboard, took out a pile of letters and threw them in my lap. ‘These are all love letters Chinese girls have written him! I won't mention anything before, but when he went to Taiwan to visit he added quite a few more! You know, you yourself wrote him a lot of letters, when the man from the Immigration Service came to ask about you, he asked if I had any material to give them, so I gave him your letters.'

‘I couldn't care less!' I picked up that bunch of the girls' letters and weighed them in my hand, then threw them back at Betty. ‘Are you jealous?'

She shrugged. ‘We're very fair, he has his life and I have mine.' She pointed to the half-naked man lying on the mattress watching television.

‘All these letters, and yours, he gave to me, to show his faithfulness to me.' Betty laughed. ‘Last night, he thought I was dead; I was lying
on the floor, in a daze. I thought I saw him walk in, I kept on thinking: I want to die once, I want to die once, I want to die once to scare him. I was thinking and thinking and didn't know where I was. I was floating in the clouds. The wind was blowing, the clouds floating, the flowers were swaying. I swayed along with those white round flowers, swaying, swaying. I suddenly understood why the wind blows in such a way, why clouds float along like they do, why the flowers sway like they do, that's the dance style of the wind, clouds, and flowers. I have my own dance style, too. We're each an independent life, and when we're together we dance differently to the same rhythms. I got up off the floor and went down to the basement, I came across
Bill
down there, that's the only time he's ever come down to my basement. He was holding a bunch of letters and looking through them, probably looking for the letters you wrote to him. “I've already given the letters you're looking for to the Immigration Service. I also know Helen's going to have a child, your child,” I said standing in the doorway. He jumped. I laughed and said, “I'm not dead.” He started laughing too. He said that bunch of letters was meaningless, he wanted to burn them. I said I still hadn't finished looking at them, I don't know Chinese, but those different characters look like different pictures. He said, well, then, save them for you as a pastime.
Bill
and I have been together for more than twenty years, our children are already married, and I still don't understand Chinese people. But I can communicate with you. We're very frank with each other. Now, I want to ask you a question. Do you want to keep the child?'

‘And if I don't?'

‘I can raise your child. I need a little something in my life.'

‘Thanks, Betty. I want my child for myself.'

The people upstairs began singing Peking Opera. It seemed they were competing to remember opera verses - a line here, a line there, everyone scrambled to sing it first, intermixed with the singing was a girl's laughter.

‘. . . Who was your first love?'

‘At sixteen I slept with that King . . .'

‘The feudal lords do not cooperate, with sword and lance they contend. Day and night I dream a thousand plots. I want to sweep the wolf out with the smoke, so peace will reign within the four seas like in the time of T'ang Yao . . .'

‘Yo ya ya ya. But wait! On all sides are the songs of Ch'u. Can it be that Liu Pang - he, he, he's already captured the land of Ch'u?'

‘Ah, great king, do not be alarmed. Send someone out to investigate, then you can make your plans.'

‘Can it be my son is insane?' We switch operas.

‘When I hear it said I'm mad I get so happy I just play along with it. I lie down in the dust and babble nonsense.'

‘My son. Are you really mad?'

‘What do you call it?'

‘Mad.'

‘Ha ha ha . . .' Chiang I-po laughed in a woman's voice then suddenly stopped.

I was standing in the doorway to the upstairs living room.

 

 

New York. The Ford Building. I'm on Forty-Third Street.

The Ford Building is a huge glass tank, divided into smaller glass tanks. There's a person in every tank. Each person has a telephone by his side. There's a courtyard in the middle of the tank where flowers of all seasons bloom.

A blind man walks past the tank, led by a large fat dog.

Suddenly the blind man begins running and yelling in a frightened voice: ‘The Ford Building is falling. The Ford Building is falling! My dog, where's my dog?'

I'm the only one who looks at him. I laugh.

 

It's drizzling, a good day for a funeral. There's a long long procession
of anti-war protestors on Fifth Avenue. White, black, yellow, one by one, streaming from Greenwich Village, past Washington Square, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick's Cathedral (a sign hangs on the door: please come in and rest and pray), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, streaming toward Central Park.

Not a single pedestrian turns to look at them. The pedestrians are pushed along in the mob, pushed into the entrances to the iron ribbed, concrete buildings.

Only one person follows the demonstrators. His body jerks up and down, his head rolls backwards, he stretches out a crippled hand and waves at the protestors, laughing, ‘Hello, hello, can you hear me? Hello! I have something to tell you: a monster from outer space has invaded New York. It's taken over the Empire State Building. Hello ... Did you hear me? A monster from outer space has taken over the Empire State Building. Did you hear me?'

The demonstrators don't listen to him. The pedestrians don't listen either.

I approach him. I'm listening, I tell him. He invites me to the Red Onion for a Bloody Mary.

Mulberry, I'm glad I'm the one who came to New York, not you. I'm having a wonderful time. I'll be certain to write down everything interesting that happens. If you show up by chance, you will know what's been happening. Look, I'll cooperate with you if you won't spoil all the fun.

 

 

I absolutely refuse to let you give the child to Tan-hung.

Teng and I go out sightseeing all day in New York. We go out at night. We go see a Broadway play. The people in the audience go up on stage, strip off their clothes and dance; the cast goes down and sits in the audience. They throw fruit peels at the people on stage. Teng explains that in that kind of play every person in the audience takes part. We don't tell Tan-hung about the play. She's too genteel to understand.

 

 

I'll tell you what happened.

Jerry and I were in the living room with the black walls. Tan-hung and her Chinese friends had gone to the Chinese-American Friendship

Association to sing Peking Opera. Teng was at a meeting. Jerry's face was the colour of steel. Even when Tan-hung calls him Jerry darling his face remains the colour of steel. He was sitting at the table playing with his cameras. All in all he has fourteen different cameras, varying in size from a large box camera to a tiny match box. Recently he bought the latest German model, the one that fits into a match box, so the unlucky number thirteen became fourteen.

I sat on the sofa watching television: a girl in a long blond wig, blinked her long false eyelashes, thrust out her pointed breasts (perhaps, they're false, too!) and held up a Cralow electric mirror, her lips kept turning from pale white to pink to purple: ‘... All the mirrors of today reflect your face from only one source of light. In fact, there are many different light sources in the world. For this reason, Cralow Company has invented the Cralow True Light Mirror, all you need to do is press a button on the mirror and you can see your face in the various lights of sunlight, lamplight, and fluorescent light . . .'

‘Pretty soon they'll be creating electric children,' Jerry said in English. ‘Electric children would have one merit: they'd never grow up; they'd forever be in the state of infancy, then the world wouldn't have any more wars. Now we can use test tubes to make babies; the baby's sex and personality can all be decided beforehand, scientifically.' He was still playing with the cameras on the table.

I looked at his wristwatch: under the round glass shell were small cog wheels—the most recently invented toy. The knees of his tight pants were zipped closed with zippers. ‘Tan-hung likes kids, you can make a baby in a test tube.' I was speaking in Chinese. I can't speak English to yellow faces.

‘I don't like kids. I'd rather let Mary keep a dog.' He's never called her Tan-hung.