The food was good. It might have been the variety, or the complex flavors, or the hour, but they ate more slowly than they had at lunch, talking less and with more comfortable pauses. The tuning fork still hummed, but at a lower pitch.
“What was it like for you growing up in China?” The question, Seeley knew, could spoil the mood but, as in the taxi with Palmieri, it was the question he asked of anyone who interested him; for him, it was the single great mystery.
Lily clapped her hands as a child might. “Oh,” she said, “I had a wonderful childhood.”
“What were your parents like?”
“I never really got to know them. My father's a physicist and my mother's a chemist, but when I was growing up they were either in prison or on a farm hoeing beans and being politically reeducated. I came to America before they got their lives back.”
She spoke of this so lightly that Seeley was certain that he misunderstood.
“My grandparents-my mother's parents-raised me. They were wonderful people and they spoiled me terribly.”
She described trips with her grandfather to a local zoo populated with a weird assortment of animals, and of toiling side by side in her grandmother's small vegetable garden, offering the stories as gifts that implicitly asked for Seeley's memories in exchange. To Seeley's astonishment, he found himself talking about adventures of his own: bicycle excursions to places like the Ellicott Square Building that he'd only read about in the newspaper or seen on television; the long solitary hours he spent in Buffalo's wondrous art museum. He had grown so accustomed to thinking of his childhood as a single, unremittingly dark passage that, as when he remembered building beerbottle castles with Leonard at the Germania, the memories were like bright windows opening.
Seeley said, “Besides being able to eat like a party official, what else do you like about America?”
“The independence.” She pronounced the word carefully, as she had “relationship” the other day, as if the very word was a treasure to be handled gently. “Young Chinese women come here, they find good work and, for the first time in their lives, they have financial independence. Sexual independence, too. That's another reason they don't go back.”
Which Glamour article had she turned to first, Seeley wondered, the one about overcoming shyness or the one about ten bedtime treats?
“It must be hard,” he said, “balancing relationships with independence.” It was his last attempt to get her to talk about Steinhardt.
“You're a good listener,” Lily said.
“I liked the stories about you and your grandparents.”
“No, I mean your remembering what I said about relationships at lunch. Not many people listen that closely.”
“I would have thought that's mostly what scientists do. Observe. Listen.”
She poured tea from a teapot and the fragrance of jasmine blossomed over the table.
“The ones I meet, all they want to talk about are their toys. I can tell you anything you want to know about every concept car and useless electronic gadget ever made.”
“You ought to enlarge your circle.”
“I'm trying.”
She rose to gather the dishes. When Seeley started to help, she said she was sure he had been a very dutiful husband-how did she know that he had been married? — but that he should go out on the balcony and watch the fog come in.
On the other side of the sliding doors, the night air was damp, and the ocean and the town were already lost in fog. Seeley listened for the foghorn that at lunch had sounded every fifteen minutes, but didn't hear it. The silence must have transfixed him, because at some point, without his realizing it, Lily had come onto the balcony. She slipped next to him at the rail, and Seeley was aware of a fragrance, like the gardenias in the apartment, but paler.
“It's so quiet,” he said.
“Not really. Concentrate. Listen to the ocean.”
After a long minute in which Seeley tried to block out the street sounds, she said, “What did you hear?”
“Waves splashing against rocks.”
She put her arm around his shoulder to cup a hand at his ear, making it a shell. “Listen.”
“Nothing.” Seeley shook his head.
“It takes time. With practice, you can actually hear the ocean itself, the animal life, the plants, everything.”
At that moment, Seeley wished that he could stay on the balcony with Lily at his side forever. Any hope that he had of discovering Steinhardt's secret lifted off from the balcony rail and soared like a gull out over the Pacific.
Lily said, “The fog will be like this all the way back to the city. It won't clear until just before dawn.”
“I bet you knew that when you asked me to dinner.”
“I'm a scientist. Of course I knew.”
She took his hand-her fingers were as cool, as he'd imagined they would be-and led him back to the living room, indicating the place next to her on the couch. When she drew her legs up beneath her, the magic slit in her skirt parted once more, just barely, but this time remained open.
“Would you like more tea? Anything?”
Seeley said no. “What was your name? In China.”
She smiled but shook her head. “You'd never guess.”
“Something beautiful, I'd imagine.”
“Or mysterious.”
Her hand slipped to his wrist and, unbuttoning the shirt sleeve, she let her fingertips graze his arm. The other hand rested casually on her thigh.
Watching the dark thoughtful eyes, Seeley placed a hand against Lily's cheek. She brushed it with her lips and opening his shirt, leaned into him, pressing her ear to his chest so that she could listen to his heartbeat. Eyes closed, Seeley traced in his mind the imagined arc of the seagull until it was no more than a speck against the night sky.
Seeley felt Lily draw away, and when he opened his eyes she was above him, her features in the dim light-the perfect curve of an eyebrow, the slope of a porcelain cheek-like fragments of a puzzle. She unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse and pulled his head against her own heart. “Listen! This is how the ocean sounds.” After a time, long fingers gently pulled him upward. She touched her lips to his, and Seeley tasted some flavorful trace-tamarind? ginger? — before taking her head in his hands and kissing her.
His lips barely touching hers, Seeley said, “You didn't tell me your name.”
“You're very persistent.” Her fingers rested on his arm, as if she were waiting for something to happen.
“So are you.”
She ran her other hand through his hair. “Mi Hua.”
“Which means?”
“I knew you'd ask.”
“Which is why you wouldn't tell me.”
“Would you like to stay the night?”
“That would be nice,” Seeley said.
“Secret Flower.”
Ah.
FIFTEEN
Trials are theater, a fact that Seeley considered once again, while waiting for Judge Farnsworth to make her entrance. Palmieri was busy at his laptop and Barnum faced the empty jury box, his back to counsel's table. In the bright tiled washroom, Steinhardt preened before the mirror for a full five minutes, patting his already slicked-back hair, running a small ivory comb through the neatly trimmed beard, adjusting and readjusting his tie before finally unknotting and retying it. Coming into the courtroom, he wanted to know where the press was. Was there someone from The New York Times?
“They're in the row on your left,” Seeley said, “but, when you get on the stand, don't look at them. Look only at the jury or at me.”
Leonard was two rows back, gesturing that he needed to talk to Seeley. Seeley saw the jury filing in through the back door, and shook his head, no.
The clerk cried for all to rise, and from the same door as the jury, Judge Farnsworth swiftly ascended the bench. Even before she settled into her high-backed chair, she signaled Seeley to put on his witness.