how did you meet your husband?’
No point in going into that – I couldn’t explain it even to myself. I gave her the simple answer, meaning to be polite. ‘I was his student,’ I said, remembering how he used to read to me for hours, so caught up in his work that he’d hardly pause to catch his breath.
‘Ah,’ Dr Yu said with a smile. ‘Very good student?’
‘Very good,’ I agreed. ‘Too good. Brownnose.’
‘Brown-nose? What does that mean?’
‘Someone who is too nice to teacher, tries too hard, always sucking up …’
‘Suck-up?’
‘Never mind that one. Maybe you work with someone like this, someone who’s always trying to be the boss’s favorite – we call them “brownnose” from, you know – his face stuck to the boss’s … behind? Rear end?’
Dr Yu smiled, took a pen from her pocket, and quickly sketched two Chinese characters on her palm. She flashed them at me, rubbed them out quickly, and said, ‘We have a word, which translates in English as “ass-face” – is that close?’
‘Very.’
‘But you are not an ass-face.’
‘Sometimes I am,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I’ve been an enormous ass-face. You wouldn’t believe.’
Behind me, two Chinese scientists seemed to be discussing my new friend. I heard the word yu again and again, and I interrupted Dr Yu’s protestations to ask her what they were talking about.
‘Same old thing,’ she said wryly. ‘Work. All so very ambitious here. This is the new way, new reward-for-responsibility system made by Old Deng – you know?’
‘I thought I heard your name.’
Dr Yu laughed. ‘They are talking about what your husband does. They say yú with a rising tone – means fish, and yú with a falling-rising tone – means rain.’ She wrote the words on her palm in pinyin and added their tone marks. ‘Say after me,’ she commanded.
I did, amazed at her singing language. Until she coached me, all my tones had sounded exactly the same. Fish, rain, the effects of rain on fish, a rain of fish, a fishy rain – in my mouth there had been no difference. Dr Yu kept drilling me, passing the syllables back and forth, and I didn’t care that people stared at us. I was slowly beginning to get the idea and as I did I began to understand the men behind us, as if static had suddenly cleared from my ears.
There were four tones, said the books I had studied. Flat, rising, falling-rising, falling – four. The books had been clear. But without someone to talk with, the tones had never made it from the page to my ears. ‘Yú,’ said one of the men behind me, perfectly clearly. Rain. At the reservoir, Walter and I had worked even when it rained, even when the sky was so cold, so gray, so bleak, that there seemed to be no boundary between the lake and the air, between night and day, between work and the rest of life.
As if we had conjured it up, rain began to fall outside. Dr Yu fetched some more beer and then, while people around us danced and sang and told each other stories, we began trading words in earnest, correcting each other’s pronunciation, building sentences, muttering tones. I drew words on my palm, matching the characters she drew on hers and warming, finally, to her charm and persistence. She told me how she’d been sent off to raise pigs in Shanxi province during the Cultural Revolution – ‘the blood years,’ she said – and I told her how Mumu, my fat Swedish grandmother from whom I’d inherited my weight and my hair, had taught me to catch shad and bake them for hours until the bones dissolved. How I’d loved to fish but had never meant to study the creatures until Walter came along.
‘What is he like?’ Dr Yu said. ‘I mean, in his privacy?’
What was the harm in telling her? I thought about the way he wouldn’t eat unless the food sat correctly on his plate – peas here, potatoes there; no drips, no drops, no smears. How he couldn’t sleep without the top sheet tucked in all around him; how he liked his women as neat as his mother. Smooth, groomed, no visible pores or swellings, no fat – my God, my fat! How he dressed after the fashion of Einstein, in black socks, gray pants, shirts that varied slightly but were always subdued, jackets that were almost identical.
And how uncomfortable he was here in China, how much he disliked the steamy, crowded buses, the old clothes, the crowded sidewalks, the open-air markets with their unrefrigerated offerings, the smells, the dirt, the noise, and the absence of wildlife, which implied to him that everything had been eaten. I thought about that astigmatism of his, that twist which made him see the worst in anything, and about his ability to make others see the same way, as if he’d etched their corneas with acid rain.
But I didn’t say any of this. ‘He likes a clean house,’ I said instead. ‘He likes things neat.’
‘You live in a nice house?’ Dr Yu asked, and I said yes but then, pressed to describe it, found myself describing another house instead. Not our spacious, clean colonial so near the university, but the cramped bungalow where I’d grown up with my mother and father and brother and Mumu, who was stuck in a wheelchair and slept in the den. As I spoke I sketched the house’s outline in the air, and I could see that it seemed luxurious to Dr Yu.
‘Six rooms,’ she marveled. ‘We have three, very large apartment for just three people, now that our daughter and youngest son are away. Kitchen, sitting room, sleeping room separate. Plus a bath with running water. Plus central heat. You could come visit us, and see.’
I nodded. ‘Someday,’ I said. I thought this was only one of those conversations I’d had at a hundred cocktail parties. Vague promises, vague suggestions, all forgotten the next day and never followed up.
Dr Yu finished her beer and looked at me. ‘So, what do you do now?’ she asked. ‘For work, I mean.’
I was embarrassed to tell her about my recent idleness and so I stretched the truth instead, casting back to the houses I’d bought and redone with my great-uncle’s money. ‘I’m a renovator,’ I told her. ‘A rehabber.’
‘What is that?’
‘I buy old, ruined houses and fix them up again. I make them look nice, and then I sell them.’
Dr Yu stared at me, apparently fascinated. ‘This is a job?’ she said. ‘People pay you for your … your …’
‘Taste,’ I said firmly. ‘People pay me for my taste.’
‘Really?’ She seemed puzzled. ‘They can’t fix these old houses themselves?’
‘Well, they could,’ I said. ‘But they don’t have the time, or they don’t understand how to do it …’
‘I see,’ Dr Yu said. ‘That’s very interesting. Perhaps you could explain …’
But suddenly the burr-voiced woman stepped to the microphone again, waved the musicians silent, clapped twice, and said, ‘Thank you for attending this our reception-party. Good night.’
Instantly the room began to empty. I looked at Dr Yu; Dr Yu smiled and said, ‘The party is over. Time to go.’ She gathered her umbrella,
