The Love Wife (28 page)

All this in silence. We understood each other.

I reviewed the sheet with gravitas.

Had she forgotten our kitchen encounter?
Impossible, impossible.
Still I wondered, and was gratified to see how her gaze seemed to visit all manner of objects I did not believe of true compelling interest.

Practice account. Web address. Opening balance. I tried to focus, glad for the shelter of my desk. Feeling, already, my growing embarrassment. What with all the light bouncing up from the snow outside, the ceiling shone brilliant—so brilliant that a great light cascaded down, in turn, on us. That light was too bright; the room felt like a tanning parlor. How exposed I felt, and yet still I sat. Spoke. Swiveled.

Had she never tried to imagine me, under my clothes and manners, a man? Having imagined so much about her, I could not quite believe it. Guessing even now at her feel, her smell, her laugh. There she was, lovely, serious—Lan!—not five feet in front of me, the top of her head glowing almost white. She did not sink back into her chair, or even perch on it, exactly. Rather, what with her back a few inches forward of, and exactly parallel to, the chair back, she seemed to have stacked herself on top of it. Afraid of me then, still. Or was she afraid of herself? And how to put her at her ease? I explained the American Stock Exchange, wondering where she liked to begin. Whether she liked games; music; the morning. I guessed: passionate or shy, athletic or soulful, noisy or quiet. How long before she would lose herself with me? And how long before I lost myself with her? I was not self-conscious about my body, but wondered if she had it in her to make me so—even as I felt her breathing hard; beheld her jaw slack, her face unfocused, her hair everywhere. Her self-possession returned only in the moments after, in that sober, happy, half-embarrassed collecting—the combobulating, Blondie and I called it. I described the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, wondering whether she minded the floor. What her rhythm was. I hoped she was not bouncy; I did not like bouncy. I wondered whether we would prove a fit. Also what sorts of things she would divulge, come pillow time. What her regrets were, her dreams, her hopes.

You,
I imagined her saying.
My dreams are about you.

Though I could also imagine,
I dreamed the Dow Jones jump forty points.

I explained what a stock was. A bond. A commodity.

Blondie was full of projects I could not take seriously. How often my love consisted, not of a feigning per se, but of a distinct getting up of support. Would that be true with any woman? And would I be able to forget Blondie while with someone else? Ah, marriage. Even as I dreamed of sin I involuntarily and to my own annoyance answered every question re: Lan with Blondie’s response; indeed, framed the questions based on her. How I had wondered, once, at all the places Blondie had light coverings of barely perceptible hair—fuzz. How I had marveled at her many shades of whiteness. She was so blue-white in some places, so pink-white in others. And the curly paleness of her pubic hair—I had wondered at that, once, as at her blue eyes and translucent lids. Once upon a time I could have spent days watching the kick kick kick of her pulse. Her inner truth, it seemed, trying to get out.

But now, of course, I no longer watched. Now I beheld, simply,
wife.
Wife with worries, wife with plans, wife with issues. Wife who now required a certain expertise, from time to time. There were still nights of tumble and come; but other nights where judiciousness was called for. Much depended, now, on the time of month. It was possible, now, to miscalculate. Blondie, in short, required a consciousness I imagined smooth Lan did not. I had no data to support this. And Lan was, not to forget, a year older than Blondie. Probably this notion was racist. Behold, after all, the human stacking chair.

Still, I imagined her hungry, quick; her mouth warm and intuitive. I imagined our selves no selves, all sweet spring melt.

The Dow Jones Industrial Index. The SEC. The NASDAQ composite index, such a source of joy these days.

LAN / 
Of course, I knew what was on his mind. Men are men.
Zui weng zhi yi bu zai jiu
—an old drunk’s interest isn’t in the wine.

CARNEGIE / 
I convinced her to sit at my desk. To use my computer. She logged in successfully. She opened her account of five thousand dollars. The idea was to buy and sell for a semester; the club member who made the most money got one real share of stock in Amazon.com. I showed her how to place orders. I showed her how to read the stock pages of the newspaper.

Lan nodded and nodded, her forehead tensed. Trying to catch my words, it seemed, with her eyebrows.

— Do you understand?

She never tried to get me to say things in a way she could get. Nod after nod after nod, but each nod was more about appreciation than comprehension. It was what my mother would have wanted, had she been the explainer. Each nod saying, not ‘I get it, I get it,’ but ‘You are so kind, you are so kind.’

Lan asked no questions.

My mother:
That is right way to listen! Keep mouth shut! If student has so much to say, he should be teacher.

But what if the student just doesn’t understand? What if the teacher isn’t getting through?

Then student should study harder.

Mutual funds, earnings reports. SEC filings. I feelingly explained that ‘P/E ratio’ meant profits-to-earnings, or the number of shares you had to purchase in order to have bought one dollar’s worth of actual profit from a company. Passionately I defined ‘profits’ for her, ‘earnings’; lovingly I pointed out that a high P/E ratio typically meant that a company was overvalued, although investors had ignored such traditional measures in the case of companies like Amazon. I inquired tentatively about the Internet. Did she know what the Internet was?

LAN / 
How could I be so ignorant? Just because I didn’t go to college didn’t mean I was a frog at the bottom of a well.

—
 Of course,
I told him.
In China, Internet Café very popular. Spreading like hotcakes.

CARNEGIE / 
— In certain companies, I said, people begin to buy, not what the company is, but what it could be. What makes the market so interesting is that it is so much about perception.

Lan nodded.

I waited.

— Of all things! she said finally.

I linked from her class website to other visuals. She nodded a bit slower, her brow opening. Overtaken, it seemed, with helpless wonder. Partly this might have been the color screen; the color on my computer was truly miraculous. But also she seemed to see herself as entering some inner sanctum. She had that reverence.

LAN / 
Finally I was watching the show that real Americans watch.

CARNEGIE / 
It was as if she’d made her way from the outer courtyard of a Chinese house to the inner courtyard, and from there to the inmost chambers; even into the curtained room within a room that was a Chinese bed.

We were getting somewhere.

I showed her how to pull up a stock-advice site. Then, another. I showed her how different the advice could be, with one adviser bearish where another was bullish. That could be true at any time, but was especially so these days, what with the NASDAQ decline slowing. Some people thought the NASDAQ would rise again, I explained, others that they had better move to limit their losses. I backed up to explain what ‘bearish’ meant. ‘Bullish.’ Also how people kept tabs on the market while they were working, how they placed orders to buy or sell on their lunch breaks. Between meetings.

— Not everybody, I said. Some people. As many people as, say, keep birds in China.

The nodding stopped. She looked at me quizzically.

— Don’t people keep birds in China?

— Of course, she said.

She looked at me thoughtfully, as if trying to make out the true meaning of my question, even as I made out the play of her breasts against her loose-knit sweater. The sweet bulge of the former, the obliging give of the latter. The barely perceptible enlargement of the knit loops that made for the give, each loop a peephole to the bra below. And of course I did peek, although each hole was too small to show anything more than the slightly shiny knit cloth of what I guessed to be a soft-cup bra. Ah, assimilation—good-bye cold war armor! As she inhaled, the peepholes along the top slope of her breast ever so slightly enlarged. As she exhaled, they ever so slightly shrank. The peepholes close by her nipples seemed to enlarge and shrink most; those closer to her shoulder, least. The difference was negligible, and what could one really tell through a sweater and bra? Yet her nipples did seem to protrude a bit more happily than might be warranted by an introduction to the stock market.

She tucked an errant hair behind her ear; her hand hesitating as it grazed her lobe, which she caught, momentarily, between her bent fingers. Tugging it down gently before her hand fell away.

She returned her attention to the screen. I made a mental icon of my wayward thoughts and dragged it into the trash.

Still rearrangement was in order.

— Here, you try it, I said. This is an icon. You click on it to select it.

She placed her hand on the mouse willingly enough, but did not click.

— Click, I said.

I reached down and gently depressed her soft-skinned fingers.

— Click, I said once more, then lifted my hand and drew back. My other hand gripped the molded-plastic back of the chair. How easily that chair swiveled! With the lightest touch I could turn her—just like that—to face me.

— Click?

I was about to show her again when she clicked herself.

My heart bumped hard.

She is good student. That is because she is Chinese girl. She is not like Blondie, think the sun shine every day. Lan understand in this world, all kind of way to fall down. As long as you have money, you have cushion. No money, your pee-pee will be so black and blue you cannot stand up.

—Now this is a critical graph, I said. Click again. Here.

I pointed to the screen, leaning carefully over her. I hoped I was not panting.

— You’ll be a power user before you know it, I said.

The trees outside crackled.

— This end point, of course, is today, I said.

— This dot here? she asked.

I scrolled back horizontally, over the miles of data that preceded that dot.

— All this tells you something, I said. It tells you a lot. And yet we still don’t know what happens next. Anything could happen.

She nodded.

— You can make a lot of money through the stock market, I went on lamely. Of course, you can lose a lot too.

I found myself lowering my voice as I spoke.

— Do you make money? she asked, lowering her voice to match mine.

We were not whispering per se; and yet we could have been construed to be murmuring, our talk assuming the low-toned back-and-forth of private exchange as we discussed how, just as in China, people here could start companies and became millionaires. How anyone could do it, even immigrants. Even people without connections.

— Not everyone in China who start company is Party member, she said, bristling.

— Did I say that?

— That is American propaganda, she continued; but her tone had a shrug in it.

— You could start a company. A dot-com, I said. Even without a college degree. Anyone could start one.

— No no no no, she replied, waving her hand like a shield. — Of all things!

— I’m not saying you shouldn’t get a degree.

Still she was adamant; people like her could not start companies. On this matter we had no understanding.

Yet the underpart of her wrist thrust forward as she waved, like an eagerness belying her words.

I showed her how to position her hands on the keyboard. I explained that she was going to have to learn how to type.

Later that week I dug up an old Macintosh for her. This was an SE, one of the sand-tone small-screened boxes that had once seemed so eminently portable, slipping so niftily into its padded Cordura case. Now it seemed quaintly pre-laptop, antique-shop material. It had sixty-four megabytes of memory and no color and could only be hooked up to the Internet via the most creative finagling. Still Lan seemed transfixed by the idea that it was hers to use. I was in fact trying to give the thing to her, but she resisted so energetically that I finally allowed her to insist the computer was on loan.

I lugged it into her kitchen and made her sit down.

— This cable goes here, I explained. See this symbol? That’s for the universal port.

— Universal port, she repeated. Thank you.

— This is your floppy drive, I said. This is your diskette.

— Floppy drive. Thank you. Diskette. Thank you.

She nodded, nodded. From downstairs came the surprisingly clear
naa
-ing of the goat.

— On, she said. Off.

She tried the switch. The first time tentatively, but the second time with matter-of-fact expertise.

— You plug the mouse in here, I said.

She peered around the computer. Her breasts did not quite clear the wood-look tabletop, but rather roosted on top, like a pair of pigeons. Above them, her scoop-neck sweater gapped. I could see her bra strap, narrow and white, slack, and under it an expanse of sweet, smooth flesh. All of her fine left collarbone, the beginning swell of her breast, and beyond it, at the tunnel of her sleeve, the tuck and turn of her entering arm. All was lit rose pink by her sweater, but not evenly. The pink was barely perceptible by the sweater’s neck, deeper and deeper farther in.

I helpfully showed Lan how to access certain programs besides her stock-club site. The word processor, for example.

— Click on this icon here.

From below us came the sound of the van crunching up the driveway; then of car doors detonating, one after another. So loudly! Far more loudly than when you were downstairs, maybe because down there the noise was simply volume, whereas up here it was intrusion as well. So too the screeching of the children, returned from a shopping expedition. Bailey particularly was shockingly loud, his shrieks filling the apartment to the rafters.