The Secret (45 page)

Therèse arrived in two days. She moved into his room in the apartments. Liz had moved to the Kimberley Hotel in Kowloon, from where she departed in a few days for New York.

Five weeks later a chartered jet carried my father to Miami International Airport. He was able to travel by limousine to Fort Lauderdale.

That was the end of my father so far as the business is concerned. I call him every few days to report to him the developments in our businesses, but he is less and less interested. He is partially paralyzed and does not travel. He will never return to Hong Kong. He spends his time fishing, studying the alligators in the canal, and watching the birds come to eat Therèse’s chicken necks. He spotted a manatee in the canal, which was for him a big enough event to require a call to Hong Kong.

And he writes. He spends hours every day writing his chapters of these memoirs. His memory is perfect.

*   *   *

We did enter into a form of partnership with Yasheng Lin. It is a complex deal, put together by Sir Arthur Xu, Hugh Scheck, and a firm of San Francisco lawyers specializing in business arrangements in Southeast Asian countries.

It is working smoothly. Our businesses are expanding. The name Yasheng gives us entry into places where we would not otherwise find a ready welcome.

Tom Malloy was right about the Sphere IV. It is steadily growing in market share. It goes against the conventional wisdom in the computer world, which is obsessed with miniaturization. Millions of people still want to work at what some computer gurus scornfully call desktops.

My personal attention is focused chiefly on the expansion of Cheeks into Asia. Bai Fuyuan was right when he said the Chinese would buy many millions of our items. We had expanded about as far as we could in the States. The Europeans have not been terribly receptive to what we sell. But we have a burgeoning market in China and Japan, plus a prosperous market in Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, and Singapore.

Lily Xiang has proved a fortunate choice for us. She supervises our Hong Kong manufacturing operations and manages our expansion into China. We have a different manager for Japan, and others, locals, in the other countries.

Vicky and I, with our children, spend eight or nine months of the year in Hong Kong. The kids are being educated there, and we can’t run them back and forth between Hong Kong schools and Connecticut schools, so we make Arbuthnot Road our home most of the time. Of course, I have to make frequent trips to New York.

Sir Arthur arranged for us to have permanent-resident status in Hong Kong, a necessity. We carry United States passports but can live full-time in Hong Kong.

Poor Liz saw my father for the last time when she visited him at Matilda Hospital. She lives in Houston now. My father can’t go there, and she can’t go to Fort Lauderdale. She has thrown herself into her work, but I also understand she has taken to drinking a bit more and has developed something of a reputation for being indiscriminate about men. I see her whenever I go to Houston, which is not often. She offered herself to me. I turned her down as gently as I could.

Little Chang Lin has, of course, become an internationally famous model. She worked for us for a while, and then was picked up by a New York modeling agency. She models for us occasionally but much more often for designers. She has kept her head shaved, and sometimes she sticks flower decals on her head to give the appearance that she has had her scalp tattooed.

She is very grateful to me. And she is a problem. I can’t resist her, and Vicky has found out about her. I have been with her only three times since the night we went to Macau—once in Hong Kong, twice in New York. Vicky is resentful, but she has not made a horrible fuss about it. She would if she thought Li threatened our marriage, I am sure. But Li absolutely does not. She is an appealing novelty, and Vicky thinks of her that way.

Finally, what goes around comes around. One October morning shortly after Vicky left to deliver the kids to school, an outing that always took an hour and a half, the telephone rang, and I had a call from the reception office on the ground floor.

“A Mrs. Sue Ellen Cooper is here to see you, Sir.”

I told him to send her up, and shortly there arrived at my door my ex-wife, whom I had not seen in ten years.

“You haven’t changed, Len,” she said as she stepped into my office, took my hand, and offered her cheek for a kiss.

“You haven’t either,” I said.

She hadn’t, either. She was still defined by her oversized boobs; almost forty years old, she was still taut of figure and was still the somewhat vacuous blond I had married.

She was direct. “I’ve come to ask you a favor,” she said immediately.

I pointed to the couch and asked, “Which is?”

“I came out here looking for a job. My father sent me. The only really unusual qualification I have is that I am still fluent in Chinese. My father has given me references to two American companies with offices in Beijing, but I decided to come here first. I spent some time in Beijing, you know, and found it a pretty depressing place.”

“You speak Mandarin,” I said.

“So I’ve been forcefully reminded since I arrived in Hong Kong. Coming here, I tried to tell the cab driver where I wanted to go, in Chinese. I wound up having to tell him in English.”

“You can learn Cantonese,” I said.

She sighed loudly. “Could you give me a drink, Len? I’m in deep shit. I’m living at home with my parents, who despise me. I can’t do anything right. I can’t get or keep a job. I’m too good for the jobs and I can get and not good enough for the ones I want.”

I stepped into the kitchen and poured her a Scotch. “What’s with Mollie?” I asked.

“I haven’t seen her in five years.”

“I don’t know what you’d do in Hong Kong,” I told her. “It’s not an easy place to get a job. Besides, you’d have to get a work permit, and they restrict those to people who have skills not readily available here.”

She swallowed her Scotch and used the back of her left hand to wipe tears from her eyes. “I was hoping you could help me,” she whispered. “I understand you’re running an expanding business from Hong Kong.”

The last thing I wanted was to have Sue Ellen in Hong Kong. I shook my head. “You see all the office I have here. We have another one downtown, but there are only three people working there. We have branch offices and stores on the Mainland—”

“Lenny…” she wept. To my amazement she dropped on her knees in front of me and yanked up her polo shirt, exposing her breasts. “Isn’t this how a woman is supposed to beg?” she whispered hoarsely. “On her knees, with bared breasts?” I stared at her. She wasn’t wearing rings in her nipples. In fact, I couldn’t see the holes. Apparently she had stopped wearing rings, and the holes had closed. “Help me, Lenny! I’m begging you.”

“Mollie taught you to give a first-class blow job,” I said coldly. I am an evil man. I confess.

Sue Ellen’s eyes widened. “Sure. Sure, Lenny. Why not?”

She did it, just as Mollie had taught her, just as she had done for me a hundred times. And when she was finished, she wiped her mouth and said, “Anytime you want it. And I’ll be invisible. Your wife won’t know I’m in Hong Kong.”

“No, because you won’t be. I’m going to send you to a woman called Lily Xiang. She does our hiring for the Mainland. If we have a job for you, that’s where it will be.”

When Sue Ellen had left, I called Lily and explained who was coming to see her. I told her she didn’t have to hire Sue Ellen, that it was up to her. Of course I knew she would. I didn’t have to tell her that I wanted my ex-wife out of Hong Kong and as far away as possible.

Tianjin, once called Tientsin, is a river port not far from Beijing. It is a city of more than six million people, the third-largest city in China, and we had two Cheeks stores there. It is the site of a university, has museums and art galleries, and Lily thought Sue Ellen would be happy there. She appointed her her own deputy, so to speak, and assigned her the duty of making frequent trips to Beijing to look in on our three stores there. Also, she was to visit container ships as they arrived from Hong Kong carrying our goods. It was a responsible job, and Lily proposed we pay well.

So … I am an evil man, but I did something good for Sue Ellen, too.

I am not ashamed of myself.

The world’s best-selling novelist returns with a high stakes game of moral ambiguity, love, betrayal, and dangerous consequences in

NEVER ENOUGH

1

SATURDAY EVENING, APRIL 20, 1974

Four of them were together that Saturday evening: Dave Shea, Cole Jennings, Bill Morris, and Tony DeFelice. It was a warm spring evening, and teenagers from Wyckoff, New Jersey were doing what teenagers everywhere in America were doing: hanging out.

They and their peers groused constantly about what teenagers always grouse about: that there is “nothing to do.” They had hung out on the streets of Wyckoff and Ridgefield, sometimes sitting on the fenders of other people’s cars. They were conscious—sometimes resentfully conscious, usually just amused—that they were not welcome on the streets of the several small towns they frequented. Teenagers generally were not. They were not thought of as menacing, only annoying and nuisances.

Apart from sitting on cars, apart from sometimes obstructing sidewalks, they were often boisterous and loud, capering around, slapping at each other, shooting punches that were not meant to land. The police often ordered them to move on. Only rarely was any action taken against them, and that usually was just notifying their parents.

With an exception—

When they were tanked up with beer, they could make themselves a real problem. Occasionally, only occasionally, one or more of them was arrested and held until his parents could come and take him home.

These four—Shea, Jennings, Morris, and DeFelice—had minor reputations as more than common exuberant troublemakers.

—Dave Shea was a handsome young man, tall and muscular, a football player. He was charismatic. Every girl’s dream was to date Dave Shea. He was his school’s quarterback two years, during which years his team lost only one game. In his senior year the team went undefeated. Besides that, he was an outstanding scholar. He was inducted into National Honor Society in his junior year. His special subjects were mathematics, chemistry, and physics. As of April he had accepted a football scholarship at Rutgers University. Without the scholarship he would have been unable to go to college. But he had the scholarship, and his future seemed assured.

He had, though, a dark side. It wasn’t the beer. The unhappy fact was that Dave would
cheat.
He did it on the football field, where he had an exceptional talent for knowing when officials weren’t looking and then clipping, and for face-mask violations, even for punching an opposing player on the nose. In close contact with a defensive lineman, he might growl “Nigger!” and precipitate a furious assault that got a star defense man ejected from the game, while Dave stood gaping and shaking his head and ostensibly wondering what had caused the foul. In the chemistry lab he knew what results were expected from a problem in qualitative analysis and pretended to have achieved that result, when he really hadn’t. He was in fact a good player and a good student, but he had his little tricks to make himself look even better.

“You’re good enough, Shea.” In the manner of teenagers, they called each other by their last names. “Why…?”

“Look, Jennings. Your family will send you to college, no matter what. You’re smart, too, but you don’t need a scholarship. I
do.
I have to be, by god, good enough to…”

“Gotcha. But you
are
good enough!”

“Yeah? Well, don’t begrudge me a little insurance on it. The son of a wholesale grocery salesman who drives around the country begging for little orders … Hey! Like Willy Loman. Like in
Death of a Salesman.
They add up their nickels every month, hopin’ there’s enough to make the payment on the car. I don’t want to live like that, Jennings!”

He didn’t want to live without sex either. Hung like a horse, he first shoved his big penis into a girl when he was thirteen years old.

She was seventeen.

“Jesus Christ! The guys said you’re … Hey, I can’t take all that, Shea.”

“Bet ya can. Why would I have it if a girl can’t take it?”

“Well … Hey! God almighty! Hey! I wouldn’t have believe it!”

Eventually, Amy, who also declared she couldn’t possibly, but did. And complained it hurt.

You gotta be a football hero to get along with the beautiful girls. Okay, he was a football hero. It was no disadvantage to be known for being a stud.

—Cole Jennings played basketball and was good at it. He was tall, six-feet-six, and had an indefinable agility on the polished floor that brought him recognition as a valuable player. His blond hair fell over his forehead as he dribbled toward the basket, dodging this way and that, avoiding the players trying to guard him, until at the last moment he passed the ball to a teammate close to the goal and charged in to take the rebound if the shot missed. He made most of his points by capturing rebounds and jamming the ball through the basket.

He, too, was an excellent student. One of them, Dave or Cole, would be valedictorian of their high school class.

As Dave had suggested, Cole did not need a scholarship, athletic or academic, to go to college. His father was senior partner in a major realty firm. His family could and would pay his tuition at any school he wanted to attend.

From the time he was old enough to drive, Cole had his own car. That night he was driving his graduation present, already given him though graduation was six weeks away. It was a black Pontiac TransAm. That his parents had given such a car to an eighteen-year-old boy spoke something about their indulgence and their judgment.

Cole was a responsible young man, and though he could burn rubber he didn’t. He was in fact sober and thoughtful, compared to Dave.

Dave was immensely jealous of Cole’s sporty new car. He never even got to drive his father’s old Chevy. That car was too important to making a living for his father to allow his son to drive it.