Part 1 of 5: The Roof of the Mouth
On the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving I was expecting a call from my then-girlfriend, so when the phone buzzed I left the knife in the peanut butter and dove across the floor of the kitchen to unhinge it from its charger. In the seconds between my belt-less jeans falling down and my own tumble onto the linoleum, I felt vaguely graceful, silhouetted in the dim light of the window above the sink as the rain poured down outside. Then I hit the floor, cursed, and clawed my way over to the wall socket where the charger lay nestled.
“Vicky?” I blurted as soon as I could press the phone close enough to my face. “Uh, hey, this isn’t—”
“OOH BYRON TOUCH ME HARDER,” moaned a gruff voice on the other end. I yelped and drew the BlackBerry away from my ear to check the name, then sighed.
“Chris, you fucking—”
“Happy Thanksgiving to you too, little brother! Where your turkey at? Where your girlfriend at?”
“Fuck, man, St. Louis,” I said, looking across the grim common space I shared with two other urban planning students. Was that my belt hanging off the folding table? Or maybe dangling from the fan?
“Well, fuck that, kid, fuck that,” shouted Chris. “Keep your turkey close and your stuffing closer, right? Right? Shit man, I’m drunk, I’m sorry.”
I looked at my watch. “Chris, it’s not even eight in Oakland.”
“Fuck you, DC! You picked up the phone! You gonna judge me? What’re you doing, eating peanut butter out of a jar and looking at street layouts going ‘hmm, yes, let’s play some fucking capture the flag, mmm,’ that sorta shit?”
I started and stared guiltily over at the Skippy on the counter. “Nah man, I’ve got plans. Just waiting for Vicky to call, you know?”
“Whatever, bro, ain’t no thang.” On the other end of the line, I heard a faint muttering, and then Chris speaking too fast for comfort. “Hey look, I called to ask a favor, alright? You know some place in Washington called…uh… ‘Aumerle House’ or something?”
Four credits’ worth of History of the District of Columbia wasted, I thought. “No,” I told Chris. “Not that I can think off of the top of my head.”
“Shit, man, shit. We’re putting out this piece on Friday and my editor needs a picture. Like, has gotta have it. A recent one. You know anyone that might know where it is? You think you can take this shot?”
I felt my brow furrow. “Chris, man, it’s Thanksgiving.”
“Fuck you, you Chinaman, you ain’t going back to see Mom & Dad!”
“You know, they told us at Cornell that people who use ethnic slurs as identifiers are really engaging in a self-loathing exercise.”
“Bitch, please, tell that to Jay-Z. They told us at Berkeley that Asian glow means danger zo-o-o-one, motherfucker,” shouted Chris. “Xu Bai Han, redder than the Red Sea in the Yellow Sea—”
“Fuck you, man.” I swung the phone back down. Chris’s voice blared through the receiver.
“Yo, hey, whatever, man, I’m just playing. I really need that picture. Byron? Byron?”
“By Friday?” I asked, already kicking myself for bringing the phone back to my ear. “Everything’s closed tomorrow, you know that. I have to wait for Vicky’s call, and… why’s it gotta be Friday?”
“I dunno, man, it’s always the way. Look, this is a big story, some sort of ‘put-our-names-on-the-map’ kinda deal. No one in San Francisco makes money doing this stuff, I don’t wanna have to go back to Boston and admit that Mom & Dad were right and I should’ve taken over the shop, so, yeah, man, c’mon.”
“Mom wanted you to go to law school,” I said.
“Fuck you,” replied Chris. “Go plan me an urban or something.”
I laughed despite myself. “You’re gonna owe me big time for this, okay? And no promises.”
“Dude, bro, I am forever in your debt. Seriously. ‘Aumerle House.’ A-U-M-E-R-L-E. Go get it.”
“You’re damn right you’re in my debt. Go sober up, man, you’re ridiculous.”
“Fuck yeah! Happy Turkey Death Day!” I caught the tail end of Chris’s exaltation as he put the phone back into his pocket: “Fuck yeah, he’s totally gonna—”
Three of us grad students lived in one apartment out west of Cleveland Park in northwest Washington, an angular, high-ceilinged space in a drab early-seventies bloc that we messily called home together. Both my apartment-mates had gone down to North Carolina for Thanksgiving, but my parents, industrious second-generation Chinese merchant-types, worked on all holidays that their Evangelical Methodism didn’t demand they take off, and I was in no mood for another lecture about how much of their money I was wasting by staying in school.
With Vicky electing to stay in St. Louis and both of us at an impasse over who was going to give up their non-cash-cow graduate degree to be with the other, it looked like all the hallmarks of a bad week, down to the pumpkin pie offer at the local Vietnamese restaurant, but Chris’s call gave me a strange boost. I cleaned off a portion of our disgusting table and opened up my laptop.
Googling “Aumerle House” produced nothing, so with some trepidation I turned to Twitter. I kept it simple, imagining the number of exciting spam replies I’d receive. “who knows where ‘aumerle house’ is in DC? or what it is?”
I flipped through the contacts in my phone, idly contemplating where my belt had gone before realizing that my pants were still down. It was times like this I thanked genetics that it took me a good week to grow something resembling the stubble my roommates seemed to produce on-demand, and by that thought process I came to a stop on Elena Malcolm, Queen of Cats.
As was typical, my fingers hit the “call” button long before I was actually ready to talk, and Elena was always more of an adventure than I’d bargained for, but if anyone else would be spending Thanksgiving with enough esoteric knowledge to solve my own little mundane mystery, it would be here. Still, I found myself hoping it’d go to voicemail before her measured voice came over the line.
“Byron Xu, I presume?” purred Elena. Few people look exactly how they sound, but Elena would be the picture in the Encyclopedia Britannica if they ever got around to putting in an entry for the phenomenon. Of average height and weight with a deliberate grace to her walk, she towed the line between a tomboy’s nonchalance and a dowager’s elegance, and her wavy long brown hair betrayed an exoticism that her Wisconsin upbringing profoundly defeated. Better to think of her from the wilds of Maine, or the bayous of Louisiana, as her lovelorn suitors often did.
“Hey, Elena,” I said, as a vision of her seated on my couch floated before me, hazel eyes locked on a point somewhere just behind my own.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” The sound of shuffling fabric came through the line. I felt my face flush.
“Ah, maybe a little hand with some research, actually,” I said. “I’m at a loss.”
“Are you familiar with this ‘Google,’ Byron?” said Elena, letting the leisurely tone ooze out of her. “They’re doing such wonderful things with it these days.”
I muscled some steel of my own into my voice. “I have better things to do than waste my minutes asking you to be my Google buddy,” I said. “I’m wondering if you’ve ever heard of a place called ‘Aumerle House.’”
“Yes, yes, I’ve seen your little tweet,” she said. “If you were enterprising enough to Google ‘Aumerle’ yourself, you’d’ve learned that it’s a title of a minor insurrectionist in Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II,’ who’s pardoned after Henry IV takes the throne despite his threat to Henry.”
“Well,” I said, scratching down “aum = sspeare” on my arm with a stray pen, “that’d, uh, defeat the point of having you around, wouldn’t it? Who would you research for, the cats?”
I heard the slapping-shut of a book—a thick one, by the way it carried over the phone. I envisioned Elena in front of the wall of books in her tiny New York studio, three mottled cats following her finger as she selected a particular tome. “Yes, well, that’s all I’ve got for you, I’m afraid, though as you know, if it happened after 1950, I’m just not your girl.”
The temptation for the rimshot proved too much. “Like your taste in men, no?”
An icy pause. Then: “I do value maturity a bit more than, say, you.”
I thought fast, then botched it and tried to laugh it off. “I mean, sure, look, you, uh, it’s just so easy to pigeon-hole the younger girl and the older men with their emotional hang-ups—”
A curt bark cut me off—a surprising outburst from the Queen of Cats. “As opposed to you, dear Byron Xu, the kind of younger man with emotional hang-ups that can’t wait ‘till he’s twenty-nine and able to sink his over-educated claws into those younger girls? Don’t worry, you’ll be there soon enough, and you’ll cast off your long-distance ball-and-chain, then use her as a crutch when you can’t be faithful to anyone for longer than a week.”
I must have stuttered into the phone, because Elena continued after a moment. “Yes, well, that’s what I thought you’d say. Anyhow, ‘Aumerle’ sounds French to me. Do you have any friends down there who speak French? Come to think of it, do you have any friends at all? Bourbon doesn’t count.”
I rallied—magnificently, I thought, though I was always up to a comment about drinking—and slammed the door on my own mistake: “Always a pleasure getting torn up by you, oh Queen of Cats.”
“Oh, Byron, it gives me such pleasure in return to tear you up. Keep your nose clean and all.”
“I’m not the one with four cats,” I said.
“Your loss.” The line went dead.
By the time I’d wriggled my jeans back on and found a spot on the couch untouched by pizza boxes to sit with a beer and collect my thoughts, I’d picked out at least one follow-up lead: Reynard, the French Embassy’s finest foreign officer. It wasn’t yet midnight – though the town would probably roll up the sidewalks early, given the rain, Reynard could be relied upon to find the last open bar in Adams-Morgan and reel in the drunken stragglers, even without the cell phone he detested so much and refused to use on principle.
Sipping my Sierra Nevada, I pulled out my BlackBerry again and checked my Twitter feed, despite having the laptop less than half a room away. A new follower’s reply greeted me:
000lvidal000: @xubaihan aumerle? aumeNTARle! (lo que quisiera, obtenga a la farmacia… o tu sepultura)
I moved my lips along to the words, struggling to remember high school Spanish. “Get it at the pharmacy… or your grave”? I shivered and took another pull from my beer bottle, letting the “phunk” of my lips breaking the seal around the neck echo through the empty room.
My eyes widened as I started drawing connections. Pharmacy… Pharmacy Bar? The dive on 18th that Reynard often held court in during the weekdays, when it would be unseemly to be wasted on the dance floor? I gulped down the rest of the lager and checked my watch. Almost midnight. I had time before Thanksgiving. I put on my long, bulky Japanese coat to disguise my scrawny frame, slipped my roommate’s ridiculous wide-brimmed fedora on to keep out the rain, and stepped out the door.
It wasn’t until some time later that I realized I’d left the peanut butter open on the counter, knife stuck in at just such an angle, with the saturated fat slowly congealing around it in the rainy November air.
Part 2 Thursday evening.
November 25, 2009, 11:00pm Comments
