The Man With No Time

“I'm grateful,” I said, meaning it. My headache approached tumor magnitude. “But there's still something wrong with him. Whose brother is he? Your mother's or your father's?”

“Neither,” she said. She looked at my big doleful white man's face, mistook my grimace of pain for a pang of conscience, and lifted herself up to kiss my cheek. She'd always been forgiving, and I'd often taken advantage of it. “Uncle is a term of respect. For years, I thanked Uncle Lo in my prayers every night for what he did for my family. If he hadn't, there wouldn't have been any family.”

Now we were on familiar ground. Eleanor's family had been landowners, a fatal mistake when the Chinese government made one of its Great Leaps forward. Her father, a university professor, had spent eighteen hours kneeling on broken glass and reciting his sins to illiterate Red Guards. Then he'd been sent to prison in Manchuria, and when the prison officials realized he was going to die, they released him so they wouldn't have to bother with the body. Somehow he got himself home and impregnated his wife with Horace as a final gesture toward life. That finished, he'd turned his face to the wall and let life go. That was in 1959. Eleanor was two.

Like many men of his class, he'd been an intellectual, which made him doubly guilty. He'd written a long scholarly treatise about Cao Xueqin's The Dream of the Red Chamber, the novel that Eleanor and I loved best in the world. It had brought us together at UCLA, me in Literature, she on loan from Oriental Studies. Both of us had been transfixed by the tale that set forth the problems of Bao-Yu, the pampered and neurotically sensitive rich boy, and his two beautiful female cousins, the ethereal Dai-Yu and the earthy Bao- Chai-a vanishing Gone with the Wind way of life painted unexpectedly on a Chinese canvas like the frilly blue tragedy of the Willow Pattern.

“So, Uncle Whoever,” I said as the room listed in the other direction. “Uncle Duplicitous who doesn't like Pansy.”

Eleanor's eyes narrowed, never a good sign. “Simeon.” Then she heard what I'd said. “What do you mean, he doesn't-”

A hand landed heavily enough on my shoulder to make my teeth crack together, and I turned to see Horace grinning lividly at me. He was an especially drab shade of olive and perspiring freely, and there were flushed blotches under his eyes. Over his shoulder, Pansy gazed cheerfully at me through her square spectacles. Compassion surged over me. “Nice imitation of military camouflage, Horace,” I said, throwing an arm gently over his shoulders. “How are you, Pansy?”

“We are fine,” Pansy said as she always did, meaning the family. Pansy's ego could have floated in a fairy's tear. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that said OHIO U, and her inevitable high heels. Something was missing.

“Four-ninety-one,” said the woman at the cash register.

“Here,” Eleanor called urgently, waving a slender arm. She grabbed my sleeve and yanked at me, and Horace came along in my wake, grunting unhealthily as he bumped against me. Pansy, who couldn't see his face, put a possessive hand against the small of his back and beamed affectionately at his neck. “Horace isn't hungry,” she said to me.

“I'll bet he isn't,” I said as Eleanor pulled us along. Horace burped discreetly, and the burp reminded me of what was missing. “Where are Julia and Eadweard?” I asked. I hadn't seen Pansy without the twins since the day they were born.

“Home,” Pansy said. In the absence of the twins three cameras hung around her neck, vestigial organs from an earlier life in which she'd wanted to be a photographer. Marriage and the twins had recast her, in the Chinese tradition, as wife, mommy, and daughter-in-law to Eleanor and Horace's remarkably difficult mother. Until that moment in the Empress Pavilion, the only mementos of her earlier calling had been the twins' names, which were bestowed in honor of Julia Cameron and Eadweard-pronounced 'Edward'-Muybridge, two of the seminal figures in photography, and the abandoned cameras hanging high on the walls of the apartment where the children couldn't reach them.

“You're kidding,” I said. The jade-green dining room of the Empress Pavilion yawned open around us. An infinitesimal Chinese waitress in a black skirt and white blouse was leading our wagon train toward an empty corner table. “Who's taking care of the twins?”

“Uncle Lo,” Horace said, succeeding at speech against all odds.

“He didn't come?” I asked stupidly, craning my neck around to look past Pansy. “But this was supposed to be in his honor.”

“He decided to stay home,” Horace said enviously. “Said he'd had too much to drink last night.”

“Also, jet-lagged,” Pansy said, translating her Fukienese dialect as she went. “He has some kind problem with time.”

“We're here,” Eleanor said. An empty table for four blocked our way, and Eleanor began to organize. “You there, Simeon. Me, here. Horace, across from me, and Pansy-”

“Just minute,” Pansy said, circling the table and doing things to lenses. “Sit, Horace, please. Sit, everybody.”

We sat. Pansy took enough pictures to fill the Spiegel catalog and then seated herself, her face gleaming with exertion and good humor.

I hadn't seen her look so happy since Horace had brought her home from Singapore, where they'd met. At that time her conversation had been full of Edward Weston, Robert Capa, Duane Michaels, and Cindy Sherman, photographers who had made a difference. She'd said “I'm fine' when asked, instead of 'We're fine.” Now she said 'we' all the time, and the names in her conversation were Horace, Eadweard, Julia, and Mommy, and the cameras had been left to hang on the walls.

“It's, um, noisy,” Horace offered, surveying the room with ill-concealed loathing. As always, he clutched his knife and fork, the Empress Pavilion's sole concession to gwailos-non-Chinese-straight up in his fists, like a baby. A very large, very belligerent baby.

“Poor Horace throw up this morning,” Pansy contributed. “I don't know why.” Her face was innocence personified.

“Maybe it was the motion of the earth,” I said nastily. I made a whirlpool in the air with my hands. “You know, it spins and spins and spins. .”

Horace waved my hands away pleadingly. “I want another planet,” he said. “One that isn't noisy. One that doesn't spin.” He fanned himself with his right hand. His upper lip was slick with sweat. “What was Uncle Lo drinking?”

I tried to recall, but my memory seemed to be wrapped in opaque white cotton. “Not much, whatever it was. He said he was hung over?”

The first dim sum cart appeared, an aluminum two-decker filled with balloons of white pastry, pushed by an angular Chinese man in a too-short white jacket above impossibly narrow black trousers. He rocked the cart back and forth as though the dumplings were infants about to cry.

“If he's hung over, it's because he's not used to drinking,” Eleanor said a trifle severely, giving 90 percent of her attention to the dim sum. “He's a Responsible Human Being.” Eleanor was good at speaking in capital letters.

“I gather Bravo didn't think so highly of him,” I said, watching her choose something white and vaguely spherical for me. Bravo Corrigan was the dog I'd loaned to Horace and Pansy so the kids could have something to torment. Big, genetically generic, raffish, and fiercely territorial, Bravo was Topanga Canyon's canine free spirit, taking up residence with anyone who would put out a bowl of something to his liking. “Tried to bite him, didn't he?”

“Bravo only like the twins,” Pansy said, swallowing first, as always. Pansy's manners were brilliant.

“He's wonderful with them,” Eleanor acknowledged as she flagged another cart pusher. “He sleeps in their room. He follows them all over the apartment. He lets them ride on him and try to tie his ears into knots.”

“They call him 'Papa,' ' Pansy said, laughing. 'Horace get so mad.”

Horace was staring balefully at the steamed buns on his plate as though he was afraid they might start square dancing. “I can understand their confusion,” I said.

“Eat, poor Horace,” Pansy said, helpful as ever. “Make you strong.”

“I don't want to be strong,” Horace said sullenly. “I want to be sensitive.”

“The new Horace,” Eleanor cooed. “Remember all the new Nixons? Did I tell you,” she said to me, “that my mother's coming out to see Uncle Lo?”