A Declaration, a short story

A Declaration

She was recently married, after what I understood to be a long and smooth courtship. At one point he had given her a car, a beautiful Lexus, and he had sent flowers to her office quite regularly, large, ornate (nearly monstrous) bouquets, mostly fat congregations of roses delivered by messenger. It was a courtship to stand back and be impressed by with the end pretty much a given, judging by all those expensive signs. And now she seemed content, at least from what I could tell.

She was tall, reserved, and had the most beautiful hair I had ever seen, so dark it hinted blue in places, when the light was right. And graceful. Then one day, it was a little after ten in the morning and I was in my research library wrapping up the inventory of new arrivals—so it must have been a Tuesday—she knocked softly on the partially open door, entered and said she wanted to talk to me. I said, sure, and stopped what I was doing to look at her. She came up to me, almost tentatively; her face, still and serious, and her steps, slow and deliberate, told me what she had come to tell me was important. Three feet away from me she stopped and took me in with a calm that seemed the fruit of a deep resolve, eyes still and brown and holding mine. “Scott,” she said. “I know you neither want nor need to know this, but the truth is that I love you.”

There was no one else in the library at that time. Only Mai and I and the floor to ceiling collection of law books which allowed little echo so even though her words did not have far to travel they barely seemed to reach me before they were gone, swallowed by a thousand legal spines.

“I know,” she added, I guess to make sure I was hearing her correctly, which would be how she did things, “this is crazy, and I apologize, but I had to tell you.”

She remained standing, still and straight, one of her hands now finding comfort in the other’s company, as if bracing for my reply. There was no doubt in my mind that she had meant what she said. And I, naturally, had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Her name was Mai Dai, well, Wilson now that she was married, and she was a third year associate at my firm, Westin, Prescott & Dunn, a Los Angeles law partnership. We specialized in corporate law; agreements and so on and I believe we got the lion’s share of the town’s Chapter Thirteens; at least half of our attorneys specialized in bankruptcy law.

Mai had clerked with us her last two summers, and from what I heard she got a very good offer from the partners when she graduated UCLA Law School, good enough to fend off other firms that apparently had courted her as well, some quite insistently if there were anything to the rumors.

To my thinking she was the perfect lawyer. She was ambitious and conscientious, and she certainly put in the hours. One of my duties as a paralegal cum librarian was to make sure all was in order for the new day and this entailed arriving at seven o’clock each morning. The theory being, I guess, that I’d be the first one in, to open the shop so to speak, but as a rule she was here before me (along with one or two of the other climbers, of course). Arriving, on my way to the library further down the hall, I’d walk by her office—her office door was often open, or only partially closed, something I for some reason liked about her—and looking in on her I’d see her pouring over paper on her desk, or busy at her keyboard, intent and undisturbed by my passing glance. And it goes without saying that she was always here when I left, still, after three years, putting in the first year associate’s 80 hour weeks.

“Mai,” it wasn’t quite a stammer. “I, I don’t know what to say.”

She looked down, shook her head slowly and smiled. Not sadly. Then looked up at me again. “You don’t have to say anything,” she said, “but I had to let you know.”

Had to. Those were very strong words.

Some moments come too replete to be fully lived as they occur. This was one of those moments. I turned to vacuum looking at her looking at me. Then, still smiling, perhaps a little sadly now, she turned and left.

Leaving me and my vacuum.

And disbelief. It was as if her words were still working their way in, and it took a while for them to actually reach me. The sensation was that they sort of leaked in, filling me drop by drop, till I was finally full of them: this beautiful and elegant woman, for some reason I could not even begin to fathom, had just declared her love for me. For me, married all these years, kids for heavens sake. Mai loved me. Astonishing. Mesmerizing might be a better word. But quite a ways removed from the real. There was nothing like a handle to get on it, and I don’t think I moved, I don’t think I as much as shifted my weight from one leg to the other, for God knows how long. Me and a thousand law books, equally clueless.

Loved me.

Three different emotions (for lack of a better word) now had a go at me in turn. The first was this disbelief. It simply was not possible. I must have heard wrong, I must have dreamed it, I must have something or othered it; but on this point reality seemed quite clear: she had said it, and she had meant it. There was no getting away from that.

The second was joy. Or, rather, one of joy’s distant, nameless, cousins. A glad cousin. Happy to be here. Not very specific about it, though, just generally, viscerally. Unlike her words, however, it did not fill me drop by drop, but arrived in one soft flood. For yes, on occasion I had dreamed about her, of course I had, anyone in his right mind would. Well, not explicitly or with any focus, more like those dreams that launch of their own accord in fuzzy, non-specific sort of ways, every now and offering glimpses of you and her someplace, a dinner perhaps, lighted candles, or in a car along the Pacific, the top down, whatever. Just notions, little fantasy moments enjoyed like hard candy, lasting a while, but savored as much for their impossibility as for their sweetness.

The third was impossibility. Whatever she had just told me, whatever I may or may not feel, there was simply no way. Not in this world. Simply no way.

And then disbelief returned for another whack at me. Then joy. Then impossible. Very impossible. Besides—disbelief returning in another guise—how could she possibly love me? She didn’t even know me well enough to love me. I certainly didn’t know her well enough to actually love her. Did I? So how could she possibly? Possibly?

And look at our differences: Mai was oriental, I was not. Mai was a class act, a beautiful woman. I was a far cry from classy, something I had on good authority: my own opinion for one, and those of my immediate family’s for two. And she was, oh, at least ten years younger than I was, perhaps more. And as if that was not enough: I was not particularly good looking nor did I stay in tune with trends or fashions to make up for it, like some lawyers I could name. So, how could she possibly?

Then disbelief, then joy, then impossible. And still I had not as much as shifted my weight.

As an associate, she did her own research. This was firm practice. Most of it she did in her office (which had a floor to ceiling window and a large teakwood desk) and then she’d come to me for books of decisions which she would carry or cart off for digestion and summation. I’d always offer to bring them to her but she’d usually decline, unless it was just too much for one person to handle.

Occasionally, however—especially, as I came to understand, when she was up against a tight dead line or under some other pressure (for pressure please read supervising partner)—she would come to the library and use its research area. No windows here to distract you, she’d say. No running back and forth for references, she’d say. And no phone to worry about either, she’d add with a smile. I understood. And I made sure she got everything she needed.

The phone startled me and I finally moved. It rang again to let me pinpoint the noise. I found and brought the receiver to my ear.

“Are you all right?” Her voice had no trace of the oriental. I think she was born here, or arrived in this country very young.

It took me a second or two to reach my voice. “I’m fine,” it said.

“I’m sorry, Charles. I should not have told you,” she said, and after a slight hesitation added, “It was not fair.”

Fair? That was a strange word. But as it sank in I saw that she was right, had used the right word. For it wasn’t fair. Not alongside impossible. Not fair at all. Especially when her voice, vibrations very much her own, stirred that visceral joy alive again, or that distant cousin of his, flooding.

When I said nothing in return, she said, “I’d like to tell you why. Can you come to lunch with me?”

I heard my voice reply, “Yes.”

Well, if I’m to be really honest:

It was a little over a year ago. She came into the library and told me she had been given forty-eight hours to finalize a merger contract, about half the time necessary to do a decent job of it even if she worked around the clock, she said. Did I mind very much if she moved in? I shook my head and said no, no, I didn’t mind, and with that she took command of the research area, all of it: three desks, as many chairs, the floor surrounding, and books everywhere with her up and down looking for more, and me helping her as I could.

This was during her second Associate year, and her supervising partner had found in her someone he could depend on in a crunch. Only now, from what I could see, these crunches were becoming commonplace. He worked her hard. It’s the kind of buzz you grow sensitive to in a firm our size, and the prevailing question was whether she would hold up, or would stand for the abuse, rather.

So far, she had. She never seemed to complain, she always got her projects completed on time, usually well in time. And now, here she was working another crisis.

After making sure she was fine, had everything she needed, I left her to her task around seven o’clock that evening. At the door I checked again, just to make sure. “Yes,” she said, with a grateful smile, “Yes, I’ll be fine.”

The first thing I noticed the following morning as I turned the corner from the lobby into my hallway was the light spilling out through the library door onto the dark carpet. She’s still at it, I thought, and I was about to enter the library with some perky comment of commiseration or support—I forget what I had in mind—when I was brought up short by the sight. She was asleep, slumped over the table, her head resting on an outstretched arm, her hair spilling onto paper and books, her features facing me.

At first I felt like an intruder. Then, as the face did not evaporate, like a spectator; then, in that still, dark morning, when her beauty struck me, like a lover.

I must have stood in that doorway for the better part of five minutes, not daring to move lest I wake her. God, how beautiful she was. If ever there was a perfect face, it was hers in sleep. Peaceful, untroubled like a child’s. Every breath was even and full through delicate nostrils that expanded minutely to give way for air every time she exhaled. Her lips, pulled slightly by her arm, formed a smile, as if she was dreaming about something pleasant.

Then she stirred and opened her eyes: looked right at me. Why is it eyes find other eyes so easily? As if related.

Unknowing at first, a little confused, for just that moment, then she was all there. “Sorry,” she said, “Fell asleep.” With that she gathered herself, brushed her hair back with her hands, rose and left, only to return fifteen minutes later, looking and smelling fresh in a clean blouse. She must have brought it or perhaps she kept a change of clothes in her office for occasions like this. I could only guess.

On some level I would never be the same after that morning. The glimpse I had caught of her, of her private, beautiful sleep, had enriched me. I remember startling a little when she returned from freshening up, as if caught out, and I had to fight down an urge to tell her, to confess my intrusion and to apologize, all the while seeing in her movements, in her settling down again to continue her research, in the way she picket up her pencil and again began to write in what I knew to be a very graceful hand—all the while seeing in all this someone I then wished with all my heart I could have encountered earlier, before my life took its turn for the mundane and grew so insipid.

Perhaps love is the word.

Baker’s Restaurant was not very crowded, but then it was nearly two thirty and lunch was for the most part over for the professional crowd. Only strays like us now. No problem with a table. The maître d’ smiled warmly at Mai, looked at me a little less warmly, as something slightly incongruous, then offered us a table close to his right. Mai indicated that she’d prefer a window table, apart from the remaining guests, and the smiling—a little fawning, I would say—maître d’ was quite happy to oblige.

She was ill at ease. Her eyes were not the steady, somewhat curious ones I had grown used to. Rather, they flitted a little, touching each view just for a moment. Finding mine then her hands, then something on the other side of the window pane, a car perhaps, or a building. Then she briefly surveyed the empty tables surrounding us before looking back at me, and then down at her hands again. Not at ease.

She cleared her throat, then took a sip of the iced water which seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, perhaps it had been there all along. Replaced the glass and regarded it for a while. Looked back up at me, took a deep breath, held it for a second, exhaled, said, “You know, it was an awful thing for me to say. Awful for you.”

I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t. Her wanting to see me at lunch, to talk with me, had finally brought it home. Filled me to the brim: Mai Dai, for whatever reason, and however illogically, was in love with me. Disbelief vanquished. And that left joy and the impossible, and they were doing battle.

Whenever I saw her again, after finding her asleep that morning, my heart would take a few extra beats. I came to think of them as dance steps. I’d lose a little breath, and I would always steal a second glance. She had become someone, something, in my life, a warmth. Not love, of course not, but she something bright that I would notice and cherish whenever I saw her. Something I would miss sort of vaguely if I didn’t see her for a couple of days and once when a rumor had it that she was leaving the firm I found myself quite alarmed. In fact, I eventually felt compelled to ask her about it, and it was a great relief to me that she denied any such thing. She had become a faint light on my heart, a secret glow.

But love? No. Come on. No. More like a fantasy that you never question nor inspect nor elaborate upon. Like a seed you do not let grow, do not dare let grow. You just know you have it, you let it make itself at home in your thoughts and you keep it as a private happiness. None’s the wiser and no one gets hurt. Innocent enough.

And no, it wasn’t like a crush either. Like the one I had in ninth grade on this tall, quiet girl who I’m sure didn’t even know I existed. My fantasy was that I would save her life one day by diving in front of an on-rushing car or some other suitable threat and push her out of the way, just barely, while I got slightly injured in the process, broken leg perhaps, at most. Not too badly, only badly enough so that she would look down at me with this mixture of worry, thanks and love that seemed to be what my heart craved at the time. And her father would be rich and he would insist on a very large reward and I would decline, of course, but claim the real price it its place and we’d live happily ever after.

Besides, Mai would never fall for anything like that.

She camped out in the library several times after that, always with urgent projects and unrealistic deadlines, and I would insist I’d stay with her in case she needed help. She said she appreciated it. A lot. Once or twice she stayed through the night (I could dream up no good reason why I had to stay as well), but I never caught her asleep again.

I finally found my tongue. “Not awful, Mai. No, not awful. Unfair, perhaps, as you mentioned. But not awful.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, don’t be,” I said, “don’t be.”

Followed by a silence which had all the signs of settling in. I tried to think of things to say and I’m sure she did too, and I’m sure she tried as well as I did to rush this silence with something that would pierce and crush it, but neither of us was quite up to it. It was the waiter that saved us.

He topped up our water and performed the daily specials, which we listened to politely. He knew them so well, still, we both ordered from the menu.

Before the silence had a chance to settle back in she said, looking straight at me, “Aren’t you in the least bit curious?”

I’m not sure from where on her list of things to say that one came but as it happened it was the perfect thing to say. I just had to laugh. And she smiled.

“Yes,” I said. “And a little more than just a bit. Curious, yes, and flattered. Really flattered.”

She took another sip of water. Calmer now. “I have a dream about you,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I heard her right. Not sure whether she said had or have. She clarified it without really meaning to, “I have this dream. It’s not really you, not your face, not this face you wear right now, but still it is you. I know it is.” She’s not looking at me, she’s looking at her hands, slender fingers resting on the white table cloth.

“I’m at my grandmother’s. She lives—well, lived, she died four years ago—in a small fishing village north of Nha Trang in Vietnam. I can’t be more than seven, maybe eight. It rains and storms all night and grandma prays that the house will not come down on us. Her prayers are answered and when the morning comes it is clear of clouds but for a few large billowing ones, and bright with a large sun. All that’s left of the storm is the swell of the sea, rolling, like echoes, high upon the sand. And all is fine, until I discover that my dog is gone. We search for him everywhere, Grandma and I, but we can’t find him. He’s such a small and light thing that if he had slipped outside during the night the strong, erratic winds that threatened to tear the house down could easily have carried him away, perhaps out to sea.”

She paused but kept her eyes on her hands.

“I am afraid that he’s drowned.” Then she looks up, part of her still in dream, the rest here, for me.

“I see Grandma walking toward me from looking all along the beach and although she is still far away I can hear her sobbing. More for me than for my dog. She enters the house but I stay on the beach, calling for him, calling and calling to the waves to return him. And they do. You step out of the ocean with my little dog in your arms. You have trouble holding him he’s so exited to see me. Once it’s shallow enough that he can run you set him down and he charges through the last of the water like a little spray comet and jumps up at me. But you remain distant. You stand to your knees in the ocean, smiling. Then you turn and disappear into the next large swell.”

Her face told me that was the dream.

After a while I asked the first question that came to mind, “Why do you think it was me?”

“I know it was you.”

“But how?”

“I know it’s you because you’re kind. I know it’s you because you were troubled and returned to the sea. I know it’s you because you brought him back to me.”

She was clutching her hands while she talked to me. Her fine fingers, so lightly brown, touching each other, and her beautiful gold wedding band. As if she noticed my noticing she covered it with nervous fingers.

“Yes, but how can you know?”

“I do, that’s all. It is you in the dream, Charles.”

“But it’s just a dream,” I ventured.

“There’s no such thing as just a dream,” she said.

The silence made a bid to return. Then, whether it was the right or wrong thing to say, somewhere I found the courage to say it: “I have never been unfaithful to my wife.”

I realized as these words stumbled out that they were only the last carriage in a much longer train of thought and that they could easily be taken the wrong way. But she took them the right way.

“That’s not what I’m asking,” she said. “I miss my dog.”

After a while I said, again, “But it’s a dream.”

“It is not a light dream,” she said.

“What do you mean? What is a light dream?” I stressed light as well.

“A light dream is just a dream. This is not light. It is more than dream. And,” she drew a deep breath, “I dream it often.”

“And I am in it each time?”

“Yes.”

“And it is the dream that makes you love me?”

“No,” she answered after a moment or two, “I think it is my loving you that makes the dream. But perhaps you’re right. I’m not sure.”

“I don’t know what to say, Mai.”

“I know it’s unfair.”

“Yes, a bit.” More than a bit, I thought. Much more. She really did love me. A woman. She might as well be a Goddess. I should have risen, smiled and said again how flattered I was, but, you know, let’s be sensible and all that.

Is what I should have done. Instead I asked, “But what about your husband?”

“He’s more like the ocean,” she answered.

“You don’t love him?”

“One day, perhaps, I may learn how to.”

“But you don’t now?”

“No.”

“Then, why did you marry him?”

“It was the right thing to do, all things considered.”

“What things?”

“Families, parents, cultures. Custom.”

I believe I understood what she was telling me. “I see.”

She said nothing in return.

The voice of reason, mine apparently, then offered this: “But you don’t know me, Mai. You can’t possibly love someone you don’t really know.” I knew that to be true. For when you love someone you don’t know it’s called infatuation and knowledge is usually its number one enemy.

“But I do know you,” she said. “I know the way you looked at me that morning when I woke up in the library and you stood in the doorway looking at me.”

She looked up from her hands as she said that, deep brown eyes on mine, and I shivered to find that she had noticed.

“I know the kind of music you play in the library, and how you turn it down and even off sometimes so that it won’t disturb me when I am in there and try to concentrate. I know the kind of books I see on your desk or in your hand as you go to lunch. I know how punctual you are and how you keep your library neat, almost like a sailor’s cabin. I know how you keep pictures of your two children on the wall by your desk. I know how you love them. And I know how your wife’s picture is not among them.”

Each sentence was a little truth I could not repel.

Then she added, “I know how you are different from my husband.”

Then she touched my hand, lightly, and asked: “How about you, Charles? Do you love her?”

“My wife?” A question more for stalling than for clarification.

“Yes.”

The waiter arrived with additional breathing room (although I’m sure Mai would have allowed for silence). And with pasta for her and salad for me and thanks that’s fine, just a tad please of the pepper for my salad and a small yellow snowfall of parmesan for her prima vera and yes a lemon would be fine with the ice tea, and no, nothing else, thanks, I did have some time to reflect.

Love. The word that once had meant so much to me had for some years now not been much more than an echo. A word I had not considered for quite a while. Not in these terms anyway. Once I had, though. We had had so much in common, my wife and I. Up through the nights just talking, and enjoying all those words and words. We were a perfect match, at least on paper, its wordy surface. We talked so much. Read to each other. Talked about what we had read to each other, talked about our talking. And on the strength of that, on the strength of all these words, we married and had children. The surface, all those words, however, had proved thin, and knowledge—what was done as opposed to said—gnawed away at love, or at infatuation perhaps, until duty was all that remained. No, I thought, and especially in the presence of this contrast, this understanding, only a foot or so away across from me, no, I no longer loved my wife, if I ever had.

And that is what I answered, “No.”

She flinched ever so slightly, as if the answer had stung her.

“But you’re still married?”

“My daughters,” I said.

“That’s what I thought.”

Silence settled in again, this time to more or less stay. Too much had been said, too much life exposed, perhaps. I guess we both had to digest, assess maybe, what had happened here, and so we ate our meals over only a few additional words.

When the waiter returned to tempt with dessert she shook her head and I asked for the check. It was high time we got back.

“What about you?” she asked in the elevator lifting us to our floor. There was only the two of us in it.

I knew what she meant, but had to ask anyway, more like a reflex. “What about me?”

“How do you feel,” she hesitated, “about me?”

Then I felt like an idiot for forcing her to say it. And even more like an idiot for what I replied.

“I don’t know, Mai.”

And I think she knew I was lying. Still, I believe she meant it when she said, “Really, I’m sorry, Charles, I should not have brought it up.”

The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. McDermot and French stepped aside to let us out, impatient to go somewhere.

We walked toward her office in silence and when we got there and she turned to enter I knew I had to do something, say something. If not for her, for me. I had to keep this alive, even if she was a goddess, as unreachable as clouds. If only for my dreams.

“I’m not sorry, Mai. I’m glad you told me.”

She smiled then, and gave me her hand, as for a handshake, as if for show. Perplexed I took it. But it was like a kiss.

The best way to describe the next to days is: a mist. I think it was only routine and the demands of my office that kept me functioning, comparatively sane.

Time and again I dreamed myself child and wifeless, but each time I woke up to the impossibility of it. I saw Mai several times, in her office as I strode past, once in the elevator. She smiled, shyly I thought. Similar dreams?

In the end, no matter how I thrashed and wriggled, dreamed and dreamed again, I could only arrive at one resolution: it simply could not be.

I called her and we agreed on another lunch.

I don’t know how she knew of my resolve, but she did. Once we were alone at our table she made a motion to place her hand on top of mine, but changed her mind. Instead she looked down for a second then told me.

“I have decided to leave, Charles.”

Looking back, I see that this should not have come as a surprise. This is what she would do, remove herself in apology for her intrusion. I should have felt relieved, I guess, but I wasn’t. I was devastated.

“What to you mean, leave?”

“The firm.”

“Why?”

“Why? Why would you ask that? I cannot rob your children of their father, nor your wife of a husband, love or no love. I have no right. I was wrong to tell you. Really, I was.”

Yes, I guess she was. But she had told and it could not be untold, not by her leaving, not by apologizing, not by anything.

“To be honest,” I said, “Over the last two days I have wished a hundred times that we could have met years ago. Or that I would never have married, and that you would never have married. That this would be simple.”

“But it’s not.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not. It’s more than not simple, it’s impossible.”

“I know.”

We picked at our food but didn’t eat much.

But there was one thing I didn’t quite understand. “Why did you marry?”

At first she seemed surprised by the question, but she answered it willingly enough.

“As I mentioned, Charles. Family, custom. It was what was expected of me. The thing I owed my parents. And, really, my husband was very sweet while we were engaged. With my career and his, and what we both wanted to achieve professionally, it was a good match.”

“But you didn’t love him?”

“I did love him, or thought I did, at one point. Perhaps it wasn’t love, perhaps it was comfort.”

“What changed?”

“I know this sounds pathetically clichéd, but once we were married, once I was his, and that’s how he put it, he changed. It was as if he had played the part of caring fiancé just to cement a deal, and once we were married he grew tired of it. He turned into his father, and into perhaps his father before him. The ruler of the household. That’s what he is now, and claims whenever we argue. What he says goes. By tradition, by our Vietnamese tradition, I no longer own myself.”

I must have looked incredulous, for she went on to assure me.

“It is our tradition. I thought he had outgrown that. He said he had. He treated me like a queen. But, as I came to realize, it was all part of the courtship, the last, gilded stretch of freedom for the Asian woman.”

For all our internets and gadgets and sources of information, how ignorant we are about things that actually matter, I thought. About life and cultures and people.

I was about to answer when she added, “I will leave him.”

“Can you? I mean, will he divorce you?”

“I’m going to ask him. If not, I will leave anyway.”

I was going to ask, will he let you, but looking across the table from me I realized that it was not part of the equation. She would leave, whatever it took to leave.

Instead, I asked, “And the firm?”

“Yes. I will leave the firm too.”

“You can’t.”

She said nothing, so I added, “You must stay.”

That earned me a deep glance. “Why?”

“Because I want to know you. I want to know where you come from, who you are, your hopes and dreams. All about you.”

“But you said it’s impossible.”

“I know I did.” And then I ran out of words.

By an eerie coincidence, when the elevator doors opened to let us off on our floor, we were in McDermot’s and French’s way again. I saw bemusement in their faces too, well, in McDermot’s anyway, French was more intent on surveying Mai than being surprised. They rushed inside and we walked, slowly, trying to extend the journey, down the hall. We decided to meet again.

“When I was younger, from sixteen onwards, I read a lot of eastern philosophy, that’s where I figured I’d find wisdom. The more lasting values, like peace and compassion. The soul. India especially. They seemed to care about these things.”

She said nothing, only watched me.

“But the more I read about India, apart from the century or so around the Buddha, the more bloody and violent it got. Hesse’s Indian Life really brought the violence home.”

“The Glass Bead Game.”

“Yes. Magister Ludi. Did you like it?”

“Yes, I did. Although I found it a little depressing. He’s very insightful, and spiritual. But also very German. Clinical. And his protagonists have a thing for killing themselves.”

“True.”

I poured some tea for us and picked up my thread. “Same with Japan. I always had the idea of a gentle, kind and loving people, until I got some insight into the Samurais and Warlords and suddenly realized that maybe there was no more warlike people in the world.”

She simply nodded.

“And your country. I could hardly believe the accounts I read of atrocities committed by North and South against the other. Incredible violence. I wonder if Asia ever was spiritual?”

“It was,” she said, “and still is. But also practical.”

“Practical?”

“Extremely practical. In the war it was well known that sufficient pain will always give you answers. But usually the victim ends up maimed before talking and by then it’s an act of kindness to kill him. To spare him. The objective is everything. Besides, you only kill a body, not the person.”

I shuddered at the words, so incongruous with her face, and marveled at her matter of factness. Not the person.

“So you believe in the soul?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“That you have a soul?”

“No, that you are a soul.”

That you are a soul. “Were you born here?”

“No, in Vietnam. We came her when I was ten.”

“But you have no accent at all.”

“There were lots of Americans around to learn from when I grew up.”

“Of course.” I tried to recapture my train of thought. “That you are a soul? They taught this in school, or was it your parents?”

“It is our country. It’s something you know. We have not lost touch with life around us. No matter how cruel the war was, no matter how much blood was shed, each and every one knew that when he died he would return, knew that the life that is life within us is the same life that grows the trees and the rice and the bamboo and the birds, and we have not lost that. I hope we never will.”

“Something we have lost.”

“Yes. Something you have lost. Here there are far too many layers of comfort between life and living. At times it makes me very uncomfortable.”

“What do you mean, Mai, between life and living?”

She gave it some thought, and took a while to formulate answer.

Then said, “To many of us in Vietnam life is more natural, more basic, and living it is as natural as rain. At heart life is the life the farmer lives when he watches the sky for signs of wind or storm, when he watches the fields for growth, for signs of pests, watches his flock for signs of illness or health. When keeps an eye out for predators and knows how to nurse life. Especially the small farmer. His living is close to life, close to the heart of life. But look at us. Look at that nicely dressed man over there gulping a cheese burger. I bet he has never even thought that he is eating something that lived not long ago. That was slaughtered and skinned and hacked up and minced so that he could eat. His living is far removed from life. Far too distant. This country of yours, of ours, has lost this contact and it will not go well. That is Vietnamese wisdom.”

She paused, and I was about to say something, when she continued, “Here in the West we are losing this intimate contact with life, and when it is all gone, we will no longer live. Our lives will be a mockery of living, simply motions gone through, consumption, ignorance. The East has not gone that far.”

“But catching up fast,” I suggested, thinking about India who produces more movies each year then the United States, and about all the call centers that are now flooding the sub-continent to meet the West’s customer service needs economically.

She sighed. “Yes, I think you’re right.”

I finished the salad. We had to get back. Truth be told, I was shaken, for every exchange, every insight into her life, so much deeper and richer than I had imagined, brought me closer to admitting that I loved her too. Mai was someone I could live with, as opposed to going through the motions with. And again I wished myself single and younger.

“Do you and your husband ever talk about these things?” I wanted to know.

“No,” she answered and shook her head. The blue streaks in her black hair rippled. “No, we don’t.”

At one point my wife and I had exchanged words like this, or words similar to these, but they were just words. When after our wedding I had suggested that we take a year off and travel to India, to Asia, and find out for ourselves, she thought I was crazy. No, she would much rather move back to Cleveland where her parents still lived. Los Angeles was too exotic for her, forget India. Besides, India was a thing of the sixties. We had grown up now. But I had not, have not. I’m still nineteen at heart no matter what my birth certificate says or what my face implies. When it came to doing as opposed to talking, we parted ways soon after the wedding, at least our spiritual ways. Oh, if it hadn’t been for the kids.

“Neither do we,” I said.

She did not reply.

“Why did you become a lawyer?” I didn’t mean for it to sound like an accusation, but it did. Still, curiosity was the stronger ingredient and she took no offence.

“It was my father’s wish.”

“But, do you believe it’s the right thing to do?”

Her face turned quite still. “I am their only child and my parents sacrificed their lives for me: to give me an American education, to give me an American life. Every thing they did, every job they held, every insult they suffered, it was to give me an education ‘in America’. They saw immigration as the only way to break the bond of servitude and tradition. They have had no life of their own, the only life they have lived is mine. I could not refuse his wish, and he wished me to be a lawyer. ‘The Lawyer,’ he used to tell my mom and me, ‘is the new land owner, the new ruler,’ and he wanted his daughter to be one, to deliver the family. So they worked day and night while I completed college and law school. I chose to specialize in the area of law I found least offensive: corporate practice, contracts. It at least has some use.”

How quick we are to judge, I thought. And how little we really know.

She turned the tables. “And you? What are you doing in a law firm? Seeing as you don’t approve of lawyers.”

I may have blushed, but I tried to ignore that. “I started as a legal secretary. After a while I offered to help set up a library data base and that led to helping the librarian part time and I found I had a knack for it: I love books and I like order. One of the partners, Ludwig, retired now, liked me, or my work, or both, and wanted me to run the library one day. But, he said, I had to finish college, and take some paralegal and librarian classes. The firm would pay the tuition and I could study two days a week if I promised to stay with the firm once I was done. I agreed. And I’m still here.”

“Did he make you sign a contract?”

“No. We just agreed. Handshake sort of thing.”

I think she approved of Ludwig.

“But what made you come here in the first place?”

“Typing and computers were what I knew and I needed a job. Word processing was a good match. And law firms used word processors.”

“And you stayed because you promised.” She smiled, more to herself.

I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but it was true.

“Where is your husband from?”

It was not a pleasant subject for her, and she did not answer directly. But after a while she said, “He come from many generations of men.”

“Why do you like Bach?”, she asked.

“He likes order,” I answered. “And he has discovered the heart of mathematics.”

That earned me a smile.

“But why have you never pursued art? When you love it so?”

She shook her head. Sadly. “It was not my place to wish. First it was dad. He wouldn’t hear of it. Mom had told him, even showed him some of my drawings. Wouldn’t hear of it. Then it was time. Lack of time. Law school is very demanding. I wanted to be at the top of my class. To pay dad back.

“And then it was Frank. He doesn’t like art. He says he does, but doesn’t. He always finds something to complain about when I settle down to draw. Something that needs doing, that can’t wait.”

My relationship to writing, exactly.

We saw Il Postino together. I was “working late,” she was “finishing up an agreement.” At first we did not, then we did: hold hands in the dark theatre, like teenagers in love. She cried at the end. I wanted to but remained the man, with moist eyes.

“I think the string quartet is the perfect musical expression.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because there are only four voices. But those four are sufficient to weave a master piece with nowhere to hide.”

She smiled, “What do you mean, hide?”

“Take a symphony, there are so many voices, so much volume, force, really, that you can hide behind it. Too many voices, especially if you misuse them, which can be a temptation if your are not sufficiently gifted as a composer. Volume, rhythm, diversions. You can’t get away with that in a string quartet.”

“No, I guess not.”

“How about the Beatles?” She wanted to know.

“I saw them live, you know.”

“You did!?”

She was actually impressed. Like a young girl taken by surprise. I felt old. Then her face became mine and I grew young again.

“I feel a lot cleaner without it,” I said.

“If God had meant us to not eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?” she said. And laughed.

I laughed too.

We drove up to Ventura one night to catch Procol Harum at the Concert Theater, their last reunion tour. She did have some doubts about this. Our alibis were solid enough, but she had never heard of the band.

“Procol Harum released the single most fantastic record of all time,” I said.

She looked at me.

“A Whiter Shade of Pale,” I explained.

“Have I heard it?”

“You must have,” I said.

“I don’t know. I don’t recognize the name.”

They didn’t play it until the second encore, but when they did it brought back the summer of ‘67. Brooker’s voice the very timbre of promise.

She tugged my sleeve. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard this one before.”

They ended as always with “Repent Valpurgis” and when during Trower’s solo (a storm of guitar growing up from the floor and devouring everything) I looked over at Mai her eyes had grown two large tears and I knew then that I loved her beyond anything.

“I had one brother and one sister,” she said one day, but did not want to elaborate just then.

“You think I’m eating too much meat,” she said.

“Yes,” I answered.

“I find Faulkner a bit morbid,” she said.

“He is morbid,” I answered. Then I said, “When on earth did you have time to read Faulkner?”

“In the bath,” she said.

It was raining but the drizzle was so fine it bordered on mist falling. We didn’t notice at first and once we did we didn’t care. We sat on the steps and watched a flock of Mexican children play. All black hair and white teeth and smiles and laughter and snippets of language we both knew. They didn’t care either. And we both wondered what it would be like, if. And we looked at each other and did not speak.

We never held hands in public, of course not, but when we touched, by design or by accident, the spark was real and each time new.

“Charles,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I want to make love to you.”

We were walking back from the deli where I had a salad and she a sandwich. She didn’t look at me as she said this, yet the words were direct, carefully considered.

“I can’t,” I answered. “I can’t be unfaithful to my wife. Not yet,” I added.

“But you already are,” she said.

“Come,” she said. She laid her warm hand on top of mine and left it there for several seconds. She then stood up and shouldered her handbag. I paid the waiter and followed her toward the elevator bank.

“Where are we going?”

We stepped into the glass cage and she pressed twenty-six. “I rented a room for the day,” she said as the doors slid shut.

The elevator surged upward and the sexual fist struck the middle of me with damaging force. I could not breathe for several heart beats and I knew I was shaking slightly. Vibrating with it. We stood apart, waiting for our floor. I could not speak for lack of moisture. She smiled and the fist struck again.

She took my hand and led me out of the elevator, to the left. I followed, unable to resist, thinking that this must be wrong, this must be wrong, still following, still hurting.

We had never kissed before, and at first our lips collided. Then parted, then met again, gentler, fitting to each other in warm symmetry searching for a perfect fit. Our tongues melted and formed a glow, a rush, a river. I think I cried. And we melted together.

I burst almost immediately. “Sorry,” I said, not yet aware of shame.

She clung to me and refused to let me out. “The kiss was worth it,” she said and she must have been smiling.

We rested a while.

Guilt is a funny thing. For me it was as strong as the urge that brought it. It dogged me, occupied me, spoke to me, harassed me, covered me like a lead blanket, making it hard to feel anything else.

I had never been unfaithful before. For all my dreaming and wishing myself away and out of my marriage, I had never cheated on my wife before. But now thought had turned to deed and there was no unthinking it. I had committed adultery. In the middle ages they hung adulterers, or worse. Nowadays they sued them. Adulterers lost rights to see their children, were despised and were of a different breed of human beings, a lower, filthier, unholier kind. And I had made my way among them.

Mai read my mood and stayed away. I was too occupied to marvel at her perception.

I had to tell my wife. Get it off my chest. I resolved this time and time again, but time and time again reneged. I stewed in this sticky, sickly, gush called guilt.

Then, it was a Wednesday, she was not there.

I walked by her office as I arrived and the door was still closed. No light seeping out through the narrow gap beneath. An hour later as I picked up the morning mail, still no Mai.

By lunch I checked with Lisa, her secretary. No, Mai was not in. She was ill.

It was strange the way I had never considered the two as ever related: Mai and illness. Incongruous concepts.

She was still out the next day and Friday as well.

By Monday, when she was not back, I feared something was very wrong. And thinking about her, trying to imagine what was the matter, why she was no longer here to see, to talk to, I realized both how strong and how tenuous our relationship (if that is what we had) was. For while I was nearly frantic about her it dawned on me that I had no idea where she lived or how to reach her.

Then I got a hold on myself and consulted the firm directory. It would list home numbers. It did. I called.

I listened to several rings, and then came the answering machine. A sing-songy male voice, not very deep, informed me that the Wilsons were not available to come to the phone right now, and would I please try back later or leave a message. I did not leave a message.

I tried several times that morning. I did not leave a message. Then, just after lunch.

“Hello.” The voice from the machine.

“Hello. Is Mai Wilson there please?”

“She is resting. Who is this?”

“I’m calling from her office.”

“I’ve already told you, she’s had a minor accident. She will back next week. She is resting now.”

A minor accident? “Thank you.”

I checked with personnel, but they had nothing to add to that.

The week passed very slowly. I busied myself with tasks and tried not to think about her. I thought of calling again with the hope to reach her, even tried it once. Got the machine again. She would be back next week, he had said. So I waited. Guiltily.

The light was on but the door was closed. I stopped. Felt fourteen years old all over again. Uncertain, scared, hopelessly in love. I knocked on the door, and opened it, and saw her face, and knew why she had stayed home.

Her eyes met mine but we said nothing. She knew I knew and that no amount of makeup would fool me. She shook her head and started to cry. I closed the door behind me and walked over to her. I kneeled by her and she buried her head in my shoulder. I felt her warm tears on my neck.

After a while she said, “I’ve been very foolish. I told him. I told him I wanted a divorce. That I had met you, no I didn’t tell him your name, but that I met you and wanted a divorce.

“I had misjudged him. He grew wild. Like some beast shouting Vietnamese. I had lost touch with all form and tradition, he yelled. I had lost my place as a woman and degraded him as a man, and he ranted about ruling and owning and me being his servant, his stupid love-sick servant cat in heat, and he began beating me with his belt. Over and over and over and over. In the end I screamed so loud that he had to stop.”

I had never had the urge to kill anyone before. But at that point I knew that I was capable of killing Frank Wilson. I held her again, as tightly as I could and promised her it would never happen again. Never.

I’m not even sure that we actually planned what we did. It was more like the lawyer in her took over, and I followed suit. Over the next week she liquidated every asset she had in her own name, and some of those held jointly by forging her husband’s signature, still making sure to take no more than was ethically hers.

Me, I spent as much time as I could with my daughters, 15 and 12 then. Just time, nothing else, both knowing and not knowing how precious time was now and I wanted to give them all of it that I could offer.

I also signed an affidavit and left it with my lawyer to the effect that the house was now in my wife’s name including all it’s equity. I paid our car loans off and transferred the balance of our savings into her checking account. She would find out her next statement. There was enough there now to cover the mortgage for a few years to come.

The evening before, I took in the kitchen, the front room and the den as I looked around and asked them how their homework was going. Fine, they said, just fine. Need any help? No, thanks though. Sure.

The next morning I left earlier than usual. It was still dark outside. Not much in the way of packing, but enough.

Mai stood on the sidewalk by the main entrance. Not much packing either. She let herself in and sat down beside me.

We headed east on the 10 freeway. Into the dawn. Just a pink band of suggestion along the horizon, widening. She hooked her arm through mine as I was driving and leaned her head on my shoulder. Her cheek, her warmth seeped through my clothes and filled me.

Thoughts? I'd like to hear them.
Ulf Wolf

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