Now, as the all-Caucasian band played a waltz for the Chinese dancers, he looked at his wife. He had always thought she was pretty, but her prettiness had softened over the years. The line of her cheek, which she had rubbed lightly with rouge, was plumper now. She was both the same girl he’d met a decade ago and undeniably changed, and for the first time in a long time he felt a kind of ache for her. It wasn’t the yearning he would have felt as a young man long separated from his lover. It wasn’t a simple physical desire. It was thoroughly unscientific, this feeling that was overtaking him, as if his body was belatedly acknowledging how far apart they had been for so long, and his mind was finally catching up.
He had missed her.
Ever since he returned from the war, he’d felt as if part of him were still back in China, but he wasn’t there anymore. Those army hospitals had been long dismantled; those boys he treated had returned to their homes—or at least they were beyond suffering. And here he was now: in this gaily colored and dramatically lit nightclub in America, sitting across from his American wife. The music was loud and brash; the smell of perfume and cigarettes lay heavy on the air. He lifted his mai tai to his lips and took another sip of his drink, the condensation dripping down the side of his hand like an electric shock. Wake up. You are here.
Grace turned to look at him. He put down his glass and reached across the table for her. She was surprised, but she put her hand in his.
PART III
I Only Have Eyes For You
November 1954
19
Friday night, after her parents had gone to sleep, Lily turned on her lamp and got out of bed. Ever since she and Kath had decided to go to the Telegraph Club, she had thought endlessly about what she should wear. She had only a vague idea of what one wore to a nightclub, and she wished that she could consult Shirley. Even if Shirley didn’t really know, she had instincts about these things.
Shirley would probably tell her to wear something daring. A form-fitting, low-cut blouse tucked into a wiggle skirt or a strapless party dress with a gauzy shawl over it. Not the black rayon circle skirt Lily had planned to wear or the boring white blouse with its Peter Pan collar, or the girlish blue short-sleeved dress she’d been keeping in reserve just in case. They were all terrible: unfashionable and unattractive and wrong.
Shirley would also tell her that looking her best began with a proper foundation—the right girdle and bra and stockings—and Lily was sure that nothing she had in her dresser was right. Her mother had bought her a new bra that fall, but she knew that Shirley would say it was the wrong shape. As she wriggled into her panty girdle, she contemplated her selection of stockings, and realized that none of them were sheer enough. She wore them to church, not to nightclubs, and they were thick and plain. Nonetheless, she rolled them up her legs and fastened them to the girdle; she wasn’t going to go to the Telegraph Club wearing bobby socks. That would definitely make her look like a schoolgirl. She hoped, at best, to be mistaken for a young secretary, or a college coed.
Shirley would take her time with her hair, setting it in rollers expertly and fixing the curls in place with a pretty comb or hairband. Lily’s hair had never held a curl well—despite even Shirley’s efforts—and although she’d taken her bath a little early so that she could set her hair, it had only been a couple of hours. Not long enough. As she pulled on her slip, the rollers snagged on the nylon fabric, and she had to struggle to delicately maneuver the slip over her head without ripping. She was half blinded by the slip, which also restricted her arms, and a sudden burst of anger exploded within her. She hated her clothes and hated her hair and hated, most of all, her uncertainty about everything she was doing.
Was she really going to do this?
She finally managed to free her slip from her head and began to pull the rollers out as fast as she could. In the mirror she saw that the curls were already loosening and wouldn’t hold their shape. She glanced at the clock; she was supposed to leave the house in less than half an hour. If she didn’t hurry, she would be late, and if she was too late, Kath would leave. They had agreed to wait for each other on the corner of Columbus and Vallejo for five minutes, and if the other hadn’t arrived by then, they’d walk around the block and wait another five minutes. If they were still waiting alone by half past eleven, they’d give up and go home. They’d made their plan just in case, although what the case was had never been verbalized. It was some nebulous fear better left unsaid.
The throb of her heart was so strong it frightened her. The anger that had reared up inside her was replaced, now, by a growing panic. She had never done anything like this before. Getting up in the middle of the night, sneaking out—it was unprecedented. Lily Hu didn’t do these things. She pulled the last roller out of her hair and dropped it into the basket, and almost as if she were rising out of her body she saw herself in the mirror like a stranger.