The Other Side of the World (17 page)

And I couldn't help wondering about something else—something I vowed that night I'd never ever ask Nick about—whether Jin-gen had been telling me the truth about the two of them.

I went back to work in the morning—sober, but with small green men banging away inside my skull with large
hammers—and I compared notes with Nick, and he teased me about how deep in the tank I'd been, and suggested I leave my car in the garage after work, that he'd drive me to my apartment so we could continue to celebrate. “You should never miss a chance to celebrate,” he said, “because you never know when they'll be taking the set down, and the whole goddamn stage and building with it.”

So he'd think nothing had changed between us—that I was the same guy I was before my week with Jin-gen—I gave him something else from Max.

“And as my father would put it,” I said, “and this was usually when I'd be heading out on a date, or to meet some friends—‘Don't forget to have a good time, son.'”

 

My apartment looked wonderful—hotel-like, for sure, but with brighter, warmer colors in the carpets, furniture, and framed prints than I remembered Nick or me choosing—and there was a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice, a red bow around its neck, waiting on the coffee table, along with a half-dozen plates of small delights. We drank and ate and drank some more, and Nick got mildly loaded and kept reciting my father's line—“‘
Don
'
t forget to have a good time
,
son!
' I love it! ‘
Don
'
t forget to have a good time
,
son! Don
'
t forget to have a good time
…'”

A few minutes after he left, there was a knock on the door and when I opened it—hardly a surprise—a beautiful young woman was standing there. She was wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, which she doffed in greeting. She walked past me, turned, and asked if I'd found everything in the apartment to my satisfaction. As with Jin-gen, her English was impeccable. Was she another of the women Nick had saved?

“All is well,” I said.

“Well, your happiness is my responsibility,” she said, and added that she would be grateful if I would allow her to fulfill her responsibilities.

I did, and when I woke in the morning she was gone and the dishes were washed and put away. I never saw her again.

I never saw Jin-gen again either.

 

Six and a half weeks after I moved into my apartment, Nick and I landed in Borneo. We flew in a two-engine company plane—what Nick called a swamp-jumper—that offered exquisite views of the South China Sea, a sea that, in the early morning sun, was all silver-blue and rippling gold—and it didn't take long before I was in love again. This time, though, I fell in love with a place, not a woman.

The first week at the hotel with Jin-gen, I began to see—along with my being able to leave the office every day before six—had, like Jin-gen, been a gift from Nick. After that week, I rarely left the office before nine or ten at night, using the hours when the rest of the staff was gone to catch up on paperwork, and to put in calls to people in Japan, Hawaii, Europe, and New York so I could catch them during
their
workdays. I spent a good part of my own regular workday, eight to six, talking to people in Borneo and Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, and China, and supervising the men and women who worked under me.

“Being able to delegate authority the way you do has never been my strong suit,” Nick said when we were having a late-night drink early in my fourth week on the job. “It was one of the reasons I quit football. I did my part, but could I count on the other ten guys to do theirs?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“
Sometimes?
” he said. “Not good enough—
never
good enough. But I'm getting at something else, Charlie—something I've been thinking about since you got here: that this is probably the main difference between us.”

“There are differences?” I said.

“I'm being serious,” he snapped, and glared at me as if daring me to say more. “What I figured out,” he continued, “is that
you trust people, and I don't mean only in the office—trusting people to do what you tell them to—but you really
trust
others, and you always have.”

“Probably,” I said.

“I don't.”

Although I was tempted to talk about why this might be so—the differences between my father and his, for starters—I remained silent. Still, he was right about my feeling easy about relying on others when I needed to know things: how much oil we shipped, or how much we promised to ship, and in what condition; which parts of a contract were already agreed to, and which parts needed to be amended; which billing charges from shipping firms were accurate, and which were padded; which reports on productivity were reliable, and which ones were full of shit; which government officials were trolling for gifts, and which budget lines to use for the gifts, and which lines for new equipment, parts, or repairs, and who to rely on to make sure the stuff was really needed; and if we ordered equipment, parts, or repairs, who were the best people to make things happen in the most cost-effective way. And—shades of Joe Wancyzk—I had an assistant I depended on to follow exchange rates so that, when the dollar fell, we could take advantage and get more bang for our buck by ordering stuff from the States.

Then Nick started in on how everybody at the office
liked
me—and how this was a difference between us too: that I was the original
nice guy
the way I'd always been. People may have respected him, and been grateful to him, but they didn't
like
him the way they liked me. We were both good with people, he said, especially with the Chinese, who made up most of our firm, high and low, the same way they made up most of Singapore. The Chinese had enormous respect for people who worked hard—there was nothing, other than being old, they admired more—but what he'd realized was that he and I were successful with them for opposite reasons.

“You're good because, same as me, you work hard, learn fast, and are good at what you do,” he said, “but also because, as I was saying before, you trust people. Me—I'm good with them because I don't.”

“Do you really still think of me as being the original nice guy?” I asked.

“You bet.”

“But nice guys finish last,” I said.

“Nice guys finish last,” he repeated. “I like that—one of your old man's sayings?”

“It's from Leo Durocher—the Brooklyn Dodgers' manager when Max was growing up.”

“‘Lippy' Durocher, right? And wasn't he married to an actress?”

“Laraine Day,” I said, but didn't offer any more information, though I was remembering that I used to like hearing my father quote Durocher because it seemed out of character for him to admire a guy who hung out with gangsters. Despite what a nice guy my father always
seemed
to be, he could be tough-minded too, I wanted to tell Nick, and the instant I thought of doing so, I felt a distinct tumbling in my stomach and realized that what I really was hoping for by quoting Durocher was to gain Nick's approval—to show him that, like my father, I wasn't quite the pushover he took me for.

“Well, when it comes to that stuff, you already know what I think, right?” he said, a hand on my shoulder.

“If you want to win in this world you have to be ruthless,” I said, quoting one of his own lines back to him.

“You got it,” Nick said. “Ruthless for sure. And mean—mean like the real you, Charlie boy, right?”

“You never know,” I said.

 

On weekends, we usually partied in Nick's apartment, and either used
The Good Book
, or hooked up with Nick's
friends—American, Dutch, and Japanese mostly—who brought a rich variety of women, food, booze, and drugs with them. But late on a Friday afternoon two weeks before our trip to Borneo, Nick told me I was on my own for the weekend because he had ‘family obligations' to attend to.

What this meant, I assumed—he actually seemed to be bragging about it, as if he wanted to impress me—had to do with what Jin-gen alluded to: that he was involved with the daughter of a wealthy Chinese family, and in order to keep the relationship going he had to play the respectful suitor to the young woman's family, especially to the father and grandfather.

That first time he told me I'd be on my own for the weekend, I went down to The Sling Shot and looked through
The Good Book
. But women in the book, like women in my bed, were already starting to seem as bland as the rest of the city. Not because they weren't charming and beautiful, but because I began to see few differences between them other than variations in the obvious—height, weight, sexual tricks—and because I knew that no matter what they did with me and for me, it wouldn't be that different from what I'd experienced before, or would experience the next time, or the time after that—and because I also knew they'd never be able to give me what I'd had with Jin-gen. Or perhaps, it occurred to me, my sex life and love life after Jin-gen—
because
of Jin-gen?—had gone into early retirement.

So I stayed in my apartment the first weekend Nick and I didn't hang out together, leaving only to bring in food and to get in a workout at the club, and once I got through a few hours of mild restlessness, I found that it was okay being alone, and more than okay. Being by myself also reminded me of what life had been like in Northampton when Max was between wives or girlfriends—when it was just the two of us, and he'd be gone teaching, or out for dinner, and I'd have the entire house to myself, and of how I'd fix myself a snack, camp out in his office, and plop down in his wide-armed easy chair with a book. These
were also times I'd have friends over, and we'd put on music, smoke pot, sample Max's liquor supply, and mess around. As good as times with my friends were, though, I found that I preferred being by myself even if—no small thing—it was only to put on one of the porno videos we were passing around, and whack off to it.

In one of Max's jokes that would sometimes come to mind while I played with myself, a rebbe asks the boys in his Bar Mitzvah class how they like their girls best—in the flesh or in their dreams—and coaxes them all, except for little Moishe, into raising their hands and admitting they prefer their girls in the flesh. ‘And you, Moishe?' the rebbe asks. ‘Oh rebbe,' Moishe says, ‘you meet a much better class of girls in your dreams.'

This proved as true for me in Singapore as it had in Northampton, since what turned out to be most pleasurable that first weekend I was on my own was, simply, being on my own: fixing myself a favorite sandwich—roast-beef, mustard, and horseradish—and tall drinks—ice-cold sparkling water with half-limes during the day, and another sandwich and vodka tonics with half-limes in the evening—and sitting in the living room, the air-conditioning turned on full blast, and reading. And before sleep, I'd dream about women I'd known, and women I wished I'd known, and, for sure, about women—Jin-gen first in line—I'd lost. And during these hours it would occasionally occur to me that maybe I was my father's son, after all.

 

Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, made up three-quarters of an island that was itself the third largest island in the world (after Greenland and New Guinea, and not counting Australia and Antarctica), and once we'd left the South China Sea behind, our plane headed inland for a makeshift landing field near a new plantation we were developing. Although Borneo had several mountainous regions, most of the island was made up of peat forests and lowland rain forests, and from the sky
these forests were astonishing—so many shades and textures of green that I found myself wondering if native peoples there had as many names for the color green as Eskimos did for snow.

Then, as we approached the plantation—“Here it comes, buddy, your first sight of our brave new world,” Nick said—the forests ended, and a vast treeless landscape came into view, and the instant it did, I felt as if someone had whacked me across the chest the way Jin-gen said Nick had whacked Joe Wanczyk. In the moment—I was trying to stand, but Nick pressed down hard on my arm to keep me where I was—all I could think of was getting my breath back, and of how a dozen years before—the memory, bouncing off the plane's wing, came in a flash of white sunlight—I'd felt the same thing when I'd first entered a giant redwood forest in Northern California, except that instead of standing on the ground and being surrounded by two-thousand-year-old, three-hundred-foot-high trees, I was in the sky looking down at something equally awe-inspiring.

It was as if the far rim of the rainforest over which we'd passed had been the edge of a cliff from which we were now dropping down into a world that, as far as I could see, was an endless expanse of mud that was spotted here and there with small fires and dismembered parts of trees. Batallions of orange, red, silver, and yellow earth movers, tractors, wood shredders, and dump trucks moved steadily along the ground, tearing the remaining trees and bushes from their roots while hundreds of men, like infantry, followed, but instead of rifles and machine guns, they carried chainsaws, and were slicing up and dragging trees that had been uprooted or chopped down. Our plane banked to the left, leveled out, and we headed for a landing strip edged with orange cones. At the end of the strip, a group of men stood waiting next to a pale red fire truck.

Other than foliage on shrub-like trees that lay on the ground, there was no green anywhere. “They've done a good job,” Nick said. “Clear-cut the whole fucking thing in eleven days. Amazing,
don't you think? We've got seven square miles of trees coming in next week from which we'll start getting oil in three years. The fuckers grow like weeds with thyroid conditions.”