That’s my idea of an imposition. If I have any more questions, I’ll be back.”
I walked back to the table. The waitress in the red shoes padded over with the check and a fortune cookie. I dropped enough money to cover the check and a tip on the tray. I had no desire to prolong it, but I couldn’t resist cracking open the fortune cookie. They’re always upbeat, and I needed some good news.
When I peeled it open, a second slip fell on the floor. I bent down to pick it up and caught a look of abject terror in the frozen face of Red Shoes. It softened when I slipped the paper into my pocket. I couldn’t tell who else noticed. I busied myself with pulling on my topcoat while I read the fortune-cookie missive:
“Success cannot long exceed your grasp.”
God bless the chef.
6
Tyler street was taking on a new face when I left the Ming Tree. The black frozen slush was freshly coated with a new white dusting of the kind of snow you get when the bottom has dropped out of the thermometer-dry and squeaky to the walk. The wind had fallen off, though, and a full stomach was better insulation against the cold than another layer of clothing.
I turned right and walked the half block to Beach Street. A left and one more block brought me to a well-lit coffee shop with no name on the right-hand corner of Beach and Harrison. It was smoky and heavy with the drone of mumbled Chinese coming from the clutches of both young and old sitting around the bare wooden tables.
I found a corner under a fluorescent light and took out the slip of paper that had fallen out of the fortune cookie. The way my day had been running, it was no surprise that the writing was Chinese.
I was surrounded by people who could probably translate, assuming, of course, that they could speak English. Somehow it did not seem like a good idea to ask. I tucked the note away in an inside pocket and braced for the walk outside.
I stayed in the nook of the entranceway to be out of earshot and out of the wind at the same time. I tapped a familiar array of numbers into my cell phone, and my mind ran back ten years or so.
Harry Wong was one of the best memories I had from my days at Harvard College. He was the grandson of a woman who left China to start a string of the first Chinese restaurants seen in the suburbs of Boston in the early twenties. She was a maverick with nerve and a keen sense of demography. Harry told me that she noticed that most of the non-Chinese customers of the Chinatown restaurants were Jewish. She picked her locations by cruising the neighborhoods and checking the names on the mailboxes. Whenever she found a cluster of middle-class Cohens or Goldsteins, or better yet, a synagogue, she’d plant a restaurant. In ten years she went back to China with enough money to rule a southern province.
Harry’s family migrated back to Boston around the time that Mao Tse-tung’s army made capitalistic wealth a scourge to be cleansed. The family transferred its prominence from a southern province of China to the province of Brookline, west of Boston.
Harry and I met as freshmen at the tryouts for an intermural wrestling team at Holworthy House. He was tall for a seventeen-year-old Chinese American, but somehow he came equipped with more speed and strength than you’d expect from his beanpole build. He not only made the team, he managed to embarrass most of the beefy Caucasians at practice-and one particular half Puerto Rican-by pinning us like butterflies while we were still counting his ribs.
One of his victims once asked him what kind of trick he was using. He had a gentle smile and a soft voice with just enough of a trace of his parents’ accent to be eligible for racial prejudice from the preppy blue bloods who made up 90 percent of the team. It was a smart-aleck question, but he gave it a courteous answer. Unfortunately, when he said that everything he did stemmed from an ancient Chinese discipline called tai chi, which he had practiced since he was three years old, he was permanently branded as some kind of mystic freak by those who finally had a means of satisfying their need to feel superior to him.
I saw a door shut in his eyes when he heard the half-hidden whispers and laughs. I didn’t think I could open it again, but I caught him after practice. I asked if he’d help me. I could feel the defensive refusal in his hesitation. I told him I meant it. I needed help. He was somewhere between anger at all of us and rejection of what he took to be my pity when he snapped out, “I’ll be here at five tomorrow morning. Do what you wish.”
It was painful, but I had my body at the gym at five the next morning, and every day for a year. Harry brought me into the discipline of peace through controlled patterns of body movement that was his version of tai chi. We were matched to wrestle each other at every practice, since nobody else wanted much of either one of us. I worked harder than I had ever worked at anything in my life, and by the end of the spring term, I could pin anyone in Holworthy House-except one.
Three telephone rings, and I was beginning to wonder if I could catch him at home. I hadn’t seen him since Thanksgiving. But then I could say that three hundred and sixty-four days a year. After college, I went to play in the law, and Harry started devouring the alphabet. He got an MS degree in biochemistry from MIT, and hung on for a PhD in record time. He picked up a few more initials in London before becoming a resident brainchild back at MIT.
Our lives took us in different directions most of the time, but we met religiously for Thanksgiving dinner at my mother’s house in Newton. She always cooked what I thought from childhood was a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner- pollo con arroz and cornbread.
Six rings, and I decided to try his office. That reached him. He still put an Asian twang on “Hello” and I was mighty glad to hear it.
“Harry, it’s Mike. What’re you up to?”
“Mike, good to hear from you. What’s up?”
“I was hoping we could get together.”
“Is it Thanksgiving already?”
“Not for a little while. It’s February. Actually I need your help. Could we meet?”
“Sure, Mike. How about lunch tomorrow?”
“How about coffee in an hour?”
I think he caught my urgency. If there was a pause, it was a fraction of a second to reorder his schedule.
“You name the place, Mike.”
I looked around. “I’m in Chinatown, corner of Beach and Harrison. There’s some kind of a coffee shop behind me. I don’t see a name. Can you meet me here?”
His voice picked up tension. “No, I can’t, Mike. Listen to me. Don’t hang around there. Hang up the phone and just get the hell out of there.”
“Why? What is this place?”
“Let’s not discuss it at the moment. Walk to the right up Harrison. I’ll meet you in the bar at the China Sea.”
I wanted to tell him he sounded like a character out of an old Fu Manchu movie, but he was gone.
I was the only one at the China Sea bar, sipping Tsing Tao beer until Harry slid onto the next bar stool.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Michael.”
“Happy New Year, Harry.”
I reached in my pocket and handed him the slip of paper that had fallen out of the fortune cookie. He lit a cigarette lighter and held it up to scan the symbols.
“You want a beer, Harry?”
He waved off the suggestion. “Where’d you get this?”
“In a fortune cookie.”
He gave me a look. “Fortune cookies are to make you Caucasians feel good about leaving a tip. Is this note serious?”
“I suspect it is. Could we share the contents?”
He relit the lighter for another look.
“It’s a girl’s name. Ku Mei-Li. And an address on Beach Street. You know her?”
