Flings

by Justin Taylor

  A plate of baklava was brought to the table. They hadn’t ordered it but happily tucked in. A few minutes later the owner emerged from the back. A thick man with olive skin and a creased face, wearing a sauce-spotted apron over a golf shirt and chinos. Danielle’s father stood to greet him. The men shook hands, called each other by their first names. Danielle stood up also, cleared her throat. “This is my daughter,” her father said, turning toward her and making a small gesture of introduction with his hands.

  “Ahh, so wonderful,” the man said. “A daughter. I had no idea.”

  In Sha Tin she walked the concrete path uphill toward the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas. The Fodor’s said the project had been undertaken in 1949, the infancy of the postwar, and completed in ’57, the same year her father was born. Was this history then? Buddhas lined both sides of the path, life-size on red pedestals that doubled as planters. They sat amid greenery and behind them rows of trees reached twenty, thirty, forty feet up like canyon walls. The Buddhas were bald of course, but most of them were skinny, which was a surprise. Excepting their black swoop eyebrows and crimson lips they were gold from head to toe. Many were tranquil, reserved, dignified, but others had wild expressions and seemed alive with anger or sorrow; some appeared to leer. The farther Danielle walked, the higher she climbed, and the more ornate the Buddhas became. They held staves and lotuses, boasted haloes and filigreed robes, rode animal familiars, wielded swords. Some were freaks. One stood eight feet tall on Gumby legs. Another had white eyebrows so long they coiled ropelike in his lap. Her favorite had a black Fu Manchu framing pursed lips, a blue cap that matched his robe, and muscular baby arms growing out of his eye sockets. On the hands of these arms, thumbs were pressed to third fingers as if in meditation. Small colorless eyes like cauterized wounds stared out from the proffered palms.

  Stan Ross had come out to Hong Kong with Lehman Brothers but by the time the shit hit the fan with the market he’d left the company to start his own thing. Ross Investments was a fund that specialized in mainland Chinese real estate. He got the rights to things—lands, development deals—that were next to impossible for non-Chinese citizens to get the rights to. What could not be done, he did. He had divorced his wife, Lynne, when Danielle was a junior in high school, five—no, six—years ago and left the States maybe two years after that. When Lynne took her maiden name of Melman back Danielle insisted on taking it, too. She saw her father when he came stateside on business, once or twice a year. He’d build a few extra days into his schedule, rent a car in New York, and drive out to the Pioneer Valley: see the college, take her and her girlfriends out to dinner, shake hands with whichever indifferent boy she threw in front of him, weather her moods. If he so much as mentioned her mother she turned to stone. It wasn’t until Lynne got engaged to Cliff that Danielle realized she was the last man standing on the battlefield of her parents’ marriage—the war was over, won and lost, and there she was in the smoking ruins, waving a flag. Why? Because she’d been doing it so long she didn’t know what else to do, how else to be with her father. Their relationship had narrowed to her anger at him. She finished school at the beginning of May, and her mother’s wedding was in Peekskill on Memorial Day weekend. The following Tuesday, the three of them drove to the airport together. Mr. and Mrs. Cliff Sutphen had gone to Majorca for twelve days and Danielle, still a Melman—now the only Melman—had come here for the summer.

  Her father’s apartment was on the far south side of the island in the Repulse Bay, a combination hotel and residence. The building was baby blue with yellow and peach highlights, long and skinny like a flag. The paint job reminded her of downtown Miami but the rolling lawns and white stone walkways were straight colonial nostalgia chic. Across the street were the bay and its half-moon beach. Her dad said the design of the Repulse Bay epitomized Hong Kong logic: a modern luxury building for the international business and leisure class but built with a several-stories-high feng shui hole through its middle to ensure that the dragon who lived in the mountain still had access to the water.

  The sunsets were incredible. Air pollution blown down from Shenzhen warped the light into something out of Coleridge—blustery, beautiful, unreal. She often went down to watch from the sand, would look away from the water and back through the hole in the hotel to the green slope dissolving in shadow. In her mind she saw the dragon blazing through the gap like a rocket, leaving hot wake behind him in his plunge from the mountain to the sea.

  Ross Investments was developing golf courses across the Chinese countryside, the logic being that as the Chinese middle class inevitably suburbanized itself in the American style (which to them would, presumably, not seem stultifying or hopelessly quaint) the courses—and the roads that led to the courses—would make natural anchors for housing developments. Her father was forever taking trips to meet with businessmen or view promising sites. Danielle regarded her father broadly as a visionary. At the same time she found his particular vision unsettling, even ugly. But if he didn’t do these things surely somebody else would. She tried to love her father unconditionally, even as she was coming to understand that she hardly knew him. She knew he was considered an innovator in his field, that he liked shawarma with spicy ketchup. She knew what his iPod was loaded with—Clapton, Hendrix, Eagles, Beatles, Stones—but she had never seen him listening to it. He didn’t always remember to take it when he went on trips. She knew he preferred the elliptical to the treadmill, but only exercised at all because his doctor had advised it. She knew that the woman who wrecked his marriage—or, rather, for whom he’d wrecked his own marriage—was named Erica, but that their thing had ended well before he’d moved to Asia, and that he seemed to have been alone since then, or at least to be alone now. She knew he always took his golf clubs with him when he went to Beijing.

  There was a Thai restaurant in a small shack at the edge of the beach. Danielle ordered pad Thai and a spring roll—unimaginative choices, perhaps, but her favorite—and took her dinner down to the sand. She had a blanket and a bottle of wine in her satchel: a sweet, lonely sunset picnic. There wasn’t usually anyone out at this hour, but today she spotted a family on their way back from a walk along the shore. At first they were silent silhouettes, but as they got closer she could hear the little boy’s vroom noises, could see that he was kicking up sand and tearing away from his parents, careening ahead. The man let go of his wife’s hand and started to jog after his son, but he was a beat too late. The kid had already closed the distance, hopped right over Danielle’s wine bottle, and landed in her arms.

  “Aunt Rachel!” he said. He was American. She hugged him back.

  “Hi there,” she said to him while looking over his head at his dad.

  “I’m so sorry,” the dad said to Danielle. And to his son, “Dylan, honey, that’s not Aunt Rachel.” To Danielle again: “I’m so sorry. You look, it’s actually funny, kind of like a friend of ours. She lives in the States, Dylan knows her from Skype, and we’ve been telling him how she’s coming to visit later this summer and—well.” He shrugged and grinned, as in, You know how kids can be. Dylan was pudgy and warm—she could feel his heart humming in his chest against hers. The man stepped onto Danielle’s blanket. He leaned in close. She could smell his cologne or else deodorant, felt his strong fingers slide between her body and his son’s. Dylan giggled as he was pulled from Danielle’s arms, found himself hoisted up onto his father’s shoulders. “Ellen,” the man said, turning away from Danielle and toward his wife, who was still a few yards off. “Honey, you’re gonna get a kick out of this.”

  Before he took his most recent leave, Danielle had complained of her loneliness to her father. She felt isolated, she said, hoping he might cancel his trip or invite her along. Neither of those options, he explained, was feasible. But if she liked he could e-introduce her to some of his employees, people with whom she might, in his words, “have something in common.” By this Danielle thought he meant that they were in their thirties, most of them, which she supposed w
as better than nothing. Back upstairs, the memory of the boy’s warmth and the man’s grazing fingers still faintly on her skin, Danielle fired off a BBM to the one named Colin. She had her fingers crossed he’d turn out to be English or at least Australian. He pinged back a couple minutes later, said he was out with some people in Lan Kwai Fong and she was welcome to join up if she liked. Danielle rolled her eyes. LKF was an endless expat frat party crammed into a few blocks of bars and restaurants at the edge of downtown. It was like a bizarro Bourbon Street where all of the tourists were finance people and also weren’t tourists so the same ones came back every night.

  “Cool,” she replied. “U got an address?”

  “Place called Stormies. White bldg at bend of d’aguilar st elbow. Big pink neon sign, boat theme, u cant miss.”

  She guessed it would take her a half hour to get there.

  “From Repulse that’s optimistic,” he replied, “but no worries. Here for the long haul.” It was a Monday.

  Colin was fit and sandy-haired, maybe with some gray mixed in but it was hard to tell. He wore black slacks and black loafers, a white shirt with silver cuff links, his collar and the next button down both open. He was sitting with a small group at a table near the door. “Heya,” he said—American; oh well. The bar was a nightmare. When he’d said “boat” she’d thought yacht club, but this was more like Jersey Shore. They were blasting Bon Jovi. People were doing Jell-O shots out of plastic syringes. She hadn’t sat down yet and she was ready to leave. Colin leaned in and shouted in her ear: “Comforts of home, eh?” They made her a spot at their table and he made introductions: Rajiv, Hugh, Megan, and Thao. They were all eager to know how Danielle was enjoying her visit, what she’d eaten, where she’d been. She told them about the Buddhas at Sha Tin, then asked how they all knew one another. Colin explained that they all worked together, or rather had worked together until a recent shake-up. Megan had been recruited for executive management and her reconfigured portfolio was taking her out of the division, which itself was being scaled down, as a side effect of which Rajiv had been let go and Hugh was about to announce that he would quit; he was joining Colin, working for Danielle’s dad. (One of the things Danielle had learned about expats was that since their jobs were their only reason on earth for being where they were, it was rude not to let them go on a bit about the minutiae of their office lives.) Thao—Vietnamese by way of London and Berlin, though all his degrees were from American schools—believed that he would soon be doing what amounted to both Rajiv’s and Hugh’s jobs. He was pressing Megan as to whether she thought, in her freshly executive opinion, he might be offered a salary bump and/or new title. Rajiv was going back to Kerala so his in-laws could spend some time with their granddaughter before he moved his family to the States, where he hoped to buy some American real estate before the economy got better and interest rates went back up. So these were not just drinks Danielle had stumbled into but good-bye drinks. But in Hong Kong, Colin said, leaning close again, his lips brushing her ear as he struggled to make himself heard over Bono and then Fred Durst, everyone was always coming or going, so nobody got too worked up. Everything here was a stepping-stone to something else—the Singapore or Beijing office, a new job with a different firm in London or New York or Mumbai or wherever home was or wherever you wanted it to be next.

  Danielle stared into her “Dark and Stormie”—the house special, her second or maybe third one—and wanted to say something but didn’t know what it was. She wanted to ask them questions about her father, whom she gathered they all knew or at least knew of. Was he open in his dealings, free with his anger, generous with his time? Did he remember people’s birthdays? Did he have a girlfriend and what was her name? Had he ever set foot inside this particular awful fucking bar? But none of those questions was the real question, or if one was it would cease to be as soon as she asked it. There was something great and shapeless alive inside her and to speak it would be to distort its essential character. Its truth abided in the fact of its remaining forever suspended, unborn. Danielle drank her drink.

  People took their money clips out, started to say their good-byes. Danielle reached for her purse but they stopped her. She tried to insist but Colin put his hand down on top of hers, said, “Danielle, please.” She made a mental note to give a good report to her father, whenever she saw him again.

  “I’ll see you ’round,” they all said to one another, though in several cases there was no particular reason to believe that this was so.

  Hugh and Colin, luckily, were still up for action, and Danielle was feeling comfortable enough at this point to tell them what she really thought of LKF, so they hopped in a cab and made for a place on Johnston Road called the Pawn. There were love seats and overstuffed leather chairs clustered around low black tables. They had a walk-in humidor, a whiskey list so long it came in a leather-bound book. Another of her father’s employees met them there. Like many native-born Chinese who dealt regularly with Westerners, he’d adopted a Western first name and introduced himself as Ned Chu. They were on a third-floor balcony, the men all sipping Laphroaig 16, Danielle with a Grey Goose and cran.

  “This used to be an actual pawn shop,” Ned said.

  “No shit,” Hugh said.

  “It’s true,” Ned continued. “My father was a beat cop in the seventies. He walked these streets every night. Talk about a different world.” But then he didn’t talk about it, and none of them pressed him. He stared past the railing and out at the busy street, looking at the strolling people and passing cars as if he didn’t quite believe in them. Danielle thought of the mountain dragon exploding through the hole in her father’s building. Hugh, rolling a pin joint, let out a small contented sigh. “Hong Kong,” he said, “is whatever you want whenever you want it, all the time.”

  “Ask my father about that,” Ned said. “I always say to him to write a book.” But again, nobody bit. These guys weren’t interested in history, Danielle thought. They were barely interested in the present. She felt that this fact explained something essential about who they were or the circles they ran in or the world they were forging, or something, but she couldn’t decide whether this essential thing was what made them fundamentally different from her, or whether it was rather the basis for whatever little common ground they shared. Danielle knew one thing: it was a million degrees out and humid as a swamp. She knocked her drink back, shut her eyes against the welcome clatter of ice cubes on her nose.

  “How’s it going over there?” Colin said.

  “Ready to call it a night, I think.”

  Colin walked her downstairs and hailed her a cab. It crossed Danielle’s mind that Colin might share the cab with her, though she doubted they lived near each other. Her father’s place wasn’t near much of anything. Still. Maybe he’d slide in beside her and see if she balked. That was ridiculous of course, with Ned and Hugh standing right there on the balcony, looking down at them, glasses raised in mock salute. Colin ignored them; Danielle waved back. They stood with the open cab door between them. Colin said, “I’m glad you made it out, Danielle. We should do this again sometime—or something else.”

  “Yeah,” Danielle said. “Let’s do whatever we want all the time.”

  Colin shut the door, put his face up to the window, winked once, then stood upright and slapped his hand on the trunk. The driver hit the gas. Danielle was drunk and alone on the wrong side of the planet, a strange city streaking past a window that might as well have been a movie or computer screen. Or maybe, she thought, the window was a camera and she was the one in the movie: The radio blares Chinese pop music. The pretty girl slumps alone in the backseat as highways yield to mountain roads curving through foreign dark. Cut to:

  Danielle woke up hungover, popped a coffee pod into the Keurig, hit the button, held her head while the machine wheezed and clugged. She sat on the porch with her mug and stared out at the bay. It was late morning, hot and hazy. She took a long shower, then went back to sleep. When she woke up there was a
BBM from Colin: “Heyagain. Hike this weekend if yr free?”

  “Why not tomorrow?” she fired back. “Not like my old man’s there to crack the whip.”

  “Touche but 2morrow no good. Could do thurs tho. Meet at Central Pier, 1230. U need directions?”

  “I can always use direction,” she wrote. Thinking, If this doesn’t do it . . .

  They took the one o’clock ferry to Lamma Island, disembarked at Yung Shue Wan, a village of seafood restaurants and narrow poured-concrete homes on narrow roads. Men drove puttering flatbeds the size of golf carts, hauling stacks of pressboard and sections of pipe. Frayed strips of sun-bleached tarp rose in the hot breeze like fingers. Construction dust rimed branches and fronds. They walked past cloudy fish tanks full of razor clam, lobster, eel, and prawn.

  The walking path would take them south across the ridge of the island along Ha Mei Wan Bay, which was scenic despite a three-stack coal-fired power plant that, like a dark spot on the retina, occupied a small corner of every otherwise perfect view. (Colin said it powered all of Hong Kong—Danielle thought reflexively of the frigid air forever bleeding from the storefronts all over town.)