The woman in the booth across from me looked different from her picture. Her formerly straight, black hair was now curled and dyed a dark cherry color. Beside her, Dad wore a new shirt and had combed his silver hair. He still had the dumpy good looks of a long-retired movie star.
Dad said, “Honey, this is Yuxi. And this is my eldest daughter, Eve.”
“Nice to meet you,” I typed in my phone. I tapped the audio symbol, and it translated aloud in Mandarin. The app’s voice was clear, female, pleasant.
“Xièxiè.” Yuxi smiled and made little bowing movements. A server dealt a menu to each of us and Yuxi glanced at it, a little disdainfully.
“She doesn’t like eating out,” Dad said. “She never likes the way the food tastes. She’s such a good cook. She makes this delicious chicken thing with all kind of vegetables.”
He’d been trying to invite us to lunch for weeks, but I’d made excuses. Roman was busy and Cassie flatly refused.
It was true that I’d always been afraid of my mother going first, because I knew what would happen. Without her to absorb and buffer my father, the cosmos would prevail upon me to take her place. Though things had gotten worse. Things had definitely gotten worse. Sometimes I did not answer his phone calls. I averted my eyes from his cluttered countertops, the prescription refill bottles, unread mail and toast crumbs of solitary living, which seemed to demand my intervention and fussing. When I hugged him he felt soft, like a fruit beginning to rot. All my life he had been all rind, now he wanted to be cut open and savored.
“How are you,” I typed in my phone.
Yuxi scrawled characters on her screen with a fingertip. My life is glorious, the voice said. Her hands were rough, and large for her slight frame.
“I think she likes me,” Dad said. He patted Yuxi’s hand on the tabletop and plucked the fabric of his sleeve. “She got me this, wasn’t that nice? Thanks, sweetie.” He looked almost glossy in this new plumage of happiness. And that filled me with a surge of hope, and lifted an accusatory weight off my chest.
“You mommy,” Yuxi said, raising the hem of her sweater.
“What?”
“You mommy.” Underneath the sweater was a black-and-white striped shirt. It was cheap and cotton, laundered to dullness. Mom wore it all the time. At some point, she had just stopped buying new clothes.
“She’s learning English.”
Yuxi spoke into her phone in Mandarin and held it out to me. I am wearing your mother’s clothes and shoes.
“She alters them,” Dad said. “She’s so talented and resourceful. She never wants to spend money.”
I’d seen it crumpled in the laundry basket and folded on top of the dresser, placidly evacuated. Now, it seemed to reanimate in protest. The child in me recoiled at this appalling and apparently sanctioned act of vandalism. Dad gazed adoringly at Yuxi. It was plain he would be of no help.
In Taiwan I worked as a tailor, the voice said. In Taiwan I worked as a tailor. I nodded and smiled, as if I’d understood it better the second time. Yuxi laughed. She laughed a lot, she seemed full of uncontainable joy and delight. Evidently, these two made each other happy.
All clothes can be changed, said the voice, optimistically.
He had had asked Cassie and me if we wanted anything before he hauled it away. Cassie wanted the oil portrait I’d painted of her wearing a kimono, and other than that we took the two Japanese silk kimonos—a gift from her father; and a few pieces of her mother’s jewelry, which weren’t really wearable pieces and had an overwrought, Victorian heft. I claimed the garnets and Cassie got the amethysts, and we agreed to exchange them every few years. We were sentimental in private. That wasn’t something we openly shared.
Dad studied the menu. His skin was still remarkably smooth and wrinkle-free, though with his heart, tennis had long ceased to be an option and even normal-speed walking was a labor. But there was a spring in his shuffle and pink in his cheeks. His transformations were coming fast, frozen chunks of grief falling from him in great wet splats in his blood rush to green up and live again.
He had known Yuxi all of three months. In the picture he showed us, a petite, smiling Asian woman in hot-pink satin pajamas flashed flirty double V-signs. He’d taken the picture in his living room, with the old beige couch lolling in the background. “My girlfriend’s name is pronounced you-she,” he beamed. “She’s very sweet. She cooks and cleans and gives me massages whenever I want. She takes such good care of me. She’s sixty-two and loves to laugh.”
“Only a ten-year age gap,” Cassie scoffed. “I guess I’m supposed to approve.” If Cassie were here now, she would make a scene.
No one could blame Cassie for being protective. In her twenties she would get unstoppable nosebleeds. She’d have to sit still with her head tipped back for an hour or more. She supported herself, an unemployed boyfriend and an overweight Dalmatian by working at a grocery store and illustrating children’s books. The boyfriend took her to live in a series of awful communal places. One Thanksgiving, she watched a random baby in a dirty diaper crawl across someone’s floor and try to eat a cigarette butt. Not long after leaving this man, Cassie discovered he’d opened several credit cards in her name and charged two-hundred thousand dollars in purchases and tuition. The guy disappeared, and she couldn’t track him down. She opened fraud claims and tried filing for bankruptcy, but she didn’t qualify. She would never pay the debt off in her lifetime, she reasoned, so she might as well commit to her art.
The server returned to take our orders. Yuxi hovered her phone over the lunch menu to translate it. Dad pointed out options, but she frowned and shook her head. The restaurant was called Colophon because it was attached to a bookstore. Dad called it coliform, like the gut bacteria. Mom liked bland food. She was a soup and sandwich gal. Dad was a creature of habit. He finally ordered a salad with shrimp and sesame dressing for Yuxi.
“Honey, how’s work?”
I knew to answer simply and without too much detail. That’s how he liked answers. However he phrased questions, they were essentially yes or no.
“Eve works for China,” he told Yuxi. Yuxi nodded and peered intently at her phone.
“Works for China,” Dad dictated. Yuxi nodded again and began typing. I was growing impatient. There was a lot to say, and the simplest things took ages.
“Dad, I don’t work for China,” I began, but Yuxi’s phone interrupted me.
What is that rash on your neck?
I clapped a hand below my right ear, where I had recently noticed an inflamed patch of skin.
I will give you tea to help cool and detoxify.
“Thank you,” I typed. I’d read that rashes could be stress related.
Yuxi bowed her head and excused herself to the restroom.
“At the massage parlor they have all kind of teas,” Dad said. “When I go, they ask me if I’ve had breakfast and they cook for me. That’s how they do it. They all live there. It’s easier that way. They don’t have to drive or take the bus at all hours, and they have each other for company. Chinese girls are amazing.”
Yuxi couldn’t rent, he explained, because she didn’t have a bank account or any proof of income. She’d let her visa lapse a year before. She didn’t want to go back to Taiwan, because she couldn’t make any money there.
Where had I been? Where was I, while my dad was out driving late at night and early mornings to poorly lit roadside establishments and strip malls? I had been in my studio, working on that actress’ painting. The months had flown right by.
Yuxi returned to the table and wrote in her phone. Your father is a kind gentleman.
I picked up my phone. Works for China, I typed. Words appeared: wéi zhōngguó gōngzuò. I copied that and translated it back to English. It read: we are still young. This was madness.
Dad didn’t speak a word of Mandarin. Though he still sometimes mentioned the one trip overseas he took for work nearly thirty years ago, to Shenzhen. I was little. All I could remember were his photographs of a theme park exhibit. There was a toy-sized Great Wall of China zigzagging over grassy mounds, with little bushes pruned to look like trees. There was a mini-Forbidden City with a grinning Chinese toddler for scale, like a Godzilla let loose in a village of Pizza Huts.
I set my phone screen-down on the tabletop. The food arrived and I took a few bites of bland turkey sandwich. Yuxi skated her shrimp in circles around her plate. I actually worked for an education company based in Shanghai, but this hardly seemed worth explaining now.
“Good?” Dad pointed at the salad, and Yuxi shrugged. “No good.”
What I had to say would have to wait. Tell him we have no money, said Cassie’s voice in my ear, like, negative money. We can’t help him.
Dad was thoughtless with finances, what little he had. And he was at that age, an easy target.
In the first year after Mom died, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He hammered together a few Adirondack chairs and took long drives and bought things he didn’t need. Then, he started going online. He boasted of the tender ages of the women he chatted with, slipping non-sequiturs into our conversations whenever he could. It was like watching a teenager lurch from hobby to hobby, praying they don’t stumble into anything irrevocable. Once, Cassie intercepted his plan to drive across state lines to meet a woman. “Her name is Mary. She’s thirty-four and lives in Coeur D’Alene. She thinks it’s still too early to meet.” Cassie tried chastising him gently. Not that a lovely woman wouldn’t be genuinely interested in him, but was there a chance that this was not real? “Oh, honey, it’s not serious, Mary is too young for me. Besides, I don’t think anyone would do something so elaborate.”
Now, I remembered the science-fiction thriller he wrote and asked us to read. Henry, a retired mechanical engineer, restless and recently bereaved, abandons his carpentry projects to tinker in his garage lab. One day Henry makes a shocking discovery that answers one of science’s most baffling mysteries. Convinced he has detected dark matter, Henry writes a paper and secures an invitation to a prestigious conference in France, where he crosses paths with a sensationally sexy Chinese astrophysicist. Competing researchers antagonize him and he’s surveilled by the CIA. Henry flees with the lady to Switzerland, where he buys a nice watch and surrenders his findings to CERN for the good of all.
About halfway through the story, there’s a racy scene that takes place on a cot in the garage. When I failed to mention it, Dad asked me what I thought, his eyes full of mirth. “I just get horny. I’m not trying to publish it or anything.” Then about a week ago, things got even worse. He announced that he and Yuxi were in love.
“He’s such a mark. Was he born yesterday?” Cassie fumed over a text. “Who is she? What do we know about her?”
“He denies it,” Roman wrote. “He says she says she’s not doing all that anymore.” As the oldest son, and a physicist, Roman got away with being distant.
“Like hell she’s not. Everyone knows that’s what they are. The FBI busted several in the area in recent years.”
“On the other hand, it’s less offensive than recreating Mom.” Roman sent an image of Mao in a green army jacket and red arm band. Underneath, he wrote: “We just need a graphic of Dad’s relaxed face seen from below, waving like a tyrant god and encircled by his subservient women.”
Yuxi wasn’t eating. I had no appetite. Dad had dripped some au jus on his shirt front. Yuxi dipped her napkin in her water glass and began sponging the stain.
I saw a chance to speak candidly. “Dad, can we talk about your long-term plans?”
He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Of course, honey. A lot is going on. Yuxi wants to start her own business. She can’t make enough money working at the massage parlor down the street, so we’re looking for a parlor to buy or rent. To legally work, she has to get a work card. She applied and will receive one in August.”
Yuxi’s phone sang out. In Taiwan I worked as a masseuse. Before that I took care of olds. In Taiwan I worked as a masseuse. Before that I took care of olds.
“She gives great massages, anytime I want. She treats me like a king.” He looked at Yuxi the way kids do at a dog that barks on command, or an agreeable toy, their most successful Lego construction to date.
“We drove down south yesterday and looked at a couple places. Two of the places won’t rent to a massage business, the woman said that’s because there was a massage parlor there a few years ago and it was at the center of a prostitution ring. So, we’re still looking.”
Yuxi scribbled characters on her phone and placed it in the center of the table. To open a massage parlor, you must work on your own and be able to capture some regular customers. If you have to rely entirely on others to make money, young girls will make things difficult for their bosses. Will be annoyed by employees.
I could see now that I had set something in motion and hadn’t monitored its progress. I was the one who had bought him a gift certificate at a classy spa in town. I just wanted him to feel better. I pushed my plate away. Yuxi prodded her phone as if it were misbehaving, speaking softly and distractedly to herself in the precious nonsense of babies dawning on language.
In a lowered voice, Dad said, “Now listen. I haven’t forgotten about your mother. But I am still young. I deserve another chance at happiness.”