The Train to Lo Wu (7 page)

And now?

He spreads his fingers wide.

You’re sitting still, he says. The hand relaxes. It doesn’t know what to do with itself. The fingers get in the way. All of your natural responses are gone.

That’s a kind of insanity, isn’t it?

Hold on to your center, he says. Pay attention to your breathing. Follow the situation around you. So tell me, what is Zen?

Lewis strikes the floor as hard as he can.

Only that?

Sitting here talking to you.

Keep that mind and you won’t make any new karma for yourself.

It’s not that easy, Lewis says. I came here to make a decision.

The teacher adjusts his robe and takes a sip of tea. I remember, he says. You’re considering getting divorced.

I’m not sure this was the best choice. Coming here, I mean.

Why not?

Well, Lewis says, I’m not supposed to be
thinking
about anything, am I?

Haven’t you already tried thinking about it? Has that worked?

It hasn’t. Does that mean I should stop?

Sometimes you can’t solve your problems that way, the teacher says. Your thinking-mind pulls you in one direction, then the other. There are too many variables involved. The most important decisions we make are always like that, aren’t they?
Should I get married? Should I move to California?
You try and try to see all the dimensions of the question, but there’s always something you can’t grasp.

So you’re saying that there’s no way to solve these problems rationally.

Not at all. Your rational mind is very important, but it also has limitations. Ultimately you have to ask yourself,
what is my true
direction in life?
Logic won’t help you answer that question. Any kind of concept or metaphor will fall short. The only way is to try to keep a clear mind. And be patient.

Aren’t you going to tell me that I have to become a monk?

The teacher grins so widely that Lewis can see the gold crowns on his molars. Why would I do that? he asks. Being a monk won’t help you. Do you think we have some magic way of escaping karma? We don’t. Nobody gets away from suffering in this world. All we can do is try to see it for what it is.

Lewis rubs his eyes; he feels a dull headache approaching.

I’ve got a new question for you, the teacher says. Are you ready?

Lewis straightens his back and takes a deep breath.

You say you love your wife, right? What’s her name?

Melinda.

You say you love Melinda. But what is love?
Show
me love.

Lewis strikes the floor and waits, but no words come. His mind is full of bees, buzzing lazily in the sunlight. Don’t know, he says.

Good, the teacher says. That’s your homework. He rings the bell, and they bow.

The housekeeper’s name was Cristina; she was paid for by Melinda’s company, part of the package that all expatriate employees received. Two days after they moved into their apartment, she arrived with three suitcases and a woven plastic carryall, and occupied the bedroom that Lewis had wanted for his studio. She was polite and efficient, and cooked wonderful food, but the apartment was small even for two people; they took to arguing in whispers, and gave up making love, feeling self-conscious. It took three weeks for Melinda to convince her supervisor that she didn’t want or need an amah, even though every other couple in the firm had one, and the contract had to be broken at extra cost, taken out of her salary. When they told Cristina she wept and begged them not to send her away, and they were at a loss to justify themselves. I’ll be more quiet! she said. Not even any telephone calls! Finally Lewis threatened to call her agency and complain, and she went to the elevator crying and wailing in Tagalog. All along the hallway he heard doors opening and closing, the neighbors talking in low tones.

Afterward Melinda couldn’t sleep for days. She might have been sent back to the Philippines, she said. That’s what she was afraid of. Anytime they’re out of work they risk losing their visas. Maybe we could have kept her on.

What did you want me to do? Not work?

No, she said. I know. But I don’t know how we can live with ourselves.

It isn’t our fault, Lewis said. Who thought that an American couple would be comfortable having a live-in housekeeper in a tiny apartment? Couldn’t they at least have asked?

Everybody else has one.

Well, I’m not interested in having a servant, Lewis said impatiently. I don’t want some kind of colonial fantasy life.

I want
my
life, he wanted to add,
our
life, the one we promised each other, the one we had in Boston. He remembered what she’d said to him in the airport, when they were standing in line at the gate, clutching their tickets and carry-on bags and staring out the window at the tarmac, as if seeing America for the last time: she’d turned to him, wide-eyed, and said,
no matter what
happens, we’ll still be the same, right?

That was how it began,
he thinks, staring at the ceiling, on the nights when the throbbing in his knees keeps him awake. The things they couldn’t have predicted, and couldn’t be faulted for. In the first month he visited the offices of a dozen magazines and journals, after sending slides and a portfolio in advance, and found himself talking to assistants and deputy editors who seemed not to have heard of
Outside, Condé Nast Traveler,
or
Architectural Digest,
and who regretted to inform him that there was a glut of photographers in Hong Kong at the moment. For the first time in six years he was officially out of work. On the bus, in the subway, in restaurants, he had moments of irrational rage, hating everything and everyone around him: the women who brayed into their mobile phones; the insolent teenagers with dyed-blond hair and purple sunglasses; the old men in stained T-shirts who stared at him balefully when he paid with the wrong coins. Cantonese was an impossible language: even people who’d lived in Hong Kong twenty years couldn’t speak it. He couldn’t master the tones well enough to say
thank you.

But I’m not the only one who changed.

Melinda’s cello, which had cost them a thousand dollars to ship, sat in its case in the corner of their bedroom, unopened, growing a faint green tinge of mildew. Her address book hadn’t moved from its slot on the shelf above her desk in months. When he called their friends on the East Coast, waking them up after eleven at night, they asked,
what the hell’s happened to her?
It wasn’t just the seventy-hour weeks; it wasn’t the new secretaries she had to train every month, or the global trades that could happen at any hour of the day, in Tokyo, or Bombay, or Frankfurt, so that she often had to be on call overnight. She’d always worked hard, and complained about it, and fought Coopers for every bit of time off she was entitled to. Now they never discussed her schedule at all. If he asked her about vacation time, or free weekends, or made a casual remark about never seeing her enough, she would say,
that’s the last thing I want to think about.
Her face had taken on a kind of slackness, a faint, constant unhappiness, as if no disaster could surprise her. She slept with her knees tucked up to her chest; she was constantly turning off the air conditioner, even when the apartment was stifling, complaining she was cold. Despite the subtropical sun, her skin was becoming paler; she had to throw away all her makeup and start over with lighter shades. And in three months she had gone from two cigarettes to four to half a pack a day.

On a Sunday afternoon in March of that first year he convinced her to come shopping with him at the new underground supermarket in Causeway Bay. She wandered through the aisles like a sleepwalker, picking up items almost at random—a jar of gherkin pickles, a packet of ramen—frowning, and putting them back. Half-joking, he said, I think we’ve become a reverse cliché, don’t you? I’m the bored housewife, and you’re the workaholic businessman. Maybe my mother was right.

She stopped in front of a pyramid of Holland tomatoes and turned to look at him, her lips pressed into a tiny pink oval. Just before the wedding, his mother had said to him wryly,
marry a
career woman and all you’ll wind up with is a career,
and they’d quickly turned it into a joke: when she kissed him, or touched him, she would say,
how do you like my career now?
But the joke isn’t funny anymore, he thought, and wished he could suck the words out of the air.

Is that what you really think? she asked. Do you think I arranged it all this way? So that you’d be out of work and frustrated and taking it all out on me?

Is this what you call frustrated? he said. Making a joke? Asking an innocent question every now and then?

I’m not a workaholic. She tore off a plastic bag and began filling it with broccoli rabe, inspecting each stalk carefully for flowers. A workaholic
likes
it.

No, he said. A workaholic can’t stop.

She turned away from him, sorting through mounds of imported lettuce: American iceberg, Australian romaine, all neatly labeled and shrink-wrapped.

Can’t you ask them for more time off? Lewis asked. Just one Saturday? I mean, it’s the same company, isn’t it? You’re in a more senior position than you were in Boston, and
now
you don’t have any flexibility?

Do you know what happened to the Asian markets last week? she asked. Did you even read the papers?

That isn’t the issue. That’s never been the issue. You’d be working this hard regardless.

I don’t know how to explain it, she said. Her face darkened, and she stopped in the middle of the aisle, her shoulders drooping, as if the bags of vegetables were filled with stones. It’s different here. She looked as if she would cry at any moment. A young Chinese woman passing them stared at her, then twisted her head to look at him. We have to fight for everything, she said. Clients. Market share. Out here we’re not the Big Five. Accounts don’t just fall in our laps here the way they do at home. And anyway, the whole economy’s in a goddamned meltdown.
Nobody
wants to open up a new account right now.

He should have taken the bags from her hands, and dropped them in the cart; he should have embraced her and said,
forget
about shopping, let’s get a drink.
Instead, he crossed his arms and waited for her to finish, feeling impatient, irritated at her for making a scene.

And you just don’t care, do you? she said. It’s not that you want to see me, is it? You’ve just given up trying, and now you want to go home. Well, it’s not that easy. You made a promise to me, and we never said that there wasn’t a risk. Hong Kong isn’t Boston. If you can’t adapt, well, I feel sorry for you.

There was a bitter taste in his mouth. I’m glad you feel sorry for me, he said. I’m glad you feel
something.
He turned around and walked toward the escalator, and though she called after him,
Lewis, wait, I don’t know how to get home,
he ignored her and kept going.

At first he thought he would head straight back to the apartment, but he turned right on Queen’s Road, blindly, and walked in the opposite direction, into a neighborhood he’d never visited before. It seemed to him that everyone he passed—the old man selling watches from a suitcase, the young fashionable women laden with shopping bags, even the boys throwing a volleyball back and forth—had red, puffy eyes, as if the whole city had been crying. He was walking too slowly; people veered around him, or bumped him with their elbows as they tried to get by.

It would be so easy to leave: to buy a ticket for Boston tomorrow, to rent a studio in Central Square, to make a few phone calls, get some small assignments, to start making a life for himself again. She wouldn’t fight the divorce; she would give him a fair settlement, probably more than he needed. A lawyer could finish the paperwork in a few weeks. And she would stay here, getting thinner, smoking more, biding her time until her bosses realized she wasn’t going to be driven away. Whatever inertia it was that gripped her now would swallow her whole.
I can’t do it,
he thought.
I can’t abandon her. I can’t shock her out of it.
He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared up at the buildings overhead, looking for a landmark to orient himself.
If I were
home,
he thought bitterly,
someone would stop and ask if I needed
directions. They wouldn’t all stare at me and think, what are you
doing here in the first place?

I have a question, he says to Hae Wol as they are walking through the market, searching for the lightbulb store. What about change?

Change? The monk furrows his eyebrows. Everything is always changing. What kind of change?

Changing yourself. Trying to do better. Not making mistakes.

Mistakes are your mirror, Hae Wol says. They reflect your mind. Don’t try to slip away from them.

Enough with the Zenspeak, Lewis says. Plain English, please.

The monk shrugs, and a look of annoyance crosses his face. You have to understand cause and effect, he says. Watch yourself. When you see the patterns in how you act, you’ll begin to understand your karma. Then you won’t have to be afraid of your feelings, because they won’t control you.

I’ve
been
watching myself, Lewis says. But I keep wondering: even if I understand completely, can’t I still make mistakes? How do I know that when I go back to Hong Kong things will be different?

It isn’t so much a question of conscious effort. You have to give up the idea that coming here is going to
get
you anything.

Lewis looks around him, at the meat vendors carving enormous slabs of beef, the shoe repairmen, the grandmothers carrying babies tied to their backs with blankets. His eyes are watering.

I keep hearing that, he says, and it just sounds like a recipe for standing still.

No one ever said it was easy, Hae Wol says sharply. It’s not like a vacation for losing weight. If you come here looking for some kind of quick fix for all your problems, you’re missing the point.