When he handed me the key to my apartment, he joked, “Now you, too, are part of the Fong Family Resettlement Scheme.”
I took the key without argument. Angie, my sister, is still stuck in a one-bedroom four-share in the West Village, and Angie’s twenty-seven. I don’t keep up with the day-to-day politics of Albany let alone of Hong Kong, but I was sure glad that China had timed its takeover for just the moment I came fully into ripeness. I was ready that July. Frankie didn’t have a chance.
The apartment he rented for me was less than a mile from his own ten-bedroom Victorian on Union Avenue, with five baths and a wraparound porch wide enough for a jogging track. I never saw the inside. Frankie set some rules, the main rule being that he came to me, like some kind of old-time Chinese landlord. He was a new element in a traditional town, he apologized, he needed to come on as a respectable businessman. A cornered rat, I translated.
I liked this arrangement. I preferred he spend the nights in my place, among the clutter of vintage straw hats on dresser tops, the chintz dust ruffle I’d tacked together for the brass bed and the sepia-tinted family photos in oval frames. The family photos weren’t of the DiMartinos nor of the Giancarellis, which was Mama’s maiden name. I bought them in flea markets and at garage sales. Grim old grannies and stern grandpas in round collars and derby hats stared down at me making love to a Chinese immigrant and set their mouths just a little tighter.
Frankie wasn’t a man of set habits. He was spontaneous in a scripted sort of way, the way good actors are. It must have been the Flash in him. Night after night he could deliver the same love grunts and bites, make the same smooth moves, and have them come across to me as unique, urgent, sincere. Back then, because I was into Improv in a big way, I didn’t think to ask who scripted my part in the Fong-produced Flash Kicks American Ass extravaganza.
He brought over old Flash videos and walked me through each shot, tried to educate me about the hidden Shakespeare: You see the Chinese Othello figure Flash cuts, or That’s just a choreographed Coriolanus with a bit more blood.
The ending Frankie gave each Flash video was pure Fong! Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris left piles of bodies behind. Frankie made customers out of both victims and villains. That’s why I fell so hard for Frankie. He leveraged buyouts of silver linings to every sad sack’s clouds.
We made love only after he’d rewound the tape. At forty-five, Frankie still had the Flash moves. And afterwards, we lay in bed and talked. Well, he talked; I mostly listened. I’m a good listener, the best. I know to pay attention. It makes the talker feel good, and all the while I’m filing away factoids for future use. Autodidacts are the best educated. I don’t mean to knock my SUNY marketing degree—it should get a twenty-three-year-old a job that pays more than minimum wage, it cost Mama and Pappy enough—but classroom education isn’t going to take anyone to the places that wisdom born of smarts will. I learned more in those two summer months in the cozy crook of Frankie’s arm than in the four debt-loaded years on the Albany campus.
Before Frankie insinuated himself into my life, I’d convinced myself that I was just another restless upstate daughter looking to make it medium-big and marry medium-nice in Manhattan. In that Before Frankie epoch, I didn’t read the papers or watch the news, but I knew, because all DiMartinos were Republicans, that the country had gone to the dogs, and the cities had been taken over by crack-cocaine addicts, rapists, muggers and welfare queens. Frankie changed all that. For Frankie, the New World was as green and crisp as a freshly counterfeited hundred-dollar bill. In the After Frankie months I became a news junkie, a fact hound. I started thinking like Frankie, a cornered rat with options. And suddenly life became interesting. Suddenly I was sniffing out possibilities where the world saw only problems.
About a month after we’d watched our first video together, as Frankie was slipping Flash Takes All into my rented recorder and explaining to me how the opening shot was his homage to “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” I whispered a confession. “I wish I’d had the Flash for a dad,” I said.
Pappy, forgive me; you aren’t the one I regret.
Frankie inhabits a Frankie-centric universe. “Think lover, not father,” he sulked. “Age doesn’t diminish … uh, drive and virility.”
Watch out, all you tigers and rhinos, I thought: the Flash would wipe out whole continents if he decided he was slipping. I hit the EJECT button on the VCR. “I wasn’t talking about us, Frankie.”
He pulled a tiny snapshot out of his snakeskin wallet and shoved it in my face. “The chap look old to you, dahling?”
I caught a smoky blur of a smiling Chinese face above a satin jacket, and lied, no. Not that the man looked old and droopy, not exactly. He looked more plumped up, embalmed.
“My dad,” Frankie said. “At eighty-two.”
“So this is where you get your good looks.”
“Old age runs with its tail between its legs when it comes up against Fong genes.” He didn’t smile when he said this. “Genes count.”
I grabbed Al’s photo before Frankie could put it back in his wallet.
“What can you tell me about Bombay?” I asked that night, after we’d made love. “What do you know about Devigaon village?”
Hot, dry, smoky, full of whores: that’s the litany I expected. But Frankie said nothing, he just stared. He stared at me the way I must have stared at him that first time.
“You’re from there, aren’t you?”
And I knew, from that instant, I had power over him. I was what he wanted, what he aspired to, and could never have. And I’d revealed it all to him, so casually, almost carelessly.
“That’s it!” Frankie snapped his fingers. “I knew there was something exotic about you. A touch of Merle Oberon.”
I didn’t go to foreign movies, didn’t know the names of foreign stars. From the way he said it, I assumed he was paying me a compliment.
“It’s your eyes,” he went on. “It’s the way you walk. Like women in Burma balancing jugs on their heads …”
“Hey,” I objected, “I don’t do jugs!” I didn’t give a damn about what women in Burma wore for hats. “I’m adopted.” My voice sounded firmer, bolder, the second time. Not I was adopted, but I am adopted, meaning I want you to know that we’ve both invented ourselves, you couldn’t have found another woman as much like you as I am if you’d taken out personals.
That night what must have started out for Frankie as a one-night stand clotted into codependency.
The not-quite-American playboy had plans on a grand scale for the not-quite-Asian novice playgirl. He wanted me to model for Chinese couturiers in Paris and London; to travel with him as his personal assistant to Honolulu for an FHP Board of Directors meeting. I could be the Elastonomics Girl, I could do half-hour infomercials.
“Trust me, my lovely little foundling,” he said. “A new Hollywood star has to be made, not born.” Blondes were dead; they’d been sent to rerun hell. My un-beach-bunny look was what California was dying for but didn’t know yet. He got so carried away with the plans that he decided he’d make a new Flash movie, costarring me as an orphan who looks for, and with kick-boxing help finds, her long-lost parents. “The world’ll fall in love with you!” he promised.
“What do you mean, Frankie?” I didn’t need the world to fall in love with me.
“We’ll call it Farewell, My Fond Foundling,” he shouted. “That’s it!”
And later that night, Frankie confided in me his dreams of the Fong Empire he would build by catering to American wants with Asian needs. Chinese need rhinoceros horns and tiger bones and prostitutes for potency. Americans want potency too, but they have to call it love, and they’ll settle for Elastonomics to bring them both.
Americans convert needs into wants; Asians wants into needs. That was Frankie’s point. It made enough sense. “So when I’m saying Elastonomics on the phone, I’m really saying tiger balls?”
“Absolutely.” He stroked my cheeks, my throat, my collarbone. “I want to
hear tiger balls and rhino horn in everything you say.”
“Grrr, Mr. Elastonomics.”
He called me Tiger from that night on.
Frankie Fong was my first mature lover, the first one I didn’t need to get drunk to do it with, my first older-but-shorter man, my first non-Italian, nonclassmate hunk, but that doesn’t explain mesmerism. I didn’t want to manipulate him, like poor old Wyatt. I was putty for him. The charm of Frankie Fong started out as the charm of foreignness, of a continent I couldn’t claim but which threatened to claim me. It ended up the opposite.
If it had all gone right in those hot last two weeks of August, if Frankie had been genuinely impulsive and asked me to marry him, I would have. Even if he’d just kept me around as his upstate concubine (delicious word), I’d have accepted. I’d have adjusted to his gifts of jade brooches and coral bracelets (“trinkets of value,” he called them, “sew them into your suitcase”). And when the good feelings ran out, I’d have left him so he wouldn’t have to leave me. I am not a jealous person. Whatever I did to Frankie or to others, jealousy was never my motive.
What I did was torch Frankie’s precious home in Saratoga Springs. Flippant Frankie was right: there are only two categories of people, those with wants, and those with needs.
Baby Fong dropped out of the plump, drizzly sky one late-August afternoon in Saratoga Springs. What other reason besides a malevolent deity, or the supreme indifference of fate, could have compelled her to dump the semicomatose Aloysius in the care of smuggled-in, illiterate live-ins from Nanjing, ride the Amtrak to Troy, then rent a balloon from a Saratoga company called Bubbly in the Breeze, Inc.?
When I say “dropped,” I mean “dropped.” Baby’s balloon landed between a row of rose bushes and a bed of Japanese irises in the backyard Frankie’d just had professionally landscaped. He said, “Why couldn’t my mother have been another Imelda Marcos?” Why couldn’t she spike-heel up and down Madison Avenue, dropping platinum-colored plastic?
Frankie’s nickname for his mother was First Class Fong. Baby was a compulsive shopper with only one criterion. “You sure it real fine? You sure it genuine classy?” He’d caught her once in Singapore asking, “Is this your top price?” She could be on the Ginza or in Rome or in Toronto and she’d ask, “You sure this first-class stuff?” Why, oh why, Frankie grumbled, did he have to suffer for her obsessive need for “first-class” society? And why did she have to express it upstate by out-hosting Mary Lou Whitney?
I kept a file of First Class places, little crumbs of information from Frankie’s ranting. Hazelton Lanes, Via Veneto, Union Square. The factoid I didn’t have to file for keeps: Frankie s Debby.
Saratoga Springs in the racing season attracts blue bloods and grifters, touts and tarts, writers, Degas wannabes, balletomanes and a real dog pound of high-class mutts. Baby confused the classiest riffraff with the classiest elite. She planned pageants instead of parties: Mongolian contortionists and Chinatown acrobats entertaining titled guests in striped tents; Chinese “boat people” in chef’s hats wokking whole carp that they’d carried up from Chinatown on Amtrak wrapped in newspaper on their laps; Thai masseuses offering fussy cocktails from silver trays.
He didn’t show up for a week. He couriered me gifts, mostly the unimaginative kind, like flowers, boxed candies, perfume and lingerie. And one expensive one: a black silk Chinese-y dress with long side slits. So, he wanted me to be more Chinese. I’d be more Chinese than the Great Wall. Frankie liked to buy flowers more than I liked to receive them, and as for chocolate, you can’t sew it into the bottom of your suitcase. The dress I tried on. It looked okay on me. I had the mystery genes, the boyish hips and good legs. On Angie or cousin Nicole with their chunky bodies, the slits would’ve buckled out. They would’ve looked sluttish. Or, worse, pathetic.
The Saturday night of that dinner meeting with Baby, Frankie came over a half hour earlier than we’d arranged. I’d been ready and dressed for at least an hour: hair blow-dried wild, cheeks blush-brushed vampy, boyish body glamoured up in that Chinese sheath.
Before he could close the door behind him, I did a twirl and two-step to show off the whole getup.
“Nice,” he said.
“Nice?” He made it sound like I’d just won the Miss Congeniality Contest in the Saratoga County Beauty Pageant.
“Very nice?”
Third runner-up for Miss Nassau County. “Frankie …?” I went. “You want me to do something different with my hair? Don’t I look okay?”
“Very nice.”
“Jeesus, Frankie … nice? Like Merle What’s-Her-Face nice?”
He focused on my shoes. Retro platforms in chartreuse patent leather.
“Too tacky?”
He was headed for my closet.
“Go ahead. Be my guest.” I did have a quiet pair of black pumps. “I want to knock First Class Fong on her ass.”
“I don’t.”
Frankie picked out a white silk shirt and a navy skirt and navy slingbacks. With a few grunted curses and twenty minutes of frowns and finger snapping, he made me over from in-your-face vamp to staid-on-the-outside, sultry-on-the-inside secretarial assistant. He slicked my thick hair down with gel and pinned it up in a neat roll. He lightened the blush and the eyeshadow, but plumped up my lips to a lotus pout. In the back of the closet he found a tan faux-croc pocketbook with a metallic shoulder chain.
“Voilà!” he whispered when he had adjusted the links for the pocketbook to hang just right against midhip. “Perfect! Smashing!”
I looked in the spotty, thrift-store mirror above the mantel. Frankie had paled down my eyes, brows, cheeks, but given them clarity. I had dared to cast myself as mysterious, I’d thought I was playing in Frankie’s league, and he’d bounced me back to upstate reality. Clarity was the bond of give-and-take between us. Clarity, not love.
He scoured my drawers for accessories, and came up with a shirt length of emerald silk, which he draped like a shawl around my shoulders. “What do you think?”
“Do I need it?” DiMartinos do their thing with scarves. Shawls are exotic.
Frankie twitched the silk piece this way and that for the right effect. “Green looks good on you. When you walk in, have the bloody thing frame your shoulders just like that,” he advised my speckled reflection in the mirror. “When you settle into your chair at the table, let it glide down on its own. You’re not thinking about clothes, that’s the main idea.”
Because I’m thinking “Expiration date”? And what’s he thinking? Rhino horns and tiger balls?
“Well,” he said, giving me the final once-over, “it’s in your hands now.”
I caught the kiss he air-blew.
Frankie slapped his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. “Shit! I’m all out. Meet me at L’Auberge? We shouldn’t both be late!”
It’s in your hands now. I’d believed Frankie then. Maybe I still do. Success or failure’d been in my hands that evening. But the question I can’t stop asking myself is, How had these hands come to belong to a DiMartino woman?
An orphan doesn’t know how to ask, afraid of answers, and hopes instead for revelation. Ignorance isn’t bliss, but it keeps risky knowledge at bay. I never badgered Mama to tell me all she knew about my toddler days. Mama must have liked it that way too. She kept my origins simple: hippie backpacker from Fresno and Eurasian loverboy, both into smoking, dealing and stealing. She left my bio data minimal: some sort of police trouble my hippie birth mother had got herself into meant that the Gray Nuns in Devigaon village had had to take me in; one of the nuns had renamed me Faustine after a typhoon, but Mama’d changed it officially to Debby after Debbie Reynolds, her all-time favorite.
It was in my hands. I didn’t want it to be in anyone else’s. This was a night I expected revelations. It would close on champagne and Frankie’s saying, one hand on mine, another on Baby’s, “Mama, she is the most important person in my life.”
I was demanding acknowledgment, not a wedding ring.
; Frankie slipped out of the apartment. I didn’t stop him. From my window I heard Frankie slam the building’s outer door, then slip into his Flash walk, swiveling and strutting through the parking lot, leap into a silver Jaguar I didn’t know he owned and vanish around the block. I stayed at the window awhile, savoring the splintery roughness of the window frame, and the play of shadows cutting across the sidewalk. In the park the Dixieland band was doing a halfhearted job, but, thinking Tonight’s the big night, tonight Prince Flash will fit the glass slipper on the Foundling’s foot, I didn’t mind at all.
By the time I made my teetery way on the slingbacks with the high heels and the pointy toes, an upscale crowd in a party mood was already clotting the sidewalk outside L’Auberge Phila, and the small open space around the bar, waiting for the maître d’ to find them tables. My mood was good to begin with, but the head turns and near leers from tanned guys in summer blazers as I cut through the crowd to the maître d’ made it soar.
“I’m with the Fong party,” I announced. For the rest of my life: The Fong party. Debby Fong.
“Ah, yes, the others are waiting for you,” the maître d’ said with a perfunctory dip from the waist, and led me to a table for four. See how they scrape!
Frankie was in one of the two chairs that faced the wall. He was leaning forward, elbows on the tablecloth, listening to a young and very sexy Asian woman with long-lashed eyes and long black hair tell what must have been a joke. If this was Baby, then Baby was aptly named. She had a high, melodious voice, and she was saying, in an accent that sounded very much like Frankie’s had when he’d called me that first night from Kuala Lumpur or wherever, “There was a talking bird in a golden cage stranded with a deaf-and-dumb chap on a desert island …” I stopped behind Frankie’s chair, wanting to shout at Miss Asian Knockout: Hey, you can’t call a person dumb. Not in Saratoga. I confidently waited for Frankie to feel my presence before I spoke up, but he just hung on her every word, looking down her dress.
Leave It to Me Page 3
