Lost in Translation Page 0,35

leaned close to him again. "Altogether, she says there’s eighty-two hundred dollars available."

"What? I thought I had more. Ask her if she’s sure."

The woman shrugged, touched something on her keyboard, and the computer spit out a little slip of white paper. She passed it across the counter.

"Shit," Spencer said softly, studying his balance.

The woman let out a stream of Mandarin.

"You want all the eighty-two hundred?" Alice translated.

He chewed his lip.

Alice raised her eyebrows, waiting.

"What about you?" he said. "Are you coming with me?"

"I don’t know yet." She closed her face off, not wanting to commit either way. The truth was, she found herself wanting to go. Lucile had taken chances. So had Teilhard. Breaking some respected boundaries means a torrent of new life, —then I feel safer and stronger.... "I haven’t decided," she said.

"Okay," he said, "keep thinking. Tell her"—he nodded toward the clerk—"tell her I want all of it."

She took a bus up to the quiet, leafy neighborhood where Bruce Kaplan lived and knocked on the round wooden gate. His old Ayi, gap toothed and steel haired, exchanged pleasantries with Alice as she led her over a succession of doorsills, under the clicking boughs of ailanthus, past wood-and-glass-walled si-he courtyard rooms that Alice knew had been closed and curtained for many years, back to the inner court. When she saw Bruce she ignored the Chinese conventions she knew he now followed—the protracted interchange of dispositions— and in a rush poured out the story of Adam Spencer and Peking Man. "I don’t know, Bruce. Should I go?"

"Bruce." He tried to form the English word with his mouth, smiled his moonlike smile, and lapsed into Chinese. "The world calls me Guan Bai now, you know. And I find I am no longer able to speak English—even with you. It dries up in my mouth."

"Chinese, then. Eh, I forgot. But hasn’t my memory long been pitiable? This letter from your mother." Alice reached into her purse and withdrew the letter she’d picked up at the American Express office. "Do you still read English or not? I could translate."

"Just leave it here." He lifted a hand toward a teakwood table, on which his Ayi had just placed a pot of tea.

Alice examined him compassionately. Bruce Kaplan— Guan Bai—lived in another world. Whenever Alice visited him she always found him seated in this same spot, under this plum tree; only the leaves changed with the seasons, and his clothing changed from the lumpish, thickly padded robes of winter to the thin, loose silks of summer. Now his hand played over the book he’d been reading, Mengzi, the Confucian masterpiece of Mencius. Written more than two thousand years ago. She checked the characters on the book’s cover. Archaic. Of course.

Bruce was far down the road, farther than she’d realized.

"What are the opinions of your other friends?" he asked her.

"Those I know in Beijing now are few."

"Is it so? What about Tom and Maureen, the journalists? And that German diplomat—Otto, wasn’t it?"

She shrugged.

"They’ve moved away?"

"No, they’re here. Things change." She felt she could not really explain to Bruce, who led the secluded life of a Chinese scholar, how her friends had grown up. How their concerns were different: the hardships of bringing up children in China, the struggle to find good Ayis, the schools, the apartments, the price of imported milk. And like a barb in the center of it all the fact that she herself was single, and over thirty; an almost unmentionable creature in China. The expatriates, like the Chinese, seemed almost not to know what to make of her now. In the States, not marrying might have been acceptable. Here it was an embarrassment. She couldn’t deal with her old friends. She stopped calling them.

"It would be interesting for you to see northwestern China," Guan Bai offered.

"That’s so."

He poured tea out of the ancient brown Yixing pot. A real one. "And what about this American archaeologist? Is he interesting?"

"Yes. Hapless in a way—but interesting."

"Not someone with whom you could be close."

"No."

"Why? Because he’s American?"

"Partly. You know I am not an American, not anymore, not really."

"I used to think that of myself," he said wistfully. "Now I’m not so sure. But the archaeologist—he’s not someone you could be interested in."

She shook her head. "No. Definitely—no. But"—she brightened—"I have been reading these last few days about a mesmerizing love affair that took place here, in Beijing, sixty years ago."

He hoisted his brows, amused.

"Between two people who agreed never to become lovers. The French priest Teilhard