Last Night in Twisted River (39 page)

“Okay,” Danny said again. Just how safe could Joe get? the writer was wondering. The boy had an ER nurse taking care of him, not to mention
two
Japanese babysitters.

Most nights, both the cook and his emergency-room nurse were working; either Danny stayed home with Joe, or one of the Japanese twins looked after the boy. Sao and Kaori’s parents were from Yokohama originally, but the twins had been born in San Francisco and they’d grown up there. One night the cook had brought them home from Mao’s; he’d woken up Danny to introduce him to the twins, and he’d taken Sao and Kaori into Joe’s room to allow them to observe the sleeping boy. “See?” Tony whispered to the twins, while Danny lay bewildered and barely awake in his bed. “This child is an angel—he’s easy to look after.”

The cook had disapproved of Danny asking his workshop students to babysit for Joe. Danny’s students were writers—hence easily distracted, or preoccupied, in Tony Angel’s opinion. Young writers lived in their imaginations, didn’t they? the cook had asked his son. (Danny knew that his dad had always distrusted imagination.) Furthermore, these young writers were
graduate
students; many of them were older than the usual graduate students, too. “They’re too
old
to be competent babysitters!” the cook had said. His dad’s theory was new to Danny, but he liked Sao and Kaori, the identical twins—though he could never tell them apart. (Over time, Joe could, and wasn’t that all that mattered?)

“The Yokohamas,” as Danny thought of the twins—as if Yokohama were their family name—were undergraduates and part-time waitresses at Mao’s. Therefore, Iowa City had a decidedly Asian flavor not only for the cook but for Danny and young Joe. The twins spoke Japanese to each other, which Joe loved but Danny found distracting. Most nights, when Sao worked at Mao’s, Kaori was Joe’s babysitter—or vice versa. (In which case, no Japanese was spoken.)

The Yokohamas had at first maintained a distant respect for Yi-Yiing, whose ER schedule did not often allow her to coincide in the house with either Sao or Kaori. They were more likely to run into one another at Mao’s, where Yi-Yiing occasionally came late (and by herself) to dinner—though she preferred the all-night shift in the emergency room to working daytime hours.

One night, when Xiao Dee was the maître d’, he mistook Yi-Yiing for one of the waitresses who worked at Mao’s. “You’re late!” he told her.

“I’m a customer—I have a reservation,” Yi-Yiing told Little Brother.

“Oh, shit—you’re Tony’s nurse!” Xiao Dee said.

“Tony’s too young to need a nurse yet,” Yi-Yiing replied.

Later, the cook tried to defend Xiao Dee. (“He’s a good driver—he’s just a shitty maître d’.”) But Yi-Yiing was sensitive.

“The Americans think I’m Vietnamese, and some Shanghai clown from Queens thinks I’m a
waitress!”
she told Tony.

Unfortunately, one of the Japanese twins, who
was
a waitress—at this moment, she was also young Joe’s babysitter—overheard Yi-Yiing say this. “What’s so bad about being a
waitress?”
Sao or Kaori asked the nurse.

The Japanese twins had also been mistaken for Vietnamese war brides in Iowa City. Most people in their native San Francisco, either Sao or Kaori had explained to Danny, could tell the Japanese and Vietnamese apart; apparently this was not the case in the Midwest. To this shameful lumping together, what could Danny truthfully say? After all,
he
still couldn’t tell Sao and Kaori apart! (And, after Yi-Yiing used the
waitress
word as an epithet, the Yokohamas’ formerly distant respect for the nurse from Hong Kong grew
more
distant.)

“We’re all one happy family,” Danny would later try to explain to one of his older workshop students. Youn was a writer from Seoul; she came into Danny’s fiction workshop the second year he was back in Iowa City. There were some Vietnam vets among the workshop students in those years—they, too, were older. And there were a few women writers who’d interrupted their writing lives to get married and have children, and get divorced. These older graduate students had an advantage over the younger writers who’d come to the Writers’ Workshop right out of college; the older ones had something to write about.

Youn certainly did. She’d been a slave to an arranged marriage in Seoul—“
virtually
arranged,” was how she first described the marriage in the novel she was writing.

Danny had criticized the
virtually
. “Either it was an arranged marriage or it wasn’t, right?” he’d asked Youn.

Her skin was as pale as milk. Her black hair was cut short, with bangs, under which her big dark-brown eyes made her appear waifish, though Youn was over thirty—she was exactly Danny’s age—and her efforts to get her real-life husband to divorce her, so she wouldn’t be dragged through “the Korean rigmarole” of trying to divorce him, gave her novel-in-progress a labyrinthine plot.

If you could believe either her actual story or her novel, the writer Danny Angel had thought. When he’d first met her, and had read the early chapters, Danny didn’t know if he could trust her—either as a woman or as a writer. But he’d
liked
her from the beginning, and Danny’s developing attraction to Youn at least alleviated his inappropriate fantasizing about his father’s girlfriend in her countless pairs of pajamas.

“Well,” the cook had said to his son, after Danny introduced him to Youn, “if there’s a Chinese nurse and two Japanese girls in the house, why not a Korean writer, too?”

But they were all hiding something, weren’t they? Certainly, the cook and his son were in hiding—they were fugitives. His dad’s Chinese nurse gave Danny the impression that there was something she wasn’t saying. As for Danny’s Korean writer, he knew she exhibited a seemingly willful lack of clarity—he didn’t mean only in her prose.

There was no fault to be found with the Japanese babysitters, whose affection for young Joe was genuine, and whose fondness for the cook stemmed from the camaraderie of them all working together in the ambitious chaos of Asian and French cuisine at Mao’s.

Not that Yi-Yiing’s rapt attention to Joe was insincere; the ER nurse was a truly good soul. It was her relationship with the cook that amounted to a compromise, perhaps to them both. But Tony Angel had long been wary of women, and he was used to hedging his bets; it was Yi-Yiing who shouldn’t have tolerated Tony’s short-term flings with those traveling women he met at the Writers’ Workshop parties, but the nurse accepted even this from the cook. Yi-Yiing liked living with a young boy the same age as her missing daughter; she liked being a mother to
someone
. Being a part of the cook’s all-male family may also have struck Yi-Yiing as a bohemian adventure—one she might not find so easy to slip into once her daughter and parents finally joined her in America.

To those bold young doctors at Mercy Hospital who would inquire as to her
status—
was she married, or did she have a boyfriend? they wanted to know—Yi-Yiing always said, to their surprise, “I live with the writer Danny Angel.” She must have liked saying this, for reasons beyond it being a conversation-stopper, because it was only to her closer friends and acquaintances that Yi-Yiing would bother to add: “Well, actually, I’m dating Danny’s
father
. He’s a cook at Mao’s—not the Chinese one.” But the cook understood that it was complicated for Yi-Yiing—a woman in her thirties with an unsettled life, living so far away from her native land, and with a daughter she knew only from photographs.

Once, at a party, someone who worked at Mercy Hospital said to Danny, “Oh, I know your girlfriend.”

“
What
girlfriend?” Danny had asked; this was before Youn came into his fiction workshop, and (before long) had moved into the second house on Court Street.

“Yi-Yiing—she’s Chinese, a nurse at—”

“She’s my
dad’s
girlfriend,” the writer quickly said.

“Oh—”

“What’s going on with Yi-Yiing?” Danny had later asked his father. “Some people think she’s living with
me.”

“I don’t question Yi-Yiing, Daniel. She doesn’t question me,” the cook pointed out. “And isn’t she terrific with Joe?” his dad asked him. Both of them knew very well that this was the same point Danny had made to his father about his former Windham College student Franky, back in Vermont—yet it was strange, nonetheless, Danny thought. Was the cook, who was turning fifty, more of a bohemian than his writer son (at least until Youn moved into that second Court Street house)?

And what was it that was wrong about that house? It had been big enough for them all; that wasn’t it. There were enough bedrooms so that everyone could have slept separately; Youn used one of the extra bedrooms as a place to write, and for all her things. For a woman over thirty who’d had no children and endured an incomprehensible Korean divorce—at least it was “incomprehensible” in her novel-in-progress, or so Danny thought—Youn had remarkably few things. Had she left everything behind in Seoul, not just her truly terrifying-sounding former husband?

“I’m a
student,”
she’d said to Danny. “That is what is so liberating about being a student again—I don’t have any
things.”
It was a smart answer, the writer thought, but Danny didn’t know if he believed her.

IN THE FALL OF
’73
, when Joe was starting third grade, the cook kept a crate of apples on the back porch of their Iowa City house. The porch overlooked a narrow, paved alley; it ran the length of the long row of houses that fronted Court Street. The alley didn’t appear to be used for anything, except for picking up garbage. Only an occasional slow-moving car passed, and—more often, even constantly—kids on bicycles. There was some loose sand or gravel on the little-used pavement, which meant the kids could practice skids on their bikes. Joe had fallen off his bike in that back alley. Yi-Yiing had cleaned the scrape on the boy’s knee.

A porch, off the kitchen, faced the alley, and something was eating the apples that the cook left out on the porch—a raccoon, Danny at first suspected, but it was a possum, actually, and one early evening when young Joe went out on the porch to fetch an apple for himself, he put his hand in the crate and the possum scared him. It growled or hissed or snarled; the boy was so scared that he couldn’t even say for sure if the primitive-looking animal had bitten him.

All Danny kept asking was, “Did it
bite
you?” (He couldn’t stop examining Joe’s arms and hands for bite marks.)

“I don’t
know!”
the boy wailed. “It was white and pink—it looked
awful
! What
was
it?”

“A possum,” Danny kept repeating; he’d seen it slink away. Possums were ugly-looking creatures.

That night, when Joe fell asleep, Danny went into the boy’s bedroom and examined him all over. He wished Yi-Yiing was home, but she was working in the ER. She would know if possums were occasionally rabid—in Vermont, raccoons often were—and the good nurse would know what to do if Joe had been bitten, but Danny couldn’t find a bite mark anywhere on his son’s perfect body.

Youn had stood in the open doorway of the boy’s bedroom; she’d watched Danny looking for any indication of an animal bite. “Wouldn’t Joe
know
if he was bitten?” she asked.

“He was too startled and too scared to know,” Danny answered her. Youn was staring at the sleeping boy as if he were a wild or unknown animal to her, and Danny realized that she often looked at Joe with this puzzled, from-another-world fascination. If Yi-Yiing doted on Joe because she longed to be with her daughter of that same age, Youn looked at Joe with what appeared to be incomprehension; it was as if she’d never been around children of
any
age before.

Then again, if one could believe her story
(or
her novel), her success in obtaining a divorce from her husband—most important, in getting him to initiate the allegedly complicated procedure—was due to her failure to get pregnant and have a child. That was her novel’s tortuous plot: how her husband presumed she was
trying
to get pregnant, when all along she’d been taking birth-control pills
and
using a diaphragm—she was doing all she could
not
to get pregnant, and to
never
have a child.

Youn was writing her novel in English, not Korean, and her English was excellent, Danny thought; her
writing
was good, though certain Korean elements remained mystifying. (What
was
Korean divorce law, anyway? Why was the charade of
pretending
to try to get pregnant necessary? And, according to Youn, she’d hated taking birth-control pills.)

The husband—ultimately, Danny assumed, the
ex-
husband—in Youn’s novel was a kind of gangster businessman. Perhaps he was a well-paid assassin, or he hired lesser hit men to do his dirty work; in Danny’s reading of Youn’s novel-in-progress, this wasn’t clear. That the husband was dangerous—in both Youn’s real life
and
her novel—seemed obvious. Danny could only wonder about the sexual detail. There was something sympathetic about the husband, despite Youn’s efforts to demonize him; the poor man imagined it was
his
fault that his scheming wife couldn’t get pregnant.

It didn’t help that, in bed at night, Youn told Danny the
worst
details of her miserable marriage—her husband’s tireless need for sex included. (But he was trying to get you
pregnant
, wasn’t he? Danny wanted to ask, though he didn’t. Maybe sex had felt like a duty to Youn’s unfortunate husband
and
to Youn. The things she told Danny in the dark and the details of her novels were becoming blurred—or were they interchangeable?)

Shouldn’t the fictional husband, the cold-blooded-killer executive in her novel, have a
different
name from her actual ex-husband? Danny had asked Youn. What if her former husband ever read her novel? (Assuming she could get it published.) Wouldn’t he then know how she’d deceived him—by deliberately trying
not
to get pregnant when they were married?