“Vicky—”
She kissed me. “When they do, I’m gonna say, ‘Too fuckin’ bad. Don’t show me this shit. I don’t care.’”
I shook my head. “They wouldn’t.”
“Hey, Len. You think you know everything? Okay. Maybe you oughta be wiser. I’m gonna tell you something you don’t know. Your father made his bones some years back. Not too long ago, either—maybe ten years ago. Before you and I met. A guy and a gal tried to kill him. They sleep with the fishes. That’s a silly cliché nobody really uses. But that pair do. They tried to kill your dad, and they got eaten by sharks. Or … apparently they did. They disappeared in Florida and were never seen or heard from again.”
I can’t say how shocked I was. I knew Vicky wouldn’t lie about such a thing. I also knew she had sources of information.
“I’ve just proved something to you, my darling,” she said. “You can’t rely on promises.”
“From whatever source,” I said bitterly.
“Okay. The world is the world, Len. What I’m telling you right now is that you can’t rely on those Chinese operators. Cover your ass, Len. Cover your ass, because they’re gonna cover theirs, for damned sure, and they’ll take the first opportunity to steal you blind.”
“You telling me to back out?”
“No, I’m not telling you to back out. I’m telling you not to trust them.”
“You’re telling me not to trust anybody, not even you. Isn’t that what you’re telling me?
“Trust me? Well … I’ve told you. I’ve trusted you. I do trust you, lover.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I promised your father I would never tell what I’ve just told you.” She shrugged. “I lied to him. I didn’t know I was lying to him when I said that, but … Don’t tell your father what I said to you about Florida. Okay? Don’t ever mention that to him.”
“All right,” I said.
I suppose I was as depressed that night as I have ever been—ever, anyway, since I was given the news of the death of my mother. When we were in bed, Vicky did that thing for me that she alone could do; she sucked my entire scrotum and testicles into her mouth and held them there, licking and warming them, until I could think of nothing else but what she was doing. She was eighteen years older than I was, and I suppose Chang Li was eighteen years younger, but Vicky was the artist Li would never be.
56
Tom Malloy and Liz McAllister pronounced themselves satisfied with the chips coming to us from China. Guangdong Micro-Technology, GMT, proved capable of producing chips that consistently met every test. The tests were beyond my comprehension but not beyond my understanding that they worked, which was what counted, so far as I was concerned.
Malloy designed the Sphere IV and put it out for beta testing. He took it to national trade shows and let the computer types play with it. It got good notices in the trade journals. There was a half-breathless anticipation for it, something like what there had been for Windows 95 before it shipped.
All I knew was, it was a handsome machine. And, more important, it ran Windows, not just a Malloy proprietary operating system. That would make all the difference.
The merchandise from Bai Fuyuan was generally good. Charlie Han inspected it in Hong Kong before it was shipped to the States. He rejected an occasional batch of items, but on the whole the lingerie was put together well from high-quality fabrics. Charlie Han knew fabrics, and he knew stitching. We were lucky to have him.
The only real problem we had was with colors. For some odd reason, Bai’s people could not exactly match our colors. That is, he could not match the colors used by our Hong Kong makers.
Okay …
We were doing business as we had planned. The legalities of some parts of it were mysterious, but we relied on Hong Kong solicitors to steer us. The merchandise was made in China and shipped to Guangzhou or Hong Kong without labels. In those two cities labels were sewn in saying the merchandise was made in Hong Kong, some of it in the United States. Shipments to the States—merchandise with Hong Kong labels—went out as air cargo. When it arrived in the States, import tariffs were paid. Shipments from Guangzhou went up the coast and were delivered at various Chinese ports, chiefly Shanghai. The labels on the merchandise said it had been made in Hong Kong. The shipping documents said it had been made in China and was being shipped only in coastal trade.
I asked my father to come out to Hong Kong. I wanted him to see the Friendship Store in Guangzhou, and Bai wanted him to be present for the opening of our two shops in Beijing. He insisted that an appearance by Jerry Cooper was important.
One reason why he did not want to come was that Therèse did not want to. She had settled into a comfortable life in Florida, fishing, playing bridge, and feeding her herons; and it was true that the flight out and back was an ordeal, even for younger people, even if they did travel in the first-class section.
Reluctantly, my father agreed to make the trip alone. He sounded weary on the telephone, and I was tempted to tell him to forget it, that he was entitled to his relaxation.
Imagine my surprise when I met him at the new airport and found him not alone. Liz was with him.
“She wants to see how Zhang makes chips,” he explained. “So, it occurred to me that she could come with me and ease some of the burden of travel.”
My father was full of surprises for me always. He casually announced that Liz would not be going to a hotel but would share his room in the second apartment.
* * *
She had brought with her a Sphere IV. She hooked it up in my apartment office and shortly had it doing impressive things. I’d learned a lot about computers before leading our company into making the commitment it had made, but Liz was a computer guru and could make the machine do things I didn’t know any machine could do.
“Look, honey,” she said to me, leaning over me and brushing me with her oversized breasts. “This one is set up with both Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect.”
I knew that was important. Loyalists for both programs wanted to see documents formatted for their choice between these major word processors. To do that, the Sphere had to have a lot of RAM: a lot of memory, plus a capacious hard drive. What was more, this computer ran at six hundred megahertz, which was about as fast as any desktop could then run—what the advertising copywriters liked to call “blinding speed.” Of course, I knew that today’s blinding speed would be a crawl tomorrow.
My father watched quizzically, without total interest, as Liz demonstrated the Sphere and then turned it over to me. He didn’t pretend to know what we were talking about. He had pronounced himself too far along in life to learn a whole new science.
* * *
He was no innocent, though. At the end of his second day in Hong Kong he took me aside in my apartment office and asked me a pointed question.
“How much are we paying Charlie Han?”
“A hundred twenty thousand,” I said. “Plus perks.”
“Do his perks include that Mercedes? That’s one hell of a luxury car.”
“No. We’ve known all along that he was doing some business on the side.”
“All I want to know is, is he competing with us? Or worse, is he cheating on us? You know, he could be putting his imprimatur on merchandise that does not in fact meet standards.”
I nodded. “Are we getting complaints? Are the customers back home…?”
“No. Well … it would take time. But no. We’ve had no complaints about the merchandise. But I can walk into a store and tell immediately what was made in Hong Kong and what in China. It’s good stuff. It’s correctly sewn. But the colors are all a little off.”
“I’ve noticed that,” I said.
“I wonder,” said my father, “if Bai Fuyuan doesn’t have some reason for that. I mean, he can walk into any store, anywhere, and know what part of the stock came from him.”
“I tend to trust Charlie Han,” I said.
“I’ve got good reason to tr
ust him,” said my father. “He committed perjury for me, one time.”
“But it’s a slippery business. I lose sleep over it.”
* * *
Liz went over to Guangzhou to meet Zhang Feng and see his shops. Charlie sent along a young Chinese woman to be Liz’s interpreter.
Bai Fuyuan wanted us to be in Beijing for the opening of the first Cheeks shop there. Liz very much wanted to see Beijing and said she would pay her own expenses to go there. So it was arranged that she would fly from Guangzhou to Beijing and meet us there. I knew, of course, that my father would take care of her expenses.
She already had her visa for visiting China. We had to obtain ours and so had to go to the Chinese travel agency, be photographed, and fill out our applications. Two days later we returned to pick up our passports with the visas stamped inside.
Before we left for Beijing, Zhang Feng appeared in Hong Kong and offered us a boat ride. We agreed to go. The boat would circle Hong Kong Island and stop for a fish dinner on Lamma Island. We would have a good time, he promised.
Zhang was conspicuously taken aback when he discovered that my wife was with me. He had brought along three little girls. He had planned that we should have a good time.
At least he had the sensitivity not to bring Chang Li.
Or maybe she was not available.
“I had supposed,” I said to Zhang, “you would stay in Guangzhou and escort Liz McAllister to your shops.”
“This I did for two days,” he said. “Your young woman asks many questions.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s her job.”
“She is a very intelligent young woman.”
He did not offer a run to Macau or an overnight stay on the boat. We were at home before midnight.
I wish, though, that I had known who owned the boat we were on that evening.
* * *
We flew from Hong Kong to Beijing—my father, Vicky, and I, with Charlie Han—and landed on an airport that did little credit to the People’s Republic. We were treated courteously and efficiently and moved to our waiting limousine with no trouble, but the airport terminal was shabby. Someone told me later that they are building a new one. I hope so.
The drive to our hotel was uninteresting, on an expressway that might have been seen in Los Angeles except the Chinese characters on the signs—which were also in English.
Our hotel was the Sheraton Great Wall. It was even more opulent than the hotels in Shenzhen and Guangdong.
Even so, it told me something about China: There was a serious unemployment problem there. The hotel was overstaffed. We would observe that one little girl did nothing all day but run a dry mop over the marble floors of the lobby. Twenty minutes after she had mopped a given area, she would be back to do it again. You could not press an up or down button to call an elevator. A young man in blue blazer would do that for you. You could not press the button for your floor. He would step in and do that for you. On your floor you could not take an ice bucket to the ice machine. You hardly got out your door before someone in blue blazer would appear to take it for you.
Liz was there, luxuriating. She moved into my father’s room, rather than him moving into hers. The hotel staff noticed. When they returned to their room at night, two servings of hot water and two sets of tea bags would be waiting.
Liz introduced my father to ginseng tea. He acquired the taste, as I had.
The first Beijing store would be in the Sheraton Great Wall hotel, in a mall just off the lobby. It was far more open than any Cheeks store in the States. People strolling along the marble-floored corridor would have a full view of the merchandise, the clerks, and the customers. In fact, there was no door, no windows; the store was open to the mall, and it would be open twenty-four hours a day.
The store was already open and doing business, even though we were there for its official opening.
I suppose I have to admit that we remained coy about our inventory. We still kept what we thought of as bolder items—especially fetishist things—halfway concealed. The Chinese were realistic. If a pair of panties was attractive and might sell, they displayed it, no matter that it had no crotch at all. Mannequins stood about in leather handcuffs and leg restraints, some of them clothed in fetishist rubber and vinyl. Westerners gawked. The Chinese were interested or not interested and regarded our merchandise as they would any other.
The first night in Beijing Bai Fuyuan took us to dinner in a club that featured Chinese opera. The performance on the stage was highly stylized—I thought stiff. The performers wore makeup so heavy that you could not tell when one came on stage if it was an actor you had seen before or a different one. They sang, much of it falsetto. They gesticulated wildly. The dancing was athletic, involving leaps. For us it was all but impossible to follow the story lines, even though the programs summarized them in English.
It was a memorable experience. I wouldn’t want to see much more of it, but I was glad I had seen this much.
My father was bored.
Over dinner he presented Liz a gift. When she opened the box and found a black sheer-and-satin teddy, she blushed deeply. It had been custom made to fit her, in Hong Kong, on the order of Charlie Han. I tried, but I frankly could not imagine how she would look wearing it.
The next day we attended the formal opening of the shop, which was held not in the shop but in a meeting room in the hotel. It was much like the show I had attended in Guangzhou. My father spoke briefly and said the same sort of thing I had said in Guangzhou. That night he saw himself on Beijing television, speaking Chinese.
The next day we set out in limousines to drive north of Beijing to the Great Wall of China, stopping along the way for a visit to the famous Ming tombs.
“There’s something funny going on here,” my father said as we rolled out of Beijing.
He and I, Vicky and Liz, sat in the backseat of the car. In front was a chauffeur and an interpreter. A glass separated the front and back seats. I was not sure the interpreter and chauffeur could not hear. I gestured that that might be the case, and my father nodded.
He went on. “The stuff Bai sends to the States is a shade off our colors. What he’s selling in Beijing is an exact match of the original color. What’s he got in mind?”
I suggested an answer. “He could prove that what we’re selling in the States, labeled ‘Made in Hong Kong,’ was in fact made in China, since the color is wrong.”
“Which gets him what?” my father asked.
“It’s not all odd colors,” Vicky said. “I noticed a few items in the shop that are exact duplicates of our items.”
“I’d like to know why that is,” my father said.
“Well, let me ask Liz a question,” I said. “What about Zhang Feng’s chips? Do they follow Malloy’s designs absolutely? Or are there little differences?”
“There are little differences,” she said. “Nonperformance differences. Zhang’s chips do precisely what Tom designed them to do, without question. But there are small differences in layout. An expert can tell how Zhang’s chips differ. To be perfectly frank with you, some of Zhang’s differences improve performance—which he would use to explain if you asked him why he deviated from the Malloy design.”
“He would say he improved on it,” my father commented.
She nodded. “He would say he improved on it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Bai Fuyuang could say his all-but-imperceptible deviations from our color standards improve our merchandise, make it more attractive.”
“Then,” asked my father, “why is some of the merchandise in his Beijing store dyed to our exact specifications?”
“Easy,” said Vicky. “He’s selling some merchandise he’s not manufacturing in China.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning he’s ripping us off somewhere, some way.”
We had to pause to think about that. The implications were too complex to be considered in a minute’s thought.
* * *
Wh
at can I say about the Great Wall of China? What can I say that hasn’t been said? Just this—that you don’t climb the Great Wall; you climb on it. There are places where it has been restored to make climbing possible for the average man or woman. Where we went, you were lifted to the Wall on a modern cable car. From the station at the top you could climb and walk a half mile or so in either direction. I’m glad I did it. I am not glad my father tried. He was too old for it, and even with help he could not do it.
That experience made me more aware than I had been before of my father’s age. I knew he was beyond the age when he could do anything and everything, but seeing him struggle, flushed in the face, on those irregular stone steps made me acutely aware of his vulnerability.
And, I suppose, of my own.
57
JERRY
I did not tell Therèse that I fooled around with Liz. I am not sure she would have found that particularly distressing. What counted for Therèse was that we had a pleasant home in a pleasant place where she could indulge in her pleasant activities and never be challenged. What is more, she had an identity. Maybe for the first time in five decades she was not the girl who had been stripped, had her head shaved, and had been marched naked through the streets of Lyon. She was Mrs. Jerry Cooper, a gentle, intelligent, amusing Frenchwoman, married to an odd American who sold scanties. To our neighbors in Fort Lauderdale we were a little eccentric and the more interesting for it.
Did I love Therèse? Absolutely. She was a comfort and a companion, and I knew I was lucky to have her.
Liz had nothing to do with that, and Liz understood. Big and gawky though Liz might be, she was smart as hell. She needed respect and got it, but she needed affection also, and men could take advantage of her. I determined I wouldn’t. So it wouldn’t be that way, I made sure we understood each other, from the beginning. I would enjoy her. I hoped she would enjoy me. But she was never to imagine I was in love with her, and she was not to allow herself to fall in love with me. That was how it had to be.
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