The Foremost Good Fortune (11 page)

Anke moves in line behind me. “How are you?” I ask. She looks so thin that I can tell she’s in trouble. The girl behind the counter hands me my slices, and then I ask for two inches of provolone.

“My husband is having an affair,” Anke says, and smiles broadly. “I have three days to decide whether to leave him or not.” Then she laughs. “I’m calling it Project Beijing.”

“Wow,” I say. I do not smile. I know smiling is not the thing to do right now. But I’m at a loss in front of the cold cuts. I make a concerned face.

“I am supposed to go to my husband’s parents’ place in Texas for Christmas,” she says. “I can’t go, can I? I’ve found photos of the woman and their secret e-mails. She’s waiting for him, right now, in Malaysia.”

I stand and stare at Anke and recall that her husband is an American engineer. “Well,” I say and glance at my slices of cheese on the white counter. “Well.” The problem is, I don’t know Anke. There was a time when I wanted to. All fall, really, when I was trolling for friends. But Anke has always seemed distracted. I have a feeling that today Anke could use more than a three-minute talk about her marriage in the April Gourmet deli line. “Christmas can bring out the worst in people,” I finally offer and then can’t believe how trite I sound.

“I’ll snap, won’t I?” she says and looks away. “If I go to Texas, I’ll snap?”

“Probably,” I answer and look her in the eye. She seems jumpy. Unstable. She keeps looking around and smiling.

“Isn’t this a great store?” she says quickly. “Today I’ve bought arugula and these nice tomatoes.” She holds up her plastic basket for me. “But if I don’t go with him,” she says, “and I let him take the kids to the States without me, the lawyer I just talked to said I might never see my kids again. That he could keep my kids in Texas with his parents forever.”

“Where’s your own family?” I ask and turn to fully face her. “Where can you go with your kids and get away from him?”

“I’m a nomad,” she says. “We just move around. Tom’s job moves us around. I go wherever he goes. My mom lives in Amsterdam.”

“Can you go to your mom?” I ask. “You should go to your mom.”

“I think Tom’s abusive,” Anke says then. “Mean to the kids and always yelling at me. You know, I suspected him all fall. He kept telling me I was imagining it.”

Anke has a five-year-old girl named Anna and a two-year-old girl whose name I don’t know. I’ve got my cheese now and I step out of line. “Please call me. I can help if you need it. If he gets abusive. Really. Call me.”

“I will,” Anke says, and she seems happier now. I wonder if she’s on tranquilizers. I would be if I thought Tony was going to leave me alone in Beijing with two kids for a woman he’d taken up with in Kuala Lumpur.

The last thing Anke tells me is about a place she knows in Beijing where you can get a great martini. It’s right above the best foot massage place in town. “You’ve got to go,” she says and hugs me. “The very best drinks.” Then she smiles that smile. “I have three days to figure out what the hell I’m going to do.”

“Call me if you need me,” I say again and meet her eyes, then I walk to the counter with my basket of lunch meats.

When I get back to the apartment, Aidan and Thorne have set the table with bowls and Tony has made a broccoli soup. We eat together in the dining room and I eye Tony over my bowl. So much of our time in China so far has been about laying grounding wire—figuring out how to buy apples and salt. Learning how to pronounce Chinese verbs. I’m not sure how I would describe our marriage. It’s certainly a partnership, but there are long stretches here where it doesn’t feel romantic. Instead it feels like we’re running a small overnight camp for American boys in Beijing.

And what am I really doing here?
I want to ask Tony.
He
is out slaying corporate dragons, hiring a staff and meeting with the heads of some of the world’s largest banks. I am trying to write every day, but it’s hard to get my mind to settle. Maybe the astrologer was right. Because it feels like Saturn may be casting a long shadow. I’ve been avoiding my desk. I once taught an adult writing workshop in Boston. The informal title of the class was “Ass in Chair.” No one in the group had written in years. I kept finding myself explaining that there’s never any writing—not one word—unless the ass is firmly in the chair.

I take a sip of Tony’s soup and remember to thank him for it. He’s a kind man. He’s made us lunch. Never before has our marriage felt more lopsided. In some ways Tony and I seem to be in a new marriage. The old one was changed when we got on the plane to come to China. We’re both learning more here than we imagined. Needing Tony so much makes me resent him sometimes. There’s a lot we don’t say because the words would be redundant. We’re almost each other’s only friend here. Or at least he is mine. How at this exact moment I would gladly trade him for any number of women friends. Tony makes good paper airplanes and stands with Aidan now showing him how to fly them. The kids run down the hall to Aidan’s room to kick soccer balls. I tell Tony about Anke and the woman in Kuala Lumpur. Tony doesn’t lean back into his chair and say,
Don’t leave anything out
. It’s not that he wants to avoid talking. He just doesn’t share my need to unravel the day’s events through a series of sentences.

I could get frustrated with this. I take another sip of soup and wonder whether or not to point out his deficiency again. I put my spoon down and say, “I wish sometimes we had time to check in with one another. You know—a few spare moments to talk.”

“We do have time. Right now. But you’re talking about walking on the beach.” The line comes from a fight we had five summers ago. We’d landed the rare Saturday babysitter and jumped in the car, but were too tired to go anywhere. Instead we parked by the side of the road in Phippsburg and fought over what we should do: go to a movie or take a walk on the beach. I wanted to be the couple that went for the beach walk and had interesting things to say. I wanted, in some unspoken way, to go back for a few hours to a time when we didn’t have children. When we weren’t so damned tired all the time.

So I sat in the car by the side of the road and said, “Maybe there are other things you’d rather be doing than walking on the beach with me.” Then for good measure I added, “Take me home. I don’t want to go anywhere with you ever.”

It turns out that when you have babies, sleep deprivation can be a dangerous thing. “So this is great,” Tony said while I sulked in the passenger seat. “All this time we’ve been talking about walking on the beach, when we could have been walking on the beach.”

I look at my husband across the dining table and tell myself that
marriage is a continuum. We’ve taken ours on the road. I stand up and announce that I’m walking the boys to the playground. I want to give Tony a break. He’s made lunch, after all. When I come back, he’s written a note by the phone:
A woman named Anke called
. But there’s no phone number. Tony tells me she said she’d call back. I haven’t heard from Anke since.

Piaoliang

The site for the Olympic beach volleyball sits in the park across the street from our apartment, and on a warmish December Sunday we decide to put on our parkas and investigate. Chaoyang Park is huge, with miles of picnic spots and paddleboats and enclosed basketball courts. We walk over to the ticket kiosk and stand in line to board one of a yellow fleet of golf carts.

The tour driver is yet another no-nonsense Chinese mother who half plays nice and tells us about the dilapidated amusement park rides we pass, and half chastises me for not having my children sit properly in their seats. One moment this woman wants to touch Aidan’s hair, and keeps saying how beautiful he is. The next moment she’s trying to scam Tony for another hundred RMB. She and her copilot wear thick blue park-issued polyester parkas, with small wool caps.

When we get to the stadium, our driver says in English that come August this place will seat ten thousand people. I look at the barren park and the piles of dirt and bricks left in the makeshift lot and wonder if the Chinese government will forgive us all if we stay home and watch the games on TV.

Outside the stadium is the biggest digital photograph of a volleyball player I’ve ever seen, and I haven’t seen many. But this one must be ten stories high. The woman is diving for the ball in the sand, and her cleavage has begun to spill over. The golf cart stops here, and we look up at the woman: Aidan and Thorne and Tony and me, plus our pilot and copilot in their parkas.

The volleyball player has her arms outstretched to return serve, and the photo almost makes me blush. Isn’t beach volleyball an American
sport? The bikini and the woman wearing it and even the stadium itself hit a Chinese cultural flat note. None of these things seems to me like it belongs in China. Beach volleyball involves lots of bright, clear sunshine, tanning oil, an ocean breeze, and copious amounts of sand. Our driver makes a whistling sound between her teeth and puts the engine in reverse. Then she yells loudly at Aidan and Thorne in Chinese to turn around and sit up. They are officially scared of her now. That’s when she reaches out to touch one of Aidan’s plump cheeks. “Piaoliang,” she says to Tony.
He is beautiful
.

Thorne has a friend at school named Molly, who is also beautiful. The tide has turned and Thorne now has several friends, Jiho from Korea, Mads from Denmark, Ted from China. This is sweet relief. It turns out that being fast at tag can also be an asset if you’re placed on the right team. Molly is a thoughtful six-year-old Chinese girl with long pigtails and round wire-rimmed glasses. She likes to read and sing, and she and Thorne sit at their homeroom table together every day and talk for hushed minutes with each other about how neat their penmanship is and how many minutes they can hula hoop. Molly holds the playground record.

When you meet Molly you know right away that she’s one of those wise children who understands more than her years. Her brothers, Finn and Jack, are British boys with swatches of blond hair who love soccer and electric guitars. Their mom is the school principal—an incredibly talented blond Brit named Julie.

For months Thorne has talked about Molly at home, just a line or two: “Molly had a fall on the playground today.” Or, “Molly broke her pencil this afternoon.” Then he came home yesterday, found me in the kitchen, and said, “You won’t believe this.”

“Try me.” I put my tea down on the counter.

“Molly’s adopted!!! She told me today she’s adopted.”

“So interesting,” I say, trying not to let my surprise show because I can’t believe it hasn’t occurred to him before. He’s almost beside himself with excitement.

“The real mommy put Molly in a cardboard box and someone found her and took her to an orphanage.”

Lately, Molly has decided that she feels like sharing her story with her first-grade class. Thorne still can’t get over it. “Her real parents didn’t want her. They put her in the box. But then Richard and Julie found her and they are her parents now.”

We talk about adoption through dinner and how the new mommy and daddy love the babies they adopt just as much as the real mommy and daddy did. Aidan listens silently while he eats his dumplings, and then he tells me he would not like to be adopted. I nod at him. Next he pauses in his chewing, looks me in the eye, and goes one step further by announcing, “I’ve decided not to leave. I’ve decided now to stay in this family.”

“Good,” I say and reach for another dumpling. “Wise decision.”

The Bag Lady

One of the things you do when you’re dating new women in Beijing is you go on a series of follow-up dates. It’s very Jane Austen at first. I try to pay attention to the rules of etiquette: it often starts with an e-mail—maybe from a woman I sat next to at a school luncheon, for example. I’m supposed to reply to the e-mail and suggest a follow-up activity: a trip to the Silk Market to buy fake pashminas, or a hutong walk. Once we’ve begun the courtship, it’s understood that it will play out for weeks, if not months—a carefully calibrated series of overtures. The only thing many of us have in common is that we live in China, and our children may go to the same school. So it’s not unusual during these rituals for me to have pangs of longing for my friends back home and to consider throwing in the towel. I’ve also learned that “dating” takes up an inordinate amount of time.

But I invited Sabrina and her kids over for dinner last Friday, and now she’s called to ask if I want to go handbag shopping with her. I think this qualifies as a follow-up date. Sabrina and I may be courting. I say yes to the handbag shopping for the same reason I said yes to the sweater party. I’m still lonely, and part of me knows that having friends in Beijing is a good thing.

I’ve been told by an Australian woman at the boys’ school that if I ever need handbags, I should go to the Bag Lady. Her operation moves around every few months to outrun officials, so while Lao Wu is driving toward downtown, I hand Sabrina the Bag Lady’s phone number on a piece of paper and ask her to call. Sabrina’s father is one of the coaches of China’s soccer team. She’s spent almost her entire life in this city and knows the back streets. It will be easier if she gets the directions in
Chinese. But the Bag Lady answers and wants to know how Sabrina got the number, because she doesn’t like to sell to Chinese women, only to (gullible?) foreigners. She tells Sabrina the address, but warns her not to share it.

We head to an apartment plaza called Soho near the boys’ school and take an elevator to the eleventh floor of Tower Four, then turn right and knock twice on the door at the end of the hall. There’s a small glass window in the door, and after we knock, someone opens a curtain inside and stares at us. Then I hear a dead bolt pulled back, and a stern teenage boy looks us over, then motions us in.

It’s the penny candy store of illegal purses—they’re piled on tables and in boxes and along wooden shelves. The majority of them look the same: shiny and black, with one or two leather shoulder straps, and a brand name stamped in silver or gold lettering. There’s the Prada section and then Louis Vuitton. There’s Chloé and Burberry and Miu Miu, and over there are Givenchy and Ferragamo. While I take in the room, the teenage sentry turns and locks the door so we’re caged in.