文/伊卷舒
“Do you think, at my age, people can still fall in love?” Pamela asked in Chinese, flipping potatoes over burning charcoals. Above the potatoes, a whole lamb was skewered on a roaster as long as a dining table.
I heard trembling in her voice, over cracklings from drippings of the lamb, unusual for a stoic statistics professor. Through bursts of smoke, I saw an eagerness in her eyes, like a teenager rattling on about her first love, unexpected from a married woman in her fifties. I swallowed the jokes on my lips, and spilled out a confirmation, “Yes, of course.”
I could see where the question was coming from, a place I understood to be although outside the domain of rationality. Her husband David had been away for two years, having taken an investment banking job in Hong Kong.
Left alone, Pamela had withered, like a football with the air being sucked out. Her sphere of life, once full of the excitements of hiking, the gym, cruises and stage shows, was instantly deflated to two points, school and home. Howling winds kept her up all night and driving rain distressed her. Up the circular staircases, she would sometimes trudge, because the creak of floorboards, piercing the dead silence of the house, would bring some alternations to her life.
Pamela liked music, not too high-pitched nor bass heavy, as if there was a band of frequencies limiting the fluctuations of the music range. David on the other hand, loved rock, especially songs from Queen, and even played in a band on weekends. But he dissolved his band and stored his guitars in the attic, since she did not like that “crazy music”.
Only once could I recall David ever breaking the sound band. When a group of friends spent weekend at her house, David took his shower.
“Paaaaam!” He bellowed. “Where are my skivvies?”
Right after that was another band breaking yell.
“Paaaam! Yellow? You know I hate yellow.”
“Didn’t you see the gloomy sky outside? Yellow is perfect for the day.” Pamela smashed the rebellion with a growl emphasized by a glare.
In her calculation, that was a fair trade. Though his roaring fell outside her sound band, the husband was pushed right back into his behavior band.
At the news that David had taken a job in Hong Kong, everyone had been startled. We were even more astounded at the airport, when David booked two tickets to the place half way around the world, one for himself, and one for his guitars.
“Take care of Pam for me.” David waved to us before he walked to the gate.
After David left, we had parties every weekend. Although Pamela was a vegetarian, she would roast a lamb to lure friends to drive from afar. Nice food and a lively crowd helped Pamela kill her weekends, and survive the weekdays.
And yet at this routine weekend gathering, Pamela threw me off with this totally unanticipated question that let out a seemingly unbelievable romance in her life. There in the backyard, with the lamb roasting, I tried to steer our conversation towards the abstract, avoiding details like “who is he? And How did you meet?” as if keeping it vague, it would hold less of an existence. In fact, I felt awkward to hear her “little stories”, as if I had become an accomplice of a betrayal.
“Listen,” Pamela pushed her cell to my ear. “From him.”
Pop music, coarse voice, and within her music frequency.
“Once in your life you find her
Someone that turns your heart around…
When you get caught between the Moon and New York City
I know it's crazy but it's true
The best that you can do is fall in love…”
“He must be an American, and he is young.” I could not help but say out loud. It was the song of those who had their feet stuck in their homeland, where only they could “get caught between the moon and New York City.” As for immigrants, like me, who always felt like a guest staying in other people’s homes, if they get caught, it must be between, say, Manhattan and Queens, or stocks and income properties, something practical. The suggested solution wouldn’t be to “fall in love,” but to have tummies filled in a genuine Chinese restaurant.
The aroma of grilled lamb spread over the well-maintained backyard, where flowers grew enclosed in patches, and grass divided the space between activities and inaccessible bushes. The scene struck me as that of our lives---we got bound by all sorts of formulated domains, worldly and spiritual, tangible and intangible, Platonic and lusty, and surly, the domain of morality.
Pamela did not bring this conversation up again at subsequent parties. She sent me songs, always pop style like “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran and “All of Me” by John Legend, and always the identical theme, “fall in love regardless” and “dive right in nevertheless.” With each song serving as one piece of a collage, I put together the picture of his presence, a wholesome figure against airy clouds, a gust of wind at the parties, the grove of spruce trees Along the hillside on her way to work and warm-toned wallpaper all over her house.
She revived like a withered flower regaining its life in slow motion. Though she had often been viewed as short of feminine attractions like a curved body and fine skin, once she started to talk, she distinguished herself.
Another weekend, another lamb on a spit. The red dot on my cell blinked, another song from her, to be precise, from him, and a new dimension added to the collage:
“…I just want to be your everything
Open up the heaven in your heart and let me be
The things you are to me
And not some puppet on a string…”
“Not some puppet on a string!” Absolutely. But could people be sure that a puppeteer is the one that controls the puppet, and not the other way around? What does one to give up to be a puppet? Heart and soul, or trivial matters like color of underwear? What does it take to be a puppeteer?
With music playing, I walked towards the boundary of the backyard, only to find a newly propped board besides mulberries, “Mosquitoes and Ticks, Please Spray before Entry.” Further down was a fence with two words in black, “Property Line.”
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