‘I am a lake ecologist, like your husband,’ Dr Yu said. A worried look crossed her face. ‘Walter Hoffmeier is your husband?’
‘He is,’ I agreed.
‘Mrs Walter Hoffmeier, then,’ she said. Her temples were damp, and I suddenly realized she was too shy to fight the crowd surrounding Walter and so had settled for the two women near me, and finally for me instead. I felt mildly insulted to be her last choice, but my curiosity was stronger than my hurt pride and I had no one else to talk to.
‘Grace Hoffmeier,’ I said. ‘I used to be a lake ecologist too. Sort of.’
‘Yes?’ Dr Yu said. Her face relaxed. ‘What does that mean, “sort of”?’
‘I worked as my husband’s assistant,’ I told her. ‘Years ago. Helped with his projects, gathered data, drafted papers …’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Dr Yu said, nodding energetically. ‘That is nice for a wife. You have children?’
I fell into a fit of coughing and then said, ‘No.’ How had we gotten so personal, so fast? I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, and there seemed to be no point in telling her the whole history of our not having children, no point in going into who was to blame and why.
Dr Yu’s face fell and I softened my answer. ‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘No?’ she said. ‘You’re so young, you could have many …’
‘Not so young,’ I told her. ‘Thirty. How about you? Do you have children?’
‘Three,’ she said proudly. ‘Two boys and a girl – was before the rule of one child only. Do you know this rule? My father had ten children, but now …’
‘Sure I know it,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to miss.’ All over Beijing, I’d seen posters exhorting couples to sign the one-child pledge. ‘One Couple, One Child,’ the most striking poster had said. ‘Eugenical and Well-Bred.’
‘Hard to miss?’ said Dr Yu.
‘That’s an idiom,’ I said, already tiring of this conversation. I looked over at Walter and saw him lean toward a group of Chinese students whose faces were upturned toward his like hatchlings waiting for their pellets. Loving every minute, as he used to love it when I’d listened to him, when he couldn’t teach me fast enough and couldn’t believe how fast I learned. If I’d wanted to catch him I couldn’t have planned a better way. As I watched he raised his right hand and, with a gesture that still wrenched my heart, smoothed and smoothed again the thinning hair at the back of his head. His fingers were as gentle as if a child lay under them; as if, by his own touch, he could bring himself to life again. I could still hear his voice, teaching me in the old days: There are two laws of ecology, he’d said. The first is that everything is related to everything else. The second is that these relationships are complicated as hell.
Dr Yu cleared her throat and I finished what I’d been saying. ‘Short for “hard to miss seeing,” I think – you use the phrase for something very obvious, right there in front of your eyes.’
Dr Yu nodded sharply. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. Her large earlobes were threaded with small pearls. ‘That’s a good phrase. I will use in a sentence: “Hard to miss that you are younger than your husband.” Is that right?’
‘It is,’ I agreed; this woman didn’t seem to miss much. Walter, lean and balding and lined, looked ten years older than his forty-two.
Someone gave a signal for the toasts to end and the eating to begin. ‘Come,’ Dr Yu said, plucking the sleeve of my dress. And although it had been wildly expensive, and was one of the few things I looked even passable in, for an instant I hoped she’d rip it. It was a wife-dress, a suburban dress. Something I never would have worn in the days before Walter, when my taste had run to black jeans and my brother’s torn shirts.
‘We should get some food,’ Dr Yu said. She’d apparently decided to adopt me for the evening. ‘Maybe you would introduce me to your husband?’
I nodded and followed her, steering my way around the Chinese string quartet who were clustered at the microphone and mangling some Mozart. Walter nodded coolly to me and then turned away. Dr Yu said, ‘Here, try some of this. And this, this is good, and this, and oh, you must have some of this, and this is delicacy, sea-cucumber, you have had?’
My stomach rumbled and Dr Yu smiled. What she heaped on my plate could have fed six people if those people hadn’t been me. Pork skin roasted in sugar and soy, chicken in white pepper and ginger, puffballs with bok choy, shrimp dumplings, deep-fried grass carp boned and cut to resemble chrysanthemums, marinated gizzards sliced fine, sea-cucumber with vegetables, roast duck. ‘This is good,’ Dr Yu said of each dish. Although she couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, half of me, she heaped her own plate too and then turned to look wistfully at Walter as we left the table.
With a full mouth and waving chopsticks, Walter was holding court.
‘Maybe I could introduce you later,’ I said, following her eyes. ‘When he’s not so busy?’
‘Later,’ Dr Yu agreed. ‘You wish to sit with him?’
‘Are you kidding?’ I said, and then we had to pick that phrase apart. She made me feel useful, in an odd way – every bit of idiomatic speech I offered delighted her. She asked more questions and I explained what I could, until the music silenced us both. The string quartet played more Mozart, a girl sang some Mendelssohn, a man in a tuxedo sang arias from a revolutionary opera.
While the musicians performed, I watched Walter and considered how I’d ended up with him. I could hardly remember – something was thumping at me just then, something that made me want to plant a bomb in the midst of that civilized scene. I wanted to tip the tables over, light a bonfire in the corner, burst out of the room and into the life that was streaming through the streets outside. I wanted to dance on the tables, screaming my lungs out all the while. Instead, I applauded loudly whenever Dr Yu did. Her plate was already empty, I noticed. I hadn’t seen her take a bite.
Smiling, she picked up a conversational thread I thought we’d snapped, and she said, ‘So, why have you no children? Who will carry on your name?’
I shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know.’ The burr-voiced woman appeared at the microphone again, laughing this time. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘now, we have sung and made music for our var-ry distinguished for-eign friends. Now, we ask they sing for us! Everyone, sing your own country’s songs!’
The Chinese clapped; the rest of us laughed until we realized she was serious. Finally two good-natured Americans, surely small-town boys, made their way to the front of the room and sang a bawdy Irish tune off-key. Walter frowned, offended. Dr Yu said, ‘This is a typical American song?’
‘No,’ I told her, laughing. ‘It’s a very bad song.’
Dr Yu agreed. A troll-like man got up to sing a Hungarian song I almost recognized, and a Swede sang a song I was sure Mumu had once sung to me. Everyone danced and the tuxedoed man sang a Viennese waltz that sent people whirling around the room. A band – electric piano, two guitars, violin, drum – assembled near the microphone and tried with mixed success to accompany the singers. A Japanese limnologist sang a festival song that seemed to have something to do with a shovel. Three
