“What? What kind of fight?”
“Not, like, violent or anything, but, so, we just came back here to, you know. We’re back.”
His mother nodded agreeably, a clear indicator of disbelief, and dismissed her son from her consideration. “What do you have to say about it?” she asked the other young man.
For a long couple of seconds during which emperors were poisoned and kingdoms squandered and prophets calamitously disbelieved, there was no reply.
“I’m hungry,” said the other young man.
“Are you, now?” said the matriarch. “And, so, why didn’t you two come in the front door?”
It took an extended interval of mutual silent interrogation for one of them to devise a plausible reply.
“Because we were hungry? And the kitchen is in the back of the house?” said her son, and saw weariness roll across her eyes like a fog.
“Get in here,” she said.
Tired and footsore, they trudged up the steps of a fir-wood terrace that overlooked the raked pebbles and dwarf cypress of the back garden. They unslung their packs and racked their weapons and stepped across the ancient sandstone threshold of the kitchen, haunted by the smoke of a thousand banquets and revels, with its vaulted ceiling and its deep stone walls. By the time they entered, she had already lit fires, rendered fats in mighty kettles, wrung the necks of ducks and chickens.
“I got leftover pancakes in the freezer,” she said. “I can microwave them. That’s it. I have a meeting, I have a crazy day. I have to go.”
“We’re fine.”
“Honestly, Mom. For real. You can go.”
But they sat at the table where, over the years, noted rogues and gentleman killers had gathered to praise the hospitality of the house and empty its cellars of rice wine, its larders of ducks hung from hooks like pleats of a long curtain. And the matriarch of Jew-Tang lay before them a feast of noodles leafed with fat, roasted organs, pickled trotters, eggs that had lain treasured for three winters in the ground.
“Take some syrup,” she said, arms folded across the front of the short gray silk jacket she wore. “So you want to move back in?”
“He— Oops.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Julie. Here’s a napkin. Mop it up.”
“You know I don’t,” said the other. “And you don’t want me to. You don’t like me.”
“If I didn’t like you,” said the matriarch of Jew-Tang, in the epigrammatic style she favored, “I would never give you the satisfaction of telling you that I didn’t.”
“I ain’t staying.”
“Okay. So what’s the plan, then.”
The boys consulted each other by not consulting, spoke without speaking, sought each other’s gaze by keeping their eyes resolutely on their plates.
“I
Her son laid down his eating implements, carved from the tooth of a sea unicorn, and sighed. “It’s all stupid,” he said. “Come on, Titus, you know that it is. Like Quentin Tarantino is ever going to let you, just, ‘Oh, hi, I’m fourteen and I look twelve, so, like, which way to my trailer, motherfucker?’”
And his companion hid his face behind his hands and wept.
“You had a fight with your dad,” the matriarch said after a decent interval had passed, handing him a cloth to wipe his eyes.
“Whatever.”
“You can stay here,” the mother said. “You can stay here as long as you want to or need to, Titus.”
“I ain’t staying.”
“Look, I’m sure you are a genius of cinema in the budding. No, I’m serious, I read your screenplay, and what do I know, but I thought it seemed very good. But Quentin Tarantino needs you to be at least eighteen years old before he can take you under his wing. If nothing else, I’m sure they have union rules to govern that kind of thing. Now, look, I have to go. I’m already late. Can you tell me in twenty-five seconds or less what is making you sad?”
The knight of secret grief seemed to ponder this question for a period whose duration impressed his stout companion.
“She didn’t get her pillow,” he said at last.
“What? Who didn’t?”
Quickly, her son narrated, as well as he could, the failed early-morning raid by the Empress on the School of the Turtle.
“She can’t sleep without it,” Titus said. “It’s, like, stressing her out. It’s probably stressing my brother out, too.”
“I’m sure your brother is fine,” said the matriarch. “But I tell you what.”
She left and returned a minute later carrying a cushion crafted, in barbarian lands of the north, from the innermost down of the snow goose.
With an awful solemnity, bowing her head, she entrusted them with the Long Cushion of Untroubled Slumber.
“What you boys need,” said the matriarch, “is, clearly, something to do.”
Gwen crept up the narrow stairs, let herself in with the spare key. Slipped off her espadrilles to cross the polished wood floor of the dojo, with its faint Parmesan dusting of the smell of feet and, by the weapon racks, its dark, aqueous mirror wall. She was stalked as she passed by the hiss of her soles sticking to, peeling away from, the cold bamboo floor. The mirror wall seemed to harbor as much shadow as it banished, as if it bottled the reflections of past students, forty years of West Oakland youth trying to kick, punch, and style their way out of their lives.
Though it spooked her to be alone with that shade-haunted mirror, Gwen was glad to find the place deserted. She did not care to face her teacher again so soon. She planned to retrieve her scant belongings and be gone before Irene Jew returned from her Thursday-morning appointment with the traditional Chinese doctor who rectified her qi.
Master Jew had sent her out that morning, her resolve cinched with the knotted black belt of the old lady’s counsel, to accomplish a clear, simple, even rudimentary objective: Retrieve one pillow, used, not especially valuable. But, like everything she did nowadays—as she had realized aloud while talking to the state senator from Illinois—the rescue mission turned out to be wasted time.
It seemed probable that she had been wasting her time from her arrival in California in 1994. She looked back with embarrassment now on that Gwen Shanks, showing up in Berkeley with her nursing degree from Hopkins, a letter of recommendation to Aviva Roth-Jaffe, and grandiose plans to restore, to her obstetrically diplomate family and to the black community at large, its rich ancestral heritage of midwifery. For a long time Gwen’s gifted hands, steady nerve, and the way patients tended to fall for her skeptical good humor about their hippy-trippy whoop-de- doo had served to mask the cavernous echo, when you tuned your ear for the sound of black voices, of the waiting room. Now that silence was all she could hear. As for her marriage, she had fallen in love with Archy Stallings having no illusions about his sexual past or his strength of character. But the outbreak of forgiveness that followed each new transgression of her husband’s, as typhus followed a flood, called into question the difference, if any, between illusion and its willful brother, delusion, with its crackpot theories and its tinfoil hat.
It was not supposed to have gone like that for Gwendolyn Ward Shanks. From Mrs. Hampt’s kindergarten at Georgetown Day School, which she had entered already knowing how to read
