Chapter 11

11.
“Cello Concerto in E minor Op. 85: II. Lento - Allegro molto: Elgar”

Every character in every story has a radius, his distance from the center revealed to us as the story progresses. It is this circle in which he or she moves, lives and exists; it is the backdrop, the setting, and the world of the story itself. Occasionally the radius will present one way--say very small, the contents of a mind--and end up huge, spanning the globe, or delving into the far reaches of reality.
Like this story for example, up until very recently, Joshua’s radius (excluding memories, flights of whimsical prayer, and the never ending sound-waves of music) was exactly 3.82 kilometers around, the distance between his home and the Oper Haus. Then, through a series of unfortunate events, he finds himself in China, expanding his radius, and the radius of the story itself to almost half the world. But that larger distance, though measurable, isn’t what we’re interested in.

It is the well-worn distance of 3.82 kilometers that is of significance to the story at this juncture. For in what is perhaps a poor, poetic glimpse into the outer limits of mathematical irony, (the one and only type of irony writers shy away from) the home of Bai LanLan became part of Joshua’s invisible radius on the very night he pulled into port.

Her home, where she was on the night in question, wide awake, tossing and turning in her bed, was exactly 3.80 kilometers from the Conte Camano. When she awoke moments before, jerked out of a dream, the ship was .02 kilometers from port, being escorted into the harbor by ghostly fishing boats. It was there, that unbeknownst to both of them, BaiLan became part of Joshua’s radius, or indeed more accurately, he became part of hers.

Is it possible that the merging of one radius with another can knock a person from sleep? When you think about someone out of the blue and get a letter from them the very next day--does it perhaps bear a similarity to that? What’s the word--kismet? The Joshua of earlier in this story would have said, yes. Fate was his friend and his ally. He would have been amused by a concept like merging radiuses and how they would play out physically. But post unpleasantness, he didn’t care. Even if he were knocked a bit by the curved circumferential aura of a thin-limbed cellist called Bai LanLan, he most likely wouldn’t even have noticed. It would have been like launching a stone into a rushing river.

But BaiLan’s world was as still and quiet as carefully guarded pond, the slightest of ripples would be felt like tsunami waves of anxiety, and that night for no explicable reason, she would wake feeling like a paratrooper moments before his first jump.
To be fair, BaiLan was not unfamiliar with spontaneous bouts of anxiety. She once asked her parents to take her to see the doctor because of an inexplicable heaviness in her chest she couldn’t seem to shake. When he presented her with a clean bill of health she felt better for a little while, but the feeling came back soon enough and she was too embarrassed to bring it up again. Sometimes she felt that she had a heart condition doctors were unable to diagnose because only she had it. In her mind, it was from this rare disease that she would one day perish and no one would understand why.

But this BaiLan, the girl who in a paranoid fantasy was slowly dying, existed only behind closed doors. The game face was one of austere perfection, each and every day meticulously scheduled, styled, and planned well in advance and extending far into the future with the help of her family, and time-tested, ancient, reliable, Chinese tradition. So naturally, the longing in her soul--which she was convinced, had metastasized into a tumor on the night in question--was a source of frustration for her. Why would so charmed a life be burdened with such pain? No one else she knew lost sleep for no reason, it was inconvenient and embarrassing and she had to hide it at all costs. So when she woke the next morning exhausted, she applied powder to hide the gray circles under her eyes and graced the breakfast table appearing as rested as could be.

No one asked if she had slept well, it was evident that she had, for BaiLan did everything well. Everything. She made only good decisions. She was helpful to those in need. She was humble, demure and had a strong desire to please, but she was also independent and often outspoken. She was the embodiment of beauty and grace, she was talented and smart, she was asymmetrically balanced like a perfect bouquet arranged painstakingly by her own hands. Everything she did was done deliberately in the interest of making BaiLan seem best, envied, desired. Her parents had only one child and she was determined not to make them regret this fact even for a second.

But there was something in the air. A barometric shift had occurred somewhere within her sphere and it caused her to yawn twice at breakfast. Nothing was said, by either of her parents thought her father did look up from his tea long enough to regard her strangely, which made her pinch the back of her leg with two fingers to suppress yet a third yawn. A third yawn wouldn’t be ignored. She let her tea brew long. Fortitude is what she needed, after a night of sickening weakness.

“HongWei plans to attend your recital with his parents next week, LanLan. Will you welcome him?” BaiLan’s father didn’t look up from his paper as he waited for her answer. He kept reading, confident that his daughter’s reply would satisfy him as it usually did.

“I didn’t know HongWei was interested in music,” she said teasingly. She liked to tease her father because she was the only person in the world who could. It was also well known that HongWei, a young associate of Mr. Bai, didn’t have the slightest idea about music. A lengthy recital would probably bore him to tears. It was BaiLan he came to see. And the more her father mentioned the handsome businessman the more she began to get the feeling that he was somehow intended for her and this inflamed the tumor to an almost unbearable degree.

HongWei was ideal, the perfect match for her in so many ways. He stood exactly three inches taller than BaiLan, the ideal height differential between two people romantically attached. He was handsome, obedient, hardworking, and not--she could gamble with one hundred percent certainty--plagued by late night fits of disillusionment. He was also the source of much girlish envy among her friends in the piano trio who deemed him dreamy from the start. And while BaiLan loved being envied, she couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about. If it was her parents wish that someday she marry HongWei, then it would be so. She didn’t see how his being dreamy played into it. Sure, she went along with talk of his attributes, grinned, giggled and forced a blush--as it was all the rage at the moment to waste one’s time in the pursuit of love; but to BaiLan, it was silly and childish. HongWei was humorless, which contented her. She didn’t like silliness in men. Charlie was silly and he enraged her. Besides, she had bigger problems to contend with. For what if they were married and HongWei found out about her night terrors? What if it interfered with their ability to have a child? What if she was unable to give him a son?

“It’s not the music he’s coming to see, LanLan.” Her father nearly winked at her.
BaiLan rose, suppressing that third yawn and a tired achy feeling in her limbs. “That doesn’t mean I don’t have to practice. There will be other people in the audience, father.”

Mr. Bai tapped the table with his three middle fingers, which signified the practical close of their father daughter exchange. With the slightest of bows, she excused herself from the table and went upstairs to get her gloves and hat as it was nearing the nine o’clock hour and she had to be on her way to practice.

In her room with the door closed, BaiLan looked at herself in the mirror and was pleased with what she saw. Her dress was cut in the western fashion and made from a soft wool the color of milky coffee. Her stockings were silk, her shoes Italian, and her hair not overly finger waved like the girls on the street, but tucked back neatly as was fitting an unmarried woman from a family such as hers. Her face was fresh and lovely; the dark circles had thankfully faded. She studied her visage and liked that it didn’t so much as hint of desperation. Then, in a moment of inspired irreverence, she adorned her wrist with a jade bangle that might have looked gaudy on another girl, but lent, she felt, just the right amount of personality to separate her from the crowd.

In a black fur collared coat BaiLan greeted the gray misty morning. As her feet clipped along the pavement, she noticed that she could smell the sea in the air stronger than usual. Her heart flipped in her chest. Was this to be her sad lot in life, a steel façade sheltering a weak heart that had a mind of its own, torturing her with no warning, no sense of timing or discretion?

When she reached the corner Charlie was waiting for her as he always did. She was almost glad to see him, as his nonsense might help to distract her heart. He used to wait for her in front of the house but her father put a stop to that ages ago. Still, the man refused to give up and BaiLan had given up trying to shake him. It’s not that she disliked Charlie. When they first met she had found him charming. But there was something about the way he persisted after being outwardly rejected that she found intensely pathetic. She decided to tolerate him, as an act of charity, for charity is what the pathetic need above all else.

“Did you sleep well, BaiLan?” Charlie leaned against a wall with one knee bent like some sort of rare bird. He was smoking, which disgusted her, and his hair was uncombed. “I didn’t.”

BaiLan kept walking. “I slept fine, thank you,” she lied.

“May I walk with you?” Charlie always asked but only listened half of the time. When she said no, he would walk with her anyway and the conversation would be a boring debate about her tendency toward cruelty. BaiLan didn’t have the stomach for it that morning so she permitted him the walk but refused to meet his eyes.

“You aren’t wearing a coat, Charlie. You must be cold.”

Charlie checked his person. “You’re right. I must have left it at the club. Last night was whoopee!”

“Whoopee?”

There is, thankfully, no word in Chinese for whoopee. Charlie said it in English, a language he claimed to have mastered, because Charlie worshiped America. And though BaiLan didn’t know what the word whoopee meant, she understood the gist.

Like her, Charlie was a musician. They studied at the conservatory together. He had played the piano. But a few years ago, remarkably right around the time that her father noticed him waiting for her on the stoop in front of his house, Charlie quit the conservatory after a near epiphany involving the music of someone called Count Basie. Now he worked playing piano for the Japanese in an American style Jazz club in the French Concession. BaiLan found every last bit of it repellent.

“Yes, whoopee! Whoopee jazz so crazy!” He said in English, nearly bursting with excitement.

“Pull yourself together, Charlie.” BaiLan pulled the collar of her coat up higher to conceal the bottom half of her face so that she would be harder to recognize.

“You come to club, baby. Get dance hot stuff!”

“Please?”

“Fine. Sorry. You really have to see it, LanLan. It’s the most amazing thing. Not like the conservatory at all.”

“But I like the conservatory.”

“And you’ll like this!”

“No, I won’t.”

“I promise you will.”

It seemed her fuse with Charlie was shorter than usual that morning because she usually didn’t blow up at him until the end of their walk. “What’s there to like?” She turned on him. “A bunch of drunk Japanese soldiers listening to primitive noise in a smoky bar? Thank you for the invitation but I think I’ll pass. I have a concert to practice for.”

“May I come?”

“What, and take you away from your whoopee?”

“I’d love to see you play again.”

“So come then. It’s open to the public so I can’t stop you.”

“Was that an invitation, LanLan?”

“No, it was a statement of the facts.”

“I’ll be there. I’ll bring some of the boys from the band.”

“Please don’t.”

“We’ll behave. Then afterwards we can all go over to the club and dance the night away, super hot jazz style.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying it would help you.”

BaiLan stopped walking. The sun reflected off the water pooling in the gutters. Charlie had one foot in it but didn’t seem to notice.

“Help me?”

“It would loosen you up, bring some passion to your playing.”

But BaiLan had quite enough. “Good day, Charlie.”

“LanLan?”

She stormed away leaving him with a wet foot. Passion to her playing, how dare he. She was a fine musician without his western dogma. For someone like him to criticize her was ridiculous. He was the one that quit. He was the one with no passion. She vowed silently to herself never to speak to Charlie again. The charity stopped here.
She walked the rest of the way to the conservatory with her collar up. She couldn’t shake his words and didn’t want the sour look on her face to adversely affect those on the street who might be admiring her jade bracelet. She folded her weakness in fur and by the time she reached her school and saw the other members of her trio waiting for her on the steps, smiling and rubbing their hands for warmth, she was able to reveal her pretty face to them as if nothing had happened.

Which brings us back to mathematics. BaiLan had no intention of ever going to Charlie’s club. If the spirits of her dead ancestors came to her and told her that she would not only go, but that by going, her life would change forever, she would have probably laughed in their transparent faces. The odds were against it. But she would go, and her life would be changed thanks to the undeniable pull of two conflicting radiuses like planets headed for an eclipse.