“It’s exactly on Mott Street,” Sally said, giggling. “Do you know where that is, exactly?”
“Well, not exactly,” Jesse admitted.
“Do you girls live together?” Buddwing asked. “Tina? Is that your name?”
“Yes, that’s my name,” Tina said. She had a very small voice, faintly touched with an Oriental flavor, a slight musical quality. “What’s your name?”
“Sam.”
“Why’d you want to know if we live together?” Sally asked, turning to face Buddwing.
“I’m just curious.”
“Are you sisters?” Jesse asked.
“No, we’re not sisters,” Sally said, smiling, and then turned again to Buddwing and again asked, “Why’d you want to know if we live together?”
“Because he was hoping maybe you’d invite us in for some tea,” Jesse said.
“Chinee tea velly good tea,” Tina said in a mock Chinese singsong.
“Velly velly good,” Sally said, picking up the phony accent. “Hot and holly.”
“I mean, after all, we did get this jalopy started for you, and looka me driving you all the way downtown. That deserves a cup of tea, don’t you think?”
“At the very least,” Sally said, and she giggled.
“What you like with your tea?” Tina asked. “We got fortune cookie, almond cookie, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry ice cream, orange sherbet, kumquat.”
“I’d just like a nice cup of tea and maybe some soft music and a place to put up my feet,” Jesse said. “Man, I been on the go since four o’clock yesterday.”
“You like we play nice music on samisen?” Tina asked.
“I like you play nice music on record player.”
“Well, we see,” Sally said. “You make turn here, please, this Canal Street.”
They came into the maze of Chinatown and cruised the streets looking for a parking spot. This was not the nighttime Chinatown of red and green neon, of tourists trying to decide which restaurant to enter, of brilliantly lighted souvenir shops with paper dragons and cardboard swords, of teenagers in search of firecrackers. This was a neighborhood, and it happened to be Chinese, the way that side street in Yokohama had happened to be Japanese, with people living here and going about the daily routines of their lives. The neon signs did not shout their intentions at one-thirty in the afternoon. Huge muted Chinese calligraphs stood white and pale against the sides of tenement houses. The souvenir shops seemed gathering the strength of their motley wares for the Saturday evening onslaught, Chinese women dusting porcelain Chinese warriors in window fronts, a Chinese man hanging a colored paper lantern, pulling it taut and testing the light bulb, a feeble glow in an afternoon window. Boys and girls stopped to talk to each other on the street, in English, and old men lingered about newsstands, reading the front pages of Chinese-language newspapers. Women moved in and out of the markets, the food in the windows rare and exotic to Buddwing’s eyes, the water chestnuts and green onions, the ginger syrup and kumquats, the octopus and lychee nuts. As he stepped out of the parked car into the spring afternoon, he found himself looking into the open kitchen door of a restaurant, and seeing the hanging pigs on their great hooked chains rotating slowly over a smoke oven. The pungent smell of roasting pork touched his nostrils, evoking a stronger memory, the cleavers in a neat row hanging above the chopping block, the sea bass marinated and ready to roast, the rows of frogs’ legs tied in neat pairs for hanging in the L-shaped oven, these, these; he took Tina’s hand as she stepped out of the small car.
“Well, do we get the tea?” Jesse asked.
Sally put one hand on her hip and extended her leg, bending it slightly, the pale white length of her thigh showing in the deep slit. Tina was wearing a blue skirt and a white blouse, with a tiny gold pendant watch around her throat, and she looked much less Chinese than Sally in her green silk, high-necked, thigh-slitted dress. Sally was thoughtfully considering Jesse’s last question now, her pale brow faintly wrinkled, her teeth gnawing on the inside of her mouth. Whatever decision was being formed in her inscrutable mind apparently had little or nothing to do with Buddwing or Tina. Buddwing immediately suspected that Sally, who seemed to be close to thirty-five if not over the hill and gone already, had her own apartment here in Chinatown and was now debating whether or not to share humble abode and hot and holly tea with two strange white devils, one of whom was sailing man. The decision, in any case, contrary to the one made in the car where Tina had advised and Sally had accepted, was one that Sally would undoubtedly reach independently, with neither counsel nor debate from Tina. So they all stood on the sidewalk in dumb anticipation while Sally wrinkled her brow and jutted her hip and extended her bent leg and nibbled at the inside of her mouth, and the neighborhood Chinese women came and went with their marketing baskets.
“Well, what the hell,” Sally said at last, “let’s have some tea.”
It was going to be a monumental drunk, one that Buddwing would remember for years to come. It was going to be one of those roaring, boisterous, sex-filled, whiskey filled afternoons where nothing mattered but the wild soaring joy of letting go, and even that was not a conscious thing.
The apartment was not as Oriental as he had thought it would be, not as Oriental as the small wooden hut on the Yokohama side street had been in May of 1946. A Chinese man was sitting on an upended milk box in front of the tenement doorway as they climbed the front steps, following Sally. He looked up in brief disapproval and then went back to watching the street. There had been smoke coming from the shack in Yokohama. It had been in a row of shacks on a street behind what must have been a major thoroughfare before the bombings. A small path led to the door of the shack. They had followed the older woman with the gold tooth, and the younger girl shuffling along behind her, up the path to the door of the shack and then had entered. There was the smell of woodsmoke. A small hibachi burned in the center of the room. Sally opened the door to her apartment, and they followed her into the kitchen where beaded Oriental curtains hung at the far end, separating it from the living room. A calendar was on the kitchen wall, a Chinese girl decorating its face. There were a range and a sink and a refrigerator and an enamel-topped kitchen table. Sally walked directly to the beaded curtains and held them aside for Jesse and Buddwing. They walked into the other room, and Tina and Sally followed them. The décor here was faintly Oriental, twice removed, Sally’s honorable ancestors being honored more in the breach than in the physical actuality. There was a couch bought from one of the modern foam-rubber places on Park Avenue South, and a very low slatted table before it, and on the other side of that a pile of brightly colored cushions. Another calendar — Japanese, not Chinese — hung on the living room wall, and an abacus was on the top of a modern chest of drawers on the opposite wall. There was, too, an open game of mah-jongg and — on the wall above the chest of drawers — two delicate Chinese prints of birds. Aside from these touches — the calendars, the abacus, the game, the prints — the apartment could have been any one of a hundred apartments in the neighborhood where he had been born and raised. No, there was one other thing, and it was this that brought back with peculiar pungency the Yokohama shack: the faint aroma of burning incense.
“Do you really want tea?” Sally asked.
“Well, like what did you have in mind?” Jesse said.
“I thought maybe a drink, but...” Sally shrugged. “You think it’s too early for the fleet, Tina?”
“It’s too early for me, that’s for sure,” Tina said.
“Tina just sniffs the cork,” Sally explained, “and right away she’s back in the Tang dynasty.”