James peers at the tangle of wires; his brother calls himself an “audio-gook.” “What’s this box?”
Dagou grins. “This is an illegal transmitter. I bought it for a few hundred bucks off of a guy who convinced someone to drag it here from China in his suitcase. I wait until it’s dark and put it in the attic.” He nods at his laptop. “I’m making notes for tonight. Tune in to 88.8 between one and two a.m. tonight for pirate radio! FM 88.8, a lucky number! I’ve been broadcasting for weeks. I don’t know if anyone listens, but I don’t care. I’m going to invite the whole world to my party!”
“I’ll tune in,” James promises, making a mental note. “It’s great to see you,” he says. “I came to the restaurant last night. Where were you?”
Dagou closes his laptop. He gestures for the tumbler and James hands it to him. “It’s a long story.” He takes a gulp. “I’m in a kind of jam.”
“Are you going to talk to Ba?”
“Never.” Dagou takes another gulp. “I would tell you all about it, James, but it’s too depressing.”
“But you’re picking fights with Ba. You’re drinking in the afternoon. What’s going on?”
Dagou sets down the tumbler. “You’re full of questions, aren’t you, Snaggle? Well, you know my old dreams of living in the city? Of living as a small fish in a big pond until I make it as a musician? Well, I’m done with that. I’ve given up, I’m ready to settle down for good in Haven, to be a big fish in a small pond. But the problem is—I’m not big enough to do it!” He buries his face in his hands.
James feels a surge of love for his brother; Dagou never hides what he’s going through. “Is this why you broke up with Katherine?”
Dagou sighs. “Are you disappointed in me for breaking up with her?”
James shakes his head.
“Then you really are on my side. Because, of course, everyone else loves Katherine more than they love me!
“There’s a kind of woman, Snaggle, who is above all a good woman, such a relentlessly good, upstanding person that it’s impossible to be in love with her. That’s Katherine! She even looks like a pillar—such smooth skin, so straight and pure with that long neck—and understanding and forgiving! and solvent!—all of it!—and yet why is it such a struggle to love, to feel an essential tenderness toward her?”
“Didn’t you love her?”
Dagou considers. “I think I admired her, Snaggle.”
James’s thoughts, questions, crowd each other, but he can think of no reply.
“Are you wondering, how is it possible to have sex with someone out of admiration? Well, the answer is, it’s not hard at all.”
“She’s pretty,” James says, now red in the face.
“She’s exceptionally good-looking. And good. She’s way too good for me, that’s the problem. It turns out, I want a woman who is equally as bad as myself.”
Dagou straightens up and frowns at his toes again, wiggling them thoughtfully.
“The question is not why I slept with her, or even why we went out for so many years, but, why did I get engaged to her? How did that happen? How did we go from perfectly cordial dating, which had been going on since God knows when, best friends, every day as pleasant and uneventful as the one before, to pledging to spend our lives together?
“She is my best friend. Since she took that job in Chicago and followed me back to the Midwest, our romantic life has slowly evaporated. But it didn’t really matter until the last year or so.”
“Dagou, what’s going on?”
Dagou reaches down, digs his right finger between his smallest toes and twists it around. He brings it out, examines it, and sniffs it.
“So maybe we were engaged for so long it became more and more obvious that we were never going to be married. But words were spoken. Promises made. When we were barely out of college, I gave Katherine Ma’s old ring. It was from Ba’s side of the family, I guess, and when I started bringing Katherine home, Ma gave it to me. You’ve seen it, do you remember it?” James tries to recall. A green stone, the color and clarity of lake water, shimmers from somewhere in his memory. “A big chunk of super-rare jade with a complex gold setting, some Asiatic panther with spots of diamonds wound around the jade—it’s the only thing Ba brought from China, it was the one thing he ever gave to Ma. I honestly don’t think he inherited it; I figure he won it somehow, gambling, during those years he spent in Macau. Ma told me there were still a lot of old things tumbling around Macau, left over from the gold and jewelry people brought out of the country and saved and gambled and lost.
“Anyway, I gave her the ring. We were serious at the time. Words were spoken, promises made, unborn children were imagined and named! We were twenty-two years old. We get engaged, everything is fine, and then—well, a decade goes by. I don’t even know if it’s just one day or gradually, but it’s not fine. I realize I don’t want to be married to Katherine. I ignore this. Because I’m a shit. I don’t want to be the bad guy. I want her to break up with me, throw me aside, so I can come across all clean here in Haven to Ma, Ken Fan, Mary Wa—why do I give a flying fuck about what they think? Anyway, this goes on for years, me torturing myself, back and forth, and Katherine—well, I think she knew. I believe she knew I was waiting for her to break up with me and so she just … didn’t.
“Then it happens. One day, someone walks into the restaurant, and my life is changed. And it’s imperative, crucial, that I break up with Katherine and get the ring back.”
“Who is it?”
“Hold on. So, I try. I have no dignity, I beg her to break up with me and give me the ring.” Dagou twists the tumbler in his palm. “She won’t do either thing, of course. You may think breaking up is unilateral. It doesn’t take two people to break up. But you’re not dealing with Katherine. First of all, she knows everyone we know; they call her whenever they need to find me, she talks to Ma every week on the phone. It’s like she’s their daughter, and I’m the shitty son-in-law! I can’t even forget her birthday, they’re all reminding me. They want to know the present.” He imitates Mary Wa’s quack: “‘What did you buy for Katherine?’ And this is because they know the truth: She has no reason to stay with me! She could find someone else in a snap.” He tries to snap his fingers. “So why doesn’t she?” he moans. “Why doesn’t she just fucking find someone else?”
He breaks off and stares at James imploringly.
“I don’t know,” James says.
“Because for Katherine, a promise is a promise. Words are not only words, they are as real as real. Those imaginary Han children, they are real children.
“So what do I do? I sleep with someone else. I fall in love! But secretly. Because I can’t bear to have everyone think I’m a cheating scum. Now I really need the ring. So what do I do but go back and say the most humiliating thing possible.”