The Fortunes (28 page)

John had flushed darkly, managed to thank the student civilly. The host's “If there are no more questions . . .” had been drowned out by simpering giggles.

It had been nothing, really. (He'd blamed his mother, who'd taught him the term and neglected to correct it when he showed her the manuscript, but that turned out to be even more mortifying:
I thought you knew! I certainly never called it that after you were a baby. I thought you meant it.
Meant it!
You know I don't understand your stories. I thought it was supposed to be something . . . kinky.
) Nothing, and everything. He knew he'd been a diversity hire, suspected that the hiring committee had looked past better-qualified candidates. Now he sat in classrooms, in faculty meetings, feeling like a fraud, or worse—a minstrel show. He'd played around after that with a project about Anna May Wong, the early Chinese American movie star trying to make it in the era of yellowface. She'd had her own Chinese critics, but after a couple of years the work hadn't advanced much beyond copious notes (even their choice of Anna as a name for Mei was only coincidental; they'd had Nola's grandmother in mind) when he'd been offered an unlikely lifeline. He'd been making money, if not a reputation, for several years now writing faux dime-store novelizations of the old TV series
Kung Fu.
The sheer bogusness of the show, the very reason the publishers had sought out an Asian American writer, afforded him an ironic distance from his anxieties of authenticity and enabled him to write again, albeit under the pseudonym Jack Ling—his mother's maiden name, his own middle one, John Smith in her view being too common. (He couldn't very well tell colleagues about these new books anyway. As far as they were concerned he was working on a novel about the Vincent Chin case, and he suspected he'd only secured tenure because the college had had to settle a discrimination suit the year before.) And yet at the same time he felt enough real affinity for the half-white, half-Chinese central character to find some secret satisfaction in the books, even if Nola considered it hack work. (When they'd met in graduate school, she'd wanted to be a poet, but she had given up—in the face of his early success, he sometimes feared.) He'd written half a dozen of them over the past four years and had recently pitched the publisher the idea of starting a new series of Charlie Chan novels.

So they were comfortable, and although neither of them had yearned for a child—
I have enough of them at school,
Nola quipped—it seemed that one might give their lives focus. They could afford one, John could remember thinking, just as a few years earlier they could afford a house, and a few years before that a car. And so they had tried, experimentally at first, trusting to chance, and then a little more determinedly until Nola had gotten pregnant.

And then things had started to go wrong.

Just past her thirty-seventh birthday, Nola was considered of “advanced maternal age,” meaning that a regime of tests and monitoring was recommended, as a result of which they learned from a genetic counselor that their fetus was subject to a chromosomal abnormality. “Mongolism?” John blurted. He couldn't help calling it by the old racially tinged term, realized he'd felt a subconscious dread of the diagnosis, as if what was wrong were an excess of Chineseness. “No,” the counselor said evenly. “Not Down Syndrome. Another trisomy, known as Edwards.” And amid the despair, John had felt a moment of furtive relief, as if it weren't his fault.

They'd had the procedure. They knew their own limits. But afterward, in a way they couldn't anticipate, they were changed. Or at least Nola was. Whereas before she'd seemed relaxed about motherhood, not one of “those women,” as she said herself, now she seemed driven. To her, gently, John suggested it was just the sense of wanting something more when you couldn't—maybe (the condition wasn't inherited, but the risks did increase with age)—have it. “Like poetry?” she asked mordantly, and he dropped it. Secretly, though, he feared her desire was driven by guilt. Nola's family was Irish American, and while her Catholicism was long lapsed, he sensed an atavistic anguish. It was hard, after all, to deny family history when you were trying to create some of your own. So after a decent interval of mourning (if it even
was
decent to mourn something you'd killed), they had tried again. He'd been wary, worried about putting themselves through the rigmarole (his word) again, a process that now seemed so fraught that their younger selves—only a year younger—seemed as naive as teenagers embarking on it, but Nola's desire brought a new fervor to their efforts.

Frankly, it was the best sex of John's life, more erotic, if anything, for the suspicion that Nola didn't want him so much as a child. There was a sense of her using him, of her taking control, that stirred him. In retrospect, he wished it had lasted longer, this second effort, but she was pregnant again within a couple of months, and within a couple of months more had miscarried, likely as the result of another chromosomal event. If the first time had been bad, the second time was worse—more hopeless, more inevitable. More final. They were just very unlucky, the genetic counselor commiserated. But it felt like a diagnosis, a medical opinion. John knew they wouldn't be trying again. Nola handed in her notice. She said she couldn't face the kids. She'd gone back after her leave of absence, but when she picked up their ongoing chapter book to read to them, she realized she had no idea what had come before in the story. “I couldn't make any sense of it,” she told him. “They were all calling out explanations, asking me to read on, but I just had to close the book.” John held her tightly, told her she didn't have to go back.

They spent a wary year, shying from pregnant friends, bridling at antiabortion bumper stickers, and most of all circling each other. They celebrated their tenth anniversary in muted fashion, oppressed by the prospect of their future together, the years like something to climb. They hadn't had sex for months. John found himself noticing the young women in his classes for the first time in years (while at the same time realizing that they weren't likely to notice him back). He found himself masturbating like a teenager (the sound of one hand clapping, as he called it to himself, very Zen). At the suggestion of a colleague, he started to talk about taking a trip, an adventure. He surfed the Web, brought home guidebooks and spread out maps. He had in mind something reckless, romantic. Nola seemed neutral, until one night she told him, “You gave me the idea really, with all your maps. We can go to China, adopt a baby.”

So here they were, even though China had never featured among his suggested destinations, even though he'd never been before.

Nola confessed tearfully that she'd secretly looked into domestic adoption but been put off. “Ironically enough, there are fewer U.S. kids up for adoption since
Roe v. Wade.
” She'd got as far as answering an ad and talking to a pregnant freshman thinking of giving up her baby. “But she wanted to know why I couldn't have a baby of my own, and when I told her what happened, she never called back.” The idea that she'd done that behind his back, had had to go through that alone, had persuaded him.

1:51.

He's cuddling up to Nola again, nudging his dick into the soft cleft of her ass (the “crack of doom” as they call it, in reference to the moment she's promised to let him fuck her there).

The bedside phone rings, and John starts, snatches it up, heart racing, presses the receiver back into the cradle without answering. In the dark he feels for the cord, unplugs it.

They've been in China for—what? he figures—four days, three sleepless nights since they landed in Beijing. Their first evening, when they were both still jittery with jet lag, he'd sidled up to Nola—hotel rooms had always turned her on—but she'd pushed him away. He hadn't brought any condoms. “You never know,” he'd whispered. “It might be fate. Wouldn't that be ironic? ‘Only Nixon' or something.”

Nola had put a cool hand on his chest, and just for a moment he'd thought she was yielding. “I'd say we're way past fucking irony by now, wouldn't you? I've certainly had my fill of it.”

He'd lain awake for hours after that, missed his chance to catch up on his sleep. Time has felt slippery ever since, past and present sliding around inside his head.

There'd followed a day of sightseeing, John so tired he slumped into a doze on every bus ride as if gassed by the diesel fumes. He felt agoraphobic in Tiananmen Square, dizzy on the Great Wall, contemplating its undulating length, like a spiny dragon's tail laid out across the land. When he turned his head to track a guide's pointing finger, he felt his brain sloshing in his skull, inertia making it turn just a little slower than his eyes. The scale of China seemed all wrong to him, at once existentially vast yet so crowded it was hard to breathe (though that might have been the smog hovering overhead like cigarette smoke below a ceiling). It was like being squeezed between the vinyl covers of Mao's Little Red Book (of which their party had bought several souvenir copies, along with dozens of calligraphy scrolls, oilpaper umbrellas, assorted porcelain, jade, silks, pearls—Mao's book, as far as John could tell, being perhaps the only thing they couldn't have found on any street in San Francisco's Chinatown).

Now they're in Guangzhou to get their children. “Time for get best souvenir of trip,” as their young female guide, Napoleon, joked on the bus after one of their “factory” tours, jade or silk or terra cotta. (“For get souvenir” sounded just right to John in his state of bleary stupefaction.) She delivered her English in strings of short, crisp syllables, sounding each distinctly—a familiar singsong cadence it took John a moment to place. Then he remembered mocking his mother's pronunciation of vehicle:
vee-hee-cull.

Napoleon's real name is Ng Poh Lian. She introduced herself at Beijing airport. “But Nah-po-lee-on if you prefer. Like emperor!” She'd said it with a glowing smile, and John imagined it'd gotten a laugh from previous groups, along with the bent elbow cocked over her waist. But this time the gesture only served to accentuate the swell of her stomach. It was subtle still, John supposed, but not to a group of men and women who had been trying and failing to conceive or carry a pregnancy to term for years, and at dinner that night there was much whispered grumbling about insensitivity or, worse, a sly effort to shame the Westerners. “Very Chinese,” someone murmured, and then looked awkwardly at John and added, “No offense.”

He'd yawned so deeply he'd thought he'd inhale the room. “None taken,” he assured the woman. This was Jeannine, who power-walked through airports, did curls with her wheelie bag, ran a thudding 5K every morning on the hotel treadmill, as if parenting were a triathlon.

Most of the others decline to call their guide Napoleon, settling for “Miss Ng” or “Poh Lian,” eager to work on their pronunciation. Only John uses the nickname, smiling at her as if in on the joke. It suits her, he's told Nola. The young woman is diminutive in her black capris and pastel tops but fierce with taxi drivers and hotel porters, shaking her head until her long black hair flies. “She even has the potbelly,” he's joked, but Nola shushed him. Mostly he's relieved to have someone in charge, just as he'd once put his faith in doctors and nurses.

No one had mentioned Napoleon's pregnancy—a slight, John couldn't help feeling—and he made a point of asking when she was due, offering her a seat, but she just looked embarrassed. He had to stop himself asking, as he might have back home, if she knew the gender. It was illegal in China to disclose those results from an ultrasound, but he'd heard the technicians could be bribed (he'd heard
everyone
in China could be bribed). And yet he couldn't help wondering if she'd keep the child if it was a girl, or give it up for adoption. But how to ask such questions? What he really wanted was to lay his hands on her stomach, span the soft swell of it, feel the kick of life, but he couldn't very well ask that either.
Unless I bribe her,
he thought facetiously.

Nola was always adamant that she'd never want another man touching her like that. “Especially when the woman's really big, with the belly button distended, it looks like the men are groping a huge tit!” John had joked about the baby coming to her rescue, kung-fu kicking those hands away. But that was before, of course . . . though in the midst of his jet lag he can't shake the feeling that just as it's the middle of the previous afternoon where he lives, somewhere else on earth, impossibly distant, his past is taking place simultaneously.

And this is also a decidedly Chinese disorientation. It's not just the physical scale of China that has John reeling but the temporal too—the ancient history and the frenetic pace of modernization, cheek by jowl, both such sources of national pride. Napoleon toggles between the two without missing a beat, one moment favorably comparing the achievements of the first emperor—the wall, the terra-cotta warriors—with those of his contemporary, Alexander (referred to, with ingenuous condescension, as Alex), the next rattling off statistics about the towering new skylines (the speed of the elevators, the number of floors, the megawattage to light them all). It makes John's head swim, as if he's years—whole eras and epochs—not mere hours off the pace.

Their second night in Beijing he might have slept. Nola was already out, and he had felt himself nodding off when the phone jangled to life. He'd snatched it up almost guiltily, whispered into it, “Hello?”

“Mister Smith, sir?” A woman's voice, bright accented English.

“Yes?”

“Do you need anything, Mr. Smith?”

“Need?”

“Such as extra pillows? Such as special guest service? Anything at all you desire?”