And then Ellen had met another man and left him, moving back to northern California, taking the boy with her.
"I’m sorry," Alice said.
"Thanks." He drank. "I have a son, though: Tyler. Want to see?" He dug out his current school picture, third grade, a towheaded boy with a serious, freckle-faced gaze.
"Cute," she said. "Do you share custody?"
"I get half of each summer and school vacations."
"Oh." She nodded sympathetically, hearing the pain in his voice. "That’s tough."
"Yeah." He looked at the picture for what seemed like a long time before putting it away. "You? You have kids?"
"Me? Oh, no." She picked at the label on her beer. Children were way down on the list of things she figured the universe was ever going to allow her to have. Like love. Start with love. "I’m not even married," she said.
"Oh," he answered, as if he didn’t know, but of course he knew already, for he had seen her riding her bicycle back to the hotel in a short black dress, had seen her walk into the building at dawn, tugging her hem down over her thighs. Then at breakfast it was obvious. He had not written it in his book, it was a private observation, but he’d seen: she was single. Very. He’d been drawn to women like her when he was much younger, when excitement was the thing he wanted. When he had not yet learned to assess how twisted up a girl was inside. Not anymore. Not now. If it ever happened for him again it would be with a woman who could be trusted. But not now, not soon. All he wanted now was his son. And to get his career back on track. Peking Man.
Yet this interpreter was interesting. Likable-as long as he didn’t get too close. "By the way, Alice. I brought you a book." He removed The Phenomenon of Man from his day pack and pushed it across the table. "Father Teilhard’s best seller. Thought you might want to reread it."
"Hey. Thanks." She flipped through it, remembering the picture of an expanding universe, the sense of Christian revelation, the coherent, unified vision of human growth. Whereas her own evolution had been stalled forever. "Are you interested in Teilhard’s philosophy, then?"
"No. I find it a little hard to read. I’m interested in his life here in China-who he knew, where he went. Because somewhere here, he hid Peking Man."
She closed the book. "So tell me about his life, then. Here in Peking. He lived here on and off for…"
"Twenty-three years. Nineteen twenty-two to 1945. He went back to Europe and America a few times, but this is where he lived."
"He had a lot of friends?"
"Everybody knew him. The foreigners’ community was a small one. And he was an explorer, a scientist-a real man of the world. Women found him fascinating. One woman in particular. Lucile Swan."
"Who was she?"
"An American in her thirties, a sculptor. She had come to Peking from New York after a bad divorce, and stayed on. Peking was a fantasy world then. Foreigners could have anything, live any way they wanted, cheaply. I think all she wanted to do was sculpt, and find a man to love. Couldn’t have been easy for her in China."
"I think she sounds interesting."
"You do?" He drank from his bottle, and thought: Of course you do, she’s right up your alley.
"Did she ever fall in love?"
"Yes-with Teilhard. Unfortunately, he was a priest. That kind of limited things." Spencer smiled.
"Did they…"
"Doubtful. I don’t think so. I think they were so emotionally enmeshed it didn’t matter. I haven’t researched her too much-I’m pretty sure she had nothing to do with where he hid Peking Man. But if you’re interested, you can read their correspondence. It was recently published, all twenty-three years of it."
"I think I’ll start with this one." She glanced at the volume in her hand, Teilhard’s masterpiece of theology. "Thank you, Dr. Spencer."
"Don’t call me that."
"What, then?"
"I don’t know-Adam? Spencer? But no ’Doctor.’ "
"Okay." She liked the detached, friendly way he talked. He didn’t seem interested in her as a woman any more than she was interested in him as a man. Which was not at all. Western men didn’t get to her.
"You ready?" he said.
As they crossed the gleaming floor of the lobby he tapped her elbow. She took in the row of girls flaunting brief skirts and pouty, red-painted lips. They were giggling and whispering. One of them got up and intercepted a foreign man in a business suit, said something to him, and smiled prettily.
"Is that what I think it is?"
"Sure."
"What? You mean they’re-"
"Hookers," Alice supplied.
"In China?" He was incredulous.
"Of course. Prostitution did disappear for a few decades, obviously, but now-now that we have the kai fang, the open door, it’s back." She made her voice mischievous. "Commerce is booming everywhere in the Middle Kingdom, Adam. In all forms."
"But who’s"-he looked around-"are they just independents, coming in here?"
"You mean who’s running their business? The PLA."
"What!" Now his voice was a minor screech.
"That’s right, the PLA." She was enjoying his reaction. "The Army owns this hotel. They control the girls and, of course, the profits. Or so everyone says."
"The Army? I can’t believe it."
"The Army is business," she told him, suddenly sober. "Very serious business. Remember that. You don’t ever want to cross them. Don’t be fooled by all these big glitzy hotels. Regardless of all the new stuff you see around you-all the Big Macs and the Italian shoes and the Seiko watches-the Army’s power in this country is still absolute."
She left Spencer at their hotel and stepped into a taxi. "Where go?" the driver bawled in bad English.
"Am I a miserable white ghost from the western sea, ignorant of civilized speech?" she asked sharply. "The American Express office, quickly. And don’t take Changan. The traffic’s a dammed-up river which threatens to overflow its banks."
"The honored foreigner speaks." He pulled out from the curb. "Ten thousand pardons."
"None needed," she murmured, knowing she had been short with him, feeling her stomach knot up as it always did when she went to check for mail and faxes from her father. She had to go, she hadn’t gone in too long. Plus, this time of the month, he usually sent her money. She closed her eyes, hating herself for wanting the money and relying on it; at the same time so glad it was coming.
The driver swung onto Ximen and crawled north through the traffic. He leaned on his horn and swore constantly at the swarm of cars and bicycles in front of him. "Sons of turtles!"
"Too many cars." God, she thought, fourteen years ago there was barely a car on the street here. Just bicycles. And I was a wide-eyed graduate student, freshly arrived, ecstatic to have escaped America and finally be smack in the middle of the oldest, most complex, most intricately structured society on earth. Safely walled in by what was different. By the labyrinth. She leaned her head back on the overstuffed, antimacassared seat and watched the bustling free-market stalls, the parade of offices and restaurants and shops, the lit-up character signs more discreet than the visual cacophony of Hong Kong and Taipei, but still so earthily and ineluctably Chinese. The pyramids of cabbages stacked on the stone sidewalks. The post-Soviet dinginess of the low block buildings. The fetid smell of rotting garbage and untreated sewage. The remarkable light, crystalline white when the air pollution cleared, which always seemed to Alice at its most beautiful in the hutongs, where it bathed the traditional gray courtyard houses in its distinctive weightless glow.