In the office, she watched Zoe zip about like a fevered hummingbird. “The feng shui man says the last Saturday in August is the most opportune time for a wedding,” Zoe told her, and sneezed into a tissue before she continued. A doctor had diagnosed her with a sinus infection and prescribed antibiotics, but she refused to rest.
“We should have the ceremony when the sun is at its height, and facing water to ward off dangers. He said no guests who’ve just crossed the ocean, and expect disaster if the rain starts to fall or if anyone uninvited shows up. Not that I really believe this stuff, and of course I offered to send my mom a ticket. So can you believe it—I think you can, actually—Billie the diva said, ‘honey, I miss you like crazy. Just have another wedding for your old mom and your grandma and your friends when get back here, okay? ’Cause you can imagine what a plane ride like that would do to my back. You’d be pushing around your crippled old ma,’” Zoe said, in a near-perfect mimic. “What mother doesn’t come to her daughter’s wedding? Of course, if she did come, the wedding would be all about her.”
Zoe was silent a moment, and Ming was sure she was thinking of the would-be father, who wouldn’t have to cross the ocean. Coincidentally enough, that night Charles sent her a to-the-point email: I heard about the mad Bradley Kwan. Have you heard from the folks in Sunshine Village?
Time to let him know his “researcher” has some authority, Ming decided, and replied: In fact, I’m back in Sunshine Village, back at my job as the co-head of Sunshine Finance. And time to give Zoe the gift of truth. He’d need to be there for that to happen, so she wrote: Zoe is getting married to the CEO, William Sun. She’s been pretty busy, so I’m supposed to invite you. It would mean a lot to her to have you come.
She’d tried to find refuge in Tom, then lost herself in work, but when she saw the name “Charles” on the screen, a sword pierced her heart. This was, presumably, her punishment for deceiving Charles and deceiving Zoe. It was four weeks until the wedding. Twenty-eight days, to be exact. She gave herself exactly that length of time to get over him.
His e-mail address taunted her again the next day: I should see Sunshine Village. Very interesting. I’ve read about William Sun. I’ll see if I can make it. Thank you for passing this along.
This message, like the one the day before, was unsigned. Was he trying to leave her uncertain as to whether she should call him Professor Engelhorn or Charles, or maybe she was supposed to forget she knew his name altogether? Maybe when he referred to “the folks in Sunshine Village” it was strictly a fatherly concern about Zoe?
But to worry over love and paternity was an indulgence. William asked Ming and Zoe to come down to the bunker, and he showed them Number 2099 on the screen. The number had been steady and unblinking for the past week, but William’s immortal eyes had detected a slight fading in the pixels. Ming didn’t see any difference. Neither did Zoe.
“Stop staring at the screens and get out more,” Zoe rasped.
Three weeks before the wedding, Charles sent another non-signed message saying he was going to come to Sunshine Village soon, and he hoped to be there for the wedding. Perhaps the message foreordained that Ming would prepare a pot of jasmine tea for her ailing friend and censored wisdom would come pouring out. Zoe was telling Ming about a business plan, but she stopped to sneeze and threw a wadded-up tissue into the garden of Kleenex carnations that had piled up in her wastebasket.
“You ought to be in bed. Did you ever suffer from childhood asthma, by chance?”
Zoe shook her head. “I’ve never been sick, ever.”
“I just wondered because Professor Engelhorn had it—” Ming stopped herself too late. They stared at each other.
“Jeff has a very big mouth.” Zoe bounded out of her chair, paced about, then stood over Ming with her arms folded, like an interrogator. “And how many other intimate details do you know about Professor Engelhorn?”
“He left me.” Ming hung her head. Then she confessed everything, a guilty party hoping for mercy—including how she’d uttered Billie Austin’s name and Charles had turned as red as a stoplight. The only lie Ming uttered was the biggest one of all—
“I’m over him,” she swore. “He might come to your wedding.”
“He doesn’t go to ABD weddings,” the cross-examiner declared. “Or is he thinking of coming to see you?”
Ming hung her head again. Twenty-one days, she reminded herself.
“I have some important things to do,” Zoe snapped. Ming saw how her shoulders were trembling as she stomped out of the office.
She observed, also, the tissues in Zoe’s wastebasket. Ming had in mind a good deed she could perform; as long as Zoe was mad at her anyway, might as well seize this opportunity to come forward with the tough-love gift. She seized the clean corner of a wadded up tissue. Ming happened to have struck up a friendship of sorts in the last few weeks with a lab technician at the Sunshine Village hospital named Ning Bao, who had applied for funding to start a business testing biomarkers. It was time for a little quid pro quo.
Two weeks before the wedding—thirteen days before Ming’s self-imposed deadline to banish Charles Engelhorn from her heart—he appeared in the doorway of the corporate headquarters of Sunshine Finance. He’d had a New China makeover—his beard trimmed neatly, a crisp new summer tweed blazer.
“Hello,” Ming said, willing her voice to stay low and formal. Charles sported a wide grin, and she noticed, for the first time, the slight gap between his front teeth.
She saw Zoe do a double take, then recover and step forward. Even her face had a sudden healthy bloom. She’d gotten into character, Ming saw—Zoe might as well be on stage, playing a character who wasn’t sick and was capable of uttering the words: “Professor Engelhorn, how wonderful to see you. You must come to dinner with us tonight. You too, Ming.”
“I’d be delighted,” Charles replied. Ming detected a trace of anxiety in his voice. He’d like to play a role of his own, it occurred to her; the role of Zoe’s father.
That evening at Zoe and William’s house, the three conspirators drank vodka martinis and said nothing of Ming’s guilt, and when Charles arrived Zoe mixed more martinis.
“The emphasis on fine wine and elegant cocktails in the New China is really intriguing,” the professor intoned about halfway through his cocktail. “There is plenty of bonhomie, without much evidence of alcoholism. As if the entire enterprise were the brainchild of New Yorkers who wanted all the world to be a party.”
“Yes, it was my idea—mine and Zoe’s,” said Ming.
“New China is merely a front, actually,” said William. “What we really do is drop drugs in the water supply.”
Charles laughed, and the party went on.
The four of them dined on sautéed monkfish, spicy noodles, baby eggplants in a garlic sauce, black mushrooms, and chicken with oyster sauce, with a white Cotes du Rhone.
“I’m getting spoiled rotten,” said their clueless guest. “All this food prepared by professionals, and costing only so much as you can afford. But I look around and I see that even though Beijing and Shanghai had a utopian appeal, the people didn’t seem to know how to be content. Americans ask me what I think is going to happen in China, and I tell them I’m an historian, not a soothsayer. Still, if New China retains a semblance of democracy, well and good, but whatever the political system, inequality will inexorably rear its head again.”
“Have you found the roots of this noble experiment?” Ming had to ask, and didn’t dare look her co-conspirators in the eye.
He shook his head and looked bewildered all over again. “I can only surmise that it had something to do with this being a civilization that has always been on a search for perfection.” His gaze rested on Ming for about a nanosecond, then he looked at William. “I would respectfully submit that China has been the only society that keeps trying to examine the nature of perfection and strive to achi
eve it. In the West, we ushered in the age of enlightenment and democracy and called it a day.”
William told Charles he might be on to something—and he sounded totally sincere. “We have a tendency to get a big idea and spread it overnight,” William said. The men expounded with each other, like two sages grafting theory onto theory. Ming poured more wine for herself and Zoe, while William and Charles kept on, reaching back into loftier and loftier texts that shed light on the character of China; when William cited a few philosophers so esoteric Charles admitted he hadn’t known their writings existed, he didn’t grill his host on how he’d found such obscure texts. Alpha men respect other alpha men; how very primitive, Ming reflected.
“Evolution is stalled, right here,” she whispered to Zoe. “I’m going to get some sleep. You should too.”
Zoe nodded, and they bid the men goodnight. As Ming was closing the door behind her, she saw Charles and William, brandy snifters in hand, settle into comfortable armchairs in the library. It was if they were plotting the country’s next strategic move.
In the morning, Ming had a piece of unfinished business to attend to, and she’d thought of someone in town who could help her. Her heart beat in nervous staccato as she hit Jeff’s number.
He picked up, and said, “To what do I owe this summons from my strangely estranged one?”
“I need you to do something special for Zoe. Tell Charles…”
“Ah, you are on a first name basis.”
“Shut up. Anyway it’s over; I’m completely over him, and he’s avoiding me like he thinks I still care and I really, really don’t.”
“Aw, he broke your heart like you broke mine.”
“Promise me you’ll help? It’s something you’ve been wanting to do for Zoe for years. Tell Charles that Sunshine Group has appointed you to make the rounds of all visitors. Tell him that the summer rains left us with a few cases of malaria and that everyone needs to be tested at the lab. They just need a dab of saliva. Ning Bao is on duty this afternoon. She will swab his inner cheek, and it’s all done. But be sure you see Ning Bao.”
“Malaria? You are an evil genius.” As she’d suspected, it was a game of intrigue he couldn’t resist; he even said so.
Just before six that evening, Ming received a text from Jeff: Your X-lover & I are bonding at Nirvana. Spit accompli. Please come, need your help, damn it.
Ming had a couple of hours before she’d promised to do bunker duty, so she scrambled into a jade silk dress with a wide sash, and spritzed herself with ylang ylang perfume. At the Nirvana Café, she found her estranged husband and ex-lover drinking jasmine beers and looking engrossed in a discussion that seemed to involve a claim that the sky over Sunshine Village had been a moldy green in the rainy season. She stood beside Jeff’s chair and said, “Hello,” to get their attention.
“Well, well, if it isn’t my dear wife,” Jeff murmured, pretending surprise. “Pull up a chair, Mrs. Kirschenbaum.” When she sat down he reached over and stroked her hair as if she were a cat preening for his attention. Charles flashed a crooked grin at her and kind of slouched over his beer.
“Oh my god. Vegetable brain drugs!” Ming thundered at Jeff.
“Just one, dear wife.” He kissed her ear and whispered, “for the cause.”
There were places in the peasant villages, Ming knew, where tourists would go and buy herbal cigarettes laced with opium. It might have been a harmless quest except that rumor had it the cash from the opium trade was funding the campaigns of Raindance Party politicians.
“To think,” Jeff continued, his eyes looking half-mast, “I wasted four years of undergrad at Columbia and never took Professor Engelhorn’s Chinese history class. Oh, and you will be pleased to know, Ming, that we both had our malaria tests this afternoon, but I’m pretty sure we’re both negative.”
“Malaria,” Charles muttered. He raised an eyebrow at Ming. “I have a suspicion. More than a suspicion. There’s no malaria really, is there?”
Ming dug her elbow into Jeff’s side.
“Oh, I told Charles all about it.” Jeff leaned back and reached his arm behind Ming’s chair. “That I married a damsel in distress who worked for a crime ring to pay for her pretty teeth, and then became a fugitive. Did I leave anything out, Ming? Opiates are the true confessional of the masses.”
Ming pinched Jeff’s thigh under the table; he pinched hers back, then traced a long line up her thigh, followed by a short one—as if he were casting an I Ching message.
“I have another confession,” Jeff went on. “The malaria test was, in fact, a paternity test. A dear friend of ours grew up without a father, and now that she’s about to get married, we think it’s time she finds out who he is. Apparently, a little over thirty years ago you might have known her mother very well?”
Charles’s mouth dropped, then his face lit up like a kid in a spelling bee who had given the wrong answer but explicably won the prize.
“Our friend’s mom ran away with a Christian rock group in the 70s. Then she defected to New York and got into sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. And God delivered her a pregnancy.”
Charles turned as red as he always seemed to do at the thought. “Billie.…” He spoke her name as if it came from an immortal ballad.
“‘I live upstream and you downstream, from night to night of you I dream,’” Ming quoted softly in Mandarin, a troubadour’s love song by Li Zhiyi from the Song Dynasty. The troubadours of medieval China and Europe, she reflected, worshipped love and lust for their own sakes. The pain arrived when your passion had an object. She had a sudden urge to ask Jeff what he thought about that.
“Billie Austin sang at a club in the East Village,” Charles said, his voice reverent. “It was the end of the summer, and I was staying at an apartment with my aunt and uncle. One night, when my aunt and uncle were away, I…I invited some of the East Village students over for a party. Billie came with some guy, a college dropout who played the guitar. She pointed to me and said—and I’ll never forget this—‘He’s smart, he’s going to be somebody.’ The absurd thing was, at that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be a guitar-playing dropout. Anyway, they fought, Billie and the guitar player; he was quite a jerk. He walked out, and I persuaded her to stay and talk. I had some good dope and told her I’d teach her some words in Mandarin.” He shook his head over his own youthful machination.
And so he mastered the art of chatting women up, thought Ming.
“She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen,” he confessed. “Idiot kid that I was, I thought we might have something going after that, but two days later I rang her doorbell, practically panting like a lovesick puppy. I heard a guitar playing before she even opened the door. Later, somebody told me the boyfriend had skipped out and left her pregnant. She was still in New York, and I—I had this crazy dream that I was the father and that we would marry and live in one of those apartments with cardboard walls and shag carpets, pinching pennies and feasting on love. She’d work as a secretary while I finished my PhD. Stupid, I know. I decided to propose to her anyway, planned it for weeks. There was a miserable snowstorm the night I went to her apartment, but I didn’t care. I slogged through it, all the way out to the East Village.”
He took a long swig of his jasmine beer.
“Turned out she wasn’t alone,” he continued, “and she wasn’t moping like I’d imagined. They were having a party. Billie was dressed up like the Virgin Mary, wearing a paper halo, in a white gown and bare feet, even though the floor was cold. I told her that I wanted to marry her and take care of the baby. She laughed so hard she began to cry. Someone actually opened the door, like I was a dog that should go home.”
“What was the guitar player’s name?” Jeff asked.
“Something that suggested he should be playing bagpipes…Baldwin? No, Malcolm.” Then, as if remembering who he was now, Charles rose to his feet, saying he h
ad calls to make and was sober enough to get back to work.
“Well, well,” Jeff pondered. “Sorry he didn’t ask you to come nurse his old wounds. We do make a good interrogation team.”
“Actually, I have to get to work too.” She longed to stay there, safe with Jeff in spite of the inebriated way he slurred his words, but of course she didn’t have a choice.
“You’re going to leave me after these surreal revelations?” He looked as if she’d socked him. “I thought we were friends again.”
“Oh god. What about Zoe?”
“He’d like to be her father, Old Engelhorn, he’s not a bad guy even if he did fuck my wife. Don’t say anything to Zoe until we get the test results tomorrow. But stay. We have a lot to talk about.”
“I know, but I can’t, really.”
“Well, then, darling, I wish you goodnight.” Jeff’s lips grazed across her cheek, and then he was off, sauntering toward a group of tourists at the bar. Ming let herself out the back door of Nirvana. A moon beamed through a light drizzle. It was a night in which you could tell the difference between visitors—with their slickers and neon umbrellas—and the villagers, who strolled through the mist as though it were sunshine.
At the end of the pine grove, she felt a tap on her shoulder. Jeff had run and caught up with her. He was panting. “I followed you. A crazy stalker, I know. I just want to talk. Can we?”
Ming hesitated, biting her lip. “I’m hoping Engelhorn is her father. Maybe just because I’m hoping that Malcolm asshole isn’t.” The mist enveloped them. “But I have to go. Really, I have a company to run, you know.” She turned and began to walk away.
“I had a tryst with Zoe,” Jeff blurted out. He did know how to stop her in her tracks. She glanced back, then made herself move on. “One of these days you and I are going to have to meet in divorce court,” Jeff called after her.
“What if we don’t?” Ming asked, finally, over one shoulder.
“You know, if you had told me you were in trouble, I’d have figured out a way to help.” He was behind her again, and puffing. “How about a peace pipe before you go? Yeah, I know it’s gauche, but I did it for the cause. Then I promise I’ll quit.” Jeff pulled out a homemade cigarette and a match. “Relax. This some pretty fi-ine stuff, mellower than pot. I can see how people get addicted.”
Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization Page 25