Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
As we pulled out of Thirtieth Street Station, the droplets of condensation that had been trembling on the surface of the window began to streak in horizontal lines across the glass, pushed into movement by the acceleration of the train. The paths they left behind them cleared the blanket of vapor that blurred the outside world from view, mapping islands and mud cracks onto the translucent pane. The moving water made the trees and buildings look liquid as they rushed past.
Trains always helped me think, even when I didn’t want to. I was thinking about the last time I saw Paul, outside the Gare du Nord in Paris. It was late in the afternoon, and raining, and in the sunlight the falling water looked like snow. I was heading back to Philadelphia, where Paul was supposed to join me later on. We’d just spent a month with his family in France, where we’d retreated because he’d overstayed his visa for the U.S. and if he’d remained there any longer he might have been banned from returning. He was going to look for a job, or apply to grad school—whatever could get him back into the country.
The unfortunate thing about knowing someone better than they know themselves is that sometimes you know they are lying before they do. When Paul told me, that day at the station, that he would see me back in Philly, I believed him, and I lived sweetly in this belief until I turned away, at which point I realized on some level that he was not going to join me, that it was over, that I had lost him again. I flew back and, left to his own devices, inertia set in. He overslept appointments at the consulate; he missed application deadlines; he blamed an inscrutable fatigue. He insisted it had nothing to do with me, but when I suggested marriage as a bureaucratic expediency, he was evasive, persistently so, even as he continued to insist that it had nothing to do with me. We kept going for a few months, but the rot of unmatched expectation had set in, and as it grew and spread, it became impossible to ignore. Now, two years later, he had written me an email, which I pored over, conducting forensic sweeps, learning nothing except that he still had the power to upset me.
Farmland flashed by the window. So much of my memory of Paul was associated with trains. He grew up in Toque-Faubourg, a small town or large village, the distinction escaped me, in the French countryside. His parents lived near the station, and whenever the trains passed, no matter where we were in the house, the sound of them filled the whole room. The summer we lived there, we often took the train to the city because there was nothing much to do in Toque-Faubourg. There was one bakery, open three days a week, and one restaurant, which was always closed. So we went to Paris, sometimes with tickets, sometimes saving ourselves the ten euros and hoping the conductors wouldn’t single us out for a spot check, and that Paul would be able to charm them into releasing us if they did. Many times we stayed too late in bars and missed the last train and had to wait until the morning, drifting in and out of sleep on cold metal seats under the cavernous fluorescence of the Gare de Lyon, his head in my lap or mine on his shoulder. The train left Paris near dawn, and on the journey home we watched the sun unfurl over the wheat fields. The carriage windows were kept open, and white fluffs of pollen, identical to the kind that filled the air and the drains and made the world ethereal each spring in Beijing, floated in from one window and out through the other side, like apparitions from my own childhood home, overlaying the present with memories of the past, merging the two in a way that made it hard not to interpret the sight as some kind of portent.
In the evenings when Paul and I were not in Paris, we lounged in the grass of the unkempt garden at Toque-Faubourg, which opened up into the forest where so many Impressionists had wandered with their easels, and where Napoleon met Pope Pius VII, who had to trudge through the mud to reach the emperor. We ate bread and cheese and Paul poured amber beer into squat steins for us to drink, tilting the glasses to leave light wisps of foam. What did it mean to have that kind of experience and then return to your elsewhere life, as I did? What if the email meant he was pining too? That he wanted to come back? That he needed me? The idea that I might be able to access those tactile beauties again, might smell the dew on the grass in the early mornings and watch the pink dawn seep through the copse of oaks, my mind alive with the fevered clarity that jetlag gifts, made me so excited that it almost made me sick, the yearning rising in my chest like bile.
I looked to the other side of the carriage, and through the far window the words flashed by in white letters: trenton makes the world takes . Did Trenton still make? The bridge that the slogan spanned was a beautiful green Pennsylvania truss, named after the Pennsylvania Railroad, at one time the largest corporation in the world, responsible for almost twelve thousand miles of rail line. The pedestrian lane had close-up views of the interlocking triangles that formed the structure and the backs of the letters of the famous motto. On the New Jersey side was a black plaque with gold lettering that said George Washington stepped out of a ferry there on April 21, 1789, before the bridge existed, to say hello to happy Trentonites before continuing on to New York to be inaugurated as America’s first president. The man in the seat in front of me unscrewed the cap on his bottle of Diet Coke, and the gas hissed like a pierced tire. I allowed my thoughts to move on to the contents of my father’s most recent voice messages. He said he had talked to my mother. He sent me the name of the town where she lived, somewhere in New Jersey. It was very nearby. But I wanted to assess Paul’s email more than I wanted to think about my mother, or how my father had learned of her whereabouts, and why he had told me like this, and how I should feel about the way he was behaving. I couldn’t bring myself to be angry at him, because I knew how much he hated sharing bad or awkward news.
I woke Apple as we pulled into Trenton, where we switched to the light rail, which would take us south along the river to Bordentown. If my father’s information was accurate, I was now in the same state as my mother. On the rare occasions I did think of her, I used to imagine she had moved somewhere like Zanzibar or Ushuaia. It is easier to believe you have been abandoned in favor of exotic swashbuckling than it is to hear that the maternal apostate now lives in Maplewood, New Jersey. On the left side of the train were the marshes and on the right, an old US Steel site. I wasn’t sure if it was still in operation, but it didn’t look like it was. Whenever I saw a physical manifestation of decaying industry, which I often did when I traveled around, I couldn’t help but marvel at America. In the richest country in the history of the world, there was so much waste just sitting around, taking up space, contributing nothing to national productivity, and it didn’t seem to matter: the wealth still amassed. Would America have gotten as far as it did without so much fertile and resource-rich land? The answer had to be no, but now I wanted to pose it to Paul, who had ready-made opinions about everything. Russia and Canada had their endless frozen expanses that maybe global warming would make arable and inhabitable, which would be interesting. I thought of China, of all the desert and barren mountain land that stumped the best efforts of geoengineering, and of the old dynasties that had hewed to the east and left the steppe, for the most part, alone.
It was a short walk from the station to the seminary. I had only a vague plan of what we were going to do when we got there, but I hoped we would be able to roam the grounds unhindered. I had just finished reading a book about the Spanish Inquisition and I didn’t feel like talking to any priests. The seminary was located on the former estate of Napoleon’s brother Joseph, who had moved to New Jersey after Waterloo. I tried not to think of my mother: St. Helena, NJ. I’d always wanted to visit the estate, which was called Point Breeze when Joseph lived there, like the neighborhood in Philadelphia. Apple was not keen. She was uninterested in pre-twentieth-century history, saying she didn’t “see the point.” But she came along anyway to Thirtieth Street Station after a morning of flyering outside the Rivebelle. She’d asked me if I was only volunteering to impress Hoang, and I hadn’t replied, not because I didn’t know the answer, but because I wasn’t sure it mattered: if the action was good, surely the motivation was irrelevant.
As we walked, I told her how Joseph had built a mansion on the site we were visiting, and when it burned down one night, he built another, bigger mansion, which people said was the second-finest house in the country after the White House. Joseph moved back to Europe and died there, and years later an Englishman bought the property and tore down the beautiful house because he hated the French. It was amusing to imagine him acting out his own anti-Bonapartist revenge drama, destroying something that everyone liked, out of spite. Maybe amusing was the wrong word.
“You know,” I said, “he offered to switch places with Napoleon. They’d pretend to be each other, and Joseph would surrender to the British, and then Napoleon could have escaped to America. But Napoleon said no. He wouldn’t do it. He turned himself in.”
“It’s a really weird coincidence,” said Apple, “that the famous one has the crazy, like, Beyoncé, Cher type name. Like what if he was just called Jake? No one would be referring to him as Jake. Maybe he wouldn’t even have been that famous?”
“Jake Bonaparte.”
“See what I mean? Oh my god, Pee, it’s like me and Steve. Steve is Joseph. I’m Napoleon!”
I changed the subject and asked about Gus. Apple equivocated. She copped to her deception, but refused to explain why she’d lied or how she felt about it now. The question of how he’d found out didn’t interest me; it was easy enough to google her name, which made the fact that he hadn’t uncovered her lie earlier only startling in that it seemed to delineate another difference between male and female courtship behavior in the modern era. Scouring the internet for morsels of information about a new romantic interest was the first thing any woman would have done, and Gus clearly hadn’t done it. I was trying to pare back within myself a surprising flare of moralistic indignation, both because it was very much a glass house situation in terms of me judging Apple for lying and withholding information, and because I suspected I was just being loyal to Hoang, who I essentially believed had been born with a core of incorruptible honesty, and, as if guided by a spectral version of him from which I took my behavioral cues, I wanted to emulate his good qualities when he was not around. I had never had a problem with telling small lies but he seemed so obviously to be someone not only averse to lies, but unfamiliar with their temptation, that even thinking of lying now stressed me out.
The town was extremely suburban, and before long we were passing large bare trees and houses with gable roofs, red-shuttered windows, and big American flags undulating from clipped grass lawns. Apple grew up amid such scenery and was not fascinated like me. She kept her grumbling to a minimum, even when we had to switch onto a larger road with no pedestrian path and hop over puddles, and keep watch for speeding vehicles.
“Remember when the pope came, and they shut off all the streets, and we took those pictures lying down in the middle of the road?”
“I should’ve asked my mom for her car.”
Since I didn’t drive, the idea of procuring a car never occurred to me.
“She wouldn’t have minded?”
“It wouldn’t have been an issue. Are we almost there?”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked up from the map on my phone. “All this on our left is the grounds, we just have to get to the main entrance.”
I could tell she wasn’t in a good mood, because even when I told her Inno had given up on his “ Eat Pray Love tour,” as she’d once called it, to work at McKinsey, her glee was desultory. Possibly it had become a delicate issue to mock now that her own treachery was on the docket.
We turned onto a wide driveway, fields stretching out on either side of the road and trees clustered at the edges of the property. I could tell it was lovely and verdant in the summer, but now it was December, and everything was taupe.
“Do you think they’re watching us? From the inside?” Apple said, pointing to a beige building in the distance.
“Maybe. Should we flip them off?”
“Why would we do that?”
“They’re all pedophiles?”
“That’s offensive.”
“Sorry, some of them just cover for the pedophiles.”
Apple stopped walking. We were at a parabolic fork in the road, and at the vertex of the parabola was a sign that said private property .
“You can’t just lump all Christians together and say they’re evil.”
“I didn’t. This is a specific critique of the Catholic clergy.”
“My parents go to church every Sunday, are they bad people?”
I looked at her. “You’re a Baptist.”
“So?”
I shook my head. “I can see one. He’s coming over.”
A man had emerged from the beige building and was walking in our direction. As he got closer I realized he was Asian, and was ashamed to notice some of my hostility ebbing away, disarmed by the novelty of an Asian man in clerical clothing and perhaps also by some atavistic feeling of racial kinship in a foreign land. Maybe he would turn out to be Japanese.
When he reached us my principled opposition faced another blow: he introduced himself as Father Lin. For a nonsensical moment I imagined that here was my mother, reincarnated as a man, a Catholic priest, atoning ineffectually for her sins.
Father Lin told us he was from Taiwan; the seminary gave room and board to visiting priests from all over the world, he said, and he was spending a year in America. I told him my name was also Lin.
“Where are you from?” Father Lin asked. By now we had switched to Mandarin.
“Beijing,” I said.
“I’m from here,” Apple said in English. She was definitely not in a good mood.
“Her parents are Taiwanese,” I told the priest.
“Where in Taiwan?” he asked Apple. “You live in Bordentown now?”
“No, I’m from Paoli, Pennsylvania.”
“Her hometown is named after a famous Corsican revolutionary,” I said. “Pasquale Paoli. He inspired Napoleon. We’re very interested in Napoleon, that’s why we’re here. We were hoping to take a look around. This was his brother’s estate.”
“I know,” said the priest, “Joseph. He was ambassador to the Vatican, and he negotiated the Concordat. He was a better man than Napoleon. Can you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“The birds.”
There was a cawing, like a young crow, and chirps from something else.
“ Blue jay ,” said the priest. “And chickadee . Nothing makes me more homesick than the sound of foreign birds. I wake up in the morning and I have no idea where I am.”
We listened. It was pleasant. Vengefully, Apple broke the human silence.
“Isn’t it funny that this is Father Lin, but your own father isn’t even father Lin?” Apple turned to the priest. “Her dad is a very famous artist in China.”
Apple only referenced my father’s profession in slightly mocking terms or in the context of a joke, and she never asked about his work, but sometimes I thought she regarded his being an artist as the most interesting thing about me. Apple’s secret, guarded passion was painting. Since she was a child she had produced still lifes of the objects in her house—purple-pink geodes, money trees, meat cleavers—on flattened cardboard boxes, using the enamel paints from Steve’s discarded model airplane kits. By the time she was in middle school the paintings were nearly photorealistic; by the end of high school, she had developed a way of depicting light and shadow that looked more real than the thing itself, a Taiwanese American Pieter de Hooch. She kept the paintings in the attic until her parents told her she had to clear them out because they were turning the attic into an office. She took photographs of every painting and then threw them all away, even though she could have just moved them into her room. She explained that although her parents hadn’t said so, she knew they wanted her to move on. I didn’t know if this was true. I saw the paintings once, when she let me swipe through the photos she still had on her phone, that’s how I knew how good they were. She hadn’t, as far as I knew, painted since.
“An artist?” said the priest.
“Have you heard of Yukon Zhang?” Apple said.
Father Lin shook his head.
“Zhang Yukang,” I said.
“Ah, of course!” He gave me a thumbs up. “Very impressive!”
“Thanks,” I said. I was stung by his dismissal of our shared name, his positive outlook on my father, and his contention that Joseph was better than Napoleon. “Can we walk around?”
He said we could, and bade us farewell. “God bless you,” he said in English, and then he said goodbye in Chinese.
“I can’t believe he said that about Napoleon,” I said after the priest left, and we began walking again. “But I guess it makes sense. You know the pope excommunicated him?”
Apple didn’t say anything, so I tried another topic. “Remember when we were wondering if there were any Chinese soldiers in the American Civil War? I looked it up. There actually were a few in the Union army, like you said, but there were also these conjoined twins who moved to America from Thailand and made tons of money touring the country and showing off their conjoinedness, and became American citizens, and like, settled down in North Carolina and got married and were slave owners with sons who fought in the Confederate army. Isn’t that crazy? Also, that’s why people say ‘Siamese twins.’ These guys are the original conjoined twins from Siam, that’s where the name comes from, can you believe that?”
Apple ignored me and began to talk about something else, as if picking up the thread of an earlier conversation we had set aside. “You’re just lucky, you know. You have moral luck,” she said. I asked her what she was talking about. She said I had been born without ambition, which she and Inno possessed, and which meant they had to make unsavory career choices that I would never have to face—not because I had actively decided it was wrong, but because I was uninterested in making money and impressing peers and strangers; nor did I have to contend with parental pressure the way she and Inno did; nor did I have loans to pay off, like she did. I was quite offended by this, in particular what she said about my lack of ambition, but I tried to let it slide. I interrupted her to say that if I was so unambitious, how come we had traveled here to learn more about Napoleon, the most ambitious man in history? She kept going. She said I couldn’t accuse her of “selling out”—I hadn’t—because she never claimed to “buy in” in the first place. I started to feel that, just as a hallucinatory Hoang floated around my head, telling me to look at the trees and be honest with other people, a ghostly Gus resided in hers, and was listening, from the stands, to Apple’s self-defense.
“Okay,” I said, “I have moral luck. Do I still have toska?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I can just tell.”
“Maybe you have toska,” I countered.
“Maybe. Daylight savings is getting to me.”
“Me too.”
We reached the edge of the marshes. Across a body of unmoving water, we could see the train tracks on which we had traveled earlier in the day. I was wondering if the sudden vehemence of my anticlericalism, and my willingness to verbalize it, were relics of Paul’s influence. He was a vocal and committed atheist in a way that had gone out of fashion in the U.S., but was still common in continental Europe, and he reserved a special hatred for the Catholic Church, as you’d expect from a worshiper of the French Revolution, or, to be precise, of 1793. I was supposed to be channeling Hoang, but was I now channeling Paul again? Either way, it felt better than when I had no one to channel, when there was only me.
“Is this what you were expecting?” Apple asked me.
“I don’t know what I was expecting,” I said. On my phone I showed her some paintings of the estate in the days of Joseph Bonaparte. She agreed that it looked beautiful. We continued walking, because there were supposed to be tunnels somewhere on the property.
“So are you ever going to tell me what happened after Inno’s party?”
I couldn’t tell Apple what had happened, or almost happened, in Hoang’s room, because I couldn’t tell her about the email from Paul. I knew she would be aghast, and disparage him, and monitor me for signs of a relapse, which she would find, and I wanted to relapse in peace. I listened to the sound of her duck boots crisping over the dry grass and the leftover snow that prickled the ground. Because I knew it would cheer her up, I said, “We went back to his house and had some really nice conversations, and then he walked me to the door and then I went home. Also, we ate snow off a railing. We might have hugged, but I can’t remember for sure.”
“Mm,” she said. “Would you be upset if I burst out laughing?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
I stared at a clump of snow at my feet, heaped like a bowl of bingsu.
“I think we’re just friends.”
Right away I wanted to take back the “just.” What was so bad about being friends? Why did we consider it better to be somewhere else on the continuum of interpersonal relations?
“Friends,” Apple repeated.
“Friends,” I confirmed, believing it now, thinking of Paul and the promise of his email. “He’s probably moving to Antarctica.”
“Right. Are you going to hook up before he does?”
“Apple, stop.”
“You’re so repressed!”
“I’m not repressed. I just think some things should be private.”
“Can I be harsh for a second?”
“If I said no, would you not say what you’re about to say?”
“I think you avoid new experiences and hold on to old ones because you grew up with hippie artist parents, and your mom was a force of instability in your life, so now you crave stability, and never take risks.”
“So what?”
“So you agree?”
“Sure. That wasn’t even harsh. How is any of that a bad thing?”
“Because I’m saying you’ve never gotten over your mom’s abandonment, and it’s holding you back.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is!”
“But how can it be true if I never feel it or experience it or think about it?”
“I don’t believe you. But if that were the case, it would only be proof that you’re repressed.”
We were standing in front of a small stone bridge, the arches clad with moss and chipped and worn with age. I could feel the old thought patterns revving up, like a tic. Paul hadn’t said why he was visiting, or for how long. What if he was moving to the U.S.? What if he wanted to try again? Would he have reached out if he didn’t?
“I actually knew about the Antarctica thing,” said Apple. “So weird.”
“You did? From Gus?”
“No, from Mohd. Is this one of your tunnels?”
“This is a bridge.” I paused, absorbing the rest of what she had said. “The mouse killer?”
“The what?”
“Mohd?”
Apple revealed that she had met him at the party in the koala house, which was of course his house, where he lived with the anonymous koala lover. They’d exchanged numbers, but Apple had just begun seeing Gus, whom she prioritized. In the ensuing weeks, though, the memory of her brief conversation with Mohd had returned to her. I asked her what they had talked about, and she said she couldn’t remember. She was impressed that she had forgotten the conversation but still retained such a strong memory of him. She admitted that she herself had told Gus how she had been lying to him about her job, hoping it would cause a rift, and while she recognized it was wrong, everything had worked out for the best, i.e., in her favor.
I thought of Gus and his “break” and his “love.” Secondarily I felt unnerved by the level of complexity of the subterfuge, and that she hadn’t told me about it. Normally she kept me updated before and as events occurred; why was I only finding out about this now? Why, of all people, had she chosen to date men with connections to Hoang? Wasn’t there anyone else? I asked if she would keep coming with me to the flyering, and she said she would think about it.
We barely spoke on the walk back to the station, and I couldn’t tell if the tension I felt was something occurring between us or my own projection. But on the light rail Apple startled back to life, perusing her Twitter feed and now and then showing me something on the screen: a joke about unprotected sex, something terrible Trump had said, a video of a polar bear inching across an ice sheet on its belly, a picture of the presidents and their wives in the front pew of the funeral of George H. W. Bush, a joke about wanting a sugar daddy, the discovery of a new planet in another galaxy, the appearance of a Eurasian beaver in Italy after an absence of five hundred years. She fell asleep again on the train back to Philly. The winter sun idled above the sharp tops of the trees. I looked at Apple’s sleeping face reflected in the window. I felt a sudden tenderness, hearing her susurrate and watching her eyes revolve under her eyelids. Her hands rested in her lap, one clutching her phone and the other, nearer to me, holding nothing. I wanted to reach out and clasp it in mine. I wanted to tell her about Paul, tell her that he was coming back, that he was coming back for me, that the bouts of toska would end, that I was seeing him tomorrow, that I would be happy again; but I let her sleep.
She roused briefly when the train jerked on the tracks, and I turned to her.
“Remember in sophomore year, when we ordered takeout and I called it ‘fake Chinese food,’ and you started telling me how in Asian American Studies you learned that Chinese American food should be considered its own cuisine, because it was invented by guys who moved to San Francisco and New York without their wives and made up dishes based on memory, because their mothers weren’t there to tell them how to cook it, and they couldn’t find any of the proper ingredients? And then I said that was no excuse for bad food, and you didn’t speak to me for like two weeks?”
“I stand by that,” Apple said, and went back to sleep.
In Chinatown, the streetlamps were on, and clouds glowed in the blue-black sky. There was a letter waiting for me in the mailbox, a short one, written on the back of a grocery store receipt for green apples and spearmint chewing gum.
Penelope,
I picked up your horse book again. I don’t know why but the part where he writes about his mother almost made me cry. Crazy how different America was before the Europeans brought the horses over, I always thought they (horses) were here from the start. Zoo this Sunday, meet at the front entrance, by the lion statue!
Hoang
Xinwei was at the standing table, gazing into a bowl of soup. When she saw me she dashed to the kitchen to get me some before I even said hello. It was her herbal chicken broth with red dates, ginger, and goji berries, a winter classic. She served it to me in the bowl Raymond had given her for her birthday, the one with their faces printed on the outside with cartoon blush spots on their cheeks and artificially widened eyes. There was a matching mug.
“It’s damp outside! Eat!” Xinwei ordered. “And don’t leave the hongzao like you always do!”
The front door opened. It was the third roommate, who had returned from Munich to spend the Christmas season with his parents. He’d meant to surprise them, but upon arriving at his family home, he had discovered that his parents were on a last-minute cruise vacation to Curacao and would not return until the new year. So he was back for a few weeks; apparently he had been paying for his room the entire time he was gone.
“My Uber dropped me off at the wrong location,” he said morosely. “I had to walk five blocks. I witnessed pickpocketing.” That was the kind of thing he said instead of hello. Xinwei did not offer him any soup. He went into his room and I asked her if she had spoken to Raymond since he moved out.
“He’s saying he wants to marry me now. He realized what it’s like to live alone. Now he knows someone was there all along, ironing his socks and cooking his meals.”
“Are you going to marry him?” I asked. People ironed their socks?
“Of course,” Xinwei said. “But first I will let him suffer a bit more.”
“Why?”
“Because he made me suffer.”
Through the thin walls of the apartment I could hear the third roommate practicing German on his app. Even to me, it was clear from the sentences he was being tasked to recite that he had not advanced much during his time in Germany. Frohliche Weihnachten! Wo ist das Büro? Wieviel kostet das?