by Kathy Wang
“You know me, I don’t like to introduce new things until I know for sure,” Shirley said. “And plus, I hate the word boyfriend. It’s so juvenile, isn’t it? At our ages, we should have husbands.” She couldn’t help but swivel her neck once again around the table, the triumph clear on her face. Yvonne met Linda’s eyes: Can you believe this?
Linda felt herself beset by an uncharacteristic rash anger. What did Shirley think, that she was the only one desirable enough to find another husband at their age?
“Congratulations, Shirley,” she called out, before she could stop herself. “Is this the dinner next month?” She let a brief pause elapse. “I can bring someone, too, if we do it on the third weekend.”
“Oh my!” Candy cawed. “Two surprise weddings! Should I be thinking about a new husband too? Seems like there are many good opportunities out there!”
“Linda, are you getting married?” Yvonne asked. She looked wounded; just the week before they’d met for coffee in Los Gatos, where Yvonne had confided the latest monetary demands of Jackson’s Taiwanese concubine. She’d been too agitated to ask about Winston, and Linda hadn’t offered.
“No, not that. Just a special friend.” Special friend. She silently tried the phrase on again for size and found she quite liked it. “No hurry for me. I enjoy to be alone, spend time with grandchildren.” Unlike others here, with abnormal adult sons and no continuing progeny to speak of!
* * *
At first she’d been nervous to tell Winston about the dinner. He had only a weekend in the Bay Area, after all, and had already spent considerable time detailing all the potential activities he’d want to partake in (staycation in Napa! Stanford sculpture gardens! San Francisco Opera!). But when Linda informed him of the event, posing it as a choice fully his to make, he’d been enthused.
“I’ll wear a special suit,” he promised. Linda was relieved he wanted to make a good impression on her friends; he was always going on about how most of them were saboteurs, stewing in a paranoid sulk whenever she met with Yvonne. “I had it custom tailored by a famous shop in Hong Kong.”
“That’s not necessary.” It wouldn’t do to have Winston look like he was trying too hard. “Just a pair of clean slacks and a sweater.”
“If only Black Sun weren’t making me return so early. We could go somewhere outside of California. Like Arizona. Have you ever been?”
“No,” Linda demurred. “Stanley and I talked about it, but we always ended up in Vegas, usually Circus Circus.” That was back when they went on vacations; they’d stopped traveling together after the children were in their teens.
“Oh my Lord. I don’t like to speak badly about other men, but your former husband really didn’t deserve you. A woman like you shouldn’t be in Circus Circus. Arizona is one of my favorite destinations. It’s so beautiful, and warm all year. There’s a very good steakhouse that John McCain goes to. And a wonderful hotel, five stars, where you can see the mountains.”
“That all sounds very nice.” She quietly flipped through the morning’s Wall Street Journal. Didn’t she see a teaser for some article about U.S. Steel? She’d been accumulating shares since the beginning of the year.
“Finally, we will be together soon. I cannot wait. Do you feel the same passion as I do? Please say yes!”
Ugh. She hated it when Winston got all drippy. “Yes, I feel that we have become very close. Just remember, in person with my friends you needn’t say such, ah, romantic things. You should still be a gentleman, of course,” she added hastily. “But they are very conservative, and their relationships aren’t like ours.”
“Because they’re in loveless marriages. Like you and I used to be. They’re jealous. Remember how I said Chinese our age, they just can’t stand to see happiness when they don’t have any.”
“Some of them are in good relationships. My friend Candy, she is very happy.”
“Is she the one who owns apartment buildings in Mountain View?”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t mention that when you meet her.” She’d have to vet his manners carefully when he arrived; coach him not to blab everything she’d told him about her friends.
“I read that book you recommended,” Winston said. “The Ha Jin.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“I finished it in one night. Linda, we are soul mates. I never met anyone who loved all the same things I do. How fortunate we are to have found each other!”
After they hung up, Linda felt a trickle of guilty relief. Winston could be so cloying at times. If she didn’t answer his video chat, the mobile and home lines would ring incessantly, until she finally picked up; he was also a prolific emailer, whereas she used email purely as a basic communication tool.
She went to the guest bedroom, where she had begun to make up a bed before realizing Winston would likely sleep in the master, with her. What would that be like? Linda hadn’t shared the California King she currently occupied for well over a decade, and over the period she had established certain habits she was loath to relinquish. The connecting door to the bathroom, for example, hadn’t been shut in years; she could use the toilet in the middle of the night without fear of the noisy flush or fumbling for the knob. She used to complain vociferously, and often, about Stanley’s snoring. Who was to say she didn’t do that now? Or, God forbid, fart?
Stanley had slept in the guest bedroom the last years of their marriage, after Linda decided he was no longer welcome by her side at night. The evening she informed him of his new quarters, she’d slept soundly, sprawled over the king-size mattress like a queen. Over time she’d reverted back to her original side, the left, but still. She wasn’t sure how comfortable she would be sharing her sleeping space, not to mention everything else that happened in the bedroom. By the end with Stanley, many months would pass between the inevitable nights when she would creep open his door and lie next to him; they would silently move together, her back to his front, him barely touching her, her nightgown still on, hiked up. Though he was always responsive to her overtures, Stanley never once came out of his own accord to her bed, likely out of respect for what he believed were her wishes.
That routine, she knew, wouldn’t be what Winston expected—not with his abundant I love yous and talk of soul mates. With him there would be the assumption of passion, a fiery spirit unable to be contained. And it wasn’t that Linda was technically against such a thing; it was just that she had gone for so long without that she didn’t know how it was done anymore and was terrified of being humiliated.
She went to Kate’s old bedroom, where her old clothes and memorabilia were stored. After her children left for college, Linda had figured anything they’d abandoned was fair game. She’d gone through their remnants, tossing out crusted-over nail polishes and yellowed baseball cards and fruity perfumes, labeling the remainder in neat boxes: Kate’s Diaries, High School.
In the second dresser drawer she found what she sought, a stack of silk slips Kate had purchased from Victoria’s Secret when she was a junior. When she brought them home Linda had been suspicious but not in a serious way—she never thought they had been procured to actually be used, had simply filed them under inexplicable purchases, things teenagers wasted money on. Kate’s own explanation was that she thought they were pretty, which they were, flimsily so. Linda held one up to the light, a baby blue lace confection edged in dark crocus. It was lovely but juvenile.
She wished she still had her satin nightgown and robe, the ones from that crazy period when she had thought it possible to stoop to Stanley’s level and continue to be married to him. She’d never told anyone about her affair with her former coworker, a dalliance she wouldn’t ever have dared consider had he not been so bold in professing his love for her, bowling her over with his sheer lust. He’d been American, as in white, a good-natured bear of a man who she imagined cheered loudly at his children’s sports games, occasionally beating his chest at the referee. Clement James, a delicate name for such a rudimentary person, from whose slight
caveman-like demeanor she’d extrapolated all sorts of assumptions regarding his behavior in the bedroom. Their two meals together were hideously awkward, what followed after even more so, and that’d been the end of it, the second and only other man she’d ever slept with.
Linda riffled through the bureau until she pulled out a more demure slip, in a larger size. This one was cream with ecru. She held it up to herself. She noted that each of the teddies still had their original tags on; Kate had never even worn them once.
Chapter 15
Fred
In Fred’s opinion, one of the worst developments of the digital age was the proliferation of in-person photo sharing. It was one thing to post item after item on social media—he himself used Facebook purely for stalking, skipping directly to his intended targets—but it was another offense altogether to badger acquaintances in person, trapping defenseless colleagues in agonizingly long reveries of budget holidays and tacky remodels. As an Asian man in finance, Fred had long felt pigeonholed into one of two personas: Gentle Asexual Worker Bee or No Social Skills/Possibly Asperger’s, and after a careful assessment of the associated trade-offs, he had reluctantly adopted the former. Doing so had allowed him to rise higher than certain brethren like Johnny Kim, a genius in computational models who insisted on consuming the same stinking chive-and-egg buns every day at his desk for lunch, refusing all collegial invitations to dine out while surfing esoteric soft-core porn when he thought no one was looking. But the strategy had also branded Fred as someone pleasantly innocuous, a persona he hadn’t yet figured out how to shed without social consequence. So he continued to be waylaid by chubby admins as they brandished albums of their hideous babies, always so pale and fat, the girls even uglier than the boys; squandering precious minutes as he oohed and aahed over cheap Disney World getaways, slivers of dirty beach that were purportedly ocean views.
When Fred returned from Bali, the same low-level grunts had politely inquired into his travels, but he found himself sharing only the most broad and succinct of details. It wasn’t much fun, he discovered, gloating about Killer or a D-lister’s bare breasts—not when the audience was a research analyst who due to budgetary constraints still shared a one-bedroom condo with her boorish ex-husband, a deadbeat who smoked pot all day. What had transpired in Bali was a victory of the sort that could be shared only with a true partner, someone whose interests were undeniably intertwined with his own, and thus happily willing to tolerate the necessary debates over his LinkedIn profile (which title communicated power more: general or founding partner of Opus? Third-person shot of him in profile, mouth ajar and hands in the air as if speaking to an immense crowd? Or traditional headshot photo, which might require a visit to a professional studio?). Erika had always considered Fred’s job one of his most attractive qualities, so it was ironic that they were still on the outs, not speaking or communicating, right as he was in the midst of the best career run of his life.
For at the same parallel moment that Fred had been clumsily stabbing at the phone in his villa in Bali, in a drunken late-night attempt to order nasi goreng from room service, Leland Wang had been en route to Menlo Park in a (first-class) airline seat to conduct an irate dressing down of Griffin Keeles. His specific grievance: why Lion Capital, and thus Leland himself, didn’t garner more respect in Silicon Valley. After all, wasn’t Leland a billionaire? And Lion one of the largest technology companies in Asia, a totally important region? Then why so little press? Why not more interviews with Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal, and why no participation in the latest financing round for Gadfly, which two of their neighbors in the same Sand Hill complex had subscribed to? Why no in-person pitch from Hugo Menendez, who instead had sent a few moonfaced lieutenants in his place—a complete slap in the face? And why such shitty seats at this year’s Breakthrough Prize gala? Didn’t anyone consider that Leland might want to sit farther up front—or at the very least, not spend the entirety of the three hours staring at the back of some Google executive’s head (not even Larry’s or Sergey’s!).
Leland didn’t want to hear Griffin’s tactful protests about money, his nervously phrased explanations that despite Leland’s personal wealth, Lion Capital managed only $250 million in assets, rendering it a tiny, insignificant minnow in a sea of oversize whales. That despite all its talk of globalization, Silicon Valley was still US-centric and, as such, didn’t always recognize the full groundbreaking influence of the number three components manufacturer in Taiwan. What Leland wanted, he barked, was results—and he wanted them fast. And of course, both came with the unsaid command that ran through each of his pronouncements: that he wanted it cheap. Thus just a few days later—when Fred’s email landed in Leland’s inbox, dangling $6 billion in Thai government money with precious few strings attached—it had been like a boon from above, an offering from the gods whom Leland had never doubted were in his favor.
The Thais! As it turned out, Leland adored the Thais (he had once informally proposed himself as a match for one of the princesses, a flying leap of a social elevation that even vast wads of Lion cash couldn’t push forward). He loved the idea of Opus, and sovereign wealth funds. (Didn’t everyone know that to efficiently conduct business in Asia, you needed the government? As if things were so different in Western society!) And most of all, he loved the idea of an additional $6 billion under his kind-of-indirect control. Sure, Lion had to put in some cash—$100 million as a starting sweetener, which Leland freed with uncharacteristic decisiveness from the company’s ample hoards—but it was a shrewd bargain given the privilege of managing a pot fifty times its size. And Leland made it clear that Fred, and Fred alone (with some help from Jesus Christ), could claim credit for the magnificent bounty that had been laid at his feet.
The understanding that he had spectacularly upstaged Griffin was delectable, so sublime that Fred didn’t even initially care when he learned that Leland had assigned a minder from Taiwan to periodically “check in” on Opus, a spy from headquarters who later turned out to be his own son. The scion, a loutish Wharton graduate named Maximilian, was rumored to appear any day now, to aid his father in what he was pretentiously referring to as “on the ground frontier technology scouting,” and Fred had moved quickly against the encroaching tentacles of nepotism. He received verbal approval from Reagan to title himself a general partner and surreptitiously ordered new business cards, going around the normal admin channels to work directly with the printer. When the cards arrived, the final versions were exactly what he’d envisioned: Fred Huang, in a simple, discreet serif, followed by General Partner, Opus Ventures. Then an email address, no phone. Only foot soldiers made their numbers public—senior leadership like Fred filtered incoming traffic through generic inboxes, which an assistant then combed through as a first barrier to entry (he’d also have to hire an assistant).
Good news continued to accumulate. Donna Caldbert, his bad-tempered admin, put in her two weeks’ notice; a well-trafficked tech site picked up the rumor of Lion and Opus and printed Fred’s name next to the identifier of Venture Capital Executive. Executive! Fred forwarded the link to Kate, who replied with an emoticon, and then Linda, who left it unanswered. Fred followed up with his mother the next day, dialing in half-hour intervals until she picked up.
“Hello?” she answered. “Who is this?”
“What do you mean? It’s Fred.”
“Are you the one who keeps calling?”
“What? Yes.” His mom was getting loopier. “Who else would it be? Did you read my article?”
“From yesterday?” He could hear rustling in the background; the unpacking of reusable grocery bags. “What is this TechCode? I’ve never heard of it. I almost didn’t click the link; I thought it was one of those viruses Leonard’s always warning us about.”
“It’s a famous publication, Ma. Everyone reads it in the Valley.”
“Where can I buy it?”
“It’s online only. Free to read.”
A pause. “I see.” Then, almost
grudgingly—as if recalling a particularly distasteful passage from the Sensitive Parenting book Stanley had brought home and never read during Kate’s brief teenage rebellion phase—“I am proud of you.”
Afterward, alone at home, Fred consumed a bottle of Cabernet and pondered why everyone said family was so great. What good had his ever been? They’d never been happy for him at the right times; had often mourned when they should have been merry. Unfortunately, the one person Fred did know would be unequivocally joyous over his success was still refusing all attempts at contact. Either Erika’s cell phone was off or she had blocked both his mobile and office numbers; only one of his numerous calls to the apartment she shared with Nora had been picked up, to a few seconds of labored breathing followed by the dial tone. She had snuck into his place at some point in the last few days and removed the majority of her belongings—when Fred returned, he’d been startled by the barren white of his bathroom counters. If he wanted to make nice it was clear much more was required, a dramatic show of appreciation. And nothing spoke to Erika like the physical manifestation of ardor: presents.
The next day during his lunch hour Fred drove to Union Square, where he briefly wandered between various luxury boutiques before settling on Hermès. Inside, he was helped by a young Korean sales assistant with creamy skin. He’d originally wanted to purchase a small accessory, a silk tie Erika could use around her neck or in her hair, but he cued off the saleswoman’s hints that, once wrapped, the piece might seem entirely too small. Instead, together they selected a medium-size scarf in shades of taupe and navy blue she thought would go well with Erika’s described complexion.
“And what color is her hair?” she asked.