New Yorkers were not overtly friendly—women, especially, would rarely return a glance or smile—but if you stopped and asked for directions, or for the time (I never wore a watch, so I could initiate conversations this way), New Yorkers were the most helpful people I’d ever known. I loved shmoozing with store owners, bargaining with sidewalk vendors, eating by myself in restaurants, overhearing conversations and lovers’ quarrels, and, mostly, meandering along streets—Broadway especially, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (where I rented a one-bedroom apartment)—that overflowed with thousands of people I didn’t know.
What I loved most, though, as I had when I was a boy, was riding the subways. And this time it wasn’t so much the physical stuff that enchanted—the tracks and tunnels, rats and dirt and noise—but the mix of people. In any one subway car on any day of the week I’d get to see individuals of more varied and wondrous colors, shapes, dress, sizes, and ethnicities than most people in the rest of the world saw in a lifetime: Asian, Hispanic, Russian, Slavic, Scandinavian, black, white, old, young, tall, short, fat, skinny, disabled, disheveled, and decrepit. Sometimes I’d close my eyes as soon as I sat down in a subway car and make a mind-bet with myself as to how many different nationalities—how many different species of human being—I’d see sitting on the stretch of seats directly across from me. And if there was no doubling—no more, say, than one black man or one Asian woman—I’d tell myself I’d won double.
Living in New York for the first time in my life, what I also loved—how not?—was the feeling it gave me of being close to Max by imagining I was experiencing some of what he’d known when he was a young man growing up in New York before he’d married, before he’d published, before he’d settled in Northampton, and before I’d been born.
Despite the fact that Singapore was, in its harbor, financial centers, and skyscrapers, a thriving center of global commerce, and that people who worked there worked at least as hard as people did in New York (until I worked with the Chinese in Singapore, I’d thought nobody worked as hard as New Yorkers), and despite the fact that it was amazingly diverse, both in its native population and in its expatriates and itinerant merchants, it seemed as different from New York as Amherst was from Bangladesh, and it seemed to exist merely and provisionally as a place, to use Nick’s phrase, ‘for processing product.’
By the time I arrived, Nick had taken care of pretty much all my essential needs—apartment, car, work pass, health care, health club, insurance, domestic help—and all I had to do, and most of what I did do that first week, after I’d slept off jetlag, was to let him shepherd me from one bank, bureau, and agency to another.
Our company’s offices were on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth floors of a building in what was known as the CBD (Central Business District), with spectacular, unobstructed views of the marina area, the harbor islands (Coral Island, Paradise Island, Treasure Island, Pearl Island), and the Straits of Singapore beyond. Our company—Singapore Palm Oil Technologies Limited—produced and sold palm oil, and to do this, we bought, leased, developed, and managed palm oil plantations for which my responsibilities were pretty much the same as Nick’s: to make sure that what we promised to deliver was delivered safely, and at the agreed-upon price. Our job was to monitor every stage of the enterprise—from contract negotiations to locating plantations and/or creating new ones, and from the deforesting of land to the planting and cultivation of trees, the hiring of workers, the harvesting of fruit, the transformation of fruit into oil, the shipping of either the fruit or the oil (crude and/or processed), and the delivery and acceptance of product. What this meant, whether the oil was produced by small companies or large (in old-fashioned village ways or on modern industrial plantations), was that we were involved in what happened, and in the most literal way, on and in the ground.
My flight, via Hong Kong, arrived in Singapore early on a Sunday morning. Nick met me at the airport and drove me straight to his pad, where I slept for fourteen straight hours, after which, on and off for the rest of the week, starting early Monday morning, we made rounds of insurance and real estate offices, government agencies, law offices, and banks, and, still in a stupor—enhanced at breakfast that first morning by two Bloody Marys (heavy on horseradish and vodka)—I filled out forms, signed papers, nodded comprehension, had my photo taken some half-dozen times, and wrote checks. Nick showed me the apartment and car he’d picked out for me, got me settled in my office, and introduced me to people at work (two secretaries and three clerks, all Chinese, were assigned to me).
Whenever he had to excuse himself to take care of stuff that needed immediate attention, I sat in my office, gazed out at the harbor and horizon, and read through stacks of brochures, reports, and papers he’d assembled for me—mostly about the wonders of palm oil, which, I learned, had already passed bananas as the number one fruit crop in the world, and which could be used not only in the production of food, soaps, detergents, and cosmetics, but also as an inexpensive biofuel. Palm oil was the future of the world, brochures and company literature proclaimed, and who were we, Nick advised, to argue against such sublime prophecy? Others, however, I soon discovered when I went online to inform myself about palm oil—especially about what the creation of palm oil plantations were doing to Borneo and the environment—didn’t see palm oil as anything like the pure blessing Singapore Palm Oil Technologies Limited claimed it was.
At exactly five-forty in the afternoon of my second Monday in Singapore, Nick announced that, our work done, it was time to play, at which point we headed for his favorite watering hole, The Sling Shot, located on the ground floor of one of the city’s major waterfront hotels, with views both of the western end of the Tanjong Pagar wharves (they extended for more than three miles), and of one of the most extraordinary Hindu temples in the world, built, Nick informed me, in the middle of the nineteenth century by Indian convicts.
The amazing thing about The Sling Shot, and what delighted Nick about it, were not the views it offered through a huge plate glass window that was its southern wall, though the views were exceptional, but its interior, which had been modeled, and with impeccable fidelity to detail—including the long bar, panelled walls, potted plants, and (even) cigar smoke scent—after The Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in New York City.
“Go figure, right?” Nick said. We ordered drinks, toasted our reunion, and then Nick talked about work, moving directly to what, he asserted, I would discover was at the heart of it all: contracts. Corruption was everywhere and assumed, bribes a legitimate and time-honored form of negotiation, and what might have been considered illegal or unethical somewhere else was here openly talked about in language that emphasized friendship and respect. But alongside this traditionally sanctioned trading of favors there was an obsessive formality and exactitude, a legacy of English rule, where everything you did—when you blew your nose, or pulled up anchor, or arranged to arrange for an arrangement that would lead to an arrangement—had to be authorized by a contract that was impeccably detailed, and, once signed, was honored in each and every particular and—the good news—could be trusted.
We had a second round of drinks, Nick talked about the chain of command in our company—who we reported to, who reported to us, who was and wasn’t trustworthy—and then, as we started on our third round—we were mildly pie-eyed, and Nick kept slapping me on the shoulder and exclaiming: “You’re really here, buddy! You did it! You’re really here!”—he signalled to the maître d’, who brought a leather-bound book that he set down in front of me, a book handsomely tooled with gold and green curlicues, and one that seemed too thick to be a menu or wine list. I started to open it, but Nick stopped me, his hand on top of mine.
“Guess,” he said.
“A wedding album.”
“Close,” Nick said.
“A Chinese translation of Triangle.”
“Closer,” Nick said.
“A smorgasbord of Asian delicacies.”
“Bingo!” Nick said, and took his hand
away.
I opened the book, began turning the pages, and found myself looking not at wedding pictures or elegant entrées, but at glossy photographs of beautiful young Asian women who might have been posing for Chanel or Oscar de la Renta ads in places such as Vogue, W, or Harper’s Bazaar, except that the majority of them wore no clothes, and were doing things to themselves and other women you would never see in these magazines. In several pictures, there were two women, in some three or more (there were no men in any of them), and in some—I looked at Nick with alarm when I came to the first of these—there were girls who could not have been more than eight or nine years old.
Below each picture was a number.
“Welcome to Singapore,” Nick said, “where false advertising is frowned upon.”
“What you see is what you get?”
“And you do get it,” he said, and when he did, as if on cue, the maître d’ returned, and placed a cordless telephone between us.
I had left the book open to a picture of a pretty Asian woman, perhaps nineteen or twenty, dressed in the familiar, somewhat shapeless uniform of a Singapore Airlines flight attendant—a sweet, unrevealing batik print in blues, reds, and golds. She looked less voluptuous than most of the others, and—the word that came to mind even as I nodded to the maître d’—incongruously wholesome.
I lifted the receiver, tapped in the number below the photo, then placed the phone back in its cradle. A few minutes later, the maître d’ handed me a small ivory-colored envelope. Inside the envelope was a card with a number on it: 747.
“The room, I assume,” I said. “And it’s here in this hotel, right?”
Nick nodded.
“Here’s the deal,” Nick said. “Much as I love hanging out with you, Charlie, I decided to be practical, and staying with me would clip wings, yours more than mine. This way, the journey can be as varied as you choose, and without me standing behind you directing traffic. And there’s also this: since everything’s a perk—we’ve got relocation allowances and expense accounts to make a teamster official envious—without you having to worry you’re running up a tab on my turf. You can stay here, all expenses paid—and I mean all—until your apartment’s ready.”
“What about my toothbrush?” I asked.
In the middle of the night—two-twenty-one on the bedside clock—the door opened and two women entered the room, one of them carrying a small satchel. The woman I was with—her name was Bao-zhu, which she’d told me meant treasure-jewel—put a finger against my lips to indicate that I shouldn’t be alarmed.
The two women, dressed as Bao-zhu had been in the uniforms of Singapore Airlines, seemed to glide toward me on cushions of air. The woman carrying the satchel set it on the floor, and spoke in a surprisingly clear and silky voice, and with an accent more American than English.
“We are here compliments of your good friend and ours,” she said. She pointed to the satchel. “I have brought your toothbrush, of course, plus several pieces of clothing and some personal items I thought you might need before you leave for work in the morning.”
“Hey thanks—but am I now expected to reciprocate—to send two women to his room?” I asked.
“If you wish,” she said, and smiled in a way that made me think she understood my attempt at irony. The second woman, who had moved to the other side of the bed, stepped out of her shoes and dress, and lay down behind Bao-zhu.
“You speak excellent English,” I said to the woman who faced me.
“My name is Jin-gen,” she said, “which means golden root, but you may call me Ginny if you prefer. I will be your translator tonight.”
The woman behind Bao-zhu, her arms around Bao-zhu’s waist, tapped me on the shoulder and spoke in what I assumed was Chinese.
“She wishes to explain that although her name, Jin-feng, is similar to mine in its first part,” Jin-gen said, “yet due to its second part, it becomes quite different from mine. It means golden phoenix.”
“So that I’ll rise again—is that the message?” I forced a laugh. “I mean, come on—what’s going on here? Is this for real?”
“Oh yes—quite real, as you will see presently. And seeing is believing—is that not a common expression where you come from?”
“Seeing is believing,” I said. “Sure. But I’ve never done a foursome before—a quartet, right?—never even seen one.”
“Then we will have the honor of being your first.” She knelt beside the bed so that her face—an almost perfect oval that was heartstoppingly beautiful, and without any least sign of care or tension—was level with mine. “You are very sweet, Mister Charles,” she said, “but there is no need to be nervous.”
“You can call me Charlie if you like,” I said.
Again, she smiled ever so slightly and, with her index finger, she pressed on my chest at the center of my breast bone.
“As I said, I will be your translator tonight. I am here, that is, to translate your wishes into reality. In this room, with us, whatever you desire or imagine is possible.”
“I wonder, though,” I said—a line I thought my father—or Seana!—might have found admirable—“if that’s either desirable or possible.”
She answered my question by running her finger down my chest, the nail scraping my skin but not breaking it, and letting her finger come to rest just above my navel.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I see what you’re getting at, but when you came in a few minutes ago, I was asleep, and at first…”
I hesitated.
“Yes?”
“What about my dreams?” I asked. “When you entered the room, I was dreaming wonderful dreams, and in the last one I was reading a book—I was a character in the book, actually—and I fell in love with a beautiful woman who confessed to having loved me forever, and we began to make love as if it were the first time for each of us.”
“And then—?”
“The famous what-happened-next—?”
“Yes. Tell me, please. What happens next?”
“Okay,” I said. “But first, I have to tell you that I’m feeling very sad. I mean, I know it’s strange, given that the three of you are here, but I’m feeling sad, and I think it’s because just as the woman and I were about to make love, my dream was interrupted by two women entering my room.”
“So you are upset with me for stealing your dream from you, is that it?”
Bao-zhu was licking the back of my neck while Jin-feng, who’d moved to the foot of the bed, had begun massaging my feet.
“Maybe,” I said.
“You will have more dreams,” Jin-gen said. “You have my assurances.”
In the morning, when the others were gone, I asked Jin-gen if she could return and spend the evening with me, and she said she could, and I also asked if I could call her JG rather than Ginny—that Ginny seemed like a name for a high school cheerleader, and I didn’t want to think of her that way.
“You may call me Jin-gen,” she said.
“Why not JG?”
“Because.”
“Because why—?”
“Because it is not my name,” she said.
Before she left—I was to have an hour or so to myself until it was time to leave for work and for my appointments, she explained, so the transition from night to day would not be unnecessarily abrupt, and so the moment could be noted in a way I felt appropriate—she said she would pick me up by car in front of my office building at five-forty, and she hoped I would allow her to make reservations for dinner.
“Sure,” I said, and added: “Many things may be possible, though I get the feeling that disagreeing with you will not be one of them.”
“You are at least as clever as you are kind,” she said, inclining her head toward me in a slight bow, and leaving the room before I could ask what had made her use the word ‘kind.’
A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door, and I thought—hoped—she might be returning, but it was a waiter bringing breakfast. After Jin-gen’s arrival, I
’d slept well when I’d slept—a deep post-coital sleep that was, as far as I could remember, and despite the assurances Jin-gen had given me, dreamless. This was something that rarely happened to me, and I’d mentioned this, told Jin-gen I loved to dream—that I often wanted to go to sleep in order to dream—and that my father had sometimes reminded me of something I’d said when I was a boy: that for me going to sleep and dreaming was like going to the movies, but even better because in all the stories I got to be the hero.
And there was this too, I realized while, from the terrace, I watched small boats (called bumboats, or cigar boats, I’d learn) darting and skittering around the larger boats as they made their morning pick-ups and deliveries—that despite the bodily pleasures and intimacies I’d just experienced, I was feeling at ease in a way I’d sometimes felt, not after a night of love, but after an evening spent hanging out with good friends.
Jin-gen stayed with me for the next seven nights, and I counted none but happy hours during our time together, and not only because of the physical pleasures, which were exquisite beyond anything I’d ever known, but because of the way, at dinner that first night, and at breakfast the next morning—and before we made love, and after we made love, and when we’d wake in the middle of the night or toward morning—we traded stories. It felt wonderful to lie beside her and feel as if I’d been given permission to tell her everything, and to do so not to impress her, or to get her to please me in sublime and/or (previously) forbidden ways, or to settle scores, or to let old injuries and demons loose—or for any reason, really—but for the sheer joy of telling stories.
The Other Side of the World Page 10
