The fragrant nightie under the pillow on Youn's side of the bed turned out to be the beige one, and Danny found a discreet moment to give it back to her. Now no evidence of her remained in his bedroom. Youn slept with her tiny daughter in her writing room; they were both small enough to fit in the bed in that extra bedroom, although Danny had suggested to Youn that she could put Soo in the extra extra bedroom. (He'd noticed that Youn's husband had slept in that room, alone.)
"A two-year-old shouldn't sleep unattended," Youn had told Danny, who realized that he'd misread the curiosity with which Youn had scrutinized Joe; she'd simply been wondering what changes to expect in her daughter between the ages of two and eight. (As for what she'd written about, and why, there would never be a satisfactory explanation, Danny supposed.)
When K
yung came back from Chicago, and the doctor soon left again with his little girl--they went home to Seoul together--Youn wasted no time in finding a place of her own to live, and by the next semester she had transferred to someone else's fiction workshop. Whether she ever finished her novel-in-progress was immaterial to the writer Danny Angel. Whether Youn would one day become a published novelist also mattered little to Danny, who knew firsthand that--in Youn's time in Iowa City--her fiction had been an almost complete success.
It was Yi-Yiing's success, at pretending to be Danny's girlfriend, that would linger a little longer. The ER nurse was not naturally flirtatious, but for months after the need to pretend she and Danny were a couple, Yi-Yiing would occasionally brush against the writer, or trail her fingers, or the back of her hand, against Danny's cheek. It seemed she had sincerely forgotten herself, for she would instinctively stop--as soon as she'd started something. Danny doubted that the cook ever saw her do this; if Joe saw, the eight-year-old took no notice.
"Would you prefer it if I dressed normally around the house?" Yi-Yiing would one day ask the writer. "I mean, maybe it's 'enough already' with the pajamas."
"But you're the Pajama Lady--that's just who you are," Danny told her evasively.
"You know what I mean," Yi-Yiing said to him.
She stopped wearing them--or, perhaps, she only slept in them. Her normal clothes were a safer barrier between them, and what had amounted to the occasional contact--the brush of her passing behind his back, the touch of her fingertips or the knuckles on her small hands--stopped soon after as well.
"I miss Yi-Yiing's pajamas," Joe said to his dad one morning, when they were walking to the boy's school.
"I do, too," Danny told him, but by then the writer was seeing someone else.
WITH YOUN GONE FROM their lives--especially later, in their last year in Iowa City, when they were living in the third house on Court Street--their regular habits resumed as if uninterrupted. The third house was on the other side of Court Street, near Summit, where Danny conducted a discreet daytime affair with an unhappy faculty wife whose husband was cheating on her. The back alley, where Joe had been tempted to pity himself--while he watched Max practice skids on his "backup" bike--was also gone from their lives, as was the possum. The Yokohamas, Sao and Kaori, still took turns babysitting for Joe, and everyone--all of them--gathered with a seemingly increasing need (or desperation) at Mao's.
The cook knew in advance how much he would miss the Cheng brothers--almost as much as he would miss Yi-Yiing. It was never knowing what it might have been like to be with the Hong Kong nurse that Danny would miss, though his return to Vermont was preceded by another kind of closure.
As their Iowa adventure was concluding, so was--at long last--the war in Vietnam. The mood at Mao's was not predisposed to a happy ending. "Operation Frequent Wind," as the helicopter evacuation of Saigon was called--"Operation More Bullshit," Ketchum had called it--turned out to be a devastating distraction from the dinnertime preparations at the Asian and French restaurant. The TV in the little kitchen off the Coralville strip proved to be a magnet for discontent.
April 1975 had been a bad month for business at Mao's. There were four drive-by brick-throwings--one of the restaurant's window-breakers was actually a chunk of cement the size of a cinder block, and one was a rock. "Fucking patriot farmers!" Xiao Dee had called the vandals. He and the cook had canceled a shopping trip to Chinatown because Xiao Dee was convinced that Mao's was under attack--or, as Saigon fell, the restaurant would come under heavier siege. Ah Gou was running short of his favorite ingredients. (With Tony Angel's help, there were a few more items from Italy on the menu than usual.)
All that year, the South Vietnamese soldiers were deserting in droves. The runaway soldiers had been rounding up their families and converging on Saigon, where they must have believed the Americans would help them escape the country. In the last two weeks of April, the U.S. had airlifted sixty thousand foreigners and South Vietnamese; hundreds of thousands more would soon be left to find their own way out. "It will be sheer chaos," Ketchum had predicted. ("What did we expect would happen?" the logger would say later.)
Did we care what would happen? Danny was thinking. He and Joe had a table to themselves at Mao's, and Yi-Yiing had joined them for dinner. She'd skipped her shift in the emergency room because she had a cold; she didn't want to make a lot of sick or injured people any worse, she'd told Danny and Joe. "I'm already going to make you two sick--you two and Pop," she said to them, smiling.
"Thanks a lot," Danny told her. Joe was laughing; he adored Yi-Yiing. The boy would miss having his own nurse when he was back in Vermont. (And I'll miss having a nurse for him, the writer was thinking.)
There were two couples at one table, and three businessmen types at another. It was a quiet night for Mao's, but it was still early. The boarded-up window didn't improve the looks of the front entrance, Danny was thinking, when one of the Yokohamas came out of the kitchen, her face as white as her apron and her lower lip trembling. "Your dad says you should see what's on television," the Japanese girl said to the writer. "The TV's in the kitchen."
Danny got up from the table, but when Joe tried to go with him, Yi-Yiing said, "Maybe you should stay with me, Joe."
"Yes, you stay!" Sao or Kaori told the boy. "You shouldn't see!"
"But I want to see what it is," Joe said.
"Do what Sao says, Joe--I'll be right back," his dad told him.
"I'm Kaori," the Japanese twin said to Danny. She burst into tears. "Why am I getting the feeling that all 'gooks' are the same to you Americans?"
"What's on the TV?" Yi-Yiing asked her.
The two couples had been laughing about something; they hadn't heard Kaori's outburst. But the businessmen types had frozen; the gooks word held them poised over their beers.
Ah Gou's smart girlfriend, Tzu-Min, was the maitre d' that night. Xiao Dee was too agitated by the brick-throwing patriot farmers to be safely allowed out of the kitchen.
"Go back in the kitchen, Kaori," Tzu-Min told the sobbing girl. "No crying permitted out here."
"What's on the TV?" Yi-Yiing asked the maitre d'.
"Joe shouldn't see it," Tzu-Min told her. Danny had already disappeared into the kitchen.