The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  So I became Swiss, though mostly it sounded as if I’d had a sudden stroke that left the right side of my face paralyzed. Ivy’s grandmother smiled politely and let me get through a few sentences before saying something in Cantonese, which Ivy translated as, “You can’t put a swan back in its egg.”

  I’d brought Ivy’s grandmother the hopelessly lame present of espadrille heels from the factory. She blushed when she tried them on, somehow squeezing her foot—like splintered driftwood, knobby and crooked—inside the shoes. Better I should have given her a head of cabbage. Still, she wore them for the rest of the afternoon while mending one of her fishing nets and prepping dinner. A few times I caught her wincing when she had to walk, possibly bleeding on the back of the heel, but when we told her to take them off and relax, she crossed her legs at the knee, arched her back and lifted her chin. “I feel like a woman you see out in the world,” she said. “This is how city girls sit, isn’t it?” Ivy giggled through the translation. Then her grandmother put her legs wide apart, and leaned forward, elbows on thick knees. “This is how we sit in the country. Always something between our legs.” She grabbed her fishing net, dropped it between her feet and began sewing.

  * * *

  I remembered this botched plan as I went wheeling on the motorbike down the narrow dirt paths between rice paddies. My skin tingled, a dull itchy burn, and the cold wind pasted my wet jeans to my legs. I passed women walking back from the fields, slow and determined, wooden yokes across their shoulders carrying bamboo bundles lashed with string. The rice fields ran up to a village, and I was weaving through snug alleys with the smell of wood smoke and there was a family stir-frying shahe fen for the holiday by a fire pit and I could see just a part of their faces, each one lit in the quiet flame, but one face jumped out, that of a young woman, and just for a brief second her round face rose to mine and just as quickly it vanished.

  Foshan in the distance: spotlights on top of the skyscrapers scanned the river as if they were looking for someone down below where the first fireworks came sizzling off the barges, exploding red and gold against the tarred sky. I couldn’t walk into the hotel restaurant like this: shivering, clothes rumpled and half-wet, smelling like old fish and factory sludge. One step in and Dad would size me right up: Oh, you’ve decided to come dressed like our old super, Chaim Pupik, from the cellar. I turned onto Haiwu Road, the Intercontinental Hotel rose before me like a black column. A fog had rolled in, sitting high up on the building, which looked like an upside-down reflection of itself in the water: the bottom half-smooth and slate, the top all wiggly and distorted and smoky, as if the hotel grew through a misty lake. The building was brand-spanking new, in the last four years, same with the canal and the lake; nothing here, not even the blacktop beneath my tires, was more than five years old. Every pavilion and park and shrub, balanced and harmonized, five elements in perfect accord, clean and tidy, and on the street-side of the Interconti, standing on the manicured grass, a taxi driver was pissing on a red azalea bush.

  I parked Ivy’s bike beside a fleet of Rolls Royces and Bentleys. The head doorman, Li Jun—hair oiled back—came bombing down the steps and asked, “Good evening, Mr. Younger Cohen? And how is the respected one above, Mr. Cohen?”

  “Just fine.”

  Li Jun has known my father for as long as he’s lived in this hotel. But I bet my dad doesn’t even know his name.

  I palmed Li Jun two ten-yuan coins to park the bike under the hotel. He shook them like dice in his fist—that was the sound of the hotel—coins jangling. If you didn’t tip, you might as well have been a ghost, no one would serve you.

  Past the revolving lobby doors, the first blast of air-conditioning swam up to my chin. I shivered, my shirt like wet cardboard. Coming straight toward me was Karri, the Chinese hotel manager in her cardinal-red pencil skirt, matching blazer, hair tied back in a solemn bun, and her hands folded in front. Her heels conked on the marble then silently sank into the crimson rug with golden arabesques that looked like hundreds of flirty eyes winking. She was in my father’s shoes. One of his designs: faux snake, a pink plug on the vamp.

  I was betting she was going to say something related to my attire: “Perhaps you aren’t aware of our rear door?” She’d studied hospitality in Sweden. Imagine the house she keeps. But instead Karri said, “Pursue me,” pivoted sharply on one heel, a military vestige of her middle-school PLA training, and walked briskly toward the elevator.

  “Follow you?” I asked.

  She was already ten steps ahead when she wheeled around with her eyes closed in frustration. “Yes. Yes. Follow. In present.”

  “Now?”

  “YES!” She tapped the glass face of her watch with her nail. “Fedor—Mr. Cohen—is forecasting you upstairs. He does not like waiting. Therefore, more speedy.” She was off again toward the elevator banks, and all of a sudden there was a rush of heat to my face and I knew. It was her. Karri was Dad’s mistress. A woman like that is her own dowry! The old dog. Of course—was it a month ago? Two?—in this same lobby, Pop and I had been waiting for a factory car and I was telling him about a late shipment while he was staring over at Karri in her red uniform, like a burning phoenix flower, smiling and chatting away with a rakish older Brit, and Dad tilted his head in the man’s direction. “That old-timer thinks he’s going to put the wood to her.”

  “Pop,” I said. “Did you hear anything? We’ll lose the whole margin.”

  Now it was obvious. He was really saying, I’m the one schtupping this broad. As I was sure he’d schtupped for twenty years. Up and down the coast.

  Karri pressed the button for the sixteenth floor and, once the elevator doors closed, she took out a white handkerchief from her breast pocket and wiped away her fingerprints from the gold-plated panel, as though we were running a jewel heist. Same fingers that had gripped my father’s jug-handle ears and poured him out; those polished French tips scribbling down his hairy back toward the one sneaky mole down by his ass that he swore would kill him in the end. Karri started wiping down the brass railing inside the elevator, the wood beads of her Mala bracelet rustling. She was Buddhist and potching my dad. Sort of added up actually: if life was suffering she wasn’t taking any shortcuts.

  But if that was the Buddhist part of her, there was another part too, which I saw by looking over her shoulder down the narrow lapel of her blazer, down the shirred V-neckline of her blouse to a glimpse of scalloped lace on her lime-green bra peeking out, which quickly disappeared with a scoop of her finger. Karri gave me a weak smile and reflexively folded her arms across her chest, bracelet against breast like a twofer of secrets. Looking me up and down, she frowned at my filthy outfit and said, “Next time use my rear entrance.”

  “That’s definitely not what you mean,” I said.

  The sixteenth floor opened to the Brazilian restaurant. Karri led me past the salad bar and the pasta station. Usually my father was at one of these buffets, never ordering anything, just leaning way too close to the food, saying, What’s this, what’s this, what’s this and abruptly shaking his head like he was calling off a catcher. At the back of the restaurant a Filipino woman sang Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” in a short sequined dress. We whisked past waiters carrying charred flanks and squeezed through tables—six inches of space—and where a sideways Karri slipped easily through, I was dragging my belly and groin against the shoulders of women in backless gowns, apologizing to everyone I touched.

  Behind the band stage we reached a door that opened to a private room. There was my dad at a round table talking with the top management of the factory. I felt a sudden sharp shift in the air, a rush of cold that knifed the words off my father’s lips midsentence. I could not move from the weight of his look across the room, could scarcely draw a breath, but then his mouth broke into a faint, slow smile where only the right side of his lip curled up.

  The special room was a circle of onyx walls polished to a high
gloss so I could see my own face in a murky reflection above Dad’s head, staved together on a totem pole.

  “The VIP graces us,” Dad said.

  I said a cursory hello to the table and went to sit down, forgetting all my guanxi—no, it wasn’t that I forgot, it was Karri pushing me, her warm hand in the small of my back, toward the armless white leather chair, which my father was stroking like a cat. I sat down while Karri leaned toward him. They began discussing the dinner menu. I needed to stand up, bow formally and shake hands, but right as I moved to stand, the head waitress buzzed into the room talking in Chinese. For such an intimate room, there were people rushing back and forth, conversations in all these languages, and Dad had his big gut pressed against the table. All the muscle was in his shoulders, wide and stout, regular suits never fit, so he was wearing one of his custom-made getups. Most of the other men wore simple tailored black jackets with gold ties and khakis, but Dad was sitting there in a bright velvet suit like a giant purple berry. Holdover pimp from the ’80s. It’s style, kid, you wouldn’t understand.

  There was a famous tailor in Hong Kong who made custom suits off a mannequin replica of my father. On your first visit, he slathered you up in this gummy silicone and mummy-wrapped you in plaster bandages. The tailor stored the mannequin in an underground warehouse; all these body doubles in perfect neat rows like the terra-cotta warriors at Xi’an. “Say you want a new suit,” Dad said to anyone who’d listen, “you just call up. Never have to waste a trip—ach, wasted trips!—never again. That’s Chinese efficiency. Tailors, you got to understand, are like the early primates of Jewish business. Sure we invented off-the-rack, but the Chinese hang you by it.” Dad’s little setup took real discipline though. Don’t dare gain a pound, otherwise the tailor has to start all over. For it to work, you are who you are forever.

  “...and very well, sir,” Karri said, “The duck prepared how? Szechuan, the entire head, breast, thigh, or you like Peking, sliced skin rolled up with scallion?”

  “Oh, no,” Dad said, looking her dead in the eye. “I want the whole bird.” His jaw twitched. She touched the gold butterfly at the base of her throat. Those were thin soles on her shoes, and I knew she felt the cold tile on the bottom of her feet, and she was knuckling her toes. Were they painted pink or red? It was a rule in this hotel that all employees wear closed shoes. Five-star but not a single toe.

  “Of course, sir,” Karri said politely and walked off, leaving a zip of some sweet scent like Ivory soap behind.

  “Stand up now,” Dad said to me. “I want you to meet Gang Xiaodan.”

  I stood. “I thought this was a dinner for just us two?” I whispered to Dad. “Shouldn’t I change?”

  “No, no, we waited long enough,” Dad said, grinning, and I didn’t know how to read that smile or why the hell they were all here, Yong, the co-owner with my dad, and Shen, the plant manager, one Taiwanese, the other Chinese, but especially Gang, the mayor of Foshan. Gang was probably in his early sixties, wearing an old-school button-down tunic. One of these guys from whose face all expression had been sandblasted away by decades of loony Mao slogans piped in through a red squawk box mounted high in the corner of his courtyard.

  Dad said, “Gang, this is my boy I was telling you about,” like I was twelve years old again. Gang didn’t respond right away. You could tell by the way he circled a burl on the table with his finger that he enjoyed an obvious and prolonged show of deference. One of his eyes was brown and the other was dead. It was this milky fog, the right eye, the slightest hint of a colored iris, dull green, beneath a cloud. I was in Gang’s blind spot, wondering if he could see me at all. It was a bit strange that no one had mentioned I was late or that I smelled like raw sewage. You’d think that would come up right away, but they were letting it all slide and there had to be a reason. I felt my future getting sorted out in this black fishbowl with a smooth gold ceiling, not in any understandable way of course, just a crinkling around the edges of my consciousness.

  “Eldest son,” Gang said to me, familiarly, but not smiling, “why do you look nervous? Relax around me.” Somehow I got the hunch he could see me through his dead eye. Also that no one had ever relaxed around him. “I have a son too,” he continued. “In Manchester right now studying for exams, or so he tells me. His credit cards tell me something else.” He smiled now, too perfectly; his teeth must have been veneers. “I am only here to wish you congratulations. Also I never turn down a free meal. That is my secret—no filling me up. I am always hungry. It is a curse. I can eat and eat and never gain weight. Still I weigh a hundred sixty pounds. Never feel full. Well, tonight I try again. I want to welcome you officially to Foshan and ask you to think of her as your new hometown. Tell me that. Repeat it now for me with conviction.”

  This struck me as a very odd thing to do, to have me repeat this, as though it was boot camp, but he was a decorated party member and I was just a guest, a temporary resident. So I said it. “Foshan is my hometown.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, “still too nervous.”

  Just then Dad nodded to a waitress waiting by the bar below an enormous flat-screen TV, who whispered something into the microphone pinned to her vest, and then the doors blew open and two other waitresses, wearing sleeveless red-and-gold qipao with stand-up collars and double slits up the legs marched into the room—one holding a tray with a fountain pen and ink pot, the other carrying a stack of documents on a red velvet pillow cushion.

  The girls set the pillow and ink tray down in front of Dad, who nodded, the head waitress nodded, Yong and Shen nodded—some secret communiqué passing between them all—and the young waitress in a short qipao lifted a bottle of red wine off the bar. It had all been planned out in advance, rehearsed; my only surprise was that I didn’t notice it sooner. Everything in Dad’s world order made sense.

  Dad handed me the pillow with the documents on top, and before it was even in my hands I knew it was infinitely heavy. He stood up and raised his glass. “I’m not one to make speeches,” he began, the typical opening of someone who loves nothing more. “So I’ll keep this short. It was only a year ago that I brought Alex up to Dongguan to the Avon business, which you remember we were doing out there with Winston and Jerry. So we’re all around the conference table finishing our tea and Winston, you know how he works. He was doing twenty-hour days in the factory, don’t ask me how this is even possible, but he’s designing samples one day and he passes out right in the cutting room. He is out cold. Goes into a coma. This is true. He’s in a coma for about a month when he comes out. He tells me he’s fine, no problem. ‘Oh, we’re so sorry,’ I say, ‘that’s awful, horrible, da-te-da-te-da,’ because it really is, so I say. And Alex, do you know his words to Winston? He says, ‘What was it like?’ To the poor man he says this. You have to admit you said that, Alex. What were you expecting? ‘Oh, I caught up on my reading.’ Did you think he’d recommend a coma? It’s not a day spa, Alex. ‘How was it?’ You have to admit this was not your finest moment. Gang, Yong, Shen, I said to myself, we’ve got trouble, major tsuris. Point is, that’s long in the past and we’ve seen much better days since. Alex, I want you to take over the business for me. I’ll shadow you, but I want to officially sign it over. There’s legal reasons and financial ones too. I can’t do this forever, everyone here agrees. It’s 2015. We’re tired. We don’t look it but we are, and you’re ready, at least we hope to God you are, I’m kidding, you’re ready. It’s time.”

  This whole while I’d been holding the pillow, heavier and heavier in my hands, my palm sweat seeping into the velvet. They all turned to look at me, impatient for the reaction—the correct reaction, which I knew I wasn’t capable of giving. No, it wasn’t that I couldn’t, I just wouldn’t. I was conscious of the fact that I stunk, my clothes still damp and acrid from the river, and somehow that rickety houseboat with the heat crackling over yellow snakeweed, a surge of camphor when the wind picked up—somehow that seemed
much safer than this place now.

  My hand went to the pen and held it. It was shaking, and I worried that they would see my shaking hand. This was planned too, I was sure, since the day Dad first held me, wet and bleating, smoothed the blond down on my head like he was testing top grain. So this had always been my fate, ever since the cattle carrier huffed out of Belgium with my grandfather. Okay, Dad, I thought, I’ll be you, and do it just as well.

  “Sign, Alex,” Yong said, smiling, “or we drown you in the Pearl.”

  He was joking, I hoped, but they were all a little afraid inside. I saw that. The pen was in my hand, my fingers flared, and they were staring at me, at my power to fill up the room. No, I could do this better than Dad. He’d been at it too long; he was dried up. A new approach. Fresh ideas. I’d nudge Dad aside, push if I had to. First I’d ditch the midtier department stores and go after the boutiques and higher-level brands. Get out of knockoffs. I wanted to do something my father never could because, smart as he was, he was a knockoff himself, a duplicate of duplicators. I wanted to design originals. Artisan leathers—kid and calfskin—those delicate, soft, supple leathers Dad wouldn’t touch anymore. My own brand I wanted. Stop screwing around with table runs of 60 percent C-grade hides. No more private label. I saw my own designer brand on the floor at Nordstrom or even Neiman Marcus, under my name. Or some name. I’d find a name. I would try at least. And I figured if it got to be too much, if Dad wouldn’t let me breathe, well, I could pull the rip cord, escape if I needed to. I could always get the hell out.

  There was a silence in the room and I could see my father fidgeting, crossing one leg then the other. I saw his hands too were trembling. The cool air moved across my neck. And there was a drop of ink quivering on the end of the fountain pen. Yong raised his wineglass to me. “Good luck, Alex. You can’t forget what the Pirkei Avot says, ‘Love work. Don’t get friendly with the government.’”