The Last Chinese Chef (11 page)

“Soft as a pillow,” said Jiang.

“I could eat that right now,” said Sam. “Okay. I’ll start working on the ticket right away.” His eyes wandered back to David and Xiao Yu. Where they had been talking was only a blank patch of wall. They were gone. Had they sat down? He scanned the tables, the waiters moving sideways through the aisles. No. They had left. He felt the twinge again inside him, the odd feeling he’d had before, the pleasantness of the hour with Maggie McElroy. Where had David and Xiao Yu gone? He kept thinking that the next time he glanced over he might find them standing there again, restored. But he did not.

 

On his way to the office Carey had tried to settle on what he would tell Maggie. Too little would disrespect her, while too much would hurt her unnecessarily. He fiddled with what to do. Tell her the truth, of course, but only when she asked and only that part of the truth which pertained.

He remembered, when he’d met her here in Beijing three years ago, being aware right away that she did not know.
She has no idea,
he remembered thinking.
Matt never told her.

Carey was not surprised. He would not have told either. So Matt had gone a little wild; so what? He’d pulled his reins in quickly enough, and by himself, too. Let it be, was Carey’s feeling. He was a nice man, Maggie seemed like a nice woman, no need for them to suffer. Let them be as happy as they could. That’s what he had thought. Now of course he half wished Matt had told her himself, so he wouldn’t have to.

Not that it was what Matt would have intended. Matt was a steady man, a man of rules; this Carey had seen about him from the first moment. He could still see Matt at the airport, with his hyper-organized luggage, his smooth, clean face smelling of the shave-soap provided on the plane. The man had force. His legal work was like that too, meticulous, powerful, unbending. He stayed with the rules. He was, Carey knew, exactly the type who sometimes had to break out.

It was a pattern he had seen before. He guessed one in twenty were like Matt, good, hardworking guys who bolted their traces when they came to this place where everything was on offer, where a wild, clubby economy turned cartwheels around the power center of government, where any desire could be satisfied.

“Let’s go out,” Matt had said at the end of his first day in the Beijing office, on his first visit, seven years before. That was the beginning. He had left even Carey in the dust, and Carey was known far and wide as a king of the night. They roamed from one pulsing spot to another on Sanlitun. After the crowded bars and the costume raves Matt would walk away and negotiate with the women who worked the clubs. Carey tried to tell him there were finer women to be had elsewhere, only marginally more expensive, women with something close to beauty, even class. A phone call away, come, let’s go — No. Matt would go for the bargirl. And he would walk up to the African drug dealers too, relaxed, companionable. He’d ask them what was up, like they were in New York. Not a blink. They’d always tell him what they had, hashish, ecstasy, LSD. He bought hashish and rolled it with tobacco. That was where he drew the line. His restraint when it came to drugs fit with the other Matt, the married man, the one Carey had met at the airport. And that was the Matt who showed up at the office after their nights on the town — always on time, frayed but ready — and put in a full day’s work. This impressed Carey. The man was a rock.

But Matt started to feel guilty. On his second visit, later that same year, he came into Carey’s office one afternoon and said he’d decided he should just go ahead and call Maggie now and tell her everything.

“Have you lost your mind?” Carey remembered saying. “Why would you tell her?”

“Because I tell her everything.”

“Things like this?”

“I never did things like this before.”

“You tell her
this
and you’ll change everything. Ask yourself — are you going to do it again? Is this going to be your new lifestyle?”

“No! I feel bad already.”

“Then don’t do it anymore. And don’t tell your wife. She doesn’t need to suffer.” His hand strayed to the file he had been working on. The clock had been running on the client and he didn’t like to stop. “It’s okay, man,” he added gently. “Everybody slips a few times.”

Matt had thanked him, and agreed that yes, this was the thing to do. “You’ll have to find a new late-night companion,” he joked, and Carey told him
that
would be no problem. At the same time, he was not surprised Matt had climbed back into himself, red-faced, so quickly. This too he had seen before.

But two evenings after that, Matt buzzed him again, on his cell. It was late. The office was almost empty. Carey was ready to leave anyway. And there was Matt again, that same excited edge in his voice, saying, “I know what I said, but can’t help it. Let’s go out.”

“Okay,” Carey said, feeling his own smile form. At moments like these Matt was as willful and open as a child. He acted on his needs. There was something almost like purity about him, an up-rush from inside. Maybe it was because of this that Carey indulged Matt in those first few years, went out with him, shepherded him. They were two friends who knew each other only at this single crossing in their lives. The two men rarely spoke when Matt wasn’t in China. The last year before Matt died they had not talked at all. And then he was gone. Carey was well aware of the fact that he had other friends he knew better. Still, it was hard to think of Matt now, this past year, without a bolt of sorrow.

From outside his door he heard the tones of his secretary and beside her another voice — Maggie. The door opened and in came the widow, her walk slow, hyperconscious. She had changed in the three years. Her face, always too sharply arranged to be called pretty, had started its turn toward the elegant concavity of age. Her body looked ropier than he remembered, under loose, neutral clothes. Care and grief had her in a cage, leaving only her large eyes, which now burned with extra intensity, as if compensating for the rest of her. “How are you?” he said, uselessly, and rose to give her a hug.

“Had better years,” she said into his shoulder.

They sat a few minutes talking. Their words made circles around Matt, remembering him, trying to laugh about him, talking about the shock of his death — “Christ, that’s one phone call you never want to get,” said Carey. After they talked about Matt he inquired elaborately into the comfort of her flight, and the apartment. She told him about her assignment. And then she noticed the file, which he’d laid out on the table between them. “You’ve seen this already,” he said, “right?”

“Zinnia showed it to me.” She opened it. “Talk about being blindsided.”

“Me too,” he said.

She looked up abruptly. “You mean what you said before? You knew nothing about a child?”

“No,” he said, and repeated: “Nothing about a child.”

The way he said it hinted at more. “Then what about the woman who’s named here as the mother? Gao Lan?”

He exhaled. “Yes,” he said. “Her I knew about.” He watched her eyes widen and almost instantly glaze over, as shock was followed by humiliation.
Tell her the truth.

“What exactly do you know?” she said.

“Just that it did happen between them.”

“Her and Matt.”

“Yes.”

“Was it at the right time?”

“Yes. It was brief, though. I don’t want you to think it was a relationship.”

“Why?” she said, her voice sharpening. “Does it count for less if it wasn’t?”

“No,” he said.

“Especially when there’s a child.”

He raised his hands; she had him. But it did count for less. It would have been worse if Matt had actually loved this woman. He hadn’t, and that mattered. Right now, though, Maggie couldn’t see it. Understandably.

“Tell me what happened,” she said, and he did. He started with the night Matt met Gao Lan.

Nice girl, Carey remembered thinking when he first saw her under dancing, roving lights. Pretty. But there were endless girls who were pretty. He knew that. Matt, still somewhat green in China, did not. He saw Gao Lan across the room and begged and pestered Carey until the two of them went over to Gao Lan and her friend and bought them a drink. To Carey it was boring. They were such ordinary girls. There were better girls elsewhere. But he could not get Matt to leave that night and go somewhere else.

The way Carey told it to Maggie, he took his leave early and could only infer what had happened later. It was easier for him to convey it this way, even though it was not the truth. Actually Matt and Gao Lan had been the first to leave; they left together, and Carey saw them go. He could still see Gao Lan turning her perfect oval rice-grain face up to Matt as they walked to the door. She’d had a porcelain femininity that made her quite the opposite of Maggie, across from him now, angular, sad, intelligent.

“Was it just that one night?” she asked. “Or did it happen more times?”

“Only the one night.” Carey couldn’t be sure of that, of course, but it was what Matt had told him.

That winter Matt had come to China twice. On the second visit Gao Lan called him, and what Matt told Carey afterward was that he had broken it off with her then and there. He didn’t share any of the details, just said he didn’t want to see her. Didn’t want to talk to her.

At the time Carey had thought it unfeeling. Carey’s sympathies, if they lay anywhere, were snug in the lap of male prerogative — but there was no reason to hurt a woman, either. Matt had sheared Gao Lan away with one swipe. She didn’t like it. Carey had seen her only once since then, at a reception. She’d given him an icy stare and turned away.

“I felt sorry for her at first,” he admitted to Maggie now. “Bad about what happened. Not anymore. Not after I saw this.” He tapped the claim form. “I know he could be the father, I admit it, but at the same time I still don’t believe it. If she had his child, why would she keep quiet all this time? And — I know this sounds strange, but it’s hard to imagine a child coming from a liaison that meant so little to him.” Carey felt no need to tell Maggie that this had actually seemed to be a little more, emotionally, than the one-night stand it probably was. “A liaison that he regretted.”

“Nature doesn’t care about your feelings for someone,” she shot back. “And how do you know he regretted it? What makes you say that?”

“He told me,” Carey said, and closed his eyes. He could hear the clang of the metal door and see the bright fluorescent lights and see Matt, in the office men’s room, his head over the sink, guilty from the night before. “I shouldn’t have done it,” he said to Carey, raising his face, and Carey, who did not inhabit Matt’s universe of commitments and barely understood its layout, nevertheless read the wild mix of remorse and terror on his face. It was then he sensed that hearts had perhaps been open, along with the sex. “Do you think I could have screwed up my life?” Matt had asked from his well of misery over the sink.

“He loved you,” Carey told Maggie now. “He felt terrible after it happened because he was afraid he might lose you. He was abject. That’s why he cut it off with her. And it never happened again. One night only. I don’t know if it makes you feel any better, but he was in agony afterward.”

“How nice,” she said, voice going slightly flat. “But from what you’re telling me, the child could definitely be Matt’s.”

“I’d say there’s a good chance,” Carey said, “yes. But chances mean nothing. You need the absolute truth.”

“I need the test,” she said.

The classics tell us that the mysterious powers of fall create dryness ingent. heaven and metal on the earth. Of the flavors they create the pungent. Among the emotions they create grief. Grief can neither be walled away nor be held close too long. Either will lead to obsession. For someone grieving, cook with chives, ginger, coriander, and rosemary. Theirs is the pungent flavor, which draws grief up and out of the body and releases it into the air.

— LIAN G WEI,
The Last Chinese Chef

 

 

M
aggie had called Sam Liang to say she would be late, but even so she had only a half-hour from the time she stumbled out of Carey’s office to the time she was due to present herself smiling at the chef ’s front gate. She got in a taxi and lashed herself into a humiliated state. She’d been made a fool of. Matt had been with this woman, Gao Lan, and he’d been with her at the right time. And she never had a clue. She loved him unflaggingly, until the very last day of his life. Loved him still. Or did she?

This is boxed away,
she was telling herself when she came to the chef ’s front gate, for now she had to work.
This will be sealed until later.
His gate was ajar. So she stepped in, called out a greeting, and followed the pot-clanging sounds to the kitchen.

His back made a curve into the refrigerator. When he stood up and turned around he was holding a whole poached chicken on a plate, its skin a buttery yellow. “How are you?” he said.

That, you don’t want to know. I am the last stop on the bottom of creation.
“Fine.” She dropped her bag on the same stretch of counter she had claimed the day before. “How about you?”

“Stressed. I need a better source of live and fresh fish, for one thing, and I need it fast. And I’m cooking until all hours.”

“Trying dishes for the banquet?”

“Trying to conceive the meal.” He leaned against the counter in a brief exhaustion.

“When did you go to sleep last night?”

“Two.” He amended. “Three.”

“We don’t have to do this today.” One hand still rested on her bag. She could turn and leave. She had her own problems, from which, she knew, this would barely distract her anyway. “It’s no problem for me.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Stay. Sit down. I made this for you.”

She glanced at the whole chicken, plump, tender-looking. “You shouldn’t be making anything for me, with all you have to do.”