The Wangs vs. the World (13 page)

Everything he did, he did with passion; emotion didn’t enter into it. Women were ruled by emotion; men by passion. That was the truth of it. Forget Mars and Venus, the real secret of the difference between the sexes was right there.

Men: conquerors of lands, seekers of beauty, upholders of truth.

Women: bearers of the children, keepers of the homes, mourners of the slain.

It was something that Charles had always known. Look at magazines. Women’s magazines were all about feeling something. There was advice on how to feel pretty, how to feel love, how to feel happy, all sold to you by making you feel like you were none of those things. Men’s magazines, on the other hand, were about making money, going places, having sex with beautiful women, and eating rare or bloody things. Passions, not emotions.

He had pleased himself with that thought whenever he looked over the piles of glossy business magazines commingling with the fashion books in the waiting room of his office:
Fortune
pairing with
Vogue,
Elle
and
Marie Claire
splayed across
Fast Company,
staid
Inc.
and
Money
getting their kicks with
V,
SmartMoney
sticking it to
Glamour.
Those magazines had always made him feel vaguely sorry for women, as much as he admired them and lusted after them.

Charles remembered reading something in one of the magazines—
Fortune,
he thought it was—back in the early days of the millennium, when it had seemed like nothing he did could possibly go wrong. “Companies fail the way Ernest Hemingway wrote about going broke,” the writer had said. “Gradually, and then suddenly.” That was exactly what it had been like for Charles, though even the gradual part had been very, very sudden.

Emotion was the culprit.

Really, Charles’s mistake had been as dumb as keeping all his cash in a box under the bed and then getting drunk and chatty with a thieving locksmith.

For years he’d expanded judiciously, buying factories only when demand raged or prices dropped, but suddenly, simultaneously, sales of three of the brands that he manufactured had skyrocketed, bringing a jump in orders and an influx of cash. The money needed to be reinvested in order to avoid a big tax hit, and Charles’s competitive streak was stoked. Why stay in the background, churning out goods for small-time makeup artists, when, in fact,
he
was the visionary? If it was all about the verticals, then
he
should be getting right in front of the consumer with his
own
product. Why let these amateurs earn the giant markup? Charles Wang knew what the world wanted, and he was going to give it to them.

But to do it right, he needed more cash.

In certain dark moments, Charles allowed the conversation to replay in his mind. Each time the turning point loomed larger, each time his own failings stood out more harshly.

Really, it was a series of strikes.

ONE:

Marco Perozzi, the banker he was accustomed to dealing with, was gone.

In his place, J. Marshall “Call me Marsh” Weymouth.

Charles was not a man who believed in the false familiarity of nicknames.

TWO:

It was 2006.

The Fed had just raised interest rates to 5.25 percent and threatened to go higher.

Charles was a man who knew that when governments made threats they tended to keep their word.

THREE:

The luxury cosmetics market was worth $6 billion.

The largely untapped ethnic cosmetics market was worth a potential $3 billion.

Charles was a man who believed in potential.

Right, wrong, wrong.

“Marsh,” Charles had said, wielding the nickname like a hundred prep-school roommates and fellow eating-club members had done before him, “no one is doing this right now. We can make fortunes!”

Marsh twisted his signet ring. He looked at the line of products that Charles had arranged on the long obsidian tabletop and fiddled with the trackpad of the laptop that Charles used for his presentation.

“What are your intentions in creating this line, Mr. Wang?”

“Intention? To make money.”

The banker shifted again. “Is that it?”

Charles was confused. He had already talked about his growth strategy, about the buying power of nonwhite women, about the success of other targeted makeup lines, about his stellar supply chain and his plans for distribution.

“What else is there?” asked Charles.

Marsh leaned back dispassionately, dismissively.

“Business is no place for politics,” he said.

“Politics?”

“The fight for inclusion is a worthy fight,” said Marsh, “but it’s not one that traditionally yields high financial returns.”

Who did this wan, overbred man think Charles Wang was? Some sort of brown-people revolutionary with a tube of red lipstick in his raised fist and an ammo belt strung with eyelash curlers?

“This is not some NAACP for eye shadow, Marsh. Do you know what the markup is on cosmetics even when label is buying straight from manufacturer? Seventy-eight percent! Do you know how much I can make, since I make it all myself? Ninety-five percent markup! The research is there. The market is open. I know how to sell. I have mucho skin in the game. I only need more capital; not so much money for very substantial return.”

“No one is questioning your business sense, Mr. Wang. You’ve clearly been very successful so far. It’s my experience, though, that businesses created to do some perceived good rarely achieve that goal.”

That asshole. Worse than the Communists, with words that confirmed their meaning by denying it.

“We simply like to be certain that our money is being used to make more of it.”

Charles thought longingly of Perozzi, his former point man at the bank. They had enjoyed a nearly perfect borrower-banker relationship. Charles requested; Marco assented. Charles prospered; Marco collected. What more was there?

And then it came. The fatal flaw. Emotion slunk into the picture.

J. Marshall Weymouth made Charles feel small, like he hadn’t made his first million by the time he was thirty-three years old, like he didn’t have a flaming redhead named Saoirse on call, like he hadn’t blown out of Taiwan with nothing but a urea pipeline and lucked himself into the most ideal wife-and-children combo possible. Made Charles feel like five thousand years of Chinese culture didn’t stand up to a few generations of penitent nobodies who thought a single act of tea-soaked rebellion was enough to crown a nation. Nobodies who took pride in being nicknamed for a winged parasitic bug. Fucking WASPs.

“Fine,” said Charles. “Personal guarantee. This is not some sort of multi-culti show, this is a strong and serious business investment. Here—”

Charles reached for the loan papers and uncapped a black Sharpie. Across the section that began
LOAN AND DELIVERY OF COLLATERAL PURSUANT TO PROMISSORY NOTES,
he penned
836 Glover Circle
.

“My home,” he said, shoving the papers back across the table. “You wonder how much money I expect to make for you? Enough that I stake my family house on it. Personal guarantee. This tell you enough?”

Hot. Charles remembered being burning hot, the tiny points on his scalp jumping and prickling.

Weymouth had simply raised an eyebrow, and said, “Alright, Mr. Wang. I’ll choose to believe in the numbers.”

And then, to add insult to stupidity, Charles had said—oh, how he hated himself now!—“Right, then. I believe in the numbers, too,” and opted for a fixed-rate loan.

And then interest rates dropped step by step as surely as they had climbed in the twenty-two months before he locked in his loan. Every day Charles watched them fall as he bit his knuckles and told himself that he was about to be so successful that none of this would matter. Nothing would matter. The point of making so much money was so that money itself would no longer matter. He’d pay off the whole loan at once and beat the rates at their own game.

He was, of course, wrong.

All of it mattered; mattered so much that it wiped out everything else that had ever mattered before.

All it took was two years. Charles secured that loan and opened two ten-thousand-square-foot, no-expense-spared flagship stores in San Francisco and Chicago—cities that, he thought, were underserved by beauty—and filled them both with a flotilla of makeup-artists-slash-salesgirls who ranged in hue from champagne gold to glistening obsidian, each possessed of the ability to transform a customer’s face with a few sure strokes, raising cheekbones and defining jawlines using creams and ointments that melted smoothly into the clientele’s variegated complexions.

It should have been a success. Charles knew it was brilliant. And necessary. At its core, good makeup involved nothing more than a technical knowledge of skin tone and facial structure—it had as much in common with taxidermy as it did with art—and no one else was bringing that knowledge to the millions of nonwhite women who were walking around with chalky faces.

But from the start, it was a mess. His factories were focused on supplying the new stores, which made them late on shipments to a few long-standing clients. Some of them were understanding, and some were ungrateful pricks who forgot that Charles was the one who had believed in them when they’d first walked in with lint in their pockets and a meager little dream in their hearts.

And the stores weren’t drawing in customers the way they should have been. Charles himself had masterminded the ads for the Failure and, just as he’d predicted, they had created a sensation: five beauties, glistening and nude, covered only in images inspired by their cultures. The black woman, a regal Ethiopian model who had grown up in a tiny brick row house in Astoria, had a tribal pattern that ran from knee to hip; that leg was slung across the lap of the Asian woman, a fiery Tibetan girl whose favorite word was
balls
and whose breasts were painted with a fire-breathing dragon; it panted flames towards the Latina model, actually an Italian who took care never to let her tan fade, who faced away from the camera, her back entirely covered in an Aztec sun; the rays of which were obscured only by the smooth brown head of the Indian model, a well-behaved Orange County girl who had never been seen entirely naked by a man until the makeup artist disrobed her and whose arms were intricately patterned with
mehndi
; wrapped in those arms was the final model, a mixed-race girl so beautiful that Charles almost, almost, began to feel a bit more sanguine about the prospect of grandchildren that were not 100 percent Chinese. Her name was Opal and she was the face of the store, an exclusive contract that took a not-insignificant bite out of the Failure’s generous ad budget. Thanks, in part, to that very, very generous ad budget, the beauty press was quick to lend Charles their support, but their readers didn’t follow suit.

They were self-haters, all of them, slavishly buying makeup formulated for other faces.

By the first quarter of 2008, it was clear that the Failure was failing or, at the very least, proving to be spectacularly unsuccessful. But Charles knew, with a kind of sureness that came from years of landing in shit and getting out clean, that he’d be able to turn things around between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Almost half of all cosmetics sales were made during the holiday season, and if they could just stay open until then, they could ride the rebound through 2009, when things were sure to change.

“A bridge loan,” said Charles. “That all I need. Enough just to keep both locations open through late fall.”

There were three bankers this time. Three dry white men stacked like dominos along one side of a mahogany table, their dry white lips speaking dry white lies about their inability to extend any more credit, no matter how soon the Failure might turn into a Success.

“In this climate,” said Banker #1, “it’s just too difficult to get approval for a loan of this sort.”

“Of course, we’re taking your admirable track record into consideration,” said Banker #2, “but in this climate, past success is no guarantee.”

“Makeup,” said Banker #3, “may not be the wisest investment. Not in this climate.”

And then, in unison, the three had lifted their small glasses of water up to their pointed noses and taken a chorus of quick, polite sips. Charles burned, but he kept it down, a flat palm inside his chest pressing down his heart before it exploded in a splatting fury. Instead, he ran through the numbers again, wondering if they’d somehow missed his explanation of the holiday season. It seemed impossible—these men were all supposed to be retail specialists; they should be familiar with the insatiable American need to end each calendar year with a frenzy of purchases—but how else to account for their stubborn reluctance to understand that recovery was just a blush-happy gaggle of teens away?

“The lipstick index,” said Charles. “Leonard Lauder. 2001. Right after 9/11, America was in a recession that was more than just recession, right? The whole country depressed. Everyone sad. Nothing the same ever again.”

He had paused there and looked at the three faces before him. Their pupils had widened a bit at the mention of 9/11, and they’d all assumed an appropriate air of seriousness and concern.
Oh yes,
he’d thought,
Charles Wang  for the save!

“Nobody was buying anything, except for lipstick. That’s right! Lipstick sales go up 11 percent after 9/11.”

Charles waited for a moment. None of the three had batted an eye.

“So maybe we start another recession now, but even if we do, lipstick go up!”