A Good Fall (20 page)

I couldn’t drift off to sleep in the car, thinking about Huong. What kind of man was she in there with? Was she all right? Did she like it if the john was young and handsome? Was she acting like a slut? Sometimes at night I couldn’t sleep and would fantasize about her, but when I was fully awake I’d keep my distance. I knew I was just a presser in a sweatshop, gangly and nondescript, and might never be able to date a nice girl, but it would be shameful to have an easy woman as a girlfriend. At most, I could be a good friend to Huong.

Tonight she returned in less than fifty minutes, which was unusual. I was pleased to see her back all right, though her eyes were watery and shed a hard light. She slid into the passenger seat, and I pulled away from the curb. “How was it? No trouble?” I asked, afraid that the client might have discovered she wasn’t Thai.

“Rotten luck again,” she said.

“What happened?”

“The man’s an official from Beijing. He wanted me to write him a receipt like I’d sold him medicines or something. Where could I get a receipt for him? Nuts!”

“Did he haggle with you?”

“No, but he bit my nipple so hard it must be bleeding. I’ll have to put iodine on it once we’re home. My clients will think I’m diseased now.”

I sighed, not knowing how to respond. As we were crossing Thirty-seventh Avenue, I said, “Can’t you do something less dangerous for a living?”

“You find a me a job and I’ll take it.”

That silenced me. She slipped a ten into my hand, which was the unspoken rule worked out by the women—every time I drove them, they tipped the same amount. Actually, only Huong and Nana did that, because Lili didn’t take outcalls.

I thanked Huong and put the money into my shirt pocket.

The three women often compared notes. The best clients, they all agreed, were old men. Older johns were usually less aggressive and easier to entertain. Many of them couldn’t get hard and spent more time cracking dirty jokes than doing real business. Those old goats could be more generous, having more spare cash in their “little coffers,” unbeknownst to their wives. The older ones seldom ate dinner at the house. Some of them were friends of Mrs. Chen’s, in which case the women would treat them like special guests, and even give them Viagra. I was surprised when I heard that.

“Viagra?” I asked Lili about Mr. Tong, a bent man in his mid-sixties. “Aren’t you afraid he might have a heart attack?”

“Only half a pill, no big deal. Mrs. Chen said he always needs extra help.”

“He pays you well besides,” Nana said. “Lili, did he give you two hundred today?”

“One eighty,” Lili replied.

“Doesn’t he have a wife?” I asked.

“Not anymore. She died long ago,” Huong said, cracking a spiced peanut.

“Why wouldn’t he marry again?” I went on. “At least he should find someone who can take care of him.”

Nana let out a sigh. “Money’s the root of the trouble. He’s so rich he can’t find a trustworthy wife.”

Huong added, “I’ve heard he owns a couple of restaurants.”

“Also your sweatshop, Wanping.” Nana looked me straight in the face, as if forcing down a laugh.

“No, he doesn’t,” I shot back. “My factory is owned by a girl from Hong Kong named Nini.”

That had them in stitches. Actually, the owner of my garment shop was a Taiwanese man who taught college before coming to America.

Many of the johns were married men. They were reluctant to spend time and money on a mistress for fear of complications that might destroy their marriage. So they tried to keep up appearances while indulging in a sensuous life on the sly. But there were always exceptions. One day, Huong said a middle-aged client had told her that he hadn’t had sex for almost two years because his wife was too ill. Huong had advised him to come more often, at least twice a month, so that he could recover his sex life. As he was now, he was totally inadequate. “He’s a good man,” Huong told us. “He couldn’t do anything with me at all, saying he felt guilty about his wife, but he paid me anyway.”

“Then he shouldn’t have come to a whorehouse in the first place,” Lili said.

I could tell that Huong and Nana didn’t really like Lili either. She often bitched about misplaced things, and once accused Nana of using her cell phone to call someone in San Francisco. They had a row and didn’t speak to each other for days afterward.

The story about the man with a bedridden wife made me think a lot. If I were a policeman, knowing about his family situation, would I have arrested him for visiting a prostitute? Probably not. I used to believe that all johns were bad and loose men, but now I could see that some of them were nothing but wrecks with personal problems that they didn’t know how to handle. They came here hoping that a prostitute might help.

I was in bed one night when a cry rose from Nana’s room. At first I thought it was just an orgasmic groan she had faked to please a client. Sometimes I was unsettled by the noises the women and the men made, noises that kept me awake and fantasizing. Then Nana screamed, “Get out of here!”

I pulled on my pants and ran out of my room. The door of Nana’s room was ajar, and through the gap I saw a paunchy man of around sixty standing by the bed and madly gesticulating at Nana. This was the first time I had seen an older john make trouble. I moved closer but didn’t go in. Mrs. Chen had told me to give the women a hand whenever they needed it. She hadn’t made it explicit, but I’d guessed that she wanted me to provide some protection for them.

“I paid you, so I’m staying,” the man barked, and flung up his hand.

“You can’t make a night of it. Please go away,” Nana said, her face stamped with annoyance.

I went in and asked him, “What’s your problem? Didn’t you already get your time with her?”

He lifted his eyes to squint at me. His face, red like a monkey’s ass, showed he was drunk. In fact, the entire room reeked of alcohol. “Who are you?” he grunted. “This is none of your business. I wanna stay here tonight, and nobody can make me change my mind.”

I could tell that he thought this was like China, where it’s commonplace for a john to spend a night with a girl if he pays enough. “I am just a tenant,” I said. “You’ve been kicking up such a racket that I can’t sleep.”

“So? Deal with it. I want my money’s worth.”

As he was speaking, I glanced at Nana’s bed. Two wet spots stained a pink sheet, and a pair of pillows had been cast aside. On the floor was an overturned cane chair. By now both Huong and Lili were up too, but they stayed outside the door, watching. I told the man, “It’s the rule here: you fire your gun and you leave. No girl is supposed to be your bed warmer.”

“I paid her for what I want.”

“All right, this is not my problem. I’m going to call the police. We simply cannot sleep while you’re rocking the house.”

“Oh yeah? Call the cops and see who they’ll haul away first.” He seemed more awake now, his eyes glittering.

I pressed on. “All the tenants here will say that you broke in to assault this woman.” I was surprised by what I said, and I saw Huong and Lili avert their eyes.

“Cut that shit out! I paid this ho.” He pointed at Nana.

“She’s not a whore. Nana, you didn’t invite him here, did you?”

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head.

I told him, “See, we’re all her witnesses. You’d better get out of here, now.”

“I can’t believe this. There’s no good faith in this world anymore—it’s worse than China.” He grabbed his walking stick and lumbered out of the room.

The three women laughed and told me that the old goat was a first-time visitor and that they felt lucky to have me living on the same floor. We were in the kitchen now, all wide awake. Nana put on a kettle to boil some water for an herbal tea called Sweet Dreams.

I wasn’t pleased by what I had done. “I acted like a pimp, didn’t I?”

“No, you did well,” Huong replied.

“Thank God we have a man among us,” Lili added.

Lili’s words made me uneasy. I’m not one of you, I thought. But afterward, I felt they were more friendly than before, and even Lili started speaking to me more often and with her eyes fully open. They’d ask me what I would like for dinner, and cooked fish three or four times a week because I was fond of seafood. My factory provided steamed rice for its workers at lunch, so I just needed to bring something to go with it. Whenever it was Huong’s turn to cook, she would set aside the leftovers in a plastic container for me to take to work the next day. Nana and Lili often joked that Huong treated me as if I were her boyfriend. At first, I felt embarrassed, but little by little I got used to their teasing.

One morning in late July, I woke up feeling as if my lungs were on fire. I must have caught the flu, but I had to go to the factory, where a stack of cut pieces was waiting to be ironed. Unlike the sewing women, I couldn’t sit down at the ironing table. The shop provided tea in a samovar, which tasted a little fishy, but I drank one mug after another to soothe my throat and keep my eyes open. As a result, I went to the bathroom more frequently. Some of the floorboards were crooked, and I had to be careful when walking around. By midafternoon I was sweating all over and my pulse was racing, so I decided to rest on a long bench by the wall, but I tripped and fell before I could reach it. The moment I picked myself up, my foreman, Jimmy Choi, a broad-shouldered fellow of about forty-five, came over and said, “Are you all right, Wanping?”

“I’m okay,” I mumbled, brushing the dust off my pants.

“You look terrible.”

“I might be running a fever.”

He felt my forehead with his thick, rough hand. “You’d better go home. We’re not busy today, and Danny and Marc can manage without you.”

Jimmy drove me back to Mrs. Chen’s in his pickup and told me not to worry about coming to work the next day if I didn’t feel up to it. I said I would try my best to show up.

I felt too awful to join my housemates at dinner. Instead, I stayed in bed with my eyes closed, forcing myself not to moan. Still, I couldn’t help moaning through my nose occasionally, which made me feel better. Before dark, Huong came in and put a carton of orange juice and a cup on the nightstand, saying I must drink a lot of liquid to excrete the poison from my body. “What would you like for dinner?” she asked.

“I don’t want to eat.”

“Come on, you must eat something to fight the illness.”

“I’ll be all right.”

I knew she would be busy that evening, because it was Friday. After she left, I drank some orange juice and then lay back and tried to fall asleep. My throat felt slightly better, but the fever was still raging. I regretted not having gone to the herb store earlier to get some ready-made boluses. The room was quiet except for the faint drone of a mosquito. The instant it landed on my cheek, I killed it with a slap. I was miserable and couldn’t help but miss home. Such a feeling hadn’t visited me for a long time—I had always managed to suppress my homesickness so that I could make it through my daily routine. A busy man cannot afford to be nostalgic. But that evening the image of my mother kept coming to mind. She knew a lot of folk remedies and could easily have helped me recover in a day or two, but she would have kept me in bed for longer to ensure that I recuperated fully. When I was little, I used to enjoy being sick so she could fuss over me. I hadn’t seen her for two years now. Oh, how I missed her!

As I was dozing off, someone knocked on the door. “Come in,” I said.

Huong came in again, this time holding a steaming bowl. “Sit up and eat some noodles,” she told me.

“You cooked this for me?” I was amazed that it was wheat noodles, made from scratch, not the rice noodles we usually ate. She must have guessed that, as a northerner, I would prefer wheat.

“Yes, for you,” she said. “Eat it while it’s hot. It will make you feel better.”

I sat up and began eating with chopsticks and a spoon. There were slivers of chives and napa cabbage in the soup, along with some dried shrimp and three poached eggs. I was touched and turned my head away so that she wouldn’t see my wet eyes. This was genuine home cooking from my province, and I hadn’t tasted anything like it for two years. I wanted to ask her how she had learned to make noodles like this, but I didn’t say a word; I just kept eating ravenously. Meanwhile, seated on a chair beside my bed, she watched me intently, her eyes shimmering.

“Huong, where are you?” Lili cried from the living room.

“Here, I’m here.” She got up and left, leaving the door ajar.

I strained my ears to listen. Lili said, “A man at the Rainbow Inn wants a girl.”

“Wanping’s ill and can’t drive today,” Huong replied.

“The place is on Thirty-seventh Avenue, just a few steps away. You’ve been there.”

“I don’t want to go tonight.”

“What do you mean, you don’t want to go?”

“I should stay and take care of Wanping. Can’t Nana go?”

“She’s busy with someone.”

“Can you do it for me?”

“Well,” Lili sighed, “okay, only this once.”

“Thank you.”

When Huong came back, I told her, “You shouldn’t spend so much time with me. You have things to do.”

“Don’t be silly. Here is some vitamin C and aspirin. Take two of each after the meal.”

That night she checked on me from time to time to make sure I took the pills and drank enough liquid and was fully covered with a thick comforter of hers, so that I could sweat out my flu. Around midnight, I fell asleep, but I had to keep getting up to pee. Huong had left an aluminum cuspidor in my room and told me to use it instead of going to the bathroom, so that I wouldn’t catch cold again.

The next morning, my fever had subsided, though I still felt weak, not as steady on my feet as before. I called Jimmy and said I would definitely come to work that day, but I didn’t get there until after ten. Even so, some of my fellow workers were amazed that I had reappeared so quickly. They must have thought I had caught something more serious, like pneumonia or a venereal disease, and would remain in bed for a week or so. I was glad there was not a lot of work piled up on my ironing table.

A week later, some sewers left the factory and we all got busier. There were twenty women at the garment shop, and with two or three exceptions, they were all married and had children. Most of them were Chinese, though four were Mexican. They could come and go according to their own schedules. That was a main reason they kept their jobs, which paid by the piece, and not very much. Most of them, working full-time, made about three hundred dollars a week. Like them, I could keep a flexible schedule as long as I didn’t let work accumulate on my ironing table or miss deadlines. I must admit that our boss, Mr. Fuh, was a decent man, proficient in English and knowledgeable about business management; he even provided health-care benefits for us, which was another reason some of the women worked here. Their husbands were menial workers or small-business owners and couldn’t possibly get health insurance for their families. Like the other two young pressers, Marc and Danny, I didn’t bother about insurance. I was strong and healthy, not yet thirty, and wouldn’t spend three hundred a month on that.