The Wangs vs. the World (6 page)

Now Charles wanted to curse the land somehow, to cry bitter salt tears that would curdle the earth and kill the thick wall of bougainvillea that shielded the lawn. Any child conceived in these rooms would be an insult to his children; any love found on these grounds would make his own loves into a lie. When some other family moved in, some family whose dollars flowed greenly from their hands, dark thorny vines should spew out of the ground, twisting through the iron gate and out across the grass, choking the magnolia tree, with its generous branches and sweet-smelling blossoms, snaking around the house until all the windows were blinded and all the doors taken prisoner. Gallons of overturquoised water would roil and churn and splash over the charcoal slate that framed the pool, rotting the impenetrable stone until it crumbled and sank, pulling the foundations right out from under the house.

Charles closed his eyes and mentally erased the house from top to bottom, scrubbing the whole thing out in wild strokes, leaving a white patch between the Leventhals’ five-bedroom-plus-six-car-garage Spanish Mission and the Okafurs’ seven-bedroom-plus-tennis-court Cape Cod. And in that blank space he pictured instead the mountainside estate in China that he had heard so much about as a child.

He could feel Barbra sitting next to him in the passenger seat and knew without looking that she was pulling her cashmere wrap tight around her shoulders though the morning was warm even for September in Los Angeles. A door slammed shut and that was Ama, settling into the backseat with a grunt.

Keeping his eyes closed so the estate stayed in place, Charles turned the key in the ignition and shifted into drive. At the edge of the darkness behind his lids, there was the cliff that had been waiting ever since his doctor warned him about the possibility of his ministrokes presaging something bigger and more devastating. But Charles wasn’t afraid. He could negotiate the driveway by feel—the lazy 180-degree curve around the front lawn, then 900 feet of concrete and a pause at the automatic gates before the tires hit asphalt.

Lately, the gate had been slow to open. The crank mechanism groaned and he could hear it sticking, bit by bit. Charles sat, eyes still closed, and thought about a time when he might have noticed that and gone for a can of WD-40 himself, made a Sunday project of it instead of waiting for Pano to figure it out.

Barbra and Ama were both silent. After another moment, Charles lifted his foot off the brake and let the car roll forward. Forty more feet and he’d hit sidewalk, but Charles squeezed his eyelids tighter together. No one ever walked at this time of day. Most of the houses on their block didn’t even have sidewalks in front of them, just dipped from lawn straight into street. The station wagon surged on, lowering itself out of the driveway and wheeling into the road. If he kept his eyes closed for long enough, Charles wouldn’t have to look at the assessor’s hearse of a black car parked hastily at the curb. Maybe he’d even be lucky enough to hit it. At the last minute, though, self-preservation kicked in and his eyes snapped open in time to catch Ama and Barbra looking at each other in the rearview mirror.

七
Santa Barbara, CA

FINALLY, SHE WAS ALONE. Rachel had folded up six pairs of Grace’s jeans and skipped down to lunch, where she’d probably tell everybody that the Wangs were headed to the poorhouse and were going to start collecting food stamps and stuff. It didn’t make any sense. Half the girls at school probably had at least one KoKo lip gloss or eye shadow—some of the guys probably even had the special-edition guyliner that they’d put out.
Emo fucks.
And now they’d all be talking about her as they chewed their disgusting giant mouthfuls of disgusting chicken fingers.

Grace flipped open her phone and hit the call button. This was the fifth time she’d called Saina today, and her sister still wasn’t picking up.

“Hey, this is Saina. I miss you, too. Leave a message.”

Beep
.

“Jiejie! Where
are
you? Do you realize that we’re coming to your house, like, today? God, I wish that you were still living in New York. I mean, I know you’re still living in New York, but I’m talking about the city. Listen, you have to call me back, okay? I need, need, need to talk to you before Dad and Babs get here. Okay, bye.”

God. How could Saina ignore her calls like that? Especially today?

It was Tuesday, so Andrew was probably still in his Bio lab. Grace texted him.

Have u talked to Dad yet? Call me asap after Bio
.

Okay. Fine. She’d pack. But she was just going to bring the stuff she actually wanted to bring. Forget about being practical—they couldn’t be so poor that they didn’t have money to buy underwear, right? She could sell ads on her blog or something.

Grace’s phone started buzzing as soon as she set it down, inching its way across her bedspread.

“Andrew!”

“Hey, Gracie.” Oh Andrew. He didn’t even sound upset. Grace wasn’t sure whether that should make her more or less worried.

“Did you talk to Dad?”

“Nah, I was in class, but he left a message. Sucks, huh?”

“Sucks? Uh, yeah, it does. Andrew, the
house.
”

“I know. Hey, Gracie, I can’t talk right now, okay?”

“What? Why not? But you called me! How can you not talk to me right now?”

“I just, I wanted to make sure you were okay, but I’ve got to finish something right now. But you guys are getting here tomorrow, right? So I’ll see you soon, okay?”

八
Phoenix, AZ

ANDREW PRESSED the end call button on his iPhone and looked at it again to make sure that he wasn’t somehow still connected. He dropped the phone on top of his jeans, which were puddled on the floor of his dorm room, then picked it up and placed it on his desk, where no one could step on it accidentally. A second later he reached over and checked again, just in case he’d pocket-dialed someone when the phone landed on the floor.

He had to do all of that with just one arm because the other arm was trapped under Emma Lerner’s breasts. They were great breasts. “A great rack,” Howard Stern would have called it. Yes, Howard would definitely think that Emma had a great rack, and he’d be even more impressed because they were 100 percent real. Why was Howard always talking about boobs on the radio where no one could see them? He should have gotten himself a TV show instead of that satellite gig, although he probably wouldn’t have been able to show naked racks on TV either. Unless he was on cable.

Emma wiggled in place next to him, face hidden in the pillow, and pretended to snore, then raised herself up slightly and brushed her nipples along his arm. Phone forgotten, Andrew flung his free arm and leg over her and pulled her in tight, burrowing through a mess of blonde hair to kiss her perfect pink cheeks.

“Hair in my mouth again!” he teased.

“Better than a hair up your butt.”

“You’re going to get something else up your butt!”

Emma flipped over to face him, grinning. “Really? And what’s that,
hmm?
Look at you, you’re blushing already!”

Andrew rolled his eyes at her. Sex talk plus beers before noon equaled red cheeks for him and Emma knew it. She loved teasing him about his Asian flush even though he tried to make it clear to her that his family was actually descended from ancient Manchurians who rode wild horses and were nothing like the engineering geeks on campus. Unable to think of a comeback, he pounced on her instead, catching her wrists in his hands and attacking her neck with half bites.

Hot
. If only she wasn’t so freaking hot. With those plush lips and the little freckles on her nose and that beach volleyball body. And now her red-and-pink-striped panties—
panties!
Andrew loved that word!—and his black boxer briefs were the only barriers keeping him from everything he’d ever wanted. Sliding his hands down her upstretched arms and slipping his tongue between her lips, Andrew tried to stop himself from pressing into her too much. But just a little. And a little more, and more, and, oh, another torturous bit. Just enough to feel exactly how they’d fit together, so easily.

“Andrew,” she whispered, breathing out on the first syllable. “C’mon. Let’s.” She tugged at the waistband of his underwear and then slid her hand inside, reaching for him.

“Emma.” One warm hand around his penis.

“Oh Andrew. Come on. You’re leaving. Let’s just . . . let’s.”

He felt the rest of his body tighten and his erection loosen a bit in response.

“Em, you
know.
We talked about this.”

“I have condoms in my bag over there.”

“Look, I think you’re amazing, and you’re so, so hot. And not just hot, you’re beautiful, too.”

“But you don’t love me.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Dude, I don’t care! Who cares! I’ve had sex with tons of guys I don’t love! I mean, not tons, but a few. A couple.”

“And that’s okay!”

“Is it because you think I’m a slut?”

“No! No, no, no. I don’t even like that word.”

“Stop being such a feminist, Andrew, it’s gay.”

“I’m not gay!”

Emma laughed. “I didn’t say you were. I know you’re not gay. Would this happen if you were?” She gripped him again, tugging him towards her, and he immediately sprang to attention. “See? Your body knows what you want. Aren’t you tired of being a virgin?”

Andrew turned away from her and put a hand over his penis, willing it to quiet down. He
was
tired of being a virgin, but that didn’t mean that he was just going to have sex with Emma without being in love with her first. Andrew just wished that love wasn’t so difficult to figure out. It had been simple with his first girlfriend, Eunice, whose Groucho Marx eyebrows had just made her even more beautiful. For the last two years of high school and the first year of college, they’d been in love—he’d felt buoyed by her very existence and fascinated by the smallest detail of her being—but they’d never once had sex because Eunice’s father was a minister and she loved Jesus just a little bit more than she loved Andrew. They’d done everything but—“But not everything butt,” he’d joked to his high school friends—and in a way he’d relished his relatively chaste devotion to her. It meant that he was nothing like his father, who didn’t even bother to hide his affairs from Andrew, though it seemed like Barbra and his sisters didn’t know about them.

“Em, have you ever been in love?”

“We’re in
college.
We have plenty of time to fall in love. And that’s got nothing to do with sex anyways.”

“But shouldn’t it?”

Emma was quiet for a moment. She sat and hugged her knees to her chest, not seeming to care that she was still nearly naked. Just as Andrew started to think that she might tell him she actually was in love with him, Emma made a gazelle leap over him, out of bed, and yanked her sundress off the closet door.

“Hey! No! Stop! Are you mad? Why are you getting dressed?”

“You have to pack. Don’t let me stop you.”

“It’ll take me twenty minutes. They’re just leaving L.A. now—we still have—”

“You know, I know where Bel-Air is. You could say that they’re leaving Bel-Air.”

“Well, but Bel-Air is in L.A.”

“Ha ha. Funny. You’re so funny. You should be a comedian.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“No, I mean it. It’ll be awesome. You can hang out with Long Duk Dong and Harold and Kumar. Have a good time. Make tiny-dick jokes. Oh, and Margaret Cho. Good thing she’s a lesbian. You won’t have to have sex with her.”

“Actually, I think she’s bisexual. She went out with Quentin Tarantino.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Emma shrieked, hurling one of her lethal heels at him. It skidded against the stucco wall like a nail on a chalkboard and landed, innocent, on his pillow.
What was wrong with her?
Emma was usually so uncomplicated, so easy to be with. She didn’t confuse him like most girls. Why was she being so mean? And why did she care if Margaret Cho was bisexual?

“Whatever, Andrew,” said Emma, quiet again. “I’m not going to beg you to fuck me. And you are the last hot guy I’m dating. My mom was right.” And then she turned and walked out, shoeless, slamming the dorm room door so hard that his Lenny Bruce mug shot poster slipped off its nail.

Andrew let himself fall back on the bed, his elbow narrowly missing Emma’s spike heel. Well, that was that then. Another breakup. At least Emma thought he was hot, too. But already this year there had been Jocelyn, and then the end of Jocelyn, a rekindled fling with Soo-Jin, and then the end of Soo-Jin, and now Emma and, very soon after, the end of Emma. And fall semester had just started.

It was really hard to fall in love when everyone kept breaking up with him. Eunice had broken up with him, too, because she’d met someone on a mission trip who was as devoted to purity as she. “It’ll be better this way,” she’d said over video chat, as he’d stared at his own face in the corner of the screen, willing himself not to cry as she enumerated all the reasons he should forget about her. Andrew thought that he’d spend his newfound singlehood on finally having sex already, but when the opportunity presented itself after a drunken make-out session with a cute nursing major at some fraternity’s ’70s party, it had all felt sordid and desperate and coercive in a way that it never would have with Eunice, and he’d left before either of them could fully disrobe, deciding then that he’d rather wait until he had something closer to love. Who knew it would take so long to find?

Andrew was just reaching for his phone to call Grace back—she’d sounded so wounded that he couldn’t talk—when Saina’s name flashed on the screen.

“Hey.”

“Angie, did you talk to Dad?”

“
Saina!
You can stop calling me that already.”

“Drewly?”

“This is serious.”

“Seriously serious.”

“It is.”

“God, I know. Did you ever think—”

“Let’s call Gracie.”

“Wait, Andrew, before we do. How do you think Dad is?”