The Wangs vs. the World(63)
In the end, he and Nash agreed on only two things: History had failed them both, and the only solace left was that China, their China, remained the greatest civilization in the world.
“Wang xian shen!” Nash, at least, pronounced Charles’s last name the way it was meant to be said, long and rounded, not flat and nasal. “You’ve been fingering that phone all night.”
“Sorry, sorry.” He slipped the cell phone back into his jacket pocket, embarrassed. The lawyer wasn’t going to call now; he’d probably been out of the office since lunch, spending Charles’s six hundred dollars an hour on golf course fees and showy watches. Charles looked at Nash and hoped his friend wouldn’t ask. Anything.
Another hour. More whiskey. The night was almost over. Drink made the world thrum with possibility. When sober morning came, Charles always realized that he’d spent the previous evening talking too loudly and with too much conviction about things that he would never do and could never change, but in the moment, it all seemed endlessly possible.
Sometimes Charles thought that conversation must be the truest art form. In a good back-and-forth, you’re continually creating something new, something that only exists in a single present moment. Whole universes were built and destroyed in the course of a good conversation.
“Some of my students haven’t even read Plato. They barely deserve to be enrolled in a university!” said Nash.
“Aha! You say all should be love and equality, but now you want exclude people depending on what they read. What if someone grow up in house with no books? Not everyone have grand library like you!”
“No, that’s precisely what I do not want to do! Books are the simplest gateways through which to pass. There are public libraries! Anyone can pick up a book! There are compendiums of the classics that a lazy person can read through in a week!”
Charles tried to edge in with an excellent point, but Nash talked right over him.
“Look, I don’t expect everyone to be well versed in Sino-American relations or the history of the Great Leap Forward. I recognize that those are specialized areas of interest, but whatever happened to our shared references and understandings? How can we be a polis when 95 percent of us would rather watch aging housewives bicker on TV than express a well-formed opinion of our own? When I go to a failing strip club in New Orleans and say that I’m at Ozymandias’s pleasure palace, I want everyone to laugh and get depressed.”
He paused for a moment and stared at Charles. Laugh and get depressed. Get depressed and laugh. What else was there to do?
“Why is that too much to ask? I don’t want slaves; I don’t even need servants. By the end of this year, I will have to sell my monster of an estate for taxes, and I’ll do it gladly—the state can have it! My great-great-grandfather built that place to house the Nashes for a thousand years. How could he have known that some cards and ponies would get in the way of our fortune? I don’t even care! I don’t begrudge the material loss of my birthright, but I don’t think a life of intellectual riches is too much to ask of the world! I give the world thoughtful observations and considered theses, and it gives me back a dozen Kardashians. You know what’s going to happen to my library when I sell it? Nothing. Flat nothing. It will probably go to some interior designer who will tell her client how authentic it is, but I’ll be damned if a single one of the books are cracked open by their video-game-playing f*cktard children!”
Charles looked sideways at Nash. The key right now was to say something, but not too much of something. Enough for his friend to know that he heard him, but not enough to open up the vast floodgates of their twin losses. If the breaking down began, it might never end.
二十八
New Orleans, LA
SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED. Ever since the cake was served, his father and Uncle Nash had been talking, talking, talking at each other nonstop, but now, suddenly, they weren’t. Andrew could see the two of them through the window, sitting in the empty room, staring past each other. Merrily and Glenn’s friends had all headed down to the bonfire by the creek; Grace was out there with them.
That silence was weird. It scared Andrew a little. The two of them looked tired. Two worn-out men, deliberately quiet. Sad. They looked sad. When had his dad gotten so gray? Andrew wondered what they were not talking about. Actually, he didn’t have to wonder, because he knew—what else could it be? If getting money had once been the thing that occupied all of his father’s thoughts, losing it must be even more engrossing.
It smelled piney out here on the porch. Beyond it, everything was vast and dark. He heard a faint splash and a yell from the creek, voices that bounced off of the unseen rocks on the other side.
And then Dorrie was standing next to him.
Her sharp, bony fingers gripped his arm. She leaned in, close. He had drifted apart from the rest of the guests to get away from her, but now he didn’t half mind that she’d searched him out.
“You’re a beautiful thing,” she said, grabbing him tight.
“Um, you’re kind of freaking me out.” But even as he said it, Andrew knew that he liked her intensity. No one at school was like that. Especially not girls. She had these crazy blue diamond eyes with light eyelashes that were a very pale pink and amazing masses of goldish red hair like some sort of fairy queen.