"I mean whezzer I can become a decent poet in English eef I persevere."
"No doubt about that, Nan. You'll be a fine poet." "I may also mess up my life."
"That's common. I've already ruined a good part of mine." Dick laughed and blinked. "Why did you say zat?"
"My parents wanted me to be a lawyer. I even went to law school at Columbia for a year, then I quit. My dad was mad at me for wasting so much money. In my parents' eyes I was a loser."
"But you're a success now. You have an excellent jawb."
"I may lose it anytime. If Emory doesn't give me tenure, I don't know where I'll go. Look, you have your wife and kid and you have a home. That's already a success. I have nothing but myself. Most poets in America are worse off than I am. I knew a middle-aged poet who died of pneumonia because he had no health insurance and couldn't go to the doctor when he was ill. To tell the truth, in a way you're lucky, Nan. Whatever happens to you, your family will be with you and love you. To top it all, you have your own home and business, a solid base."
Dick's words surprised Nan. Never had he thought his family could play such a vital role in the writer's life he tried to imagine for himself. Indeed, even if he ruined himself totally, his wife and son would remain with him. Without question, to Dick he was a kind of success, at least domestically. This realization gave him some confidence, now that he knew he had little to lose. All he could do was try.
He drove to three local libraries and found seven of the eleven poetry books Dick had listed for him. To get the other four titles, he went to Borders at Gwinnett Mall and bought two of them. He also ordered Linda Dewit's Elsewhere at the bookstore. But they couldn't find Richard Harrison's An Appointment in the Afternoon. The young saleswoman searched in the computer, but to no avail. "Are you sure this is the right title?" she asked Nan, biting the corner of her mouth, beside which a pair of thin lines emerged. Nan wondered whether they were wrinkles or scars.
"Yes. Do you carry ozzer books by zis author?"
"No, I don't see any here." She kept her eyes on the monitor.
"Have you ever stocked zis title?"
"No, we haven't."
Nan didn't try further, since the nine poetry books already in his hands would occupy him for two or three months. Besides, he was sure that Dick had a copy he could borrow.
When Dick came to the Gold Wok the next time, Nan mentioned his inability to get hold of Richard Harrison's book. Dick reddened, lowering his eyes while slurping seaweed soup. "What's zer matter?" Nan asked. "Don't you have a volume of his poetry?"
"Of course I do. I wrote it."
"What? But your name is Dick, not Richard. Your new book has 'Dick Harrison' as zee author."
Dick laughed nervously, his face puckering a little. "You don't know Dick is a nickname for Richard."
"Oh, I really don't know. You mean it's like Bob for Robert or Bill for William?"
"Exactly. From now on I go by Dick for my author's name."
"My, I never thought you would be on zer list."
"Why? You think I'm unqualified?"
"No, I don't mean zat. We Chinese would never do that!"
"Do what?"
"To put down your own name on such a list. I didn't imagine it was you. Hey, I don't mean to hurt your feelings. I'm just telling zer truth."
"I'm not that fragile. But I have to assert myself, even to pat myself on the back. A lot of poets just write dreck, but still they have everything-fame, money, and women."
"So you write for those?" asked Nan, half joshingly.
"Why not? Poets are not saints. We have to make our way in the world too."
"But poetry seems useless to me."
"You have to take it as a matter of life or death if you want to write well," Dick said in earnest, and unconsciously put down his spoon.
Nan thought about his friend's words afterward, but he was unconvinced. He couldn't see how poetry could be used as a means of getting fortune and fame, much less women. In the Chinese tradition, poets often celebrated poverty, believing their art could improve and mature with hardship and impoverishment. On the other hand, Nan remembered that Wallace Stevens once said money could become poetry. Yet that statement was mainly about the time and energy the poet needed for writing; it didn't bear on the fortune and fame Dick had in mind. Nan didn't agree with his friend, and neither would he believe in the principle upheld by traditional Chinese poets who had ritualized poverty. He felt that too much hardship could dull a poet's sensibility and smother his talent, just as in his own case the hard work over the years had stunted his growth as a poet. Now he had to keep his mind alert and clear and find his way.
4
IN MARCH, Mrs. Lodge bought eight ducklings, each already more than half a foot long, and kept them in the lake. They grew rapidly and in two months looked like adult ducks, waddling about with heavy asses. When swimming in the green water, they looked blaz-ingly white. Though they didn't fly away to other bodies of water, they took off occasionally, darting from one end of the lake to the other end and quacking gutturally. Because of their ability to fly, Nan often wondered whether they were a hybrid of some domestic and wild ducks. The eight of them always stayed together. When they paddled around, the largest drake would lead the flock, and together they resembled a miniature cruising fleet. Taotao called the head drake the bully, because the rascal would chase female ducks and even geese. If a goose was too large and too tall for it to tread, it would just sit on her back as she sailed around in the water, both of them shrieking like crazy.
One morning in May, Nan and Taotao returned from the supermarket with the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The moment they got out of the car, the boy caught sight of the bully duck perching near the gate to the backyard and shuddering in silence. Taotao went up to it, but the drake wouldn't move or make any noise. He pushed it with his foot; still it wouldn't budge, trembling without pause. Nan came over too. They saw blood on its head and feathers. "He must have been injured," Nan thought aloud in English.
The boy ran into the house, flapping his hands above his waist like a pair of penguin flippers. He shouted, "Mom, we have the bully duck in our yard. He won't go away."
Mother and son came out together while Nan held up the drake and saw that it had been mangled by fishing lines and hooks, its tongue hanging out, slashed by a large fishhook that had gone through it from underneath. Several pieces of fishing line were twined around its neck, choking it. One of its wings had collapsed, unable to move. Stroking its feathers, Nan found another hook stuck in its good wing. He managed to dislodge this one and some other hooks, but he couldn't take off the one on its tongue, which, when he tried to remove it, hurt the duck more and made its mouth bleed again. The poor creature was so damaged that it couldn't make any noise.
Pingping cut the fishing lines with scissors, but they couldn't get rid of the fishhook without further injuring the drake's tongue. She went back into the house and returned with a pair of pliers, her apron pocket stuffed with a bottle and cotton balls. With both hands Nan severed the hook so that the barb wouldn't cut the tongue again when he pulled the shank out. The steel of the fishhook was so hard that it had even dented the edges of the pliers. "Open his mouth," Pingping said to Nan while taking an aspirin tablet out of her apron pocket.
Father and son pried the duck's bill apart. Pingping, who had worked on a poultry farm for two years back in China and knew how to treat sick chickens, broke the aspirin in half and inserted one piece into the drake's mouth. It swallowed the medicine, and she rubbed its throat to ensure that the aspirin sank into its craw. Next, with a pair of sticks she picked off the maggots from its wounds. Then she gingerly rubbed the gashes with a cotton ball soaked with hydrogen peroxide; the wounds kept foaming while the drake's legs twitched fitfully. After the treatment, Taotao and Nan carried the creature to the lakeside and released it. It paddled away listlessly, hardly able to keep its head above the water.