The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  Screw it; let him feel something he couldn’t control for once. Only Dad could turn an employee’s suicide into his own maudlin pity party.

  “Get some rest,” I said. My voice sounded heavy. Strained. I wanted to say: Here’s the truth, old man. This is on us. Don’t pretend China’s got you by the balls. You got it all backward. Everything’s out of your control but this. This we could have done something about and we didn’t. If you want to own anything, own that.

  “Sure, sure,” he said, real distant. “Same for you.”

  Then he slumped off to the elevator banks, and I was surprised to feel a little sad when he was gone.

  * * *

  Upstairs, I lay down on my bed waiting for Ivy. Focusing on the popcorn ceiling, I heard in my head, You think Ruxi’s got it bad, have you seen my goddamn T-Zone lately? The heat’s doing a number on me. I thought I was rid of that. Slipping into his voice to avoid the hard stuff. As soon as Ivy arrived I was going to tell her the truth—the new Abelson’s CEO was driving their business into the ground, fewer orders every season. We were going to have to lay people off if it didn’t pick up. So how about me and you just haul it out of town and go live on some aboriginal island off Taiwan and spear fish and grow pears. Brew our own Kruska. What did you need to grow pears, anyway? Bees? And you probably needed other pear trees too. Lots of them. That was the hell of it. You always needed your own kind to survive.

  * * *

  At 8:00 p.m. I rode the employee elevator down to the garage where they kept the Bentleys and Rollses. I slipped out the side door right as a blue taxi pulled up to the curb. The door opened and one of our pewter gladiator sandals planted itself on the ground. Ivy got out of the car and came toward me, wearing a jean skirt and a black tank top, her hair thick and dark and long, a soft wave at the ends.

  The cab reversed and the yellow beams lit her up from behind so I saw only her silhouette, this fuzzy penumbra around her body, a white hum that looked kind of sinister, like one of those famished, wandering ghosts coming to reach inside me, but then the light slipped away, the cab was gone and she was wrapping her arms around my neck.

  I led her to the elevator. She was smart to have suggested the back entrance. I felt lousy about smuggling her into the hotel, but there was no way of getting in through the front, not with Karri snooping around, the bellboys, the maids. There was a tight network of surveillance, and they knew right away when someone didn’t belong, like they could read your net worth from a glance.

  We walked through a narrow halogen-lit hallway up a staircase to the mezzanine and past the hotel library with ceiling-high oak bookcases full of leather-bound faux books, and then past the frosted green doors of the hotel salon onto another set of elevator banks.

  A fresh stack of towels sat outside my hotel room door wrapped in sheaves of tissue paper with a note on top that I picked up and read:

  Dear Alex,

  A fresh set of towels. You should always use fresh. I believe this was the cause of your jock itch.

  Love, Dad.

  “What is it?” Ivy asked, her breath warm on my shoulder.

  “Nothing,” I tell her, crumpling the note and shoving it deep in my pocket. It was heat rash anyway. In the hotel sauna a few days ago, I’d shown Dad a rash on my thigh. “Jungle rot,” he said, whistling low. “Buhao.” No good. After the sauna, he insisted on showing me the correct way to towel off, swabbing every nook and cranny. “Don’t forget your ass,” he said dead serious, like Moses ran out of room on the tablets for that nugget on Mount Zion. Tell your sons. Tell everyone. Dry thoroughly and don’t forget the ass.

  Ivy crossed the room and stood by the window under the big double pouf valance, rubbing her bare shoulders. The floor boy had the air conditioner turned down to sixty-four degrees. I gave her one of my sweatshirts, which she pulled over her head, and it hung down to her knees.

  Her eyes slid around the room and settled on the complimentary wine and fruit basket on a silver tray, sitting in the middle of the fluffy king-size bed, and I worried that she thought I put it there as a romantic gesture. I wanted to tell her I wasn’t one of those guys. I could’ve told her that it came every night for everyone at the Ambassador level, but that somehow sounded even worse.

  “Do you want to shower?” I said, and Ivy’s arms were still crossed. Maybe that offended her. Made her feel like a charity case. At the dorms they had to wait in a long line to shower and there was only hot water at 8:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m. and even then they were timed at five minutes.

  She said, “With you?” which stopped me cold.

  “It’s a nice shower,” I told her. “The soap’s flown in from Italy or someplace.”

  What the hell was I talking about? I’d already slept with her. The whole point of sleeping with someone was so you could finally reveal that you’re a real person.

  “Yes,” I said. “Together.”

  She smiled now. I hadn’t fucked the whole thing up. And I was glad for that. Glad that around her I could blurt out the first thought from my gut without dreying over everything.

  “You’re fine?” I said. In my head I was thinking, Stop dreying.

  “I will tell you if not,” she said, and she laid the towel on the desk chair and pulled off the sweatshirt. “I can take care of myself,” she said, tossing it to me. Her skirt rasped down her legs.

  “Damn right,” I said.

  I followed her to the bathroom. And that thump was back once we were inside the shower with all the mirrors. Mirrors were forbidden in the dorms, because Yong said vanity alone can bring a factory to its knees. The girls, he said, must think of the factory as having one body, one face, one voice. You are all the arms and legs; we are the head and voice. Together we are the body.

  Here though, it was all mirrors, and I turned on the water pretty hot and she was pressed right up against me. Her lips crushed against mine and there was a quickening in me as I got down on the tile floor on my knees and washed her feet with the bar of soap. The contrast between the black tiles and her white feet. My hand a washcloth gliding along the curve of her ankle joint down to the negative space of her arch, where these tributaries of sole creases—some strong, some weak—flowed side by side until a sudden confluence, one deep line flowing toward the ball of her foot. And then up over her instep, the washcloth traveling over the forked vein, a pale denim blue.

  I stood back up, and she reached between my legs and squeezed me, firm in her hand, clutching me, and then she was down on her knees washing me with soap and taking me into her mouth and when I closed my eyes there was a bright bloom of color, I was gone and something else came in, God, or I didn’t know what, and I ceased to exist, and then the wanting badly to see her face, opening my eyes, but behind her long hair her face was hidden, which made everything ache, even my metal fillings. I leaped at the sight of Ivy’s tongue, pink and long, running slow along the length of me, and she looked up at me, the last inhibition steamed off, and I pulled her up to her feet, pressed her chest against the wall, and she arched her back, and she reached down and slid me inside of her and I groaned, the water breaking over her back in foamy streams and I was inside her and we were alone there.

  No Dad on the toilet with the door wide-open, shouting, “Elsa, where’d you hide my goddamned reading glasses?”

  No mother pounding on the bathroom door yelling at me that Lilith will steal my seed and bear me demon sons if I masturbate; that God always sees me even if she can’t.

  I clenched my eyes and Ivy pushed back against me, moaning against my ear, she ground hard against me, my knees trembled and everything went black and crushed as she said something in Chinese in a half-choked breath, craning her neck back with her mouth open.

  * * *

  Afterward, I watched Ivy drying herself off in front of the sink. Dad would have been pleased at her thoroughness. She didn’t forget the ass. Her skin was all
goose-bumped and red. She knotted a bath towel at her chest, and we lay down in the bed on top of the sheets and everything felt sedate and good. She was pressed up against me, along my left side. She’d brought a peach to bed. As she was paring it with a knife, I thought, That’s how you cut a peach? That’s not how I’d cut a peach.

  I wondered how I was supposed to go through life with Dad’s nonsense in my head. But it wasn’t just nonsense. There was also an edge to it.

  I remembered my mother at the kitchen table once reading an old mystical text for the sages called the Zohar, and my father whisked through the room saying, sarcastically, “Elsa, you’re so smart you should be reading this?” A lifetime of these little jabs.

  “I’m a Cohain, aren’t I?” she snapped. Everyone fell back on that.

  “Relax, Elsa. Read your fancy book.”

  She ignored him.

  When he was gone, I went up to her and said, “Hey, Ma,” but she didn’t look up. Her lips kept moving. Reading the words. In the second century these rabbis went into a cave, took their clothes off, buried themselves in sand and twelve years later came out with the Zohar.

  Finally, she realized I was there and her head snapped up.

  “You want ginger ale?” she asked. That line came out whenever she wasn’t listening to me. Like whatever the problem was, ginger ale would solve it.

  I shook my head. I didn’t even know what I was going to say. There was a look on her face. Like she wouldn’t mind burying herself in a cave for a few years. She was off on an island where Dad couldn’t reach her. But that meant I couldn’t either.

  Then she reached out and stroked my hair, and said, “You’re okay, darling.”

  Sometimes I’d volunteer to practice reading Hebrew just because I liked her standing close behind me: her hand on my shoulder squeezing when I flubbed a word, softening when I found my groove.

  I wanted to tell Ivy all of this, but right as I was thinking about how to begin, she asked me a question.

  “Who was your first girlfriend?”

  “Danielle Feeley,” I said. “She was an all-state swimmer and always had a fever blister on her lower lip. I don’t know if those two things are related.”

  Ivy made a face.

  “I wasn’t in a position to get picky.”

  I told Ivy about how Danielle and I had snuck off into Harold King Forest and lay down on some shiny green ground cover to fool around, which led to my first blow job. But that night I felt an itch at dinner, which grew into this horrible burn by nighttime as I lay in bed convinced I’d gotten gonorrhea and everything my mother warned me about the goyem—non-Jewish girls—was true.

  “I am goyem?” Ivy asked.

  “Big time. Anyway, it turns out you don’t all have gonorrhea. By 10:00 p.m. I knew it was poison ivy. This isn’t a joke on your name by the way. This is true. Do you have it in China? Poison ivy.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, of course.”

  “I didn’t know. Well, it was on my penis and the itch was absolutely horrible. Sure that I needed to go to the hospital, I woke up my parents. Dad started yelling in the hall, ‘On your schmekel? The hell were you doing?’ Then my sister came running out in her nightgown—‘That’s why I call you dickweed!’—and Mom was cursing and Dad said, ‘Everyone just hold on a second, let me get my reading glasses.’”

  Ivy’s forehead wrinkled up and she leaned back. “Why did he want to see?”

  “I don’t know. He’s fucking nuts. To diagnose it, I guess. But that’s my father. I mean, I couldn’t even have that to myself. My first blow job. Even that turned into a disaster. Standing in the bathroom. Dad doing his real low whistle.”

  I did the whistle and Ivy laughed. “This is a terrible story,” she said. She’d throw herself down a well before showing herself like that to her parents.

  Then she blushed a little and said, “Mine was better?”

  “Much better,” I said and smiled.

  We were quiet for a while and I was about to ask about her first, but something on her face told me she’d moved on from that.

  “Are you thinking about Ruxi?” I asked, my hand folded behind my head.

  “No,” she said. She turned on her side and faced me with her elbow on the pillow. She drew a sharp breath.

  “Alex, I have to go to Beijing this weekend and I want you to come with me.”

  “Beijing? Why? Did you tell your work-team leader?”

  A darkness came over her face. Or maybe it was pity, I couldn’t tell, some distance, even though she was still pressed right against me.

  “Did ever something bad happen to you? A tragedy?” she said.

  I was quiet for too long. I could hear her swallow.

  “Mmm,” she said, her question lingering. There was Ruxi of course. But before that there was Bernie and me at nine years old sitting in his mother’s room and she was spluttering into a napkin while stroking Bernie’s arm and I found that odd and beautiful, that she’d stroke his arm when she was the one dying from cancer, and he had his head on her chest, her breath coming short and labored, and I was standing by the foot of the bed, imagining her feet swollen and purple under the covers, and she whispered something to him and then it was like she left her smell behind in him, because from then on he smelled like her always. Kind of like the glossy pages of an old magazine. In gym class for weeks, months, he’d suddenly drop the floor-hockey stick or basketball and walk off into the corner and start talking, all animated, to the cement wall, gesturing and pleading and arguing and then he’d come back and say he had a fight with his mother and point to the wall saying, Don’t you see her? And it threw this chill over my skin like I’d jumped in a cold lake, mostly because his eyes were intense and alive, black as fresh tar, and I knew he wasn’t fucking with me. I knew he was talking to a real ghost.

  So I was about to tell Ivy about that when I had this terrible thought—my life has been too easy, suspiciously so, and what if there’s been someone at the reins, someone out of sight, greasing the wheels, getting a mild-grade screwup like me into a good college like Brandeis. Getting me third and fourth chances. Getting me from intern to staff at Traveler magazine in a few months. I’d never asked. I hadn’t asked the hardest questions of myself. Or maybe I’d always known it was Dad. It was him pulling the strings. Not God.

  “Tell me about your sister,” I said. “I want to know everything about you.”

  “Walk it with me,” she said.

  “Walk what?”

  “Tiananmen. Come with me to Beijing if you want to know.”

  She was talking softly but her voice was firm and insistent.

  “I can’t explain in words,” she continued. “When I try, it is like leaving the kettle boiling too long and all the water disappears.”

  “Evaporates,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  She started picking at a loose thread on the pillowcase. I knew I’d said the wrong thing. I was scared, that’s all, and a little embarrassed because I’d never had my face pushed down in it, not like Ivy, so I flexed some muscle by correcting her vocabulary. Scared she’d think I was soft. And she’d be right. The only real grief I’d had was those four months in New York alone working at The Plaza Hotel as a shoe-shine boy—Bernie’s dad got me the job. He knew the front office manager, Anthony. Old black guy. “Use your bare hands,” Anthony told me when he saw me applying polish with a rag. He used to hover over my shoulder. “The warmth melts the polish into the leather. Go on. It won’t hurt. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” That man was a saint. I worked hard for him. Kneeling before that mahogany throne with brass stirrups and pearl knobs. Buffing and polishing three coats, all dizzy from the heavy naphtha smell, until I could see my own face in the guy’s shoe. But I can’t explain it. Why it felt so desolate. I know you can get a story out with all the words in the right order, but it doesn’t put y
ou in control of the thing. Ivy didn’t want me to understand, she wanted me to feel it. She was asking for something, so I needed to stop being a selfish prick. She wanted to show me. Shut up and say yes.

  I remember how sometimes, if the customer was a friend of his, Anthony would let me put a nice gob of polish on the toe box and set it on fire with a lighter. A bright blue flame. I wanted him for a father. Feels like I could’ve done something with my life if Anthony was around every day to tell me there was nothing to be afraid of.

  “Okay, I’ll go,” I said to Ivy, suddenly, almost surprising myself, and I expected her to be real happy about this but her mouth drew a hard line.

  “Alex,” she said, “it is not just my sister. I have a meeting in Beijing. Let me say all this at once. I try to tell you before. I belong to a political party called the DRP. The Democratic Revolutionary Party. That is who I am.”

  “Is it legal? This party.”

  “No. We remain a secret. Others registered with the government officially. The LCCP and the DCP. But they all disappeared or got arrested or fled.”

  “Is this why you came here tonight?”

  Her face flattened.

  “No, I needed to see you. Just you. But also this I needed to tell you in person. The phones and the computers are not safe.”

  Did Gang, the mayor, set it all up—wiretaps, surveillance—to see anything he wanted? Hadn’t he told me at the restaurant to watch myself; people disappeared in Foshan all the time.

  “It is worse for me,” she said. “My cell phone and my email is monitored because of my sister’s part in ’89. Same with my parents. My role in the DRP is a secret. For now. But they want to meet you.”

  I sat up in bed. “Me? You told them about me? Are you fucking crazy? They could shut me down. Close the factory. I could get thrown in jail.”

  “It is secret,” she said, shushing me with her hands. “I promise. Believe me. No one finds out.”

  It was quiet for a moment while I tried to sort out my thoughts but they were coming fast and muddy.