Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home Read online

  “What?”

  She repeated the initials.

  I must have grimaced — something to do with technology? — and walked away. Back then I didn’t even own a computer.

  Many years later, one August afternoon I ran into her in Taos. She’d broken up four years earlier with Alice and had come to say a final good-bye to the town where Alice had had a second home and where they often vacationed.

  Walking with a friend down Kit Carson Road, I saw her in the distance, standing in front of a gallery. “I have a vague feeling she’s someone I know,” I said to my friend, pointing. As we came closer and I saw her face, I knew I knew her but couldn’t place her.

  “Hi,” she said, that big grin, her white teeth.

  “Hi,” I said back.

  She could tell I was computing in my mind. “I’m Yu-kwan. Remember? New York? Alice?”

  “Ohh,” I said, then jumped in. “Yes! I even remember during a break I ran into the two of you in that old café near the class. I had just ordered chocolate ice cream. The walls were green….”

  “Yes, yes,” she said excitedly.

  An unusual cloud moved overhead, oblong like a train, and I pointed. All three of us bent our heads back.

  Yu-kwan glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to run. I have a massage. Great to see you.” She rushed off, and I watched her cross the street at the light.

  I turned to my friend. “Maybe I should go out with her?” I’d just been lamenting no dates for a long time.

  We e-mailed for six months, my long missives responded to mostly with two or three lines and then an occasional long e-mail telling me of her day. It might have gone along like this for even longer, but as winter approached, she invited me to New York for my birthday to see Turandot by Puccini at the Met. It was an opera about a ruthless, cold Chinese princess softened by love.

  But first she would fly out in late December to go snowshoeing and see a movie about Paris that, amazingly, wasn’t showing in all of New York. She wouldn’t let me pick her up at the airport. Instead I met her at the shuttle in front of the Hotel Santa Fe.

  The night was cold and dark, and she popped out of the van in a heavy green coat. I handed her a dozen pink tea roses, and we went to an Italian café near the Plaza, where the food we ordered went almost untouched — we were nervous and absorbed in each other.

  Intermittently she patted her lips with a white cloth napkin, and I thought I had gotten it all wrong. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and her beauty emanated from the inside out. She glowed.

  In New York she presented me with an expensive pen. A terrible gift choice. I only use fast-writing cheap pens and spiral notebooks. This Rebecca Moss pen was slow and too thick. Hadn’t she read any of my books?

  We bumped along seeing each other. Once in Texas; she’d never been in that state before. I had work there, and she came early for the weekend. I gave a keynote in Washington, DC, and she met me there. We walked under the cherry blossoms along the Potomac, and I told her about Japan and my love of Japanese authors. Eventually she bought my one-bedroom studio in Santa Fe, where she had sometimes stayed in the past, so we could date properly — in the same town.

  Slowly, the recognition of her true, sweet, odd nature unfolded inside me. I noticed she told the same joke over and over. When a restaurant meal was brought to the table, she would say to me, “What are you eating?,” meaning she was going to devour everything we’d ordered together. I never failed to laugh.

  She never walked barefoot, even in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. She’d grope for her slippers before her feet landed on the floor. I asked, “Is this a Chinese thing?” in my vast ignorance, and she shook her head no, with no further explanation.

  For her birthday I worked hard on a painting of a homemade coconut birthday cake. To the left of the cake was an old-fashioned mixer and mixing bowl; a chocolate chip cookie was prominent on a plate to the front right. All on a checkered tablecloth with rose-flowered wallpaper in the background. I was afraid I might have overworked the layers of color, trying too hard to get it right.

  I presented it to her the morning of her birthday. She glanced down at it on the table in my studio, then walked over to the house, saying nothing. I thought, She hates it. I decided not to ask.

  Two hours later, she looked up from the newspaper as she turned the page, “That is the most wonderful present anyone has ever given me.”

  I grew to love and be fascinated by her long silences.

  And her huge generosity. For Valentine’s Day she surprised me with a large red oil painting I’d admired in a gallery a month before, and then a small oil as the Valentine card.

  On the first night I spent in her New York apartment — on the ninth floor, lulled by an old memory of the soft hum of traffic below — I slept for twelve hours straight. That single night of long sleep sealed the relationship.

  The silk of her legs, and the depth of her ability to relax, awakened longing — I could learn this ease from her, this unrestricted acceptance, and recline into peace.

  But that tranquillity was still foreign to me. On a hike two weeks later, back in New Mexico with my friend Erica, who was also my local doctor, I tried to explain this quality of deep relaxation.

  “Nat, she’s a cat,” Erica said as we huffed up a challenging mountain. “The rest of us are dogs, eager to be petted, acknowledged.” Erica made short panting sounds. “Love me, love me.” She hung her tongue out.

  “Yes, yes, that’s it,” I laughed.

  On a bench outside, a few months later, Yu-kwan began for no reason: “This is how cats lick themselves,” and she extended her lower arm across her tongue and then the other arm. She turned her head to the left and raised her upper left arm, nuzzled and licked under her armpit. “This is how they get clean.”

  My eyes twirled in my head. She looked exactly like a feline. “Did you ever have a cat?” I asked.

  “No, never.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  That night, when I couldn’t sleep, I listened to her breath, heavy, then slightly snoring, then snoring deeply, then silent, never using a pillow. In a pale yellow nightgown, she was out in space, against aging and time, arms outstretched over the whole dark world.

  Later, feeling the fragrant heat of her breath, I shook her awake. “Sing to me,” I said, and she obliged, still hovering someplace else. Out came a sweet rendition of the Beatles’s “When I’m Sixty-Four.” At that time we were both in our sixties, out beyond our generation’s imagining, out in the footprints of the comets.

  * * *

  —

  When Yu-kwan first moved to New Mexico, a year and a half after we began dating, I told her, “You have to learn to drive. We have no subway lines, and few cabs.” I spread out my arms. “This is the West, big country,” and then I added, “I’m not going to be your chauffer.”

  First, she stuck up her nose. “I can drive.”

  “Yeah, a license you got thirty years ago and never used.”

  “Watch me.” The next day she went by cab to the Honda dealer out on Cerrillos Road and bought a tan Honda CR-V. From then on, for ten months the talk was of speed limits, traffic lights, left-turn lanes, parallel parking.

  When she was at the wheel, I sat in the back seat, catching up on past issues of the New Yorker. I didn’t dare glance up. Often I’d hear a car horn.

  “That person is so rude,” she said.

  “You cut him off.”

  “I did no such thing. I had my directional on. I signaled.”

  “But you also have to look.”

  She snapped on the radio to an oldie station, singing along. “Stop! In the name of love” — she had a beautiful voice with a classical English accent.

  Whenever my car needed a tune-up, oil change, or tire rotation, she gladly volunteered to take it in and alway
s made a 7:00 a.m. appointment. (I thought, That’s efficient — in and out.)

  One afternoon she was upset. “I couldn’t get scheduled till ten this time. All the good donuts were taken by then.”

  “They give them for free?” I was putting two and two together.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “No chocolates left. I had to eat one with blue icing and another with pink.” She paused, smiled at the memory. “But they were good too.”

  “I thought you took the car to help me out and also to further your auto understanding.”

  “That too.” A big grin spread across her face. “Last time, what do you call them? They had crullers. Delicious.”

  10.

  I WATCHED YU-KWAN not resist being tired. Instead she accepted it and lay down on the bed or long couch in the back room, staring out the window at the aspens.

  Our acupuncturist encouraged us to buy a lamb shank and drink the broth. “It’s so good to build strength,” she said. I did it once or twice, didn’t like the taste, was bothered by the smell in the kitchen.

  Yu-kwan persisted, bringing home that raw shank every other day, plopping it in the pot and waiting while it boiled. She poured a cup for herself and one for me. “C’mon, I insist you drink it.”

  “Why don’t you drink mine too?” I sipped at it, making the ordeal longer than necessary.

  She watched me quietly, a resignation in the way she leaned over the sink holding herself up. “Do what’s right. We have to do what is good for us.”

  * * *

  —

  Yu-kwan’s mother fled China when the rest of her family was killed in one of the many empty revolutions Mao stirred up. Her mother gave birth to Yu-kwan at the age of seventeen in Hong Kong. There was no father nor a mention of a father. When her mother first met her stepfather, Yu-kwan was farmed out to a poor family at age seven for two years. Her mother was afraid the English soldier wouldn’t want her if she had a child.

  Yu-kwan’s adopted family ate one bowl of rice a day and some salted fish. When they sat at the table, they kept their feet raised on the chair rungs. Rats came out at dinner and wandered under the table, hoping a crumb or morsel would be dropped. Barefoot, thin as a wire, she wandered the streets. The ghetto people called her “the wooden beauty” because she was so sad.

  After her mother couldn’t get pregnant in England, she confessed to her new husband that she had a little girl left in Hong Kong. Her husband flew back and appeared at the door of the boarding house. Yu-kwan was standing in the hall when the owner opened the door to this tall white Westerner. He told her to call him Daddy and yelled at the man that her mother sent monthly checks for her care, yet she was filthy and starving.

  The next day he took her to the movies to see One Hundred and One Dalmatians. She sat next to him with one fist full of popcorn and the other gripping chocolate malted milk balls.

  For a short time, maybe six months — Yu-kwan can’t recall the exact amount of time — the three of them stayed in Hong Kong. She said those months were the best time of her young life. Each Saturday, while her parents played mahjong with the neighbors, Yu-kwan slipped out of the house and took the double-decker bus — front seat, top deck — all the way to the other end of Kowloon. The ride took a half hour, and then she’d walk to the cinema. She had a favorite actor who played in the Chinese operas — she followed him by photos in the newspaper — and she’d sit in front of the screen, watching a similar plot unfold each week. He was always the hero, starting out poor but eventually winning the kingdom and the girl. If an English feature played nearby, she might go to it too — first the Pathé news, followed by a cartoon, and then a slapstick starring the Three Stooges. “You didn’t need to understand the English; they were just funny.”

  On the way home — again front seat, top deck — she’d get off at her street. As the bus turned around at the corner, she’d race it to the end of the block with her long skinny legs. She always made sure to beat it, because then she would reward herself with a gateau at the bakery. It was a game she played with herself. Then she’d visit the candy shop, where she’d spend the last of her pocket money on one stick of Wrigley’s chewing gum and a single sweet-and-sour hard candy.

  At home her parents were still playing mahjong. No one looked up when she came in the door or asked where she’d been all day.

  This was after the Second World War. Soon the family moved to Germany, where her stepfather was transferred. They sent Yu-kwan to an English boarding school. They changed her name to Violet, thinking that would help her adapt more easily. She became Violet Jones.

  “It sounds like a porn star,” I told her.

  English was the first language she learned to read. The kids bullied her and made fun of her for being Chinese — “Violet” didn’t help — but this was where she learned the power of her own essential nature. Her mother told her, “Fight back.”

  Her mother had a cobbler make her very first pair of shoes when she went off to school. They were made to last — too large for her, she’d grow into them, with metal around the edges. She hated them — another reason to be made fun of. She even stuck them under the tire of a parked car, hoping they’d be crushed when the car moved. It didn’t work — nothing could destroy them — so she turned those shoes into a powerful weapon.

  She calculated her moves. She waited for each bully to be alone, and then she’d use those shoes to attack.

  The big, overweight, fleshy leader of the bullies was her most ambitious target of revenge. One day, at the edge of the school campus, Yu-kwan saw her walking on the sidewalk. She ran behind her, and with her sturdy shoe, kicked her hard in the butt. The bully fell over, her thick glasses flung out of reach. Facedown on the concrete, she stretched her right arm out for them. Yu-kwan rushed ahead and was about to crush them with her huge shoe.

  “This is where you develop who you are, your character,” she told me. “In a split moment I changed my mind. I reached down, handed her her glasses, said I was sorry in English, and walked away.”

  “She bounded after me, gave me three of her marbles, took my arm, and pulled me to the playground.” From then on they were best friends, the skinny short Chinese girl and the big white Brit.

  Because of Yu-kwan’s great effort to learn, her sharp ability in math, and her appealing face, her teachers took a liking to her and kept her close. She learned perfect hygiene and elegant manners.

  The English kids were well fed. Her early childhood had been marked with hunger. She developed a zest for kippers, baked beans, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding.

  Her mother stopped her from drinking milk. “You’ll grow too tall and won’t find a Chinese husband.”

  Half of Yu-kwan had no idea she was Chinese, because the language in which she first learned to read and do equations was English. Her first ten years in Hong Kong were amorphous, bent on survival and the exigencies of chance. But learning to decipher words, building the obtuse logic of numbers, even sitting in rows in a classroom — the dailiness of repetition began to form her character with a British lilt.

  She developed a highbrow accent, as if she and Queen Elizabeth frequently had tea together. Her Chinese voice was lost in her clear, precise pronunciation of this new language — syllables and consonants at attention, her strange way of pronouncing aluminum, schedule, vitamin, like swimming in a dark and separate sea. Though she often dropped articles of speech: “I go to bathroom.”

  In her sophomore year of high school, one spring afternoon she beat the 100-meter women’s world running record by two seconds. The physical education teacher went crazy.

  The dean called her parents, who decided that her stepfather would work to train her all summer. They purchased new running shoes and shorts and sleeveless cotton T-shirts for her.

  The first day, alone with her stepfather on the deserted summer field with so much skin exposed, she felt vulnerable, unsafe. As she’d grown into puberty, he
had begun to notice her in uncomfortable ways, and one rainy afternoon a year earlier in the hallway to her parent’s bedroom, he’d reached out and squeezed her left breast. This running practice is going to go on every day for two months? she thought.

  She walked off the track, telling him, “I don’t want to run anymore.” No beseeching changed it.

  Her mother never really learned the new language, became more isolated, insecure. She beat Yu-kwan with a stick. “Why aren’t you nicer to your stepfather? He loves you.”

  “My stepfather used to take me to the movies. One afternoon we saw Peyton Place. In the movie, the stepfather impregnates his daughter. I watched and a light went on. This could happen to me. I was certain my mother wouldn’t care if I became pregnant by my stepfather. It would be one way to keep him. She’d raise the child as her own.

  “That day I began to plan my escape. The neighbor woman used to hear my shrieks as my mother hit me. Twice she called the police.”

  “What happened when they came?” I asked.

  “My stepfather was in the army. He talked to them. They wouldn’t go against him.”

  When she was eighteen, her neighbor drove her to a distant airport. She’d saved the ticket money to fly to southern England. She had a friend there with an apartment she could share. She packed very few things and snuck her passport from the top drawer in her parents’ bureau.

  She never saw them again and was alone, with no aunts, cousins, uncles, brothers, or sisters, no kin at all. Her aloneness became her family. It stayed close, and she knew it thoroughly, right to the ground.

  When I met her, her mother and stepfather had faded into her past.

  “Don’t you want to know if they’re still alive? Where they are?” A true American, I could not leave it alone, thinking everything can be changed, made better, have a happy ending.

  Surprised even at the question, she said, “No. Why would I want to know? My mother hated me. And also abandoned me for two years when I was seven.”