The Refugees(19)
“It’s like beautiful people and ugly people,” Louis said. “Beautiful people can’t let on that they need ugly people. But without the ugly, the beautiful wouldn’t look half so good. Am I right? Tell me I’m right.”
Arthur eyed the next course the waiter was slipping onto their table, six roasted squab fetchingly arrayed on a bed of romaine lettuce. “I suppose you’re right,” said Arthur, whose grasp of capitalism was tenuous at best. “Those look delicious.”
“The moral of the story is this,” Louis said, choosing a bird for himself. “The more fakes there are, the more that people who can’t buy the real things want them. And the more people buy the fakes, the more the real things are worth. Everybody wins.”
“That’s the way you see things,” said Arthur, lifting a squab by its slender little leg. “But don’t you think you’re just telling yourself what you want to hear?”
“Of course I’m telling myself what I want to hear!” Louis shook his head in mock exasperation, his eyes wide behind his sculptural Dolce & Gabbana eyeglasses. “We all tell ourselves what we want to hear. The point, Arthur, is this: Do you want to hear what I’m telling myself?”
Arthur had indeed wanted to hear the many rhetorical questions posed by Louis over the past few months. For example, Louis had said, consider his eyeglasses, manufactured in the same factory that produced the real D & G frames, but after hours, with ghost workers whose shadow labor resulted in a product that cost two hundred dollars less. For those with limited income, didn’t the right to own some Italian style trump any possible losses to Dolce & Gabbana? Or, Louis went on, think about Montblanc. Arthur had never thought about Montblanc and did not know it was a pen company until Louis told him. Did it suffer more than its workers in Wengang, China, Louis asked, if those workers could not make their replicas of the very expensive originals? Although Arthur had no idea what Wengang looked like, he could conjure up a blurry image of the faraway Chinese, dark haired, tight eyed, and nimble, somewhat like Louis himself.
“I’m hearing what you’re telling me,” Arthur said, watching Louis eat his squab with the bird perched between thumbs and index fingers, his pinkies pointed upward and outward. “Otherwise your things wouldn’t be in our garage.”
“Hopefully you’ve been listening and not just hearing,” said Louis. “Money’s to be made, Arthur. Good money.”
But for all of Louis’s talk of profits, Arthur and Norma had refused the ten percent commission Louis had offered. Lending Louis their garage was an act of sympathy stirred by the sight of his apartment, a one-bedroom cave doubling as a warehouse. The loan was also a way of paying back Louis’s father, who had saved Arthur’s life last year, however inadvertently. As Louis nibbled on the squab, Arthur was moved once more by the memory of Men Vu, a man he had never met.
“Keep those boxes in our garage,” Arthur said. “Like I told you, it’s our gift.”
Before Louis could respond, Arthur’s cell phone buzzed. The text message was from Norma: pick up dry cleaning. After Louis leaned over to read the message, he poked Arthur in the shoulder and said, “You should pick up some flowers for Norma as well.” Arthur meant to ask what kind of flowers he should get for his wife along with her clothing, but the arrival of the bananas flambé, Arthur’s favorite dessert, distracted him from doing so. Even though he had the nagging sense throughout the afternoon of there being something he needed to do, what that was he could not remember. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the waiter lighting the thimble-size pitcher of rum and pouring the flaming liquor over the bananas, a spectacle that never ceased to seduce him.
The most unexpected thing to happen to Arthur Arellano, and the fateful event that brought him together with Louis Vu, was the failure of his liver, an organ to which Arthur had given much less thought than his nose, or his big toe, or even his right hand, all of which he could have lived without, however uncomfortably. Thus, when his liver began dying a premature death some eighteen months ago, Arthur was unprepared in every way except for having health insurance, courtesy of his younger brother and employer, Martín. The insurance covered his visit to Dr. P. K. Viswanathan, who explained that Arthur’s liver was the unwitting victim of a disease Arthur understood only in its parts: auto, immune, hepatitis. Swiveling in his seat as he talked, the doctor said, “Autoimmune hepatitis means that your body no longer recognizes your liver as a part of itself. When this happens, your body rejects your liver.”
“My body can do that?”
“Your body is a complex organism, Mr. Arellano.” The doctor stopped swiveling and leaned forward, his elbows on the leather writing pad of his desk. “It can do pretty much whatever it wants.”
Arthur left Dr. Viswanathan’s office convinced of his imminent death. People needed far more organs than were available, and never had Arthur won anything worthwhile in his life. He was a chronic loser of bets big and small, from the thoroughbreds at Santa Anita to Pai Gow at the Commerce Casino’s pay-to-play tables, his undistinguished career as a gambler culminating in the loss of the pink bungalow in Hunt-ington Beach, miles from the shore, in which he and Norma had invested seventeen years of mortgage payments. After the bank repossessed the bungalow in the twenty-ninth year of their marriage, Norma left Arthur to live with one of their daughters and Arthur moved into Martín’s house in Irvine. It was at the university hospital there, not long afterward, that he learned of his diagnosis, which explained how the problems he was having—the pain in his joints, the fatigue, the itches and skin rashes, the nausea and vomiting, the loss of appetite, all the things that Arthur blamed on the stress of his gambling debts over the past several years—were merely symptoms of a rot far deeper. But of all these signs, the one that drew Norma’s attention when she came to him at Martín’s house after the diagnosis was the jaundice, the creeping yellowness of his skin that compelled her to exclaim, “Why haven’t you been taking care of yourself, Art?”