“She just wants to get a green card; she can’t be serious about a yellow man. Even if she agrees to marry you, she might not give you children. Or maybe you’ll dump her once you’re done toying with her.”
“That’s not something for you to speculate about. Didn’t you do that to me? Anyway, you mustn’t think ill of my girlfriend. I believe in names. Do you know any woman named Olga who is an adventuress?”
She laughed. “You’re so silly. You haven’t even met her yet, but you call her your girlfriend. Doesn’t she have siblings?”
“She has a younger brother, she told me.”
“Doesn’t she have parents?”
“She does, and grandparents.”
“See, are those not a kind of baggage? The same sort of past as we have?”
Stumped, he looked at his wristwatch and stood. “I have to go to the UPS store.”
She got to her feet too and refrained from saying she wished to remain his friend, but told him she missed his cooking, to which he didn’t respond. She lifted the cold coffee and downed it to the last drop, then stepped out of his house without another word. She wasn’t sure how serious he was about Olga or whether he’d bought the plane tickets for Kiev. Maybe he couldn’t help but act out of character. Whatever he might do, she hoped he wouldn’t make a fool of himself.
The House Behind a Weeping Cherry
WHEN MY ROOMMATE MOVED OUT, I was worried that Mrs. Chen might increase the rent. I had been paying three hundred dollars a month for half a room. If my landlady demanded more, I would have to look for another place. I liked this colonial house. In front of it stood an immense weeping cherry tree that attracted birds and gave a bucolic impression, though it was already early summer and the blossoming season had passed. The house was close to downtown Flushing, and you could hear the buzz of traffic on Main Street. It was also near where I worked, convenient for everything. Mrs. Chen took up the first floor; my room was upstairs, where three young women also lived. My former roommate, an apprentice to a carpenter, had left because the three female tenants were prostitutes and often received clients in the house. To be honest, I didn’t feel comfortable about that either, but I had grown used to the women, and especially liked Huong, a twiggy Vietnamese in her early twenties whose parents had migrated to Cholon from China three decades ago, when Saigon fell and the real estate market there became affordable. Also, I had just arrived in New York and at times found it miserable to be alone.
As I expected, Mrs. Chen, a stocky woman with a big mole beside her nose, came up that evening. She sat down, patted her dyed hair, and said, “Wanping, now that you’re using this room for yourself we should talk about the rent.”
“I’m afraid I can’t pay more than what I’m paying. You can get another tenant.” I waved at the empty bed behind her.
“Well, I could put out an ad for that, but I have something else in mind.” She leaned toward me.
I did not respond. I disliked this Fujianese woman and felt she was too smooth. She went on, “Do you have a driver’s license?”
“I have one from North Carolina, but I’m not sure if I can drive here.” I had spent some time delivering produce for a vegetable farm outside Charlotte.
“That shouldn’t be a problem. You can change it to a New York license — easy to do. The motor registration office is very close.” She smiled, revealing her gappy teeth.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“I won’t charge you extra rent. You can have this room to yourself, but I hope you can drive the girls around in the evenings when they have outcalls.”
I tried to stay calm and answered, “Is that legal?”
She chuckled. “Don’t be scared. The girls go to hotels and private homes. No cops will burst in on them — it’s very safe.”
“How many times a week am I supposed to drive?”
“Not very often — four or five times, tops.”
“Do you pay for the girls’ meals too?”
“Yes, everything but long-distance phone calls.”
At last I understood why my female housemates always ate together. “All right. I can drive them around in the evenings, but only in Queens and Brooklyn. Manhattan’s too scary.”
She gave a short laugh. “No problem. I don’t let them go that far.”
“By the way, can I eat with them when I work?”
“Sure thing. I’ll tell them.”
“Thank you.” I paused. “You know, sometimes it can be lonely here.”
A sly smile crossed her face. “You can spend time with the girls — they may give you a discount.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Before leaving, she made it clear that I must keep everything confidential and that she had asked me to help mainly because she wanted the women to feel safe when they went out. Johns would treat a prostitute better if they knew she had a chauffeur at her disposal. I had seen the black Audi in the garage. I hadn’t driven for months and really missed the feeling of freedom that an automobile used to give me, as though I could soar in the air if there weren’t cars in front of me on the highway. I looked forward to driving the women around.
After my landlady left, I stood before the window of my room, which faced the street. The crown of the weeping cherry, motionless and more than forty feet high, was a feathery mass against a sky strewn with stars. In the distance, a plane, a cluster of lights, was sailing noiselessly east through a few rags of clouds. I knew Mrs. Chen’s offer might implicate me in something illicit, but I wasn’t worried. I was accustomed to living among the prostitutes. When I first figured out what they did for a living, I had wanted to move out right away, like my former roommate, but I couldn’t find a place close to my job — I was a presser at a garment factory downtown. Also, once I got to know the women a little better, I realized that they were not “bloodsuckers,” as people assumed. Like everyone else, they had to work to survive.
I too was selling myself. Every weekday I stood at the table ironing the joining lines of cut pieces, the waists of pants, the collars and cuffs of shirts. It was sultry in the basement, where the air conditioner was at least ten years old, inefficient, and whined loudly. We were making quality clothes for stores in Manhattan, and every item had to be neatly ironed before being wrapped up for shipment.
Who would have thought I’d land in a sweatshop? My parents’ last letter urged me again to go to college. But I couldn’t pass the TOEFL. My younger brother had just been admitted to a veterinary school, and I’d sent back three thousand dollars for his tuition. If only I had learned a trade before coming to the United States, like plumbing, or home renovation, or Qigong. Any job would have been better than ironing clothes.
The brothel had no name. I had once come across a newspaper ad in our kitchen that read: “Angels of Your Dream — Asian Girls from Various Countries with Gorgeous Figures and Tender Hearts.” It gave no contact information other than a phone number, which was the one shared by the women. I almost laughed out loud at the ad, because the three of them were all Chinese. Of course, Huong could pass for Vietnamese, speaking the language as her native tongue, and Nana could pretend to be a Malaysian or Singaporean, since she came from Hong Kong and spoke accented Mandarin. But Lili, a tall college student from Shanghai, looked Chinese through and through, even though she spoke English well. She was the one who handled the phone calls. I guessed Lili would return to school when the summer was over, and then Mrs. Chen might hire another twentysomething who was fluent in English. I wasn’t sure if my landlady was the real boss, however. The women often mentioned someone called the Croc. I had never met the man, but I learned from them that he owned some shady businesses in the area and was a coyote.