Anyway, I’m not a reporter anymore, Mom, not as of yesterday. Now I’m a full-time novelist, not just part-time anymore.’
‘No job.’
‘Self-employed.’
‘Fancy way of saying no job,’ she insisted, though Tommy’s father was self-employed in the family bakery, as were Tommy’s two brothers, who also had failed to become doctors.
‘The latest contract I signed-’
‘People read newspapers. Who read books?’
‘Lots of people read books.’
‘Who?’
‘You read books.’
‘Not books about silly private detectives with guns in every pocket, drive cars like crazy maniac, get in fights, drink whiskey, chase blondes.’
‘My detective doesn’t drink whiskey-’
‘He should settle down, marry nice Vietnamese girl, have babies, work steady job, contribute to family.’
‘Boring, Mom. No one would ever want to read about a private detective like that.’
‘This detective in your books – he ever marry blonde, he break his mother’s heart.’
‘He’s a lone wolf. He’ll never marry.’
‘That break his mother’s heart too. Who want to read book about mother with broken heart? Too sad.’
Exasperated, Tommy said, ‘Mom, I just called to tell you the good news about the Corvette and-’
‘Come to dinner. Clay-pot chicken and rice better than lousy cheeseburgers.’
‘I can’t come tonight, Mom. Tomorrow.’
‘Too much cheeseburgers and French fries, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger.’
‘I hardly ever eat cheeseburgers and fries, Mom. I watch my diet and I-’
‘Tomorrow night we have shrimp toast. Pork-stuffed squid. Pot-roasted rice. Duck with nuoc cham.’
Tommy’s mouth was watering, but he would never admit as much, not even if he were placed in the hands of torturers with countless clever instruments of persuasion. ‘Okay, I’ll be there tomorrow night. And after dinner, I’ll take you for a spin in the Corvette.’
‘Take your father. Maybe he like flashy sports car. Not me. I simple person.’
‘Mom-’
‘But your father good man. Don’t put him in fancy sports car and take him out drinking whiskey, fight, chase blondes.’
‘I’ll do my best not to corrupt him, Mom.’
‘Goodbye, Tuong.’
‘Tommy,’ he corrected, but she had hung up.
God, how he loved her.
God, how nuts she made him.
He drove through Laguna Beach and continued north.
The last red slash of the sunset had seeped away. The wounded night in the west had healed, sky to sea, and in the natural world, all was dark. The only relief from blackness was the unnatural glow from the houses on the eastern hills and from the cars and trucks racing along the coast. The flashes of headlights and taillights suddenly seemed frenzied and ominous, as though all the drivers of those vehicles were speeding toward appointments with one form of damnation or another.
Mild shivers swept through Tommy, and then he was shaken by a series of more profound chills that made his teeth chatter.
As a novelist, he had never written a scene in which a character’s teeth had chattered, because he had always thought it was a cliché; more important, he assumed that it was a cliché without any element of truth, that shivering until teeth rattled was not physically possible. In his thirty years, he had never, for even as much as a day, lived in a cold climate, so he couldn’t actually vouch for the effect of a bitter winter wind. Characters in books usually found their teeth chattering from fear, however, and Tommy Phan knew a good deal about fear. As a small boy on a leaky boat on the South China Sea, fleeing from Vietnam with his parents, two brothers and sister, under ferocious attack by
Thai pirates who would have raped the women and killed everyone if they had been able to get aboard, Tommy had been terrified but had never been so fearful that his teeth had rattled like castanets.
They were chattering now. He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles throbbed, and that stopped the chattering. But as soon as he relaxed, it started again.
The coolness of the November evening hadn’t yet leached into the Corvette. The chill that gripped him was curiously internal, but he switched on the heater anyway.
As another series of icy tremors shook him, he remembered the peculiar moment earlier in the parking lot at the car dealership: the flitting shadow with no cloud or bird that could have cast it, the deep coldness like a wind that stirred nothing else in the day except him.