The Love Wife (34 page)

— Your mother liked to read in bed, Lan observed.

I said yes, and then insisted that she try this wonderful pillow. Now it loudly presided over Lan’s boat of a bed. And under it, my mother’s flannel sheets. Blondie and I had bought Lan new sheets, but she was happy to replace them with these—so soft, and practically new.

— Your mother liked soft things, Lan said.

Something I had not particularly noticed, but now saw to be true. Corduroy, cashmere, flannel. Did she find such fabrics comforting? Did she like them because she was lonely? Lan didn’t mind putting this and that to use again, in any case. Nor did she mind using up various toiletries my mother had never even opened—her toothpaste, her lotions. The thought of using a dead woman’s toiletries gave Blondie the heebie-jeebies; she did not use the same products Mama Wong had anyway, and thought I should’ve tossed them. Lan, though, had no product preferences. Neither did she have a decorating style to speak of; she cheerfully pulled out of retirement many items Blondie would have felt beyond the pale. My mother’s Venetian glass candy dish and Wedgwood vase, for example. Her monkey-head flowerpot. Also, now that Lan had started cooking, she had my mother’s everyday pots and pans. My mother’s miscellaneous flatware, and chopsticks. Her footed Chinese rice bowls. Our ancient melamine plates.

Mere ownership of these things could not have influenced the way Lan stored her fungus and dried mushrooms, or arranged her jars in the fridge—the buzzing fridge. Yet, eerily, she did these things much as my mother had—filling, for example, the largest of her countertop canisters, the one clearly marked
FLOUR
, with rice. She had a blackboard in the kitchen, like my mother. And there, center stage on the kitchen table—the computer. My mother had only had an adding machine, but it had occupied that very spot.

Of course, I was the person who had set the computer up there. I was the person who had somehow, on autopilot, picked that place. But Lan left it there; that was true too.

I shivered as I worked the fridge out from its under-the-counter alcove, seeing all the while my mother, young and struggling. I saw her energy and drive; I imagined her exhaustion. I felt what it must have meant to her to be making it, on her own, in a strange country, her child in tow.

The compressor.

And in a way I had never been able to love her when she was alive, I found that I loved her now.

14

Shang

BLONDIE / 
Carnegie spent almost his whole career at Document Management Systems—fifteen years, anyway.

CARNEGIE / 
Our offices were a tribute to the half-round bull nose, an enshrinement of real-wood veneer. The newer armchairs were gray, but the older chairs were dark green, holdovers from the company’s golden granola days—the days when, fresh out of the garage, early tech types could believe beards and jeans and Birkenstocks were forever. Dark green hadn’t yet become the color of the decade, the color that would herald a new interest in our planet Earth. Back then it was still a forester’s color, a half-preppy, half-sixties-lives-on color. It was an alternative color perfect for people who had attended alternative high schools and sought alternative careers. People who repaired, on the weekends, not to the golf course but to the woods. It was anti-maroon and anti–powder blue. It was anti-peach. It went with almost nothing except wood tones and Ping-Pong tables.

Also plants. For a while our office might have passed for a greenhouse, except that the plants were so well browned at the edges; they seemed required by some unwritten code to have lost the majority of their major fronds. But what matter? We were revolutionaries. We were beyond office décor.

BLONDIE / 
Were they not, after all, the firm that had reinvented document management?

CARNEGIE / 
Where did the dot-coms come from?

There had always been young MBAs, hungry to make their mark—to accrete some of my power, such as it was, to themselves. Then suddenly the kids didn’t want jobs; suddenly what they wanted was for me to plunge with them into this venture or that, as messianically described in their quarter-baked business plans. Who would have said yes? Should I have given up my VP-of-development job, representing fifteen years of zigzagging ascent, for a fly-by-night gig with a bunch of twenty-somethings?

How mildly vindicating when their tide finally went out.

BLONDIE / 
If only they had not brought all of high tech down with them.

CARNEGIE / 
The dot-com air was our air; we all of us breathed it. Telecom, for example. All that cable they laid down! For the new age to come. But it wasn’t just telecom; everyone spent and spent. There were people, yes, who knew Time Warner would one day rue its wooing of AOL, that AOL would one day come to mean Albatross Online. But real-time employment lay in keeping your edge—in being considered a company of the future. Who dared defend old-economy thinking?

The tone, then, with which one uttered the words ‘in the past’; and how the past seemed to nip at your heels, the enemy. How quickly things became old technology, old economy, old old old—quick as a wink, you might say, except how slow a thing, how pathetically slow, a wink had become. No one could afford to move that slow. How you had to whir to stay new!

Until, of course, you didn’t.

BLONDIE / 
Once he was a star.

CARNEGIE / 
I was the crack strategist; I was the deep analyst. Once I divined the inchoate needs of the market. I drafted, forecasted, recruited. Acquired, jettisoned, revamped. Every year ended with a bang and a bonus.

Then consultants arrived, dropping names. They made eye contact; they offered new paradigms. They wore expensive ties. When they departed, it was more in person than in fact, leaving behind as they did their fat reports and fatter bills.

Maybe I was from the start, as my mother claimed, a sap. Maybe once the environment grew tougher it wasn’t enough to be someone who did his best and let the chips fall. Or maybe that faint aloneness I’d always felt—a vague vertigo, a feeling that I had to take extra care not to fall out of synch—did matter in the end. Or was it my true level of commitment?

Maybe.

Though how many men, in truth, don’t kick one back some days and think,
I am a fucking slave
?

More likely I’d been called a good guy a few too many times. How much better to have had coworkers report,
He’s a ballbuster.

Instead, what? I could only imagine.
You can really talk to him.

He gave me extra leave.

He made sure the insurance got backdated.

He believed in diversity.

A counterpart called me insufficiently crisp.

— If only my feet had been held to the fire a bit longer, I said.

— I’m only trying to help, said said counterpart. You’re a good guy.

Of course, said counterpart was himself laid off shortly thereafter.

— What did you expect? people said. The guy read novels during lunch.

How can you be my son? I tell you honest way, I don’t know who you are.

I was reorganized, in any event, first from my line job to a staff position, with no bottom-line responsibility, and then to a non-position, where I was given an office but nothing to do. Put out to pasture. Once upon a time I had complained about my e-mail; I could get upward of two hundred messages a day. Now I dreaded my in-box still.

How thoroughly I read every companywide announcement.

At least Blondie, bless her, sent me little notes. Forwarded jokes and weblinks. Who had time for weblinks? That’s what I used to think. Now I happily perused whole blogs.

Shame me into resigning. That seemed to be the plan, so as to avoid paying severance. The desperate strategy of a desperate company. No one could look me in the eye. People I had promoted, people I had aided and abetted, people I had gone to the mat for, now glanced away when they saw me, as though they had developed this inexplicable neurological tic. Or else they crossed the hall to greet me—
great to see you, man!
—slapped my back heartily, then conveniently broke away.

How I had worried about being laid off! Now I dreamed of it.

I dreamed of telling them the truth as I left:

One day, you too will not matter.

One day, you too will think, I used to matter.

How they would writhe with self-knowledge!

If only Blondie would go back to work, I thought sometimes. Then I could afford to quit.

Though—to be saved by Blondie! That would have been worse.

BLONDIE / 
I didn’t see why.

CARNEGIE / 
Mother of all ironies: over the years Blondie did far more of the juggling—far more of the feeding and picking up and temperature taking—than I; she arranged more play dates, drove more car pool, did more open houses, field trips, potlucks, bake sales. And yet still she managed, inexplicably, not only to avoid the demotion most moms took, but to substantively advance in her work. Was this because she had not particularly tried to advance? Because she believed in her cause? Was she right to credit, as she did, dumb luck? She depressed many a fellow mother, in any case. A fact that depressed her.

— As if things aren’t difficult enough for everyone already, she’d say.

As for yours truly—I can still see there, on our kitchen desk, Blondie’s pink, oversized paycheck. This was for many years larger than mine in every dimension, thanks to her fee-based compensation. Tied as it was to a percentage of the fund.

I freely admit that I was in full support, when the opportunity arose, of her signing up for direct deposit. Call me pathethic: at least I tell, here, the truth.

— My contract is for another twenty years, I told Lan, one afternoon in the kitchen. — Get Bailey through college, then I’m done.

— Contract? said Lan, putting down her marker.

Lan was studying at the kitchen table, baby monitor at her elbow, her homework in piles. She was happier these days, having scored high enough on the TOEFL for us to enroll her in an undergrad program in August. As for whether she would be able to complete that degree—well, we vaguely hoped things would work out somehow.

In the meanwhile she was majoring in business, minoring in color coding. Different-colored stick-its bristled from every book. Beside the books lay pens in an array of colors too—also highlighters, which I could see she liked to use. The pages before her pulsed with color. There could not have been more than a paragraph left in its original naked state.

— Sometimes I think I should have done something different, I said. Of course, we have this saying, ‘The grass is always greener on the other side.’

— The grass is always greener on the other side, repeated Lan.

Contemplating a green marker as she spoke. Was she inspired by that aphorism toward a coding-scheme refinement? She stood when the kettle shrieked, to get my coffee; I waved to her to sit back down. Thinking,
How nice a roll in the hay after a day in the pasture,
but maturely managing a just-friends smile.

LAN / 
You will rise again from the East Mountain, I told him.
Dong shan zai qi.
Don’t worry. Right now your doorway is so empty you could catch sparrows in it. But
ku jing gang lai
—after bitterness comes sweetness.

CARNEGIE / 
It was a great day for wisdom.

I made my coffee. Considering, as it dripped, the kitchen floor, which layers of wax had restored only to a wan version of its former glory.

How happy I was, in any case, to see Lan bright with hope.

LAN / 
Carnegie had some relatives living in Beijing, one of whom he thought had married a woman from Suzhou. Of course, who knew what connection there really was. Still, it was worth looking into. And while I was too old for a regular job, I was beginning to think maybe I could help some foreign company do business. Maybe translate for an American company, Carnegie said. Who knew? Maybe someone could arrange something.

If not Carnegie, then maybe someone else.

CARNEGIE 
/
 
With what authority she chatted, now, on the miracle of microlending in Bangladesh; the rationale for outsourcing software programming to India; the importance of thinking new economy. I applauded her disquisitions as I drank.

— After just four weeks! I said.

She paused at this. Rearranged her markers.

It went almost without saying that she adored her professors, especially one Woody Something—business development—and that Professor Woody adored her.

— Be careful, I told her.

But who was I to tell her anything? Having had to ask her to define ‘microlending.’

I did not, she suggested, know everything.

And later, when I continued to press her: she hoped I was not jealous.

— Of course not, I said, stung. And yet noting, such non-contact contact. It was like talking to a former lover. — I wish you well, that’s all. I will always be interested in your plans.

She laughed a little, pressing her fingers together.

— Plans, she said musingly.

LAN / 
I had known so few good men in my life. He was like a father. Younger than me, and yet like a father, or a brother.

CARNEGIE / 
A few weeks later I once again found her in the kitchen—still surrounded by piles of books, but looking pensive. She did not greet me in her usual way when I walked in; instead she glanced up, then back down. Around her, that color-coding paradise, that rapture of highlighters. But the marker in her hand remained capped, and how disconcertingly black and white the pages before her.

— Is something the matter? I asked.

— Nothing the matter.

She pulled her sleeves down. She was wearing a droopy men’s sweater, cardinal red. With the sleeves pulled down, she appeared to have no hands.

— How are your classes?

— What classes?

Across the street, Mitchell unloaded a bassinet from his new station wagon; the minx was, unexpectedly, expecting. Next came a changing table, a swing, a car seat still in its box.

— Let me guess. I took a breath, then said: — Woody.

The sun slanted diagonally across her sweater like a sash.

— Are you in love with him?

— Which him?

— Are there two hims? I joked.

She did not laugh. — You know, I am Chinese age almost fifty.

— American age only forty-seven, I said.

— With no job. No family.

— And no green card, right?

Next to her, the baby monitor lit up. A spike of red lights. Was that a cry? She drew her sweater sleeve back to turn the sound on, only to have the red dots go out. Crackling. She turned the sound off, rolled her sleeve down.

— I’d be happy to sponsor you, you know, I said. If I can get Blondie to agree. And if we can do it.

The dimensions of these largish ifs would have seemed to me of interest, but Lan did not appear to find them so.

— You are very kind, she said. At school they say there are three million people on waiting list for the green card.

— Nevertheless, people do get them.

— People say the big opportunity is not in America anymore.

— Hong Kong. Shenzhen. Shanghai. Is that what Woody says?

— Not just Woody. And Hong Kong look like not so great these days. Too much risky.