A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  He smelled Shenzhen before he saw it. Something like every fetid canal he’d ever walked over—one night in Brooklyn, early morning in Amsterdam—or was the smell just a universal signifier of hasty construction, a rush to ignore what lies beneath so that the cream can rise? As the train came to a stop and the exiting commenced, Ed kept close check on his briefcase, kept his hand on his sleeve of goods beneath his shirt. After an impressively brief time at both immigration and customs, his confidence trickled back, and when he saw a mass of people lining up, he, too, fell in line. If Chinese after Chinese exchanged money and went on their way, why shouldn’t he? He’d been told to expect currency swapping at the station, and who knew how long it would take to find an actual bank. So Ed waited his turn and stepped right up; a toothless crone did brisk business. He admired her square hands and utter absence of facial expression, her economy of movement. Ed handed over three hundred dollars in exchange for a fat sheaf of yuan banded by red rubber. He went to check through it but was hurried along by the woman behind him and by a man behind her issuing some kind of admonishment. And—quickly—in an unprecedented moment when sheer intimidation outweighed his careful nature, Ed shoved the yuan into the sleeve.

  Then he went about finding a driver.

  Cars flying past (right-hand drive, British style), no English anywhere, not even in the faraway vibrations of music coming from cars and buildings. No English in any of it, nowhere in the smoggy ether of activity, and when a car stopped, he presented his little card, which—the Hong Kong concierge was correct—he’d needed. He settled back against the dust-encrusted vinyl and asked the driver to please turn on the meter. But the driver pretended not to comprehend not only what Ed was saying but also the basic fact that he was speaking at all. He glanced out the window long enough to have the revelation that Shenzhen looked like Harlem in the 1970s, minus the excellent brownstones and glamorous Jazz Age residue. There was the same sense of impending disaster, even though the worst had surely already come to pass. The construction was rampant and defied any kind of logic. Cables swung above him and far into the distance. Bamboo scaffolding held up platforms of workers, all working on hulking monstrosities. The driver turned a corner and skidded toward a cement wall, before turning around once again. A car felt like a deluded way to move through a place like this. Where was his body armor? His jet pack? Where was his own fucking crane?

  The hotel room, at first glance, looked like one of the many hotel rooms he’d inhabited while on the road in America, both in the early days with CBOR and recently, when nobody—including his daughter—had any real idea where he was or what he was doing at any given moment. She’d complained that he wanted to send her to boarding school because he was totally consumed with his work. He was indeed consumed with his work, but what she didn’t know was that he was suddenly—after almost two decades of ridiculous success—simply trying to stay afloat. And while appraisers from Christie’s had been evaluating his art collection, he’d been running around the country to all the godforsaken places where his dealerships were failing. They had failed due to mismanagement and—in one case—a manager’s procuring of parts from a chop shop and selling the actual German factory parts out of his ex-daughter-in-law’s garage. Those dealerships had failed and he couldn’t afford to have any more fail, not when he’d lost a tremendous amount of capital on that blackest Monday and his company had to meet its monthly obligations.

  While the auto group still looked reasonably profitable on paper, he had a window of time to accomplish several seemingly Herculean tasks. His company would file for Chapter 11. There’d be an interim president brought in to run the company, and Ed would make damn sure that this person could not afford to buy it. The company would continue to run, his thousands of employees would keep their jobs, he’d be investing his personal capital (thank you, Cayman Islands) into the Chinese economy, helping to make good on Deng Xiaoping’s excellent proclamation that to get rich is glorious.

  Though there were, yes, more than likely several steps that were not entirely legal—namely, using the offshore capital on which he wasn’t even paying taxes in the first place—Ed was convinced he was doing the right thing.

  Or, at least, he was doing the smart thing.

  He would use that capital. At seven this evening, he would meet his contact (they’d agreed on the time and place during one brief and awkward phone conversation), who would hopefully be a trustworthy translator. He’d already taken several meetings in Munich and felt reasonably confident that not only was he close to acquiring the rights to BMW in Shenzhen but, just as important, that in this Chinese Wild West he’d be able to carry out his plan without the Krauts’ crippling surveillance. He would pay whatever it took to whomever he had to, and he would use his personal, hoarded, illegal offshore capital and pray each night to a God in whom he believed for a life uninterrupted by prison.

  He, Ed Cantowitz, would lease land in Shenzhen. He would import and sell beautiful Kraut BMWs.

  BMW: a company that produced aircraft for the Luftwaffe, assisting in dominating the noxious skies of Nazi-occupied Europe.

  BMW: Ed’s future.

  And so here he was at the Golden Canopy. A hotel that looked, on the surface, like a Holiday Inn—utterly impersonal, ugly in its sparseness, but admirable for its absence of any decorative strivings. But, of course, it wasn’t a Holiday Inn. Not even one year old and the walls were already crumbling around the windowsills, the drywall falling in streams of dust onto the tile floor. He stared at the mushroomy walls and envisioned the copious amounts of sand mixed into the cement, the absence of necessary rebar. There was something odd about a Chinese version of a generically depressing Western-style business hotel, and this oddness almost saved the room from being more depressing. He took the brick of money from the crone, his sleeve of goods, his little card, and dumped it all on the bed. He stripped off his suit, letting his clothes drop to the floor that—after a half second of deliberation—he deemed no less clean than the bedspread, and he went to take a piss.

  Water dripped from the shower nozzle, a steady syncopation—Chinese water torture came to mind—and something in the dripping conferred the instant realization that made him want to scream. He didn’t scream. He ran back to the bed and ripped off the red rubber bands and, right there in his hands—of course—right between the top bill and the bottom, was not money, not yuan, but tissue.

  All those Chinese lining up for the crone had surely been her employees. She probably paid each and every person in that crowd in order to draw in the single sucker of an American businessman.

  He put his clothes back on. He felt vulnerable enough without being naked in addition. He lay down, tense from head to toe. He closed his eyes, taking deep breaths, or attempting to—because all he needed now was to have a fucking cardiac arrest in Shenzhen, China—but as he tried to think of his daughter, his heart sped that much faster. Because his daughter was not at home on Park Avenue, eating Häagen-Dazs at the kitchen table. No, Rebecca was at boarding school in Connecticut; he had sent his only child away. He’d suggested it because he knew he needed to be gone for most of the time now, and—more important—he hadn’t wanted Rebecca to see him the way he knew he currently was on a daily basis: desperate and distracted. When he and Jill had brought her to school on the first day, when they had moved her into her little room in her little dorm with her music and her books and her pens and her pillows, he had driven away from that campus so fast that he’d gotten a warning from the crossing guard. Then, once on the road, he’d cried so hard that he had to pull over to the side of I-95.

  Times had changed—they had changed tremendously—and he repeated this to himself now and again. Of course the school was different from when Hugh Shipley had attended—it was coed, for one thing; it had abolished chapel services, for another—but as Rebecca had been applying, as he’d seen the school crest on the brochure and every page of the application, Ed certainly remembered how Hugh had frequently referred to the s
chool as prison. He had hated it with such a fervor, which—looking back now—had bordered on excitement. Oh, how Hugh had hated that school.

  But Rebecca liked it—didn’t she? Wasn’t Hugh’s alma mater, first and foremost, one of the highest-ranked prep schools in the country? Wasn’t its excellence the main reason that Ed had suggested it? Still. He couldn’t stop himself from flushing with shame when he imagined how Hugh would react if he ever found out Ed had sent his daughter there, no matter how excellent the education. Ed had, for the most part, stopped having conversations—real or imaginary—with Hugh, but this topic brought him back there, each and every time.

  It still irked him that Hugh could believe he’d end a friendship over politics. It irked him—irrationally, he did recognize—that Hugh hadn’t immediately understood why he would behave so terribly. Of course, more reasonably, he also wished that he could have simply gotten over what had happened with Helen and behaved like a normal human being. Couldn’t he have made it with his best friend’s girl and just moved on, like countless other men throughout history? Couldn’t he have managed to have dinner once a year with them both, even though Helen had stayed with Hugh? Would that have been so terrible?

  But, yes. Yes, it would have. His wanting to know about her—his wanting—would have gotten the best of him each and every time. He would have pushed and pushed until he ended up telling Hugh. And so—a fact he always came back to—he’d made the right decision.

  Then, as now.

  Before he plunged into some kind of seriously ugly mood, he picked up the phone to call Rebecca. Connecticut was twelve hours behind, and what did that even mean? He was pushing fifty. Shouldn’t he be able to conceptualize time zones? His attention to concrete details was utterly required.

  “Snap out of it,” he said aloud. “Don’t fuck up.”

  The phone rang and rang. The dorm phone. It was in a little closet and Rebecca never answered it; her room was way down the hall. It made him unaccountably distressed to imagine Rebecca making the journey from her room to the phone closet. When he pictured her face on that journey from her room to the phone closet, it was never happy. He wished he could call her on another phone, on a personal phone. He wished that each student—like mini doctors or corporate raiders—could have his or her own personal, portable phone. Jill had had sleek black phones installed throughout her new apartment. There was a phone next to her bathtub, so that she could answer it without even sitting upright. She’d told him this once this past summer, when he’d picked up Rebecca, and he could have sworn that she was flirting. He’d fantasized about getting in that tub with Jill—of course he had—hearing her sounds again, feeling her against him in some new impossible way.

  He sat in his suit now, on the terrible synthetic bedspread, and that dorm phone rang and rang and he tried not to think of how Rebecca would be going to Jill’s boyfriend’s Southampton house. The house had a name—Gould Gardens. How pretentious was that? And what difference could it possibly make if—as Jill had obviously felt the need to point out—the name was meant to be tongue in cheek? He tried not to think about how, maybe even during Thanksgiving, Jill and the schmuck would announce their impending marriage. Where would Rebecca sleep then? When she wasn’t at school and when she wasn’t with him—where would his daughter be picking up the phone? Why wasn’t someone picking up the goddamn phone right now?

  He gathered his belongings and locked the door behind him. He’d be early for his meeting, but he went—where else?—to the Golden Canopy Hotel bar.

  The bar was decidedly better than the room, and he was immediately buoyed by his swift decision, by his wisdom in choosing to get out of there. The right thing. Besides which, in addition to alcohol and music—whining Chinese music, but music nonetheless—there was a woman at the bar who was slim, with a curtain of black hair and an alluring birthmark at the corner of her mouth. Though she looked anything but cheap, he idly wondered, before taking a seat beside her, if she was a prostitute.

  “This song,” said Ed, to the Chinese woman. He assumed she didn’t speak English, which made his attempt at conversation strangely easier.

  She turned to face him, tilting her head in a question.

  “What are the lyrics?” He knew he was talking for the sake of it, in order to feel less alone, but when she smiled and said nothing, he persisted yet again. “The song.” He gestured vaguely to the ceiling. “What does it mean?”

  Though her expression was unchanged, she seemed to listen for a while, and finally she said carefully, “I am in my car, Shenzhen. How fresh the night breeze, Shenzhen. How bright the flowers when I am running my car in the streets … through the sea of lights.”

  “Sea of lights,” said Ed, making sure to hide his surprise at her fluency. “Running my car. That’s nice.”

  “You like Chinese music?”

  Ed shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  She offered a grin. “You are honest.”

  “I am. And you?”

  “I am an honest woman.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, “can I buy you a drink?”

  “Very well, but I am waiting for somebody. He comes? I go with him.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You like whiskey?” she asked. “You like American Johnnie Walker? Suntory?”

  “I’ll have a Tsingtao, please.” It seemed understood that she would be ordering for him; he wondered if she maybe even worked here at the Golden Canopy in some capacity.

  The drinks arrived along with some peanuts; Ed scooped up a handful, more because they were familiar than because they were appealing. “So,” he said, “are you from Shenzhen?”

  She laughed, endearingly showing her gums before quickly covering her mouth. “Nobody is from Shenzhen,” she said. “You must know this, no? Aren’t you an American businessman?”

  “I was just making conversation.”

  “Nobody is from Shenzhen. Nothing. Only trees.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “Why does anyone? Money.”

  “And are you finding it?”

  She stuck out her lower lip, in consideration. “One day here a person barely survives, and another day, next day—rich.”

  “Sure,” said Ed, “okay.”

  “Most important is how people react to these type of days.” She took a slow sip from her glass of whiskey. “Reaction’s important.”

  He took in her black crepey dress, her pale skin, bare hands, and minimal chest. Flame-red lipstick. “So do you work?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “What is it that you do?”

  “You guess?”

  “No, I couldn’t possibly. Let’s see … are you a dancer?” he said, trying his hand at euphemism, which really could not sound cornier.

  “Dancer? You guess very poorly.” She shook her head, clearly displeased. “I attended university.”

  “Yeah? Where?”

  Her face went a shade darker. “Wellesley,” she said curtly, before taking another sip of beer.

  “You went to Wellesley?”

  She looked him squarely in the eye. “Yes.”

  “Wellesley in Wellesley, Massachussetts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.”

  “Like her,” said the stranger, with her first hint of archness. “But less good fortune.”

  Suddenly he felt off balance; what an idiot he was. He cleared his throat. “Ms. Li Huy Ying?”

  She nodded, less confusedly than he’d expected.

  He smiled. That they were both early for this meeting seemed fortuitous. There he was, already thinking like an Asian. “I’m Ed Cantowitz.”

  At dinner he declined the ox penis, which was cut in the shape of delicate stars, and stuck with something that resembled chicken in brown sauce. He drank several bottles of beer.

  After the meal, she removed a cigarette from a black lacquer case. Ed reached for the matches on the table and scrambled to offer her a light. It
had been a long time since he’d done that (any cigarettes he’d lit between Helen’s and now were nowhere in his memories), and it felt as if he were playing a role in a school play. He expected she might laugh. She didn’t laugh; she inhaled and exhaled.

  He laid out what would happen if she made significant introductions (hefty bonus), came down with unfortunate sicknesses (he’d pay her up to a point), or in the unlikely case that she was overstating her abilities (they’d part ways swiftly and she’d forgo compensation).

  “You know, businessmen typically investigate me more carefully,” she said. “They ask what I know about the state of Massachusetts.”

  “Oh, I don’t have time for that,” Ed told her. “You come highly recommended. I want to get started. I’ve got a feeling you are very smart.”

  “I am,” she said. “My name means intelligence.”

  He offered to escort her home and she said no, understandably not wanting him to see where she lived. They shook hands in the lobby of the Golden Canopy. That night he had no trouble sleeping. And when they met in the lobby the next morning, he didn’t recognize her at first.

  She was wearing a navy suit with a slit up the side of the skirt. Her hair was elegantly pinned up. And she looked more comfortable, as if this powerful presentation was her real self and the sexier version he’d met at the bar had been an odd trick.

  She escorted him to meet the representatives of several generals, and in their bad suits, with their offers of tepid tea, these lackeys talked around issues, always arriving at the unsurprising conclusion that any decision must be made by a general. Ed imagined these generals sitting in canvas tents with side flaps, as if they were still at war. He imagined the waistlines bulging, the gold affixed to their teeth, and when—at their last meeting—he instructed Li to tell the representative that he wanted to meet with his boss, the lackey replied in harsh tones. Though Li was obviously not translating every last comment—and certainly not the comments directed toward her—Ed knew the stream of Mandarin was unfailingly vulgar. Each meeting led to another meeting. To more god-awful tea. The sounds of those chuckling lackeys would surely haunt him. He spent the days in such meetings and the nights at a club where early Frank Sinatra crooned from a record player no different than the one in his uncle Herb’s basement.