The Man With No Time (2 page)

“You detective boy,” Uncle Lo said, surprising me. When I'd been told the family hero was in town, I hadn't known he'd been told what I did for a living.

“Yeah,” I said, worrying about Pansy and the twins. “Detective boy.”

“Hah,” Uncle Lo said, as though I'd admitted personally eating most of the members of the Donner Party. “Some Chinese not like detective.”

“And some detectives don't like some Chinese,” I said, draining my newly full glass without thinking about it.

Uncle Lo put his hand on my arm and squeezed. I lowered my head—which seemed to take a
lot
of time—to check it out. His index finger was scraped raw, its nail split vertically to the quick. It must have hurt him to squeeze my arm, but nothing showed in his face. “What you think about me?”

“I think you've got a terrific black eye. And I think Horace should be home with his wife.”

Uncle Lo sank his fingers more deeply into my arm, and I watched the skin beneath the nail go white, except for the livid line of red beneath the split. It had to hurt like hell Then he smiled a cheese-yellow crescent that defied the pain and stood. He didn't wobble this time. “We go home then.”

“Swell,” Horace said, materializing next to the table. He'd splashed his pants, leaving a pattern that suggested an archipelago of uninhabited islands adrift in a khaki sea. “The urinal moved,” he said.

The girls laughed again, dutifully this time, and Horace settled the tab, added a big tip, and led us out through the door in an imprecise conga line. Horace and I had lost the ability to identify either of our feet as right or left, but Uncle Lo walked with the kind of precision that would have qualified him to lead the Long March. Once we were squeezed into the front seat of Horace's little Honda—the backseat was taken up with the twins' stuff—Uncle Lo leaned against my shoulder and went promptly to sleep.

“I gather the dog tried to bite you,” I said conversationally, but he'd departed the conversation zone.

Horace was far too drunk for L.A. on a Saturday night, but the luck that had deserted him in the men's room rejoined us in the car. He swerved away from oncoming headlights once or twice and said
"Wheeee"
too often to reassure the faint of heart, but eventually we pulled up behind the apartment house that he and Pansy and the twins rented from his and Eleanor's mother. Pansy stood silhouetted in the light from the door as Uncle Lo revived against my shoulder and gave the world a survivor's squint.

“So,” I said as Uncle Lo and I climbed carefully out of the car beneath Pansy's sober gaze. “Who'd you call in the bar?”

“Always detective,” Lo said. He held up the wrist bearing the watch he'd kept checking. “I look my watch, and all wrong. So I call Time.”

I started toward my car before the question struck me: “Why didn't you ask one of us what time it was?”

“Detective boy,” he said dismissively, “Good night.”

I thought about it all the way home.

2 - Dim Sum and Then Some

A
s much as I loved Eleanor Chan, my hangover was making it difficult to like her.

“He saved my
life,”
Eleanor said, grabbing my arm with surprisingly strong fingers.

“This seems to be a family trait,” I said, pushing her hand aside. Then I hung onto her wrist. The room had developed an alarming tilt.

We hadn't been seated yet. Horace, Pansy, the two kids, and Uncle Lo were late meeting us, and the competition for tables at the Empress Pavilion was too fierce to allow us to do anything but mill around hopelessly, clutching our paper numbers and praying that the rest of the group showed up before our number was called. The entire Chinese population of Los Angeles proper, which is to say all but the more recent Mandarin-speaking arrivals who had laid claim to Monterey Park, showed up at the Empress Pavilion for
dim sum
on Sundays. Every single one of them was talking. For all the myth of the inscrutable Orient, the Chinese are the most demonstrative people on earth.

“Well, he
did"
Eleanor said, raising her voice over the din. Like many Chinese, she seemed perfectly at ease packed shoulder to thigh with strangers. "He carried me, literally carried me, more than two hundred miles across China on his shoulders with my pregnant mother following behind dressed as a peasant. When we hit the water he tied my hands around his neck and swam toward Hong Kong with my mother paddling along behind.”

We hadn't actually talked about this in detail before. “Lo did that?”

She turned away, scanning the crowd for latecomers. “The harbor was full of police boats. He bought them off, somehow. Three or four times we saw the spotlights skipping over the water. Once a light stopped just above our heads and someone yelled something in Cantonese. I thought we were dead.”

“What did he yell?” I just can't help asking questions.

“Who knows? I was just a little kid. But whatever it was, and whatever Uncle Lo called back, the boat turned around without picking us up and moved away from us, and Uncle Lo told us to follow the boat, and half an hour later another boat picked us up and we were in Hong Kong.”

“He must be very resourceful,” I said.

She gave me Full Glare. “You make it sound like an accusation. If he
hadn't
been resourceful, I'd still be in China.”

“I'm grateful,” I said, meaning it. My headache approached tumor magnitude. “But there's still something wrong with him. Whose brother is he? Your mother's or your father's?”

“Neither,” she said. She looked at my big doleful white man's face, mistook my grimace of pain for a pang of conscience, and lifted herself up to kiss my cheek. She'd always been forgiving, and I'd often taken advantage of it. “Uncle is a term of respect. For years, I thanked Uncle Lo in my prayers every night for what he did for my family. If he hadn't, there wouldn't have been any family.”

Now we were on familiar ground. Eleanor's family had been landowners, a fatal mistake when the Chinese government made one of its Great Leaps forward. Her father, a university professor, had spent eighteen hours kneeling on broken glass and reciting his sins to illiterate Red Guards. Then he'd been sent to prison in Manchuria, and when the prison officials realized he was going to die, they released him so they wouldn't have to bother with the body. Somehow he got himself home and impregnated his wife with Horace as a final gesture toward life. That finished, he'd turned his face to the wall and let life go. That was in 1959. Eleanor was two.

Like many men of his class, he'd been an intellectual, which made him doubly guilty. He'd written a long scholarly treatise about Cao Xueqin's
The Dream of the Red Chamber,
the novel that Eleanor and I loved best in the world. It had brought us together at UCLA, me in Literature, she on loan from Oriental Studies. Both of us had been transfixed by the tale that set forth the problems of Bao-Yu, the pampered and neurotically sensitive rich boy, and his two beautiful female cousins, the ethereal Dai-Yu and the earthy Bao-Chai—a vanishing
Gone with the Wind
way of life painted unexpectedly on a Chinese canvas like the frilly blue tragedy of the Willow Pattern.

“So, Uncle Whoever,” I said as the room listed in the other direction. “Uncle Duplicitous who doesn't like Pansy.”

Eleanor's eyes narrowed, never a good sign.
“Simeon.”
Then she heard what I'd said. “What do you mean, he doesn't—”

A hand landed heavily enough on my shoulder to make my teeth crack together, and I turned to see Horace grinning lividly at me. He was an especially drab shade of olive and perspiring freely, and there were flushed blotches under his eyes. Over his shoulder, Pansy gazed cheerfully at me through her square spectacles. Compassion surged over me. “Nice imitation of military camouflage, Horace,” I said, throwing an arm gently over his shoulders. “How are you, Pansy?”

“We are fine,” Pansy said as she always did, meaning the family. Pansy's ego could have floated in a fairy's tear. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that said OHIO U, and her inevitable high heels. Something was missing.

“Four-ninety-one,” said the woman at the cash register.

“Here,” Eleanor called urgently, waving a slender arm. She grabbed my sleeve and yanked at me, and Horace came along in my wake, grunting unhealthily as he bumped against me. Pansy, who couldn't see his face, put a possessive hand against the small of his back and beamed affectionately at his neck. “Horace isn't hungry,” she said to me.

“I'll bet he isn't,” I said as Eleanor pulled us along. Horace burped discreetly, and the burp reminded me of what was missing. “Where are Julia and Eadweard?” I asked. I hadn't seen Pansy without the twins since the day they were born.

“Home,” Pansy said. In the absence of the twins three cameras hung around her neck, vestigial organs from an earlier life in which she'd wanted to be a photographer. Marriage and the twins had recast her, in the Chinese tradition, as wife, mommy, and daughter-in-law to Eleanor and Horace's remarkably difficult mother. Until that moment in the Empress Pavilion, the only mementos of her earlier calling had been the twins' names, which were bestowed in honor of Julia Cameron and Eadweard—pronounced "Edward"—Muybridge, two of the seminal figures in photography, and the abandoned cameras hanging high on the walls of the apartment where the children couldn't reach them.

“You're kidding,” I said. The jade-green dining room of the Empress Pavilion yawned open around us. An infinitesimal Chinese waitress in a black skirt and white blouse was leading our wagon train toward an empty corner table. “Who's taking care of the twins?”

“Uncle Lo,” Horace said, succeeding at speech against all odds.

“He didn't come?” I asked stupidly, craning my neck around to look past Pansy. “But this was supposed to be in his honor.”

“He decided to stay home,” Horace said enviously. “Said he'd had too much to drink last night.”

“Also, jet-lagged,” Pansy said, translating her Fukienese dialect as she went. “He has some kind problem with time.”

“We're here,” Eleanor said. An empty table for four blocked our way, and Eleanor began to organize. “You there, Simeon. Me, here. Horace, across from me, and Pansy—”

“Just minute,” Pansy said, circling the table and doing things to lenses. “Sit, Horace, please. Sit, everybody.”

We sat. Pansy took enough pictures to fill the Spiegel catalog and then seated herself, her face gleaming with exertion and good humor.

I hadn't seen her look so happy since Horace had brought her home from Singapore, where they'd met. At that time her conversation had been full of Edward Weston, Robert Capa, Duane Michaels, and Cindy Sherman, photographers who had made a difference. She'd said “I'm fine" when asked, instead of "We're fine.” Now she said "we" all the time, and the names in her conversation were Horace, Eadweard, Julia, and Mommy, and the cameras had been left to hang on the walls.

“It's, um, noisy,” Horace offered, surveying the room with ill-concealed loathing. As always, he clutched his knife and fork, the Empress Pavilion's sole concession to
gwailos
—non-Chinese—straight up in his fists, like a baby. A very large, very belligerent baby.

“Poor Horace throw up this morning,” Pansy contributed. “I don't know why.” Her face was innocence personified.

“Maybe it was the motion of the earth,” I said nastily. I made a whirlpool in the air with my hands. “You know, it spins and spins and spins . . .”

Horace waved my hands away pleadingly. “I want another planet,” he said. “One that isn't noisy. One that doesn't spin.” He fanned himself with his right hand. His upper lip was slick with sweat. “What was Uncle Lo drinking?”

I tried to recall, but my memory seemed to be wrapped in opaque white cotton. “Not much, whatever it was. He said he was hung over?”

The first
dim sum
cart appeared, an aluminum two-decker filled with balloons of white pastry, pushed by an angular Chinese man in a too-short white jacket above impossibly narrow black trousers. He rocked the cart back and forth as though the dumplings were infants about to cry.

“If he's hung over, it's because he's not used to drinking,” Eleanor said a trifle severely, giving 90 percent of her attention to the
dim sum.
“He's a Responsible Human Being.” Eleanor was good at speaking in capital letters.

“I gather Bravo didn't think so highly of him,” I said, watching her choose something white and vaguely spherical for me. Bravo Corrigan was the dog I'd loaned to Horace and Pansy so the kids could have something to torment. Big, genetically generic, raffish, and fiercely territorial, Bravo was Topanga Canyon's canine free spirit, taking up residence with anyone who would put out a bowl of something to his liking. “Tried to bite him, didn't he?”

“Bravo only like the twins,” Pansy said, swallowing first, as always. Pansy's manners were brilliant.

“He's wonderful with them,” Eleanor acknowledged as she flagged another cart pusher. “He sleeps in their room. He follows them all over the apartment. He lets them ride on him and try to tie his ears into knots.”

“They call him 'Papa,' " Pansy said, laughing. "Horace get
so
mad.”

Horace was staring balefully at the steamed buns on his plate as though he was afraid they might start square dancing. “I can understand their confusion,” I said.

“Eat, poor Horace,” Pansy said, helpful as ever. “Make you strong.”

“I don't want to be strong,” Horace said sullenly. “I want to be sensitive.”

“The new Horace,” Eleanor cooed. “Remember all the new Nixons? Did I tell you,” she said to me, “that my mother's coming out to see Uncle Lo?”

“Good lord,” I said. “Turning her back on the bright lights of Las Vegas?”

“And the new one, too,” Eleanor said.

I poked whatever she'd served me. “That's right, there's a new one, isn't there?”

“A plumber. Actually, a plumbing contractor.” Eleanor put something that was almost certainly a chicken's foot on Horace's plate. Horace recoiled discreetly and looked out the window. “She wouldn't have a mere plumber.”