Free The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White Page B

a Chinese grad student in physics, actually was. As we listened, she phoned him at his apartment, where she knew he’d be lost in calculations. She told him she was the operator calling to test his “unit” and, despite her heavy Chinese accent, he believed her. “I want you to walk across the room and put your unit in the top drawer of your walnut dresser, close the drawer, return to your present position, and say, Wong, wong.’ ” The physicist’s compliance, coupled with the fact that dogs in China say wong-wong instead of bow-wow, made us sick with laughter. Soon Kay had him whistling, hooting, and grunting at his unit.
    Betty was at the same time quickly loading the table with dishes. We were drinking beers, and the cold imperious Kay had turned bright red from drink: “Autumn Moon” became her new name.
    Then it was Betty’s turn to be teased. She’d made the mistake of complaining that she felt fat, though she carried no more excess weight than a cricket. Kay told us how she’d recently called an exercycle company in Detroit and, in Betty’s name, asked for a free demonstration. One afternoon while Betty was deep in her chemistry book, a big blonde in black high heels clomped-clomped up the wooden fire escape, rising into Betty’s view like a sea monster. “Are you Betty Wong?” she demanded.
    “Yes.”
    “One minute please while I assemble the horse.”
    Before Betty could say ee, erh, san , which is one, two, three in Chinese, she’d been strapped, all eighty-five pounds of her, onto the weight-reducing demon.
    “That night,” Kay was saying, “when she asked me in tears how they’d come up with her name, I told her they go through the infirmary files and approach anyone who’s overweight.”
    The two other male guests were Chinese in white shirts, sober ties, and gray suits, smiling and nodding, knees together, hands to either side flat against the chair seat as though ready to spring up at any moment. Before long I’d grasped the underlying idea. The girls were supposed to have all the personality, but everyone, men included, was meant to be a “character”—Betty a cheerful but driven maniac; Kay the severe kidder, until she became “Autumn Moon”; the men polite and neat, but each harboring his secret though innocuous foible: gluttony for cherries, passion for Elvis. This jokey, satirical style was far more pointed than the mirthless Midwestern joshing I was used to, the flaccid wordplay, and the tiresome envisioning of dull improbabilities (“Wouldn’t it be really neat if the moon really was made of green cheese?”)
    For white Americans of that time and class and place, the only alternative to public joshing was intimate confession; we gave too little of ourselves or too much. But the Chinese students I met were guardedly friendly when alone and gleefully satirical in groups—but satirical of minor vices, none too close to the bone. We white Americans were grim psychoanalytic theorists, sure that sex (greedy sex, guilty sex) was our sole motivation, whereas the Chinese were capricious, artistic. Kay told me, “You always wear blue because you like blue eyes,” and it was perfectly true that the boys who attracted me—the boys I fell in love with, not the brunettesI lusted after—were blue-eyed blonds. Or she’d say, “You eat as fast as possible, like a badger,” or, “You always drawl out your yes when you really mean no,” or, “You rub your nose with the back of your hand like a cat.” Knowing I was being scrutinized flattered and alarmed me.
    Into the party burst a thin Chinese woman in her fifties, salt-and-pepper hair drawn back, black pants, black sunglasses, fingernails and lips unpainted. Everyone grew silent and uncomfortable. The newcomer spoke rapidly in a maddening whine; I couldn’t pick out a word in her dialect. After half an hour she stood and left, nodding at Kay and one of the men and ignoring the rest of us.
    “She’s a sort of princess.