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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810130616 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2015 |
| Series: | Triquarterly |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
All Things Tending towards the Eternal
By Kathleen Lee
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2015 Kathleen LeeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3061-6
CHAPTER 1
In the East China Sea somewhere between Osaka and Shanghai on the second of a three-day journey, Fanny Molinari witnessed a murder. An accidental murder. Death inadvertent.
This was in the middle of August, 1989. The Red Star, flying the flag of the People's Republic of China, slipped free of Osaka harbor. Passengers crowded against the deck rails, snapping photos, laughing and talking, squinting into the high glare. Why did sailing away make people jubilant, Fanny wondered. Alongside her fellow passengers she stood at the rail: tall, pale, separate, in her traveler's skirt of soft gray, with her long braid; her face alert, amused, shining with sweat like a diver surfacing from the dark into a bright, unexpected world. No one touched her, not even accidentally. Japan receded. The bay water twitched and glinted and a warm, salty breeze blew across the deck. Ahead lay a plate of gray ocean rimmed in the distance by a smudged line dividing water from sky.
By the next afternoon the same deck would be deserted, everyone below in air-conditioned shadow; crew and ship officials attending to their duties, the surrounding ocean a sheet of steel.
Fanny paced the decks, scouting for distraction in the form of someone to talk with. Up and down stairs, around the front and back of the ship, along the sides; nothing, nobody. She peered into the no-smoking lounge where a young girl played the piano while her mother coached in shrill Cantonese; the smoking lounge, filled with chairs dressed in pleated skirts; and a couple of gift shops. One shop offered brightly colored swim trunks (to swim where?), liquor, biscuits. The shop across the hall sold buttons, washers, screwdrivers, plastic cigarette lighters, cheap flashlights. The salesclerk stood stiffly in a red polyester skirt and jacket. Fanny approached. "Do you sell batteries?" she asked.
"Yes," the clerk said, unsmiling.
"What sizes?" She needed batteries for her headlamp.
"Yes," the clerk said.
The clerk stood with her hands clasped in front of her, unmoving. Fanny waited a beat. "Is there another shop that sells batteries?" The clerk nodded and said yes.
"Is this the only shop that sells batteries?" The clerk nodded and said yes.
"Thank you." Fanny bowed—a remnant gesture from traveling in Japan. So much for batteries.
She circled back to her cabin, flung herself onto her bunk, and listened to her berthmates. Mandarin. Fanny didn't understand a word, but how much could be surmised from tone and inflection. One minute the language sounded like nails hammered into a coffin, the next like a broom sweeping the floor. Her berthmates were two women, seated facing each other on a lower bunk. Fanny occupied an upper bunk; the fourth bunk was empty. The older of the two women, dressed in a gray silk Mao jacket, did most of the talking, her finger jabbing the air in front of the other's nose, her eyes narrowed. The other, in a shiny flowered blouse and fashionable sunglasses, grunted now and then. The old woman's voice sank, conspiratorial, and rose, emphatic. She imitated someone ironically, then segued into indignation. Her hair was parted on the side and clipped neatly behind each ear with a hairpin. Then, as if they'd arrived at an impasse, they pulled out cigarettes and lighters and fled the cabin to smoke.
Wistfully, Fanny watched them depart, then sank into a minor internal skirmish over her tolerance—or lack of it—for the stillness and boredom imposed by travel. This was the great myth of travel: there you were, off to China (from Japan!), how exotic. Except the exotic didn't diminish the quotidian. You're traveling, a word implying movement, but it meant you had to be still for hours and days on end. It wasn't as if she were walking or swimming to China. Travel involved waiting for one thing to be over so that you could wait for another thing to start, and so on and on. Three days trapped on this boat, to be followed by days trapped on a train or a bus or another boat. Separated by a scattering of nights in bad hotels. At times the waiting was featureless, like the first moment after you awaken in the morning and you don't know who or where you are. Or the waiting was dense with misunderstandings and blunders; a topography of minor disasters. What envy this trip had generated—a one-way ticket to Asia. Not working. People imagined a vacation; they didn't imagine tedium, or weeks of talking to yourself. Or, thinking. She had a few topics she rotated through, one of which was: what next? At home she kept a folder labeled Should I Do Something Else, stuffed with graduate and certificate program information and job descriptions: X-ray tech, social worker, ESL teacher, hospice nurse, woodworker, nutritionist, permaculturist. She longed to find a means of being more useful in the world, and wouldn't it be nice to unearth as-yet-undiscovered talents and skills? But from the vantage point of her forties, nothing had the irresistible sheen of possibility. The trip so far had yielded no progress on this topic. She opened the first, then the second of her two knapsacks and gazed at her possessions, calmed by the items which comprised her companionship: her worn gray sweatshirt, a blue soapbox, a rock from Atalaya, Bruno's journal.
The young man seated beside Fanny at dinner wore a gold turtleneck with a heavy gold zipper. He told her that he lived in East Africa, worked in textiles, and was on his way home to Shanghai for a vacation. His teeth were yellow-brown from smoking. He kept an unlit cigarette beside his chopsticks, touching it now and then. At each of the round tables, waiters slapped down great bowls of white rice and platters of steamed buns. The food was bad, evidence that they had left Japan. Her dining partner asked the questions Fanny had grown accustomed to, and her answers were rote. "I live in New Mexico, in the western part of the United States." By the way he nodded, she knew this meant nothing to him. Probably he imagined she was from Mexico. His hair was clean and he smelled powerfully of cologne; he was attractive in a sad, garish way, like someone on their way to Las Vegas for a funeral. In answer to the next questions, she reported flatly that she was forty-three years old, unmarried, without children. Fanny had always believed that the best way to live an interesting life was to remain solitary. She secretly held that the single-minded pursuit of romantic love was for the unimaginative. This streak of austerity in her character—like a nun's—did not extend to sex. She was like a nun who had sex. A bad nun. A very bad nun.
But instead of the usual undisguised expression of shock, sorrow, and sympathy, the man with the gold zipper laughed cheerfully.
Fanny laughed too, as if her answers were amusing.
When she'd turned forty, she'd hardly noticed. Now, three years later, her back bothered her, a formless anxiety often woke her in the night, and she felt her life sliding away under its own volition. Not only unmarried, without children or property, she had never been divorced or fired from a job, never filed for bankruptcy, never taken antidepressants or gone to a therapist, and she still wasn't sure what to do with herself. Soon she'd be invisible, an aging woman, her access to the currency of romance gone, and she couldn't decide if she ought to lean forward like a runner trying to be the first to break the tape, or if she should jog at the back of the pack, reluctant for it all to be over before anything had come of it. Traveling in Asia, where she was repeatedly asked about her age and marital and motherhood status, had made her acutely aware of what her life was not. Was this funny? In any case, it felt good to laugh.
His next question should be about work. Questions came in order: place of origin, age, marital status, children, work, income. Sometimes she said she made fine wooden furniture because she'd taken Introduction to Woodworking at the community college and had made exactly one piece of furniture: a small table. Sometimes she said, "I work in a hospital." Which was true. Most people assumed she was a nurse, or maybe even a doctor, which was not true, and when she was asked for medical advice, things grew awkward. He held up his index finger, eyebrows raised in question. "One people?" he said.
She considered the wall mural over his shoulder, one of those cliché oriental scenes of green spiky peaks and tiny monk figures meditating in miniature lonely shacks. She offered a smile and nodded. Hell, yes. She was alone.
Their conversation was interrupted by a man across the table raising his voice, rubbing his bony chest, and grunting in a kind of percussive accompaniment to his declarations. He held up his mug—painted with bamboo and a panda—filled with duty-free cognac (the bottle on the floor beside his chair). "I'm a happy man," he shouted, and everyone in the dining room turned. A manifesto. He'd worked as a chauffeur at the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong. Now he was retired, on a tour of Asia. The skin on his face was so thin it appeared glued to his bones. His Adam's apple pumped up and down. "Shanghainese are," he declaimed, "the cleverest people in China." He took a swig of his drink. "Look at me." He jabbed his own chest with a forefinger. "I worked my way up to chief chauffeur." Fanny and Gold Zipper exchanged a look. The way Happy Man went on to speak about pachinko and mah-jongg, it was apparent that he'd lost a great deal to gambling.
Fanny felt light after her exchange with Gold Zipper; even if they didn't run into each other again, it had been enough contact to make her feel human. Under the darkening sky, she went up on deck and stared out to sea, the expanse of dark water shiny with moonlight, surging softly. Here was the reason people rejoiced at setting sail: a ship's deck to survey from, the curve of the earth to roll over, a spit of land to round. The seen to the unseen, the known to the unknown; the unfamiliar turning by mysterious alchemy into her own experience before sliding into the past. Far from home, riding the watery flanks of the world. She knew this, had discovered it with Bruno long ago, but each time she encountered it, it felt fresh, a source of pleasure that she stumbled upon again and again. After an inconclusive month in Japan, she was restless. To be on the move was like scratching an itch, voluptuous scratching.
She pulled Bruno's journal from her pocket. It was a worn address book, narrow, maroon-colored. She'd taken it from his house thinking she'd need it to contact his friends, but when she'd opened it a week later, she found that it was a journal of the trip he'd made to Asia the previous year. An odd journal, employing an abbreviated accounting of experience. It was cryptic in a way that suggested something hidden, a message embedded among the entries. This, anyway, was what she wished for: that Bruno had left her a message. One that would occupy her time and require her intelligence and attention in order to decipher. She felt sure that he would have left her something. Not an object, more like a directive—advice, a piece of wisdom. With Bruno's journal and Wen Li's letters to him, Fanny was composing her own pursuit. Maybe she would discover that he'd left her something, or nothing, or maybe she'd discover that he'd meant to leave her something if only he'd had time and foresight. She flipped through the journal and halted at H, reading in the dim light:
HongKong. turnip cake shrimp dumplings roast duck congee lamb chops & mint jelly. tea, buckets of. Dense clouds, no rain. roasted pig on a board down a bus aisle. Friday ferry to Lantau, sweaty hike, bee-chased through rice fields, cows on a beach in the morning glories & large snail shells. Scottish Julia F! met at a bar cum hair salon by day. her blue room, 15th floor of Chungking I took the stairs (quads strong) landings full of garbage & turbaned men smoking salty neck, opinionated, kind, light & hefty. julia julia shall we shall we meet meet again again
Fanny shut the book, feeling guilty for eavesdropping even though, well, even though. Julia F, whoever she was, appeared under the letter J, too, as Wen Li appeared under W and under E in the entry for Emei Shan, Fanny's designated destination. The entries for Wen Li were not at all revealing. Still, this was where Fanny was going: the People's Republic of China, Sichuan Province, a town called Emei Shan to meet a woman named Wen Li. Who was this person who had written so many letters to Bruno?
Fanny observed an older couple at the ship's rail. The man stepped behind the woman and massaged her shoulders and neck. She leaned into him and the two stood facing the ocean. The air was sweet and briny. The world is made of couples, Fanny thought. Not exactly a brilliant deduction. How had this couple met? What chance encounter in their past had led to this moment, studying the South China Sea from the deck of the Red Star? There was enough white in their hair to catch the moonlight and make their heads gleam.
The couple moved away and Fanny picked at the coil of rope on which she was sitting. She had no companion and this had begun to feel barbed; she would not entertain desperation. Her habit was to deflect any but light attachments (wasn't detachment Buddhist? she asked Bruno) so that she would not suffer when the attachment was severed. Bruno the Buddhist often reminded her that when she attempted to avoid suffering she was separating herself from experience and the mystery of being, thereby increasing her suffering.
Bruno used to have a lot of girlfriends; later, it seemed there were fewer. A memory of Bruno at a party, bent and rummaging in a refrigerator, extracting a large onion which he peeled and bit into. He ate it, whole and raw, glass of red wine in one hand, onion-as-apple in the other. It made Fanny laugh and Bruno liked to make his sister laugh. After their parents died, making Fanny laugh had become his avocation. At the party, he said he'd eat the onion, then a few garlic cloves, and see how many women he could get to kiss him. What did Fanny wanna bet? They had years of bets going, a long complex accounting that only occasionally resulted in money changing hands. He chewed through two fat cloves of garlic, shedding their thin skin with his fingers. He started in the back patio, talking first to a woman in a flowing skirt with curly blonde hair. Fanny caught bits of their conversation. You've got a wonderful mouth, he said to the woman. Then something about how best to juice an orange and how to draw a perfectly straight line with your eyes closed. Could he kiss her, he asked. Then he did. After which he'd glanced at Fanny, the light of success in his face, the index finger of his left hand rising discreetly: there was one.
So long ago, just after Bruno had moved to Berkeley, when he was beginning to take Buddhism seriously, before everything that was to come. Her chest tightened. She was resilient, often unflappable, used to things not going her way, practiced at gathering herself in trouble or after failure. If he were to appear beside her on this deck, she'd slug him. The asshole. Who would make her laugh now? How could he have left her alone? She considered the dark water churned into a white froth by the ship's passage.
On the afternoon of the second day, Fanny sat on deck on the same rope coil, wiping sweat from her face with a bandanna. Failure was another of her topics: she had no career (only an ordinary job, one that let her take a three-month leave, no less, but shouldn't she have a career by now?), no relationship (never longer than nine months, her love life on a school calendar), and now, she was no longer a sister (she was unsure how she'd failed Bruno). She glanced around the worn plank deck at the various rails, pipes, and vents, the purposes of which she was entirely ignorant. A woman came around the corner and leaned against the railing. Was it starboard or port? It was the older woman from the couple Fanny had seen the night before. Her khakis were crisp, the sleeves of her yellow blouse rolled neatly to her elbows. Fanny considered going to talk to her, but then a young man approached the woman. Did they know each other? He strolled past, the woman didn't turn. No, they didn't know each other.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from All Things Tending towards the Eternal by Kathleen Lee. Copyright © 2015 Kathleen Lee. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,All Things Tending towards the Eternal,