by Don Winslow
“Bud it is.”
Neal watched him as he went to the refrigerator and looked for the beer. He was even thinner than he looked in his photograph, with a body that looked like it had never met a quart of chocolate ice cream. He was wearing a bright green chamois shirt and baggy khaki trousers, with a pair of brown moccasins that someone must have bought for him; they were much too laid back for a biochemist. His hair was a trace longer than it had been in the photo, and he looked older. Neal was surprised at his voice—it was low and gravelly—but didn’t know why he should be. Preconceptions again, he guessed.
Pendleton set a bottle of beer on the counter.
“Do you want a mug?” he asked.
“The bottle is great, thanks.”
“Get ready with sauce,” Li said. “Hello, Neal.”
She was preoccupied with preparing the meal, which was okay with Neal because it gave him a chance to stare at her. Her hair hung long and straight—the blue cloisonné comb had only a decorative function. She had put on light eyeshadow and red lipstick. Her black western shirt had red piping and red roses on the shoulders, and her black, pointed-toe cowboy boots were etched with blue designs. It was one of those outfits that could look either ridiculous or wonderful. It looked wonderful.
Neal was in the midst of this observation when Tom Kendall came in. He was short and plump, with prematurely white hair and a white beard. He was sporting a green chamois shirt that looked identical to Pendleton’s, and jeans with sandals. He had light blue eyes and a ruddy complexion.
What’s the bit with the lookalike shirts? Neal wondered. Who is Pendleton supposed to be in love with, anyway? Li Lan or Tom Kendall?
“The tub,” Kendall said in a soft, reedy voice, “will be hot by the time we’re ready. Neal—I assume you are Neal—when you are a Marin County shrink married to a woman who owns an art gallery, you are expected to have a hot tub. It wouldn’t do to violate an archetype.”
He smiled broadly and shook Neal’s hand. “I’m Tom Kendall.”
“Neal Carey.”
“I see you have a beer, which prompts the question: why don’t I have a beer? Why don’t I have a beer, Olivia?”
“I don’t know, sweetie.”
“You’ll have to get it yourself,” Pendleton said. “I’m in big trouble if I miss my sauce cue.”
“Big trouble,” Lan said.
“Some bartender. Bob and Lan are the official host and hostess tonight,” Kendall explained to Neal. “Bob can’t cook, so the deal was he would tend the bar.”
“Now with the sauce,” Li Lan said, and Pendleton poured a small bowl of red sauce into the wok. The sizzling stopped with a whoosh.
Olivia said, “Neal, please have a seat.” She gestured toward the sofa.
“Actually, I’d rather watch the cooking.”
“No, please sit,” said Li Lan. “Dinner should be surprises.”
Dinner was surprises.
The first round of drinks was a surprise. Having consumed his share of straight scotch in his time, Neal didn’t figure any little Chinese wine in a tiny black cup could get to him, but the clear, fiery liquid scorched his throat and smoked his brain. He didn’t quite manage to utter the salutation, “Yi lu shun feng,” offered by the rest of the party. Instead he choked out, “Jesus, what the hell is this?”
“Ludao shaojiu,” Lan said. “White wine, very strong.”
“Uh-huh,” Neal answered.
Then she set a plate of appetizers on the table. They were pastries—translucently thin dough filled with red bean paste. The pastries were very sweet, which was just fine with Neal as they put out the flames in his mouth.
“These are wonderful!” Olivia said.
“Xie xie ni,” Li Lan answered. Thank you.
“So good they deserve a toast,” Tom Kendall said, and he filled everyone’s cup with more wine. “What’s a good toast in Chinese?”
Li lifted her cup. “Gan bei—empty cup.”
“Gan bei!” they responded.
Neal managed the toast this time and threw back the wine. He was surprised that it went down easily. Something like fighting fire with fire, he thought.
Li had gone back into the kitchen, and she came back with the next course, individual bowls of cold noodles in sesame sauce. She noticed Neal’s discomfiture as everyone started to dig in with their chopsticks. Smiling at him, she said, “Put bowl to mouth, use chopsticks to push in.
“Slurp,” Pendleton said. “Just get them up near your mouth and slurp.”
Neal slurped, and the noodles seemed to jump out of the bowl into his mouth. He wiped a drop of sesame sauce off his chin and felt a twinge of guilt. What are you waiting for? he asked himself. Pull the trigger. Pendleton’s sitting right across the table from you, so just say something like, “Dr. Bob, the folks at AgriTech want you to punch in now, so what are you going to do?” Why don’t you say that, Neal? Tell him you’re here to hound him until he goes home? Because you’re not ready to have them despise you yet. Because you like these people. Because Li Lan is smiling at you. He opened his mouth to speak and then filled it with more noodles. There’d be time for betrayal later. Maybe after the next course.
The next course was pot stickers, small, pan-fried dumplings. Li Lan had made three for each of them. “One shrimp, one pork, one vegetable,” she said, and then laid three small bowls in the center of the table. “Mustard, sweet sauce, peppercorn sauce, very hot,” she said.
She walked around the table, stood behind Neal, picked up his pair of the black enamel chopsticks, and put them in his right hand. Then she laid one of the sticks between his thumb and index finger, and the other under his forefinger. Then she lifted his hand, squeezed so that the sticks seized one of the pot stickers, and then guided his hand to dip the pastry into the mustard. Then she brought the food to his mouth. “See?” she asked. “Easy.”
Neal could barely swallow.
“Lan,” Olivia scolded, “you’ve hardly eaten a thing!”
Lan sat down, effortlessly stabbed a pot sticker, swished it in a generous amount of peppercorn sauce, and popped it into her mouth.
“It is very bad,” she said, and then devoured another one.
“Is very good,” Pendleton told her. “Uhhh … hen hao.”
“Very good!” she said. “You are learning Chinese.”
Neal watched Pendleton blush—actually blush—with pleasure. This guy is in love, he thought, major league.
“More beer,” Pendleton said awkwardly, aware that the Kendalls were beaming at him. He brought back two handfuls of Tsingtao bottles and passed them around.
The beer was ice cold and tasted great along with the hot mustard and the hotter peppercorn. Neal drank it in long draughts and practiced with his chopsticks as Tom Kendall and Bob Pendleton talked about feeding the roses in the garden out back. Li Lan popped back into the kitchen and emerged with another dish: a whole smoked sea bass on a platter. She showed them how to use their chopsticks to pry the white flesh off the bones, and it took a long time, another beer, and another round of ludao to finish off the fish.
As they were celebrating their conquest with more cups of wine, Olivia Kendall said, “So, Neal, tell us about your work.”
Well, Olivia, I’m a rent-a-rat who has lied his way into your house in order to threaten your friends.
“It’s very boring, really,” he said.
“Not at all.”
“Well,” he said, reaching through the haze of wine, beer and food to try to recall his notes, “primarily I’m interested in the political subtext contained in Qing Dynasty paintings as an effort to subvert the ruling foreign Manchus.”
Okay?
“And how do you pursue this research? What are the sources?” Tom Kendall asked.
Et tu, Tom?
“Museums mostly,” he said. “Some books, doctoral dissertations … the usual.”
He wondered if he sounded as stupid to them as he did to himself. Come on, Neal, end this. Just tell them that you w
ouldn’t know a Qing Dynasty painting if it was tattooed on your left testicle. Get it over with.
“You have looked at the pictures at the De Young Museum?” Lan asked.
The De Young Museum … San Francisco.
“Oh, yes,” he answered. “Superb.”
He looked at Pendleton and asked, “Now, what do you do?”
A pathetic desperation effort, Neal thought.
“I’m a biochemist,” Pendleton said.
“Where?”
Pendleton pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. His lips edged into a small smile as he answered, “I’m between jobs right now. So I’m abusing the hospitality of these good people.”
“Nonsense,” Tom said quickly. “Bob is the official Kendall Household Adviser on Rose Fertilization.”
“You’ve done a wonderful job,” Olivia said. “Now if you could just think of a way to kill the weeds …”
“Not my line, I’m afraid. I only know how to make stuff grow.”
“You can keep your present position for as long as you want,” said Kendall.
“The pay isn’t so hot,” Pendleton said, “but the food is great, the beer is cold, and the company …”
Pull the trigger, Neal. Pull it now.
“The company is sublime,” Neal said.
Yeah, it is, he thought as he finished off his cup of wine. You cultivate loneliness like a flower in your garden, you treat people like weeds that need to be torn away, and here is a world where people love eating together, talking together … love being with each other. A world you’ve imagined but never experienced. Until now. Until this evening. Talk about abusing the hospitality of good people….
“Chicken with peanuts and dried red peppers,” he heard Li Lan saying, and he looked up to see her set down a steaming plate.
“The peppers are not for eating,” she continued, “just for flavor.”
The chicken dish stoked the dormant flames in Neal’s throat and brought tears to his eyes. Every bite was hotter and more delicious than the last and made the wine taste sweeter and cooler.
He watched Li Lan gracefully take the half-peanuts with her chopsticks and feed them to Pendleton, and he felt simultaneously touched and jealous. Let him go, he thought. Let him go and let yourself go. You can start over. Take the rest of your money out of the bank and stay here. Apply to Berkeley. Or Stanford. Or become the Official Kendall Household Adviser on Eighteenth-Century English Literature. You must be getting drunk. Getting drunk? You are drunk. With wine, with beer, with great food, with soft lights, with … you’re drunk.
“Oh, God, more?” he heard Olivia groan in mock despair as Li Lan brought out a plate of broccoli, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and mushrooms in bean sauce.
“Your show ends tomorrow?” he asked Lan as he munched on a crisp stem of brocolli.
“Yes,” she answered sadly.
“It was very successful,” said Olivia.
“Then where do you go?” Neal asked.
She didn’t answer. You could cut the tension with a chopstick, Neal thought.
“Home,” she said quietly.
“Hong Kong?” Neal asked.
She looked straight at him. “Yes. Home. Hong Kong.”
“Let’s not talk about it,” Olivia said. “It makes me sad.”
What about you, Dr. Bob? thought Neal. Does this mean you’re going home, too?
“I have a toast to propose!” said Tom. “Fill up your cups!”
Olivia poured out the wine.
Tom lifted his cup and scanned the table, looking each of them in the eye, then said, “To beauty—the beauty of Lan’s art, the beauty of the crops that grow through Robert’s knowledge, and the beauty of friendship.”
Neal drained his cup as a stupid question came to him: Had Judas liked the wine at the Last Supper?
Neal had never liked being naked. People didn’t get naked in New York, not outdoors, anyway, and they sure as hell didn’t shuck their clothes in public in England. But it was hot-tub time, and his hosts insisted that he join them. They didn’t use bathing suits in Marin County, and he was undercover—so to speak—so he surrendered his clothing in exchange for a promised towel and robe and then slid into the deepest part of the hot tub. He was grateful for the dim blue lighting on the deck, and more grateful that it was only Pendleton who joined him at first.
“I’m not a hot-tub kind of guy,” Neal said.
“Neither am I.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“I wanted to talk with you and know I’m not being recorded.”
Great, Neal thought. You sure fooled them.
“So, did the company send you?” Pendleton asked.
Neal thought about saying something clever like “What company?” or “Huh?” but decided that the old game was up and he might as well get it over with.
“Yeah.”
“That’s what I thought. Lan says that you don’t know anything about Chinese painting.”
“I just know what I like.”
If Pendleton thought the joke was funny, he disguised it pretty well.
“What does the company want?” he asked.
“They want you back.”
Jesus, this is stupid, Neal thought. Sitting here up to my chin in steaming water, half in the bag, trying to persuade another naked man to go back to work. I have to get a real job.
“I’m not going back,” Pendleton said. His thin chest puffed out in determination.
“What’s the problem?”
Perspiration had slid Pendleton’s glasses down his nose, and he pushed them back up again. Then he said, “You’ve seen her.”
Yeah, Doc. I’ve seen her all right. I wish I hadn’t.
“Look, Doc, they allow love in North Carolina.”
“To a Chinese woman?”
Come on, Doc, Neal thought. Lighten up. Join us in the 1970s. What’s the big deal?
“Sure, why not?”
Pendleton snorted sarcastically and shook his head. “I’m going with her,” he said.
“Yeah, well, there’s a problem with that.”
“Yeah? What problem?” Pendleton asked.
Neal saw that he was getting pissed off.
“You have a contract that has a year and change left. They’ll sue you.”
“Let them try to get to my money in Hong Kong.”
The hot water was starting to get to Neal. The wine didn’t exactly help, either. He felt enervated, tired.
“Doc, you don’t want to do that. Look, if it’s really love, it’ll last a year and a half. She can visit you, you can visit her…. I’ll bet AgriTech would even spring for the airfare. Finish out your time and then you’ll be free and clear.”
It’s been about a year since I left Diane, Neal thought, and I don’t think it’s going to last. And who am I to talk about being free and clear? I haven’t been either free or clear in my whole life. If I were, I wouldn’t be sitting here.
“You’re never free from those people,” Pendleton said bitterly. “Once they have you, they think they own you forever.”
I know the feeling, Doc.
“It’s a free country, Dr. Pendleton. If you don’t want to sign the next contract, don’t sign it. But the harsh fact is that you have to honor the one you have.” Or love the one you’re with, or something like that, and why did I have to drink all those toasts?
“Honor?” Pendleton said with a chortle. “I don’t know.”
They sank into a sullen silence. It didn’t last long, because Li Lan came out wearing a black robe and carrying a tray with a teapot and three cups. She set the tray down by the edge of the tub and then straightened up and undid the belt of the robe.
Just then Neal couldn’t quite figure out whether Li Lan dropping her robe would be the best thing in the world or the worst thing in the world, and when she opened the robe around her shoulders and then let it slide to the deck, it turned out to be both. His heart stopped, his throat tightened, and
he tried not to stare as she slipped into the hot water beside Pendleton. She rested one hand on his shoulder.
“Now we are all undressed,” she said to Neal.
“He is from the company,” said Pendleton.
Lan nodded.
“They sent him to bring me back,” Pendleton continued.
“To talk to you,” Neal said. “I can’t bring you back against your will. I can’t throw cuffs on you and haul you onto a plane.”
“You’re damned right you can’t,” Pendleton said. He looked like an angry bird.
“Robert …” said Lan quietly, stroking his shoulder, calming him down.
“Just go back and talk to them,” Neal offered. “You owe them that, don’t you? At least go back and tell them you’re quitting, see if you can work things out.”
He kept talking, laying out the whole thing: It was no big deal, everything was forgiven, Pendleton wasn’t the first guy to fall in love and lose his head for a while, no sense in destroying a distinguished career. Why, Neal himself would even help Pendleton negotiate some sort of visiting arrangement. Swept away with his own eloquence, he pushed on: North Carolina is beautiful; a change of scene would help Lan grow as an artist; there is, in fact, a large Oriental community in the Research Triangle. He was so convincing he convinced himself: their life would be great, his life would be great, they would visit each other for magic evenings.
Lan turned around and started to pour three cups of tea. The movement of her shoulder blades sent another pang shooting through Neal. When she turned back and leaned over to hand Neal a cup he could see the tops of her breasts, but it was still her eyes that drew him. She seemed to be looking into his mind, maybe into his soul. She handed Pendleton a cup and then leaned back to sip her own tea.
“Maybe Neal Carey’s thought is correct,” she said.
“I’m not leaving you,” Pendleton said quickly. He sounded like a twelve-year-old.
“Will Robert have much trouble if he does not return?”
“His research is very important.”
“Yes, it is.” She smiled at Pendleton warmly, and Neal would have donated his live body to science to see that smile sent his way.
“You’re more important,” said Pendleton thickly, and Neal had the sudden impression that Pendleton was going to start crying.