“Ha!” Leo’s guffaw is like a blow. “I haven’t sold this place! I was bluffing. Sucker! You believed me?”
Dagou says nothing. His father can take everything else: the vodka, the profits, and the restaurant; yet he won’t take one more day of Dagou’s life. He loads the final dishes. Once again, rising like hot steam into the crevices and alleyways of his memory, past the windows, past the cornices and roofs and turrets and towers of his reasoning mind, unfurls his dark dream.
“Hey!” His father’s roar from below knocks out his breath. “Get those bottles down here. You want to be here until Christmas morning?” Dagou hears, from the basement, the jingle of bells.
“Hey, loser!”
Moving numbly, Dagou picks up a half case. Not feeling its weight, he stands at the top of the stairs. He can hear his father’s muffled singing, sardonic, sentimental in his deep baritone voice, exaggerating the held notes.
“Siiiiilent niiiiight …”
He hears the creak of the freezer door. The floor is dissolving, as if through the curls of black steam rising from below, and he is falling, falling into darkness. The restaurant is empty and his father is in the freezer. The events unfold themselves to him as they have a dozen, a hundred, even a thousand times: himself, having done what he has long imagined doing, emerging from the basement, turning off the lights, walking freely out into the silent night. All is calm, all is bright.
Carrying the vodka, Dagou descends the stairs.
The Gift
Katherine puts on her coat, alone, but not empty-handed. How did Mary Wa remember Winnie has always given her a Christmas gift? Typically, something unfathomable: a china piggy bank, a Badgers baseball shirt. Once, a set of tiny matching silver ear-cleaners. She and Dagou had a running joke about those presents. Still, she treasured them. It was not precisely the thought that counted, not for Katherine and Winnie—but the ritual of the gift. This year, Winnie no longer believes in material possessions. But Mary Wa has remembered. Clutching her present, Katherine ducks into the bathroom. She’s promised herself not to unwrap it until Christmas morning. She’ll be in Sioux City, where she and her parents will have piled two dozen colorful boxes under the tree, and she’ll have brought with her this one package from Haven. A most likely puzzling, probably goofy reminder of the community, of Winnie. Winnie, alone at the hospital. Winnie, seeking tranquility. What is nothingness like? Dagou is gone. Katherine shuts her eyes. Against her burning lids, she can still see Dagou and Brenda, torch-lit, clutching hands. They are one. In their fleshiness; in their beauty, almost coarse; in their matching physicality of charismatic light: they are one. She is gripped by panic; her heart quails. What is there in all the world? Standing at the sink, she removes one of her mittens. Using a fingernail, she makes a tiny rip on the corner of the package. There’s a flash of embossed gold: it’s a Bible.
The exploration began more than a dozen years ago, in college. Raised white, by a white family in a white city, she first reacted to Dagou with resistance, even repugnance. She rebuffed his advances in the same way she rejected that unknown part of herself. He rose to the challenge, insisting she meet him at the Asian American Students House for the Lunar New Year party. Why not? he teased. He wasn’t inviting her to the Language Club; she wouldn’t have to learn Chinese. Was she not curious, did she not want to explore even this watered-down version of Asian culture? Of course, it wasn’t only culture he wanted her to explore. Dagou, funny and self-deprecating, was even then a specialist of appetite and lust. Dagou, with his old-country parents and Haven community, became, over the years, a desire, a fixation.
She gazes at the green jade glowing on her finger. She listens to scraps of conversation: Dagou and his father moving the liquor, Leo Chao bellowing and singing from the stairs. Then quiet. She tucks Mary’s gift back under her arm. She wipes her eyes and leaves the restroom, nodding at O-Lan in her puffy coat. She won’t go back into the dining room, doesn’t want to see the tattered decorations. Doesn’t want to say goodbye to anyone; they’re probably assuming she’s already gone. She’s going to leave through the rear door. As she makes her way back down the hall, a light catches her attention. The door to Leo’s office is open.
DECEMBER 25
Dagou’s Dream
It’s three a.m. when Dagou and Brenda finally hoist the shopping bags of Christmas presents onto Brenda’s bed and open everything. There’s a beautiful cocktail shaker from Jerry Stern. Mary Wa has given them a ginormous, glossy gold box of chocolate truffles that Dagou suspects must have fallen off a truck, or else they must be fake chocolates, since she never spends an extra cent if she can help it. There’s a useless tourists’ blue and white china tea set with dragons. There’s a stuffed gray mouse, a fountain pen, a ballpoint pen, and a shaver. There’s a dragon wall clock from Maud Marcus, who doesn’t know the superstition about giving clocks of any kind (that your life is coming to an end), and an elegant designer umbrella from the architect’s American wife, who doesn’t know the superstition about giving umbrellas (that your life will fall apart). Brenda loves the silk scarf from Corey Chen’s shy Taiwanese boyfriend. Eric Braun, who either does or doesn’t know the superstition about knives, has given them an excellent chopping knife.
“What was that all about?” Dagou asks.
“I used to sleep with him,” says Brenda. “Senior year of high school. I haven’t seen him in years. He got rich, got married, had a kid. He fooled around, was kicked out by his wife, and had nowhere to go for Christmas Eve.”
Dagou considers this. He understands. In the transformation of the last few hours, his terrible jealousy has released itself into the night. He thinks of James and Alice, in his apartment, and a wild happiness and pride for James fills him. “Do you want one, too?” he asks. “A baby.”
“Not right now.”
“Maybe sometime?”
“Maybe.”