When Fox Is a Thousand Page 19

  But later in the night her hands were warm and gentle and the crickets sang as they breathed each other to a place beside water. This breathing was no small thing. It was the kind of breath that comes from deep below the earth. In the breath and in the warmth that moved from hand to belly, history itself passed between them. Impossible that they should be here like this, in this place where they were meant to compete for white people’s attention, for white people’s money and knowledge. They talked about it as a defiance of gender and racial expectations, and this made their passion illicit and dangerous, which in turn made it weigh more like a water-heavy melon, bursting with sugar about to turn.

  “I don’t know why I let this happen, I don’t know why,” Claude whispered late at night on the brink of sleep, half to herself, half to Artemis’s hair. Artemis had no idea what she meant.

  “Are you busy?”

  “I’m on my way to class. What’s wrong?”

  “Delilah got hit by a car.”

  “Is she hurt?”

  “Broken leg.”

  “You should take her to the vet.”

  “That’s what I’m calling about. I have a previous engagement.”

  “So tell them you’ll be late.”

  “I can’t.”

  “So you want me to take Delilah to the vet.”

  “Would you mind?”

  “I guess I could always borrow Eden’s notes. If you really can’t break your date.”

  “I can’t. I suppose Delilah could wait, but then again, you can never tell what other damage has been done until the vet checks it out.”

  Claude was gone when Artemis arrived. The car keys and a piece of paper with the address lay on the kitchen table and Delilah herself sat under it, licking at a warm pool of her own vomit. Samson and Uzi were asleep on the bed in the living room. Artemis coaxed the dog away from the pool of barf and shooed her into the car. She hated driving this car. The gearshift was rough and sticky and the brakes were going. She had to slam on them to get the thing to roll to a slow stop. Why Claude should choose a vet so far from where she lived, Artemis couldn’t fathom. Cars honked at her because she had trouble getting the car from first to second. With all the stop signs and lights through downtown this happened often. But she was thankful the dog didn’t puke again in the car.

  The waiting room smelled like a barn. A row of dogs and dog owners sat patiently against the wall. One of the dogs had a wounded eye from which pus ran freely but he just sat there with his thick tongue hanging out of his mouth, looking stupid. Maybe the gates of hell are guarded by dogs like these and their dough-brained owners, she thought. Two of them sat in the corner talking frankly about the merits of dried versus canned food.

  The vet’s office looked like a surgery ward. The vet’s assistant, a short-haired young woman in overalls and a white coat, lifted Delilah onto the steel table. The vet talked to the dog the way you would to a small child. Delilah didn’t trust him at all and growled. The assistant had to hold her down while the vet poked and prodded, gave her an injection of anaesthetic, and began to push her leg bones into place. Just then the receptionist called Artemis to the phone.

  Artemis looked at Delilah’s stunned eyes, hesitant to leave.

  “It’s all right,” said the vet. “She’ll be fine.”

  Artemis left and took the phone. It was Claude.

  “Can you come pick me up?”

  “Where are you?”

  “At Café Elysium.”

  “What are you doing all the way out there?”

  “Diane took me here.”

  “Diane.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how to tell you this but – do you think you could come and get me and then we can talk?”

  “What about your dog?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Café Elysium was one of those new American-style espresso bars out on the West side, miles from where Claude, Artemis, or Diane lived. All forest green, eggshell, and shiny chrome, one Claude had said a number of times that she hated. The car stalled twice on the way, and the gear shifts got rougher and rougher. Delilah whined the whole time and tossed Artemis almost human glances of resentment. Artemis drove as fast as she could, half out of hurt and anger and half just wanting to avoid as many red lights as possible so she wouldn’t have to gear down and then up again.

  Claude was sitting in the window blowing clouds of tobacco smoke. Artemis saw her as she leaned on the brakes to turn onto a side road, but the brakes weren’t engaging. She swung sharply onto the side road, narrowly missing the car that came up in the opposite direction, and yanked on the hand brake.

  Then Claude was there, tapping the window on the passenger side.

  “What have you done to my car?”

  “Your fucking car nearly killed me. The brakes are shot.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it when I drive it.” An irritated driver swerved around them.

  “Just help me push it out of the way.”

  “I’ll drive it,” said Claude. Artemis got out of the driver’s seat and held the door for her. Claude drove, angling the car gracefully to the side of the road and throwing the hand brake just in time. Without looking at Artemis, she stepped out of the driver’s seat and slammed the door hard behind her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To call a tow truck.”

  When she came back, Artemis said, “You can’t use this business of the car to pretend that something more serious isn’t happening.” She was proud of herself for the clarity of her position. It was something she’d figured out after many dealings with Diane, who had a great talent for hijacking any crisis with one of her own in such a way as to make the other person’s look trivial by comparison. Anyway, Claude wasn’t half as smooth.

  “I wasn’t trying to. It’s just, you know, the car had to be dealt with and you didn’t seem to have a handle on it. Do you want to go inside and have a coffee while we wait?”

  “I didn’t bring my wallet.”

  “I’m buying.”

  “No, thanks. I’d rather sit out here. Tell me about Diane.”

  “Now?” Claude’s face suddenly seemed very young, like a child too large for her age being scolded for bullying a smaller one.

  Artemis looked at her expectantly.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Look, it doesn’t really matter anymore because Diane went out to get cigarettes almost two hours ago and never came back.”

  “There was something going on between you.”

  “No. I mean, there used to be. Before I met you. But not anymore.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me when you called the first time?”

  “You didn’t ask. I didn’t think you needed to know.”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”

  “You can’t go through life assuming the role of the victim in every difficult situation. You play everything with this wide-eyed innocence and you think it means you don’t have to be responsible for anything.”

  “Ask me about Delilah.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “They pinned her down on a steel table and gave her an injection. The vet tried to make a jigsaw puzzle out of her broken bones.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “I thought there was more trust between us than there seems to be now.”

  “Diane is complicated.”

  “Diane is a bitch.”

  “I should have told you. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve known her for a long time, you know. She lived with me for a while before I met you, but then she got involved with some guy. She’s so smart. Her politics were so sharp. She could take apart anyone that had ever hurt her with such clarity. Her teachers, her brother, her father. Our stories were so close. Or at least, I thought they were. It was addictive almost.” It was starting to rain.

  “She knows how to hook people in.”

  �
��Well, I don’t feel sorry for her anymore.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I thought you’d rant and curse at her.”

  “I will, trust me. Later. You’re not off the hook yet.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Sorry or not, that damage is done.” Artemis found herself reaching for Claude’s hand, but it was with a sorrow she had not felt before, the sorrow of knowing that people can hurt each other and still keep going. Their clothes were starting to soak through when the tow truck pulled up. The driver declared that the brakes were indeed shot and agreed to tow the car to Claude’s mechanic back on the East Side.

  “You may as well come for the ride,” Claude said to Artemis. She scooped the dog out from the back seat of the car. Artemis opened the passenger door of the truck.

  “I’ll take the bus.”

  “Come on, the mechanic’s is close to your house.” Claude deposited Delilah squarely in the middle of the front seat.

  “It isn’t, really.”

  There was a nervous pause while the tow truck driver finished hitching the car up. When he was done, Claude climbed in beside the dog. Artemis crossed the street and stood in the rain at the bus stop, hoping the bus wouldn’t take too long to come.

  I keep a bottle of arsenic from the time I worked as a courtesan. It was the gift of a young Persian merchant who had a shop in the Western quarter of Chang’an. “Women from the Far West use this,” he told me, “to keep their skin white. Just a little drop at a time to maintain a look of elegant pallor.” I would make use of this gift every now and then. It tasted bitter and smoky, the way I imagined the future would taste on nights when I felt less hopeful than usual.

  Lu Ch’iao left me for the acrobat, but gave me a number of pieces of jade and gold as a parting gift. I sold them and bought this temple. It had been deserted for some time. Local rumour had it that foxes had taken over. Some people said I was crazy. Others said that I myself was enchanted and that was why I wanted to move in. I liked the way it sat on a hill, just outside of town, shielded from others by a grove of bamboo.

  My first visitor was an official in charge of expurgating foreign religions. I thought I had nothing to fear, having declared myself a follower of Taoism, one of the oldest indigenous religions. He was a handsome man, and in exchange for my company, he made many handsome donations to the temple. One night, grasping my hand in the bell tower, he told me the coins he had donated were all cast from bronze obtained from the melted bells and statuettes that had once filled Buddhist places of worship. I remembered the day when, as a child in my father’s house, all the nuns and monks of a nearby temple had streamed out into the street, awkward in their secular clothes and suddenly homeless. Looking up at my own temple’s great brass bell, he asked me if I was superstitious. I shook my head. He asked to stay the night, and I shook my head again. When he tried to force me, I grabbed the clapper cord and hoisted myself up to where he couldn’t reach me. There I swung, back and forth above his head, and the bell thundered above us the whole while. Soon there were neighbours’s footsteps at the front gate and he was forced to flee.

  The second visitor to come and stay shaved her head before she arrived. Even without her hair, I recognized her as the eldest daughter of the local butcher. I had seen her in earlier days working in the back room of her father’s shop, a small girl with a large cleaver, expertly separating a pig from its ribs. Her ears were small and dainty. They stuck straight out from the side of her head, as though always wide open to hear the death squeals of the pigs, cows, sheep, dogs, and chickens that her father spent eight hours a day slaughtering. He was a red, friendly man with a big belly and a loud cheerful laugh. He was well liked by all the neighbours, and as far as I knew didn’t have a single enemy. Although he made his daughter work hard from a very young age, I knew he loved her, loved her better even than the two sisters or the cute little brother who spent their days playing in front of the shop without a care in the world.

  No one guessed how she became pregnant. There was a rumour that it was not a man at all, but the big rutting pig that stayed in the shed one night in August. They say that in the morning, her father slit its throat and bled it until it died. She was so secretive and anxious that the rumour reached mythic proportions, and a neighbour said that the girl herself had confided in her this awful truth. No one suspected that it might be the newly appointed Official of Taxation, who had already sworn her to secrecy by threatening her father’s shop. And then again, it might have been the barbarian king coming down from the north disguised as a beggar to learn the layout of the city. What if it had been? What if it had been a dragon instead of pig? A man instead of a monster? Would it have made a difference? Her father was desperate. His business dwindled and his favourite daughter was ruined. He tried to marry her to a poor, fatherless scholar in hopes of at least saving some face, but after hearing the story of the pig, the young man would not even look at her.

  She came to me with a big belly, no hair, and her beautiful ears sticking sharply from the sides of her head. Her child was born healthy and the three of us lived blissfully for a year. One day a young woman appeared at the temple gates with a message from the butcher, asking her to go back. Without looking at me she began to gather her things. I grabbed her by the shoulders, took her to my room, and sat her down on the bed.

  “Do you know what this is?” I asked, producing a clear crystal bottle with a thin black liquid inside. I swirled it so that it paled to a smoky purple against the side of the bottle.

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s poison,” I told her. “One mouthful will kill a person almost instantly.” Then, “I want you to stay with me. Say you’ll stay.”

  I took a swig from the bottle and held it in my mouth. Her eyes widened.

  “I’ll stay! “ she cried. I spat the arsenic out onto the floor and kissed her deeply. It was her first taste of death.

  She spent the night with me and slipped out while I was sleeping.

  I’m not the meddlesome type. I know you don’t believe me, especially as my reputation has become so tarnished over the years. But I do have my principles; I never interfere with the lives of mortals because of personal interests. I see myself as a teacher with certain ethics to uphold. But the line between morals and personal interest has gotten a little murky of late. A newly loosed spirit I met one night on a windy beach said it was a sad characteristic of the age that people can’t tell the difference between what is right and what is self-serving, but I’m not sure. I think the world has always been like that. It’s just that I am noticing it now – a characteristic of my age, perhaps? I don’t know. That is one of the problems of living in exile – you don’t have the experience of your elders to go by.

  As I said, I don’t like to meddle. But I had to get rid of Claude. She was disrupting Artemis’s sleep, making my own nightly visitations more difficult and feeding a low-level but deeply resonant distress that results from too many years of unspoken history. I had to think of something. An old trick came to mind.

  I stole an old dress from Claude’s mother. She hasn’t missed it to this day. I found it up in the attic of the house where the Chow family has lived for the last twenty years, in an old Kraft macaroni-and-cheese carton with the flaps crossed over one another to make it harder to open. It was the dress she’d worn the day the whole family had sworn allegiance to the Queen and received their citizenship papers. It was pale orange with splashes of red hibiscus. In the dead of night, I broke into the Value Village and slipped the dress between an awful gold lamé number and a gossamer-thin white cotton dress that swept the floor.

  In the morning, I followed Artemis through her day, making sure that she stumbled across it in the early afternoon.

  Claude gave Artemis a strange look when she appeared on her doorstep in the dress later that evening. Of course, it had been fifteen years since she had last seen it, so she couldn’t figure out why it seemed so familiar. Nevertheless, it made her
uneasy and she squirmed all the way through Thelma and Louise.

  My girl likes to shop, but it isn’t often that she goes to the Value Village twice in the same week. I had to put the coveralls in the window to get her attention. They still reeked of mothballs. I don’t know why Old Man Chow wanted to keep them. They were worn and stained with grease and now several sizes too small. It was the first pair he had ever bought in Canada, for his first day on the job at Hideo’s Auto Repair in 1969. It was a bit of a risk – his first name, “Edwin,” was emblazoned in large letters across the back. Almost half of the “w” and part of the “N”were worn off, but nonetheless, it was still perfectly legible.

  Claude was disturbed by the coveralls. They brought to mind an incident at age seven, when she had come home from grade two to the sound of her father yelling at her mother in the kitchen. Something about laziness, she remembered. It was her first clear memory of her father yelling. She walked right past the kitchen on the way to her room, glancing briefly at her old man in the blue coveralls with his toolbelt still strapped around his waist, having quite lost control of his temper.

  Again, Claude could not place what it was about her companion that made her uneasy, she knew only that she was having trouble getting her noodles down. She found herself getting snappy on the way to the video store.

  I left the dandyish turquoise scarf that once belonged to Claude’s brother on a seat in the bus. I couldn’t possibly entice Artemis into Value Village again that same month. It offset her short dark hair elegantly. But Claude’s stomach did a double flip when Artemis appeared in her doorway with the scarf doubled around her neck. They argued through the night about something drearily political. I have a hard time with twentieth-century theory. It makes me cross-eyed and dries out my nose.

  By morning their relationship was a throbbing mess and I knew my birthday preparations would soon be back on track.

  Who was that woman in your car?

  “Her name is Rachel Evans. She’s a photographer.”