by Kathy Wang
“What’s the most expensive item you ever sold?”
Jack rested his cheeks in his fists and beamed at Erika. She’d made her appearance completely unannounced at the hour mark, strolling in with a radiant smile as Fred scrambled to mask his annoyance. Descending into a chair that had miraculously appeared at their table just in time by a quick-thinking server; buoyantly confident in her greetings as if she weren’t in fact rudely interrupting his last chance to speak with Jack privately before Bali. It was the sort of power move she was always pulling, Fred thought —blithely inserting herself wherever and whenever she felt, always so confident that his friends and colleagues would love her.
Erika paused as if to ponder, though Fred knew she already had the answer. “A watch, a Patek Philippe,” she said. “Half a million. One of my best clients, and then afterward he wanted to buy another, for almost a million. He’d already wire transferred the money, but then last minute Patek wouldn’t ship it over. They said he had to fly to Switzerland first, and interview to prove he was a real collector.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Jack said. “They don’t even pay for the flight or hotel, do they? It’s outrageous!”
“Oh, so you know all about it then. Yes, it’s true. My client, he was so insulted that he immediately canceled the order. Almost returned the other watch as well.”
“But he didn’t?”
“No, I convinced him not to.” Erika smiled coyly. “That’s why it’s still my biggest sale. Since then he’s ordered a few more, but I always check now to make sure he can take each piece home immediately. Once I heard there might be a problem, limited inventory, and I swapped the model to a different one, very nice and even a little less money. I thought my client would be so pleased about the savings, but you know what?” She flitted her hand. “He didn’t even care!”
Jack clapped in delight. “Is this dude single? Fred, you’ve got some competition! This guy is spending a million a year to impress your girlfriend!”
“He was single,” Erika said. “He has a girlfriend now, or perhaps they are married. His name is Will Packer.”
“Will Packer!” Jack whooped. “Fred, you’ve got an even bigger problem than I thought!”
Will Packer was a founding partner of Tata Packer, one of the oldest and most esteemed venture firms in the Valley. Fred had never met Packer, though he glimpsed him regularly at the Starbucks on the corner on El Camino—they did, after all, both have offices on Sand Hill, though that was the extent of their similarities, he thought sourly. “Erika, do you know who Will Packer is?” Jack continued. “He’s one of the richest guys ever! Our friend Reagan knows him; they’re on the advisory committee of the same climate change gala.”
“Oh I know,” Erika said, with a flutter of the lids. “He doesn’t make it a secret, his achievements, when he speaks to me. I think he is a little . . . infatuated.”
Though she spoke to Jack it was clear who was her actual intended audience, and Fred was hit with a wave of repulsion, followed quickly by shame. It wasn’t Erika’s fault she wasn’t a native English speaker, which often made her attempts at summoning jealousy clunky and uneven. She didn’t know not to use words like infatuated, which was much too strong an adjective, particularly in regards to Will Packer, who, Fred already knew via perfunctory online stalking, was in the heady early months of marriage to his fourth wife, a Vietnamese cocktail waitress Packer was rumored to have met at a shady hostess lounge in Southern California. The woman had once played last chair in her high school orchestra; the Tata Packer public relations team was actively remarketing her as a “stunning concert violinist.”
Fred used to hate hearing stories like that, anecdotes of those reborn in a stroke of luck, soaring directly to the top without having slaved over the individual steps along the way. Friends of friends and brothers of roommates who, through the most fortunate of connections, got in on the ground floor of future unicorns. Low-level analysts who, after the right marriages, became lifestyle gurus. He had cheered each time one was toppled, felled by the hubris that the status they’d previously occupied had been earned, instead of bestowed by random chance.
Fred realized that Jack and Erika, who had both fallen quiet, were waiting for him. “Sorry, brain fart. What’d you say?”
“Pervert venture capitalists!” Jack boomed. “Going after your girlfriend, man.”
“Who could blame them?” He stretched an arm around Erika. “But she’s taken.”
And Fred could see from the mix of pleasure and relief on their faces that he had answered correctly, another small trial passed in the most important week of his life.
A feeling of contentment settled over him, which extended to Erika and Jack and eventually the entire restaurant and even Will Packer and his coterie of partners. Packer had known his current wife was a cocktail waitress when he initially met her, after all; perhaps it was just unlucky circumstances that had prevented her from pursuing an early passion for music. With her new resources, the woman could hire private tutors and purchase the very finest of instruments; who was to say that without some time and dedicated practice she couldn’t learn to play at the level of a virtuoso? And then none of what she had done earlier would matter; the world would know her only by her new name and all that had come before would fall away.
* * *
That night Erika and Fred ate back at the Dorchester, at Silver Lotus, the hotel’s Michelin star, which served braised abalone and suckling pig at breathtakingly high prices. Erika had been in a precarious mood since they first left the hotel; the air outside had been wet and hot, and her hair had instantly frizzed from the humidity. Sensing danger, Fred suggested they return to the hotel early, via the endless stream of indoor malls that appeared to constitute the majority of Hong Kong. As they passed each luxury boutique Erika stared at the patrons as if being challenged; at Chanel, where the shoppers were actually cordoned off in a line outside, she sneered at the swarm of mostly mainland Chinese waiting to enter. “They are ruining luxury,” she declared.
At dinner, they opened a bottle of Krug Jack had left as a gift ($75 corkage, reasonable); then, when Fred was in the bathroom, Erika downed the remainder of the bottle and ordered another ($1,200, a moral outrage). By the time they returned to their room he was noting a familiar glitter in her eye; she began to trip toward the toilet, before abruptly pivoting back in his direction.
“Why aren’t we married?”
Fred had been anticipating the question with dread since dinner. “Erika, please.” He rubbed his scalp. “The timing, it has to be right. Do you know how much work it is to plan a wedding? Especially the sort you want.” He’d picked up on various hints over the years: a view of the San Francisco Bay Bridge and massive displays of peonies; dozens of relatives flown in from Hungary to gape at the unimaginable luxury. Even if he did want to get married again—a concept he still wasn’t completely sold on in isolation—he knew from prior experience with Charlene that the expense would be crushing. Fred doubted that Erika even knew how much weddings really cost; simply that they were something women like her in serious relationships demanded, and summarily received.
She glowered, her arms crossed. “Then why aren’t we engaged?”
“We will be, in good time. I’m begging you to please have a little more patience right now. Can you do that?”
“I’ve had enough patience. I’m always patient, patiently waiting.” She kicked off a sandal and slowly massaged her ankle, an erotic habit she’d picked up from barre class. “I’m waiting for you to decide what you want to eat for dinner. I’m waiting for you to come home from work. I’m waiting for you to fuck me, which you can’t even do these days, because you’re always too tired. I’m waiting for you to propose, but I will tell you this now, and you will take me seriously.” She wagged a finger. “I will not wait much longer.”
“I’m not having a conversation when you’re in this state.” Fred closed his eyes and flopped backward onto the bed. “You’re cle
arly drunk.”
Erika slapped him on the side of his head. “Do not think you can sleep.” She began to undress, in her fury accidentally flinging her long pearl strand under the wardrobe. “Look how your friends like me. They admire you because of me! Can’t you see this? Doesn’t it make you feel good?”
“Of course, you’re a very desirable and beautiful woman. Don’t I already tell you that all the time? Can we please discuss this in the morning? You should have some water. From the tap,” he caveated, hurriedly removing the glass Voss bottles the Dorchester wickedly placed each night by the bed. “Hong Kong water is very clean.”
“You should have some water,” Erika mimicked. “You are so boring. Poor, stupid, boring, tired Fred.”
Fred yawned and tried to drown out her voice. Drunk women were only attractive when you were trying to sleep with them; afterward, they were just about the worst thing in the world.
Erika climbed onto the bed in just her slip and straddled him, on all fours. “You know what your problem is? You’re old. Always complaining that you need more sleep, that your muscles ache, that the music is too loud. Only senior citizens say these things.”
The words stung. He was old? Forty-four? He was in his prime! On the cusp of managing billions of dollars! But then a river of fatigue overran his indignation.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” She banged on his chest. “Are you listening to me?”
“I’m very tired. I would prefer not to spend any more time on this topic tonight.” He laid down his head and pretended to sleep. The exhaustion of the day flowed over him like water. He prayed Erika wouldn’t start crying. If she did, he was in for at least an hour of tearful consolation, as well as what would surely be a resurgence of violently contained sobs right as he entered the comforting bosom of REM sleep.
When he opened his eyes a few minutes later, Erika was gone.
Fred forced himself to sit up. He made his way to the bathroom. Excellent oral hygiene was essential to staving off disease—he had finally started the cancer book Stanley asked him to order. He found he especially liked the flosser sticks it recommended—he was catching so many items just around his gums. After he finished, he changed into a new pair of boxers and on the way back to the bed, he looked under the wardrobe. The pearls were gone.
Fred understood Erika was extremely drunk, a top five for a relationship that for the first few years had been filled almost every weekend with booze. She had likely gone downstairs to the lobby bar, with the expectation that he’d soon follow. Were they back in San Francisco she’d be strolling in her designer heels and a revealing dress right now, idly wandering through clubs and lounges. Erika never traveled past the first five or ten closest to the apartment, because she wanted to be found. Fred was always meant to appear in a frantic state at the door, worried out of his mind that she was being date-raped in a corner—only to discover her at the bar, calmly charming whichever man had reached her first. The flirtations were never intended to progress past talking, though it was ideal if Fred could catch the man looking at her breasts or eyeing her legs. The thought of someone else—a stranger—placing his mouth on her tits, sliding his fingers into her underwear, always serving to simultaneously enrage and excite him to such a point where he would then rush over and rudely yank her away, his fury now solely concentrated on the blood rushing to his dick. The evenings usually ended in the hallway, or on the kitchen counter, or once in the elevator—and afterward their relationship would hit reset, Erika’s bad behavior earlier in the night evening with his own later on.
Fred could imagine her downstairs now, testing her allure, casting a net for the fattest and richest to spur his regret. Erika was tall, white, striking; in Hong Kong, in a sea of mostly unattractive faces, she particularly stood out. (Linda: “Chinese women in Hong Kong are the ugliest. Though the Taiwanese are more money hungry.”) Perhaps there was someone talking her up right now, a faceless man who thought she was a lawyer on a business trip or the moneyed estranged wife of some minor bank executive. Maybe it was Jack, who had returned to the Dorchester for just this very purpose. At this, Fred felt the stirrings of an erection. Still, he didn’t move. He had forgotten how terrible the jet lag going East was.
The longer he lay on the soft duvet, the less acute the dull ache in his groin, its flaccidity diverting sharpness back to the brain. Erika was the one truly getting old, he thought. She was thirty-four. When they first started dating she had ridiculed single women that age, laughing with satisfied confidence that she herself would never arrive at the same life station without at least an ostentatious engagement ring (her preference, as she repeatedly reminded him, was vintage Asscher cut). When Erika learned a colleague over forty was having a baby, she’d returned home and sniggered about what they called such conditions in the medical profession: geriatric pregnancies. Geriatric! That was one area where overly politically correct Americans were completely right, she said. To have a baby at such an age was unnatural, a condition that deserved an embarrassing name.
At the time Fred had loved her attitude, the sort of confident bitch Erika was. He had long grown past his schoolboy convictions that he was looking for a nice girl and recognized that what he was really drawn to were the mean spirits, the ones who thought they were above it all. Why weren’t more white women bitches? There were plenty of Asian ones; Fred could recognize a leaden heart and a whirring calculator of a brain under a batted pair of demure eyelashes any day. They went Ivy League or Stanford and called everything else “state school”; they picked a road—beauty, smarts, or wealth—and then obsessively competed in their particular pageant down to the bone. Why didn’t Caucasian women have this excellent affliction? Was it because they had been told they were special all their lives and thus genuinely happy about the world? Or maybe they were mean, too, the way he liked, and he just didn’t know how to recognize it.
The next morning, he woke to the sensation of an audience. When he opened his eyes, Erika’s were closed. Coral blush and dark red lipstick was smeared violently on her pillow, and a row of false eyelashes hung askew toward her cheek. Thanks to his melatonin, he had slept so soundly that he had no sense of when she had returned.
Fred waited in stillness, timing his breath as if in deep sleep. She crept open an eye, and he immediately saw she knew she had miscalculated. To put her at ease, he gently brushed an eyelash from her nose. The gesture emboldened her, and an expression with which he was all too familiar crept across her face, an attitude so frequently utilized by his mother that Kate had christened it with its own name: “Let Us Pretend This Never Happened.”
“Bringing you here was a mistake,” Fred said quickly. He wanted to cut off any overture she was gearing to launch, as what he had to say was important.
And as her smile died, he told Erika what he had decided was necessary, in his last beats of consciousness on the truly excellent Dorchester mattress. He no longer wanted her with him in Bali. And since he was paying for the flight and hotel and everything else on their trip, what he really meant was: he was sending her home.
Fred was aware that what he was doing was the equivalent of pushing a red button on the relationship; that in an uncontrolled environment, the full ramifications of a potential explosion were unknown. But he also saw now that there was no way he could have ever brought Erika to the Founders’ Retreat. How could he have not realized this earlier?
Fred had always understood Erika’s behavior. How she furtively studied clients and their wives, to identify small markers of status that could be emulated (the word lovely, scuffed soles on expensive shoes, white clothing). How she’d reworked and perfected her family tree, to better reflect preferred American sensibilities for its white immigrants (the invention of a wealthy uncle, the elevation of György and Anna to academics). Her persistence as she plodded through the Wall Street Journal, dedicating herself to the rote learning of global economic trends that were out of date by the following weekend. How could he not admire and love
such a woman? But now Erika was sinking him. Her desperate hunt for a tangible return on four years of investment in the relationship had rendered her unpredictable, and given the importance of the week ahead, he could no longer shoulder the neuroses of a thirty-four-year-old saleswoman dressed in Chanel. In the days ahead, Fred would need all his faculties. He had to be flying, in top form.
It was his time.
Chapter 10
Linda
The Whole Foods in Cupertino took up nearly half the entire city block of a busy intersection, a sprawled arena that lay flat in repose against the continual stream of vehicles buffering it. Inside there was a gelato station, sushi stand, dosa maker, burrito bar, wines by the glass, olive sampler, and cheese emporium, while right outside the entrance a seasonal array of fruits and vegetables was stacked head-high, as if the store’s elephantine interior weren’t quite adequate to contain the fullness of its bounty. Since its debut there had been more of these coliseums erected nearby, the buildings even larger and more exuberant in design and assortment, but the Cupertino outlet still stood in staggering majesty, confident in its position as the area flagship for healthy living and the surrounding community’s inelastic consumption of it.
In Linda’s educated opinion, the only aspect not oversize about this particular Whole Foods was its parking lot. Whenever she went shopping she had to steel herself far in advance for the experience, especially during peak hours. Why would a superstore located in the midst of one of the highest concentrations of Asians in Silicon Valley build such cramped lanes? Didn’t its management anticipate the endless traffic jams and accidents they were sure to unleash on their own treasured clientele? Even the ethnic supermarkets in the area—which almost exclusively employed workers off the books and brazenly violated earthquake codes to jam more merchandise along already precariously tall and tightly arranged aisles—invested in regular-size parking. To do otherwise would be to generate a never-ending string of vehicular pileups and minor collisions, all of which would then surely impact customer flow, and thus the bottom line.