Chapter 27 Jason
JASON
When his daughter shut the door of her bedroom and lived for days on LUNA Bars despite the carefully prepared meals he cooked for her, Jason thought of his younger self.
How he’d taken off with his typewriter, wanting nothing to do with his parents.
It brought him some comfort to think maybe she’d inherited her intensity from him—and one day she’d grow up and, like him, find someone who made her a little less severe.
He returned to this line of thought often, and it was easier than thinking about the other part: that the things she’d said in the kitchen on Halloween had upset him.
She thought he didn’t care what had happened to the Livonia Avenue restaurant building and to the people who had lived in it, but that was not the case.
He was deeply disturbed to hear there had been a fire, that people had been hurt. But his father had sold the building and never looked back. What happened after the sale was not his family’s business, Jason felt.
But then, there were people in Brownsville who still remembered his father. Who believed he’d been responsible for this calamity.
Perhaps Sadie was right. He was still running. His father’s past was the last thing he wanted to think about.
All spring and summer, as his daughter dug into the history of the Livonia Avenue lot, Jason chewed over how he could help.
His own days were slow and solitary. He wrote in the morning, and in the afternoons he worked as an associate editor for Verbena Press.
Often, he’d reflect on how lucky he was to do what he loved, to eat well, and to feel safe.
In the evenings, he cooked and ate with Rachel, and they read aloud Ibsen or Chekhov, or else they played the game where one of them read a line from a book and the other had to guess the author.
He cherished the quiet, for as a child, quiet was all he had ever wanted.
To hear Rachel hum along to Billy Joel, or Brian Lehrer ponder the questions of the day, or the chirping of the sparrow out the window—that was enough for him.
In the early ’90s, when they’d moved to Park Slope—Rachel’s parents had bought the brownstone on their behalf—Jason had been a bit anxious about returning to Brooklyn.
Then he’d realized that the new Brooklyn wasn’t anything like the old one.
Maybe it was Park Slope, or maybe it was the era.
He never stopped double-checking the locks on the door, but as Sadie got older, he could be okay if she went to a party and didn’t come back until after midnight.
But it was also true that Brooklyn had lost something.
Its people. Neighbors had disappeared from the block, and he didn’t particularly like the entitled ones who’d replaced them.
There was a certain Brooklyn stoop culture on the wane.
He missed the days when he could just sidle up to Macon’s place, throw a stuffed animal at the window, and that was all it took to get a friend’s attention.
It was thus a big surprise to him when, one weekend in October, Macon George friended him on Facebook. As soon as Jason accepted the friend request, Macon sent him a message.
Oct. 10, 2015, 10:23 p.m.
Jason! Jason Chin. I’m realizing how my many nicknames for you won’t really fly in the 21st century, but Jason, it’s good to be writing you.
I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch for so many years.
You might not believe it, but I still have your wedding picture and your daughter’s birth announcement.
I saved them and have been meaning to reconnect for a long time.
I don’t know if you’re still in Manhattan.
How is Rachel? How old is your daughter now?
Are you already an empty nester? I’m coming to Brooklyn in a couple of weeks to help my mother move to a nursing home. Is it possible you’d like to meet?
Jason immediately invited Macon to the Park Slope brownstone. It wasn’t until he’d received Macon’s message that he understood how deeply he regretted their growing apart.
Jason pored over his friend’s profile page. Macon still lived in Los Angeles and was a surgeon at UCLA—chief of the division of cardiac surgery.
He scrolled until he found a photo. Macon, though balding, was unmistakable. He wore a suit and stood with his arm around another Black man, the latter with salt-and-pepper muttonchops. Twenty years of partnership with Thomas Collins, the caption said. And now, my husband.
“Husband,” Jason mumbled to himself, removing his reading glasses.
He smiled at the screen until his eyes began to water.
“Husband,” he repeated to himself, again and again, as if the word, like a magician’s handkerchief cloth, might yank invisible things into view, bring back all the many memories Jason had forgotten or suppressed.
The day before Macon’s visit, Jason bought more junk food than he’d ever brought into the brownstone: Drake’s Devil Dogs, several boxes of Jell-O pudding, and four Hostess fruit pies in different flavors, which he sliced into quarters as if they were sampling fancy cheeses.
He wanted to pay homage to the old days, even if it spiked their blood sugar levels.
“You chopped your hair,” Macon pointed out.
“And you have none left!” Jason replied, and guffawing, they brought each other in for a hug. Toned and glowing from the California sun, Macon was fit. Jason tried to remember the last time he’d hugged Macon, and could only recall the skinny boy he’d chased on the jungle gym.
Rachel and Sadie were at work, so for several hours, the two men sat on the living room couch, tasting and sometimes spitting out their formerly favorite snacks, impressed by their own disgust. Macon told Jason about Thomas, who was an actor, and about their wedding at the Hollywood Bowl.
“Give Mrs. Chin my best. She was always a sweet lady.”
“She has heart troubles. I’m taking her to the doctor Saturday. She’ll be happy to hear about you.”
“My mom thought Mrs. Chin had moved far away.”
“Just to Manhattan Chinatown.”
“Well, that’s far away to Mom.” Macon chuckled.
“My mom won’t leave Brooklyn. I keep trying to get her out to LA, but she’s too attached.
That’s why we had to settle with this East New York nursing home.
But I need to ask you, Jason.” Macon leaned in, a sly grin on his face that reminded Jason of the old, untoned Macon.
“Am I in the right Brooklyn? Where did all the white people come from?”
They both laughed, and Jason was glad he still had a friend who could see this.
Sometimes, spending time with Park Slope neighbors or his colleagues at Verbena Press, he felt as if he’d only dreamed the Brooklyn of his adolescence.
And yet Macon’s comment also made him a tad defensive, for wasn’t Rachel part of that white arrival?
If he could have filled the city with carbon copies of Rachel, he would have.
He thought of Sadie, then. He was proud of her for all her research into the history of the Livonia Avenue restaurant. He was also ashamed that she had come to need so little from him. Jason wondered what Macon would have done in his place.
“You know what Sadie found out?” Jason said to him. “The building in Brownsville where my family’s restaurant used to be—it burned down in the late ’70s.”
“Oh yeah? What happened?”
“It’s not clear.” He was already having second thoughts about bringing up the subject. “After my dad closed the restaurant, he rented it to tenants, then sold the building. But right after the sale, there was a fire. There are people in Brownsville who think my father burned it down.”
“Did he?”
Macon’s sly grin reappeared, but this time Jason was taken aback.
“Wait—you’re not seriously asking me, are you?”
Macon’s head wobbled with hesitation. “Your dad was something.”
“He was,” Jason agreed.
“Temperamental.”
“Yep.”
“And, I’m sorry, Jason—he was, you know, a bit, uh…”
“Racist. Absolutely. I know.”
“And all the time, ranting about those tenants. Saying he hoped they’d go to hell.”
“Why don’t I remember that?”
“Maybe you blocked it out. He would be screaming it in and out of the doors. My parents and I could hear from the porch. He was older by then. Maybe you’d already left.”
When he went to Chinatown that Saturday to take his mother to the doctor, he had a secret mission.
On arriving, he found her ready to go, wearing a purple peacoat and jade earrings.
As always, she was a stickler for presentation.
Pressing down the Velcro of her Mary Janes, he guided her into the wheelchair.
The sun was out, and on Mott Street, he pushed her slowly so she could take in the sights.
Chinatown had changed. There were more white people on the street than Chinese, it seemed to him.
A Japanese creperie shop and a Taiwanese ice cream parlor had replaced the old Toisanese pottery and dried fungi stores.
A few homeless Chinese men sat on flattened cardboard outside a shuttered dim sum restaurant.
“Hon Ngin Gai change a lot,” Jason leaned down and said into her ear.
“All the new immigrants are from Fujian Province,” his mother replied in Toisanese. “The Fujianese are poor!”
“No, I mean this.” He pointed at the creperie. “All these fancy shops.”
His mother shrugged in the wheelchair. “Hon Ngin Gai hou gi,” she said back.
Jason frowned. Even his own mother—with all her prejudices, her Republican leanings, her habit of projecting the word Fujianese like it was a cuss—was concerned about rising rents.