Love and the Art of War

by Dinah Lee Küng

  ‘Yeah. So he said.’ Sammie slipped from her grasp. She shared her grandmother’s aversion to trite dialogue.

  ‘He wouldn’t lie to you.’

  ‘Can you be a part-time liar, Mum? Someone’s either a liar or he’s honest. Dad wants to take me to Avatar this afternoon. I don’t want to go. I’ve got to swot up my maths.’

  ‘I suppose that counts as a white lie.’ Jane stroked Sammie’s hair. ‘I have an idea. Would you like to meet my friend Winston from my evening class, instead?’

  Although it was a quirky idea, it grew with the hours until that afternoon Sammie and Jane forced their way against a headwind sweeping down Primrose Hill to meet Winston for Chinese food.

  ‘Who is this guy? You’ve got a friend under forty?’ Sammie squealed over the Northern Line’s rumble up to Belsize Park.

  ‘You can have friends all ages. Hasn’t your grandmother got friends of all ages?’

  ‘Sure, from seventy to one hundred.’

  Winston beamed with delight as they walked up to the Chu counter. A noodle feast was their reward for braving a freezing Saturday of harried weekend shoppers. Nelson was at the airport picking up a shipment of new keyboards from Taiwan, so Winston’s little sister Monica would hold the fort.

  They walked to the Moonbeam Restaurant nestled in a small mews half a block away from the Saturday market crowds. With its garish vermilion sign and jade green railing, the Moonbeam was a homey place to lift the bruised heart; it seemed one of those Chinese restaurants that never changes and you never remark on—until the day you need it—and then it rises out of the mists, a Brigadoon of sweet-and-sour pork. Its sweltering dining room bustled with waiters shouting orders pushing through takeaway customers loitering near the cash register, as bursts of smoke flew up from steaming woks glimpsed behind the swinging kitchen door.

  ‘What a din,’ Winston cringed. He picked up a stained menu card propped against the soy sauce cruet. ‘I’m actually not very good at this.’

  Sammie recoiled from a plate of glistening sea creatures landing on an adjacent table. ‘Nothing with scales or tentacles, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Sammie.’ Winston patted her wrist. ‘I don’t eat squiggly things either. Anyway, you look like somebody who only eats once a month.’

  ‘Hello, Winston.’ A waitress dragged up to their table and yanked at two greasy plaits caught in her apron. Underneath a spattered bib, she wore a blue satin cheongsam that squeezed even her slender waist into two sausages of shiny fat.

  ‘ ‘Lo, Cecilia. How’s your mother?’

  ‘Made me wear this stupid Suzie Wong outfit again. How’s your Dad?’

  Their simultaneous sighs of, ‘Nothing new’ told a story in itself. The weight of Chinese parental expectation clouded their brows. Cecilia ladled out steaming bowls of rice and set an oval plate of pork strips on crispy noodles on the table. Winston told Sammie and Jane that he’d met Cecilia at the age of six in Saturday morning Cantonese class. ‘I would never have passed without her cheat sheets.’

  Mr and Mrs Ng Chow-fat, insisted Cecilia study accounting full-time and wait on tables weekends in the Moonbeam. Winston confided that his friend’s private dream was to work in ‘new media.’ How to achieve anything between hours of reckoning pre-tax profit margins for assorted relatives all over London and biking cartons of fried rice around the neighbourhood was the wan-looking girl’s desperate dilemma.

  Sammie looked with suspicion at the food. Her picky eating was getting worse. She asked, ‘What’s your dream, Winston? Why are you taking a library management class? Mom says you want to run your Dad’s business. When I grow up, I want to write Lonely Planet guidebooks and never come home.’

  Jane scowled at her daughter and shook her head, warning Winston.

  ‘Well, actually I’m not into library technology. Not even printing. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff in the shop, but it doesn’t do anything for me.’ His expression drifted. ‘It sounds corny, but I had something more traditional in mind.’

  Jane imagined a Ching dynasty Winston in long grey scholar’s gown with white cuffs and a pristine white collar. He was lifting scrolls of black calligraphy off a silk-screen press, when he wasn’t tending bamboo plants in his orangery. Somewhere a pi-pa was playing . . .

  Winston shattered her lovely vision with, ‘My toddler years were spent in Hong Kong during the last big construction boom. You might say my earliest lullaby was the rhythm of pile drivers.’ His eyes glazed over. ‘My dream is to sell real estate, like my ancestors before me and their ancestors before them.’

  ‘Winston, you’re so clumsy with numbers!’ Jane couldn’t help herself.

  Winston lost a square of pineapple off the end of his chopsticks. ‘True, I’m more a people person. I’d need a partner to watch the percentages.’

  They devoured a delicious lunch without a single tentacle or scale. Winston and Sammie found common cause in various food phobias and academic struggles.

  ‘You know I tried Tactic Fourteen, Jane.’

  ‘What’s Tactic Fourteen, Winston?’

  ‘A Chinese proverb, Sammie. You borrow tradition to give soul to your cause. ‘Course, Dad agreed right away that the Chu name must carry on down through the generations. Thanked me for warning him of threat posed by the lovely Sultana mob. Nelson caught on and right away suggested the three of us work together on something fresh, something really now to enhance our position. Here’s the result.’

  A doleful Winston dangled a green plastic sweet pepper in front of Sammie’s nose. ‘This is a key chain prototype UPS’d from my uncle Horatio’s toy factory in Foshan.’

  Tiny white print circled the vegetable’s waistline: ‘Chu Pixels and Printers.’ Sammie turned it round and round, reading, ‘—Packs a Peck of Peppy Products—Computers, Printers and Service 24/7 . . . ’

  ‘‘Notice, pixels comes first? Bad omen. Nelson had to explain to Dad what the twenty-four and seven stand for . . . ’ Winston pocketed the plastic vegetable.

  ‘I’m not quite sure what to say about the key chain but this food is delicious, Winston.’

  ‘Oh, Jane, that’s just Menu One. I can’t read the others. Probably dogs-up-a-tree, frogs in lotus leaves, dragon doo-doo on seaweed . . . ’ He played the clown to Sammie’s grinning audience. He whispered to Jane, ‘Fourteen flopped. I’m moving on to Number Fifteen. Lure the Tiger Down Off the Mountain. Harass the hell out of Nelson this week.’

  ‘Well, at least Sammie and I lured you out for a meal. Thanks for not telling her too much about the class. Her father thinks I’m studying library management.’

  Mother and daughter strolled home with fresh breezes at their backs.

  ‘He’s Hugh Grant trapped inside this beanpole Chinese body, Mum. So sweet, all stammering.’

  ‘Aren’t you glad I don’t make you slave in a print shop or kitchen all day?’

  ‘I shall spend all tomorrow studying,’ Sammie promised. ‘But tonight Grandma’s taking me to Wicked. She and one of the dressers go waaaaay back.’

  Sammie paused outside her bedroom door. ‘Is Dad coming home tomorrow?’

  ‘I think he’s working on something with Fergus.’

  ‘As long as it’s with Fergus, I don’t mind.’ The unspoken name ‘Bella’ hung in the air.

  Monday morning Jane got to work on time, drank her coffee as if nothing had happened, and prepared for the meeting to review the Public Lending Right figures totting up the most borrowed authors. Figures were important these days in the battle to keep a branch open. Chris didn’t remark on her buttoned-up demeanour but she caught her own severe reflection in a darkened computer screen. At least ‘abandoned goods’ wasn’t blinking from her brow in neon lights.

  Chris ticked off the most thumbed: ‘Patterson, Cox, Steel. The usual. So, so depressing.’

  ‘They keep us open three days a week. If our viability was based on Joshua Ferris, we’d be on the street.’

  ‘If I position Jamie’s Dinne
rs next to John Thaw and Catherine Cookson, do you think anybody would get the joke?’ Chris shrugged. ‘I’m damned if I’m sacrificing Philip Roth for Jamie’s risotto.’ Chris held up a sports bio, Black, White and Gold. ‘At least this is a good read.’

  ‘Put it next to My Walk to Freedom.’

  ‘Good idea. There, Mr Mandela, a new friend.’ Chris rearranged his ‘Triumph over Adversities’ display to better impress the directors of The Reading Agency’s Fulfilling Their Potential Initiative.

  On the other side of the room he’d set up some reading for preteens: Love Lessons, Gossip Girls, and The Girls’ Collection. ‘Convincing? You know, if I was a girl—’

  ‘You’re not—’

  ‘—a girl in this neighbourhood, I’d want to escape into Persuasion. No more television rip-offs.’ He caught Jane’s glance. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with watching telly.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Chris. Go ahead and insult television all you want. Joe moved out.’ She shuffled the borrowing data.

  ‘Oh, Jane. Do you want to call in sick or . . . ’ Chris reached for the bin, ‘Or be sick . . . or something?’

  ‘No. I’ll start to feel pain in the phantom limb any minute now, but so far, I’m numb.’

  ‘Your hair looks nice pulled back like that.’

  ‘Thanks. One good hair day is a fair trade-off for a decades-long relationship—’

  “I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I had the bathroom all to myself for a change.’

  ‘Yeah, I like being single myself. You need something, you know, to tide you over?’

  ‘Let’s leave the drugs to our borrowers,’ Jane said. ‘I’m fine. Really. What time are these people coming?’

  ‘Any minute, I expect.’

  ‘Well, then, pull all our Dan Browns and diet books out of the back cupboard and scatter them around. Go on! I’m fine.’ Her mobile rang and The Initiative Delegation walked in just in time to scowl with disapproval at Jane’s ear pressed to her mobile, ‘Yes, darling. That’s why he’s going to keep staying with Uncle Fergus.’

  Chris distracted the officials with his ‘Thrills and Chills’ table.

  ‘Sammie, I have to go, darling. Please, please, don’t let it affect your studies. I love you, too. Oh, don’t cry. Yes, I still love Daddy, too. I just don’t like him one little bit.’

  ***

  ‘You mean you don’t want to talk about it, or you just told Joe you didn’t?’ Lorraine was confused.

  ‘There’s no point in talking while he’s totally embarrassed. After all, a few weeks ago, he loathed Bella. What does she see in him? I can’t believe it’s sex—no—don’t look at me like that. If it was just a shag behind the pots and pans, I’d have lost him years ago to some ditsy PA. Dozens tried over the years.’

  Lorraine listened from the window seat. ‘For once in my life, I don’t have any advice for you. I never got them back, not once they strayed. It was all cool disdain and alimony where Jack was concerned. As for alimony, fat chance as you’re not—’

  ‘Don’t start now—’

  Jane told Lorraine how she could only view Joe’s entrapment like the Snow Queen’s enchantment of Gerda’s boyfriend Kay, and how, only after long years of searching for the Snow Queen’s ice palace, Gerda’s tears burned the troll-mirror’s glass out of Kay’s eye and heart, like an ice chip melting away under the heat of her love . . . She still loved Joe, just as Gerda had never stopped loving the boy Kay, because she knew that the boy Joe was trapped inside this middle-aged man’s frustrations and fears.

  ‘Hans Christian Anderson? The Snow Queen’s ice chips? You’re hopeless. The only ice chips that featured in my failed romances were in the champagne bucket Jack kept chilled in his dressing room for ingénues.’

  They worked for a while on the February birthday guest list, mulling over various disabilities as against conversational gifts, until Lorraine felt uncomfortable. She struggled off to change for bed. The usual pain pills weren’t relieving aches in her bladder, but that didn’t stop her humming in the bathroom. Lorraine had a favourite book character—Don Marquis’s indomitable alley cat, Mehitabel who sang, (as recorded by a cockroach Archie jumping from typewriter key to typewriter key,) ‘my youth i shall never forget, but theres nothing i really regret, wotthehell wotthehell, theres a dance in the old dame yet, toujours gai toujours gai.’

  Yes, Lorraine had given Jane nights of adolescent tears, but wotthehell wotthehell, she’d also taught her daughter songs that kept the most dismal of shows on the road.

  ***

  ‘I don’t quite follow this lure-the-tiger-out business, Professor.’ Keith read from his handout, ‘Stranded on the sandy beach, the dragon is teased by shrimps. Descending to the plain, the tiger is bullied by dogs. Well, what’s the difference between this Stratagem Fifteen and good ol’ Four—that one about tiring out the enemy while you conserve your resources?’

  ‘A bed rest has done you good, Keith.’ Baldwin stroked his forehead as he perched on a high stool in the corner. They were stuck in their tiny room and this week, all were present. Baldwin’s solution was to sit above their heads, his pointed knees inches from Dan’s chin. So far, it made him look—depending on the angle of Jane’s chair and her mood—either like the class dunce relegated to a corner or St Peter handing down verdicts from the Pearly Gates. She finally settled on The Land of Oz’s very intelligent Jack Pumpkin—all bones and big brain.

  ‘Are you all keeping track of these nuances as well as Nigel and Keith? Remember, Four was one of the so-called Winning Strategies, best used from a comparatively strong position. You set the pace, keep the other side tense, and attack might not be even necessary, if things go your way.’

  Things weren’t going Jane’s way. Her half-hearted strategies had brought only temporary victories and psychological holding patterns that evaporated within days. The benefit of the class was not so much success in fortifying her family compound as providing distraction while the whole edifice collapsed around her.

  Baldwin gained steam, ‘Now, this Number Fifteen, Keith, is the third of the six Attacking Strategies, which are more aggressive. You don’t just make your opponent anxious, you lure him, or her,’ he smiled at Jane, ‘Away from his source of strength. You isolate him from his support base, so that you can attack and harass him on unfamiliar ground.’

  ‘You mean by forcing another store to try a line or collection that directly competes with where we’re strongest?’ Kevin asked. ‘Retro-print spring wear?’

  Baldwin confirmed, ‘Exactly, Kevin. Retro-print spring wear, if you’re particularly successful with such garments. You pull the ladies away from your enemy’s fashion commitments—’

  ‘To sportswear—’ Kevin said.

  ‘While you make your dresses the must-have garments of the season.’

  ‘Those guys don’t have the right designers,’ Kevin grinned. ‘They can’t turn their orders around that fast. Even with the latest JIT inventory systems. But it would mean a huge outlay for us in promotion, ads, and in-house copywriting.’

  ‘So lure them into your market. Pull out the retro stops. Luring the tiger off his terrain will mean being very alert—’

  ‘Tightening my cycle of orders and customer-response—’

  Flexibility, speed, decisiveness. All the traits Jane lacked. But one thing was clear to her even before the session broke for coffee. Instead of waiting for Joe to show his pathetic adulterer’s hand, she would lure the tiger out of the cave. Not the tigress. She’d been thinking of Bella as the enemy, a size 38D fiend at the end of her spear, but that was all wrong, she realized now.

  Wasn’t it Joe who was thwarting her happiness? Wasn’t his weakness their common enemy? She must lure Joe off Fergus’ guest bed long enough to nip at his heels. Cowardly retreat might salve her pride, but she would have to just swallow her reticence and pull Joe back on her ground.

  With shaking hands, she dialled his number. ‘Joe, I think I’d like to talk after a
ll,’ she said. She could hear Natalie Cole crooning softly in the background amid the hubbub of a bar or restaurant. Somehow, she didn’t associate Fergus with cocktails.

  ‘Oh, Jane, I’m so glad to hear you sound okay. Yes, we have to clear the air. Considering everything I’ve put you through, I mean, actually, we have a lot to talk about. I haven’t been quite honest with you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, Joe, darling, I think I’m way ahead of you on that score. Let’s meet at home tomorrow. Sammie’s taking Lorraine to the hairdresser.’

  ‘How about somewhere more, uh, neutral?’

  ‘Sorry, Joe. I’ve only got the half hour at lunch. It’s our busiest day at the library. I’ll be home at noon.’

  ‘All right, Jane. I can make it. Anything you say.’

  ‘Yes, I have a full afternoon cleaning out all the self-help brochures. No doubt, I’ll find all the marriage counselling tips quite handy now.’

  ‘Gosh, Jane. You sound so in control. I don’t want to upset you more. Maybe it’s too soon?’

  ‘Too soon? No, Joe, you won’t upset me. You probably need the rest of your things, and it seems a good day. Saturdays I always clean out Bulgakov’s gravel box. We can clean out your gravel, too.’

  Her hand shook but her voice had held its bravado. It was less a charade than it would have been a few months before. Stratagems were all well and good on paper, but once you’d lured the tiger off his mountain and on to your territory, what could you say to make him stay? Finally, Jane’s pride was raising its abused little head. She wasn’t prepared to beg. It was time to attack.

  Besides, she had plans, too. Heading out of class, Dan had asked her to lunch again. And this time, she was happy to think, it sounded like a proper date.

  Chapter Sixteen, Yu Qing, Gu Zong

  (To Catch Something, First Let It Go)

  Of all the stratagems so far, Baldwin’s Number Sixteen resonated most deeply with Jane. Sixteen was the only stratagem she actually feared, the one that ordained, ‘To catch something, first let it go.’