My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (69 page)

In the following two weeks Yanli kept peering. Apparently she felt that he hadn’t changed in any way—that he wasn’t suspicious of her—and in time she relaxed and forgot that she’d had something to hide. Zhenbao was befuddled: now it seemed that she didn’t have a secret after all. It was like two white doors, tightly shut, flanked by a pair of flickering lamps on a wild plain at night: you pound at them with all your might, absolutely convinced that a murder is taking place inside. But when the doors open to admit you, there’s no such thing. There’s not even a building. All you can see, under a few stars, is empty mist and tangled weeds. Now that was truly frightening.

Zhenbao started drinking a lot, openly consorting with women outside the house. It was not at all like before, when he retained some scruples. He came home reeking of drink, or he didn’t come home at all, but Yanli always had an excuse, saying that he had a lot of new social obligations for his company that he couldn’t refuse. She would never admit that it had anything to do with her. She kept on explaining it away to herself, and when his dissipation gradually got to the point where it couldn’t be concealed, she explained it away to others too, smiling slightly, loyally covering up for him. Zhenbao was running wild—almost to the point of bringing prostitutes home with him—but everyone still thought of him as a fine upstanding man, a good man.

For a month it rained constantly. One day, the old maidservant said that Zhenbao’s woven silk shirt had shrunk in the wash and needed to be let out. Sitting on the bed with his shoes off, Zhenbao casually remarked, “Get the tailor to come and fix it.”

“The tailor hasn’t come in a long time,” said Amah Yu. “I wonder if he’s gone back to his hometown.”

“Eh?” said Zhenbao, to himself. “Broken off as easily as that? Not a bit of real feeling—how dirty, how petty!”

“Really?” he asked. “Didn’t he come to collect his bill at Dragonboat Festival?”

“His apprentice came,” said Amah Yu.

This Amah Yu had been with them for three years. She folded up some underpants and put them on the edge of the bed, with a light pat. She didn’t look at him, but the smile on her gentle old face was meant to be comforting. Zhenbao was filled with anger.

That afternoon he took a woman out for a good time, and purposely went around to his house for some money. The woman sat waiting for him in the pedicab. The sky had just cleared and the water on the street had not yet receded; great clumps of parasol trees shone in the yellow river. Across the street, there was a bluish haze on the green trees around the little red houses; damp yellow smoke came out of the chimneys and flew off at a low angle. Zhenbao returned with the money, smacked his umbrella down, and splashed water all over the girl. She cried out sharply. Zhenbao climbed into the pedicab laughing, full of wet, muddy happiness. He looked at the upstairs window. It must have been Yanli standing there, but what he saw was a tea-tray lace doily, yellowing with age, stuck on the bathroom wall—or maybe it was a little white saucer with a tea-stain splotch in the center. Zhenbao smacked his umbrella into the water again. Break it to bits! Break it to bits!

He couldn’t smash up the home he’d made, or his wife, or his daughter, but he could smash himself up, the umbrella whacking the water and the cold, rank mud flying into his face. Again he was filled with tender sorrow for himself, a lover’s sorrow, but at the same time a strong-willed self stood opposite the lover, pulling and pushing and fighting with her. He had to be smashed to bits! Smash him to bits!

The pedicab drove through the rippling water, and the water splashed the woman’s clothes and her leather shoes and leather handbag. She complained, wanting him to pay for the damage. Zhenbao laughed, threw one arm around her, and kept on splashing the water.

After this, even Yanli ran out of excuses. Zhenbao didn’t bring back money for the family, his daughter’s tuition went unpaid, and the daily groceries were a problem too. At that point, Yanli became a brave little wife. Suddenly, at the age of nearly thirty, she had grown up. She spoke fluently and compellingly, in tearful, eloquent complaints: “How ever can we go on like this? It’s enough to kill me—the whole family depends on him! At this rate he’ll lose his job at the factory . . . It’s as if he’s gone mad, he doesn’t come home, and when he does he hits people and smashes things up. He wasn’t like this before! Oh, Mr. Liu, can you imagine? Can you tell me what I should do? How am I supposed to cope with this?”

All at once Yanli gained self-confidence. She had social status. She had sympathy. She had friends. One night Zhenbao came back home to find her sitting in the living room talking with Dubao. Of course they were discussing him, and when he appeared, she fell silent. She was dressed all in black, and though the wrinkles on her worried face were visible in the lamplight, she still had an aura of hidden beauty. Zhenbao didn’t rush around smashing tables and lamps. He walked in, nodded to Dubao, and said a few words about the weather. He lit a cigarette and sat down casually to discuss current events and the stock market. Finally he said he was tired and would go to bed early. He took his leave of them and headed up the stairs. Yanli simply couldn’t understand what was happening—it looked as if she’d been lying. It was all very hard to explain.

After Dubao left, Zhenbao heard Yanli entering the bedroom. Right when she came in the door, he swept the lamp and the hot-water thermos off the little cabinet; they fell to the floor and cracked wide open, smashed to bits. He bent down and picked up the metal base of the lamp, hurling it at her, electrical cord and all. Turning, she fled from the room. Zhenbao felt that she had been completely defeated. He was extremely pleased with himself. He stood there laughing silently, the quiet laughter flowing out of his eyes and spilling over his face like tears.

The old maidservant stood in the doorway gaping, broom and dustpan in hand. Zhenbao turned the light off. She didn’t dare enter the room. Zhenbao fell asleep on the bed, slept through to the middle of the night, when mosquito bites woke him. He rose and turned on the light. A pair of Yanli’s embroidered slippers were lying in the middle of the floor at cross angles, one a bit ahead, the other a bit behind, like a ghost that was afraid to materialize, walking fearfully, pleadingly toward him. Zhenbao sat on the edge of the bed and stared for a long time. When he lay down again, he sighed. He could feel his old benevolent mood stealing over him bit by bit, wrapping itself around him. Countless worries and duties and mosquitoes buzzed around him, stinging him and sucking at him.

The next day Zhenbao rose and reformed his ways. He made a fresh start and went back to being a good man.

FIREWORKS

RICHARD FORD

EDDIE STARLING SAT at the kitchen table at noon reading through the newspaper. Outside in the street some neighborhood kids were shooting off firecrackers. The Fourth of July was a day away, and every few minutes there was a lot of noisy popping followed by a hiss, then a huge boom loud enough to bring down an airplane. It was giving him the jitters, and he wished some parent would go out and haul the kids inside.

Starling had been out of work six months—one entire selling season and part of the next. He had sold real estate, and had never been off work any length of time in his life. Though he had begun to wonder, after a certain period of not working, if you couldn’t simply forget
how
to work, forget the particulars, lose the reasons for it. And once that happened, it could become possible never to hold another job as long as you lived. To become a statistic: the chronically unemployed. The thought worried him.

Outside in the street he heard what sounded like kids’ noises again. They were up to something suspicious, and he stood up to look out just when the phone rang.

“What’s new on the home front?” Lois’s voice said. Lois had gone back to work tending bar near the airport and always tried to call up in good spirits.

“Status quo. Hot.” Starling walked to the window, holding the receiver, and peered out. In the middle of the street some kids he’d never seen before were getting ready to blow up a tin can using an enormous firecracker. “Some kids are outside blowing up something.”

“Anything good in the paper?”

“Nothing promising.”

“Well,” Lois said. “Just be patient, hon. I know it’s hot. Listen, Eddie, do you remember those priests who were always setting fire to themselves on TV? Exactly when were they? We were trying to remember here. Was it ’68 or ’72? Nobody could remember to save their life.”

“Sixty-eight was Kennedy,” Starling said. “They weren’t just setting themselves on fire for TV, though. They were in Asia.”

“Okay. But when was Vietnam exactly?”

The kids lit the firecracker under the can and went running away down the street, laughing. For a moment Starling stared directly at the can, but just then a young woman came out of the house across the street. As she stepped into her yard the can went
boom
, and the woman leaped back and put her hands into her hair.

“Christ, what was that!” Lois said. “It sounded like a bomb.”

“It was those kids.”

“The scamps,” Lois said. “I guess they’re hot, too, though.”

The woman was very thin—too thin to be healthy, Starling thought. She was in her twenties and had on dull yellow shorts and no shoes. She walked out into the street and yelled something vicious at the kids, who were far down the street now. Starling knew nothing more about her than he did about anybody else in the neighborhood. The name on the mailbox had been taped over before he and Lois had moved in. A man lived with the woman and worked on his car in the garage late at night.

The woman walked slowly back across her little yard to her house. At the top step she turned and looked at Starling’s house. He stared at her, and the woman went inside and closed the door.

“Eddie, take a guess who’s here,” Lois said.

“Who’s where?”

“In the bar. One wild guess.”

“Arthur Godfrey,” Starling said.

“Arthur Godfrey. That’s great,” Lois said. “No, it’s Louie. He just waltzed in the door. Isn’t that amazing?”

Louie Reiner was Lois’s previous husband. Starling and Reiner had been business acquaintances of a sort before Lois came along, and had co-brokered some office property at the tail end of the boom.

Reiner had been in real estate then, along with everybody else. Reiner and Lois had stayed married six weeks, then they had gone over to Reno and gotten an annulment. A year later, Lois married Starling. That had all been in ’76, and Lois didn’t talk about it or about Reiner anymore. Louie had disappeared somewhere—he’d heard Europe. He didn’t feel like he had anything against Louie now, though he wasn’t particularly happy he was around.

“Just take a guess what Louie’s doing?” Lois said. Water had started to run where Lois was.

“Who knows. Washing dishes. How should I know?”

Lois repeated what Starling said and some people laughed. He heard Louie’s voice saying, “Well
excuuuse
me.”

“Seriously, Ed. Louie’s an extraditer.” Lois laughed. Hah.

“What’s that mean?” Starling said.

“It means he travels the breadth of the country bringing people back here so they can go to jail. He just brought a man back from Montana who’d done nothing more than pass a forty-seven-dollar bad check, which doesn’t seem worth it to me. Louie isn’t in uniform, but he’s got a gun and a little beeper.”

“What’s he doing there?” Starling said.

“His girlfriend’s coming in at the airport from Florida,” Lois said. “He’s a lot fatter than he used to be, too, though he wouldn’t like me to say that, would you, Louie?” Starling heard Reiner say “
Excuuuse
me” again. “Do you want to talk to him?”

“I’m busy right now.”

“Busy doing what, eating lunch? You’re not busy.”

“I’m fixing dinner,” Starling lied.

“Talk to Louie, Eddie.”

Starling wanted to hang up. He wished Reiner would go back to wherever he came from.

“
Helloooo dere
,” Reiner said.

“Who left your cage open, Reiner?”

“Come on down here and have a drink, Starling, and I’ll tell you all about it. I’ve seen the world since I saw you. Italy, France, the islands. You know what an Italian girl puts behind her ears to make herself more attractive?”