The Love Wife

by Gish Jen

  Still, it made me want to see him again.

  I hadn’t talked to anyone who even knew where Suzhou was in a long long time. It meant so much to me, I was embarrassed. Probably that looked like love. But really, I just wanted to talk to him.

  He wasn’t as kind as Carnegie. But I thought maybe he would see, someday, that I was Suzhouren. I had that hope—that he would see how I should have grown up there, in my family’s garden. That I should have grown up writing poetry and practicing calligraphy by the pond. That our pavilion should have been full of musicians and opera singers instead of laundry. That I should have had a cook to cook all the Suzhou specialties. That I should have hardly known what the kitchen looked like. That I should have been married to someone very rich. Not necessarily so handsome; I should have been married to one of those old bespectacled scholars in a gown who went to the teahouse in the morning, and to the bath at night—who wrapped water in skin in the morning, and skin in water in the evening, as we used to say. I should have had a mother; my father should have lived a long and peaceful life. I should have had children. My children should have had cousins. I should have had sisters-in-law to gossip with, and a mother-in-law to complain about.

  Later people said Shang was my ticket to a better life. That was true too. But in the beginning I mostly wanted to talk to him.

  I was embarrassed.

  CARNEGIE / This guy was from the beginning the wrong story. I knew it from Google-ing him; also from someone who had once worked for him but now, it turned out, worked for one of my erstwhile direct-reports. Hazel Riley, her name was, a big-haired software engineer and PTA president who also ran kids’ soccer for her county.

  The scoop from Hazel being: not only bald, but frighteningly thin. Drank lots of water. One of the first to predict, in fact, that there were big bucks in bottled water. That people would actually pay for it, and walk around with it. He made a lot of money investing on that hunch. Sushi too. Back when no one thought Americans would eat the stuff, he bought stock in a company that wanted, of all things, to sell sushi in airports.

  The height verdict: not short exactly. However, on the short side and unpleasantly relational. The sort of man who felt a need to put his hands everywhere. Hazel said that if he entered your office, he was sure to pick something up off your desk. He could not pass a pregnant employee without putting a hand on her belly. And then, of course, there were other body parts with which to make contact.

  The most generous view of this: that for all his money he was hungry for connection.

  The dominant view: if he were a dog, he would have peed on absolutely everything.

  Hazel said Shang was always borrowing things. Pens, calculators, pads of paper. Vacation ideas. Mannerisms. She said that before he put his hands on things, he put them up things; apparently, as a boy, what with those long, thin arms, he had worked as an inseminator of prize mares. But he lost that job, Hazel said, because he killed a horse once. Or at least that’s what people in the office said; and people believed it because of his temper. He threw things across the room. He tore things up. He once threw a computer out the window. That was after he smashed its screen with a marble-based Frisbee trophy. It shook Shang himself up, people said, that he had done that.

  He took up yoga for stress reduction. However, he complained it was not competitive enough, and thought there might be money in yoga tournaments. He took many herbs. Also he tried feng shui—jumbling the office furniture so thoroughly that people barely knew where to sit. He was a crazy man to work for, Hazel said, a walking soap opera.

  On the other hand, what companies the man came up with, you had to give him credit. The most recent featuring a stadium seat pad with reusable freezer packs, sold via CoolYourBuns.com. When the company went public, said Hazel, even the secretaries made a mint.

  The dominant view: all that craziness just went with genius.

  He viewed everything as a proposition, a stock in which he would or would not invest. For example, if you said to him, School committees, he’d say, Sell. School vouchers: Buy. Rent control: Sell. Campaign finance reform: Buy.

  As for where he was putting his money now, the answer was China. He had always loved China; he loved it still. The women of China. The food of China. The sounds of China. He loved the erhu, he said. Such a planetary sound.

  — Whatever the hell a whatever-it-was was, said Hazel.

  But that had impressed Lan, that Shang knew what an erhu was. He said his Chinese driver played it for him regularly.

  The most generous view: he was interested in other cultures, attuned as he was to the limits of Western civilization and the enlightenment tradition.

  An alternate view: his real interest lay like a big dog at his feet, you couldn’t miss it even if it mostly just panted.

  LAN / I first saw him on a panel on viral marketing. I did not ask any questions but only listened and took notes, and so was surprised when he came up to me afterward and introduced himself. He gave me his card with two hands, Chinese-style. I did not have a card, so I gave him my number.

  He took me out for a drink the next week. At such a fancy place! That was when he told me he loved Suzhou. Even before he knew I was from Suzhou, he told me that, and in Chinese! Apologizing for his accent, which was indeed terrible.

  And so of course, yes. When he asked me out to dinner, I said yes.

  A most beautiful dinner! With an ice sculpture indoors, right in the middle of the restaurant. A pair of swans—how they reminded me of China, they were carved almost as beautifully as ice sculptures in China. There were little vegetable flowers too on the dishes. Those were nowhere near as fancy as vegetable carvings in China. But still the food was delicious—French. The tablecloths were pink. There were candles. And so many glasses! I was surprised how many glasses there were, and with what slender, slender stems.

  I could not believe anyone would treat me so well. At my age! I thought I must be in a dream.

  He had brought pictures of all the gardens he visited. Some of them were very famous, of course—the Humble Administrator’s Garden. The Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets. But also he had visited many smaller gardens, gardens more like my family’s. We looked at the pictures for a long time. I was impressed that he had taken so many, and of all sorts of things. The different-shaped windows, and the patterns of the tiles in the paths. The color of the roof tiles. The fish. The view before you turned a corner and the view after—the surprise. He had even photographed Baodai Qiao, a famous ancient bridge, at night, so you could see how on certain nights each of its many arches held a moon of its own—how the moon threw a string of reflections across the water, like a necklace of pearls, stretching from one shore to the other.

  — To think you might have grown up there, he said finally. Unbelievable.

  I almost cried then.

  There was a dance floor; he asked me to dance. I said I didn’t know how, but he said it didn’t matter, and it didn’t. He taught me. And for dessert he ordered the special warm chocolate soufflé for two. He looked at me while we were eating; I thought I must be doing something wrong. That maybe there was something else he wanted to teach me. But still he looked, and finally he touched my arm. Not even my hand—just my arm. As if he did not dare touch my hand.

  Then he told me he wanted me to go back to China with him. The big opportunities, he said, were in China. Not that every company succeeded. Of course not. But while in America only one in twenty start-ups made it, in China the odds were one in three.

  — You just have to try and try, he said. People say if you last five years, you are going to survive. So if you try one company at a time, in fifteen years you should have something to show, right? And if you try more than one at a time, just think. But of course you have to know how to handle the Chinese. That’s where you come in. I need somebody to soften them up. Speak their language.

  — I understand your meaning, I said.

  — Everything is a joint venture over there. Say that in
the U.S., a certain company does sales and only sales, no service, right? Well, they get to China, and what happens? They find themselves in a nice joint venture with the government, doing service. And then in another joint venture, doing investment. Until there are four companies doing something for the government, and only one company doing sales. I need somebody to handle all that. Keep the Chinese happy.

  — I understand, I said.

  — You do, he said, looking at me. I see that. You understand China. And you’re a nice woman. Of course, if all goes well, one day you will not have to be so nice.

  That surprised me.

  — I don’t understand your meaning, I said.

  He laughed.

  — Don’t worry, I’ll teach you. For now, just imagine it. What we could do with a good idea. Which I have. He leaned back in his chair. — Online gambling. Think about it .

  He had it all worked out. How people would use prepaid phone cards to place their bets, and to collect if they won. How they could bet on all sorts of things. Wimbledon—that was a tennis tournament. Or the World Cup—that was soccer. Anything on TV. Or else they could play card games online. A game called blackjack, for example. Or something more traditionally Chinese. Mahjong. We could find out what they used to do in Shanghai in the olden days, he said. We could call it LasVegas.com. Or what was Chinese for Get Rich?

  — Eventually we would want to get away from the phone cards, he said. Do our own cards. And then! Do you realize how much money we could make in breakage alone?

  He explained breakage to me, and how he was shopping his business plan with venture capitalists right now. But he wanted me to be in on this from the start. He wanted me to be a cofounder.

  — You know what I thought when I first saw you? he asked me.

  I shook my head.

  —Buy, he said. Buy and hold.

  —Where will the business headquarters be? I asked him.

  —Suzhou, he said. Of course. We’re going to set up shop in Suzhou like all the Taiwanese businessmen.

  When he reached for my hand, I gave it to him gratefully, with all my heart.

  CARNEGIE / It was like a grade-B movie: he never picked her up at the house. Because of his wife and kids, he always picked her up behind the post office downtown, a five-minute walk away. Never mind that he lived three towns over; he wanted to be careful. And in a way his trepidation about our neighborhood was justified: everyone knew everyone else’s cars, and took keen notice of anything untoward, it was true. A hedge flopped over, a flag left out in the rain, a tricycle gone loose. Stray pets. Dandelion proliferation, especially if said dandelions were allowed to advance to the puff state so tempting to children and so threatening to the neighborhood.

  In town there was less apparent surveillance. Actually, though, I did occasionally catch his comings and goings, because the temple to health I had recently joined was located on the second floor of a building facing the post office parking lot. Always I had wondered why the floor-to-ceiling windows in clubs like this—such a magnificent view of the parking meters, after all. And where was it written that treadmills must needs face big glass? I had personally never yearned to exercise with the world as my witness, and had long ago predicted the demise of this particular trend. Who really wanted to watch humans in the throes of their will-to-fitness?

  Everyone, it seemed.

  Now I too exercised in the display window Saturday mornings. Jogging, not running, as per my cardiologist’s orders. My heart on a monitor.

  This is how I knew Shang drove a black BMW convertible, and that when Lan got into the car, she did it quickly, with a furtive air. She liked black cars, I knew; in China the power elite all drove black cars. She had in fact once wondered aloud why Blondie and I didn’t drive black cars with tinted windows too. How passionately we avowed, then, our undying love of our van! But I digress. She in any case had barely enough time to close the door before the car zoomed off. Once her scarf got caught in the door. She was able to disengage herself; Shang stopped more or less immediately. Still my heart rate spiked so alarmingly that the treadmill flashed and beeped, and I was automatically eased into a cooldown.

  Once too from an Exercycle at the far side of the gym, I saw them enter the diner across the way, or thought I did; I biked a good quarter mile squinting in disbelief. Was that really Lan? Wearing skin-tight jeans, and where did that blouse come from? A deeply V’d affair with a ruffle like a bed skirt, perfect for showing off some cleavage and a carnelian necklace I could have sworn to be my mother’s.

  It was as if, through some strange computer cut and paste, a bit of Shanghai had ended up downtown. For there, sure enough, despite my best efforts, was one of those desperate Chinese women Mitchell’s brother Nick had described, on the make.

  LAN / Probably it did not look so nice. But in fact Shang was unhappy with his wife long before he met me. The only reason they had children was thanks to test tubes. He was a lonely man. I felt sorry for him.

  Sometimes I wondered about our business plan. Could we really yi bu deng tian—reach heaven in one step? I did wonder.

  But still I felt hope. For the first time in my life, I felt real hope.

  CARNEGIE / When Lan spoke to me now, it was with minimal eye engagement. If I asked, Are you going out again? she would say, If you like me to I stay home, I stay home.

  One morning I discovered a white sweater soaking in the laundry sink. There appeared to be a large red ring on it, as though someone had used it for a wine coaster. The room stank of bleach.

  Also she carried a beautiful leather backpack now. A tailored, polished half-moon this was, with thin straps and a zipper that ran across its knife-edged top.

  WENDY / If you knock on her door, she still says, You! and, Come in! But she doesn’t make snacks anymore, and it’s like she wouldn’t exactly mind if you left. Before if you tried to leave she’d think of something to try and make you stay. But now if you try to leave, she just says bye-bye. And she still asks you how things are going at school, but if you tell her about something that happened at recess she might ask you about recess five minutes later. And if you tell her what happened again she’ll say, Oh! That’s so funny! again or, Oh no, that’s terrible! And if you say to her, You just said that, she’ll say, Did I? And look genuinely sad and sorry.

  Sometimes she cooks and says it makes her feel better. But sometimes she cooks and it just makes her cry.

  — Cooking is for families, she says one day in her room.

  She has her books all around her but they’re on the floor like Lizzy’s, and if you look at her notebook you can see how she doodles in the margins like Lizzy too. But anyway, she’s not studying right now, right now she’s trying to play chess with me.

  — I have no family, she says.

  She says: — Even if I get married tomorrow, probably it is too late.

  — What do you mean? I ask her.

  And when she says she’s too old to have children, I tell her that’s not true, she can always adopt.

  — Adopt what? she says.

  And she makes such a bad move, hanging her queen, that I have to tell her she can take it back. But of course she doesn’t want to and so what should I do? Take her queen?

  — A girl like me, I say. I’m adopted, remember? In fact you could probably adopt me.

  She just laughs though and says in Chinese: — I meant a real family but okay. I’ll take you.

  I look and look at the board.

  — I’m not a bad second choice, I tell her. I was my parents’ second choice.

  And finally I do it, I take her queen. Leaving her in this awful position.

  She doesn’t even care.

  — No no, she says. You were their number-one choice, and would be my number-one choice too.

  — I wasn’t, I say. But second choice doesn’t mean second-best. That’s what they say.

  Lanlan looks at me funny then.

  — Of course you were born in China, she says in English, but
practically you are born here.

  — Practically but not exactly, I say. Check.

  — Ah! she says. You are too good for me.

  — If you use your knight you can block me, I say.

  She uses her knight.

  — Checkmate, I say.

  — Ah! she says again. But then suddenly in Chinese she says:

  — That kind of thing doesn’t matter. I can understand you no matter where you come from. No matter what, you are my number-one choice and my number-two choice too. You are my good friend.

  Then she looks at her toes—not that she can actually see them, seeing as she has her blue slippers on.

  — Lanlan, I say, what do they say?

  — They say they are old but maybe all right still, she answers, sort of smiling but sort of not. Though who knows. Maybe they will someday look like my great-aunt’s toes, and my skin will look like her skin. I have hope these days. But maybe in the end I will still die in house full of flies.

  — That’s not going to happen, I say, putting the chess pieces away.

  But she just says: — Who knows?

  CARNEGIE / More scenes from the grade-B movie: Lan comes home with a gift box in hand. The night of her next date she appears in a new sweater or skirt or jacket. A number of items are leather. No more V-necks with ruffles; these clothes are up to the minute, with features. The cut is unusual; it ties up the back; the color appears black or blue depending on the light. It shimmers, it zips, it comes with a carrying pouch.

  WENDY / — I thought you didn’t need clothes, I say.

  — I need nothing, she agrees. But look, so beautiful.

  She holds up a dress.

  LAN / These were not Hong Kong–style—more American. But I liked them, I did. And I had to think what a cofounder should wear.

  LIZZY / — Use your brain, I told her. No gifts come free.

  But she just laughed.

  — Look at these, she said, showing me some shoes.