Not so young, I told her. Thirty. How about you? Do you have children?
Grace Hoffmeier, I said. I used to be a lake ecologist too. Sort of.
Yes? Dr Yu said. Her face relaxed. What does that mean, sort of?
I worked as my husbands assistant, I told her. Years ago. Helped with his projects, gathered data, drafted papers
Yes, yes, yes, Dr Yu said, nodding energetically. That is nice for a wife. You have children?
I fell into a fit of coughing and then said, No. How had we gotten so personal, so fast? I didnt think Id ever see her again, and there seemed to be no point in telling her the whole history of our not having children, no point in going into who was to blame and why.
Dr Yus face fell and I softened my answer. Not yet, I said.
No? she said. Youre so young, you could have many
Not so young, I told her. Thirty. How about you? Do you have children?
Three, she said proudly. Two boys and a girl was before the rule of one child only. Do you know this rule? My father had ten children, but now
Sure I know it, I said. Its hard to miss. All over Beijing, Id seen posters exhorting couples to sign the one-child pledge. One Couple, One Child, the most striking poster had said. Eugenical and Well-Bred.
Hard to miss? said Dr Yu.
Thats an idiom, I said, already tiring of this conversation. I looked over at Walter and saw him lean toward a group of Chinese students whose faces were upturned toward his like hatchlings waiting for their pellets. Loving every minute, as he used to love it when Id listened to him, when he couldnt teach me fast enough and couldnt believe how fast I learned. If Id wanted to catch him I couldnt have planned a better way. As I watched he raised his right hand and, with a gesture that still wrenched my heart, smoothed and smoothed again the thinning hair at the back of his head. His fingers were as gentle as if a child lay under them; as if, by his own touch, he could bring himself to life again. I could still hear his voice, teaching me in the old days: There are two laws of ecology, hed said. The first is that everything is related to everything else. The second is that these relationships are complicated as hell.
Dr Yu cleared her throat and I finished what Id been saying. Short for hard to miss seeing, I think you use the phrase for something very obvious, right there in front of your eyes.
Dr Yu nodded sharply. Yes, yes, she said. Her large earlobes were threaded with small pearls. Thats a good phrase. I will use in a sentence: Hard to miss that you are younger than your husband. Is that right?
It is, I agreed; this woman didnt seem to miss much. Walter, lean and balding and lined, looked ten years older than his forty-two.
Someone gave a signal for the toasts to end and the eating to begin. Come, Dr Yu said, plucking the sleeve of my dress. And although it had been wildly expensive, and was one of the few things I looked even passable in, for an instant I hoped shed rip it. It was a wife-dress, a suburban dress. Something I never would have worn in the days before Walter, when my taste had run to black jeans and my brothers torn shirts.
We should get some food, Dr Yu said. Shed apparently decided to adopt me for the evening. Maybe you would introduce me to your husband?
I nodded and followed her, steering my way around the Chinese string quartet who were clustered at the microphone and mangling some Mozart. Walter nodded coolly to me and then turned away. Dr Yu said, Here, try some of this. And this, this is good, and this, and oh, you must have some of this, and this is delicacy, sea-cucumber, you have had?
My stomach rumbled and Dr Yu smiled. What she heaped on my plate could have fed six people if those people hadnt been me. Pork skin roasted in sugar and soy, chicken in white pepper and ginger, puffballs with bok choy, shrimp dumplings, deep-fried grass carp boned and cut to resemble chrysanthemums, marinated gizzards sliced fine, sea-cucumber with vegetables, roast duck. This is good, Dr Yu said of each dish. Although she couldnt have weighed ninety pounds, half of me, she heaped her own plate too and then turned to look wistfully at Walter as we left the table.
With a full mouth and waving chopsticks, Walter was holding court.
Maybe I could introduce you later, I said, following her eyes. When hes not so busy?
Later, Dr Yu agreed. You wish to sit with him?
Are you kidding? I said, and then we had to pick that phrase apart. She made me feel useful, in an odd way every bit of idiomatic speech I offered delighted her. She asked more questions and I explained what I could, until the music silenced us both. The string quartet played more Mozart, a girl sang some Mendelssohn, a man in a tuxedo sang arias from a revolutionary opera.
While the musicians performed, I watched Walter and considered how Id ended up with him. I could hardly remember something was thumping at me just then, something that made me want to plant a bomb in the midst of that civilized scene. I wanted to tip the tables over, light a bonfire in the corner, burst out of the room and into the life that was streaming through the streets outside. I wanted to dance on the tables, screaming my lungs out all the while. Instead, I applauded loudly whenever Dr Yu did. Her plate was already empty, I noticed. I hadnt seen her take a bite.
Smiling, she picked up a conversational thread I thought wed snapped, and she said, So, why have you no children? Who will carry on your name?
I shrugged and said, I dont know. The burr-voiced woman appeared at the microphone again, laughing this time. Now, she said, now, we have sung and made music for our var-ry distinguished for-eign friends. Now, we ask they sing for us! Everyone, sing your own countrys songs!
The Chinese clapped; the rest of us laughed until we realized she was serious. Finally two good-natured Americans, surely small-town boys, made their way to the front of the room and sang a bawdy Irish tune off-key. Walter frowned, offended. Dr Yu said, This is a typical American song?
No, I told her, laughing. Its a very bad song.
Dr Yu agreed. A troll-like man got up to sing a Hungarian song I almost recognized, and a Swede sang a song I was sure Mumu had once sung to me. Everyone danced and the tuxedoed man sang a Viennese waltz that sent people whirling around the room. A band electric piano, two guitars, violin, drum assembled near the microphone and tried with mixed success to accompany the singers. A Japanese limnologist sang a festival song that seemed to have something to do with a shovel. Three German algologists sang a lullaby; two Israeli invertebrate zoologists sang a folk song. More beer, more sweet pink wine. My dress was sticking to me and my armpits were damp. Dr Yu, who seemed to think we knew each other much better than we did, said, You tell me if I am impolite to ask how did you meet your husband?
No point in going into that I couldnt explain it even to myself. I gave her the simple answer, meaning to be polite. I was his student, I said, remembering how he used to read to me for hours, so caught up in his work that hed hardly pause to catch his breath.
Ah, Dr Yu said with a smile. Very good student?
Very good, I agreed. Too good. Brownnose.
Brown-nose? What does that mean?
Brown-nose? What does that mean?
Someone who is too nice to teacher, tries too hard, always sucking up
Suck-up?
Never mind that one. Maybe you work with someone like this, someone whos always trying to be the bosss favorite we call them brownnose from, you know his face stuck to the bosss behind? Rear end?
Dr Yu smiled, took a pen from her pocket, and quickly sketched two Chinese characters on her palm. She flashed them at me, rubbed them out quickly, and said, We have a word, which translates in English as ass-face is that close?
Very.
But you are not an ass-face.
Sometimes I am, I said. Sometimes Ive been an enormous ass-face. You wouldnt believe.
Behind me, two Chinese scientists seemed to be discussing my new friend. I heard the word yu again and again, and I interrupted Dr Yus protestations to ask her what they were talking about.
Same old thing, she said wryly. Work. All so very ambitious here. This is the new way, new reward-for-responsibility system made by Old Deng you know?
I thought I heard your name.
Dr Yu laughed. They are talking about what your husband does. They say yú with a rising tone means fish, and yú with a falling-rising tone means rain. She wrote the words on her palm in pinyin and added their tone marks. Say after me, she commanded.
I did, amazed at her singing language. Until she coached me, all my tones had sounded exactly the same. Fish, rain, the effects of rain on fish, a rain of fish, a fishy rain in my mouth there had been no difference. Dr Yu kept drilling me, passing the syllables back and forth, and I didnt care that people stared at us. I was slowly beginning to get the idea and as I did I began to understand the men behind us, as if static had suddenly cleared from my ears.
There were four tones, said the books I had studied. Flat, rising, falling-rising, falling four. The books had been clear. But without someone to talk with, the tones had never made it from the page to my ears. Yú, said one of the men behind me, perfectly clearly. Rain. At the reservoir, Walter and I had worked even when it rained, even when the sky was so cold, so gray, so bleak, that there seemed to be no boundary between the lake and the air, between night and day, between work and the rest of life.
As if we had conjured it up, rain began to fall outside. Dr Yu fetched some more beer and then, while people around us danced and sang and told each other stories, we began trading words in earnest, correcting each others pronunciation, building sentences, muttering tones. I drew words on my palm, matching the characters she drew on hers and warming, finally, to her charm and persistence. She told me how shed been sent off to raise pigs in Shanxi province during the Cultural Revolution the blood years, she said and I told her how Mumu, my fat Swedish grandmother from whom Id inherited my weight and my hair, had taught me to catch shad and bake them for hours until the bones dissolved. How Id loved to fish but had never meant to study the creatures until Walter came along.
What is he like? Dr Yu said. I mean, in his privacy?