Transparency (25 page)

“Hello,” Mr. Chen said, nodding. He continued to stand even though she motioned to one of the chairs. “I like to talk to you
about this check.”

“You must forgive me,” she said. “It’s all I have.”

Mr. Chen flushed. “I can’t afford to have tenant that cannot pay,” he said. “Isn’t there someone—sister maybe—who can help?”
Marnie Wilson gazed back at him without any expression in her eyes. “You go to church, right? Someone from your church can
help you?”

She looked as if she were about to speak, but then she closed her mouth. She gave her head a barely perceptible shake.

“Maybe you find a roommate,” Mr. Chen persisted. “Someone to move in here, someone you can talk to, you pay only half the
rent?”

“I like living here alone.”

“What about work? You work, right?” She was silent, and Mr. Chen closed his eyes, shaking his head. A sound of hissing escaped
from his teeth. “I’m sorry. You find another place to live.”

The Christian lady turned her head to look out the window. “I don’t like to go outside.”

Mr. Chen looked at her. “Bad weather,” he murmured.

From the windowsill, she picked up a green and silver box that looked as if it were meant to hold cigars. She traced the pattern
with a finger before passing it to him. Mr. Chen held the box awkwardly in his hands. It was decorated with intersecting green
and black lines in the shape of diamonds and three-petaled flowers with a streak of red in the center. He fumbled with the
lid, thinking there might be something inside, but the box was empty. He saw only his blurred face upside down in the warped
metal.

The Christian lady said he could keep it, but Mr. Chen shook his head, looking for a place to set it down. She said he could
give it back once she paid him the money she owed. Mr. Chen stood with the box in his hands, feeling suddenly depressed. “You
never go out?”

She pointed to the window. Mr. Chen could see the first drops of rain tapping the pane. He looked down to the parking lot
and could hardly make out his small green car in the dusk, everything coated in a pale silver sheen. The trees were stirring
to life, dry leaves circling the asphalt. It was a quiet world, Mr. Chen thought, waiting to be seized.

“It makes me afraid,” she said. “I think terrible things will happen.”

He heard the wind rising, an ocean in his ears. He could see lights flickering in the distance. The woman stood gazing out
the window with her back toward him. His own body felt vacant and cold. The apartment had become a still life, he and the
woman faceless, incorporated into the silence of the room.

The woman turned, and Mr. Chen took a step back. Though her mouth was moving, he couldn’t hear anything. Only the sound of
his blood in his ears.

“Mr. Chen, are you well? Would you like some tea?”

He shook his head. His body had broken out into a cold sweat, and he realized he was shivering. “Sorry,” he whispered hoarsely.

“Mr. Chen, why don’t you sit down and rest?”

“No, I’m okay,” he muttered, moving toward the door.

“I promise to pay you soon.”

Mr. Chen barely nodded as he shut the door behind him.

Driving home through the rain, he caught glimpses of branches and debris scattered on the road. Black leaves streamed in the
wind, slapping his windshield, getting tangled in the wipers. Mr. Chen felt as if his mind had been infected. At home, he
found his wife sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. When she saw him, she raised her eyebrows. “Well?”

“Nothing,” he muttered.

“You need to kick her out.”

Mr. Chen took off his coat and hung it in the closet. He had not known what to do with the box and had hidden it underneath
the seat of his car.

“She can’t continue living there for free,” Mrs. Chen said.

“She isn’t well,” he told her. “Something wrong with her head.”

That night, he dreamed that he’d gone to the apartment again, but it had turned into an endless cavern of rooms. An orange
cat followed at his heels, and this made him worry that the management would charge him a fine. When he found the Christian
lady, she was standing before a mirror, wearing purple eye shadow and drinking a glass of wine. “My mother,” she said, gesturing
to the wall. Mr. Chen realized that what he’d thought was a mirror was actually a photograph of a woman sitting morosely in
a chair, her thin, dark hair plastered to her skull, her eyes vacant and heavily lidded. A white bow in the shape of a rose
was pinned to the front of her long black dress. Her lips seemed to be waxed shut, and she grasped a startled baby in her
lap between both hands. The Christian lady laughed. “No need to feel sorry for her,” she told him.

Mr. Chen wondered about his dream. He knew so little about the Christian lady. When he imagined her, he always saw her alone,
reading or looking out a window, gazing into one of her mirrors or studying her meaningless collection of boxes.

December arrived, and he did not hear from her. No checks or apologies. He tried calling her number, but there was a recorded
message saying the line had been disconnected.

“That woman is robbing us blind,” Mrs. Chen said. “But you continue to act as if we are running a charity organization.”

Mr. Chen felt a terrible pressure in his head. “What can I do?” he burst out. “Throw her onto the street?”

“Don’t be naive,” his wife said.

He drove to Garden City Apartments the next day. No one answered the door, and he let himself in. The card table, the chairs,
the bookcase—all her things were in the places he remembered, untouched, as in a museum display. The silent, airless room
made him feel trapped. It was difficult to imagine how anyone could live here.

In the kitchen, the photograph of the two little girls standing in the plastic pool was slipping from its magnet. Mr. Chen
straightened the photograph and opened the refrigerator door. There was a box of cereal, a shrunken apple, and a jar of floating
olives. They seemed like odd artifacts in the empty white space of the refrigerator.

In the bedroom, the Christian lady’s mirrors glimmered faintly as Mr. Chen walked by. The mattress had been stripped of its
sheets, and dust had gathered in balls in the corners of the room.

He heard a sound of shifting from the closet.

“Miss Wilson?” he said aloud.

He tried to slide the closet door back, but it got stuck along its groove. The sleeves of her dresses poked through. In the
dark of the closet, he discerned something moving, a tangled mass of hair, though he wasn’t sure if it was a face or the back
of a head. He looked down and saw chapped heels protruding from a blanket. The Christian lady lay on her stomach, her nightgown
tightly wound around her body, her hands hidden beneath her. Her body was stiff, yet she seemed to be struggling underwater.
She turned her head to look at him, and her eyes had a shiny faraway luster, as if she were drugged. Mr. Chen thought she
looked like some kind of animal. He did not say anything but hastily slid the closet door shut and left the apartment.

At the grocery store, his wife sat on a stool in front of the cash register watching Chinese videos. “So are you going to
kick her out?” she said.

“I will call the lawyer that the Zhangs used,” he replied.

His wife continued to watch her video, but after a while her lips twisted into a strange smile. “That poor woman,” she said.

Mr. Chen could not sleep. Though it was winter, he didn’t need a blanket because his wife’s body burned like a furnace all
year long. When they were newlyweds, he had joked with her about the temperature of her body, pretending to scorch his fingers
whenever he touched her skin. She was a young woman then; her passion had been a great deal of her charm. But her temper had
increased with age, and Mr. Chen feared that his wife was like a piece of burning wood that appears firm and unyielding until
it suddenly collapses.

He turned over in bed and looked at the red eyes of the clock. Three a.m. In four hours, both he and his wife would be up—she
to open their store, he to drive to Garden City Apartments. He wondered if the Christian lady would be gone by that time,
the apartment as clean and empty as it had been five months ago, not a sign that she had ever lived there.

She had never shown up for the hearing. Mr. Chen learned about her absence from his lawyer. The judge had set a month’s deadline
for her to pay what rent she owed, but she hadn’t been able to do this. Instead, she sent Mr. Chen a Christmas card. On the
front, a quiet, even desolate painting of a lake turned blue with ice, a few spruce trees buried in a drift of snow. In mournful,
slanting letters, she wished him a merry Christmas with a promise to pay back the money she owed. He turned over in bed once
more, flipping his pillow to get to its cool side.

His sleep was no longer good. Even before his son became ill, Mr. Chen often woke up in the middle of the night, his temples
smarting as his thoughts turned inexorably against him. He would escape by going to the bathroom, flicking on the light, and
then he would wander down the hallway to check on his son. He would stop by the doorway, listening to his son’s breathing,
heavy and asthmatic in the darkness. Usually he had kicked his blanket to the ground. Mr. Chen would stoop to pick it up,
awkwardly pulling at the corners of the blanket to cover him.

It was Mr. Chen’s lasting regret that they had never been close. His son had preferred his mother’s company. Somehow Mr. Chen
had never been able to find the right words. His questions were always gruff, and he didn’t know how to smooth out his tongue.
Where were you? Did you eat? Why didn’t you wear your jacket? Have you finished your homework? To these questions, his son
had replied in monosyllables. What Mr. Chen meant to ask was whether he was hungry, whether he was cold, whether there was
anything that he lacked which Mr. Chen could offer? He hadn’t been able to show his love in any other way than by providing
for him, and so he gave him food to eat, clothes to wear, and a bed to sleep in. These things hadn’t been enough to keep him
alive.

Mr. Chen’s head felt swollen as he waited for the sky to lighten. At seven a.m., he rose from bed, his brain throbbing with
a swarm of useless images. His wife’s face was slack against her pillow, her dry lips parted slightly. She seemed to be lost
in sleep as he stood watching her, but then her eyes opened. “I’m leaving soon,” he said. Mrs. Chen stared vacantly at him,
and he wondered if she had understood what he said. “I’ll be back before noon,” he told her. She lay there, stiff and unblinking,
and Mr. Chen turned away to change.

When he returned to the bedroom, the bed was empty and his wife was no longer in sight.

He found her in the garage, sitting in the passenger seat of his car. She wore a brown sweater with large yellow flowers and
brown wool pants, and she was getting her makeup out of her purse when he opened the door. “That woman is a rat,” she said.
“I’d like nothing more than to sweep her out with a broom.”

“What about the store?” he asked.

She smeared powder along her forehead. “I put up a sign yesterday.”

When they got onto the beltway, there were rows of gleaming cars stretched into the distance ahead of them. They sat and waited,
the inside of the car filling up with exhaust. By the time they reached Garden City Apartments, they were half an hour late.
Large wreaths decorated with white and gold ribbons hung in the entranceway, even though Christmas had passed almost a month
ago. The lobby was crowded, and when Mr. Chen inhaled the scent of a woman’s perfume, he experienced the same light-headed
sickness he felt in department stores. Cold air blew along the back of his neck as people passed in and out of the revolving
doors. Boxes were already stacked along the wall, and the movers he had hired were busy unloading furniture from the freight
elevator. A man in a gray suit came up to him. “George Chen?” he inquired.

Mr. Chen nodded.

The man shook his hand and said he was from the justice court.

“Sorry to be so late,” Mr. Chen muttered.

“Nothing to worry about. Your apartment is almost all cleared out. Miss Wilson will be coming down shortly.”

“I want to go up and see,” his wife told him in Chinese. Before Mr. Chen could say anything, she stepped onto the next elevator,
the doors closing quickly behind her.

“An odd woman,” the man from the justice court remarked. Mr. Chen thought at first that the man was referring to his wife.
But then the elevator doors opened, and Marnie Wilson appeared, a faint smile on her lips. Her dark hair was pulled back into
a tiny bun, and she wore the same blue suit that she had worn on the day that Mr. Chen had first shown her the apartment.
He wondered what she had placed inside the small black suitcase that she clutched at her side. She stepped off the elevator,
followed by two policemen. The doorman immediately approached her. “Miss Wilson,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I’m sorry,
but you can’t leave your furniture and boxes here.”

The Christian lady’s face tightened, red splotches appearing on her skin. “Please,” she said.