The Dissident Read online

  “Someone once told me that’s the sign of a real artist—they don’t care about their work after it’s finished,” Cece continued, pressing the button for the crosswalk and searching in a large leather purse, the color of butter, for her keys. Palms waved in slow motion all along the pickup zone; across the street, orange and purple birds-of-paradise shared a bed with red azaleas in front of a pink stucco parking structure. I thought of my cousin with regret: these were his colors, his palette. X would have loved to be where I was now, looking up at the round restaurant rotating lazily on its narrow spire.

  “We can be excited about the work, whether it’s ten years old or two hundred,” Cece said. “But for the artist, it’s always about the next thing.”

  “Yes,” I said gravely. There were hummingbirds in the flowerbeds: I had never seen a real one before, and my hand itched to draw it.

  “Not to put pressure on you,” Cece said. “I know you’ll need lots of time just to settle in with us. For tonight—I didn’t know whether you’d be hungry?”

  I hadn’t felt the emptiness in my belly until she mentioned it. “A little.”

  “You should try to eat, if you can,” said Cece. “I made some tomato soup, and a parmesan bread, and there’s all kinds of fruit. We’re having tuna steaks for dinner—my family likes it practically raw, but I still eat it the gauche way, all cooked through—and a pesto risotto, and of course I’ll make a salad. There’s a tart I did last night that came out pretty well, with apples and currants.” Cece glanced at me. “I have to admit that my Chinese cooking isn’t up to snuff. But maybe you could help me?”

  It was amazing to have come so far, and land in the midst of a family that, at least in its emphasis on food, was very Chinese: for the rest of the ride to Beverly Hills, Cece and I discussed the dishes we might prepare together.

  As we left the airport, I was hungry enough to eat, but by the time we pulled into the Traverses’ driveway, I was so tired that I worried I wouldn’t be able to make it from the car into the house. Cece guessed this, and suggested she take me straight to my room.

  “Our house keeper will bring your bags,” she said. “You shouldn’t sleep more than a few hours, but maybe you’d like to lie down until dinner? We eat around seven—I hope that’s not too early for you?”

  Two eight oh five Mountain Drive was even more lavish than I’d expected; what I didn’t expect was how familiar it seemed, from the moment I walked in the door. It was nothing like my parents’ apartment in Shanghai, where money often buys space or ornamentation before comfort. Nor was it like the apartment I considered my true home, in Harbin, which was extremely simple. (Even after my father began to succeed at Daqing, he was understandably frugal, inclined to hide rather than display his newfound wealth.) Nevertheless, I thought I recognized the Traverses’ house, as if I’d dreamed about it before I arrived.

  The only thing that surprised me was the presence of a sort of domestic zoo: as soon as we got inside, a large white dog was leaping affectionately onto my chest; Cece managed to grab his collar, but by then two cats were twining in and out between my legs in their quick, unnerving way.

  “Sorry,” Cece said. “You don’t dislike animals, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I just learned my Chinese zodiac sign. Lupe! Come help with Mr. Yuan’s bags. I’m the sheep or the goat—depending on which book you look at.”

  I was startled. Assuming she hadn’t made a mistake with her sign, Cece was forty-four, seven or eight years older than I would’ve guessed.

  “What’s yours?”

  I hesitated only for a moment. “The dragon,” I said, upgrading my sign from the humble rabbit to the fiercest and most beautiful of the animals. I remembered how X had called me “Longxia Shanren” for a joke, the Lobster Hermit; in Chinese, a lobster is a little dragon.

  “That’s the best one,” Cece said. “So you were born in—”

  Before I could answer, a very fat Hispanic woman, dressed all in white, came into the foyer and took my bag. When I protested, Cece shushed me.

  “Mr. Yuan, this is Lupe. Lupe, Mr. Yuan. Please ask her if you need anything, and if she doesn’t understand, ask Maxwell to help you; he’s our Spanish speaker.” Lupe said something in an obliging tone, which I didn’t understand: I was distracted by a bright orange and purple pattern, projected on the floor by a high stained-glass window above the stairs. I thought again of my cousin, almost as if I were seeing everything—the house and Cece and the mysterious Spanish woman—through his eyes.

  “You’ll meet Max and Gordon at dinner,” Cece said. “Now I want to leave you alone to rest for a while—if you’re sure you don’t want a snack?”

  “I’d like to lie down,” I said: things were beginning to slide away at the edges of my vision, and I was conscious of how often I was blinking.

  “You poor thing,” Cece said, taking my arm and guiding me down three polished wooden stairs. We went through a vast living room, with cream-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, matching cloudlike drapes, half drawn, and an overstuffed, armless sofa that extended across an entire wall, upholstered in blue-and-cream-striped silk. Over the plaster fireplace was an Andy Warhol print of Marilyn Monroe, in orange and purple; on the opposite wall was a painting I preferred, a large oil abstraction in pale colors that seemed to run down the page, almost like a watercolor.

  “Mr. Diebenkorn, of course,” Cece said. “My favorite thing we have is in your room, though. It’s a Frankenthaler; you’ll have to tell me what you think of it.”

  By the time we had passed through the copper and mahogany bar, with a big-screen TV and a glass-fronted liquor cabinet, gone out the sliding glass doors, and crossed the breathtaking lawn, I knew what was familiar about the house. I had seen it in the movies—not this particular house but similar ones, where nothing that isn’t beautiful has been allowed to stay. Everything with a necessary function, from telephones to garden tools to toilet plungers, has been designed to add, or at least not detract, from the overall pleasantness of the rooms.

  In spite of my exhaustion, I couldn’t help admiring the pool, with its unusual cusped shape and dark violet-blue bottom. My arms and legs were cramping, but my upper body felt light, as if a part of me might detach at any moment, leave its battered skin (still fifteen hours ahead of itself), and sail newborn above the trees.

  Cece unlocked the door of the pool house, and all I absorbed of the two rooms were their shuttered coolness, and the large inviting white expanse of the bed.

  “Someone will come to wake you for dinner,” Cece said. “There are towels and things in the bathroom, if you’d like to wash up first.”

  I may have washed my face then. All I remember, after the door clicked closed behind her, was stripping off my clothes and climbing into those cool sheets. The last thing I thought of was an article I’d seen in a magazine at home, about the different kinds of sleepers (side, stomach, back, fetal) and what each position said about the sleeper’s personality. Someone who is outgoing (what we call wai xiang) will sleep on his back, open to the world, while an introvert (nei xiang) will face down, or curl up into himself. I thought that if my illusion were going to be complete, I would roll over onto my back. It was just an idle thought; I’ve never been able to sleep exposed like that, and I dropped off that first afternoon in Los Angeles the ordinary way, on my stomach, my face crushed into an overwhelming mass of pure white goosefeathers.

  13.

  FIONNULA WAS CHITTERING AGAIN. PHIL HAD BEEN FORCED TO SEDATE her before they left the ground; now, in the middle of the flight, suspended above the indeterminate dark rectangles of the midwestern United States, the drugs were wearing off. She had started vocalizing the moment Phil settled her under the seat, a detail he hadn’t considered when he’d imagined transporting an exotic African primate by air.

  “She’ll calm down once we’re airborne,” Phil had promised the stewardess, who was watching them.

  “You’ve got it all zipped up in its case?�
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  “It’s a cage, actually. Even more secure.”

  The stewardess, whose nametag said “Karen, Portland, OR,” looked wary. There was one bombshell of a flight attendant on the plane: southern, very tall, with waist-length red hair, freckles, and an absolutely perfect, heart-shaped ass. Most stewardesses now were unattractive. Karen was squat and jowly, with a self-satisfied expression that he associated, probably unfairly, with the Pacific Northwest. You could imagine her going on hiking trips on the weekends, with a bunch of equally smug, middle-aged “girlfriends.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Karen said skeptically.

  “She’s happy,” Phil said. “That’s why she’s, um, making sounds.” Fionnula did sometimes chitter when she was pleased, if you rubbed behind her ears or gave her a melon rind. Those sounds probably meant something different now. He had brought her home from Flushing in the same case two weeks ago, in a gypsy cab, just after he had resolved to go to L.A.

  Aubrey was not impressed, even when he showed her the biography of the bush baby, also known as a lesser galago (Galago senegalensis) in “The Online Encyclopedia of African Wildlife.”

  “We talked about getting a pet,” Phil reminded her. “You said you’d like that.”

  “I was envisioning a French bulldog,” Aubrey said.

  That was a lie. What Aubrey was envisioning was not a French bulldog, or a bush baby, but an ordinary baby, with a fuzzy head, spindly arms, and a fat, round body, containing a set of underdeveloped, unpredictable intestines. She was envisioning hats with little cat ears, stuffed giraffes, and an expensive stroller from Japan, which a more perfect version of Phil would manipulate skillfully into different configurations, depending upon the weather.

  The lesser galago required no such props. Omnivorous, arboreal, and nocturnal, he could subsist happily on a diet of fruits, vegetables, and field mice; he lived in nests or tree hollows in the bush and woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa, an environment that Phil could imagine reproducing in Cece’s large and exquisitely maintained backyard. At only seven to eight inches long (excluding the tail), and weighing in at only five to ten ounces, the lesser galago was a practical pet. Except for self-defense and, among females, fierce protection of the young, bush babies were not aggressive. They could reproduce the cry of a human infant, whistle in response to predators (including eagles, owls, snakes, and genets) and cover ten yards in seconds. They could leap twenty feet, and live in captivity up to fourteen years. Aside from his airline ticket, Fionnula was the only thing Phil had purchased in the month since his fortunes had so dramatically improved.

  A woman he had never met had changed his life. Phil Travers, struggling actor/playwright/grantwriter, was now Phil Travers, Hollywood screenwriter, with a million dollars (almost) in the bank, and a coproducer credit on what promised to be a hot summer movie. The transformation had happened, as they say, “overnight.” There was now no reason why Phil should not quit his grantwriting, give up his apartment in Queens, and marry (and then swiftly impregnate) his girlfriend Aubrey, who had been dating him with this expectation for the past four years. The woman responsible for these reversals was arguably not yet a woman at all: her name was Darcy Feyth, and she was nineteen years old.

  Darcy Feyth first appeared as the gap-toothed little sister on a short-lived network sitcom in the fall of 1986. She then disappeared for ten years and was effectively consigned to the Arts and Entertainment section of Trivial Pursuit, when along came The Big Blow, a tornado movie produced on the cheap which swept up its hitherto unknown star and dropped her gently down onto the covers of several glossy magazines, as “The Comeback Kid” and “Darcy Feyth—the Return of the Girl-Next-Door.” Jane of Hearts, Cassiopeia, and the phenomenally successful Black Dagger trilogy followed: films set in rural Idaho, outer space, and feudal Korea, respectively. Although none was Oscar material, critics concurred: “Darcy Feyth continues to transcend her material,” and “Hollywood’s Darling Is a Diamond in the Rough.”

  Phil read about Darcy’s meteoric rise (to which he was now attached, as a kind of flaming, orbital debris) on the Internet, while Aubrey pored over his contract. The contract was with Karl Niedbalski, an old friend from the Albatross—an off-off-Broadway venue where Phil had acted and Karl had been the dramaturge in a series of original productions staged by mutual friends in the late 1970s. Karl had obtained Phil’s play through one of those friends (now the artistic director of a respectable downtown repertory company), who had passed on it. Karl assured Phil that the artistic director had made a terrible mistake.

  They had negotiated the contract at an alcoholic dinner in an “illegal restaurant” above a glue factory in Red Hook, where Karl had invited Phil and Aubrey to eat a Polish delicacy called kiszka. Karl described himself to Aubrey, whom he was meeting for the first time, as “a man with a knack for transforming unreadable novels into unwatchable films.” Aubrey had pushed her kiszka politely around on her plate.

  Karl offered Phil a generous five percent of the film’s net profits. He then cheerfully explained that the only two of his eighteen films to secure distribution had lost money: “Of course, I won’t make you pay five percent of the debt,” Karl joked. (Aubrey hadn’t laughed.) They were the only people in the restaurant. Karl’s wife hadn’t been able to make it to the dinner, and so the filmmaker had brought his hundred-and-forty-pound Pyrenean mountain dog instead. It was pouring, and Phil’s primary memory of the night was the absolutely unique and probably irreproducible smell of kiszka, glue, and wet dog.

  The evening was one more indication that he and Aubrey were not right for each other. Aubrey belonged with a man who conducted his business in the daytime, in Manhattan. She should be dining at Montrachet or Babbo, drinking a spectacular vintage. Aubrey’s friends did not go to illegal restaurants. (They were, after all, lawyers.) Phil had felt for a long time that it was necessary for one of them to leave the other, and that the best person to effect this change was Aubrey. It was one of the rare points on which he and Aubrey’s family were in complete agreement.

  It was almost a month after they’d gone out to Red Hook, when Phil had practically forgotten about the cinematic version of The Hypnotist, when the phone rang. Karl was breathless:

  “I sent it to some agents. It was a joke, really, you know—Julia Roberts as Celine.”

  “Julia Roberts is going to play Celine?”

  “Better,” Karl said.

  “Good,” said Phil. “Because Julia Roberts isn’t at all the kind of actor I had in mind.”

  “Funny,” Karl said. “But we’re not talking about Julia Roberts. We’re talking about Darcy Feyth.”

  “Who’s Darcy Feyth?”

  Karl sighed. “How did I know you were going to say that? She’s the new Julia Roberts. Or I mean, I guess she’s the new Meg Ryan. Unless she turns out to be the new Nicole Kidman. You never know—she’s nineteen.”

  “She’s nineteen?”

  “She has more money than you and me and everyone we know put together, and she can’t even buy a beer. We live in a funny country, Phil.”

  “Celine is in her thirties,” Phil began. “A mother of two. There’s no way that a nineteen—”

  Karl didn’t let him finish: “The point is—she wants to do it.”

  “Is that good?”

  “That depends who you are,” said Karl. “If you’re you, you’re currently under contract for five percent of the proceeds of a film with a star whose movies have previously grossed between four and four hundred million dollars each. So yes—I would say that this has the potential to be very good news for you.”

  Everything around Phil, the computer, the bed, Aubrey’s clothes on the floor, seemed to get soft and fuzzy. He experienced a momentary feeling of ecstasy: he might slip out. He might simply extract himself from this life, like a splinter, letting everything heal up nicely behind him, as if he’d never been there.

  “That’s if you’re you,” Karl continued. “If you’re me, you’ve just bee
n paid a five-thousand-dollar finder’s fee, and invited to ‘stay in touch.’”

  Phil was indignant. “They can’t do that to you. I’ll call them. Who do I have to call?”

  The filmmaker started giggling. He giggled for so long that Phil got annoyed.

  “After all, I wrote it.”

  “Oh, man, you’re funny,” said the filmmaker. “You’d better get a lawyer.”

  Of course, a lawyer was the one asset Phil had.

  Aubrey renegotiated the contract with the production company in Los Angeles. She took a morning off from work to do it. When she finally made the phone call, he couldn’t listen. He went into the bedroom and did some breathing exercises that his therapist had shown him, which were supposed to combat his borderline social anxiety disorder.

  “Phil?” Aubrey called him from the living room: “I’m done.”

  Her voice was tearful: clearly, she hadn’t succeeded. He too was getting only five thousand dollars. If someone had told him a month ago that he was getting five thousand dollars for nothing, he would’ve been elated (at least for a few minutes). Now he felt like giving it back. He felt like crawling into the closet and hiding among the shirts.

  “Phil?”

  He went into the living room (Aubrey’s living room) and listened to his girlfriend tell him, with bashful pride, that he was now a “coproducer,” and that someone from a company he had never heard of was going to send him a check for a million dollars.

  “You did it,” Aubrey had said, throwing her arms around his neck. “I knew you would. Now are you finally going to let me read it?”

  He had written the play over a period of three months, in the middle of the night, while Aubrey slept. He had not ever intended to show it to anyone, but then his vanity had gotten the better of him. This success seemed to confirm something. But what was good about it, really? It was hardly original. He had written a play about a man who falls in love with his brother’s wife.