Moon Palace Page 10

  I walked across the street in the late-afternoon sun. Zimmer was waiting for me in the restaurant, just as he had promised.

  I gained weight rapidly after that. Within the next ten days or so, I believe I put on eighteen or twenty pounds, and by the end of the month I was beginning to resemble the person I had once been. Zimmer fed me conscientiously, stocking the refrigerator with all kinds of food, and when I seemed steady enough to venture out of the apartment again, he began taking me to a local bar every night, a dark and quiet place without much traffic, where we would drink beer and watch the ball games on TV. The grass was always blue on that TV, the bats were a fuzzy orange, and the players looked like clowns, but it was pleasant to be huddled there in our little booth, talking for hours on end about the things that lay before us. It was an exquisitely tranquil period in both our lives: a brief moment of standing still before moving on again.

  It was during those talks that I began to learn something more about Kitty Wu. Zimmer found her remarkable, and it was hard not to hear the admiration in his voice when he spoke of her. Once, he even went so far as to say that if he hadn’t already been in love with someone else, he would have fallen head over heels for her. She was as close to perfection as any girl he had ever met, he said, and when it came copy down to it, the only thing that puzzled him about her was how she could have been attracted to such a dreary specimen as me.

  “I don’t think she’s attracted to me,” I said. “She just has a good heart, that’s all. She took pity on me and did something about it—in the same way other people take pity on wounded dogs.”

  “I saw her every day, M. S. Every day for almost three weeks. She couldn’t stop talking about you.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. The girl is madly in love with you.”

  “Then why doesn’t she come to see me?”

  “She’s busy. Her classes have started at Juilliard, and she has a part-time job as well.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course not. That’s because you don’t know anything. You lie around in bed all day, you visit the refrigerator, you read my books. Every once in a while, you take a stab at doing the dishes. How could you possibly know anything?”

  “I’m gaining strength. In a few more days I’ll be back to normal.”

  “Physically. But your mind still has a long way to go.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’ve got to look under the surface, M. S. You’ve got to use your imagination.”

  “I always thought I did too much of that. I’m trying to be more realistic now, more down to earth.”

  “With yourself, yes, but you can’t do that with other people. Why do you think Kitty’s backed off? Why do you think she doesn’t come around to see you anymore?”

  “Because she’s busy. You just told me that.”

  “That’s only part of it.”

  “You’re going around in circles, David.”

  “I’m just trying to show you that there’s more to it than you think.”

  “All copy, then, what’s the other part?”

  “Discretion.”

  “That’s the last word I’d use to describe Kitty. She’s probably the most open and spontaneous person I’ve ever met.”

  “That’s true. But underneath all that, there’s a tremendous reserve, a real delicacy of feeling.”

  “She kissed me the first time I saw her, did you know that? Just as I was about to leave, she cut me off at the door, flung her arms around me, and planted a big kiss on my lips. That’s hardly what I would call delicate or reserved.”

  “Was it a good kiss?”

  “As a matter of fact, it was an extraordinary kiss. It was one of the best kisses I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience.”

  “You see? That proves my point exactly.”

  “It doesn’t prove anything. It was just one of those things that happens on the spur of the moment.”

  “No, Kitty knew what she was doing. She’s someone who follows her impulses, but those impulses are also a form of knowledge.”

  “You sound awfully sure of yourself.”

  “Put yourself in her position. She falls in love with you, she kisses you on the lips, she drops everything to go out and find you. But what have you done for her? Not a thing. Not even the shadow of a thing. What separates Kitty from other people is that she’s willing to accept that. Just imagine it, Fogg. She saves your life, and yet you don’t owe her anything. She doesn’t expect gratitude from you. She doesn’t even expect friendship. She might wish for those things, but she’ll never ask for them. She has too much respect for other people to force them into doing things against their will. She’s open and spontaneous, but at the same time she’d rather die than have you feel she’s throwing herself at you. That’s where discretion comes into it. She’s gone far enough, and at this point she has no choice but to hold her ground and wait.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “That it’s up to you, Fogg. You’re the one who has to make the next move.”

  According to what Kitty had told Zimmer, her father had been a Kuomintang general in pre-Revolutionary China. Back in the thirties, he had held the position of mayor or military governor of Peking. Although he was a member of Chiang Kai-shek’s inner circle, he had once saved Chou En-lai’s life by offering him a safe conduct out of the city after Chiang had entrapped him there on the pretext of arranging a meeting between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Still, the general remained loyal to the Nationalist cause, and after the Revolution he made the move to Taiwan along with the rest of Chiang’s followers. The Wu household was enormous, consisting of an official wife, two concubines, five or six children, and a full staff of domestic servants. Kitty was born to the second concubine in February 1950, and sixteen months later, when General Wu was appointed ambassador to Japan, the family moved to Tokyo. This was undoubtedly a clever move on Chiang’s part: to honor the fractious, outspoken general with such an important post, and at the same time to remove him from the center of power in Taipei. General Wu was in his late sixties by then, and his days as a man of influence were apparently over.

  Kitty spent her childhood in Tokyo, was sent to American schools, which accounted for her flawless English, and was given every advantage her privileged circumstances could offer: ballet lessons, American Christmas, chauffeur-driven cars. For all that, it was a lonely childhood. She was ten years younger than her nearest half-sister, and one of her brothers, a banker who lived in Switzerland, was a full thirty years older than she was. Worse than that, her mother’s position as second concubine left her with scarcely more power in the family hierarchy than one of the servants. The sixty-four-year-old wife and the fifty-two-year-old first concubine were jealous of Kitty’s young and attractive mother and did everything they could to weaken her status in the household. As Kitty explained it to Zimmer, it was a little like living in an imperial Chinese court, with all its attendant rivalries and factions, its secret machinations, its silent plots and false smiles. The general himself was rarely to be seen. When not occupied with his official duties, he spent most of his time cultivating the affections of various young women of less than reputable character. Tokyo was a city rich in temptation, and the opportunities for such dalliances were inexhaustible. Eventually, he took on a mistress, set her up in a fashionable apartment, and spent lavish sums in order to keep her happy: shelling out for clothes, for jewelry, and finally a sports car. In the long run, however, these things were not enough, and not even a painful and expensive potency cure could reverse the tide. The mistress’s attentions began to wander, and one night, when the general walked in on her unannounced, he found her in the arms of a younger man. The battle that ensued was horrific: shrieking voices, sharp fingernails, a torn and bloody shirt. It was the last illusion of a foolish old man. The general went home, hung up his tattered shirt in the middle of his room, and attache
d a sheet of paper to it with the date of the incident: October 14, 1959. He kept it there for the rest of his life, relishing it as a monument to his destroyed vanity.

  At some point, Kitty’s mother died, although Zimmer was unclear as to the causes or circumstances. The general was past eighty then and in failing health, but in a last flurry of concern for his youngest daughter, he arranged to have her sent to boarding school in America. Kitty was just fourteen when she arrived in Massachusetts to enter the freshman class of the Fielding Academy. Given who she was, it did not take her long to fit in and find a place for herself. She acted and danced, she made friends, she studied hard enough to get decent grades. By the time her four years there had ended, she knew that she would not be going back to Japan. Nor to Taiwan for that matter, or anywhere else. America had become her country, and by juggling the small inheritance she received after her father’s death, she had managed to cover the tuition costs at Juilliard and move to New York. She had been in the city for more than a year now and was just starting her second full year of classes.

  “It sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Zimmer asked.

  “Familiar?” I said. “It’s one of the most exotic stories I’ve ever heard.”

  “Only on the surface. Scratch away some of the local color, and it boils down to almost the same story of someone else I know. Give or take a few details, of course.”

  “Mmm, yes, I see what you mean. Orphans in the storm, that kind of thing.”

  “Exactly.”

  I paused for a moment to consider what Zimmer had said. “I suppose there are certain resemblances,” I finally added. “But do you think she’s telling the truth?”

  “I have no way of knowing for sure. But based on what I’ve seen of her so far, I’d be pretty shocked if she wasn’t.”

  I took another sip of beer and nodded. Much later, when I got to know her better, I learned that Kitty never lied about anything.

  The longer I stayed with Zimmer, the more uncomfortable I began to feel. He footed the bill for my recovery, and while he never complained about it, I knew his finances were not so solid that he could go on doing it much longer. Zimmer received a little help from his family in New Jersey, but basically he had to fend for himself. Around the twentieth of the month, he began graduate school at Columbia in comparative literature. The university had lured him into the program with a fellowship—free tuition plus a two-thousand-dollar stipend—but even if that was a nice sum back in those days, it was hardly enough to live on for a year. Still, he went on taking care of me, dipping into his meager savings without compunction. Generous as Zimmer was, there must have been more to it than pure altruism. Going back to our first year together as roommates, I had always felt that he was somewhat intimidated by me, overwhelmed, so to speak, by the sheer intensity of my follies. Now that I had fallen on hard times, perhaps he saw it as an opportunity to gain the upper hand, to copy the internal balance of our friendship. I doubt that Zimmer himself was even aware of it, but a certain edgy superiority had crept into his voice when he spoke to me now, and it was hard not to sense the pleasure he got from teasing me. I bore with it, however, and did not take offense. My estimation of myself had sunk so low by then that I secretly welcomed his badgering as a form of justice, as a richly deserved punishment for my sins.

  Zimmer was a small, wiry person with curly black hair and a contained, upcopy posture. He wore the metal-rimmed glasses that were common among students back then and was in the early stages of growing a beard, which made him look something like a young rabbi. Of all the undergraduates I had known at Columbia, he was the most brilliant and conscientious, and there was no doubt that he had it in him to become a fine scholar if he stuck with it. We shared the same passion for obscure and forgotten books (Lycophron’s Cassandra, Giordano Bruno’s philosophical dialogues, the notebooks of Joseph Joubert, to mention just some of the things we discovered together), but whereas I tended to be crazily enthusiastic and scattered about these works, Zimmer was thorough and systematic, penetrating to a degree that often astonished me. For all that, he did not take any special pride in his critical talents, dismissing them as something of secondary importance. Zimmer’s chief concern in life was writing poetry, and he spent long, hard hours at it, laboring over each word as if the fate of the world hung in the balance—which is surely the only sensible way to go about it. In many respects, Zimmer’s poems resembled his body: compact, tightly sprung, inhibited. His ideas were so densely woven together that it was often difficult to make sense of them. Still, I admired the strangeness of the poems and the flintlike quality of their language. Zimmer trusted my opinions, and I was always as honest as possible when he asked for them, encouraging him as best I could, but at the same time refusing to mince words when something felt wrong to me. I had no literary ambitions of my own, and that probably made it easier. If I criticized his work, he knew it was not because of some unspoken competition between us.

  He had been in love with the same person for the past two or three years, a girl by the name of Anna Bloom or Blume, I was never sure of the spelling. She had grown up across the street from Zimmer in the New Jersey suburbs and had been in the same class as his sister, which meant that she was a couple of years younger than he was. I had met her only once or twice, a diminutive, dark-haired girl with a pretty face and a bristling, animated personality, and had suspected that she was probably a bit too much for Zimmer’s studious nature to handle. Earlier in the summer, she had suddenly taken off to join her older brother, William, who worked as a journalist in some foreign country, and since then Zimmer had not received a word from her—not a letter, not a postcard, nothing. As the weeks went by, he grew more and more desperate over this silence. Every day began with the same ritual of going downstairs to check the mailbox, and each time he went in or out of the building there would be another obsessive opening and closing of the empty box. This could happen at any hour, even as late as two or three in the morning, when there was no earthly chance that anything new could have arrived. But Zimmer was powerless to resist the temptation. Many times, returning home from the White Horse Tavern around the corner, the two of us half-drunk on beer, I would have to witness the painful sight of my friend fumbling for his mailbox key and then blindly reaching out his hand for something that was not there, for something that would never be there. Perhaps that was why Zimmer endured my presence in his apartment for so long. If nothing else, I was someone to talk to and to distract him from his troubles, an odd and unpredictable form of comic relief.

  Still, I was a drain on his funds, and the longer he did not say anything about it, the worse I felt. My plan was to go out looking for a job as soon as I was strong enough (any job, it didn’t matter what it was) and start paying back the money he had spent on me. That didn’t solve the problem of finding another place to live, but at least I persuaded Zimmer to let me spend the nights on the floor so he could go back to sleeping in his own bed. A couple of days after we switched rooms, he started his classes at Columbia. One night during the first week, he came home with a large bundle of papers and grimly announced that a friend of his in the French department had been hired to do a rush translation which she now realized she didn’t have time to do. Zimmer had asked if she would be willing to farm it out to him, and she had agreed. That was how the manuscript entered the house, a tedious document of about a hundred pages concerning the structural reorganization of the French consulate in New York. The moment Zimmer started telling me about it, I understood that I had found a chance to make myself useful. My French was as good as his, I explained, and since I wasn’t terribly pressed with responsibilities at the moment, why didn’t he hand the translation over to me and let me take care of it? Zimmer objected, but I was expecting that, and little by little I wore down his resistance. I wanted to square our account, I said, and doing this job was the quickest, most practical way to go about it. I would turn the money over to him, two or three hundred dollars, and at that point we would be even aga
in. This last argument was the one that finally convinced him. Zimmer enjoyed playing the role of martyr, but once he understood that my own well-being was at stake, he relented.

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose we could split the money if it’s so important.”

  “No,” I said, “you still don’t understand. All the money goes to you. It wouldn’t make sense any other way. Every penny goes to you.”

  I got what I wanted, and for the first time in months I began to feel there was a purpose to my life again. Zimmer would wake up early to go uptown to Columbia, and for the rest of the day I was left to my own devices, free to plant myself at his desk and work without interruption. The text was abominable, filled with all kinds of bureaucratic gibberish, but the more trouble it gave me, the more defiantly I stuck to the task, refusing to let go of it until some semblance of meaning began to shine through the clumsy, garbled sentences. The difficulty of the job was what encouraged me. If the translation had been easier, I would not have felt that I was performing an adequate penance for my past mistakes. In some sense, then, the utter uselessness of the project was what gave it its value. I felt like someone who had been sentenced to a term of hard labor on a chain gang. My job was to take a hammer and smash stones into smaller stones, and once those stones had been smashed, to smash them into even smaller stones. There was no purpose to this labor. But the fact was that I wasn’t interested in results. The labor was an end in itself, and I threw myself into it with all the determination of a model prisoner.

  On days when the weather was good, I would sometimes go out for a brief stroll around the neighborhood to clear my head. It was October now, the best month of the year in New York, and I took pleasure in studying the early fall light, watching how it seemed to take on a new clarity as it slanted against the brick buildings. It was no longer summer, but winter still felt a long way off, and I savored this balance between hot and cold. Everywhere I went during those days, the streets were filled with talk of the Mets. It was one of those rare moments of unanimity when everyone was thinking about the same thing. People walked around with transistor radios tuned to the game, large crowds gathered in front of appliance store windows to watch the action on silent televisions, sudden cheers would erupt from corner bars, from apartment windows, from invisible rooftops. First it was Atlanta in the playoffs, and then it was Baltimore in the Series. Out of eight October games, the Mets lost only once, and when the adventure was over, New York held another ticker-tape parade, this one even surpassing the extravaganza that had been thrown for the astronauts two months earlier. More than five hundred tons of paper fell into the streets that day, a record that has not been matched since.