"I wanted to try and visit my wife."
A wife! But of course, he was a mature man, older than she. "So-she was the one sent here?"
"That’s how it was."
"And why do you say ’try to visit’? If you were both sent here, couldn’t you just be assigned to the same place?"
He didn’t answer right away, but made a great show of peeling the orange.
"This was a Cultural Revolution thing, right?" she persisted.
"It was during the Chaos, yes."
Alice kicked herself. She couldn’t shake the habit of using the phrase wenhua da geming, cultural revolution. Stupid. Naive. Many Chinese didn’t reply with that phrase, cultural revolution. To them it was something so much larger and more engulfing. They often called it the Chaos.
"Dr. Lin, I guess you’re not talking about her just being sent downcountry." His hand shook and the point of the knife made a jagged tear in the orange’s delicate membrane. A drop of juice welled up and dripped down the side. "Of course not," he said, and now an edge was in his voice.
"So you mean…" She didn’t want to say the word, in case she was wrong.
"Laogai, " he said, and dug hard at the orange with the knife. Just the one word was enough, laogai. Literally it meant "reform prison," but everyone knew it was a shadow world of hard labor, and lots of people disappeared into it and never came out. She saw the tight irritated press of his mouth. This happened to her a lot. She spoke pretty well, and so people thought she would float easily into the oblique nuances favored by Chinese intellectuals. For them, it was all about allusion: more beautiful than definition. But she never seemed to talk that way. Language fluency was only language fluency. It didn’t make her Chinese.
"Look, I’m sorry." She didn’t know if she meant about his wife, or her west-ocean-person rudeness.
"Mei guanxi, " he said, It doesn’t matter. But of course it did.
"Call to America," she told the fuwuyuan at the front desk. "Houston, Texas." Horace still paid for an apartment in Houston and she checked her voice mail there from time to time. Jobs, she usually got through her referrals from the U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce. But sometimes people called her apartment.
She penciled in the form the clerk gave her and headed back to her room to wait for the connection to go through. She’d been surprised to learn that her international call had to go through Beijing-it had been years since she’d been in a hotel of any size that didn’t have international direct dial. She picked up the book of Pierre and Lucile’s letters and tried not to watch the phone.
A few thousand kilometers away, in Beijing, Fourth Apprentice International Operator Yu Lihua noticed a blinking red light on her board, one she hadn’t seen before. She called her supervisor over.
"It means the call’s to be recorded," Supervisor Ling said. The older woman covered her surprise. She glanced at a sheet of little-used codes, tacked to the wall. "Ah," she said, "it’s PLA."
Yu Lihua just looked at her.
"Are your ears clogged? Has your brain run out through your mouth? You know the sequence. Tape it! They’ll pick up the tape next shift." She turned and walked away.
Finally Alice’s room phone stabbed out with its twin bursts. She snatched it up. On the line another phone was ringing, far away. She visualized her studio apartment in the Heights, upper right unit in a pleasingly outdated white clapboard, once a family home in Houston’s boomtown cowboy days, when jalopies were roaring down dirt roads and Hank Williams was blaring from jukeboxes, now walled off and turned to apartments for four single people. She was old for such a life, she knew. She was stuck in the past, with the same rough Mexican table she’d had since her days at Rice, same bookcases. No more ferns, no ponytail palms, no artful bonsai. Was never there long enough to take care of them. My life is my art, she liked to lie when people asked her. She waited now through her outgoing message and then beeped for her calls.
"Alice, how are you, dear? It’s Roger."
As if she would not know the parched voice of her father’s top aide anywhere.
"Call in, please, Alice. There are some things we need to talk-What?-Wait a minute…"
Some whispered voices in the background. Urgent tones, disagreement. Someone’s hand muffling the mouthpiece. She pressed closer to the receiver, concentrating. "Give me that," she heard distinctly, her father’s polished corporate voice.
A fumbling noise, then Horace.
"Alice, darling, please call as soon as possible. Something’s come up. Nothing to worry about. But call as soon as you can-"
There was a sharp breath, a silence. Horace, groping for words? Impossible.
"-Okay sweetheart. Good-bye."
The message beeped off.
She stared at the phone. Nothing to worry about? He never left messages for her like this. It was always Roger, crisp as the Chinese word for a dry stick snapping, gancui, checking off what needed to be conveyed to her as if he were discharging his to-do list. Or else Horace would call her message machine himself, to tell her he missed her or he loved her or she was the most wonderful girl in the world-or to ask her when she was coming home to visit him-but he was always warm, eloquent, and fully in command.
This message had sounded downright nervous. Very un-Horace.
Something had to have happened.
She scrabbled for her wallet and her sunglasses, glancing at her watch and calculating the time difference. Eight-thirty in the morning in Washington. Good. He might be in the office.
Still, she had to go out to an anonymous public phone hall. She couldn’t call him from her room. China was too full of listening ears and prying eyes-and Horace was an important man in America.
On this afternoon the public phone hall three streets over from Sun Yat-sen Boulevard was crowded with Chinese, Mongols, Muslims. Black-eyed stares lapped at her as she walked lightly across the stone floor and to the end of the booking line. She pulled her baseball cap low over her eyes. Her eyes narrowed as she saw that the people around her were different, not what she was used to, not wholly Chinese. There was an insolent, almost truculent air in the place that one rarely saw with an all-Chinese crowd. Finally she got her ticket number and slipped over to wait against the wall. The ceiling was high, vaulted stone, and it turned the noise of the crowd into a bouncing roar.
"Qi shi ba hao!" a voice sang over the din, and Alice threaded back to the counter to be directed to a phone booth. As she eased down onto the polished wooden stool in the wood-paneled cubicle, she fought down apprehension. She stared at the black metal phone, the beautiful old rotary kind she hadn’t seen in the United States in forever. Why would Horace sound so agitated?
She eased up the receiver. "Wei!"
’’Meiguo dianhua! Deng yixia!" the operator screamed, Phone call to the U.S., hang on.
The faint stew of indiscernible languages, the trans-Pacific phone lines, and then the far-off ring of an American phone. Horace’s private line, the small phone on his desk, next to the framed pictures of herself and her mother-young, fresh faced. She was already so much older than her mother was then. A second ring. Was he at his desk?
"Mannegan," he answered crisply.
"Horace, it’s me." She’d intended to be the concerned, bustling caretaker. She’d also intended to remain Alice, separate, safe on the other side of the world. But as usual, the minute she heard her father’s voice she felt the rush of belonging. He was the one person in the world to whom she was permanently connected. "How are you?" she asked.