by Lillian Li
“You did what?” Janine’s voice amplified. “I never told you to do that.”
Jimmy switched the hot phone to his other ear. He had not expected this reaction.
“You told me he was a middleman.” He ground his knuckles into the desk. The echo of Uncle Pang’s threat bounced back into his head, and his throat grew thick and choked. “Why did you say all that shit last week if you didn’t mean it? Don’t be a fucking tease.”
“I’m going to hang up.” Her voice flattened out. “You’re drunk. I knew you were drunk when I picked up, but now I’m going to point it out.”
The worst thing Janine could sound was bored. Jimmy tried to put the steel back in his voice.
“What I am is offering you a huge opportunity.” He hoped this tack would work. He needed her on his side. “Without Pang. I know you want to work with me instead. Or were you lying to my face?”
Janine took her time before answering. She probably knew he was bluffing. But she was also a curious woman. He was giving her a chance to shake things up. He could practically see her weighing her options.
“You sound stressed,” she finally said. “That’s natural after a big sale. Why don’t you come over? We can talk about this opportunity of yours.”
“Okay,” he said, barely able to believe the offer. They’d always met at her office before. “Okay. That’s all I wanted.”
She gave him her address and directions for the quickest route. His hand jumped as he wrote it all down, smearing the ink.
“Listen, you took a big risk,” she said right before she hung up. “But what’s the other option? Keep your heart in a cage like your father did? Buying the Glory was the best idea you’ve ever had.”
He straightened his spine against his chair. “I love you, you madwoman,” he said with surprising fierceness.
She said, “You hired the best.”
*
Jimmy left his office with an hour of service still to go. Three busboys were sorting out the dirty linens from the visibly dirty linens in the kitchen hallway. He had never given this nightly ritual a second look before. Each busboy had tied a tablecloth around his neck; the spotted cotton flowed behind like a cape. They shook out each bundle to inspect the damage. Crumpled zodiac placemats and chopstick wrappers fell out of the hamper, like wilted flowers.
“Don’t forget to sweep that up before you finish,” Jimmy said, when they looked over questioningly. “Run a wet cloth over the floor too—it’s filthy.” He pointed at the trash on the ground. The three men nodded; none of the busboys knew much English. On a different night, Jimmy would have gone to get the wet cloth, would have demonstrated exactly what he expected. This night, he lifted his hand in a brisk wave and turned to go, banging his briefcase into his leg.
Nan and Ah-Jack were standing at the bar. Looking at the two of them, bumping shoulders, made Jimmy want to break them apart.
“You’re looking well rested,” he said. Ah-Jack was leaning into the counter, practically lifting his feet off the ground. “Why don’t you take all the overtime tables? Let Ah-Sam and Ah-Jin know they can go home.”
Jimmy waited for Nan to start arguing with him. But equal parts smart and spineless, she looked down at her hands.
“Work hard enough, and maybe keep your job,” he said, in case Ah-Jack was thinking he might slack off once the boss was gone. The old waiter was out for good, but why not squeeze a few more working hours out of him?
Leaving the restaurant to his most senior employees, Jimmy got into his car and drove to Janine’s house. To think that only a few hours ago, those two were the greatest problems in his life.
Jimmy had long ago accepted that his older brother negotiated the world on an entirely different plane of principles, a romantic and useless system that endeared him to everyone outside of his family. But Johnny had gone too far. You didn’t promote your best waitress for the same reason you didn’t rehire a diabetic waiter with a sick wife at home. Johnny had no idea what it actually took to run a restaurant.
His brother’s insistence on the restaurant’s dignity had always interfered with Jimmy’s own designs for the Duck House. Especially since Johnny had been working at the restaurant for only seven years—compared to Jimmy’s twenty—and without ever straining his back as a waiter before their father made him a manager. As long as Johnny thought of himself as co-owner of the Duck House, he would keep on swanning around the dining halls, over-sympathizing with the waiters and kitchen staff. The bastard even had the nerve to wait until right before he left the country to break the news. On the way to the fucking airport.
Jimmy could have defied his brother’s wishes. He could have funneled his frustration directly onto Nan and Ah-Jack until they broke under the weight of his focused fury. But for once Johnny’s interfering wouldn’t change a thing. This thought alone inflated Jimmy with a generosity that almost passed as mercy. Why else had he hired Nan’s boy a month ago, after he was kicked out of school?
That was before, when he had a guarantee from Uncle Pang that the Beijing Glory would be financed. He’d written a blank check for a man his father had told him never to trust and then crossed his fingers, hoping that the sum would not be too big.
“Your uncle Pang is a dangerous man,” his father had once told him. His whispered Chinese had been barely audible over the din of the restaurant kitchen. “He sees everything, and he knows everyone. Remember this when you take over. We pay him to be part of the family, but he’s not family.”
“That makes no sense,” Jimmy had shot back in English, dodging his father’s hand. He’d been nineteen, a college dropout who thought he’d be waiting tables at the Duck House for a year, tops. But what had he known? He should have listened to his father. Panic crawled back on top of his chest. He took a drink.
He drove with one hand, rolling the open bottle of liquor in his other. He hadn’t had a drink since he’d decided to open his own restaurant a year ago. But drunk driving was like riding a bicycle. The body remembered, and his body especially remembered the rails of damage he’d done to it in his thirties, when he was first taking over the Duck House. A fun few years, he couldn’t deny that, but were they worth the begging and fighting and alimony? Pleasure was always followed tenfold by waves of discontent.
He got off the highway as soon as he could. He favored side, suburban streets, which, while covered with speed bumps and stop signs, were also empty of other cars and fixed lanes. His GPS scolded him repeatedly as he took a circuitous route to Janine’s place in Takoma Park. Driving on drink alone was a woozier affair than he’d expected. He’d forgotten all the grit he used to put up his nose, its bracing effect; he’d had to give up after the court-mandated stay in rehab. A slap on the wrist, thanks to Uncle Pang. The street he was on was poorly maintained, with streetlights that had burned down to an orangey glow. He swerved to avoid a large pothole and his right front tire popped up on a curb.
It was time for a small break. He pulled into a stranger’s driveway, the house completely dark inside.
In his idling car, which had taken on the stale, pressurized chill of an airplane cabin, he wondered if Janine might ever say yes to him. She had put her hand on the bulge of his biceps last week, but what if, rather than an invitation, her touch was meant to keep him at arm’s length forever? What if she was lying when she said there was nothing more attractive than a man with his kind of potential? But why else would a woman invite a man into her home, especially one she knew was in love with her?
Certainly she knew he was in love. He’d never said so seriously or soberly, had never even touched her beyond a handshake, but Janine was not someone who missed people’s desires, nor a woman who would play dumb when those desires targeted her.
And hadn’t she encouraged his behavior, flirting back until he turned bashful? Playfully batting his jealous moods away? He’d accused her of manipulating him countless times, bringing up her working relationship with Uncle Pang, bringing up the size of the commission she w
as making off him. She’d reacted with teasing disdain.
“You see what you want to see,” she liked to say, and then she would be back to texting on two phones simultaneously, looking up only after he’d calmed down.
Jimmy’s dashboard clock read 10:00. Janine’s son was in bed, and Janine herself freshly showered, perhaps sipping a glass of red wine. Jimmy felt terrifically unstable at the thought of her scrubbed-bare face.
He’d never thought he could get so worked up over another person, but Janine had shaken his understanding of his own desire. He had believed he wanted someone fun and ditzy, a girl as transparent and colorful as stained glass. But Janine was like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a masterpiece that loomed above him, forcing him to crane his neck until it nearly snapped taking in the expanse of her.
Early in their talks about finding a new restaurant, Uncle Pang had slipped Jimmy a single newspaper page, taken from one of the free Chinese dailies Jimmy’s father had kept in the Duck House lobby. Janine’s ad had caught Jimmy’s eye largely because her picture had taken up nearly a quarter of the page. NUMBER ONE REAL ESTATE AGENT! TOP SELLER IN MARYLAND, D.C., AND VIRGINIA. Her face was blurred soft, round with small features, and her hair was teased out big enough to touch the borders of the shot. Beneath her makeup and the pixelated ink of the newspaper, she looked to be in her mid-thirties. Jimmy wasn’t sure how proficient this fluffy-looking woman could be at her job, but he was obliged to hire her. He had promised Uncle Pang.
“I’m looking to expand the family business,” he’d said over the phone. He hadn’t yet admitted to himself that he was actually leaving the family business, and the half-truth fell comfortably out of his mouth. “My father’s passed away, and my mother, she’s not what she used to be. I just want them both to be proud of their legacy.”
“What a good son,” the voice on the other end of the line had said. “I bet you were the kind of kid that other parents compared their children to. ‘Why can’t you be more like Jimmy!’” Her voice was feminine but full-bodied and loud, like a young boy’s. Similar to his, her English was lightly accented, confident yet halting, with a cadence that refused to smooth out. She teased him as if they’d known each other for years. He stammered through the rest of the call.
When she arrived to pick him up from the Duck House the next afternoon, he’d been looking out through the glass doors for half an hour. She drove a white Mercedes, large sunglasses covering a third of her face. Her hair was voluminous but nowhere the size of the hairdo she’d sported in the advertisement. She danced across the parking lot in tall shoes. He almost forgot to back away from the doors.
With a hand wrapped around each duck’s golden head, she pulled open both doors and shouted, “Jimmy!” as if she were truly happy to see him. How had she known the man fidgeting at the end of the hallway was him?
“You look even cuter in person than you did in that magazine.” She clasped his hand.
“I didn’t realize people read that article,” he said. “I told Johnny to say no, but he thought the exposure would be good.”
“‘Best Kept Secret of the D.C. Metro Area,’” she quoted. “Oh, you framed the piece!” She pointed behind his shoulder at the article, which had come out the previous month. Johnny and Jimmy posed with a roast duck. The idiot reporter had harassed them into pinning paper carver’s hats to their heads. Jimmy was pleased to see that Johnny looked positively miniature next to his six-foot frame. Though his brother’s jawline remained the sharper of the two.
“Johnny’s idea. Again.”
“What are your ideas, then?” She pushed her sunglasses into her hair.
“Getting the new restaurant.” Her face was so expressive that Jimmy grew flustered. Not because she was beautiful, but because her features were so liquid that he couldn’t be sure she was not. He wanted to get her outside as quickly as possible, so she wouldn’t think he was as tasteless as his restaurant.
“I guarantee we’ll find just what you’re looking for,” she said.
She drove him to five buildings in the Northwest section of D.C. They chatted about nothing in particular, but for some reason, he could not stop calling her Jenny. Each time, she would gently correct him, and in his eagerness his tongue would slip again. Finally, embarrassed beyond what he thought an almost-forty-year-old man was capable of, Jimmy had offered her a large, sheepish shrug. Janine’s entire mouth had opened up and she’d let out an enormous laugh. The laugh had been as violent as the sneezes that had once exploded out of his father, a man who believed he was shooing evil spirits from his body. Shocked, Jimmy had expected the small woman to apologize for making so much noise, but Janine had continued as if nothing had happened. How could he ever pull himself away?
In the car, in the dark, in a stranger’s suburban driveway, the idea hit Jimmy out of nowhere. He shoved his scotch bottle into the glove compartment and clapped his hands to his cheeks to wake himself up. A light went on in the house next door. Here he’d been, trying to scrabble together a course of action—a confession, a move, anything—but now he saw that he wasn’t meant to have a plan. Any plan he made, Janine would have a counter, and a counter-counter. Jimmy steered his car back onto the street. The plan was to make sure nothing went as planned. Janine was going to get a rude surprise when she saw the man she’d invited in. Tonight, change was in the air.
4
Ah-May, her long braid whipping, came into the bar without warning. Nan had been chewing pebbled ice from the cooler. Seeing the waitress’s heavy face screwed up in anger, Nan swallowed the ice. Her throat contracted painfully. The waitress couldn’t still be mad at her over Ah-Jack’s tables. But Ah-May spat out one word: “Pat.”
“What?” Nan didn’t want to hear about Pat. In the month her son had been working at the Duck House, she’d flinched every time someone said his name.
“We caught him giving it to the boss’s daughter in the storage closet.” Ah-May brightened at the opportunity to share gossip. “Right over the hoisin barrels.”
“Oh my God,” Nan said, realizing that she wasn’t wearing her shoes. She quickly slipped them back on, and the extra two inches she gained over Ah-May gave her some comfort. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I saw him with his pants around his ankles.”
“Oh my God,” Nan said again. “Where is he?”
“Out on the loading dock,” Ah-May said. “That little cunt told me to fuck off when he saw me, as if I were the dirty one!”
“Don’t call my son a cunt.” Nan was heading into the kitchen. The waiters gave her a wide berth, their eyes on the floor. Some of them had known Pat since he was a baby, yet the corners of their mouths struggled to stay flat.
“You don’t tell me what to say!” Ah-May yelled, though from the sound of it, she’d stayed behind at the bar. “It’s not my fault you’re his mother!”
Nan nearly slipped when she stepped into the kitchen. She kept forgetting that her shoes were no longer nonskid, and her arms wheeled for a second before a passing prep cook set her right.
“Okay, Mami?” he said, grinning up at her. She flushed with shame. This tiny man with the gold front tooth had no doubt seen her son hunched over the hoisin barrels.
She kept her head low on her way through the kitchen, which was in the middle of cleanup. A pair of dishwashers swept past her with their push brooms. She ignored the warnings from the amigos sitting with their feet propped up on stools. A wave of warm, dirty water washed over her shoes, drenching the hems of her pants. The smell of bleach rose up through the air, but by then she was shoving past the thick plastic curtain, out onto the loading dock. The August night was muggy, reminiscent of the swamps that had once rested over the town. The wet, weighted air was the opposite of what Nan wanted to feel on her skin as she faced her son, smoking with two other busboys. From the grease of the Duck House to yet more oil outside. A strong odor of garbage drifted from the overflowing dumpster nearby.
The busboys—the you
ngest ones, William and Filipe—flicked their cigarettes when they saw her and went back indoors, jostling each other with their elbows. Pat also dropped his cigarette, but instead of grinding the butt beneath his foot, he watched the ember glint and smoke. He was avoiding her eyes. He was at least a little ashamed. She was humiliated by her relief.
“What am I going to do?” she said in Chinese, which was the better language to scold in. “Every time I think you can’t embarrass me more, you prove me wrong.”
Pat’s face, so quick and bright as a child, had recently turned putty-like and awkward. His features were struggling to grow into his widening skull. He was still handsome, but his brow was heavier, making him look mean. His mouth sometimes had trouble staying closed. Outside stimuli seemed to enter his head at a slower pace, and he often took a few extra seconds to respond to questions. Sometimes, he never answered at all, blinking into the middle distance, his eyelids erasing her words.
“I was bored,” he finally said. His eyes went over her head, as if he were trying to watch a TV show and she was in the way.
“You’re a disgrace! Even your excuses are disgraceful. And what’s worse, you’ve dragged Annie down with you. After her uncle was so generous, giving you this job. No one is ever going to want to help you again.”
“Fine.” Pat balled up his fists and stuck them in his pockets. He was wearing his rip-away track pants, and Nan saw that he had clasped the buttons wrong in his rush to get dressed. She was nauseated by how easily she could read him, how the smallest details could tell her his mood, his preferences, his misdeeds. Yet she hadn’t been able to stop him from unraveling his life.
“Oh, fine,” she said, nearly laughing. “It’s fine if you humiliate your family. It’s fine if you get fired. Then you can do what you want. You can drink and smoke and sleep with girls and set garbage cans on fire! You can waste your life and get yourself killed.”
“Yeah, you’d like that,” he said.
Nan’s mouth went sour. Pat liked to egg her on to get her to drop the argument and leave him alone. But tonight she was more than tired. Her pants were stuck to her ankles, her feet swollen and sore. Everything she usually did, every attempt to help and protect, had backfired.