Leave It to Me (3 page)

Debby DiMartino’s body might have been stuck in a cubicle in a failed mall, where fifty other telemarketers for eight hours a night were talking up rock-’n’-roll CDs, scam cruises, fat-burner pills, discontinued cosmetics and underwear in XXL sizes, but I felt I’d broken free of Schenectady. Most of my callers assumed I was in Florida or in California. Sleepless in Jersey told me he smelled surf in my voice.
Three o’clock in the morning out here in East Orange, babe. Just midnight where you are, I bet
. I never let on I was deep into eastern time. The customer’s always right. I’d never in my conscious life been out of eastern
time, never west of Niagara Falls or south of Atlantic City.
Hawaii, actually!
the telephone voice taunted.
Sun’s just going down. It’s lei and luau time … Expiration date?

Mixed in with the dreamers, I got my share of jerks.
Doesn’t it get to you, taking calls at three in the morning from slobs like me?
The perverts had meaner questions.
I know you, girl. Men don’t do it for you, do they?

A marketing major, I didn’t need the boss to tell me I was very good at pushing his exercise gizmo, but he did. On my last night shift in June. He phoned me at my cubicle from somewhere overseas where tonight was already tomorrow. A kittenish voice came on first. “Hello, this is Cynthia, Mr. Francis’s personal assistant …” I stopped the voice right there. “I don’t accept an order that isn’t called in by the client himself or herself.” I heard a choking noise, then a click, a couple of smothered snorts or laughs and finally “Mr. Francis does not dial calls himself. He is a very busy man.” This time, Cynthia’s words had a speakerphone echo to them. Kids at a slumber party having fun at my expense. “Then he should have known not to waste the time of a busy career woman,” I snapped. “We aren’t your give-us-your-credit-card-number-and-we’ll-ship-you-hard-body-equipment kind of sleazy phone-order operation. If your Mr. Francis can’t get off his butt to place the order himself, he can’t be motivated to lose weight, shape up, turn his life around. You don’t think that we sell Elastonomics to any and every plastic-dropping Joe Schmo, do you? Mr. Francis has to prove to us he’s the kind of client Elastonomics wants. Get that message across. Then have him call us.”

I didn’t hang up. It was a slow night, which meant that a telephone tussle with Cynthia & Her Slumberettes was better than no call at all.

“Jolly good, Miss DiMartini!” A man’s voice came over the phone. A man with a silky, Britishy accent was on the other end of the line, and not a prepubescent partybeast lowering her voice into a manly growl. “Splendid performance!”

“What did you just call me?”

“Anthony Tucciani was correct about you. You have a future with FHP.”

“You know Tony Tucciani? You work for Tony? Is he monitoring us employees? Listening in without my permission, that has to be a felony.”

“Tony? That’s interesting. What if I said Mr. Tucciani is my employee?”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“What if I said I was Francis A. Fong, founder and CEO of Elastonomics? How would you address me?”

“Frankie!” I retorted. “But seriously, who told you …”

The man emitted long, tinkly laughter into the mouthpiece. Then he said, “For an American you have class, Miss DiMartini.”

“DiMartino,” I corrected. “Ends with an o, not with an i like Tony’s.”

“I’ll be in touch. I’m calling from Kuala Lumpur, but Cynthia’ll let you know when, Debby. I may call you Debby, mayn’t I?”

The boss hung up without waiting for a yes or no from me. Given his
Masterpiece Theatre
voice and vocabulary,
I pictured Mr. Francis A. Fong as Bruce Lee playing Hugh Grant.

I didn’t have to wait more than a week to meet him, and when I did, at the Indigo Club, the newest jazz place on Caroline Street in Saratoga Springs, the Chinese part of Frankie wasn’t the first thing I noticed.

Okay, I have to call time out for a confession. Frankie Fong took me to dinner and to bed on the first date. And handed me keys to my first apartment three nights later. It was mesmerism at first sight. Not love; love’s the surrender to guys you grew up with, and Frankie wasn’t like anyone upstate. Let’s say he leveraged me into dependence. You took in the hair, which was blue-black and wavy. You stared. The man had cheekbones, shoulders till Tuesday, a ballerina waist, bulging little buns: all of this you registered in a flash. Then you caught yourself staring, because he was smiling at you.

Frankie hadn’t always been in the fitness equipment business. In his last incarnation, he’d been Francis “the Flash” Fong, star/director/producer of dozens of Hong Kong kick-boxing extravaganzas.

He was born Francis Albert Fong, named for you-know-who, in Hong Kong or maybe in Manila or Surabaya (catching him in a consistency meant he’d fallen in love with one of his wilder inventions), to Aloysius and Baby Fong. Every time he told his life story, he gave himself the luxury of a different hometown. I loved his made-up childhoods. His father, Aloysius Fong, with the freakishly Sinatra-like voice, was the Don Ho of a dozen South Asian Chinatowns. Baby, his mom, was Al’s fourth
wife. He’d lifted her from the chorus line of a Chinese opera in Manila. With Frankie, I traveled crazy worlds without ever leaving Saratoga.

“ ‘One for My Baby’—Dad
owned
that song in Asia. You ask any Chinese over seventy who wrote that song, who sang it, and they’ll say it’s Al Fong. They’ll say Sinatra ripped Al off. ‘One for my baby … One more for the road’ … that’s the way we lived. That’s how we Chinese lived. Dad made it into a song of lost identity. That’s why Sinatra sounds such a
whinge
, to tell the truth.”

I studied the color photo of the crooner with pomaded hair and a gold-capped smirk. Frankie would never wear Al’s blue satin jacket with the black velvet piping nor the gold lamé vest, but I could picture him—at twenty-two, at thirty-two—lounge-lizarding in a tacky Asian nightclub, cigarette in one hand, mike pressed to his lips with the other, eyes sparkling from the stage lights, the drops and the drugs, diamond cuff links glittering, karaokeing “My Way” to black marketeers and their mistresses. Those were Frankie’s origins, before he stripped off the finery, slapped on a headband, became Flash and took to beating sense into outer-space aliens, cowboys, bikers, Maoists and French colonials in a series of kick-boxing spectaculars.

He didn’t ask me about my origins, and I volunteered nothing. I was the innocent upstate Italian, playing a cameo role in my own life.

Frankie’s memories of growing up on permanent tours of China-in-exile made squalor and malice sound educational. From the way he talked about life-from-a-suitcase in hotel rooms, I understood why owning showy property
on Union Avenue was so important to him. I coveted property too, but a different kind of property. I coveted the deed to my shadowy parentage. To a cornered rat, hunger and greed, ambition and wish fulfillment, are synonyms.

Frankie needed to remember, and I needed to discover. He talked. But I wanted more; I wanted details, wanted to know the smell of fishing boats on Thai canals and the sound of monsoon rains on tin roofs. He reminisced. Of pariah dogs and flying foxes, floating bodies, ancient ruins, temple bells, Muslim calls, diesel fumes, painted “lorries.” More hash than butter, he boasted. Fevers, drugs, backroom-behind-the-beaded-curtain Asia. Playing card games with child prostitutes between clients, singing for the madams, picking the pockets of American marines on R and R, chasing monkeys in grassy ruins, shimmying up slippery trunks of giant palms, packing his father’s opium into false-bottomed trunks: Frankie made an Asian childhood sound great fun, something I wanted to claim, something I’d been robbed of. But by whom? By the California hippie who’d fucked a Eurasian thug so I could be born in that place, over there, where nightmare and poem merge? By the Gray Nuns who placed me oceans away from my orphan origins? By Pappy and Mama who believe love wipes misery clean?

From that night on I envied Frankie. As a boy he’d been everywhere the Chinese had settled: Calcutta, Bangkok, Saigon, Singapore, Manila, Jakarta, Sydney. He’d seen it all, the tin shacks and smoky dives of overseas Chinatowns, before assimilation or persecution closed them down. In Frankie’s Asia, the streets were always hot, loud,
smoky, full of cheats and drugs and whores; the nightclubs were always places of viciousness and degradation and carnality. From Frankie the Son’s stories, I pictured Al the Dad, the sleek, hatchet-faced man with slicked-back, dyed hair, sitting offstage on a stool, alternately vomiting into a bucket and spraying his throat with a minty concoction mixed by Baby, then smoking a last cigarette down to Sinatra’s approved length before making his entrance. Pappy became my dad a million times removed. Thanks to those stories, for the first time I felt connected. The DiMartinos were the aliens.

How could I explain all that to Frankie, who confided, “That’s why I took up karate, you see. It was either that, or become Al Fong’s little Michael Jackson.”

He lingered on the books he’d devoured in libraries of faded hotels with colonial names, the Imperial, the Nelson Arms, the Lord Curzon. Had these same hotels been my backpacking mom’s haunts? He’d self-educated himself, he confessed, on Dorothy Sayers and H. E. Bates, on leatherbound sets of Dickens, Bennett and Galsworthy. I’d never heard of any of these authors except Dickens, but I could feel my fingertips touching Moroccan-leather spines, could see the sparkle of gold dust rubbing off in my hands.

Forget the Asia that Mama raised mission money for, playing bingo every second Thursday night. From that night on, Frankie’s stories of Asia replaced the video as foreplay. And my mystery father became a back-alley customer of almond-eyed whores, a hanger-on in all those clubs in all those cities that Aloysius Fong’d played.

“More!” I cried.

“What? There isn’t any more.”

“I want to know everything!”

“You’re an exigent little tramp, aren’t you?” But he said that after he blew me a kiss. Then he launched into a word game he made up for me.

“First het sex with hermaphrodites in Hyderabad.”

“Jealous jockey jilted in Joliet …”

“Ah, perfect, my pleasing paramour, Deborah!
How about … 
parked with prostitutes playing Parcheesi while his parents performed
. Your turn again, my dear.”

“Moi?
Let’s see … 
sultry, suburban, Schenectady schoolgirls studying suspicious signs of …”

“Of what?
Of mystic mendicants meditating on meekness?
”

“No,
meditating on misted-over moons and menacing mango trees and missing mothers!
”

But it was just a game of words. It didn’t express what I really felt about mothers discarding daughters. But Frankie’s make-believe Asia of dogs and bats, heat, beggars, police sweeps, corruption, squalor, disease, trans-vestites, prostitutes, crows wheeling low over flat roofs, bony stray cattle ambling down muddy sidewalks, did stir up my desire for what might have been—must have been—a careless hippie mom’s Asia. You see, this is one more side effect of adoption. I can imagine myself into any life; I can wrench myself away from a thousand backgrounds. I can assess damage, then just walk away. Nothing shocked me in Frankie’s tales, nothing seemed absurd or false.

Frankie wasn’t an immigrant the way that Paolo DiMartino had been. No steerage, no crippling gratitude. Ask not what you et cetera; ask what your new country can do for you. Frankie intended to hang on to the fortune he’d made, and not let the mainland or any fool socialist system steal it from him. With Hong Kong about to go down the tubes, he said he’d decided to shift his assets, rebuild an empire and relocate his vast family somewhere within it. Five nations courted the Fongs’ pool of liquid assets. Passports were offered in exchange for new investments. He’d done his homework; he’d scouted London, Vancouver and Toronto, Wellington and Auckland, Sydney and Perth, and chosen cheap and serene New York City.

Why not California, I asked. He favored me with his silky, superior smile. “I might never have met you in Ell-Lay.” Which meant, too many Chinese in California. I might never have noticed him.

He put the complications of the Fong diaspora simply. “I signed; I paid; we filtered south and west,” he said. The “we” included his aging parents, loutish uncles, layabout cousins, and fat-boy hangers-on, most of whom he employed in Fong Home Products or its parent company, Fong Family Growth Fund.

When he handed me the key to my apartment, he joked, “Now you, too, are part of the Fong Family Resettlement Scheme.”

I took the key without argument. Angie, my sister, is still stuck in a one-bedroom four-share in the West Village, and Angie’s twenty-seven. I don’t keep up with the day-to-day politics of Albany let alone of Hong Kong, but
I was sure glad that China had timed its takeover for just the moment I came fully into
ripeness
. I was ready that July. Frankie didn’t have a chance.

The apartment he rented for me was less than a mile from his own ten-bedroom Victorian on Union Avenue, with five baths and a wraparound porch wide enough for a jogging track. I never saw the inside. Frankie set some rules, the main rule being that he came to me, like some kind of old-time Chinese landlord. He was a new element in a traditional town, he apologized, he needed to come on as a respectable businessman. A cornered rat, I translated.

I liked this arrangement. I preferred he spend the nights in my place, among the clutter of vintage straw hats on dresser tops, the chintz dust ruffle I’d tacked together for the brass bed and the sepia-tinted family photos in oval frames. The family photos weren’t of the DiMartinos nor of the Giancarellis, which was Mama’s maiden name. I bought them in flea markets and at garage sales. Grim old grannies and stern grandpas in round collars and derby hats stared down at me making love to a Chinese immigrant and set their mouths just a little tighter.

Frankie wasn’t a man of set habits. He was spontaneous in a scripted sort of way, the way good actors are. It must have been the Flash in him. Night after night he could deliver the same love grunts and bites, make the same smooth moves, and have them come across to me as unique, urgent, sincere. Back then, because I was into Improv in a big way, I didn’t think to ask who scripted
my
part in the Fong-produced
Flash Kicks American Ass
extravaganza.