if confiding. “I don’t have anything figured out. What would you put inside it? How would you start it? Look what I have.” He pulled out a three-subject spiral notebook to show her. He had divided his notes into sections: story, characters and the last one for thoughts, notes, lists, tidbits.
“I write and write,” he said, “but I still don’t know the most important thing.”
Ain’t that the truth, thought Chloe. She studied the grain in the table. He was too carefree and earnest to be saddled with her pity. “You do kinda have to know what’s in the suitcase if you’re writing a mystery.”
“Who said it’s a mystery?” He shook his head. “No. See, it’s the best thing of all. It’s an unexpected thing. You think you’re reading one kind of story, and then—POP, it’s another.”
“Like not a mystery?”
“You think it’s a mystery, but it’s really a Western.” He laughed. “Or you’re ready for a mother–daughter drama, but it’s really a two-man play about the meaning of trees. A thriller becomes a musical, a coming of age story is now the return of the native, science fiction turns out to be a war story.”
“Wait,” Chloe said, “a musical? How can a story on paper have music in it?”
He grinned as if he were about to doff his black hat. “That’s the trick, isn’t it?”
They were leaning forward over the table. The only other people in the room were three other tutors and a proctor. Outside it was deep spring, warm colors, tulips and grass, outdoor sports and new running shoes, the courtyard full of girls in light summer frocks, the kind she never wore, blowing up in the wind. She could see the three cream-brick dormitories, Payson-Mulford, Webster, and Hastings, arranged in a semi-circle of unchaperoned fun. Every Friday night before curfew, drunken madness. Next to Hastings a fence, a back gate, and a cemetery. Before the fence a tent. And under the tent, a barbecue grill and three picnic tables.
There once was a story with music in it at one of those tables.
Blushing at a hot lick of a nearly forgotten memory, Chloe quickly cantered away from the aching nostalgia of the picnic bench near Hastings, thinking we’ll never be that drunk again, her tongue-tied gaze colliding with Blake’s amused and amiable stare.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She stared at his large, scuffed hands, folded together in calm Zen across the table.
“Tell me why we must go to Europe,” he said.
“To find the blue suitcase, I suppose.”
“Why Barcelona?”
“The question is not why Barcelona,” she replied, gazing out the window. A thousand open questions, invisible to the naked eye, apparent to every living soul. “The question is why anywhere else?”
“Exactly. Who else would know this but you?”
She was trying to answer her own riddles in the unfinished English essay, a treatise on feminism and freedom in Pearl Buck. “You would write about Pearl Buck,” said her English teacher, whose insinuations Chloe didn’t appreciate, but it was too late to change her topic. You would get all As, Chloe. You would have an extra eraser, your neat notes from last year, the report handed in three weeks before deadline, and a yes from all the schools you applied to. Universities of Pennsylvania and Maine. John Kennedy Jr.’s alma mater, and Einstein’s. Every Boston school worth going to, Duke too, and San Diego, that misty Spanish renaissance on Mission Bay. You would. Chloe hated those two words.
It fed too cleanly into the digested and mealy narrative about her, the stereotype she despised and had tried all her life to change. She didn’t want to not do well. She just didn’t want to be known as the girl with the Chinese mother who did well.
You would.
My mother is fifth-generation American, Chloe would answer to every suggestion of the supposed intellectual blessings of her ethnicity. She is more American than I am, since my father’s father was born in Ireland and his mother somewhere in the Baltics. My mother, on the other hand, makes peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. She frequently forgets to buy soy sauce. Does that sound Chinese to you? And yet how else to explain her own relentless quest for excellence? Every revolutionary date, every candidate for president, every battle in the Civil War, every Law and Act, every polynomial and integral domain, every tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow all the way to dusty death had to be not just memorized but internalized?
Pearl Buck wrote about the Chinese woman from a hundred years ago, but she could’ve been writing about Chloe’s mother and father. Jimmy Devine wanted a docile lamb who would be happy to contain herself within his four walls. Pearl Buck said that a woman full of energy and intelligence could not be contained within any man’s walls, but then Pearl Buck, the obedient daughter of a Christian missionary in China, had never met Lang Devine. She can’t be held there, Pearl Buck wrote, even if the walls were lined with satin and studded with diamonds. Chloe disagreed. Her mother’s wood cabin walls weren’t lined or studded with anything but photos of Chloe.
Pearl Buck seemed to think that Lang would soon discover she was living within prison walls. Chloe begged to differ.
Even children were not enough for some women. She may want them, Pearl Buck wrote, need them, and even have them, and love them, and enjoy them. But they wouldn’t be enough for her. “Nobody likes children, Chloe,” her mother would often say. “But we have them anyway.” Chloe was almost sure Lang was joking. Because for some women, children were everything.
Some women didn’t know anything about politics. It took all their effort to be wives and mothers. Well, Ms. Buck opined, that may be sufficient for some women, but their husbands certainly found the time to occupy themselves, not only in their chosen fields and with being husbands and fathers, but also apparently, with other women as well. Just ask Terri Gramm next door who worked sixty hours at L.L.Bean to pay the mortgage while her husband honeymooned in Maui with the assistant baker from Dunkin’ Donuts.
Chloe swore she would grow up to be a different kind of woman, not Terri, not Lang, not the donut-maker-helper.
But what kind of woman?
She had no idea. Chloe had the answer to everything, except the important things.
“Don’t worry about what’s in the suitcase for a moment,” she said to Blake in a voice thick with longing. “And the answer to the why will come. Just start at the beginning. Start with something true and real. Begin with your two main characters, the junk dealers.”
“If you’re going to make fun,” Blake said, “I’m going to give them another livelihood.”
“I’m not making fun. Tell me about them.”
Eagerly Blake opened the notebook to the second section. Character. Pages were filled in pencil in a slow and careful hand, too slow, too careful for Blake. Her delighted skepticism must have been apparent on her face. Without affront, he said, “Did you know, Miss Smartass, that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his entire lifetime?”
She marveled into his grinning face, tedium forgotten, even Barcelona and parents and Hannah’s other lover forgotten for a moment. “The surprise here,” she said, “is that you would know anything about Van Gogh.”
“Come on, Haiku, you know I’m a font of useless information.”
She broke a pencil. “Are you implying that you will also sell only one thing in your lifetime, say your purported story? Or could you possibly be equating yourself with Van Gogh’s talent?”
“Neither.” Blake was unperturbed by her teasing. “Red Vineyard was not even his best painting.”
“It was pretty good, let’s say that, but again, how is that relevant”—she wagged her finger in a small pi-circle at him and his notebook— “to what’s going on