A Dual Inheritance (46 page)

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.

“There is gambling,” Li explained. “It is in another room.”

Ed nodded, watching a stunning young woman at the bar. She was talking to a fat old bastard. Probably a general. “Blackjack? Poker?”

She nodded. “Chinese dominoes, too. But not for money.”

“For what, then?” Ed asked, sipping his Tsingtao slowly. You always had to be drinking alcohol here. People became edgy if you weren’t constantly on your way toward being soused.

“Guns, ammunition, and”—Li looked away—“visas.”

“Visas?”

“People gamble for visas. Work visas for Hong Kong are important, very valuable.”

This, then, was what Li was after. He understood, but he didn’t let on.

“You’ll tell me more about that,” he said, taking a long drink and ordering another beer for him and another whiskey for Li. Ed had realized after the first night in the club that nearly everyone in the room spoke basic English.

“What more to tell?” asked Li, making him work for it.

“About the visas.”

“Hong Kong work visas?”

“Yes.”

She ran her hand along the table for one sustained moment. “Generals in each region—they can print visas,” she said. “They can print whenever they want to. They have a printer.”

“And you can just … pay?”

She nodded, but there was something more she wasn’t saying. And because—right that moment—he felt gripped by an unfamiliar reticence, he didn’t push her to tell him.

On the day the general agreed to meet Ed, Li took him to Xili Lake, where, after drinking three Tsingtaos from dusty bottles, he found himself agreeing to don a helmet and mount a horse. Never mind that the horses were emaciated and flea-bitten and that the helmets were old and obviously never intended for the purpose of riding. Ed and Li sat in their saddles, side by side. They shooed away flies. How were they supposed to act in this unprecedented context of forced leisure? The horses began to plod up into the hills. It was a silent ride, uneventful, until they came back to where they’d started and, without provocation, Ed’s horse spooked and threw him.

He landed on his bony ass (the only bony part of him) and, when he realized he hadn’t broken anything but that he was legitimately achy, to say nothing of embarrassed, he cursed the animal and rose to his feet, dusting off his clothes. The stable master’s child toddled out, naked from the waist down, and began to pet the spooked horse. The stable master followed the boy, hollering, and Li dismounted amidst the chaos. She came to Ed’s side, and he realized—not too late, thankfully—that
this pathetic horse had actually given him a gift. “I think,” he said, reaching out for her arm, as if merely to steady himself, “I think I need to lie down.”

It all came later in a room that let in the moonlight. He would be grateful to the moonlight, grateful to find out that moonlight was, even in a place so deeply strange, still available free of charge. It may have been the dismal surroundings and the relative comfort of the room, but when it was just the two of them—Ed and Li—finally alone, he didn’t waste a moment. The pathetic surroundings created, if not unprecedented passion, the unprecedented un-self-conscious expression of it. He’d never once thought of himself as anywhere near repressed, but years later—in fact, for the rest of his life—Ed would look back on that night at Xili Lake with a shudder of excitement that was, in the end, overshadowed by a lingering embarrassment at the noise that he’d emitted, that had sounded, even to his own ears, like some kind of terrible suffering.

After Li left his room at Xili Lake, Ed circled several notions, feeling wrong, all wrong, but unable to place precisely why. They had a more than pleasurable time together. She’d initiated it. He understood what she wanted—visas for her parents—and that, because of him, she was going to be able to achieve it. He thought he had done—and would continue to do—the right thing.

But his mouth tasted like blood. He briefly wondered if he’d cut his lip when he fell from that horse, or whether Li might have nicked him with one of her small white teeth.

They were strangers.

It always came back to knowing, to being known. To wondering over a gesture, whether she liked him or hated him and if it mattered. If it ever mattered. And this uncertainty, this familiar uncertainty in the most unfamiliar of places—it filled him with startling rage. He was pushing fifty, he was no exoticist; what the hell was he doing in this hotel room, in this corrupt and frankly preposterous situation? He bounded out from beneath the sheets, because being in bed suddenly disgusted him. Standing in the moonlight, which pooled at the foot of the bed, he
imagined Li climbing the stairwell and finding her room. He imagined, with strange certainty, how she would watch herself closely while brushing her teeth, how she would brush her teeth quickly, like a child forced to do so, how she’d scrub her face with concentration. And he was glad that she’d gone. He wouldn’t have wanted to see her like that.

It dawned on him that, because Shenzhen was twelve hours ahead of New York and that, though he’d been counting down the days, he’d missed a day—somewhere in there he had actually
missed a day
—he’d missed Thanksgiving. The guilt he felt over having not called Rebecca on Thanksgiving was out of proportion to how much she would care. He knew this, and yet self-loathing stung him as he shuffled back under the scratchy sheets and the nubby bedspread; he was riddled with sadness as he imagined her—someone’s future stepdaughter—eating dark-meat turkey but mostly yams at an unfamiliar table.

He picked up the phone and placed the call. As the phone rang, he went over the time difference once more and realized, amazingly, that he was wrong
yet again
and that not only was it, somehow, the perfect time to call, but across the world, in a Jed Johnson–designed dining room suffused with the exquisite clear light of Long Island’s East End, those staying at Gould Gardens would, in fact, be sitting down to eat. They would be turning their attention to the head of the table, to where his ex-wife’s
boyfriend
would declare—while raising a glass—just how very thankful he was. Ed knew he would do this, because Jill had always complained that Ed never set the right tone for their celebratory meal, that he had always shied away from any kind of public gratefulness, which had shocked him because he’d thought of himself as grateful to the point of obsequiousness around Jill.

The phone rang and rang. No answering machine.

He hung up and redialed several times, his heart speeding up with his escalating ire. Wouldn’t someone—Jill?
Rebecca
?—think to consider that the ringing phone might just be Rebecca’s father, calling to wish his only child a Happy Thanksgiving? Wouldn’t someone imagine how he might want to—yes—express his own particular gratitude?

As the phone continued to ring, the light in Southampton grew more and more celestial, the guests more fascinating, the décor and art more remarkable. As it rang, the air in Xili Palace grew staler and strangely cold. There were scratches on his ankle and on both of his knees; an inevitable bruise was forming on his ass. He was about to hang up the goddamn phone when somebody answered.

“Hello?” asked a male voice, slightly out of breath. “Hello? I just walked in.”

“I’ve been calling and calling. Who is this?”

“This is Roger. Who is this?”

“Roger?”

“The one and only.” He laughed, and Ed identified Roger as gay. This put him at ease somehow.

“I’m looking for my daughter.”

“I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

“Is this Gould Gardens?” He couldn’t believe he was speaking that ridiculous name in such a serious voice. But it helped, the name. He preferred it to speaking the name of the man whom Jill had not simply screwed but might marry.

“Yes, it is,” Roger said, suddenly official, “but Mr. Gould is not available, I’m afraid.”

“Okay, Roger. This is Ed Cantowitz. My daughter is Rebecca Cantowitz. My wife—my ex-wife—is Jill. Ringing any bells?”

“Oooh, I’m
so
sorry, Mr. Cantowitz. I’m Mr. Gould’s chef, Roger del Parra. And—again, so sorry—but there must have been some kind of communication snafu between y’all, because they aren’t here for the holiday. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way.”

“What do you mean they aren’t there?”

“I mean Mr. Gould and … your ex-wife have gone to the Palm Beach house. It’s just Christophe and me and the dogs here this weekend.”

“Is my daughter with them?”

“Well, I—I didn’t think so, but—”

“What’s the number in Palm Beach, Roger?”

“I’m afraid I’m not—”

“Roger, give me the goddamn number. Please.”

“Mr. Gould has expressly told me—”

“He’s told you what? That if Ed Cantowitz asks where his daughter is, if Ed Cantowitz wants to know where his own daughter is spending the Thanksgiving holiday—No, I don’t think so, Roger. Give me the number. Please.”

“I appreciate what you’re saying.”

“Thank you.”

Roger gave him the number.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” Ed managed to say, before hanging up the phone.

He pulled on his clothes before dialing Florida. He sat at the spindly desk in the corner. As he expected, nobody answered. The moonlight remained bright, a lone dog barked in the distance, and as he heard a car door slam and a far-off argument in Chinese, Ed kept dialing. He dialed Rebecca’s dorm and the school’s office—no answers. He dialed his apartment in New York, and his own voice greeted him brusquely. He thought about calling friends of Jill’s, but he didn’t have those numbers and promised himself that, next time, he’d travel with more of her contacts. It was difficult to think of a next time, to think beyond this night right here, this unending night, in the strangest place he’d ever been. He might have even dozed off between so many dialings of that Palm Beach number, he wasn’t sure, but when someone answered, he was so surprised that he cried out, “Don’t hang up, okay? Hello?”

“Ed?”

“Jesus Christ, Jill. Jesus Christ.”

“Where are you calling from? You sound right next door. Happy Thanksgiving—David,” she interrupted herself, “will you please turn that down.”

Ed emitted a hostile laugh. “Right, right, Happy Thanksgiving. Please put Rebecca on the phone.”

“Rebecca isn’t here, Ed. She’s spending the holiday with a school friend.”

“A school friend? Well, where the hell is she?”

“She’s actually in Anguilla,” Jill said, lightly incredulous, as if she’d had nothing whatsoever to do with it. “Her friend sounds terrific; her parents seem like interesting people. Of course I spoke with them before I gave Rebecca the okay, and—this is really funny, and obviously I was going to tell you when you were back from Asia—it turns out the girl’s father was in your class at Harvard.”

Ed felt not one shred of the usual satisfaction upon hearing Jill sound nervous. “What’s his name?”

“Hugh Shipley? And her name is Helen? He was very nice, very friendly on the phone. They both were. Said they couldn’t wait to meet Rebecca and, of course, to catch up with you.”

If hearing Helen’s name on Connie Graff’s lips the night before he left for Hong Kong had made him feel sucker punched, then hearing these names, hearing this from Jill, made him feel … disembodied. Up he floated to the cracked-plaster asbestos-ridden ceiling and saw what there was to see. He waited for his reaction or for his lack of one. There he was: the same frustrated, determined person with the receiver cradled between his shoulder and ear and the phone between his hands. This was the way he liked his telephones best—not a faggy toy of a cordless but a phone to hold, a
machine
. He held on to a phone the way another man might hold on to a football. It helped him to feel grounded, ready.