The unlikely, intangible result of all this was that Caroline owed me. I knew it, she knew it, and I won’t lie—this was not a feeling I minded.
My wife and daughters stared morosely from the taxi windows as we sped from the Xi’an airport to the Golden Flower hotel, past block after block of drab apartment buildings and sidewalks lined with limp, dusty trees. The opulent hotel boosted everyone’s spirits; nothing like the sight of uniformed doormen, marble floors, and rich Midwesterners patting their billfolds to renew one’s faith in the bounty of the universe. To my secret delight, not even Caroline cared to accompany me into “old” Xi’an, which, according to the Asian woman in a collegiate headband behind the front desk (no doubt she was the product of classes in how to look and act Western), was where I would find Stuart’s address. I left Caroline sprawled on the bed boning up on Qin Shi Huangdi, the maniac emperor who’d built the terra-cotta warriors—at the cost of many a laborer, she reported; the final masterpiece contained not only the blood and sweat of its sculptors, but occasionally even their flesh.
On the streets of “old” Xi’an I found the lady tea vendors out in force—women whose idea of washing a glass was to sprinkle water on it. I hadn’t let my daughters near these people, convinced that their unwashed glasses harbored all manner of deadly diseases just waiting for the chance to invade my girls’ frail intestines. But I bought myself a glass of tea and sipped it, bought one of those fluffy white buns filled with a suspicious mash of vegetables and scarfed it down, then bought a second. I felt terrific.
I wandered inside a Buddhist temple and heard people chanting to this delicate sound of chimes, and my stomach was fluttery in a way I remembered from childhood, the feeling you had shoplifting, or creeping into the next-door neighbor’s basement. I left the temple, savoring this as I walked to Stuart’s street, when suddenly, from half a block away, I saw him. He was standing right there on the sidewalk, talking with three old Chinese ladies. My heart leapt—there is no other way to put it. The blood rushed to my face the way it used to when I’d just seen a girl I wanted to put the moves on, and then I stopped dead. What in hell was the matter with me? This was a man, after all—a man who’d ripped me off and made me look like an ass. Was I losing my mind? But already I’d started walking again, toward him.
“Stuart,” I said. He looked blank, and I felt weirdly crushed. “Kunming, remember?” I said. “You got us the tickets.”
“Oh. Right.” He gave a baffled smile. The Chinese ladies moved away.
“We made it,” I said, idiotically.
There was an awkward silence. “So, you still writing about drugs?” I asked.
“This week it’s smuggling.”
“Smuggling what?”
“Antiques. People leaving the country with vases and stuff.”
“You sort of specialize in crime stories?” I asked, my pulse firing like a machine gun.
“It’s an area I know pretty well.”
“From experience.” I couldn’t stop myself.
Stuart cocked his head. “You sort of a would-be journalist?”
“Either that or a would-be criminal,” I said, and burst out laughing.
Stuart said nothing. He took a long look at me, and I saw in his face the first sign of real curiosity.
“Anything to see around here besides those clay warriors?” I asked.
“Not much in Xi’an,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going to some Buddhist caves outside town that are pretty extraordinary.”
“Is that right?”
“You’re welcome, if you can sneak away,” he said. “But you’d have to stay overnight.”
“Might be doable.”
He named a place at the train station and said he would wait there at ten the next morning. “If you can make it, great,” he said, turning to go.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Brady bonds, emerging markets: these were much on Cameron Pierce’s mind at Harry Meyer’s stag party, where I met him the first time. Olive-green suit, ponytail, an air of having more cowboy in him than the rest of us. How did Harry know him? Harry was tables away, a wet shirt draped over his head, trashed. It wasn’t long before the strippers showed up, three of them, each with different-colored hair, and while they went to work on Harry, Cameron told me about the limited partnerships he was setting up to invest in African countries: Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Botswana, Zimbabwe.
“You spend much time over there?” I asked.
He’d pulled a red apple from the centerpiece and was eating it with a fierce pleasure that made me want one, too. “As much as possible,” he said, grinning.
“I hear you,” I said. And, on impulse, I told him about my stint with the Peace Corps—something I rarely mentioned to people in the business.
Cameron set down his apple core and leaned toward me so that I could hear him over the hoots and catcalls issuing from our colleagues. “That’s what makes all this bullshit worthwhile,” he said. “Getting out. Seeing what’s really there.” We understood each other then; we were separate from—better than—what surrounded us.
The next week, Cameron Pierce’s lackey made a presentation at our office. One of our junior traders, Burt Phelps, seemed as interested in the deal as I was but wanted to do more checks on Pierce, or at least wait until Harry Meyer came back from his honeymoon on Bora Bora so we could run it by him. “Feel free,” I said. “I’m going in.” I was operating on pure gut, that great, impulsive organ we traders live by. And because he felt like an asshole, I guess, Burt went in, too. Both of us put up the minimum—twenty-five thousand. The lackey came to pick up our certified checks.
Cameron and I talked on the phone a couple of times after that. He was heading for the Far East. “That’s the place,” he said. “You want to get lost, do it there.” We agreed to have lunch after he got back. My monthly statements started coming in; with returns at twenty percent, I couldn’t complain. Burt was over the moon. Then I guess we sort of forgot about it. I’d got four statements in all when they stopped arriving, but it was two months at least before I noticed, and then only when Burt mentioned it. “Sam, you heard anything lately from Africo?” he said.
The rest was straight out of bad TV: calls to the Africo office hitting a disconnected line; a trip to the Kearny Street address on Cameron Pierce’s business card revealing that Africo, Ltd., had never been there. Nor was it registered with the SEC or anywhere else; ditto for Cameron Pierce and his lackey, whose name I can’t remember now. Harry Meyer, whom we’d forgotten even to consult, had never heard of the guy. “Cameron who? My party?” he said, perplexed. “Someone else must have brought him.” In other words, they were con men. We’d been had. Not that unusual in a business like ours, where guys had so much cash to throw around. But the ones it happened to were usually younger, more junior than me. More like Burt. And it was Burt who’d had the reservations.
In the world of lousy investments, twenty-five grand isn’t much to lose. But I couldn’t get over it. The guy had sat there selling me on his phony deal, and while I was thinking how much I liked him, how good it all sounded, he was thinking, He’s nibbling, no question. Peace Corps?—oh shit, I’ve got him now! The guys at work teased me about the fine example I’d set; Caroline wrung her hands a little over the money; then they all pretty much forgot about it. But not me. I kept thinking of him, Cameron Pierce, wondering how many “partners” he’d brought in, how many “deals” he’d pulled off in the past. He was somewhere—lying on a beach, smoking cigars, spending our money. At night, while Caroline slept, I’d find myself wondering who he was, really, at the very bottom. Was he anyone?
If I’d really listened to the guy, I decided, I would’ve seen it coming. Hadn’t he practically told me? I’m from another world, he’d said—a place where this one means nothing. I’d assured him that I was, too. But it wasn’t true. I’d played by the rules. And he’d won.
“What kind of bullshit is this?” Caroline said when I’d outlined for her what
struck me as a perfectly reasonable plan: while she and the girls visited the Qin terra-cotta warriors the following day, I would take an overnight trip with a total stranger to another part of China.
“The same guy who got us the tickets?” she said. “He lives in Xi’an? Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“I wasn’t sure how you’d react.”
“Why should I care?”
“You seem to care now.”
“Now that I know you kept it a secret, I care. Now that you’ve decided to disappear with him, yes, Sam, I care.”
We stared at each other, furious. “Is this sexual?” Caroline asked in disbelief.
“Oh, Christ in holy heaven!” I thundered.
My wife studied me. After a long while she said, “We’re not doing this, Sam.”
“Not doing what?”
“Whatever it is you’re trying to do.”
“I’m going with him.”
“Fine,” she said. “We’ll come, too.”
We stood mournfully in the long, snaking line of Chinese peasants waiting to board the train. Melissa and Kylie were doing their best to sulk, but their utter mystification at our sudden change of plans and the appearance of a stranger in our midst interfered with the purity of their displeasure. I went with Stuart to buy the tickets—his, too; it seemed the least I could do after he’d so gracefully agreed to bring my entire family with him to the Buddhist caves. He took off to do an errand before the train left.
“Is this a train to the worriers, Daddy?” Kylie asked.
“The warriors are for tourists,” I said.
“But wasn’t that the whole point of coming here?” Melissa asked. “For the terra-cotta warriors?”
“You’re welcome to stay and see them,” I said. “Personally, the obsessions of some whacked-out king are about the last thing I’m in the mood for.”
“Why don’t we wait in the first class lounge so the girls can sit down?” my wife suggested.
“We’re riding hard-seat,” I said. “It’s only eight hours.”
The girls looked aghast. I watched them cast baleful looks their mother’s way, and saw, in their silky, seamless faces, the thick patina so many years of privilege had left behind. Suddenly I was enraged—enraged at both of them for not knowing what these privileges had cost.
“You can wait in line with the rest of the world,” I said. “It won’t kill you.”
Crestfallen, they gazed at me—their father, who rarely let them ride a bus for fear of all the germs and scrofulous characters they might encounter.
“Your father’s afraid that if we ride first class, his friend will be disappointed in us,” Caroline said acidly.
“He’s not my friend,” I said.
“Then whose friend is he?” she asked.
For every square inch of hard-seat, there were roughly twenty-five people anxious to sit down, bringing to mind the phrase “lousy food and not enough of it.” The majority of passengers were peasant boys, barefoot, their rolled-up pants exposing those dark round scars they all seemed to have from the knee down. They’d been shopping in Xi’an and now were loaded up with identical cheap zippered bags half bursting with booty. There were no seats for my daughters, and I watched their faces fill with fear at finding themselves caught in the press of sweating, seething humanity I’d taught them to avoid. To my relief, several peasant boys leapt from their seats to make room for the girls, who ended up next to a window, facing each other. Caroline sat near them, still angry, avoiding my eyes. Stuart stood off to one side, already looking weary of us.
The hours drifted past. I kept an eye on my daughters, watching their sullenness give way to a kind of solemnity, acknowledgment of a situation that was obviously bigger than they were. Each time the train eased to a stop at a platform, food vendors swarmed around outside its windows, pushing tiny carts. After the first two hours, Kylie and Melissa were in there with the best of them, dangling fistfuls of limp bills to buy homemade popsicles on toothpicks, plastic bags full of tiny green apples, and squares of coarse yellow cake. Everything they bought, they offered to their neighbors. This broke my heart.
The land got very strange. Gray hills bulged from the earth in such a way that their middles looked wider than their bases. “It’s like Dr. Seuss,” I overheard Kylie say. Caroline sketched in her notebook. I stared out the window at the weird hills and told myself that we lived in San Francisco, in a house on Washington Street that I’d bought for a million in cash six years ago, that our house existed right now, the burglar alarm on, automatic sprinklers set to keep the garden alive. It’s all still there, I thought. Waiting. But I didn’t believe it.
We reached our destination late that afternoon—the sun still high but pouring out thick, stale light. Our presence seemed more of a novelty here than it had anywhere else we’d been, and as we tottered toward the street, passersby gathered around to stare at us in unabashed amazement.
The binguan, or tourist hotel, could easily have doubled as a jail: small rooms each containing two narrow, squeaking beds; dirty concrete floors; communal “bathrooms”—a row of holes in the concrete—no paper, no doors, big flies drunk on the stench from below. “My God,” I told Caroline, frantic when I saw the arrangements, “there’s no way we can stay here.”
“I should think you’d be delighted.”
“There’s got to be a better hotel in this town!”
“This is a tiny little town, Sam. Why should there be another hotel?”
“Shit.” I was starting to sweat. “What’re we going to do?”
“Relax,” Caroline said. “It’s one night.”
“But the girls. Jesus!”
“We’re okay, Daddy,” piped Kylie from the next room.
I rushed over there to find her hunched on her cot, looking out the grimy window at a long outdoor trough lined with faucets—our sink—where Melissa was washing her face. I sat on Kylie’s bed and put my arm around her. “I love you, baby,” I said. “You know that.” She nodded and slumped against me. Melissa returned to the room, dripping water and shivering.
“It’s cold,” she said.
“Get a towel,” I told her.
“There aren’t any.”
I looked around. “How can there not be towels?”
“There’s no hot water either, Dad,” Melissa said. “Or soap.” She threw herself on her cot to a yelp from the rusty springs and stared at the ceiling.
I watched helplessly as her long hair gathered on the grimy floor. Then I felt Kylie shaking beside me and peered at her wet, streaked face. “Oh, baby, stop,” I said. “Please, what’s wrong? Tell Daddy.”
“I’m scared,” Kylie said through chattering teeth.
“Scared of what? What’s scaring you?”
Melissa sighed from her bed.
“What if we never go home?” Kylie asked in a small, strained voice.
“Of course we’ll go home,” I said. “This is just a vacation.”
For a long time no one spoke. I held on to Kylie and stared challengingly at Melissa, my oldest, waiting for her to snort or wince—to betray her scorn in the smallest way. But Melissa lay still, her eyes closed, arms crossed on her chest.
What exactly Stuart made of the bedraggled and downcast group he led to dinner, God only knew. I sensed that we amused him. The city felt like a place the world had forgotten: dusty streets, a department store whose listless, utilitarian window displays reminded me of South Dakota, where I grew up—those yellow sheets of plastic they hung inside store windows to keep out the glare. I remembered kicking stones as I peered through that yellow plastic at outdated transistor radios that I didn’t dare even ask my luckless father to buy me, and promising myself I’d have enough money someday to buy the whole fucking store, if I wanted.
At a restaurant bizarrely named Wine Bar, we dined on bowls of scalding broth mixed with soy sauce and two raw eggs, which instantly boiled. The other diners ceased eating and gathered around to more fully enjoy
the spectacle of our presence. Soon a modest crowd pushed in from the street through the open door or pressed faces to windows, peering in at us.
Stuart turned to the girls. “How much do you hate China?” he asked.
They glanced nervously at me. “Just a little,” Kylie said.
“More than anything.” Melissa, of course.
“What’s the worst thing about it?” Stuart asked.
After some consideration, they agreed that the raucous throat-clearing and spitting on the pavement were the worst.
“In India, they spit red,” Stuart said.
“Gross,” said Melissa. “Why?”
“They chew a red nut, and it makes them spit. So they spit red.”
“Do you hate it here, too?” Melissa asked in a sweet, bantering voice I almost never heard her use anymore.
“Me, I love it,” he said. “You know every minute how far away you are.”
“Isn’t that true anywhere in the Third World?” Caroline said. “India, say, or Africa?”
“Too much suffering,” Stuart said. “Unless you’re there to help the people, what’s the point? But in China, everyone eats.”
“Our dad did that,” Melissa said. “He went to Africa and he fed the kids.”
There was a respectful pause. “Peace Corps?” Stuart asked.
“We went together,” Caroline said, taking a sip from my bowl.
Outside, the night fell dingy and red. Trailed by a small crowd of spectators, we walked to a market where vendors displayed piles of black grapes on thin cloths spread over the pavement. We hadn’t seen grapes in China before, and Melissa and Kylie each bought a bunch. The grapes were hard and sweet. Stuart bought some fresh walnuts, which he carried over to us in his untucked plaid shirt. The girls each took one. “But how do we break it?” Kylie asked.
Emerald City Page 2
