The Other Side of the World (22 page)

“That's absurd.”

“Probably. But you're the guy with the vivid imagination—a chip off the old block, right?—so whatever cock-and-bull story you come up with that does the job for Lo-chin will be fine by me.”

As I expected, Lo-chin was horrified by the idea of deceiving her mother by claiming she'd previously deceived her, and when, a few months later, I went to Nick on behalf of another woman who'd come to me, Nick suggested that if I cared so much about these women, maybe I should marry one of them.

We were partying in Jan Martens' apartment (Jan was a young cousin of the guy I'd met on my first trip to our palm oil plantations), and Nick and I were both pretty wasted when I mentioned to him that Lin-fan, the woman he'd been with for two or three months, had visited me and declared she was going to kill herself if she lost Nick.

“Is that a threat or a promise?” Nick asked, and added that Lin-fan was full of it—that he'd been straight with her from the beginning about his intentions, or—to be more exact—his
lack
of intentions.

“You really get off on this, don't you?” I said.

Nick gestured to the party going on around us. “Get off on what—on having a good time, on spreading the wealth?”

“On being cruel,” I said.

“
Cruel?!
” He jabbed me in the chest. “Don't make me laugh, buddy. Cruel in order to be kind, maybe—because I gave these women the best times of their lives. I gave them memories to cherish during the long years that lie in wait after their families marry them off to some rich Chinese dodo, and after—”

“
If!
” I said.

“
If?
”

“
If
the families can find someone to marry them now that you've gotten what you want.”

“That's holier-than-thou bullshit I can live without,” he said, “because the truth—and you came halfway around the world to prove it—is that money, even more than our precious palm oil, is the universal lubricant. Money buys
everything
in this life, Charlie, in case you hadn't heard, and these people have more money than God. Like I've been saying, China's the future, baby, so sign up early.”

A woman who'd been nuzzling me was now stroking me along the inside of my thigh. I grabbed her hand, crushed it closed. She drew closer, whispered that she liked rough sex too, and that I could take her home whenever I wanted.

“And anyway, I'm not the marrying kind,” Nick said. “I tried it once, remember? And what'd I get for it?”

“A wife and a son.”

“Well, you got
that
right,” he said, and roared with laughter. “You really got that right, Charlie boy.”

“Goddamn it, Nick—I told you before never to call me Charlie boy,” I said, and found myself taking a wild swing at him. But I was so drunk, I missed completely, lost my balance, and flopped back down onto the couch.

Then, as if he'd scripted the scene ahead of time, a woman I hadn't noticed before stood above us, said she was Yue-ming's sister and was here to thank Nick for what he'd done for Yue-ming, who'd been working as an
au pair
in Massachusetts—in Marblehead—and who'd just sent news that she was engaged to marry a nephew of the family she'd been working for.

“See what I mean?” Nick said.

“I give up,” I said, and slumped down deeper into the couch.

“Yue-ming will take her husband's faith,” the young woman stated. “Her new name will be Sarah—Sarah
Kaplan
, once she is married—and she wanted me to bring you the happy news.”

Bowing courteously, the woman started to back away, but Nick reached out, grabbed her hand.

“And you'd like to go to her wedding, right?”

The woman nodded.

“Of course,” Nick said. “So write down your info before you leave and give it to me, and I'll see that it happens.”

The woman nodded, bowed again, and left.

Chuckling to himself, Nick repeated the name ‘Sarah Kaplan' a few times, then draped an arm around my shoulder. “Oh you Jews, you Jews—when it comes to money, you can always smell the future, can't you?”

“Look who's talking, all these rich Chinese women you go after.”

“Think about it for a second, though,” he said. “If it was money I was after, I could have staked my claim back when you and I were feasting on horny Jewish sorority chicks from Brookline and Longmeadow—JAPs, not Chinese, in those days…”

“Forget it.”

“That's what my old man told me to do, by the way,” Nick went on. “Much as he hated Jews—envied them, you ask me—he was never too proud to take their money—told me to do the same. But I came out here instead, and I stayed. Why?” He gestured to the party going on around us. “Because life is good here, Charlie. You see that, right?”

“Yes. Sometimes…”

“You were always a fast learner.”

“But you set me up,” I said. “I see that too.”

“You didn't need much help. I did like your spunk, though—the way you tried to haul off on me to protect the honor of a lady.”

“But
why
, Nick? Why do you do it?'

“Do what?”

“Make them fall in love with you.”

“Ah—a question I've asked myself many times.”

“And the answer?”

He cupped his chin in his hand, furrowed his brow. Then: “That's right.”

“
What's
right?”

“Yes.”

“But…”

The woman who'd said I could take her home had slipped her hand inside my shirt and was pinching my nipples.

“You shouldn't disappoint the lady,” Nick said, “and I'll see you Monday morning at the office.”

He stood, started to wander off, then turned back. “So why do I do it?” he asked. “Okay. That's an easy one, since there's only one true answer, same as always: because I can.”

Drunk as I was, it occurred to me, and not for the first time, that like a kid idolizing a star ballplayer—or my father's students idolizing him—I looked up to Nick not because I admired him and what he did, but because I wanted to be him: I wanted to be able to say and do what I wanted when I wanted to. What sheer freedom—and power—that would be! To be free, as Nick preached, of the usual burdens and responsibilities most people lived with most of the time. To do what you wanted when you wanted simply because you could…

The woman's hand was resting lightly on my stomach, her fingers moving south, and I grabbed her wrist, yanked her hand away, stood up, stumbled to the bathroom, put my finger down my throat, and puked big-time into the toilet.

After I'd flushed, and gone to the sink and washed, I looked up. In the mirror, I saw that Nick was leaning against the door, grinning.

“Vintage Hemingway,” he said.

“Vintage what?”

“Hemingway,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“Ask your old man—he's the expert on stuff like that. But in Papa's world-view, see, whenever someone has to face the truth—or death—and can't do it—whenever a guy sees that his life's come to shit—whenever he lies to himself and sees himself for the coward he truly is—he goes and pukes. Same crap, story after story. Trouble was that—like you, brother—Hemingway was too earnest, right?”

Pleased with his word-play, Nick grinned more broadly. “But like I said, if you don't believe me, you can ask your old man.”

 

After a while I stopped going to Nick when his women came to me. And after a while I stopped hanging out with him after work and on weekends. He went his way and I went mine pretty much, and what this meant was that I spent what free time I had either in Borneo or figuring out how to get there.

When I was in Borneo, no matter where—in a luxury hotel, a village hut, or camping out on a beach—I was happy. My life there seemed as rich and beautiful as the trees, flowers, mountains, meadows, lakes, caves, and rivers I was discovering—and as doomed as the forests, fields, birds, and animals that were fast disappearing. In Borneo, my senses were alive in ways they'd never been before, yet at the same time I'd sometimes feel as if I weren't there at all: as if I didn't exist, and never had. High on a mountain, or in the thick of a rainforest, I'd feel so exhilarated—so comforted—that I didn't care if I lived or died, or if I ever returned home.

Slowly, slowly, even at the office, feelings generated when I was in Borneo, or alone in my apartment on weekends, began to push aside the part of me Nick had been preying on. The fact that someone else with my education and smarts could have done what I was doing—that I was both dispensable and interchangeable—this realization not only filled me with joy, but enabled me to give up any morsel of rage I might have had toward what our company was doing. I came to take pleasure
from the long hours spent at the office and at our palm oil plantations precisely because it was true that if I didn't do what I was doing, someone else would. And there was this too: the more time I spent in Borneo, the smaller Nick became.

Then I got lucky. Yu-huan, a woman Nick had been seeing for a few months, came to me, not to ask me to plead with Nick, but to tell me what she was going to do if and when he broke up with her. Like the others, Yu-huan was born into a wealthy Chinese family—hers owned an import-export business in fishing gear: nets, traps, hooks, lines, motors, and various electronic gizmos. Her great-grandfather, illiterate but ingeniously shrewd in playing the Communists against the Nationalists, and in his timing—knowing which side to play when—had built up the business after the Second World War, and at ninety-three years old was still running it, still going over every detail of every contract before affixing his ‘chop'—the seal that represented his name—without which ‘chop' no deal could be finalized.

What was different about Yu-huan was that she didn't care if Nick married her or not. She'd fallen in love with him, yes, and had been foolish, for sure, but her foolishness, she said, had given her something more precious than love: the chance to be independent in the way men in her family were, which meant, she said (and in language that sounded like stuff I'd been hearing from women in the States for years), not being dependent upon a husband for her identity and well-being. What she
did
desire, however, was to have Nick's child, and about this she'd found within herself the ability, like her great-grandfather, to be ruthless.

‘Decide what you want,' her great-grandfather had taught her, ‘and take it, and in the taking beware, above all, of useless moral scruples.' Yu-huan had made inquiries, and had discovered the way Nick had treated other women from families like hers, and having this information, she said, gave her the courage to act upon her great-grandfather's teachings. So that if and when she
became pregnant with Nick's son (and the child, she insisted—even mild skepticism was forbidden—would be male), and if he refused to marry her, instead of killing herself, or having an abortion (her inquiries also revealed what I didn't deny: that I'd arranged an abortion for one of Nick's ex-girlfriends), she would kill him. In this way, she reasoned, the father of her child being dead, there would be no shame in having the child, only public mourning for the man to whom, she would claim (a claim to be verified by her mother and an aunt, in both of whom she would have previously, and falsely, confided), she had been secretly betrothed.

Her plan had had its equivalent in an earlier era—it had prevailed, she said, throughout the nineteenth century—when it had been possible for a young Chinese woman to marry a dead man. The arrangement was called a ‘ghost marriage,' and it enabled families to consolidate wealth and power while permitting young women to pursue their ambitions without the interference of husbands.

When she came to me the first time, she was two weeks late in her menstrual cycle, and though alarmed by her plan and by the eerily toneless way she presented it (and alarmed, too, to realize how much it appealed to me), I tried to show nothing. I heard her out, then asked why she'd chosen to confide in me.

“Because I have seen the way you look at Nick when he is not looking at you,” she said, “and therefore know you will understand what I am going to do if I must, and that you will not oppose me or betray me.”

“Of course not,” I said.

“And because I have come to understand myself well enough to know I cannot do what I am going to do alone. Therefore, I have decided to place my trust in you.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, you can trust me.”

By the time she came to me five weeks later, she had confirmed the fact that she was pregnant and that the child would be a boy. She'd informed Nick and, as expected, he'd told her it wasn't his problem—he'd made no promises, had advised her to take precautions—and declared there was no way under the sun he was going to marry her. In fact, given her condition, it was best, he'd declared, if they never saw each other again.

“I am, therefore, going to follow through on my plan,” she said, “which will embody in my newborn son a triumph of both justice and vengeance. And I am here today to invite you to be with me when I do what I must do.”

She was so serene in the way she presented her decision—her gray-green eyes clear and unwavering while seeming to demand that I return her gaze with equal resolve—that I didn't know what to do except to nod assent, and to blink a few times so that we didn't get into a stare-me-down contest.

“Am I bitter?” she asked calmly. “Of course. But my bitterness, I have found, is bringing more joy than love ever has. Can you understand that?”