Kinder Than Solitude

9

Twice Moran had read through her employees’ manual, but an ex-spouse’s sickness, however terminal, was not listed as a legitimate reason for an extended leave. This was not unexpected, though it reminded her again that, when a death was pending, all connections but those defined by blood or marriage were dismissed as inconsequential. She wondered what other options there were. Or perhaps the idea of a leave was too greedy: deaths, like memories, required one’s entire heart, leaving little space for negotiation.

On a piece of paper, Moran listed things that she needed to look into, possible expenditures, and resources available. She had some vacation time saved — other than the annual holiday trip with her parents, she rarely took time off. The lease to the house would expire at the end of next August, but if she was unable to sublet the place, she could keep making payments from afar. Her savings account would last her two years or longer; she had always lived simply, and would continue to do so after the move. Her portfolios had posted some minor gains, as she was a conservative investor, unambitious and thus mostly unscathed by the recent financial recession. Her company’s stock, which she had accumulated some shares of over the years, she would hold on to as emergency backup. These concrete things — numbers and columns and lists — calmed Moran, as they gave this evening a purposefulness that was absent on other evenings. She would keep her car, a secondhand Saab; and she would keep her clothes and those few things she had grown attached to. The house could be cleaned out more or less with a weekend tag sale; what she could not sell she would drop off at the Goodwill store downtown. Back in the Midwest she would not need a place the size of her current rental; she could easily get by with a studio apartment. Already she could envision the place; no, not the place in its physical reality, but its imperturbable solitude, which had become a necessity for her, a habitat.

It comforted Moran that many things could be done, and they would be done without complications or difficulties. Sixteen years earlier she had come to this country with two suitcases, in which she had packed everything she had imagined necessary to begin a new life: clothes, a quilt and a pillow pressed and bound tightly to make space, two bowls, a pair of chopsticks, a folding knife, a meat cleaver, two tins of tea leaves, an umbrella, two packs of sanitary napkins, and a Chinese-English dictionary. What she could not fit into her luggage — her Sony Walkman and her many cassettes, her books, a few girlhood diaries, and the single photo album her mother had put together, containing pictures and snapshots from different stages of her life — those her mother had promised to keep safe until she came home the next time. But she had not gone back to reclaim them—people rarely reclaim what they have lost, somewhere she read that; they only replace them. Her parents, when it had become clear that she might never do so, had brought with them the photo album and the diaries on one visit to America. Moran had put them away without taking a look inside.

After the divorce, Moran moved again with the same two suitcases and an even smaller collection of things. All that had mattered she’d left behind. Her ring she had returned to Josef; the thought that he had two pairs of rings to discard, or to keep, made her heart ache, yet she did not know what to do — nor did she want — to alleviate her own pain, as it must have hurt Josef more. The wedding photos and the snapshots taken on their honeymoon — a week off the coast of South Carolina (Josef had proposed the Bahamas, though Moran’s Chinese passport at the time had made it hard to travel anywhere outside the States) — she had asked Josef to keep with his family pictures. You travel so lightly, he had said when he dropped her off at the airport, his blue eyes filled with gentle sadness, though what he had meant, what had really let him down, was that she took everything so lightly. Blame that on the mental state of an immigrant, she had said, a ready excuse she had used again and again as she continued to live in a state that in Josef’s and other people’s eyes should have been transitory but had acquired a permanency over the years. To be able, at any moment, to pull up roots minimally put down, to be able to exit without being noticed or missed — these things gave her an odd sense of virginal freedom. Anything concerning the heart leaves it in confusion; she had found this motto in one of the Buddhist books she had read after Shaoai’s poisoning; to desire nothing is to have no vulnerability.

But how many hearts could truly succeed in keeping themselves immune to all that would make them susceptible? With discipline Moran had lived in unperturbed calm since the divorce; no, even in her marriage she had longed for nothing but placidity. But peace like that was only a locked gate, and more than anyone, Josef had been gently pointing it out to her, not pushing it, yet not pretending he hadn’t seen it, either. Was that why she had broken her wedding vow? Moran had married Josef for all she could inherit from his past — his friends, children, and grandchildren — so that she would not have to build a life of her own; she had thought the crowdedness of his world would allow a young wife to exist quietly, and his first marriage, long and happy, would provide enough of a sheltering shadow for her to be nothing more than a replacement. Yet she had been proven wrong. Josef had not taken marriage as lightly as she had. Life, fair as it is, unexpectedly so at times, sets up trapping webs for even the most inconspicuous creature: Moran, panicked at the predicament in which she had found herself — love offered where she had asked only for kindness — would not have spared a limb or two in her scrambling to get herself untangled, and in doing so she had left a few scratches on Josef’s life, too. Any wound deeper than that she would not allow herself to believe. The thought that she could be ruthless was too much for her to bear: ruthlessness was a trait she associated with Boyang, and before him, Ruyu; before her, no one, as in those days, blinded by her eagerness to love, Moran had found the world a loving place.

Moran had met Josef at the county jail the first year she’d been living in America, on a tour organized by a local church group to introduce international students to the American legal system. The group had sponsored other gatherings — potlucks in the park, free English lessons on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and a fundraising concert for the church — but Moran had not gone to any of them.

There had been only four students — two boys from India and a young couple from Thailand — when Moran arrived at the jail. A man, pudgy, bald, and dressed soberly in a dark-colored jacket, came in a few minutes later and introduced himself as Josef. He said that the woman who was in charge had come down with the stomach flu, so he’d had to step in to help.

The sheriff hosting the tour seemed undeterred by the less than promising attendance. His initial remarks in the lobby lasted almost an hour, during which he gave a detailed account of his being shot at by a teenager, of the psychological trauma he’d had to overcome, of the everyday challenges a law-enforcement officer had to face, of America and its justice.

The Thai couple smiled and nodded, their hands clasped behind their backs. The two Indian boys gallantly volunteered when the sheriff produced handcuffs with which to demonstrate the more painful and the less painful way of being arrested, depending on one’s willingness to cooperate. Moran wondered if she could slip away, but Josef, standing behind his charges, dutifully blocked her way to the exit. Once again she read the visiting hours posted on the wall, which she had already memorized. It was a Saturday, the only day that the inmates were not allowed visitors. A needle of pain pulsed in Moran’s head, but surely there was more in life for one to endure than an afternoon in a county jail, which would, at some point, come to an end.

Once the sheriff unlocked the metal gate, both a relief and a hushed reverence settled over the foreign tourists. Through the barred door of a low-security cell, they saw a few men in orange outfits sitting around a table playing cards, none of them looking up at the procession in the hallway. All sorts of reasons, the sheriff answered when the Thai couple guiltily asked what had brought the inmates here. In an unoccupied cell the sheriff showed them a metal toilet with neither a lid nor a seat, and a brown mattress folded up in a corner. With a tape measure he demonstrated the size of the window, not wide enough for the skinniest man to climb through, yet offering a plentiful view of the world outside: the bare tops of the trees, the low, lead-colored clouds in the sky.

One of the four high-security cells was occupied, and the sheriff stopped in front of the door to give an introduction. He unlocked the inspection window and peeked inside before locking it again. A woman’s voice could be heard, whimpering, then screaming, then lowering again to a whimper. A metal basket affixed to the door frame held a toothbrush and a tiny tube of toothpaste.

The Thai couple looked away, as though embarrassed on the sheriff’s behalf. When he asked if anyone wanted to have a go at a straitjacket, which had been left outside the cell, neither of the sanguine Indian boys volunteered. A detour led them to the office, where the sheriff gave yet another long speech. By the time the group was released onto the chilly, empty sidewalk, it was dusk. In the orange light of the street lamps, big flakes of snow fell soundlessly, and already the world was covered by an undisturbed layer of whiteness.

It was the first time the Indian boys and the Thai couple had seen snow, so they all perked up, as though the afternoon had been a test they’d had to pass to earn this marvelous sight. The two parties soon disappeared, one trudging uphill, the other heading to the lake. For a moment, neither Moran nor Josef moved, both frozen in the dread of their separate loneliness. Then he asked her if she was all right, and suggested a cup of hot chocolate to recover from the dreadful tour.

At the café, Josef asked Moran where she had come from, what she was studying at the university, and whether she had experienced any cultural shock in America; Moran had a stock of ready answers to these questions, replies that would deter further questioning. When Josef ran out of questions, he told her that he did not belong to the church group, but that a couple who were longtime friends of his had been trying to interest him in the group’s activities. “I hope you’ve enjoyed others more than today’s,” he said.

Moran said she had not been to any other event.

“So you wanted to see a jail?” Josef said. “But not a football game? Not Oktoberfest?”

Moran did not have an answer prepared, so she only shook her head, as though she, too, were baffled. She had made acquaintances in the new town but had been unwilling to befriend anyone; another girl from her college had come to Madison, too, for engineering school, but Moran had declined when the girl had asked her to be her roommate. When Josef continued waiting for an answer, she said that perhaps she had a negative view of life, and was drawn to the dark side of the world. She did not say that Oktoberfest and college football games did not interest her because they were things you went to with other people.

Josef looked at her more attentively. She wondered if he would ask for explanations, which she could not, and would not, give him. But Josef only gestured at her name tag and asked if Lara was a common Chinese name.

She’d decided to give herself an English name when she’d arrived in America because she thought it might be hard for Americans to pronounce her name, Moran replied, though that was only partially true. In the program where she was studying for a PhD in chemistry, she was known as Moran; in the Westlawn House, a three-story building offering rooms to women in science and technology, where Moran had a bedroom and shared a kitchen, bathroom, and living area with eight other women — two from Poland, three from Ukraine, two from Jordan on an exchange program, and one Canadian Korean — no one had any trouble saying her Chinese name. She used Lara only with strangers, like the young man managing the grill at the student cafeteria, and the cashier at the grocery store who had a hook for a hand and who so loved waving at Moran that she could not avoid checking out at his register. He had once been an alcoholic, he told Moran; he had lost both children to his ex-wife when they divorced, but before that he had lost his arm when he drove his car into a wall. Never touched a drop after that, he had said cheerfully, and always wished Lara a good stay in America as he punched her total into the register with his good hand.

Josef asked her something, and Moran, having missed the question, asked him to repeat it. “How did you decide on the name Lara?” he said again.

“I wanted something simple.”

“But why Lara? Why not Lily or Nancy?”

Moran wondered if Josef was one of those tedious people who could grasp only things for which there were ready explanations. In college, Moran had halfheartedly dated two boys, and both had bored her with their efforts to reduce the world to a heap of things in need of sorting out. Moran wondered if Josef, in his youth, had likewise exasperated girls his age, but the man, unaware of Moran’s scorn, waited patiently, his eyes limpid. It was the first time Moran had seen a pair of blue eyes at close distance.

“I borrowed the name from a Russian novel,” Moran said.

“Not by any chance Doctor Zhivago?”

Moran looked up, surprised. “I wondered when you said your name,” Josef said, and started to hum “Lara’s Theme.” His voice, just loud enough for the two of them to hear, astonished Moran: its beauty and sadness seemed to belong to a different era, when men were handsome and women were beautiful and romance was accompanied by its own tune and a well-timed fade-out was the only trace of death.

“A song from my youth,” Josef said when he finished.

“From mine, too,” replied Moran. In her bedroom in Beijing, there was a box of novels, Doctor Zhivago among them, that she had been unwilling to sell but that she knew she would never go back to reread. The books had been her loyal companions for the last two years of high school. By then, Shaoai and her parents had moved away from the quadrangle. Ruyu, still attending the same high school, had become a boarding student and never said a word to Moran when they saw each other at school. Boyang’s parents had taken him away, sending him to the high school affiliated with their university; on weekends, when he came to the quadrangle to visit his grandmother, Moran would either make up an excuse to be absent, or else stay in her bedroom, burying herself in one of the bulky novels translated from Russian or French. She had never been much of a reader of fiction before, but those novels, whose characters bore long and unmemorable names, had comforted her: even the most complicated stories offered a clarity that she could not find in the world around her, and each character came to an uncomplaining end, Doctor Zhivago giving up his life when he could not catch up with Lara in the street, Lara giving up happiness.

“You’re still young,” Josef said.

Moran wanted to retort that only a fool would look at age in such a simpleminded way. But the stranger was being kind, and being true to his observation. Moran was two months short of twenty-three. To be admired for one’s youth when one had seen the dead end to which youth led — one might find solace in the admiration, yet it was not a sufficient diversion. Josef, at his age, could withdraw to the sanctuary of his memories, but Moran still had years, decades, ahead of her. She wished she were as old as Josef — having to live on when one had lived enough made one a weary impersonator of all that she was not.

Moran wiped the tabletop around her cup with the paper napkin, thinking that there must be a right reply to Josef’s comment; only she did not know what it was. When she looked up again she realized that Josef must have said something, but the look on his face said that he didn’t want to embarrass her by repeating it. To fill the silence, she asked him if he had been to a jail before.

It was his first time visiting a jail, Josef said; he and all the people he knew were law-abiding citizens. “Not that there’s much worth to it,” he added.

A man like Josef would find amusement in looking into another world, feeling complacent in a life safeguarded by sensibility. But life was never as secure as he thought. A crime could be committed, or worse, half-committed, and an unfinished murder could be worse than a murder plotted out and accomplished coldheartedly. But all this Moran had not said to Josef then, or later.

After a moment, Josef started to talk about Alena, of his and her being crowned as the Bohemian prince and princess at a Czech festival in 1952; of her winning the state championship at an accordion contest the year after. Accordion? Moran murmured, not saying more, and Josef nodded and said accordion indeed, not your everyday instrument in this country, but both he and Alena played the instrument, like every child of Czech immigrants. Their grandparents had come to the new continent from nearby villages; their fathers had been drinking buddies, both fond of pickled cow tongue. The marriage between Josef and Alena, Moran could tell, had been a good one, children raised with their best interests in mind, friends maintained with loyalty, the history of the older generations treasured, decades of memories dutifully deposited in family albums. When Josef spoke of Alena’s accident, Moran watched his eyes dampen. Certain things are easier to share with strangers when one feels the nearness of farewell; death casts less of a shadow in the heart of a passerby.

Before they parted, Josef asked Moran if she had any plans for her first Thanksgiving in America. She said no, and he asked her if she would like to join his family for the holiday. He had not mentioned that it would be the first one for him and his children without Alena, but Moran had guessed it. Had she accepted the invitation because other people’s wounds had always been more of a calling, a reason for her to be? After the divorce, Moran acquired the habit of looking at everything in their relationship with scrutiny. After all, their two years of dating and three years of marriage — a story preserved completely as though in amber, which had no connection to her life in China — was the only one for which she could find a beginning and an end; yet even this simple tale made little sense when she studied it closely. What if she had found an excuse to decline Josef’s invitation, as she had always done with similar invitations in those days, and ever since?

But back in that coffee shop, it had felt only natural to say yes to Josef, because it had been good of him to think of inviting her, a newcomer in a foreign land. When she gave him her phone number, she told him her real name.

“Which name would you prefer to go by?” Josef asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, though she knew it did.

“Well then, we’ll call you Moran,” Josef said, and she noticed that he had included his family in the sentence. “Does your name have a meaning? I heard every Chinese name has a meaning to go with it.”

There could be many different Chinese characters for a name like hers, she explained. The characters her parents had chosen for her meant quietness. “Silence?” she tried again, sounding out the word, but then said the meaning was more like reticence. “It means for someone to choose not to express an opinion, to refrain from speaking.”

What an odd name to give to a child, she waited for Josef to say, but he only nodded, as though there were nothing strange about it. She wished, then, that she had insisted on Lara, who would have been a different person: attractive, impertinent, mysterious.

When Moran had left China, she had known that she would never return, though this she had not told her parents; nor had she revealed it to Boyang, when she had asked him to arrange for her to see Shaoai a few days before her flight. They had been strangers to each other then: Moran had chosen to go to a university in Guangzhou, the farthest she could get from Beijing; Boyang and Ruyu had enrolled at the same university in Beijing, though in their second year, Ruyu had abruptly given up her study and married a man to go to America.

Uncle and Aunt must have been told about Moran’s visit that day, as they had both left before her arrival, leaving Shaoai in the care of Boyang, who helped her move around with his strong arms and coaxing words. The chemical, having destroyed much of Shaoai’s brain, had left her near blind and with the intelligence of a three-year-old. Unable to see well, Shaoai had come to where Moran was sitting on the edge of a chair and put her face close, as though she could only see a mouth, a nose, or a patch of skin at a time. Shaoai’s mumbling was incoherent, and her mood swings — from laughing to crying to whimpering — seemed neither to embarrass nor to distress Boyang. His face, having a harshness Moran did not remember seeing before, was no longer boyish, and she felt intimidated by what she sensed behind his tender authority toward Shaoai and his flawless courteousness toward Moran herself: this was someone who had found all the solutions he needed for his life, and she, among others, would be sacrificed if she hindered him in any way.

The visit had not lasted long. Shaoai’s dangerous plumpness, and the unexpectedness of her bumping from one corner of the room to another, made Moran jumpy, and she could see that Boyang had no intention of helping her; rather, he seemed to take a kind of vicious pleasure in Moran’s discomfort. Years ago he had given her the ostensible reason for the end of their friendship: she had loved him more than as a childhood companion, and in doing so she had been the one most responsible for an unresolvable crime.

Had Moran been a different person she would have confronted his injustice in that apartment: it is easier to hold a person accountable for a tragedy than to hold fate, which defeats everyone impartially, accountable. But pride held her back. She did not want to be seen as begging for forgiveness.

When he saw her to the door, he slipped her his business card. “Don’t ever forget us,” he said slowly, and before she said anything, he closed the door behind her.

He had known her well enough to put such a curse on her, and all she could come up with in her own defense was not to think about what she could not forget. If forgetting is the art of eliminating a person, a place, from one’s history, Moran knew she would never become a master at it. Rather, she was like a diligent craftsman, and never gave up a moment of vigilance in practicing the lesser art of not looking back, not thinking about the past.

But it would have been different for someone named Lara, who would choose what to forget from her past, and what to carry on for a better life. Long after the divorce, Moran maintained the habit of giving her name as Lara to the Starbucks baristas. She had once met another Lara at Logan airport, both of them waiting for their coffees, both stepping forward when summoned. The other Lara said her parents had gone through a period of thinking that everything Russian was holy, and had named her Larissa — Lara — after the heroine of a Russian novel. Later, her parents left their hippie-hood behind and gave her younger sisters more normal names: Jennifer, Molly, Aimee.

It was odd, Moran thought as she buckled herself in and waited for the plane to take off, how one could become a collector of irrelevant memories. Easily she could recall the other Lara from the airport: her full head of red hair, her tired eyes when she talked about her parents, who were “wintering”—Lara’s word — in Florida. She was not particularly close to them, Lara had said; none of the four siblings was. “A psychologist friend keeps telling me: the refrigerator is empty; stop going to it,” Lara had said, gulping down her coffee with a hungry vehemence.