SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  “If you pick right.”

  “Choosing well is my profession, and my particular gift. Besides, I only need to be totally right maybe one time in ten.”

  “Very attractive odds.”

  “The rate of increase on a single hot artist makes up for all the others—and more. A lot more.”

  “Double?”

  “More like twenty times over in five years. Fifty in ten.”

  “I see. Better than a casino, I think.”

  “As long as the artist’s run lasts, which is sometimes for decades. And when they flame out—whether it’s after two years or twenty—I drop them.”

  “Like an old whore.”

  “Exactly.”

  Mr. Zhou laughed. “OK,” he said. “So what’s your plan for Paul’s tapes?”

  I reiterated the proposal I’d made to Sammy at Cielo Azzurro, adding many details in response to Mr. Zhou’s pointed questions. The interrogation, and the liquor shots, went on for thirty minutes.

  “Tell me what you think,” I said at the end.

  “I think we need another drink. An official seal.”

  In unison, we threw back one more baijiu. “If your contacts are good,” Mr. Zhou said, “everybody will be happy.”

  “My contacts know what they like. You deliver, we’ll all make a fat profit. Bank on it. In Switzerland, to be safe.”

  My new business associate turned to Paul. “This is a very fortunate meeting. Thank you, my friend. I won’t forget.”

  “Sure, OK,” Paul said. “I guess you’ll have to set up a way to make dubs in Europe, though.”

  “No problem,” Mr. Zhou said. “We can send the masters to Belleville.”

  Paul drew a blank.

  “In Paris,” I told him, “another Chinatown. A nice central spot on the continent.”

  As our glasses were filled again, I thought about the last time I visited a Belleville restaurant with Nathalie. She had just finished writing a news story on the Russians’ stalled invasion of Afghanistan. For two weeks, she had traveled in the mountains with the mujahideen, watching them blast Russian tanks in the narrow passes with shoulder-held missile launchers they got from U.S. suppliers. Nathalie was in a wonderful mood, regaling her French friends with details of fatal ambushes. “For once your CIA does something right,” she said to me.

  I asked Mr. Zhou if he ever spent much time in France.

  “Only a few days in Paris, to visit the grave of Chopin.”

  “Your favorite composer?”

  “Me? No. I’m a Beethoven man. But my father loved Chopin. He was a piano teacher—very refined, with hordes of pupils. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to the countryside, to the far end of Xinjiang Province, to build some useless road between two villages. For three and a half years, he spent every day with a shovel. No music, no books. While he worked, not to go crazy, he repeated all the Chopin scores in his head. Every note at first. But after a few months, he began to forget little by little. Later, when I was leaving China, he made me promise to go one day to the maestro’s grave and apologize.”

  Next to me, Paul was turning restless.

  “I have to get to the studio soon,” he said. “I’ve got editing to do before the new shipment.” He looked half beseechingly at Mr. Zhou. “Are we set here? Once Jack antes up with the Oliver girl, I mean?”

  “We’ll see,” Mr. Zhou replied. “In China, before making a deal, we drink first, like this. We make big idiots of ourselves, we sing karaoke. Then we all go and get laid together.”

  “I’m familiar with the ritual,” I said.

  “When you know my drunk face and I know yours,” Mr. Zhou continued, “when we have seen each other behave very badly with music and girls, and afterwards said nothing and forgotten the night as though it never happened—then we can start to trust, to do business.”

  “It’s not so different here. But I don’t think we have time for the full program today.”

  “Right, no singing now,” Mr. Zhou said. “Next time. Today we just drink and screw.”

  Paul looked alarmed, but I knew that trying to refuse Mr. Zhou now would only queer the deal. Half rising, he poured one more round, and we clinked glasses again. The baijiu no longer burned.

  44

  The door opened, and two boys in multicolored sneakers slipped in, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. Speaking in Cantonese, Mr. Zhou gave them quick instructions that brought fleeting smirks to their faces. We all piled down the stairs.

  One level below the ground-floor music shop, we confronted a labyrinth of boxes. The boys wove us though the piles until we came to a metal shelving unit against the street-side wall. They swung the shelves aside unexpectedly to reveal a locked wooden door. Mr. Zhou keyed us in, and we followed him through a dim, damp-smelling tunnel under Mott Street and into a large basement lobby where an old woman sat at a desk.

  Behind her were two corridors lined with wood-veneer paneling and punctuated every few feet by doors—some open, some closed. Young Chinese girls, all pretty, looked out at us here and there; others got up from the chairs they had been lounging in, momentarily abandoning their fashion magazines and celebrity gossip.

  Opposite the desk, a set of stairs ran up to what I calculated had to be the back room of a beauty parlor. You could hear the nonstop lady chatter up there, and the sound of hair dryers running.

  “Just tell Auntie Pearl what you like,” Mr. Zhou said, nodding toward the old woman. “You are my guests.”

  Paul was getting very fidgety. “I really don’t feel so well, thanks. Maybe just Jack should go.”

  “Paul, relax,” Mr. Zhou smiled. “It won’t take long. I know you.”

  He spoke rapidly to Auntie Pearl, who produced a key attached to a large numbered rectangle of plastic. It was a little like getting a locker at the health club.

  Two girls—in their early twenties, I would guess—moved forward from the chairs to take Paul’s arms.

  “Hi, friend. What’s your name?” one asked sweetly. They were both very cute, both wearing bright tube tops, faded hip-hugger jeans, and high heels. Their fingers and tiny toes were painted.

  “You call me Ling.”

  With a girl on each arm, Paul began to move down the left corridor, seemingly without will, like a man being led to his execution.

  “I’m Hui,” the second girl said as they went along. “Maybe you think I’m pretty, yes?”

  Paul gave me a last desperate look over his shoulder before he disappeared into one of the cubicles.

  “You see something you like?” Mr. Zhou asked me.

  I shrugged. “All very nice, thanks.”

  “Ah, I know.” With a few syllables, he sent one of the boys down the right-hand corridor. The kid returned with his arm draped on the shoulder of a large-eyed teenager perhaps two years his junior.

  “More like this?” asked Zhou.

  “Not today.”

  It was a mistake to refuse. Now Mr. Zhou was in danger of losing face. He signaled, and the old woman came from behind the counter.

  “You wait here five minutes,” she said. “We bring pretty girl. More young. Fresh, not like these old fish. You be happy.”

  “I’m happy now,” I said quickly, looking around. “I like that slim girl over there by the stairs. She reminds me of a friend in Shanghai.”

  “Ha! Who, your old landlady?” Auntie Pearl laughed. “Her, she’s very old girl. Not for you. Almost thirty maybe. Why you want a grannie?”

  “I like to learn,” I said.

  The idea seemed to impress Mr. Zhou. “OK, sure. She’s got loads of experience, that girl. I like her, too. She can teach you some tricks.”

  The man knew his merchandise. Once we got into the tight windowless chamber, the girl, who called herself Xin, proved to be swift and adept with her hands. She hesitated only once, when she saw my bare arm.

  “War?” she asked, her voice slightly awed and caressing.

  “No,” I said. “Business.”


  That seemed to satisfy her. She probably thought I had run afoul of my own Mr. Zhou somewhere, in a deal gone awry. It was a scene she could easily picture.

  After that, I lay back on the hard, narrow mattress and let her do the things she believed would please me. In truth, she was not entirely wrong. Xin was very skilled, not least as an actress. In the near-dark, I could almost believe in her passion. For a while, she loomed over me with her hair down and swaying, her breath coming in half-moaning spurts. She called me “laowai baby” and gave a little series of yips. Her repertoire of positions, her rhythms, her cries and groans all flowed expertly; her hand on my cheek afterwards was gentle and lingering. What more could I ask? She seemed to care for me as deeply as anyone ever had, and about as long. In gratitude, I gave her a fifty dollar tip.

  When I came out, Paul was already sitting in one of the chairs, his face pale and miserable. The two girls were back to their magazines. Xin came down the dim hall and joined them, and they spoke quickly and softly to each other in a mix of Mandarin and Cantonese, flipping pages and darting their hands to their mouths to stifle the laughter.

  “Damn,” Paul said from his slump, not bothering to lower his voice. “I’ve been trying to stay away from the chinks.”

  “They’re hard to give up,” I said.

  I was a little annoyed with myself for not feeling worse. Supposedly, I had sworn off this sort of thing—for the betterment of my soul or whatever. Yet from time to time, business still had its social demands.

  “Take it easy,” I told Paul. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  In fact, I didn’t care what anyone did in Chinatown—myself included. Everything gets swiftly mixed up south of Canal Street; they speak a different language there. Besides, what did this brief Chinese excursion amount to? By any normal SoHo measure, my personal life these days was practically sainthood.

  Mr. Zhou emerged, finally, trailing two girls of his own. One had dyed red hair, and the other was the high-school kid. As they passed, the teenager shot me a teasing look. She was breathing heavily and trembling, but her half-smile worked all the same.

  “Life is good?” Mr. Zhou asked, grinning.

  Paul got up nervously. “Yeah,” he said. “Now I’ve got to get back.”

  Mr. Zhou leaned close to my ear. “Paul is afraid he’ll catch yellow fever,” he said. “Very sad for the boy.”

  “He’s young,” I said. “He hasn’t learned how to live with himself yet.”

  “Yes, yes. You understand. I’m going to tell Sammy you are a good man to work with.”

  “I look forward to it, Mr. Zhou.”

  “Call me Zhou Bob. That’s my friendly name.”

  “Like Joe Bob in English. Makes you sound like a redneck.”

  “I know. Like a Memphis-mafia cracker…from Guangdong.” He had a good laugh. “I’m Zhou Dong in business, but Joe Bob when I play.”

  “Seems like a swell idea. Living as just one person would be such a bore.”

  We said our goodbyes and a bowing thank you to Auntie Pearl at the desk. She squawked something at the girls, who rose from their chairs, smiling and saying, “Bye-bye, thank you, bye-bye, hurry back, come again,” as we filed through the tunnel door.

  45

  Paul and I emerged into the shock of the late afternoon sun, glancing at each other awkwardly. “You’ve got some charming associates,” I said.

  “Mr. Zhou’s all right. He just needs to be in control of everything, you know?”

  “It’s a common urge.”

  I looked at my watch. It was three thirty-five, almost time to pick up Melissa at school. Angela, who needed to prepare more work for her show, had asked me to take the girl to her weekly piano lesson.

  When I exited the subway on 77th Street, the cool air washed over me—a new man in black cashmere, at ease among the townhouses and prewar apartment buildings. Respectful doormen nodded as I passed, making my way toward Madison Avenue. As I approached the neo-gothic facade of the Bradford School, I saw Melissa across the courtyard with a group of friends.

  She smiled and said something to the other girls that made them all laugh. Their monitor—Mrs. Dorfman, in a brown herringbone coat—signaled to the guard to let me in.

  “Sorry for the delay,” I said. “I was trapped in a business meeting.”

  “We were beginning to worry,” Mrs. Dorfman replied. “Girls, say hello to Melissa’s uncle, Mr. Wyeth.”

  The eight little misses, all wearing uniforms of deeply pleated plaid skirts and white blouses with crested blazers, said in ragged unison, “Hello, Mr. Wyeth. How do you do? Very nice to meet you, sir.” Then they bent together in giggles, a random pair of eyes flashing up occasionally from the mass of blue jackets and neatly combed hair. The students suddenly had a great deal to say that neither Mrs. Dorfman nor I could quite hear. I saw blushes on several cheeks.

  “Girls,” Mrs. Dorfman chided them, “show some manners.”

  Melissa looked at me beseechingly.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “We really should be off. Missy’s piano teacher is waiting. Then we’re going to work on her French lessons tonight.”

  This induced gales of titters. Finally, one of the classmates stepped forward. “Missy said you might come and talk to us about really weird art sometime.”

  “Weird like what?”

  “Animal parts, wrecked cars. Right now we don’t get anything past de Kooning.” She sliced the air in a series of Zorro-style slashes. “You know, all those hacked-up women with ugly faces.”

  “That’s quite enough, Jessica,” said Mrs. Dorfman. “Very generously, Mr. Wyeth has in fact consented to address the class on postwar art. You may discuss New York School painting with him after his lecture, in February.”

  The girls found this prospect hilarious. Melissa separated herself from their laughter and whispers, taking my hand.

  “Come on, Uncle Jack,” she said. “Let’s go where we can have an adult conversation.”

  We caught a cab that took us across the park to the Upper West Side.

  “Your friends seem to think I’m pretty funny,” I said.

  “They’re just dorks.”

  “High maintenance dorks, I bet.”

  “Actually, they all think you’re dreamy, if you want to know the truth.”

  “I always want to know the truth. It’s a curse.”

  Even in the dimness of the cab, punctuated by occasional bursts of reflected light, I could see Melissa’s eyes roll.

  “You’re such a child sometimes,” she said.

  Her piano teacher turned out to be a Juilliard student in need of pocket cash, an earnest young man with wire-rim glasses and an ostentatious way of counting in German to keep his pupil on beat. The neat minuscule apartment was lined with books. At least Melissa played fluently, with the kind of feeling that Zhou Dong’s father would have approved.

  Back in SoHo, we stopped for dinner at Marc Sans on Sullivan Street. Lights were just coming on in the cloudy fall twilight. The owner gave us a table along the east wall, “where mademoiselle can see and be seen.”

  “Merci bien,” Melissa said. “On est toujours à l’aise dans ce bel endroit.”

  Marc, exaggeratedly impressed as always, immediately switched into French, and the two of them bantered away for several minutes about the evening’s menu. At Melissa’s suggestion, I ordered the duck confit.

  “You’ve made a new conquest,” I said when the young owner, slim and curly-haired, went back to the kitchen. “I’m very impressed.”

  “No, I don’t want more than one copain,” Melissa answered gravely.

  “That’s not very French of you.”

  “I don’t care. I’ve decided to be completely faithful to you. It’s more daring these days, don’t you think?”

  “It’s hard for me to say.”

  “You’ll see once you get used to it.”

  “Get used to what?”

  “My devotion.”

 
“Very cute. No wonder your friends are so entertained all the time.”

  “They were laughing because I told them about us.”

  “Told them what?”

  “That you’re my boyfriend now.”

  “Stop it. That’s very silly.”

  “Is not.”

  “It’s a fun game, Missy, but you have to be careful.”

  “Why?”

  “Because some very obtuse people might think you’re serious.”

  “I am serious.”

  “Stop it.”

  “It’s not up to you. I get to decide.”

  “Not by yourself. Both people have to agree.”

  “You do agree, Uncle Jack. You just won’t admit it.”

  Melissa was interrupted by the arrival of two mesclun salads and a basket of bread. She looked at the food very carefully. Raising her eyes to me, she said with great deliberation, “I’ve decided to be true to you because I see how the other way just massacres everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like your marriage to Nathalie, like my daddy’s life.” She did not blink or look away.

  “Your father made some mistakes, like everybody.”

  “And now he’s ended up half crazy, because some sex germ is eating his brain. That’s what Mom says, anyway. She ought to know. She’s kind of slutty herself.”

  “Don’t insult your mother, Missy.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “That she’s a terrific woman, a good mother. I also know you’re her whole life.”

  “Except when she’s off with some guy and forgets all about me. I’m never sure when she leaves the house if it’s really, really for an opening or a studio visit or whatever, or just a hook-up with some horny creep.”

  “You’re not being fair to her, Missy.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s what I feel. That’s why I want to start fresh with you.”

  “I might be the worst choice of all.”

  “You might, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t care what you do, honey. I just care what I feel. So I’m going to be true to you until you’re like really old, maybe fifty or something. Then I’ll marry a rich doctor and make him take care of you when you’re all twisted up and can’t walk and stuff.”