Legends

1997: MINH SLEEPWALKS THROUGH ONE-NIGHT STANDS

DRESSED IN LOOSE-FITTING SILK PANTS AND A HIGH-NECKED SILK blouse with a dragon embroidered on the back, Minh was clearing away the last of the dirty lunch dishes when Tsou Xing poked his head through the kitchen doors and asked her if she would run upstairs and check Martin’s beehives. He would do it himself, he said, but he was expecting a delivery of Formosan beer and wanted to count the cartons before they stored them in the cellar to make sure he wasn’t being short changed. Sure, Minh said. No problem. She opened the cash register and retrieved Martin’s keys and headed for the street, glad to have a few minutes to herself. She wondered if Tsou suspected that she had slept with Martin. She thought she’d spotted something resembling a leer in his old eyes when Tsou raised the subject of their upstairs’ neighbor earlier that week; he had been speaking in English but had referred to Martin using the Chinese word for hermit. Where you think yin shi goes when he goes? Tsou had asked. Minh had hunched her muscular shoulders into a shrug. It’s not part of my job to keep track of the customers, she’d replied testily. No reason climb on high horse, Tsou had said, whisking a fly from the bar with the back of his only hand. Not a crime to think you could know, okay? And he had smiled so wickedly that the several gold teeth in his mouth flashed into view. Well, I don’t know and I couldn’t care less, Minh had insisted. Pivoting on a heel, she had stalked off so Tsou would get the message: She didn’t appreciate his sticking his nose into her love life, or lack of same.

Now Minh rubbed her sleeve across the private-eye logo on Martin’s front door to clean the rain stains off of it, then let herself in and, taking the steps two at a time, climbed to the pool parlor. Actually, she did wonder where Martin had gone off to; wondered, too, why he hadn’t left a message for her as well as Tsou. She attributed it to Martin’s shyness; he would have been mortified if he thought Tsou had gotten wind of their relationship, assuming you could call their very occasional evenings together a relationship. She meandered through the pool parlor, brushing her fingers over his Civil War guns and the folders on his desk and the unopened cartons that contained heaven knows what. Soon after he’d moved in she had asked him if he wanted help opening them. He’d kicked at one of the cartons and had said he didn’t need to open them, he knew what was inside. The reply struck her as being very in character.

When Minh thought about it, which was more often than she liked to admit, the fact that she really wasn’t sure where she stood with yin shi exasperated her. He always seemed happy enough to see her but he never went out of his way to initiate meetings. Minh had been raised in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, a cauldron simmering with refugees of one sort or another, so she knew one when she saw one; the thing that betrayed them was they seemed to be alone even in a crowd. She herself was in the country illegally, a refugee from Taiwan. Minh was not even her real name, a detail she’d never revealed to Martin for fear he might be shocked. Sometimes she had the weird feeling that Martin, too, was some kind of refugee—though from what, she had no clue. Yin shi lived what she thought of as a boring life, ordering up the same dishes three or four nights a week, attending to his hives on the roof, making love to her when she turned up at his door. For excitement, he broke into hotel rooms to photograph husbands committing adultery, though when he described what he did for a living he managed to make even that sound boring. The single time she had raised the subject of boredom he had astonished her by admitting that he relished it; boring himself to death, he’d insisted, was how he planned to spend the rest of his life.

At the time Minh had thought it was one of those things you say to sound clever. Only later did it dawn on her that he’d meant every word; that boring yourself to death was a way of committing suicide in slow motion.

Stepping into the back room, Minh straightened the sheets and blanket on the cot, emptied the water from the plastic basin on the floor, closed the refrigerator door, put away the dishes that Martin had finally gotten around to washing. She retrieved Martin’s faded white jumpsuit and, rolling up the cuffs and the sleeves, slipped into it and zipped up the front. She put on the pith helmet with the mosquito netting hanging from it and took a look at herself in the cracked mirror over the bathroom sink. The outfit was not what you would call feng shui. Taking Martin’s smoke gun from under the sink, she made her way up the stairs to the roof. The sun, high overhead, was burning off the last drops of rain that had fallen the previous night. Vapor rose from shallow puddles as she crossed the roof to the hives. Martin had bought them and the equipment, and even the first queen bees, from a catalogue when he got it into his head to raise bees. In the beginning he had pored over the instruction book that came with the hives. Then he’d dragged a chair up to the roof and had spent hours staring at the colonies, trying to figure out if there was a flight pattern to the swarm’s movements, a method to its apparent madness. Minh had never seen him do anything with such intensity. When he’d begun inspecting and cleaning the frames he’d worn gloves, but he discarded them when Minh happened to mention the Chinese belief that bee stings stimulated your hormones and increased your sex drive. Not that the subsequent stings on his hands had changed anything—it was invariably Minh who made the first move toward the cot in the back of the loft, pulling Martin into the room, onto the cot, peeling off her clothing and then his. He made love to her cautiously, as if (she finally realized) he, not she, were fragile; as if he were afraid to let emotions surface that he might not be able control.

Minh was crouching in front of the first hive, preparing the smoker, ruminating on how making love with Martin had been like sleepwalking through a string of one-night stands that were physically satisfying but emotionally frustrating, when the dumdum bullet plunged into the frames. There was an instant of absolute silence, as if the 20,000 residents of the hive—those that had survived the impact—had been reduced to a state of catatonic bewilderment. Then a raging yellowish-brown football-sized swarm burst out of the hive with such ferocity it knocked Minh over backward. The pith helmet and veil flew off to one side and the bees attacked her nostrils and her eyes, planting their darts with savage vengeance. She clenched her fingers into fists and hammered wildly at the layers of bees encrusting her skin, crushing them by the hundreds until her knuckles were covered with a sticky residue. There was no longer a sun overhead, only a thick carpet of rioting insects ricocheting off one another as they fought for a turn at the intruder who had wrecked their hive.

Her face and lids swelling, Minh slumped back onto the hot tarpaper of the roof, swatting weakly at the bees the way Tsou had whisked at the fly on the bar. As the pain gave way to numbness, she heard a voice that sounded remarkably like her own telling Martin that, hey, you really shouldn’t wear gloves. Sure there’s a reason why. According to the Chinese, bee stings can stimulate your …