The Wangs vs. the World (5 page)

Barbra flipped the light switch outside her closet door and stepped in, letting out her breath as her bare feet, toes freshly painted, sank into the smoke-blue silk rug.

This, this was her favorite room in the house.

Let Charles talk endlessly about the hidden wine cellar that he’d retrofitted for whiskey. Let their friends marvel over Ai Wei Wei smashing a Han dynasty urn in a triptych of photos that hung on the wall behind a considerably less valuable Ming dynasty vase. Let the other rooms of the house be photographed for that new California magazine with its condescending editor who described Charles as a “small but gracious man.” This closet was the only corner that mattered to her.

Having this romantic inner sanctum in a house full of polished glamour gave Barbra the same sensation—something halfway between lust and power—as wearing a red silk peignoir under an austere dress by one of those Japanese minimalists that Charles hated so much.

She was supposed to be packing—“Quickly!” Charles had said, clapping his stubby hands together. “Quickly!”—but she didn’t feel like it. Barbra pulled out the little upholstered stool she’d always loved for its brass claw feet and sat down in front of the mirror. She closed her eyes and let the crisp 68° air settle into her skin, then raised her eyelids and held her own gaze for a long moment.

First, the forehead.

Good, still good. One thin line just barely etched across, just enough to show that she wasn’t using Botox.

The eyes. They’d always been too round, but now she skipped over that thought. The eyelids were beginning to look loose, but not so much that eye shadow disappeared in the folds. A few wrinkles on the edges and one curved line under her right eye because, though she had been trying for years, Barbra simply could not fall asleep unless she was lying on her right side. Cheekbones still high. Nose, same as always. Small and upturned. All those white women a generation older who went and got nose jobs that ended up looking like her own lamented-over nose made her laugh. How had that become their chosen shape? Her tiny little skull nose?

Her lips were undeniably starting to thin, and lipstick had started bleeding into the fine wrinkles that edged out from them on all sides like tiny tributaries of age, sapping her of the best semblance of youth.

And those naso-labial lines that dropped down either side of her nose and skipped a beat before continuing along the sides of her mouth, dragging it down into a disapproving bulldog frown. “What are you doing on my face?” she whispered at them.

Barbra placed her fingers gently on her hairline, encircling her forehead, and tugged up. Then she reached her thumbs down onto either side of her cheeks, softly, slowly, and pulled the skin back, stopping just before her nose began to splay out. There. This was the face she should be looking at. Like this, she looked better than young—she looked ageless.

“
Ah bao!
Are you almost done?” Charles called from the bedroom door. Barbra dropped her hands and the years came rushing back—five, ten, fifteen, twenty, until here she was again, a fifty-year-old woman married to a ruined man, sitting in a world that she had built up only to toss away again. Seeing her rumpled jawline reemerge, losing the image of her real, ageless self, was almost worse than knowing that she was going to lose the world she had put together so carefully. The venal optimism that had enabled her to immigrate to America and scoop up Charles and his almost empire as soon as she heard about the helicopter crash that killed his first wife was limited to desperate island girls with no fear or knowledge of the world.

Stupid
. How could Charles be so stupid? How could a man who’d made himself so wealthy be so stupid about finances? That was the one thing she’d never suspected of him. Everything else, but not that. She’d known for years that he was unfaithful, but as long as she never betrayed him with her knowledge, that was nothing they’d have to lose a house and a marriage over. She suspected that his factories were not as scrupulously safe as he claimed, but that wasn’t something that concerned her. She knew about his prejudices and knew that they probably extended rather further than he let on—especially about the native Taiwanese, especially about her own parents—but those were easy to indulge. Money made everything easy to indulge.

“Wang tai-tai, kuai yi dian la! Ni je me hai mei you kai shi shou yi fu? Mei shi jien le!”
Ama shout-whispered as she appeared over Barbra’s shoulder in the mirror, a slash of coral lipstick under her beauty parlor perm.

“Yes, I know,” Barbra replied, staring back. “I’ll be ready in a moment.”

Ama, who had been Charles’s own wet nurse when he was a child, claimed that Barbra’s perfect Mandarin was too tainted with low-country squawk to understand, so in retaliation, Barbra spoke to her only in English, a language that the older woman barely spoke at all. It worked out perfectly well because Ama never wanted to hear Barbra’s replies to her faux-polite comments and commands anyway.

“
Ah bao.
” It was Charles. Talking to her in that vaguely disappointed tone that he’d used ever since he first came home and told her what had happened. As if she had been the one to let him down.

“I don’t need both of you here telling me what to do. I know, I know, only the important things.”

“
Ah bao,
we leaving soon.”

“Wo nu er zai deng wo men.”

Barbra burned inside. She didn’t care if Ama’s daughter was waiting for them. Her last moments in her dressing room and they refused to let her have a moment’s peace. She picked up a photo of herself and Charles at the dinner that Hermès sponsored for Saina’s last show in New York, the one with all those refugee women and scarves that had gotten Saina in so much trouble. They were turned towards each other, smiling, Charles’s eyes half hidden behind the giant Porsche Carrera frames that he’d insisted on getting when he started developing cataracts—how unfair that every middle-aged Asian man in glasses now gave the impression of looking vaguely like Kim Jong-il—her own eyes opened wide, still looking at him flirtatiously after all these years. Well. Maybe she’d feel that way again, but she doubted it would happen packed in an aging car with Ama, Grace, and dunce-headed Andrew.

五
Bel-Air, CA

CHARLES’S CONVERSATION with Ama had been humiliating.

In the Mandarin that they shared:

“Rong-rong,”
she said, calling him by the pet name she’d given him when he was a downy little baby wrapped in a fur blanket, “it is good that we have daughters and that they have homes. I am going to go to my daughter’s house.”

“Oh, Ama, it’s nothing. We’ll be fine. But perhaps it would be best if you did go stay with Kathy for a little while. Until things blow over.”

“But I am an old woman, and I cannot get there on my own. I have the car you gave me, but I don’t drive it anymore.”

“Maybe Kathy can—”

“No, no, Kathy has too much work. You drive me, and then you are already on your way to your daughter’s house, too.”

And that was how she gave him the car, the powder-blue Mercedes station wagon he’d bought for his first wife when she’d gotten pregnant with Saina. It was the only car that hadn’t been repossessed because he’d sold it to Ama for a dollar sixteen years ago; she drove it once a fortnight to a mah-jongg game in the San Gabriel Valley.

And that was how she told him that she knew he’d lost everything and would be running into his own daughter’s reluctant arms. The worst part is that he’d known that she would turn over the old Merc, counted on it.

Charles couldn’t have been more embarrassed if he’d woken up to find that he’d regressed half a century and was sucking on her nipple again, a grown man in Armani trying to draw milk out of her wizened breast.

六
Bel-Air, CA

SO HERE THEY WERE, the three of them. Barbra, Charles, and his Ama. No longer so young.

And here was the car, a 1980 model, both bumpers intact, gleaming still from the weekly wash and wax that Jeffie, the gardener’s son, gave all the Wang family cars.

Cleaned more than she was ever driven, this car was a lady. Her cream-colored seats and sky-blue carpeting made her impractical for anything beyond a polite spin around the block or a tootle over to a neighborhood association meeting four estates down. She might,
might
consent to a weekend spree down the coast, provided an air-conditioned garage at a La Jolla villa was waiting on the other end. Even after nearly thirty years, her perforated leather interiors remained uncracked and the wood burl along her dash still shone. Her only blemish, really, was one little carpet stain, a resolute Angelyne pink, where Charles’s first wife, May Lee, had once let an open tube of lipstick melt in the bright white L.A. sun.

Never, not once, had the gears of her clockwork German engine been asked to cogitate on the notion of driving all the way across the country, rear end sagging with baggage, oil lines choked with cheap Valvoline. But, like the family, she suited herself to her circumstances.

Barbra lugged her own bags down the steps and waited for Charles to come open the back. He was behind her, grunting as he tried to lift the last of Ama’s suitcases—a matched pair of classic Vuitton wheelies that had also once belonged to May Lee—over the threshold. Barbra didn’t want to help. Let him do it. Ama shouldn’t even be here with them.
How much was she still being paid,
Barbra wondered,
and for what?

It was early still. Seven thirty. The quiet time after the dawn joggers had put in their miles and just before the housekeepers started their long walk from the Sunset and Beverly Glen bus stop. A weathered white pickup full of gardeners and lawnmowers sputtered up the street, spewing exhaust onto the same topiaries that they watered and trimmed daily.

Housekeepers and gardeners, dog walkers and pool men, they were the front lines, the foot soldiers. Later would come the private Pilates instructors and the personal chefs, the assistants sent from the office to pick up a forgotten cuff link or script. A home theater consultant, a wine cellar specialist, a saltwater fish tank curator—necessities all.

Charles and Barbra had never understood their neighbors’ obsession with bringing services into the home. Why have some masseuse carry in a table when you could just go to the Four Seasons? Why open your life up to more strangers than you had to? Now, of course, there was no need to think about any of that. Luisa and Big Pano and Gordon and Rainie had all been let go, fired, weeks ago. Barbra hadn’t told them why. Let them think that she had finally turned into a crazy, demanding Westside wife, unsatisfied with Luisa’s immaculately ironed sheets and Gordon’s bright, abundant blooms, maybe even pathetically sure that her husband was eyeing Rainie’s swinging breasts. She was positive that they’d be rehired immediately, even in these unhappy times. She was equally certain that her former household help had already jointly developed some theory of the Wangs’ downfall, something scandalous and unflattering that would doubtless be pried out of them by each of their new employers.

The worst moment for Barbra and Charles was the reveal. The Reveal. That’s how she thought about it in the days after—like they were on one of those makeover shows, but instead of finding that their house was beautifully revamped, the hosts had removed their blindfolds and made their whole charmed life disappear.

“Why?” Barbra had asked.

“What why?”

“All our everything?”

At that moment the word
our
rankled. Charles had never had a problem with generosity—he’d cultivated a casual way of picking up the check before he’d even made his first million—but just then the way that his wife said
our
brought out something small and sour that he forced himself to swallow, along with the true word:
Mine
. Barbra had given nothing but her bullish charm to this family—she hadn’t made the money or borne the children or even decorated the house or cooked the food. He’d done the first, his dead first wife had done the second, and they’d hired people to do the rest. Nothing was
our
.

“Yes,” he’d said. “All.”

“But how? How could you? Don’t we have anything saved? We had so—”

“So much. And now, not so much.”

He’d said that, and then he’d spread his arms out in a leaden swoop, like an aging showgirl. It had severed something between them, that gesture. Charles had never done anything awkward or unsure in his life. Not in front of her. Not in her eyes. But now her broken heart saw every wrong-footed step he’d ever taken.

“How could it happen?”

“It happened!”

“But
how
did it?”

“How, how, how! You never ask how it get good, how I make so much money, how I know what everybody want, only how now that it go away! No how!”

Had they always sounded so stilted and childish? After sixteen years in America, speaking English to the children and her American friends—whose company and mah-jongg rules she preferred to those of the mainlander wives of Charles’s friends—her own speech had attained a smooth perfection, but when she spoke to Charles, she found herself picking up his broken grammar, and the two of them gradually dropped the private Chinese they had once shared.

“Okay,” she’d said. “No more how.”

And for then, and for now, that was it. No more how. No more how, and no more house.

Charles couldn’t. He couldn’t tell Barbra what had happened, how their personal assets—their home!—had gotten wrapped up in the bankruptcy. It was something a true businessman never would have done. That was the worst of it. And now here they were, creeping out of the driveway under cover of dawn with their meager belongings stashed in the back, a troupe of Chinese Okies fleeing a New Age Dust Bowl. He’d always respected this home, kept it sacrosanct. He may have betrayed his wives in body, but he never did so under their shared roof.