The Man With No Time

2

As much as I loved Eleanor Chan, my hangover was making it difficult to like her.

“He saved my life,” Eleanor said, grabbing my arm with surprisingly strong fingers.

“This seems to be a family trait,” I said, pushing her hand aside. Then I hung onto her wrist. The room had developed an alarming tilt.

We hadn't been seated yet. Horace, Pansy, the two kids, and Uncle Lo were late meeting us, and the competition for tables at the Empress Pavilion was too fierce to allow us to do anything but mill around hopelessly, clutching our paper numbers and praying that the rest of the group showed up before our number was called. The entire Chinese population of Los Angeles proper, which is to say all but the more recent Mandarin-speaking arrivals who had laid claim to Monterey Park, showed up at the Empress Pavilion for dim sum on Sundays. Every single one of them was talking. For all the myth of the inscrutable Orient, the Chinese are the most demonstrative people on earth.

“Well, he did" Eleanor said, raising her voice over the din. Like many Chinese, she seemed perfectly at ease packed shoulder to thigh with strangers. "He carried me, literally carried me, more than two hundred miles across China on his shoulders with my pregnant mother following behind dressed as a peasant. When we hit the water he tied my hands around his neck and swam toward Hong Kong with my mother paddling along behind.”

We hadn't actually talked about this in detail before. “Lo did that?”

She turned away, scanning the crowd for latecomers. “The harbor was full of police boats. He bought them off, somehow. Three or four times we saw the spotlights skipping over the water. Once a light stopped just above our heads and someone yelled something in Cantonese. I thought we were dead.”

“What did he yell?” I just can't help asking questions.

“Who knows? I was just a little kid. But whatever it was, and whatever Uncle Lo called back, the boat turned around without picking us up and moved away from us, and Uncle Lo told us to follow the boat, and half an hour later another boat picked us up and we were in Hong Kong.”

“He must be very resourceful,” I said.

She gave me Full Glare. “You make it sound like an accusation. If he hadn't been resourceful, I'd still be in China.”

“I'm grateful,” I said, meaning it. My headache approached tumor magnitude. “But there's still something wrong with him. Whose brother is he? Your mother's or your father's?”

“Neither,” she said. She looked at my big doleful white man's face, mistook my grimace of pain for a pang of conscience, and lifted herself up to kiss my cheek. She'd always been forgiving, and I'd often taken advantage of it. “Uncle is a term of respect. For years, I thanked Uncle Lo in my prayers every night for what he did for my family. If he hadn't, there wouldn't have been any family.”

Now we were on familiar ground. Eleanor's family had been landowners, a fatal mistake when the Chinese government made one of its Great Leaps forward. Her father, a university professor, had spent eighteen hours kneeling on broken glass and reciting his sins to illiterate Red Guards. Then he'd been sent to prison in Manchuria, and when the prison officials realized he was going to die, they released him so they wouldn't have to bother with the body. Somehow he got himself home and impregnated his wife with Horace as a final gesture toward life. That finished, he'd turned his face to the wall and let life go. That was in 1959. Eleanor was two.

Like many men of his class, he'd been an intellectual, which made him doubly guilty. He'd written a long scholarly treatise about Cao Xueqin's The Dream of the Red Chamber, the novel that Eleanor and I loved best in the world. It had brought us together at UCLA, me in Literature, she on loan from Oriental Studies. Both of us had been transfixed by the tale that set forth the problems of Bao-Yu, the pampered and neurotically sensitive rich boy, and his two beautiful female cousins, the ethereal Dai-Yu and the earthy Bao-Chai-a vanishing Gone with the Wind way of life painted unexpectedly on a Chinese canvas like the frilly blue tragedy of the Willow Pattern.

“So, Uncle Whoever,” I said as the room listed in the other direction. “Uncle Duplicitous who doesn't like Pansy.”

Eleanor's eyes narrowed, never a good sign. “Simeon.” Then she heard what I'd said. “What do you mean, he doesn't-”

A hand landed heavily enough on my shoulder to make my teeth crack together, and I turned to see Horace grinning lividly at me. He was an especially drab shade of olive and perspiring freely, and there were flushed blotches under his eyes. Over his shoulder, Pansy gazed cheerfully at me through her square spectacles. Compassion surged over me. “Nice imitation of military camouflage, Horace,” I said, throwing an arm gently over his shoulders. “How are you, Pansy?”

“We are fine,” Pansy said as she always did, meaning the family. Pansy's ego could have floated in a fairy's tear. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that said OHIO U, and her inevitable high heels. Something was missing.

“Four-ninety-one,” said the woman at the cash register.

“Here,” Eleanor called urgently, waving a slender arm. She grabbed my sleeve and yanked at me, and Horace came along in my wake, grunting unhealthily as he bumped against me. Pansy, who couldn't see his face, put a possessive hand against the small of his back and beamed affectionately at his neck. “Horace isn't hungry,” she said to me.

“I'll bet he isn't,” I said as Eleanor pulled us along. Horace burped discreetly, and the burp reminded me of what was missing. “Where are Julia and Eadweard?” I asked. I hadn't seen Pansy without the twins since the day they were born.

“Home,” Pansy said. In the absence of the twins three cameras hung around her neck, vestigial organs from an earlier life in which she'd wanted to be a photographer. Marriage and the twins had recast her, in the Chinese tradition, as wife, mommy, and daughter-in-law to Eleanor and Horace's remarkably difficult mother. Until that moment in the Empress Pavilion, the only mementos of her earlier calling had been the twins' names, which were bestowed in honor of Julia Cameron and Eadweard-pronounced "Edward"-Muybridge, two of the seminal figures in photography, and the abandoned cameras hanging high on the walls of the apartment where the children couldn't reach them.

“You're kidding,” I said. The jade-green dining room of the Empress Pavilion yawned open around us. An infinitesimal Chinese waitress in a black skirt and white blouse was leading our wagon train toward an empty corner table. “Who's taking care of the twins?”

“Uncle Lo,” Horace said, succeeding at speech against all odds.

“He didn't come?” I asked stupidly, craning my neck around to look past Pansy. “But this was supposed to be in his honor.”

“He decided to stay home,” Horace said enviously. “Said he'd had too much to drink last night.”

“Also, jet-lagged,” Pansy said, translating her Fukienese dialect as she went. “He has some kind problem with time.”

“We're here,” Eleanor said. An empty table for four blocked our way, and Eleanor began to organize. “You there, Simeon. Me, here. Horace, across from me, and Pansy-”

“Just minute,” Pansy said, circling the table and doing things to lenses. “Sit, Horace, please. Sit, everybody.”

We sat. Pansy took enough pictures to fill the Spiegel catalog and then seated herself, her face gleaming with exertion and good humor.

I hadn't seen her look so happy since Horace had brought her home from Singapore, where they'd met. At that time her conversation had been full of Edward Weston, Robert Capa, Duane Michaels, and Cindy Sherman, photographers who had made a difference. She'd said “I'm fine" when asked, instead of "We're fine.” Now she said "we" all the time, and the names in her conversation were Horace, Eadweard, Julia, and Mommy, and the cameras had been left to hang on the walls.

“It's, um, noisy,” Horace offered, surveying the room with ill-concealed loathing. As always, he clutched his knife and fork, the Empress Pavilion's sole concession to gwailos-non-Chinese-straight up in his fists, like a baby. A very large, very belligerent baby.

“Poor Horace throw up this morning,” Pansy contributed. “I don't know why.” Her face was innocence personified.

“Maybe it was the motion of the earth,” I said nastily. I made a whirlpool in the air with my hands. “You know, it spins and spins and spins. .”

Horace waved my hands away pleadingly. “I want another planet,” he said. “One that isn't noisy. One that doesn't spin.” He fanned himself with his right hand. His upper lip was slick with sweat. “What was Uncle Lo drinking?”

I tried to recall, but my memory seemed to be wrapped in opaque white cotton. “Not much, whatever it was. He said he was hung over?”

The first dim sum cart appeared, an aluminum two-decker filled with balloons of white pastry, pushed by an angular Chinese man in a too-short white jacket above impossibly narrow black trousers. He rocked the cart back and forth as though the dumplings were infants about to cry.

“If he's hung over, it's because he's not used to drinking,” Eleanor said a trifle severely, giving 90 percent of her attention to the dim sum. “He's a Responsible Human Being.” Eleanor was good at speaking in capital letters.

“I gather Bravo didn't think so highly of him,” I said, watching her choose something white and vaguely spherical for me. Bravo Corrigan was the dog I'd loaned to Horace and Pansy so the kids could have something to torment. Big, genetically generic, raffish, and fiercely territorial, Bravo was Topanga Canyon's canine free spirit, taking up residence with anyone who would put out a bowl of something to his liking. “Tried to bite him, didn't he?”

“Bravo only like the twins,” Pansy said, swallowing first, as always. Pansy's manners were brilliant.

“He's wonderful with them,” Eleanor acknowledged as she flagged another cart pusher. “He sleeps in their room. He follows them all over the apartment. He lets them ride on him and try to tie his ears into knots.”

“They call him 'Papa,' " Pansy said, laughing. "Horace get so mad.”

Horace was staring balefully at the steamed buns on his plate as though he was afraid they might start square dancing. “I can understand their confusion,” I said.

“Eat, poor Horace,” Pansy said, helpful as ever. “Make you strong.”

“I don't want to be strong,” Horace said sullenly. “I want to be sensitive.”

“The new Horace,” Eleanor cooed. “Remember all the new Nixons? Did I tell you,” she said to me, “that my mother's coming out to see Uncle Lo?”

“Good lord,” I said. “Turning her back on the bright lights of Las Vegas?”

“And the new one, too,” Eleanor said.

I poked whatever she'd served me. “That's right, there's a new one, isn't there?”

“A plumber. Actually, a plumbing contractor.” Eleanor put something that was almost certainly a chicken's foot on Horace's plate. Horace recoiled discreetly and looked out the window. “She wouldn't have a mere plumber.”

“Should be good for her grouting,” I said. Mrs. Chan, now working on husband number four, was an energy demon whom I'd frequently seen scouring the grouting between her kitchen tiles with a toothbrush and a bottle of Clorox. Her fingers looked like she soaked them in lye, but her grouting was immaculate.

“What's his name?” I asked Horace, trying to bring him back into the room.

“She calls him Stinky,” Horace said. “I think it's a nickname.”

“I certainly hope so. Rich, huh?”

Horace shrugged experimentally. His head stayed on. “Who knows? He's Chinese.”

“Mom says he's lazy,” Eleanor ventured. “But from Mom's perspective, who isn't?”

Horace, often the cynosure of his mother's wrath at his inability to hold down more than two jobs at the same time, let out a sigh that fluttered his napkin, and Pansy put her hand gently over his. Horace retracted his hand, leaving Pansy looking down at empty tablecloth. I wondered, and not for the first time, whether something was going wrong between them.

“What's your mom say about Uncle Lo?” I asked. “She must be thrilled.”

“Well, she's coming. Sometime today.”

“Today?” Pansy said, knocking over, and catching, a glass of water.

“What time?” Horace demanded, alert at last.

“Three.” Eleanor lifted a hand. “Horace, I told you on the phone last night-”

“Who remembers last night?” Horace snapped.

“The pictures,” Pansy said. She licked her upper lip and then wiped it with a pale forefinger.

“Blinking baby Jesus,” Horace said. He stood up. “We gotta get home.”

“I'm not hungry anyway,” I said truthfully. “What pictures?”

Pansy, frantically hanging cameras around her neck, said, “Just pictures.”

“We haven't paid,” Eleanor pointed out. She seemed privately amused at something.

I got up and dropped thirty dollars onto the table. “Take that off last night,” I said to Horace, “and let's go.”

“What's your hurry?” Eleanor asked.

“I want to see those pictures,” I said.

“It's Pansy's rogues' gallery,” Eleanor said as Horace, thirty feet in front of us, passed a truck on a blind curve. There was an indignant raspberry from the horn of an oncoming car, and a bright red Ultra-Nondescript hurtled past us, hugging the curb. The driver was facing backward and screaming out the window.

“Remember when you could tell cars apart?” I asked. “Sweet little Pansy? A rogues' gallery? Who are the rogues?”

“Everybody,” Eleanor said. “Pansy's been wicked with her camera. But it's mostly Mom.”

“Ah,” I said, closing my eyes as I passed the truck. When I opened them, we were still alive. “Ergo, the rush.”

“Pansy's always been the perfect Chinese daughter-in-law,” Eleanor explained cheerily. “ 'Yes, Mother, no, Mother. Of course you can cut the children's hair, Mother. Why should I have anything to say about how my children look?' And all the while, she had the cameras dangling all over the house. And good for her.”

This was surprising. Eleanor had escaped her mother's massive gravitational field approximately ten minutes after she entered college, but she'd always seemed to expect filial piety from Horace and Pansy. After all, it was traditionally the responsibility of the eldest son to take care of the parents. And Horace had come through. Until Mrs. Chan had moved to Las Vegas, only eighteen months earlier, she'd exercised absolute dominion over the small apartment in which all the Chans except Eleanor lived, and which Mrs. Chan owned. It had always seemed to me the most claustrophobic possible living arrangement; there was literally no room for disagreement. Not that Mrs. Chan, then between husbands and lacking a sinkhole for her supernatural energy, would have tolerated disagreement even if they'd all been rattling around in the Taj Mahal.

“So what's wrong between Horace and Pansy?”

I could feel Eleanor's glance. “Who says anything's wrong?”

“Eleanor,” I said, “either I'm a member of the family or I'm not. They're not the same. Something's wrong.”

“I don't know,” Eleanor said unconvincingly.

Well, I thought I knew-I could smell Ning's perfume coming out of my pores.

“I can understand if he's frustrated,” Eleanor said, capitulating. “Mom is the boss, and Pansy knows it, which is pretty hard on his ego. And Pansy's pregnancy was, well, difficult, you know? They couldn't make love for months and months.”

“They can now,” I offered, and then I thought about it. “Can't they?”

“Pansy says they don't.” People, even private people like Pansy, volunteered things to Eleanor. “I was there one night with the kids, and Horace hadn't been home for hours. She was setting the table for dinner, way too late to expect Horace to eat anything, and all of a sudden she fell to the floor and started to cry. She missed a chair on the way down. So I sat next to her, and the next thing I knew, she opened up. Yikes, of all the things I didn't want to know. She thinks he's got a girlfriend.”

“I doubt that,” I said, joining the Brotherhood of Guilty Males as we coasted up the driveway of Mrs. Chan's apartment building. Horace and Pansy were climbing out of their car, Horace shouting at Pansy in Cantonese until she silenced him with something sharper in tone and further north in dialect. Over the squabble I could hear Bravo barking a manic welcome, but the barking sounded muffled. Pansy threw some phrase that was all elbows and edges over her shoulder as she climbed the steep exterior stairway leading to the back door of the apartment. Then, turning face forward again, she stopped climbing, so suddenly that Horace, running on momentum and alcohol fumes, stumbled into her back. Pansy had to throw out a hand and grasp the banister to keep from toppling back on him, but the gesture was nothing but muscle. She was completely focused on the landing at the top of the stairs.

The rickety wooden child-restraining gate that Horace had installed to keep Julia and Eadweard from the first, and potentially last, fall of their lives was hanging open. Pansy snapped something that was clearly a question, and Bravo suddenly loosed a volley of barking that was more frantic and deep-chested than simple welcome.

The gate was always kept closed. It was the last thing Pansy checked every night and the first thing she rechecked in the morning. She took the stairs two at a time, cameras banging against her body and each other, and bolted through the open back door. Horace trudged resignedly up behind her, and Eleanor pushed past me, her face grim and tight, a mask of muscle.

Then Pansy screamed. It was a virtuoso, three-octave shrill. A diva's scream, breaking at the top of the scale and shivering its way down again. Eleanor and I got through the door just in time to see Pansy, hands pressed against her cheeks, fill her lungs all the way to her knees and start a new one.

Horace had reached her by then, hoisting her like a sack of rice and carrying her backward. Following, I saw the kitchen.

It had been trashed: utensils spilled glittering onto the floor, flour dumped everywhere, the first snowfall after the bomb. Bravo thundered away somewhere near.

The hallway took me past the kitchen and into the combination dining and living room. The table lay on its top, legs sticking up into the air as stiff as a dead cow's. Upholstered chairs had been slit open and eviscerated. The rugs had been pulled aside. Pictures, including some from Pansy's rogues' gallery, had been torn from the walls and trampled. The family shrine had been bent and smashed, and a hole had been kicked in the wall below the mantel on which it stood.

Horace deposited Pansy on a sofa that looked like it had vomited its intestines and headed off toward the bedrooms, and I followed, leaving Eleanor to try to take Pansy in hand. Horace was already in the twins' room by the time I hit the hallway behind him. I could see that one of the beds was lying on its side.

“Shit,” he said, and the door to the hall closet buckled outward and then snapped back, held by a childproof external bolt five feet from the floor. I slid the bolt, and Bravo rocketed out between my legs, hitting me so hard that the door slammed shut again. I was turning away to join Horace, who was shouting something to Pansy from the twins' room, when I saw the piece of paper tacked to the door.

It said: Theyre okay, dont do nothing.

The sign drew my eyes back toward the door. I opened it and saw a surprisingly large and very dead Chinese man. He had a small mustache and wide empty eyes. He was no one I knew.

From the driveway, far below, I heard Bravo loose a long, bereaved howl.