“Well,” said Jiang, as if resigning. “Then ask him to give you a dish for the banquet. One of his specialties.”
“The pork ribs,” said Tan. “Oh! Ruanyiruan,” So soft. “The meat falls away in your mouth. He marinates them, then rolls them in five-spice rice crumbles. They are wrapped in lotus leaves and steamed for hours.”
“Soft as a pillow,” said Jiang.
“I could eat that right now,” said Sam. “Okay. I’ll start working on the ticket right away.” His eyes wandered back to David and Xiao Yu. Where they had been talking was only a blank patch of wall. They were gone. Had they sat down? He scanned the tables, the waiters moving sideways through the aisles. No. They had left. He felt the twinge again inside him, the odd feeling he’d had before, the pleasantness of the hour with Maggie McElroy. Where had David and Xiao Yu gone? He kept thinking that the next time he glanced over he might find them standing there again, restored. But he did not.
On his way to the office Carey had tried to settle on what he would tell Maggie. Too little would disrespect her, while too much would hurt her unnecessarily. He fiddled with what to do. Tell her the truth, of course, but only when she asked and only that part of the truth which pertained.
He remembered, when he’d met her here in Beijing three years ago, being aware right away that she did not know. She has no idea, he remembered thinking. Matt never told her.
Carey was not surprised. He would not have told either. So Matt had gone a little wild; so what? He’d pulled his reins in quickly enough, and by himself, too. Let it be, was Carey’s feeling. He was a nice man, Maggie seemed like a nice woman, no need for them to suffer. Let them be as happy as they could. That’s what he had thought. Now of course he half wished Matt had told her himself, so he wouldn’t have to.
Not that it was what Matt would have intended. Matt was a steady man, a man of rules; this Carey had seen about him from the first moment. He could still see Matt at the airport, with his hyper-organized luggage, his smooth, clean face smelling of the shave-soap provided on the plane. The man had force. His legal work was like that too, meticulous, powerful, unbending. He stayed with the rules. He was, Carey knew, exactly the type who sometimes had to break out.
It was a pattern he had seen before. He guessed one in twenty were like Matt, good, hardworking guys who bolted their traces when they came to this place where everything was on offer, where a wild, clubby economy turned cartwheels around the power center of government, where any desire could be satisfied.
“Let’s go out,” Matt had said at the end of his first day in the Beijing office, on his first visit, seven years before. That was the beginning. He had left even Carey in the dust, and Carey was known far and wide as a king of the night. They roamed from one pulsing spot to another on Sanlitun. After the crowded bars and the costume raves Matt would walk away and negotiate with the women who worked the clubs. Carey tried to tell him there were finer women to be had elsewhere, only marginally more expensive, women with something close to beauty, even class. A phone call away, come, let’s go – No. Matt would go for the bargirl. And he would walk up to the African drug dealers too, relaxed, companionable. He’d ask them what was up, like they were in New York. Not a blink. They’d always tell him what they had, hashish, ecstasy, LSD. He bought hashish and rolled it with tobacco. That was where he drew the line. His restraint when it came to drugs fit with the other Matt, the married man, the one Carey had met at the airport. And that was the Matt who showed up at the office after their nights on the town – always on time, frayed but ready – and put in a full day’s work. This impressed Carey. The man was a rock.
But Matt started to feel guilty. On his second visit, later that same year, he came into Carey’s office one afternoon and said he’d decided he should just go ahead and call Maggie now and tell her everything.
“Have you lost your mind?” Carey remembered saying. “Why would you tell her?”
“Because I tell her everything.”
“Things like this?”
“I never did things like this before.”
“You tell her this and you’ll change everything. Ask yourself – are you going to do it again? Is this going to be your new lifestyle?”
“No! I feel bad already.”
“Then don’t do it anymore. And don’t tell your wife. She doesn’t need to suffer.” His hand strayed to the file he had been working on. The clock had been running on the client and he didn’t like to stop. “It’s okay, man,” he added gently. “Everybody slips a few times.”
Matt had thanked him, and agreed that yes, this was the thing to do. “You’ll have to find a new late-night companion,” he joked, and Carey told him that would be no problem. At the same time, he was not surprised Matt had climbed back into himself, red-faced, so quickly. This too he had seen before.
But two evenings after that, Matt buzzed him again, on his cell. It was late. The office was almost empty. Carey was ready to leave anyway. And there was Matt again, that same excited edge in his voice, saying, “I know what I said, but can’t help it. Let’s go out.”
“Okay,” Carey said, feeling his own smile form. At moments like these Matt was as willful and open as a child. He acted on his needs. There was something almost like purity about him, an up-rush from inside. Maybe it was because of this that Carey indulged Matt in those first few years, went out with him, shepherded him. They were two friends who knew each other only at this single crossing in their lives. The two men rarely spoke when Matt wasn’t in China. The last year before Matt died they had not talked at all. And then he was gone. Carey was well aware of the fact that he had other friends he knew better. Still, it was hard to think of Matt now, this past year, without a bolt of sorrow.
From outside his door he heard the tones of his secretary and beside her another voice – Maggie. The door opened and in came the widow, her walk slow, hyperconscious. She had changed in the three years. Her face, always too sharply arranged to be called pretty, had started its turn toward the elegant concavity of age. Her body looked ropier than he remembered, under loose, neutral clothes. Care and grief had her in a cage, leaving only her large eyes, which now burned with extra intensity, as if compensating for the rest of her. “How are you?” he said, uselessly, and rose to give her a hug.
“Had better years,” she said into his shoulder.
They sat a few minutes talking. Their words made circles around Matt, remembering him, trying to laugh about him, talking about the shock of his death – “Christ, that’s one phone call you never want to get,” said Carey. After they talked about Matt he inquired elaborately into the comfort of her flight, and the apartment. She told him about her assignment. And then she noticed the file, which he’d laid out on the table between them. “You’ve seen this already,” he said, “right?”
“Zinnia showed it to me.” She opened it. “Talk about being blindsided.”
“Me too,” he said.
She looked up abruptly. “You mean what you said before? You knew nothing about a child?”
“No,” he said, and repeated: “Nothing about a child.”
The way he said it hinted at more. “Then what about the woman who’s named here as the mother? Gao Lan?”
He exhaled. “Yes,” he said. “Her I knew about.” He watched her eyes widen and almost instantly glaze over, as shock was followed by humiliation. Tell her the truth.
“What exactly do you know?” she said.
“Just that it did happen between them.”
“Her and Matt.”
“Yes.”
“Was it at the right time?”
“Yes. It was brief, though. I don’t want you to think it was a relationship.”