When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  She grinned that mischievous grin. “I do it sometimes when I’m invited. But I’m studying to be a singer.”

  “What kind of music?”

  “Opera.”

  “Opera?!”

  “My mother was an opera singer as a young woman in Tokyo.”

  “She must have made a charming Madame Butterfly.”

  “Not at all. In Tokyo, they like Tristan. My mother would sing Iseult.”

  The image of a small Asian woman battling the octaves through two and a half hours as a tragic Germanic blonde must have been too much for the man. A confused grin bloomed across his face. “You’ll excuse me. I have to go to the John.”

  “I should be going anyway.” She opened her purse.

  “Oh, please, no. I’m getting this. Here.” He snapped open his wallet and placed a credit card on the bar. He leaned close to her and whispered, “I’ll be right back.” Then he disappeared around the corner.

  “Goodbye, Allan!” Diane called sweetly to the bartender. She slid off the high chrome stool, sweeping the countertop with her hand and deftly palming the credit card. “Marshall is going to pick up the tab when he gets back from the can.” The bartender, busy with other customers, turned his head, smiled, and nodded.

  “Come on, let’s go! “ Diane quickly gathered her things from the booth and hurried Artemis out the door.

  “Shit, Diane!”

  “Shit nothing. Come on.”

  They caught a cab at the corner.

  “How did I do?”

  “That man’s going to be a woman-hater for life.”

  “Nah. He was drunk. I don’t think he’ll even notice for another hour or two. And how much can he mind, really? A man like that must know by now that pretty girls come only at a price. That opera line was risky though. Those are the only two operas I know.”

  “This isn’t right.”

  “Just creatively balancing one of society’s more glaring inequalities.”

  The driver put them down in the centre of a fashionable area of town. Diane paid him with the card.

  “This is crazy. He’ll have put a stop on it by now. We’ll get caught.”

  “I figure we have a good two hours. You need a new dress.”

  “I don’t wear dresses much.”

  “We’ll find something. Come on.”

  Diane pulled her into a shop that sold suits for men and women. She rifled through the racks, choosing items quickly but judiciously.

  “Try these.”

  “Diane.…”

  “Go on.”

  Artemis stepped into the dressing room with two jackets, three silk shirts, and two pairs of pants. She tried them on one by one. “I look like a gangster girl.”

  “Planning your career. That’s good.”

  She came out with the pile of clothes in her arms.

  “Perfect,” said Diane, placing the card on the counter. “This too,” she said to the saleswoman, taking a grey fedora off the rack and squaring it on Artemis’s head at a rakish angle.

  In the next shop, Diane pulled a dress off the rack, outrageous in red satin and vinyl. “So expensive for so little fabric, but a girl deserves a treat every now and then, don’t you think?”

  Out on the street, she looked at her watch. “Half an hour before the bomb drops. Do you like cologne?” They went to a nearby department store known for its fabulous perfume counter. Diane requested the largest bottle of Opium available, while Artemis sniffed at a number of exquisitely shaped bottles, with curves that suggested but did not mimic the lines of the body.

  “You’ve got to spray it on or you can’t tell,” said Diane.

  “Will this be all?” asked the clerk, a heavyish but elegantly made-up woman in her fifties. She had succeeded in disguising the size of her nose, drawing attention instead to her lovely green eyes with their large, carefully sculpted lids.

  “No. It’s my friend’s birthday, and I want to get a scent for her. But she doesn’t know what she wants.”

  The woman gazed thoughtfully at Artemis’s unmade-up, slightly terrified face. “Something clean and simple,” she pronounced, and produced several uncomplicated-looking bottles. She sprayed one on each of Artemis’s wrists and a third on one of Diane’s. Artemis lifted each of her wrists to her nose. All that she noticed was that her pulse was racing. She lifted Diane’s wrist to her nose to sample the third scent. The smell was a little too chemical to be pleasant, but there was something green and smoky about it that appealed to her.

  “This is it,” she said to the saleswoman.

  “The largest bottle you have,” said Diane.

  She put the card down.

  The woman looked at it, then ran it through the authorizing machine. “Anderson’s an unusual name for an Asian woman.”

  “I’m married.”

  “So young!”

  “I think twenty-four is old enough.”

  “Young,” said the woman. “But then I suppose you’ll look the same at fifty. You Orientals never age.” She smiled and pushed the slip and a pen towards Diane.

  Diane picked up the pen and paused over the slip for a moment. Then, with a quick and determined hand she signed and pushed it back. The clerk glanced back and forth between the signature on the card and that on the slip. Artemis looked at the floor. The woman tore the top copy off and gave it to Diane. “Have a nice day.”

  “Can I have the carbons?” said Diane.

  They fled to the lobby of a hotel attached to the mall. There was no reason to flee, really, except that it filled a need for the sensation of escape. Diane checked her watch and declared them out of time. In the elegant empty waiting room of the women’s washroom, they opened their bags to gloat over their loot. Diane produced a small pair of folding scissors from her purse, cut the credit card in half, took it into one of the toilet stalls, and flushed.

  Artemis glanced at her watch. “Oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “I got caught up. I totally forgot I was on my way to see someone.”

  “Not much you can do about it now.”

  “I can call at least. You got a quarter?”

  Diane opened her purse and rooted around among the things inside.

  Outside at the payphone, Artemis punched in Mercy’s number. The phone rang. After eight rings she replaced the receiver.

  “I wonder if I should just go there.”

  “How late are you?”

  “About three hours.”

  “No point then. Why don’t you come to my place and drink with me?”

  It was beginning to rain. Artemis and Diane stood under the narrow roof of a bus shelter, clutching their bags and breathing in the cigarette and wet wool smells of the other evening commuters who crowded under the roof with them.

  “Should have tried for a cash advance,” muttered Diane, careful to keep her voice low just in case. “You can get them at bank machines now, you know.”

  “Never mind.”

  “But wouldn’t you like to be sitting in a nice warm cab right now, telling some silly man where to drive you?”

  “Oh, well.”

  Diane hugged herself, pulling her thin leather jacket, which she fastidiously left unzipped, tightly around her. “Are you local born?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know?”

  “I’m adopted.”

  “And they won’t even tell you where you were born?”

  “I think they’re insecure or something. Afraid I would leave them for my birth mother. Too many secrets in my family. Still, they let me keep the name she gave me.”

  “What do they do?”

  “My father’s an Asian Studies professor. My mother’s a curator at the Museum of Ancient Cultures.”

  “Are they white?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Asian-philes.”

  “What?”

  “Orientalists.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  �
�Do they collect artifacts? You know, Chinese pottery, silk hangings, scrolls of calligraphy, stuff like that.”

  “There are a few items around the house. I have a trunk of things that used to belong to my biological mother. My mother wants to make sure I’m aware of my history.”

  “Or maybe you’re just part of the collection.”

  “Of course not. I’m their daughter.”

  “Do you ever catch them looking at you funny?”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to get at, Diane. My parents are good people.”

  “Of course they are. I didn’t mean to suggest.…”

  “I think I should go home. Look, here comes the 14. It goes straight to my corner.”

  “Change your mind. Come on, I’m sorry. Didn’t you have a fun afternoon? Come with me. I’ll tell you about the skeletons in my closet.”

  The line-up filed on. “I’m tired. I’m upset about having stood my friend up. I should go.”

  “Look, here’s my bus. Come on. I’ve got your cologne in my bag.”

  From where the bus let them out they walked eight blocks to the old peak-roofed house where Diane lived. To get to her apartment they had to climb three floors of rickety wooden steps on the outside of the building. The paint had once been lemon yellow, but was now faded and peeling. The steps were slippery because of the rain. Artemis clutched the wobbly railing nervously.

  “I don’t actually live here. I’m house-sitting for a friend for a month.”

  “And then where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. I move around a lot. But I like it here,” said Diane, turning the key in the lock. “I like to come home to this place after a good day’s worth of sophisticated delinquency.”

  “Princess by day, owl by night.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “What?”

  “Princess. I hate being called princess. Princess, goddess, star. I don’t know what’s wrong with people.”

  “You do have a certain air about you.”

  “I’ve earned any confidence I might have, okay? I put a lot of work into learning how to take care of myself.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Me too. I guess I’m tired.” The apartment was small and dark. The ceiling sloped sharply down on either side. The walls were covered with political posters, one for a march against poverty, one for a rally against violence against women, one for a women’s music festival in the park. The bed in the corner was neatly made, the short kitchen counter clean. Diane offered Artemis a chair at a somewhat cluttered table and handed her a cold beer from the fridge.

  “You steal credit cards often?”

  “No. Just sometimes. When I need to remind myself who takes care of who.”

  “Don’t you have family that looks out for you?”

  “I have a family that looks after itself. It looks after me only insofar as I’m part of it. You know what I mean?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “As long as I am what they expect me to be, they take care of me. Step outside of that and forget it. It’s not that they refuse me anything. It’s just that they don’t understand the other half of my world.”

  “What do you mean, ‘other half’?”

  The story Diane tells is sad. But she has a way of telling that infuses the story with an edgy kind of dignity. She tells it with a mixture of pride and bitterness that Artemis finds very compelling.

  “I had a brother who I loved a lot. He was more beautiful than any other Chinese man I ever met. I’m not just saying this. Lots of people thought so. He went through a phase where he brought home a new girl every week. Each girl was smarter and more gorgeous than the one before. I’m not bragging. It really was like that.

  “He was hard working too. He worked as a mechanic’s assistant at Japan Auto. He saved enough money to buy a used MG just before grad. He used to come pick me up after school sometimes. All my friends were so jealous.”

  Artemis nodded, full of admiration.

  “The summer before I was supposed to graduate they found his body in the gay cruising area of Hyde Park in Toronto.”

  “What are you saying?” said Artemis. “Was he.…”

  “I don’t know, okay,” said Diane. “I didn’t know. My parents were devastated.”

  Artemis felt both impressed and concerned. It must have shown in her face, and this must have been the desired effect, because now Diane was beaming. “I’ve never told anyone this before,” she said. “So keep it a secret please. Especially from Saint.”

  “Who’s Saint?”

  “You’ll meet him, don’t worry.”

  It made Artemis feel important to be the recipient of such dark confidences.

  “There was a newspaper article with a photo in some gay and lesbian rag the week after it happened,” Diane said. “My father got an eye infection the week it came out. His vision’s been a little off ever since. I didn’t mean what I said before about family. We take care of one another the best we can, you know. I’m trying to get up enough money for my mother to go back to Hong Kong to see my grandfather before he passes on. She hasn’t been there in twenty years.”

  “You miss your brother.”

  “Yeah. For sure I do.”

  “I’m sorry.” Artemis moved her hand across the table to take Diane’s. The slender fingers were ice cold. Their eyes locked in the last of the evening light that came in through the small window on the far wall. They leaned closer towards one another and their lips caught like a sudden match flaring in the dark.

  Diane pulled away. “That was weird.”

  “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  “Then let’s just say it doesn’t.”

  PART 2

  The Familiar Shape

  The woman with the lantern smelled subtly of roses. She asked me my name. When I told her, she seemed pleased. “My husband reads your poetry,” she said. “He quotes your lines to me sometimes.” Although her umbrella was glossy and whole, the rain had also drenched her clothing. In the light of the lantern, I could make out the shape of her body beneath her damp dress.

  Later that week, in the front room of the teahouse where I worked, I was introduced to a travelling scholar. He said he came from a family of hunters. He was tall and his skin was as luminous as the surface of a lake. He looked at me with a light in his eyes that made me think perhaps he was remembering someone else. His gaze weighed on me. I wasn’t sure whether to be worried or pleased.

  We played chess until late in the night. Some men, when they discovered that I play chess, found it distasteful, since it is not a very lady-like game. But this scholar enjoyed it. I watched his hands as he lined up his men, his horses, and his cannons. His palms were narrow, his fingers long, with nails clipped so that they were round and pink with neat white borders. They moved with a decisive swiftness that made me think of carp, darting about to capture bits of bread tossed into their shallow pool. He beat me once, I beat him twice. He complained of faulty horses and suggested we play a game of rhymes instead.

  He asked if he could stay the night, but I said no. As a rule, I didn’t sleep with the clients. Since I earned my keep with my poetry, the house mother didn’t pressure me.

  He came again the next night, claiming that the roads were too muddy for travel. He brought me a gift – a packet of rose-scented incense. I lit some. The smoke and sweet odour filled the room like fresh air from a place far away. I found myself remembering a rainy dusk on the hill leading down from the temple, and a figure standing on the path. I pushed the memory away. I was working and ought to put my energy into that. It would not, I thought, be at all unpleasant to have this man as a patron. He asked me if I could sing. I told him I had been studying with one of my sisters who had been an opera singer. I was shaking a little. I don’t often get nervous. I wasn’t sure whether it was because singing was a relatively new thing for me or because I was so anxious to please my guest. I stood up, conscious of the weight of my
embroidered sleeves, and then the weight of the whole garment, the way it flowed blue to the floor, cascading birds and flowers. The silk lining felt rough and slightly sticky against my skin, and my hands were not as steady as usual. When I opened my mouth, the voice began to come. It was frail at first, conscious of itself alone in a quiet room. Then it grew to fill the space, streaming from my lungs with the force of a tidal wave. It enveloped me firmly, guiding me through myself like a long stream to the ocean.

  The next day there was a typhoon. It started slowly on a mountain far away. Then the rain came smashing onto the street. It moved over our heads like a great beast and then was gone. The air was filled with steam. Next the wind came, bringing shards of rain cutting wildly into the air, making gashes in trees and houses, pushing people to the ground like an angry tiger in a great hurry to lay the blame on someone. I stayed in my room and lit some of my new friend’s incense to calm my nerves. Outside, earth and water and leaves and branches slammed into the side of the building. I thought I would go to bed early to hide from the storm, and had just begun to undo my hair when I heard the house mother calling me. Quickly, I rearranged my hair and went out into the foyer. The scholar was there. He was drenched to the bone and his clothes were streaked with mud. No sedan would take him, he explained, so he had walked.

  I suggested he might like a warm bath. He grew suddenly shy. His clothes were dripping, leaving murky puddles on the floor. I felt something like generosity well up inside me, and offered to bathe him myself. He agreed, but made me promise that whatever I saw, I would not hate him. I laughed, somewhat surprised at what I assumed was a vulgar reference. I promised. When the water was hot, he went into the alcove alone and drew the screen. I watched his shadow undress. A long back emerged, a little crook where the waist went in and a hip flared out. There was something familiar about the shape. Then he stepped into the tub and called to me. I went behind the screen. Slightly distorted by the water in which it was immersed was the body of the woman with the lantern.

  “Remember your promise,” she said, unable to read my face.