LIN TAN SING WAS standing on the bridge overlooking Puget Sound, watching the sea gulls (white against the blue sky) caught in the high conflicting winds. He was trying to empty his mind, even of pleasant memories like his talk with Miss Whittington on the train.
Just Lin Tan, he was thinking. Just sunrise, just sea. Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind is bearing me across the sky. He sighed. Lin Tan was very wise for his age. It was a burden he must bear and he was always thinking of ways to keep it from showing, so that other people would not seem small or slow-witted by comparison. All men have burdens, he decided. Only mine is greater burden. I am like great tanker making waves in harbor, about to swamp somebody. This is bad thinking for early morning. I am on vacation now, must enjoy myself. He sighed again. The sun was moving up above the smokestacks on the horizon. The first day of his vacation was ending and the second was about to begin.
A girl stepped out onto the bridge and stood very still with her hands in the pockets of her raincoat. She was looking at him. Just beautiful girl, Lin Tan thought. Just karma. Twin fetuses inside Miss Whittington and now this girl comes like a goddess from the sea.
“Are you lost?” he said. “Have you lost your way?”
“No,” she answered. “I just wanted to see the place where my cousin committed suicide. Isn’t that morbid?”
“Curiosity is normal mode of being,” he said. “I am Lin Tan Sing of San Francisco, California, and China. I am candidate for doctor of medicine at University of California in San Francisco. Third-year student. I am honored to make your acquaintance on lucky second day of my vacation.”
“I’m Margaret McElvoy of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Look down there.” She leaned far out over the rail. “My God, how could anybody jump into that.”
“Water is not responsible for man’s unhappiness.”
“Well, I guess you’re right about that. My father says religion is.”
“What!”
“Oh, nothing. I didn’t mean to say that.” She straightened her shoulders, leaned down and looked again into the deep salty bay. Now the sun threw lines of brilliant dusty rose across the water. On a pillar of the middle span someone had written “Pussy” with a can of spray paint. Margaret giggled.
“Please continue,” Lin Tan said. He thought she was thinking of the dark ridiculous shadows of religion.
“Oh, it’s nothing. My father thinks he can find out what got us in all this trouble. He thinks we’re in trouble.” She turned and really looked at him, took him in. He was tall for an oriental, almost as tall as her brothers, and he was very handsome with strong shoulders and a wide strong face. His eyes were wise, dark and still, and Margaret completely forgot she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. Something funny might be going on, she thought, like kismet or chemistry or magnetism or destiny and so forth.
“Great paradox of religion must be explored by man,” Lin Tan said. “In its many guises it has brought us where we are today, I agree with your father. We must judge its worth and its excesses. I am Buddhist, of Mayany Timbro sect. I am more scientist than Buddhist however.”
“I’m nothing. My mother’s Catholic and my father’s a poet. Well, the sun’s coming up and the gulls are feeding.” Margaret pushed her bangs back with her hand. She smiled into Lin Tan’s eyes. She wasn’t doing anything on purpose. She was just standing there letting him fall in love with her.
“I am very hungry after night on supertrain called Starlight Express. It would be great honor for me if you would accompany me to breakfast. I am alone in Seattle on first morning of my vacation and need someone to ask about problem I have just encountered.”
“Oh, what is that?”
“I am working part-time in women’s clinic in Berkeley, near to campus of University of California. I am in charge of test results from amniocentesis, do you know what that is?”
“Sure.”
“Some months ago I made analysis of amniotic fluid from one Miss Nora Jane Whittington of Berkeley. Was auspicious day in my life as I had been given honor by university for my work in fetal biology. So I remember date. Also, this test was unusual as it revealed twin female fetuses with AB positive blood, very special kind of blood, very rare. Often found in people whose ancestors came from British Isles, especially Scotland and Wales. So I wrote out the report and later I found I had made a mistake on it. I made a notation that the blood type is that of universal donor. I should have written universal recipient. Now, last night, in coincidence of first order, if you believe theory of random events and accidents, last night on the train I meet this Miss Whittington, now seven and a half months pregnant and in the course of our conversation she tells me how happy she is that her daughters will be able to give blood to whole world if needed. She has in her pocketbook a copy of the report, with this false notation signed with my name. I am not in habit of making even slightest mistake. Now I must decide whether to tell my superiors at the lab and spoil my record of unblemished work.”
“Could anyone be hurt by this?”
“No.”
“Then let it lay. Let sleeping dogs lie, that’s what my mother says.”
“Very wise, very profound saying.”
“Well, I’m a teacher. I’m supposed to know things. I teach first grade.” She pushed the hood back from her hair. A cascade of golden curls fell across the shoulders of her raincoat. Her eyes were beautiful, large and violet colored and clear. “I was on my way to school when I stopped by here.”
“I will walk you there.” His throat constricted. His voice was growing deeper. He heard it as if from a great distance. Just love, he was thinking. Just divine madness.
“Well, why not.” She looked out across the water, thinking of her cousin, dead as he could be. “I don’t pick men up usually, but I’m a linguist. I can’t miss a chance like this. I already speak French and Russian and Italian and some Greek. No Chinese, so far. What’s your name?” She began walking down from the bridge. Lin Tan was beside her. The fog was lifting. The sun rising above the waters of Puget Sound. The dawn of a clear day.
“My name is Lin Tan Sing. Here, I give you my card.” He pulled a card out of his pocket, a white card embossed in red. Down the center ran a curved red line. To remind him in case he should forget.
“I have to go to the launderette and get some clothes I left in the dryer,” she said. “Then we’ll go and get some breakfast.”
Soon they were sitting in a small restaurant by the quay. They were at a table by a window. The window had old-fashioned panes and white lace curtains. A glass vase held wildflowers. A waiter appeared and took their orders.
“So this is the Tao on your card,” she said. “I read a lot of Zen literature. And I try meditating but it always fails. My dad says the Western mind is no good for meditation. He writes books of philosophy. He’s wonderful. I bet you’d love him if you met him.”
“I would be honored to do so. I have wondered where the poets of United States were living. Where is he now? This father of yours?”
“In Arkansas. Do you have any idea where that is?”
“No. I am ashamed to say I do not understand geography of United States yet. I have been very busy since I arrived and have had no time to travel.”
“It’s a small state on the Mississippi River. We have wild forests and trees and chicken farms, the richest man in the world lives there, and we have minerals and coal. In the Delta we grow cotton and sometimes rice.” She was enchanted by the foreignness of his manner. This is just my luck, she was thinking, to run into a Chinese doctor and get to find out all about China on my way to school.
“Oh, this is strange coincidence,” he was saying. “In province where I come from, we are also growing cotton. Yes, I have heard of this Mississippi Delta cotton. Yours is very beautiful but no longer picked by hand, is it not true.”
“Yours is?”
“Oh, yes. I have picked it myself when I was a small boy. The staple is torn by machine. The cloth will not be perfect. Perhaps I could invent a better cotton picking machine. I have often thought I should have been an inventor instead of a scientist but my mother died when I was thirteen so I have lived to save lives of others. I had meant it as an act of revenge against disease, now see it as finding harmony for life in its myriad forms. So you know the Tao?”
“I know of it. I don’t know how to do it yet.” The light of morning was shining on her face. Just face, he thought. Just light of sun. Just Tao. “It is the middle way, the way of balance and of harmony.” He picked up a napkin, took a pen from his pocket and drew a diagonal line down the center of it. “This is the life we are living, now, at this moment, which is all we ever have. This is where we are. It is all that is and contains everybody.” He looked at her. She was listening. She understood.
“I want to see you a lot,” she said. “I want us to be friends.” Her voice was as beautiful as the song of birds, more beautiful than temple bells. Her voice was light made manifest. Now Lin Tan’s throat was thick with desire. He suffered it. There was nothing in the world as beautiful as her face, her voice, her hands, the smell of her dress. She took a small blue flower from the bouquet on the table and twisted it between her fingers. She looked at him. She returned his look. This was the moment men live for. This was philosophy and reason. Shiva, Beatrice, the dance of birth and death. If I enter into this moment, Lin Tan knew, I will be changed forever. If I refuse this moment then I will go about the world as an old man goes, with no hope, no songs to sing, no longing or desire, no miracles of sunlight. So I will allow this to happen to me. As if a man can refuse his destiny. As if the choice were mine. Let it come to me.
He closed his eyes for a second. Wait, his other mind insisted. Get up and leave. Get back on the train and ride back down the coast and enter the train station at San Francisco. Go to the lab. Work overtime on vacation. Catch up on all work of lab. Take money and increase holdings of gold coins in lockbox at Wells Fargo Bank of San Francisco, California. Spend vacation time at home. Go with friends to the beach, there is no destiny that holds me in this chair. Here is where I could prove free will, could test hypotheses. If not for all mankind, at least in my case.
“I would like very much if you would have dinner with me when you finish teaching for the day,” he said. “I will be finding the greatest restaurant in all Seattle while you bestow gift of knowledge on young minds. I will tell you about my home and language and you will tell me of Romance languages and Arkansas.”
“There’s a Japanese movie at the Aristophanes. It’s by Kurosawa. We could get a sandwich somewhere and go to the movie. I don’t need to go to great restaurants.” The waitress had appeared with their waffles and orange juice. “To think I started out this morning to go see where somebody committed suicide.” She raised her orange juice. “This table reminds me of a painting I saw last year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It was by Manet. It was just incredible. I almost died. A painting of a bar with a barmaid. This sad-eyed blond barmaid standing behind a bar filled with glasses and bottles of colored liquid. The light was all over everything and her face was shining out from all that. It was real primal. My father loves paintings. We couldn’t afford the real thing, but there were always wonderful prints and posters all over our house, even on the ceiling. This waffle is perfect. Go on and eat yours.”
She took a bite of golden waffle soaked in syrup, then wiped her mouth daintily, with a napkin. A queen is inside of this girl, Lin Tan thought. She is a princess. He laughed with delight at everything she had said, at the light on the table, the syrup soaking into the waffle, the largess, bounty, divinity of the day.
“We will go and see what the barbaric Japanese have done with your film,” he said. “Or anything that will seem nice to you.”
“What time is it getting to be?” she answered. “I’ve got to hurry up. I’m going to be late to school.”
They never made it to the movie. They walked for miles after dinner talking in all the languages they knew and telling their stories. She talked of the origins of language, how she wished to study man’s speech and was teaching six-year-olds so she could investigate their minds as they learned to read and write. As they formed the letters and grew bold and turned the letters into words.
He told her of physics, of quantum mechanics and particle physics, the quark and chaos, a vision of reality as a swirling mass of energy bound into forms that are always changing. The greatest mystery is time, he insisted. Energy is held for a moment in form, then flung back into chaos, re-formed, captured again, undone, done and undone, an endless dance which we glimpse when we hear music. “Man is the inventor of time,” he said. “Only man has need of it.”
“You don’t care if it is meaningless?”
“Is even more beautiful that way. I think I am falling in love with you, Margaret.”
“I was afraid you would say that.” She stopped by a stone wall and allowed him to take her hands. “It excites me, the way you talk. But we have to be careful. I could just be getting you mixed up with my dad. He talks like that all the time. It’s sort of made me older than a lot of people. It has made me older.” She pulled her hands away. “I don’t want to fall in love with someone just because he talks like my father. Even if you are Chinese. I mean, he is Scotch-Irish. His father was all Irish. We have a lot of Irish blood.”
“The blood of poets.”
“How did you know that?”
“Because I read your literature.”
“Well, I’m not going to bed with you tonight.”
“Oh, no.” Lin Tan bowed his head. “I was not expecting you to. I will take you home now. In the morning I will come and propose marriage. But not until I know you better.” He laughed a great hearty laugh, a laugh he had forgotten he possessed. It was the best laugh he had ever laughed in the United States. He leaned back against the wall and laughed for several minutes and Margaret McElvoy laughed with him.
“This is the strangest night I ever spent in my life,” she said. “Come on, let’s go home.”
She took him to visit her school. On the fourth day of his vacation Lin Tan found himself lecturing on Chinese education to a combined first- and second-grade class. He told them everything he knew about grade school in rural China, then showed them a dance Chinese children learn to help them remember their multiplication tables. He had gone to Seattle’s Chinatown and borrowed a traditional Chinese teacher’s costume to wear to the school. Margaret sat in the back of the class and watched the muscles of his back as they moved his arm up and down on the blackboard. The soft blue cloth of his jacket rippled as his muscles moved his hand, and Lin Tan knew she was watching him and kept his body as graceful and supple as a dancer’s as he taught. That night she went to bed with him.
“This might be too soon,” he said, when she suggested it.
“It’s too soon but I haven’t done it with anybody in a year, so that makes up for it.”
Then, in a rented room in a small hotel, with a lamp burning on the table and the sounds of Seattle outside the windows, they offered their bodies to each other, as children would, with giggles and embarrassment and seriousness, with shame and passion and a very large amount of silliness they searched each other out and made love, not very well at first, then better. “Here is where my knowledge of anatomy and obstetrics should come in handy,” Lin Tan said. “Here is where the doctor comes in.”
“I used to play doctor with my cousin, but we always got caught. We would put baby oil on each other because her mother was always having babies and we’d get it on the sheets, then they would catch us and take us off to the living room and tell us not to do it. You should have seen my mother’s face when she’d be telling me not to. The smell of baby oil would be everywhere. She was a girl but we were only four so I don’t think that means I’m a lesbian, do you?”
“What would you do with the baby oil?” They were lying side by side on the bed, talking without looking at each other.
“We would put it on and then stick this toy thermometer in each other. I guess that really was dangerous, wasn’t it? Maybe that’s what made them so mad.” She sat up on one elbow and looked at him. “I wonder if it was made of glass. We could have killed each other sticking glass up our vaginas.”
“Perhaps made of wood,” Lin Tan said. “Many toys are made of wood.”
“We could have gotten splinters. No wonder they got so mad, but I think they were really mad because we had found out about sex. They were so protective. They still are, to tell the truth.”
“What would you say to one another when you would stick this thermometer into your hollow places? Did you say, ‘I will diagnose you now’?”
“We said, ‘This will make you feel better.’ ” She started giggling and Lin Tan laughed his great lost belly laugh again and they rolled back into each other’s arms.
“Will you stay the night with me,” he asked, “or shall I take you to your home?”
“I’ll stay. When I do this I always do it right. My dad told us not to sleep with anybody unless we liked them enough to spend the night.”
“And what else?”
“To call up the next day and talk about it. I mean, say something. Because it’s pretty important, you know. It’s not nothing, making love to another person.”
“What did your mother say?”
“She said not to do it until you get married. She says it’s for making babies, not some game.”
“I would like to meet these parents of yours. I would like to talk with them.”
“Well, if things keep going like this I guess you’ll get to.” She touched his hand. She was falling asleep. She left the waking universe and entered the world of sleep. Once we were always asleep, Lin Tan remembered. Slowly man has awakened. Oh, let the awakening proceed. Let us rouse to clarity and not blow up the world where Margaret sleeps. He stilled his mind then with a mantra of wind and water and slipped down into the ancient mystery of sleep himself.
In the morning they woke very early and talked for a while. Then Margaret dressed and Lin Tan walked her down to the car. “It is very awkward to leave someone after making love,” he said. “It is very hard to know what to say.”
“I know,” she answered. “Well, say you’d like to see me again. That’s the main thing anyone wants to hear.”
“Oh, I want to see you many more times.”
“Then come over tonight. Can you remember the way?”
“I will be there,” Lin Tan answered. He helped her into the car and stood watching as she drove away. He shook his head. It amazed him that Americans worried about him finding his way from one place to another when the country was filled with maps and street signs. At the place where her car had been, several pigeons flew down from a roof and began to peck at the sidewalk. Lin took that for a sign and went back into the hotel and sat in meditation for an hour, remembering the shape of the universe and the breathtaking order of the species. He imagined the spirit of Margaret and the forms of her ancestors back a hundred generations. Then he imagined Margaret in the womb and spoke to her in a dream on the day she was conceived. Then he dressed and walked around the city of Seattle, Washington, all day long, bestowing blessings in his mind and being blessed.
A soon as Margaret got home from school that afternoon she sat down at her desk and wrote the first of what her family would later refer to as the Chinese Letters.
Dear Mom and Dad, Jane and Teddy and Len,
I have met THE MAN. I’m not kidding you. This one is too much. I don’t know where to begin. In the first place I met him on the exact place on the bridge where Sherman jumped off. He was standing there when I got there. He is Chinese. Dad, don’t go crazy. Listen to this. He is the smartest person I ever met in my life except for you. He reminds me a lot of Professor Levine. I mean he has the same kind of penetrating black eyes that just bore into you and like you so much you feel like you have known him always. He is twenty-five. He’s a medical student (third year) at the University of California at San Francisco and has a job besides. He runs a diagnostic lab and he is going to graduate with high high honors, then go back to China to help his people. Please don’t worry about this. I had to tell you, but not if I get a lot of phone calls at seven in the morning telling me what to do. Momma, thank you for sending the sweater and the blouses. They will come in handy with the laundry problems. Love and kisses. I love you,
Margaret
She sat back, read over what she had written, drew a few trees on the leftover paper on the bottom, addressed and stamped an envelope and stuck the letter in. Then she left her apartment and went down to the mailbox to mail the letter. While she was gone Lin Tan tried to call four times. Each time he left a message on her answering machine. The last time he left a poem.
Miracle of seven redbirds
On snow-covered bamboo
What brings them here on such a day?
Miracle of a tall woman
Watching beside me
She bends her head my way.
“By the poet Wang Wei from Qixion County in Shaanxi. I am counting the moments until I am with you again.”
That night he stayed at her home. A small apartment overlooking the bay. A balcony was on the back. They sat with their feet on the railings and he told her about his work. “Then I will see into the heart of life, the very heart of the beginning of life, and, for my specialty, I am studying the beginning and formation of the human brain. At a moment soon after conception one cell of the zygote splits off and decides to become brain. After that moment, that cell and all its progeny become the brain stem and the brain, the miraculous brain of man. This happens, oh, a million times a minute. Everywhere on earth new people are being created. Inside women this miracle is going on and inside miracle, second miracle of brain formation is happening. Oh, problem is how to feed and care for them. There is so much work, it must be done. Must be done. It is very presumptuous to wish to do such important work but so my dreams are. Dreams often come true. If something is not within human grasp we can not conceive of it. Think of Thomas Edison with his dream of electricity. Light up the world. Yes, and my friend, Randal Yung of Pisgah, New Jersey, only this very week, has captured atoms in a prison of laser beams and is watching them grow. They are growing because he is watching. Is called the Bose-Einstein condensation and was only a theory until this week. I have been invited to go and view this experiment. Would you care to fly to New Jersey sometime to see miracle of captured atoms?”
“You know the guy in New Jersey who did that?” She had been taking a roasted chicken from the oven to baste it. Now she closed the oven door and walked over to the table where he was sitting. “You know that guy?”
“He is a friend of mine from boyhood. From village next to mine. His Chinese name is difficult to pronounce in English so he has taken the name of Randal. We were sent to the advanced school together from our province. He is very advanced about everything, is very smart, is great scientist. Randal wishes to live in the stars. He is a beautiful man. All the girls are ready to die for him.”
“And we could go up there and really look at this?”
“Yes, we could.”
“Then we have to go. My God, this is the chance of a lifetime. I can get a substitute to teach for me. I’ll tell them where I’m going. Oh, God, my father will have a fit when he finds out. He adores physicists. He says they are doing things they don’t even understand. My God.” She threw her hair back from her face. A pot of green beans was boiling over on the stove. Lin Tan got up and took the pot holder from her and saved their dinner.
Later, they made love again. This time it was better than it was the first time since they were no longer afraid of each other.
It is a strange thing to make love to a member of another race. Exciting and strange, curious and amazing. The amazing thing is that nothing unusual happens. The foreign person doesn’t turn into a demon or begin to speak in pagan incantations or turn out to be automatically unsound. They just get in bed and make love with the same old set of moves and pleasures that have stood all the races in good stead for many centuries. This is me with this beautiful goddess, Lin Tan was saying to himself now, as he watched Margaret pulling a pink satin petticoat over her head. Just Lin Tan. Just Margaret. Just fantastic sexual activity of species. Oh, if she will only love me I will solve riddle of cancer and also learn to operate on fetal heart.
“What are you thinking about?” she said. The petticoat was across her legs.
“I am thinking of the fetal heart. Sometime the valves develop in bad sequence. If the mother has been smoking or not eating properly or very nervous and worried. You must come sometime to my lab and see the sonograms. Very beautiful to watch babies like fish swimming.” He was quiet. When he raised his head there were tears in his eyes. “Sometimes, by the time they are in our laboratories, they are not happy swimmers. Sometimes they are in trouble. Last week, we thought we had triplets on the screen. Much excitement. It was two little boys fighting to live. They had transfused each other through the common umbilical cord. So tragic. The mother was struggling and in pain. We delivered them by cesarean section and did all that was possible but they were gone by the time we got them to the incubator. Poor little mother. Thinking of this makes me wonder what has been happening with Miss Whittington.” He got up. He was wearing a terry cloth robe that had belonged to one of Margaret’s brothers. He walked over to where he had left his clothes and found his billfold and searched in it for the phone number Miss Whittington had given him on the train. “She should not have been traveling so late in her pregnancy. I should have left the train to see that she made it safely to a place of rest, but if I had done that I would not have been standing on bridge when you came out of fog bank. Like a goddess.”
“You are crying over a stranger.”
“All the world is one reality. Each man or woman is exerting many influences every moment of day. This is the night I meant to show you my great zen lovemaking I read about today in a book while you were in school. Instead, I tell you this sad story.” He stood by the bedpost holding his billfold, the drapes of the terry robe falling open across his chest and stomach. Margaret crawled across the bed and pulled him into her arms. She stretched him out on the bed and began to count his ribs. “I never had this much fun knowing anybody,” she said. “I can’t believe you left a poem on my phone.”
“I must find a more romantic poem for you. I will translate modern Chinese poetry for you so you can know my country through its poets.”
“You are going back there to live?”
“I am not certain yet.” He closed his eyes. She will think me ignoble, he decided, if I tell her that I wish to stay in the United States and make money. She is daughter of poet, very romantic upbringing. “I wish to go heal my people,” he added. “I wish to be noble physician so that Margaret McElroy will think I am a wonderful man and care for me.”
“I do,” she said. “What do you think I’m doing here?”
“Would you go with me to live in China?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I’ve never been there.”
Her father called at seven the next morning. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on. I only met him a week ago.”
“Your mother’s worried. Here, talk to her.”
“Margaret.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t do anything foolish.”
“I’m not writing to you anymore if you call me up this early.”
“Come home and bring this Chinese doctor with you. Your father wants to meet him.”
“He’s on his vacation. He doesn’t want to come to Fayetteville, Arkansas.” She looked across the bed at Lin Tan. He was nodding his head up and down. His mouth was saying, Yes, I will. Yes, I do. “He wants to,” Margaret added. “He’s here.”
“In your apartment? At seven o’clock in the morning?”
“It’s nineteen eighty-six, mother. Look, I’m hanging up. I’ll call you later.”
“We’ll pay for the plane ticket. Get down here this weekend, Margaret Anne.”
“Mother, I have company now. I’ll call you later.”
“Your father and I want you to come home this weekend. You can bring your friend with you. I don’t know what you are doing out there, Margaret. If you don’t come here, we are coming out there.”
“I’ll try. Wait a minute.” She put her hand over the receiver and turned to Lin Tan. “You want to go visit them? Momma works for a travel agency. She’ll send us some tickets. You want to go?”
“I would be honored to go meet your mother and father. But I can pay for my own airplane ticket.”
“We’ll come. Send me some tickets. Oh, okay. We’ll do that. I’ll call you tomorrow.” She hung up and turned back to Lin Tan. “Well, here we go. Now you’ll see the real me, I guess. My parents are wonderful but they boss us all around like crazy. You sure you want to do this?”
“Of course. It will be great honor and also allow me to see interior of United States. But I must pay for my own airplane fare.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s her perks, you know, she gets a certain number of tickets free. She gets mad if we won’t use them. Well, I guess we’re going then, aren’t we? Imagine you meeting my dad. Just imagine.” She moved closer to him and it was several hours before they finished their other plans.
Two thousand miles away Big Ted McElvoy was sitting at his desk trying to write a poem. He had been reading The Seven Pillars of Zen. The poem was subtly but not greatly influenced by that reading.
Hostages to fortune, what does that mean?
A man should bow his head and watch his children
Disappear? Has given hostages, a conscious act?…
He studied the lines, tore the page from the tablet, laid it on a stack. He went back to the tablet, drew several parallelograms, then four isosceles triangles, then a cone. He got out a compass, measured the angles of the triangles, then laid the compass down and picked up the phone. He called a close friend who was a doctor and asked him to come by on his way home from work.
“I’m writing a poem about daughters. You might want to see it. Where’s Drew?”
“She’s still in Tulsa. She changed jobs. So what’s up? I take it you heard from Margaret. How is she?”
“She’s out in Seattle seeing some Chinese doctor she met on a bridge. It’s too hard, Ken. It’s too goddamn hard to do.”
“She’ll be okay.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know about letting them go off to goddamn cities and start screwing anybody they meet on a bridge. Well, she’s bringing him here Saturday. Jane sent them tickets.”
“I’d like to meet this Chinese doctor.”
“Damn right. That’s why I’m calling. Come give me a printout. She says he plays chess. Come Saturday night.”
“Sure, and Ted, I’ll be over as soon as I finish up here.”
“Good. Hurry up.”
The beautiful and awesome scene when Margaret and Lin Tan arrived in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The progress of the car that carried them from the airport to the house where she was born. The embraces at the baggage claim, father and daughter, mother and daughter, mother and Lin Tan. They drove home through the campus of the University of Arkansas. The oaks and maples were golden and red and the Ozarks were a dark dusty blue on the horizon. The marching band was practicing in the Greek amphitheater. “Sweet Georgia Brown” filled the brisk fall air. Big Ted steered the old Buick slowly past the buildings that housed his life’s work. Twenty-seven years of English students had floundered beneath the gaze and searing intelligence of Big Ted. But he was not teaching now. His face was straight ahead. His hands were on the wheel. His mind was concentrated on one thing and one thing only. To get to know this Chinese man before he pronounced judgment on him. He had been up since dawn reading the late poems of William Butler Yeats to fortify himself.
“Where were you raised?” he asked. “Tell me where you come from.”
“My father owns small plot of land. He was doctor for our section for many years. Not member of party but looked on with favor by party. I am the oldest son. I was chosen to come here and learn Western medicine. There are many medicines and tools here that we need.” Lin Tan paused. He folded his hands together. “I will graduate with highest honors. Perhaps at head of class. At least in number-two spot.”
“How do you know Randal Yung?”
“Is cousin and boyhood friend from school. Same age as me.”
“Have you talked to him since he did it?”
“Oh, yes. Several times.”
“What did he see?”
“Atoms swimming in thick honey of light. Very confused activity. Random and unpredictable. Entropy setting in. Disequilibrium. Atoms are moving very slowly now. Like death of organism, he says.”
“We’ll talk when we get home.” Big Ted shook his head, as if to say, Don’t talk about this in front of the women. In the back seat Jane McElvoy gave her daughter a look and Margaret McElvoy returned the look.
They pulled into the driveway of the house. A frame house painted blue with white trim. An old-fashioned screened-in porch with two porch swings ran across the front of the house. Gardens with chrysanthemums blooming bordered the porch and the sidewalk leading from the driveway. A silver maple in full fall color commanded the yard. A sleepy old fox terrier guarded the stairs. “This is it,” Margaret said. “This is where I live.”
“Come on in,” Big Ted said to Lin Tan. “We’ll talk in my office.”
They brought the suitcases inside and put them on the beds in the downstairs bedrooms, then the two men walked down a hall and out the back door to a small building beside a vegetable garden. “Office,” it said on the door, and Big Ted formally and with graciousness escorted Lin Tan into his place of business. Held the door open for him, then waved him to the place of honor in a brown leather chair beside a desk. The office had been made from an old double garage. The walls of the room were lined with books, poems in glass frames, posters from museums. Propped against the books were other poems, framed and glued to pieces of cardboard or attached to the spines of books by paper clips. This is part of one of the poems Lin Tan could read from where he was sitting.
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change,
Thanked be to fortune it hath been otherwise,
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”…
“So you are going back to China when you finish your degree?” Big Ted said.
“No, first I have to do my residency.”
“Where will that be?”
“I am not certain yet. Perhaps on East Coast or in Seattle.”
“If you’re one or two you ought to have your choice.”
“Perhaps. They have not written to me yet.”
“Then what? After you finish your residency?”
“It will take several years. I wish to operate on fetal heart. Also, to pursue studies of child development.”
“You’ve got that pretty well knocked in your culture. Why study it here?”
“I might remain in this country. Perhaps mental aspects of child rearing are key to all health, or perhaps all is genes, chromosome charts of children with lymphomas are very interesting. Perhaps we can teach body of child to heal itself. If mothers can be taught to carry babies in their arms for one year after birth. But this is all theory of mine.”
“No, it’s common sense. Difficult to teach in the United States in nineteen eighty-six.” Big Ted sighed. He looked across the desk at the young man. The energy flowed from Lin Tan’s body, made an aura around him. It was going to be okay. I did good, Big Ted thought. Goddammit, I raised a girl with a brain in her head, hitting on all cylinders the morning she plucked this one from the sea. So, we’ll let go. Let her go. Lose her. Maybe never see her again. Goddammit, she could wind up in a rice field or a prison. No, not with this man. He could take care of her.
Big Ted sighed again. He reached into a drawer of the desk and took out a bottle of whiskey and two small glasses. “You want a drink of whiskey?”
“You are worried about something? Tell me what you are thinking.”
“I’m thinking you’ll take my daughter to a communist country and I can’t protect her there. Convince me I’m wrong.”
“I might not return to my country. I have done a wrong thing. I have allowed her to think I am hero who would give up opportunity to stay in the United States and be a wealthy man to go back and serve my people. It was unworthy subterfuge.” Lin Tan looked Big Ted straight in the eye. Outside someone was knocking on the door. “Lin Tan.” It was Margaret’s voice. “Come to the phone. It’s a man at Johns Hopkins calling you. It’s the dean of Johns Hopkins.”
“There goes your noble subterfuge,” Big Ted said. “Go and answer it.”
They were offering Lin Tan the moon and he said yes, he would be glad to come and take it. Later that night he asked Margaret very formally to be his wife and she accepted and Big Ted and Jane got on the phone and started calling their friends.
“Do we still have to sleep in separate rooms now that we’re engaged?” Margaret asked her mother, later, when the two of them were down in her mother’s room. “I mean, is it all right if I go in Teddy’s room and sleep with him?”
“Oh, my darling, please don’t ask that. I’m not ready for that.”
“We’re going to be married, Mother. Think how strange it must be for him, being here in this country, with us. I mean, after all.”
“If you want to sleep with him go on and marry him then. We could have a wedding. You could get married while you’re here.” Her mother sank back against the pillows of the bed. It was a huge four-poster bed made from cypress logged on her grandfather’s land. It had been a wedding gift from her parents, a quarter of a century ago, in another place, another time. Margaret’s mother had been the most beautiful girl in that world. She was beautiful still, serene and sure, elegant and kind. Margaret hugged the bedpost. She was always a child in this room. All her life she had come in and hugged this bedpost while she asked questions and made pleas and waited for answers. Never once in her life had she been treated unfairly or unkindly in this room. So she looked upon the world as a place that could be expected to be kind and to be fair.
“It’s too late to get married tonight,” she said. “May we sleep with each other if we’re going to get married tomorrow?”
“I don’t want to discuss this any further,” her mother said. She picked up a magazine and pretended to read it. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Margaret went to her bedroom and bathed and put on her best nightgown and unbraided her hair and brushed it. She put perfume on her wrists and knees and behind her ears. She opened the door to her brother’s old room which adjoined her own. She gathered all of her old fashion magazines from around the room and sat down crosslegged on the bed and began to read. It was ten-fifteen.
Outside in the office Lin Tan and Big Ted were talking context. “It’s got to be seen in the scheme of things,” Big Ted was saying. “Bateson’s got a nice little book on it. Trying, for God’s sake, to make them comprehend they are part of nature. Poor babies. They’ve lost that in our cities. Poor goddamn babies. Makes me want to cry.” He filled a glass with ice from a cooler, added two small jiggers of whiskey, and signaled Lin Tan to hand his over for a refill.
There was a knock on the door. Big Ted got up, opened it, let his friend Kenneth Felder in. “This is Doctor Felder, Lin Tan. He’s our heart man around here. His daddy did it before him. This is Lin Tan, Ken. He got the big fellowship at Johns Hopkins handed him today. You two have plenty to talk about.” He took Ken Felder’s coat, motioned him to a red leather chair beside the brown one.
“So how do you like it here?” Ken said. “Have you figured out where you are yet?”
“Oh, yes, we studied a map on the airplane flying here. Margaret is very good guide. This country is larger than can be imagined from maps. We flew over mountains of the west. Very beautiful country. Here in your home is very beautiful also.”
“Your own country’s doing good. My wife and I were there last summer. We were impressed with the schools. She’s a teacher, like Ted here. She had Margaret. She had all these kids. Well, we’re all glad to have you here.”
“They want to get married,” Big Ted said. “Margaret’s down there with Jane making plans. And I don’t mind.” He raised his glass in Lin Tan’s direction. “The global village. Jesus, imagine the kids. And tomorrow we’re going up to New Jersey to look at his buddy’s atoms before they condense any further. You want to go along? It’s Saturday. Call and see if you can get a plane ticket.”
“Oh, yes,” Lin Tan said. “Please go with us. My friend, Randal, is very lonesome for someone he knows to come and share triumph with him. He has been surrounded by reporters for many days now. We would be honored if you would go along.”
“I can’t do that,” Ken said. “Well, Johns Hopkins. That’s fine, Lin Tan. Really fine. You must have worked hard.”
“Very hard. Also, very lucky. There are many fine students in class with me.” He glanced at his watch. He sipped his whiskey. He stretched out his legs from the brown chair until they met Doctor Felder’s legs, sticking out from the red one. Just Chinese man being enveloped by the culture of the West, he decided. Just one more adventure on the road of life.
“I brought the portable chess board out,” Big Ted said. “If you’re ready, we can play.”