Homesick for Another World(62)
“Please, call me Stephanie,” I’d say, crossing and uncrossing my legs, sliding the contracts across the glass.
“Well, Stephanie, can we go through the numbers one more time? Because there seem to be a few items here that maybe none of us anticipated.”
“By all means. I don’t want there to be any surprises.” Lao Ting taught me how to speak this way.
I would walk them slowly through the revisions, refuting their objections before they could even raise them. “Keep them nodding,” Lao Ting taught me. I worked the older ones against the younger ones.
“You see, I told you that was the issue,” one would say to the other while I smiled.
“Don’t predict your needs based on past performances or, for that matter, the Chinese expectations,” I liked to add. “Our services don’t work that way, which is what makes us so attractive. Most companies that coordinate American and Chinese contracts can’t navigate those waters. Still, if you’d like to speak directly with the Chinese . . .”
“No, no. Of course, of course. We understand,” the businessmen would say, and I’d stand and lean across the desk to point at where Gigi had stuck all her colored arrows.
If their pens still wavered, Robbie got nervous in the silence. He said, “Everything is underwritten, of course. We have bonded insurance, blah-blah. But please, don’t sue us!”
“Let them think,” I said. “Let the men think.” The businessmen signed everything I gave them. They were always eager to please me, eager to show that they were on my side. Nobody ever sued Lao Ting.
Robbie was a handsome homosexual from Arroyo Grande and very talented, I thought. He was a health nut. Every morning he jogged twelve miles barefoot on the beach. He took frequent trips to Hawaii to meet with a medicine healer to repair his spirit. In a past life, Robbie was a mule and horribly brutalized by his master. Robbie said he was starved to death in a stall the size of a small closet.
“What country were you a mule in?” I asked him once.
“Russia,” he said. “About twenty miles from Finland. The summers were the worst because the sun was up all day and night, and my master had insomnia. He suffered from psychosis and nobody understood him. He’d ride me out into the forest where nobody could hear him, and then he’d beat me, screaming and crying. God, it was awful. I felt for him, too. It’s not that I didn’t feel for him. I just can’t get over how he put me in that stall. He was too cowardly to cut my head off, I guess.”
“Did he abuse you sexually?” I asked.
“Just emotionally,” Robbie said. “My healer is having me take this ancient lava ash. It makes my tongue gray, so I have to suck on red candy.” He stuck his tongue out to show me how red it was. “For when I have auditions.”
“Looks good,” I said.
“All natural ingredients. But it still rots your teeth. Any sugar will do that. Even fruit. But I’m feeling a little more grounded now, I think, taking the lava ash.”
Robbie didn’t eat meals with the family. He lived mostly on vegetable juices, nuts, and herbs. The family didn’t judge him for that. They supported him unconditionally. For his birthday, they gave him a little almond tree. For my birthday, they gave me a white silk robe with a pink dragon embroidered on the back. Lao Ting and Gigi were the kindest people on Earth. They were the most tender souls one could ever hope to find.
“You’re going to get over what happened to you, I’m certain of it,” Gigi said to Robbie. “I had a dream last night you were a white stallion, running free across the tundra.”
“Yes, you will come out a winner. And dear, dear Stephanie Reilly,” Lao Ting said across the table. “You and Robbie are doing such a good job. We feel happy to have you two in our lives. Our beautiful American son and daughter. We are so proud of you. Look at you both! So handsome! So pretty!”
Lao Ting had a digestive issue that restricted his diet to shrimp and boiled yams. The digestive issue seemed to be well managed by this diet, and by his daily regimen of swimming and stretching and Ping-Pong. Because he was the patriarch of the family and the boss of the business, and because the family was disciplined in their loyalties, shrimp, yams, and rice were all that was offered at meals. I once asked Lao Ting whether he ever grew tired of eating the same foods again and again each day.
“I never grow tired of food,” he answered and slapped at his narrow torso.
I wasn’t keen on cooking for myself. I had fancy flatware and some cast-iron pots at home, but I preferred taking party drugs to making food and eating it. During the workweek, all that I ate I ate with the family. I liked the rice they made. It was cooked in an enormous bamboo steamer and tasted of old wood, like the way an antique store smells. The shrimp were boiled whole, then slathered in butter and Chinese spices. The family ate the shrimp by first biting off the heads. They’d spit the little antennae and black spidery eyes out on the ground between their plastic footstools, which they used as chairs around a low table in the dining room. Then they’d put the whole shrimp in their mouths, chew them up, and spit out the exoskeletons. The eldest son, Jesse, swept and mopped the dining room after every meal. There were four children—three boys and one girl. All but Jesse were still in high school. When they came home, they helped their parents with paperwork and tidied up. The complex was always very clean and smelled of burning incense. All the floors were flesh-colored marble. The walls were decorated with big crosses woven out of red silk ropes. “These are from China,” Gigi told me. “They’re good luck. They signify birth and prosperity.”