The Dissident Read online

  Phil didn’t say anything.

  “Is she there with you?”

  “Not right now. No.”

  Phil’s girlfriend was a successful corporate lawyer, of Turkish descent. She had dark, almost black hair and was very thin, because of all her nervous energy. That was the only description Phil had given her, and so it was strange how often Cece seemed to see her. In the supermarket, in a car stopped next to her on the freeway, at the cosmetics counter in Neiman Marcus. Aubrey lived in New York, and was very unlikely to be any of those places. Even if she had been in L.A., how would Cece have recognized her? Yet these pretend Aubreys continued to catch her eye. Often, it seemed that they were also looking back at Cece.

  “I feel so far away from her. I don’t mean distance.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Talking to you, for example—it feels like it hasn’t been any time at all.”

  She had not yet told Phil about Max’s accident, but the mere possibility of confiding in him was soothing. For the first time since it happened, she felt as if everything might be OK.

  “What are you doing in Chinatown?” she asked.

  “I’m at the market. In the exotic animal section.”

  “They have animals at the supermarket?”

  “It’s an outdoor market. They have everything.”

  Cece tried to imagine an outdoor market that carried exotic animals, but in her mind, it kept turning into the shops at Century City.

  “What are you doing there?”

  There was a long pause. “Picking up Fionnula.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t talk about it now.”

  “Does this have to do with the problems with Aubrey?”

  “Totally separate,” Phil said.

  Cece felt slightly sick, while reminding herself that Phil was free to be involved with a whole brigade of Chinese animal lovers. Was it possible to be a Chinese woman named Fionnula? She thought of telling Phil about the dissident, and decided against it. Suddenly all of the excitement had gone out of the plan.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m not.” Phil sighed. “What do I know?”

  There was a long pause. “You know the dinosaurs,” Cece said.

  Phil laughed. She loved making him laugh. “That’s true,” he said. “I do know the dinosaurs.”

  “Diplodocus?”

  “Up to ninety feet long, with a muscular whiplike tail.”

  “And the seismosaurus?”

  “Two hundred thousand pounds: the earth-shaking lizard.”

  “Pterodactyls.”

  “The pterodactyls,” Phil said solemnly, “had hollow bones.”

  In the old days, when Phil was still trying to be an actor, working nights at a trendy restaurant on Melrose, they would sometimes take the kids to the La Brea tar pits. Max especially loved the dinosaurs, and Phil had become an expert, going back and forth with his nephew for what seemed like hours: Did you know that most dinosaurs were birds? Did you know that most dinosaurs were vegetarians? One of the reasons it was so hard to say “affair” was that it had never been like an ordinary affair; for one thing, it had always involved the children. It had started because of Gordon’s book, Manias and Obsessions. On the weekends he needed the house to be quiet, and so every Saturday (and nearly every Sunday) she and Philip had taken Max and Olivia on an outing. They had gone to the zoo and the beach and the tar pits. And several times to the Griffith Park Observatory. Philip had been so enthusiastic—running after the children, seeing to their needs, and keeping them entertained—that other women looked at her with envy. No one would have guessed that he wasn’t her husband.

  “That was great,” Phil said.

  “You knew all of them,” said Cece.

  “That’s because I was an unhappy kid. A sad, fucked-up little kid.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Sad kids love dinosaurs. Everything else disappoints them.”

  “What do you mean—everything else?”

  “You know,” Phil said. “Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, winged monkeys.”

  “Winged monkeys?”

  “Dinosaurs are monsters, but they’re real. They’re the only ones that pan out.”

  “I thought it was that they’re extinct.”

  “Sometimes I feel as if I’m extinct,” Phil said gloomily.

  Something to remember about Phil, when you thought you might be in love with him, was his incredible narcissism. Once she had told him that she had menstrual cramps, and Phil had said: Sometimes I feel as if I have menstrual cramps.

  “New York is like an enormous tar pit,” Phil was saying. “Full of dinosaurs. They come here, and then they never leave.”

  “Especially the whinosaurus,” Cece said. “I bet there’s a surplus of those.”

  “They have to shoot us to keep the population down,” Phil said. “But at least we don’t have the sarcastosaurus.”

  “At least we don’t have the jerkosaurus.”

  “Bitcherotops.”

  “Misogynosaurus.”

  “Cece?”

  “Yes.”

  “I adore you.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “When you’re around, I’m the adorosaurus.”

  You were annoyed, and then he said something like that.

  “I—”

  “It’s OK,” Phil said. “Because the adorosaurus is extinct.”

  There was the sound of Gordon’s car in the driveway—a sporty, cherry red Cadillac Allante—his “midlife crisis car.” Gordon wasn’t having enough of a crisis to buy a German or Italian car.

  “Phil?”

  She heard the kitchen door slam, and then Gordon saying something to Lupe.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “Hello?” Gordon called from the kitchen.

  “Max—”

  She had never said it clearly before. She had said: Max bought a gun. And even: Max was caught driving with a gun. But she had never said, “My son Max bought a gun because he was thinking of ending his life.”

  “Cece?” Gordon said, from the dining room.

  “Cece?” Phil said, from the rare animal market in Chinatown.

  “He told the police he wanted to kill himself.” There was a silence at the other end of the line. Somehow that helped her continue. “He bought a gun. He told us it was for his comic books—did you know he draws comic books? But then when they stopped him, he said—”

  Gordon’s voice interrupted on the general intercom: “Anybody home?”

  “If they hadn’t stopped him—”

  “Oh, Ceece.”

  Gordon knocked once and opened the door. “There you are. I brought the mail.”

  “Do you want me to come there?” Phil asked.

  “Mostly junk,” Gordon said.

  “I could get on a plane to night.”

  “Here’s Gordon,” said Cece.

  “Who is that?” Gordon asked.

  “Well,” said Phil. “I guess not then.”

  “Is that—”

  “I love you,” Phil said. “Good-bye.”

  The line took a moment to disengage.

  “It was your brother,” Cece said.

  “Is he still there?”

  “I didn’t think you would want to talk to him.”

  “You were right,” Gordon said. He was staring at her. She put the phone back in the cradle.

  “He says to say hello.”

  Gordon did not question this obvious lie.

  “We just chatted for a few minutes.” Something kept her from telling him Phil’s big news. Maybe it was just that she was used to defending Phil to Gordon; her impulse was to try to evoke his pity. “He’s been going through a hard time lately,” she said.

  Gordon put on an expression of exaggerated surprise. “How is Phil having a hard time?”

  “He’s having a midlife crisis.”

  “Phil is havi
ng a lifelong crisis. He just happens to have gotten to the middle of it.”

  “Gordon, I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” Gordon said. “Don’t you have to have arrived at midlife, before you start your crisis?”

  “Phil’s forty-five.”

  “Technically, yes.” Gordon dropped the mail on her desk. “A midlife crisis usually entails the consideration of one’s responsibilities—those one has met as well as failed to meet.”

  Cece wished Gordon would not use the pronoun “one.” It made her feel itchy.

  “With regard to one’s children, for example. Finances. Career. Marriage. As I understand it: a person confronting the specter of what is yet to be done.” Gordon looked past her, out the window at the driveway. “Aren’t those leaf blowers illegal now?”

  “I think so,” Cece said. “They’re supposed to be very bad for the air.” She felt slightly guilty, as if she’d betrayed Phil. Which was ridiculous. If there was anything she should feel guilty about, it was talking to Phil at all.

  “I’ll say something,” Gordon said. He started out of the room.

  “Gordon?”

  “Yes?” He turned back, blinking his eyes behind his glasses.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Gordon said patiently. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, too.”

  He nodded, and put his hand on the doorknob.

  “Gordon?”

  “Yes?”

  She knew she was annoying him, but she couldn’t stand for him to leave the room. There was a conversation she knew they had to have; she just didn’t know how to start it.

  “Why do children like dinosaurs?” Cece asked. “Did you ever read about that?”

  Her husband visibly relaxed. “Not that I remember,” he said. “But it’s logical. Children are fascinated by dinosaurs because dinosaurs are manifestations of their fears.”

  “Oh,” said Cece.

  “And yet they’re extinct—they can’t hurt them. By learning the names of the dinosaurs, children feel that they control their fears.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Cece said.

  6.

  AS SHE SAT IN OLIVIA’S BEDROOM, IMMACULATE AND READY FOR HER daughter’s homecoming, Cece thought that her longing for the old house was more than simple nostalgia. There had been something about living in a rental that had made the future seem open and indeterminate. Then her father had died, and their financial worries had ended. Manias and Obsessions had been published, to great acclaim, and Phil had moved to Manhattan. She and Gordon had looked around for six months, and finally found this house on Mountain Drive; all at once, without warning, everything had become permanently, irrevocably fixed.

  There was the sound of a car outside, and a rhythmic drumming; when Cece looked out Olivia’s window, she could see an old brown Chevy sedan, with the finish worn off but the hubcaps and tires replaced. She wondered if that was the cousin from Echo Park. The driver honked gently three times.

  Max and Jasmine were standing together at the top of the driveway. She could hear her son’s voice, but not what he was saying. All of a sudden, he leaned in and kissed Jasmine. It wasn’t a long or particularly passionate kiss, two dark heads bumping together for just a few seconds, but Cece took a step back from the window. She felt strangely childlike, startled by something she’d heard of but never seen.

  A moment later, Jasmine was tripping down the driveway in her high-heeled sandals. When she opened the car door, loud music overwhelmed the quiet street. Then the door slammed, and the sound was only a heartbeat again. It was one of those uneven days, weather-wise; when the sun was out, it was hot, but clouds kept passing in front of the sun. The four trees Felipe had planted along the driveway had bloomed yellow, and the tiny flowers shivered in a light breeze.

  A moment later Cece heard Max’s not-delicate tread on the stairs. She turned away from the window, but when he saw her in his sister’s room, he stopped. Cece felt the urge to defend herself.

  “I was just making sure everything was ready for Olivia.”

  Max looked around the room as if he were assessing her work. He glanced at the ceiling, and then down at his sneakers. He put his hands in his pocket, took them out again, licked his lips, and said: “I think it’s hard for Jasmine.”

  The confidence was so unexpected that, for a moment, Cece didn’t respond. She had the urge to stay absolutely still, as if a rare bird had flown into the house and perched on the bedpost right in front of her.

  “Because Carlos can’t always drive her,” Max continued. “When he can’t drive her, she can’t go paint.”

  “Was that Carlos?” Cece asked carefully.

  “Yeah.”

  “Couldn’t one of her parents drive her?”

  “They’re at work,” Max said. “And anyway, she usually stays with Carlos. She doesn’t really like her stepfather.”

  “Why?”

  Max shrugged. “He makes her uncomfortable.”

  “Uncomfortable, how?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, but I mean she must’ve said—” But Cece didn’t want to push it.

  “Carlos takes care of her,” Max said. “He’s working so Jasmine can go to college.”

  “Why not her father, or her stepfather?”

  “Her father’s in El Salvador. She hasn’t seen him since she was a baby. And her stepfather…” Max shrugged.

  “Well, thank goodness she has her cousin,” Cece said.

  Max nodded. “That’s why we have to go to his birthday.”

  Cece was disappointed: was this whole conversation about a party? Or was it possible that the party was an excuse, that Max wanted to share with his mother the disturbing things Jasmine had told him? Cece looked at Max, who had taken the Raiders cap off his head and was crushing it in his hands.

  “Max,” she said. “I hope you’ve told Jasmine she can always come here.”

  Max looked at his sneakers, which were some sort of futuristic new thing, without a tongue or laces. “Yeah.”

  “Any time of the day or night, she should feel free to call. And if it’s that she can’t get to the freeway, we could even pick her up at home.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s only about twenty minutes out of the way, and the traffic isn’t bad by that time—”

  But by that time, Max was already halfway down the hall to his room.

  7.

  THE LAST TIME I SAW MEILING, SHE WAS LIVING ALONE IN A SMALL apartment in the hutongs between the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower. This was in the early spring of 2000, and I was staying at my cousin’s studio in the Factory at Dashanzi. At that time X both lived and worked in his studio, a brick and concrete industrial space without heat or running water. That suited my cousin, then. Although it wasn’t comfortable (the toilet and antique communal shower were in another building), the arrangement allowed me to stay for several weeks in Beijing while I finalized the details of my trip. My cousin had helped me organize everything with Harry Lin, the professor who had once come all the way from America to see our work in the East Village.

  I would leave from Shanghai in August, just before the start of the American school year. In Los Angeles, I would be a visiting scholar at the St. Anselm’s School for Girls, and live with one of that institution’s most committed families: “patrons of the arts,” who were delighted to have the opportunity to host me for the year. I would also receive a small stipend from UCLA, through a fund called the Dubin Fellowship, which “encouraged artists to cross borders and challenge their thinking as they engaged with artists of other cultures and disciplines.” In return, I would present one solo show of oil paintings (paintings that had already been shown at TFAM in Taipei, but which would be new to an American audience) and another of new work in the spring. At that time I would also give a lecture, in which I would place my project “in the context of Chinese contemporary art and the development of freedom of expression.”

  “L
ongxia Shanren will have to come out of his shell,” my cousin joked. He had always teased me about being a hermit, a mountain man like my favorite Song painter, Zhao Cangyun. Zhao Cangyun was called “Cangyun Shanren” (Gathering Clouds Mountain Man) for his habit of wandering the Anhui hills, and I became “Longxia Shanren” (the Lobster Hermit), after the childish paintings I’d once shown my cousin in Harbin, as well as a tendency to get red in the face when I drank.

  “You’ll want to bring some Chinese clothes,” X suggested. “For meeting important people. They love that in Los Angeles.”

  “Like yours, you mean?” My cousin was fond of silk pajamas, which he often wore for interviews with the press. I couldn’t picture myself in that kind of getup, strolling around Los Angeles like some sort of Ming courtier.

  “I think you can handle the big university VIPs,” he continued. “It’s all those teenage girls I’m worried about.”

  “What will I teach them?” I asked, trying to get him to be serious for a moment. But my cousin was characteristically unconcerned with practical details. According to X, I would be an ambassador for all the artists we knew—especially those of us who’d been displaced when the East Village broke up, and were now living as far away as Xian, Ürümqi, and Inner Mongolia. There was nothing more important, X began; then he got a silly, infuriating expression on his face.

  “You’ll be taking the old work with you,” he said, indicating the canvases stacked against the walls of the studio, which I had just retrieved from a storage facility near the You Yi Shopping City. “But maybe you’ll be bringing some new work back. I’m so eager to see what the painter-in-exile will produce.”

  He was reminding us both of my long period of inaction, during which I had been working a comfortable job at my father’s office in Shanghai. I couldn’t deny it, but I thought it was unfair of him, of all people, to bring it up.

  “It’s not an exile,” I said. “I’m choosing to go.”

  “In pseudo-exile,” X agreed. “Even more interesting.”

  “Why don’t you go be an ambassador yourself?” I demanded.

  The question had the effect I’d intended. X shrugged and mumbled something, turning away from me.