Was this why she liked Ray? Yes, among other reasons. He was like her in some ways, secretive and quiet. Most of the American men she'd dated wanted her to get to know them as soon as possible, as if that was a great honor they were bestowing. Not Ray. He spoke but somehow stayed reserved. He was "reticent," one of her newer vocabulary words. They had fun, walking down Broadway at night, going out for dinner. He knew the city; it was where he'd been born. She often had the feeling he was looking at the individual buildings but he never said why. Inspecting them somehow. Often they took a drive in his red pickup truck. She might have left a pair of yellow tennis shoes in the cab, she remembered sadly. She found the big scar on Ray's belly interesting, its little mountain ranges of swirling tissue, the squarish skin grafts like fields below. Strangely beautiful to her, though she would never say that. Because he wouldn't believe her. She knew that he had traveled a lot. She had poked through his papers and found his passport and seen the stamps from China, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sudan, Thailand, lots of countries. She noticed how good he was with chopsticks. Not careful with them, but bringing the bowl close to his mouth and flinging the food into his mouth like a peasant.
But what else did she know about him? Even less than he knew about her. He lived with his father in Brooklyn, spent some time overseeing his father's rental houses. Caring for him until he died, but also waiting for something, waiting to be called away. Never talked about his work, either. She'd asked once, but he'd just smiled and shaken his head softly. But he wasn't "morose"—another vocabulary word—he was energetic and fun. He read a lot, she saw. Which she liked. Mostly philosophy and history, topics that didn't much interest her, though the fact that they interested him intrigued her. He had a physical regimen that he performed each day, like the old Chinese ladies exercising on the flat roofs of the apartment buildings in their cities, except tougher. He'd hung a long rope out of his father's top window, secured it, and then climbed straight up from the garden below to the window, feet flat against the clapboard siding, then rappelled downward and done it again. Five times a day he did this. No belts or harnesses, no rock climber's equipment. Fearless, and maybe stupid, yes, but she
had
been impressed. All arm strength. This explained his arms and shoulders. Rock hard, even a little scary. But he wore loose shirts, never showed himself off. How could a man be so strong like that? And more to the point, why? What dangerous exploit was he preparing himself for?
Jin Li had her suspicions but no answers. The closest she had come to learning had been a few weeks earlier, right before she'd broken it off. They had been walking along Fifth Avenue after eating when a fire truck had raced by. Like most New Yorkers, Jin Li had become inured to the sound of fire truck's sirens, seeing them as a noisy irritation as they passed. "Goddamned things," she'd muttered, then turned to Ray.
He'd looked at her, saying nothing, eyes cold.
"What?"
But he didn't answer. Stood there rigid, as if bracing for an attack. His teeth were set against each other, his eyes unblinking, feet spread apart. An instinctual response. She'd said something he found ignorant, and she sensed that whatever had happened to him—the scar, the unwillingness to say why he'd drifted around the third world for years—related to this very moment. She felt him capable of violence.
"Ray? What is it?"
He stared at her, traveling great distances in his mind.
"Don't look at me like that.
Please!"
Then his face eased, blue eyes warm again. Ray had nodded to himself, the emotions put back in the safe place in his head where they'd been, and took a step along the sidewalk with her, as if the moment had never happened. But it had. She had seen
into
him. Finally, she knew that Ray—
A noise! This time for certain! A door opening downstairs.
She slipped over to the window again, looked out. Two Chinese men were standing on the street below, waiting.
Now she heard noises in the stairwell. Two sets of feet stomping upward. They passed her floor and continued higher. Searching from the top, she thought.
Jin Li gathered her small number of things into a pile, pushed a dozen boxes around, and created a tiny hiding hole within the expanse of crumbling cardboard. Here she squatted down into a cannonball position and waited, the smell of dry-rotted paper in her nose.
She did not have to wait long. The two men pushed through the door, the old floorboards creaking under their weight. The Russian custodian, from his voice. And another man, whom she watched through a crack between boxes. Another Chinese man. With a big bandage taped on the end of his nose.
"It is very big room," said the Russian. "Many boxes."
The Chinese man did not answer. She could no longer see him but she could hear him walking heavily along the floor. She smelled a cigarette and assumed the Russian was waiting while the other man finished his inspection. But then she noticed that the Russian had moved to the window behind her. She held her breath and twisted her head around. The Russian was casually sliding the window shut, his tattooed fingers gripping the frame. She'd forgotten to close it! She watched his face. A grimness there. The window was the old kind with iron sash weights that rattled in their tracks, but the man was deliberate and slow, easing the window down with minimal noise, his mouth pressed
tight as if trying to hold its sound within him. When he was done, he let his hands drop to his sides. But they opened and closed and opened again expectantly, each hairy finger marked with a bluish spider of ink. Then he stepped forward quickly, making it appear that he had been standing elsewhere.
He knows, Jin Li realized, he knows I'm here.
Pain, pain, go away,
come back and kill me another day. Bill Martz rose as he always rose now, with pain in his back and knees and feet, not to mention pain between his ass and his balls, which meant his prostate gland was acting up again. He winced as he stood, found his slippers, then inspected his naked self in the bathroom mirror. You look like a hairless orangutan, he thought. He pissed with great relief into the bathtub, which he did whenever he could. No aiming, just fire, let the maid clean up after him. Pissing with freedom was an increasingly important activity to him, even imbued with existential significance, and he cared little what anyone thought. At cocktail parties and dinners at private homes, he often pissed into the bathtub instead of the toilet. Or even in the sink. What were they going to do to him? Nothing! He was Bill Martz!
Connie was making breakfast. His fourth wife. He often wondered why they were together. Once a month or so he forgot her name. She was twenty-eight years younger than he was and the difference showed every day. One of those women who had collected and instituted into their regimens so many beauty secrets that they appeared to be aging at one-tenth the rate that normal people did. Glowing! Bubbly! Peppy! He resented her youthfulness even as he absolutely required it as a condition of their marriage. Soft, bouncy, firm. And he wasn't just talking about her breasts or face or ass. Nope. It was a grim and insufficiently recognized truth that as women drifted into and out of menopause,
their sexual selves suffered mightily. No matter what the women's magazines chirped. Looseness. Dryness. Discomfort.
Pain.
Connie was old enough that menopause was out there, lurking on the horizon in a few years, but he was confident that her ob-gyn had all sorts of endocrino-logical tricks up his sleeve. He'd better. Bill Martz had seen (wife number two) what happened otherwise and it was not a happy thing. He was too rich to be afflicted by a dry vagina!
Why had he married Connie? Why, really? She was beautiful, but so were lots of women. She made him feel good. Well, sure. But why had he actually married her? They weren't going to have any children and he had gotten the snip back in his fifties between marriages two and three, when he was running around so much that he couldn't keep the women straight in his head. He had married Connie because he was lonely and she was there. Simple as that. He didn't love her, not really. He was fond of her, yes. Terrible word, "fond." He had loved his first wife passionately, but she had died of breast cancer at forty-two, and thereafter he had been able only to approximate a decreasing percentage of that original feeling with subsequent women. So, no, he didn't really love Connie. And he doubted she loved him, not if he knew anything about women, though he appreciated her willingness not to make it an issue. Why
should
she love him, anyway? He wasn't particularly lovable. He wasn't particularly anything, except rich. And nasty.
Vanity Fair
had once devoted a whole article to how nasty and rapacious he was, and not one word was libelous. He was a nasty, rapacious orangutan who pissed into his bathtub instead of the four-thousand-dollar toilet. I used to be charming, he reflected, back when I cared what people thought of me. Why'd Connie marry him? The
moan-ay,
of course. The security. But Connie was still just young enough to have children. And why shouldn't she? She had every right to have them. He understood that marrying him might have been a disastrous decision for her. At this he felt a distinct sadness for her, what she'd missed. He had four grown children and they were his only consolation. The rest of it all could go to hell.
Really, his wife was wasting her life by being with him. If he had any courage he would tell her this. She was still pretty enough to go out on
the remarriage circuit and grab a reasonably decent guy—someone with, say, eighty or a hundred mil. He and Connie had sex about twice a month, thanks to the beautiful pills science provided to guys like him, but he had to admit it wasn't great. Connie wasn't the problem. She was fine, or would be fine. He didn't have it, the juice, the mojo, the mustard. The act itself was ghostly, a tissue of sensation atop thousands of earlier iterations. He couldn't feel the pleasure in its originality, his cock no longer the time-travel device it used to be. His rational mind was never overwhelmed. In fact, he smelled death on himself—a sour, exhausted whiff. Whether this was mere aging or his problem in particular didn't matter. There was no pill for it, no woman for it, no end of it, no antidote for it—
—except big action! Making decisions, risking, winning, taking the hit when it came, feeling the force of money. Money as wind, fire, stone! Money as beauty, ugliness, and pain! Money as fear and hatred and love! Only with money were his instincts perfect, his reflexes untouched by age, his passion endless. He couldn't explain this and it certainly wasn't admirable, but it was true.
He pulled his robe tight and shuffled into the kitchen. Connie was there with two plates of eggs. The house staff arrived at nine, so she usually made breakfast. He sat carefully. Connie had put cushions on every chair in the house for him. She knew his prostate hurt. They'd fought about him not going to the doctor. Drove her nuts. And maybe that was why he didn't do it. Forcing his old guy's death-smell decrepitude upon her, a kind of rich man's sicko dominance. I didn't used to be like this, Martz thought, poking his head out the open window and looking down. He could see the morning runners in Central Park, the maples leafing out in the late spring.
He pulled his head back in. "I want to give you some carefully considered advice," he announced grandly. God, did Connie look good. Five hundred sit-ups a day, yoga, tennis, swimming three times a week in the pool in the apartment house, free weights—all her old habits from her modeling days.
She bustled about happily. "I like your advice."
"I think, number one, that I am very lucky to have you around.
This isn't about what's good for me. Number two, I think that you are probably wasting your life hanging around an old man like me who can't really fuck you decently anymore, who is crabby and achy and full of his own compacted, neurotic, self-important, and irresolvable bullshit. Okay? You are young enough that you could go find somebody and five years from now you could be feeding a couple of beautiful little children some breakfast, instead of an old man. This is the truth, lady. I'm turning into a rotting bag of meat, Connie, and somebody is going to have to wipe the drool and the shit off of me. Why should it be you? The answer is that it shouldn't. My advice is that you get a quick divorce, nothing contested, and start meeting guys. I'd give you enough money so that you didn't have to worry about anything. Hell, I'll double whatever is in the prenup that
you
made me sign, and you could actually have a decent life and not hang out with an old bum—admittedly quite rich—like me. Who isn't even
charming
anymore." He patted his place mat. "That's my morning speech. Now, where's my coffee?"
Connie silently set a cup down in front of him, along with a neat stack of the
Financial Times,
the
Wall Street Journal,
the
Asian Wall Street Journal,
the
New York Times,
and the business sections of the
Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune,
and
Washington Post.
He read them each day as a rich man, which was to say as if they were the sports pages. Across the city, no more than a few hundred men like him, all possessed of meaninglessly grand wealth and old enough to feel as he did, played the game against each other, against younger men, against technology, information, and the passing of days. They played it as long as they could, and then, if they were smart, they took their winnings at the right moment and retired to Normandy or Palm Beach or a ranch in Montana or someplace nothing much mattered anymore. If they stayed too long in the game, they got cut open, even wiped out. That insurance guy, what's his name, lost $600 million. Should have eased out, let the scandals fall on the shoulders of younger men.