Chapter Six
Chapter Six
For most of the rest of the month I was ensconced in a happy busy period at work. I had to come up with a detailed plan for the exhibition, and I was still intent on getting approval for my idea to let visitors hold the shoes in their hands. Replicas were an option, but even a flawless re-creation was too removed from the experience of the real. Apart from that, I had other ideas I was pretty sure would not be implemented but that I would propose anyway, because there was nothing to lose in the attempt and everything to lose in its absence. I wanted color projections of the women who might have worn the shoes, imposed in such a way that it looked as though they were wearing the objects on display; then, I thought, rather than seeing the shoes as pretty artifacts, the viewer would be confronted with the horrific proportions of the deformed feet and really understand the function of the shoes, which was to mask manmade deformity with prettiness. I wanted to stage a show with the Chinese shadow puppets in the museum collection—the female figures had bound feet—or let visitors manipulate the rods and move the puppets around themselves. I wanted to bring people into the white room where pens and coffees were banned. But the bulk of my work revolved around researching the history of the period and writing material that would be used for the program brochures, the wall placards, the press releases, the script for the audio guides, and the website. On top of that I still had to carry out my usual tasks, cataloging the mass of loose and unlabeled Qing-era objects that lived in the basement storage units. Time would pass and I would look up and find that it was hours later in the day than I would have guessed, and I had missed lunch or dinner. I think my unconscious might have been egging me on, training me to be alone, in anticipation of the number of close friends who lived near me decreasing by fifty percent. But I enjoyed the feeling of productivity.
Since Inno’s announcement, we had taken up our old habit of long city walks, which were not as enjoyable in the winter but which now had a valedictory quality to them that made them more precious. It was like we were rejuvenated by his leaving, removed from the torpor of habit by the awareness that we would soon have to accustom ourselves to new ones. I tried not to mention Hoang, except in relation to other things I wanted to talk about, like the book of poetry Inno accused me of reading incorrectly, or when we passed a tree I thought I could identify. I asked Inno if there was an appropriate rate at which to read a collection of poems. Was a few in one setting acceptable, or did it have to be one at a time? It was so much easier to memorize the names of cavalry regiments or pictures of cedars and dogwoods. Inno said I had to trust my instincts because no rule existed, and it would actually be odd for such a rule to exist. I found it funny that in all other areas of life—or, more specifically, in the living realm of life, i.e., when it came to romantic relationships, the observation of the physical world, and the feeling of feelings—he would never have cited instinct as a sufficient source of knowledge, and would probably accuse me of doing so to a fault, whereas in the realm of the arts—music, poetry, literature, philosophy—he was, to my mind at least, pretty woo-woo, while I longed for the nonexistent instruction manual. I conceded that I might have been a little facetious in asking for an optimal rate, that I wasn’t really so literal-minded, but I did want to address a deeper concern that I was reading poetry wrong. I took the example of the famous Frank O’Hara poem about having a Coke and going to the Frick and seeing The Polish Rider . All the lines that struck me were lines that made me think of Hoang (and sometimes of Paul, though this I did not share with Inno). Even if Hoang hadn’t been the one to recommend the poet to me, this probably would have happened, but because he had, not only was I inserting myself into the poem’s “I” and Hoang into the poem’s “you,” but I was also reading the poem as him, trying to deduce what he liked about it, fantasizing that he had read it once where I was the “you” and he was the “I.” Surely, I said to Inno, as we walked past the Italian Market, where, that early in the morning, the wood-plank tables with rusty metal wheels stood bare, and men unloaded crates of canned tomatoes from unmarked white vans, surely this was not the right way to be reading poetry. My suspicion that I was not even really “reading” it was reinforced by my complete mental shutdown when I came across lines like the one about the “tree breathing through its spectacles.” This phrase made so little sense to me that it made me angry, and proved to me that I was not “reading” the poem as much as I was skimming it for something that applied to my own life. Inno said it was a sublime image, and that part of the beauty of the blithe surrealism of the New York School, of which O’Hara was a prominent member, and of poetry in general, was that you could let the combinations of words, sounds, and rhythms wash over you, but it was necessary to liberate yourself with the realization that, when it came to lines like the one I mentioned, any “meaning” was secondary if not irrelevant; Inno rejoiced in the demonstration that it was possible to combine such words at all. Regarding my worry that projecting my own emotions onto the poem wasn’t a true reading of the poem, Inno continued, as we passed a gated park inside which small dogs raced in circles around what looked to be fake grass, everyone did that and it was fine. Not just fine—it was remarkable, wasn’t it, that a gay American man could pen an ode to his lover and, sixty years later, a Chinese woman lusting after a busboy could read what he had written and share his precise feeling? Ha ha, very funny, he’s a bartender, not a busboy, but anyway, was the point to share O’Hara’s precise feeling? Or was it something else?
Inno warned me that I was in danger of becoming deliberately convoluted, i.e., it wasn’t that deep. “But I can appreciate that my answers are unsatisfactory,” he continued. “I myself am unsatisfied with them. We may be missing things that someone with formal training in poetical analysis learns very early on, but I don’t really care about that, unless we do know someone who fits that description. And even then, they’d probably be a bore. What I mean is I don’t think we should resort to experts or search engines. It’s more fun this way, no? And I like your questions, they put me on my back foot. It’s like when a child asks you something so simple it’s impossible to answer, and you realize you’ve been trained to take certain fundamentals so much for granted that it’s difficult to explain them in a straightforward manner, which is all the child needs. I mean that as a compliment, obviously. Let’s turn left here? I like this street.”
“No, it’s the wrong way,” I said. I asked Inno why, since he loved poetry so much, he never tried to write a poem. He responded that he wished he could, but it was impossible for him, because it would “expose” him. He didn’t mean that the content of his poems would reveal too much about his inner life, or that he was shy; he meant the attempt itself would humiliate him, because it showed that he cared enough to try, and was careless enough to try, even though the greatest poems in the world had already been written. I told him this mindset itself was very revealing, and he laughed.
“I only reveal what I want to reveal.”
“Can anyone really claim that?”
“I can.”
As we walked down Morris Street, toward the Delaware River, I elaborated on my theory that I’d never had the emotional response to poetry that I was convinced Inno and Hoang and other poetry readers were having. I gave another example. In school I was taken by certain verses of classical Chinese poetry, lines in which I recognized something of myself in the experiences described, but I was conscious that what moved me was the knowledge that these lines had been written more than one thousand years before I was born, rather than the words themselves, shorn of context. Inno said he didn’t see what was objectionable about that, and wasn’t it the same point he had just made about me and Frank O’Hara and our mutual yearning? I said it wasn’t the same, because O’Hara’s world was recent, comprehensible to me, indeed O’Hara might have been alive today had he not died so young in a car accident, whereas the world of, for example, Su Shi was unintelligibly distant, which made the fact that he and I both once admired a mountain and got drunk and felt homesick, to me, quite arresting. After I said this I realized I was not satisfied with it; it was not quite what I meant, and, as Inno said, it did not bear a significant difference to what he said. I tried again. Su Shi’s world, and his psyche—not to mention that of the Tang poets, who lived and died three centuries before him—was inaccessible in a way that the modern poet’s was not. The ancient poet, as an individual, is a black box, an unknown, I told Inno, deciding I would drop the subject after this. I was running out of steam as I spoke, reaching that point of speech when you lose faith in your ability to express yourself and begin to falter. I suspected that women experienced this more than men. The ancient poet is an unknown, I said, until I read what he writes about seeing the imprint of geese feet in the slushy snow, which makes him think that life is short—life ends as quickly as those impressions in the snow—and then he thinks, even as he is mourning his friend, that no one really remembers the dead, not in the total, undiminishing way that one would like to be remembered when one dies. He’s also tired, and he has a long journey home. After I read that, I said, the poet was no longer an unknown, and the distance between us, for a moment, collapsed.
“I’m not sure I follow,” Inno said.
“I’m just trying to say that what I’m responding to is the weight of the historical, not the aesthetic, or literary, whichever one it is.”
“That’s an interesting distinction,” Inno said, and I knew he was going to ask me to elaborate, so before he could, I asked what plans he had for the weekend. He told me (workout, chess with Gleb, Spinoza reading group, Spanish lesson, dinner party) and then asked me about mine. I told him Apple and I were going flyering with someone from the hospitality union the Rivebelle workers hoped to join. I explained that Apple had diagnosed me with toska, and believed I should be doing something purposeful with my time. I left out that she thought the cause of my toska was Inno’s departure to greener, potato-sown pastures.
“There’s like a regional conference of dentists taking place at the hotel over the weekend, so more people than usual, so we’re going to stand at the entrance and hand flyers out.”
Inno found this image very amusing.
“Those poor dentists. That girl’s going to be terrorizing them all within minutes,” he said, meaning Apple. “And you? On the soapbox? Can I come watch?”
By the time we reached the riverfront, he had more or less stopped laughing. I tried to distract him by pointing out the SS United States , which we had come to see. It sat dormant in the gray water of the Delaware. It was sheathed in rust, which always made me sad, but its size was so impressive that in spite of its terrible state it retained an aura of dignity.
“It amazes me that you question poetry, yet find beauty in this,” Inno said.
“It’s the fastest ocean liner ever built. It crossed the Atlantic in like three days in 1952, and no one’s broken the record since.”
“It’s ugly.”
I shook my head. “One day a cruise company will restore it to its former glory, and you’ll see how wrong you are.”
“Don’t you get bored?”
“I’m not even a real ship fan. A real ship fan would have taken you to see the USS New Jersey . You know, the battleship?”
“Of course I know the battleship. They do brunch there. But I didn’t mean boats, I meant all of it. This morning you demand we meet on a particular street so that you can look at a plaque you’ve already read that says Napoleon’s brother—”
“Joseph.”
“—lived in one of the houses there for, what was it, a single year? And then, I’m sorry to say, we bypassed several picturesque alleys in favor of your historical tour. Don’t you get bored?”
“Don’t you get bored of poems?” I snapped.
“Poetry refreshes itself each time you read it, and oftentimes you come away with something new. But with this, I mean, there’s nothing there.”
“Why can’t a place be like a poem?”
“It can be, but—alright, perhaps this doesn’t apply as much to the big ship, although I would argue it’s boring to look at the first time around. But take the street where we met. That was just a street. There was nothing there, not really. The house he lived in was probably demolished years ago. And he isn’t even the one that you like.”
“I like Joseph. He went to law school. Like Apple.”
“There are just so many degrees of separation. And you’ve been before. Why on earth would you want to go again?”
I shrugged and said nothing, because I knew, since he hated sentimentality, I would make him uncomfortable with my answer, which was that I’d wanted to show it to him.
The monks were burning incense when I got home, and the vestibule was redolent. I peered into the mailbox, because I didn’t have the key with me. Inside I could see a slim white envelope with my name and address written in handwriting I recognized. I jammed my hand into the slot. My fingers brushed the paper. If I could get hold of one corner of the envelope, I would be able to extract it from the shallow compartment. My hand was about halfway inside; I had range but no rotating power. I pushed at the envelope with the tips of my fingers. It was moving in tiny, infuriating increments, not enough for me to grasp it but just enough to make me feel that my actions were resulting in movement, which stopped me from giving up. I twisted my trapped limb, pawing at the paper.
“Gan sha ya?”
I jumped. Xinwei was behind me, asking me what I was doing in a mimicry of Beijing dialect, her impression of me speaking Chinese. She held up the tiny key. I extracted my hand, rubbing the bone of my thumb, which was red from where it had scraped against the sharp metal sides of the mail slot. Xinwei opened the door, handed me the letter, and then took out a small mass wrapped in cellophane and tape.
“Hua jiao,” she explained as we trooped up the stairs.
I relished our moments without Raymond, when we could chat in Mandarin with what I experienced, in my capacity as an only child, as a sisterly affection, a jiejie–meimei kind of dynamic. When we reached our apartment, Xinwei swapped her rubber slippers, which she used to roam the building, for her fluffy indoor ones, and padded to the kitchen to open her packet of peppercorns. When she was done with the scissors, I used them to slit open the envelope on its short side, in order to preserve its form, and not alter the parts of it that Hoang had constructed.
Penelope,
My friend Mohd set up traps around his house to catch mice. He ordered a bunch of them on Amazon, they look like the ones in Tom and Jerry. The trip that sets it off even looks like cheese, yellow with little holes.
Below this, he had included a sketch of the mouse trap, charming in its ineptitude.
He’s been leaving them all over communicating in English, like calling, was suspect. I wondered if he was high. My father no longer drank, but he loved to take psychedelics, and kept a glass jar of mushrooms on a black lacquer sideboard in his living room, alongside his chrysanthemum teas, his ginseng root, and his Cuban cigars.
After a red-shirted union representative relieved me of my duties, I walked home, replying to my father’s message with a single question mark and reacting to Apple’s with a downturned thumb, feeling that this was the quality of response they both deserved. Part of me had hoped Hoang would appear while I was outside the Rivebelle, but I was also relieved he had not. The frisson of possibly being in his vicinity hadn’t been as powerful as I had hoped. The letter had made him real again; I feared it might be time to end my self-enforced isolation, to try and see him in person. At home I put on the rice cooker and made tomato and egg and reread Hoang’s letter, that perfect object, trying to make out words he had crossed out here and there. Shortly after we started writing to each other, I began dreaming correspondence-themed dreams. I dreamed of checking the mail, I dreamed of pages and pages of handwritten recollection, addressed to me. Once I dreamed I was walking by the banks of the Schuylkill when two lions walked past in single file, and in the dream I thought, I have to write to Hoang about this. I didn’t want to lose this dreamlike quality, and I worried it would not survive if we graduated to more conventional forms of interaction. While I washed the dishes, my father messaged me again. It was four in the morning in Beijing. I dried my hands and unlocked my phone: an address for a pottery studio in Queens, New York. And then a second message came in.
Your mother works here. Pay her a visit?