Waxwings Read online

  “Chink!”

  He thought it must be someone from the encampment, but it was a stranger, a big grizzled man in corduroys and a fleece coat.

  “You’re looking for the job?”

  At the word “job,” he nodded slyly.

  “The Mexicans are late. You ever worked with asbestos?”

  “Little bit, maybe.”

  “ ‘Little bit,’ huh? Well, it ain’t rocket-science.”

  “Please?”

  “Eight-fifty an hour.”

  Chink stared at him.

  “Eight dollars.” The man held up eight fingers. “Fifty cents.” He pulled two coins from his pocket.

  “For one hour?”

  “You got it.”

  The Mexicans—five of them—came in a pick-up truck, and the big man spoke to them in Mexican, talking very fast. To everything he said, they replied Si and Okay and Entiendo.

  “Chink,” the big man then said, pointing to him.

  “Hi, Chick,” one of the Mexicans said, holding out his hand.

  “Chick” was an American name; he’d heard it before, on the videos. He thought, Okay, I am Chick now.

  Walking in single file, they followed the big man along a narrow wooden dock to a gray military-looking vessel, more ship than boat, and clambered aboard. The man led them down a companionway ladder to the dark of the engine room, turned on a light that did little to dissipate the gloom, then slapped at the labyrinthine tangle of lagged ducts and pipes, saying, “Asbestos, asbestos, all asbestos.”

  Their job was to cut away the insulation and load it into black garbage bags. The man provided them with knives, and showed them how to work the hose, wetting down each duct before they made the first cut. The Mexicans, their faces covered with knotted red handkerchiefs, looked like bandits. For Chick, the man brought a white mask.

  One of the Mexicans pointed and said, “El puerco!” and the others laughed while he took his place among them, watching closely for cues.

  The engine room stank of diesel and the rotten-vegetable odor of bilge-water. The bad smell, dank cold, and meager light made him think of jail. The Mexicans hosed down the burlap that was wrapped around the asbestos lagging, spraying each other and yelling like small boys. He slashed at the burlap with his knife, raising a puff of white smoke. The tiny fibers stayed aloft, drifting and swirling on the vagrant currents of air, and against the bare electric bulb he could see them teeming in millions, like flying chaff at harvest-time. Though they kept wetting-down the asbestos, the dust thickened until the entire engine room was filled with a dense white fog. He ripped out armfuls of disintegrating fluff, stuffing them in the bags.

  Sometimes the big man was there, wearing a mask like his, sitting at the top of the companionway or, occasionally, wielding his own knife to gather twice as much asbestos with one slash as any of the Mexicans. Chick copied him—cutting and shoveling, cutting and shoveling, knotting each bag when it was full, and tossing it, like a great soft pillow, into the corner.

  Late in the morning, the big man called a stop to work, and led the gang to flat boxes of hot pizza and cans of Coca-Cola up in the wheel-house. Sitting by himself, Chick wolfed down the free food.

  “You do a good job of work, Chink,” the man said.

  “No ‘Chink.’ Chick.”

  “Okay, Chick. I like your style.”

  Then they were down in the white fog again, sneezing and coughing. The men took turns, two at a time, driving the truck away once it was filled with bags. On one of these excursions, the big man ordered a Mexican named Lázaro to take Chick along.

  They drove across the bridge, over the top of his encampment into a new quarter of the city, where there were even more docks, warehouses, and industrial buildings. They stopped near a Dumpster. After looking around, Lázaro put one of the bags into the Dumpster, and drove quickly on. Several Dumpsters later, there were still three bags left in the truck.

  Chick gestured at the bags and the Dumpster. “Why no—?”

  “Is the law,” Lázaro said, and laughed. “Asbestos. No good. No legal. Is illegal. Like me!”

  When they got back to the ship, it was dark and the job was finished. The last bags were loaded onto the truck, and the big man paid off each man in turn, peeling the money from a fat billfold. He paid Chick last, when the Mexicans were climbing into their truck. Seventy-six dollars and fifty cents—for one day’s work only!

  “You do painting?”

  “Please?”

  “Know how to paint?” The man mimed, conjuring a can, a brush, a wall.

  “Oh, yeah! I paint! I paint . . . real good.”

  “I thought you might. Come back tomorrow. Eight o’clock. You just got yourself a job.”

  “Eight dollars and fifty cents—one hour?”

  The big man, hands deep in the pockets of his huge fleece jacket, gave him a squinting smile. “Right. Same as today.”

  In the deep back pocket of his new jeans, he had $116.50. That was his secret. When he returned to the encampment, the woman asked where he had been. “I go walk . . .” he said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the street-market, fearful that someone might have seen him in the truck with Lázaro. But the people sprawled by the fire asked him no more questions.

  In the dark of the morning, while the others still slept in their tents, he packed everything back into the laundry bag and tiptoed out from under the bridge. He knew of a safer place now, where he could be alone with his American money—there was even a toilet and real beds. No problem. He’d live on the asbestos ship.

  “Actually,” Tom said, “it was Hildy’s story, ‘Meredith,’ that sent me back to the first chapter of The Portrait of a Lady . . . ”

  He usually began his classes with a ten-minute sermonette. Things got very airless when students discussed only each others’ work, and Tom wanted to remind them that they were apprentices in a long tradition of marvelous achievements. Comparing Hildy Blom with Henry James was rather a stretch—and Hildy herself, sitting at the far end of the long table, frowning grimly into her notebook, looked as if she were in the early stages of prolonged root-canal surgery.

  Each of the eight students had photocopies of both “Meredith” and the James chapter, but Tim was pleased to see that four of them—not Hildy, though—had bought The Portrait of a Lady in the black-spined Penguin Classics edition. At the back of the room, tall stone-framed windows with leaded panes, vaguely ecclesiastical in style, and designed to import a whiff of Ivy League and Oxbridge to the Far West, let in three shafts of pallid November sunlight. The blackboard, which ran the full length of the narrow room, was covered in Cyrillic characters, along with the single English word “Chivaree.”

  “James’s English country house and Hildy’s eastern Washington trailer park may seem to be pretty remote from each other, but James had a genius for opening scenes, and I love the way he begins The Portrait of a Lady. As in ‘Meredith,’ we’re waiting for the main character to arrive. Isabel will show up in Chapter 2. But Chapter 1 is wonderfully rich in inklings as to what the novel is going to be about—clues, if you like, laid cunningly through these pages by an artist working at the very top of his form.

  “You’ll have noticed that at first we don’t see the characters themeselves, only their lengthening shadows on the lawn. They’re all still the shades of the people they’ll eventually become, and you may have seen in James’s preface to the book—this is the one where he speaks, famously, of the ‘house of fiction’—that he describes his first conception of Isabel Archer as ‘the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl.’ This is a novel of shades and shadows, and those of you who’ve read it will know that Isabel moves from being a creature of light to one trapped in the darkness of a terribly mistaken marriage.

  “Nothing is quite what it seems. It’s a classic afternoon tea—a female ceremony, as James describes it—but the shadows of the tea-drinkers turn out to be cast by men, and although it’s a classic English house in th
e country with an English lord in the picture, the house is owned by an American. And while it’s an outdoor scene, the garden is ‘furnished,’ James says, ‘like a room,’ with rugs on the lawn, books and papers, cushioned seats. It’s as if the inside of the house has been moved outside, into the sun.

  “Well, why do you think James spends so much time on this physical description of the house called Gardencourt? The lawn slopes down to the River Thames, and here James plants another clue. Later in the book, when the real shadows close in, Isabel is going to find herself locked inside another house, with another lawn, sloping down to another river.”

  “The Arno,” said Todd Leavitt, who’d spent the summer backpacking through England, France, and Italy. His copy of the book looked as if it had been in his possession for a very long time indeed.

  “Right. In Chapter 22, page 278, you’ll see James’s description of the Italian house of Gilbert Osmond, the dreadful husband who is Isabel’s eventual destiny. And the front of the Osmond villa is ‘the mask, not the face of the house.’ The view of the Arno is behind the house, and James suggests a sort of sinister back-to-frontness about this other house, which is almost a perverse mirror-image of Gardencourt as he describes it in Chapter 1. At Gardencourt, everything’s out in the open, even the furniture, while at the Osmond villa everything’s enclosed. Long before Isabel gets there, we’ve been taught to see it as a jail. Look at those ‘massively cross-barred’ windows, James’s ‘jealous apertures.’ You can read The Portrait of a Lady as a tale of two houses, if you like: the light and the dark. And in another unexpected twist, gloomy England, with its Seattle weather, turns out to be a lot brighter and saner than Tuscany, with all its celebrated Italian light.

  “You see where I’m going here? The trailer-home at Ritzville . . . the waterfront mansion on Mercer Island? And Meredith herself, another ‘intelligent but presumptuous’ young woman? Eastern and western Washington counterposed like Italy and England?”

  He saw Hildy gaping at him—not pleased by this comparison, but as if he’d booked her on a charge of plagiarism.

  “Listen, I’d better say now that I think ‘Meredith’ is possibly the best story I’ve ever read by a student in the M.F.A. program . . .”

  The doubt in Hildy’s eyes was fierce. Tom felt himself scrutinized through those preternaturally thick specs—for what? Sarcasm? A low ulterior motive? There was even perhaps a hint of contempt, as if what he’d said was so foolish as to disqualify him from the ordinary respect due to a professor.

  Trying for appeasement, he said, “But I do think there’s a problem with the opening.”

  Chick soon found out that the big man—Mr. Don—was cunning, and to be feared.

  At the end of his second day of painting, he went to collect his pay. The office—up a flight of steps in the big machine-littered shed at the head of the dock—was cramped but cozy. Warmed by a kerosene stove, Mr. Don sat at an ancient rolltop desk, his dog Scottie at his feet.

  “Yeah, sit down,” Mr. Don said without looking up from the sheaf of papers he was studying by the light of a green-shaded glass lamp.

  Chick sat in a chair that had lost most of its stuffing. The office smelled of the dog and of Mr. Don’s cheroots. Scottie—a tousled black rug with a graying muzzle—watched him with one sleepy eye.

  He waited in the silence as Mr. Don grunted over something in the papers. Chick looked at the pictures of old tugboats on the wall, and at the spider-web of wrinkles on the side of the big man’s sun-browned face, until he finally finished what he was reading and reach for his billfold.

  “There you are. Sixty-eight.”

  Chick counted the money. “Mr. Don—you say eight dollar, fifty cents. For one hour.”

  Mr. Don studied his papers. “Rent, Chick. You thought about your rent?”

  “Rent?”

  “You’re sleeping on my ship, pardner.”

  He’d hidden everything away, and had crept off the ship in the dark, long before Mr. Don arrived at the yard in his Mercedes. No one had seen him—he was sure of it.

  “I cold,” he said.

  “Yeah, it’s getting to be that time of year.” For the first time, Mr. Don looked at him squarely. In the green lamplight, his face had the hooded eyes and leathery wattles of an old sea turtle. “See, it’s like this. You ask permission to sleep on my ship, could be I say yes. Maybe I let you live there for free. Maybe. But you didn’t ask, you just set up housekeeping aboard my torpedo retriever without my permission. Next time you ask—got it?”

  “Okay, I ask. No problem, Mr. Don.”

  “Good. You know how to work the marine toilet on that thing?”

  “Please?”

  “Toilet.” Mr. Don mimed wiping himself, then pumping a handle up and down.

  Grinning, he said: “I figure.”

  “I thought you would.” Reaching for the calculating machine at the far end of the desk, Mr. Don turned back to his papers.

  That night, lying in the bunk of the cabin marked ENGINEER (2), Chick thought of the letter he wished he could write to his family in the village: I am in America. Doing okay . . . But he had talkative uncles. If his family knew he was all right, it wouldn’t be long before the snakeheads knew, too.

  Had things gone as planned, he would now be in New York, in the noodle factory, working to pay off his debt. He owed $37,000, payable over thirty months. The snakeheads forgave nobody. They killed people who did not pay, starting with their families back home.

  He would pay, somehow. He’d spent $7.60 at the 7-Eleven store near the yard and now had $253.40. It was a beginning, but he saw the distance between that and $37,000 as an endless, lonely trail, strewn with rocks and fallen trees, bogs and caves, up a great snowcapped mountain of money. And until he had the money, everybody must believe that he was dead.

  “Yes, we have coverage . . .”

  Beth was on the phone in her cubicle, looking out over the riot of construction along First and Second Avenues. That white building was the Belgrave Realty condos. She’d checked.

  “Dr. Eusebio was recommended by his preschool. I mean, he’s very bright—he reads already, but he’s acting-up at school. They say he’s disruptive, especially in the afternoons. I got this book on AD/HD . . . I don’t know. I think he has some of the symptoms, though I’m not really sure. So it’d be great if Dr. Eusebio could see him . . .”

  Despite the three-week waiting list, Beth felt better for having made the call—and armored, at least, against her next encounter with Midge at Treetops. She’d tell Tom that she was taking Finn in for a regular check-up. He’d had one last month, but Tom never kept track of such things. She’d face the “psychiatrist” issue if and when Dr. Eusebio came up with a diagnosis of AD/HD.

  Listening to Tom on this subject reminded her of the time she’d been stuck in a cab on the Long Island Expressway one sweltering Friday afternoon, with a driver determined to convince her that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a charade staged by NASA in the Arizona desert. Proof ! he kept on saying. Proof ! Her head had grown tired with wordless nodding, just as it did when Tom talked about what he liked to call the therapy industry.

  On the tar-paper roof across the street, a man was taking in potted plants from his eighth-floor garden. He had a patio table up there, and a single chair. Beth watched as he folded the chair and took it inside for the winter. Then she swiveled around to face the screen, where she was having major problems with Phoenix.

  The babysitter—a checkout girl from Ken’s Market—was late.

  Beth was wearing her new strapless, floor-length, black silk-rayon dress by Calvin Klein, Tom the suit he’d bought in London four years ago for his father’s funeral. He blinked at Beth, took off his glasses, and kissed her bare shoulder. “God, you look good. There’s just one problem. It makes me want to unzip you like a banana.” Finn, wrinkling his nose in scorn, said, “Bananas don’t have zippers,” and went off to watch “The Planet’s Funniest Animals” on TV.

  Cour
tney finally showed up, lilac-lipped, mascaraed, and clumping on heavy platform heels, looking as if she, too, meant to go out to dinner. Beth had written the Juergensens’ number on a Post-it by the phone, and she opened the door to show Courtney the pesto sauce and fresh spinach-and-gorgonzola ravioli.

  “Great,” Courtney said dubiously. “You got any ice-cream in the freezer?”

  “Chocolate chip cookie dough, but wait till Finn’s asleep, okay? This isn’t an ice-cream night for him.”

  “Sure, no problem.”