The Train to Lo Wu (13 page)

So I’ve been told.

And Wallace is out?

He turned to face her. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her lips drawn tight, as if she’d been crying. He looked at the clock on the wall above her, and watched the second hand slide past fifteen, then twenty. Wanda, he said, what do you want me to say? I didn’t make the decision. It’s not my department.

I don’t know, she said. I don’t know you, Marcel. And I’ve never really known what to do with kids your age. Pardon my condescension. Young men. So I’m going to assume you’re not as naïve as you sound. I’m going to assume you can guess why Wallace Ford was made a partner of this firm.

Marcel stared at her and said nothing.
No,
he wanted to say.
Enlighten me.

It wasn’t because of all those other cases he won. It wasn’t because of his golf swing, either. It was to avoid a lawsuit. They never liked him. You can say what you want, but I transcribed the minutes of all those meetings. God, I hope this isn’t too much of a surprise to you.

No, he said. It isn’t. Though it had never occurred to him to think about it one way or the other. Partners were partners; how they had gotten there was irrelevant.

I’m sure they’ve shown you the graphs, she said. But they probably haven’t told you that Jim Phillips in Brussels has been doing half the business he did last year, and no one’s planning to fire him, are they? This is a setup, Marcel. They’re sending you to cover their tracks.

His heart thumped, as if someone had stepped on his chest.
Should I listen to this?
Suppose that were true, he said. What would you want me to do about it?

You’re a lawyer. Isn’t that your job?

I am a lawyer, he said, his face getting hot. And I should warn you against making libelous statements you can’t prove.

She gave a long, exaggerated sigh. Wallace is my
friend,
she said. I talk to him on the phone every week. Yes, he has some strange ideas. He’s a free thinker. And he’s made some questionable choices. But who hasn’t, may I ask? I’ve known him for twenty-one years. He’s the best lawyer this firm has. She put her hand on the doorknob, and twisted it, with the door still shut. Do something about it, she said. Don’t pretend you don’t know how.

Following the map, Marcel takes Kennedy Road to where it intersects with Queen’s, along the waterfront; he crosses the road and leans against the railing, taking a breath of sea air. The water is the color and texture of ink; in the jagged reflections of a thousand lights, it seems to boil, and congeal, and dissolve again.

He remembers when his family used to go for walks in Green-wood Park, along the Hudson, and he would climb up onto the concrete barriers and lean over to stare into the water. It always smelled faintly of gasoline, a few milk containers and Coke cans bobbing up against the wall. What would happen if I fell in? he would always wonder, imagining himself thrashing in the oily muck, unable to find a handhold; and just at that moment he would feel his father’s rough fingers, the fingers of a moving-company man, on the back of his collar. Gon get yourself killed, Marcel remembers his father saying, lifting him gently into the air and placing him back on the sidewalk. There was the reassurance, the comfort, of having those hands to catch him; but he remembers the grain of disappointment he always felt under his tongue, knowing that the danger was only imaginary, that it was a question he would never have to answer.

Wallace Ford’s house is not on Hong Kong Island, as Marcel always assumed. It is on another island, with the strange name of Lamma, a mile or so to the south, and a ferry ride of forty-five minutes from Central.
We’ll expect you around seven,
Ford told him.
That way you’ll be on the boat while it’s still daylight. It’s
something to see.
He sits on a plastic chair on the upper deck, facing forward, eating saltines and watching the horizon. Even looking at boats makes him a little queasy; he always remembers being sick, at four, the one time he took the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. His roommate at Williams, who was on the sailing team, taught him a simple cure: soda crackers to settle the stomach, and keeping your eyes on the horizon, tricking your inner ear into thinking you’re standing still. But you can hardly expect it to work here, he thinks, inhaling the smell of instant noodles and Happy Meals blowing up from the lower deck, with a folder of documents in your bag that spells the end of a man’s career. The deck tilts slightly, and he grips the arms of the chair, staring fixedly at the dim silhouettes of mountains in the distance.

Excuse me?

He turns and sees a young girl sitting in the chair next to him, and beyond her, a tiny old man, holding a cane across his lap. Sorry, she says haltingly. My grandfather says you must have some sea illness. Is it true?

He nods, not knowing what to do.

He says the best thing is to sleep, the girl says. Not stay out here. There are too much noises and bad smells. She stands up, and the old man stands, too, and beckons to him, pointing at the door. For a moment he stays where he is, wanting to say, No, I’m all right. But how would she translate this; what would the old man think of his courtesy? He stands up, shakily, and follows them inside. The upstairs cabin is nearly empty, perhaps a little quieter. There, the girl says, pointing to a long row of seats. You can rest there.

All right, he says, and sits down, just to get them to leave. But they linger, watching him, and so he has to lift his legs and stretch out his long frame, his feet sticking out over the edge.
Wah,
the old man says.
Hou cheung ah!
Good, he thinks, I’m learning Chinese now. He closes his eyes, and hears the door creak and slam shut. Hell, he thinks, as long as I’m here, why not? He puts his hands behind his head and takes a deep breath.

This wasn’t my choice,
he repeats to himself, imagining Ford’s face, those enormous, red-rimmed eyes.
I’m delivering a message.
I’m sorry I have to be the one.
And then, in the moment before he falls asleep, his father’s face appears in front of him. They are standing at the bus station, the day he left for Williams, waiting to load his duffel bag and new suitcase into the luggage compartment, and suddenly his father turns to him, his mouth twitching, as if to say,
don’t do anything I’d be ashamed of,
or words to that effect. But the words never come. After a moment, his father looks away, picks up the enormous duffel with one hand, as if it were a paper bag, and tosses it across the sidewalk into the bus driver’s hands.

He wakes when the throbbing of the engine stops, and hears feet thumping on the deck below, voices calling from the pier. The old man and the girl are gone. He stands up stiffly and sees a concrete jetty, and the low white buildings of a small village stretching along the edge of a long, curving bay.

When he steps off the gangplank, he hears someone calling his name in a high voice. Mr. Thomas? Mr. Thomas? A tall, dark-skinned woman, in a white blouse and turquoise skirt, carrying a basket of vegetables under her arm. I am Vinh, she says. I work for Mr. Ford. May I carry your bag?

No thanks, he says. I’ll carry it. There’s something about her face he can’t quite grasp. She has high cheekbones and a long, tapering chin, and her eyes are oval: perhaps Thai, or Filipino? Or Indian? She turns, flinging a long black braid over her shoulder, and he has to hurry to keep up with her pace. They pass a row of seafood restaurants with open terraces, and stores with their wares stacked on the sidewalk: plastic tubs, straw hats, brooms, crates of oil and oyster sauce. Vinh turns left, and they climb up a sloping street, narrowly avoiding a cluster of children running at full tilt, their flip-flops slapping the ground.

Is the house far from here? Marcel asks. He never imagined Ford living in any place like this: so remote, so—
Third World,
he thinks. For lack of a better word.

A little farther, she says, waving a hand in front of them. The alley widens and levels out; now the houses are set back from the road, and spread farther apart. Here, Vinh says, and stops in front of an old iron gate spotted with flakes of red paint.

When Marcel steps inside he lets out a low whistle under his breath. The house is surrounded by an elaborate tropical garden: massive ferns, dwarf palm trees, hibiscus, oleander, birds of paradise, orchids, flowers he can’t name. Ford stands on a stone pathway leading to the front door, holding a watering can, in loose cotton pants and a collarless tunic, barefoot, and Marcel suddenly is aware of the thickness of his oxford-cloth shirt, his feet sweating in tasseled loafers. The door closes, and he realizes that Vinh has disappeared into the house without a word.

Thought it would be you, Ford says, extending his hand. Excuse the informality.

Quite a place you’ve got here.

Oh, it’s Vinh, Ford says. I just do what she tells me. A garden, you know, is a work of art. Like a painting. You can only have one painter.

My mother is just the same way, Marcel says with a tentative laugh. Ford opens the door and gestures for him to enter. Only with her it’s daffodils and rhododendrons, he says, stepping inside. Not the same, I guess.

No, Ford says. Not exactly the same.

The roof of the house is a glass atrium, with windows tilted open along the sides. They sit at the end of a long dining table, underneath the branches of an enormous potted palm, and immediately Vinh begins bringing out food, dish after dish, each time scooping up the empty plates and disappearing before Marcel can thank her. He’s never seen anything like it: spring rolls with black mushroom filling, rice baked in halves of a melon, a whole carp steamed in coconut milk. Ford serves them both, and eats without speaking; between courses he folds his hands on the table and breathes in deeply, staring out the window. All the better, Marcel thinks. The chopsticks are black lacquerware, with pointed ends, as slippery as knitting needles. When Ford isn’t looking he shovels fish onto them with his fingers, trying not to stab himself on the tiny bones.

I’ll be the first to tell you I didn’t want this job, Ford says finally, leaning back in his chair, after they’ve finished the last course. I never was much for the international side of the business. Didn’t think it was in the firm’s interest to be here in the first place. But it came up just after my divorce, in 1995, and I wanted out of San Francisco. So I thought it was just the luck of the draw. And it was.

You seem to like it here.

Hell, Ford says. I’ll tell you something. This position is supposed to rotate two years from now. But I’m going to ask them to make me permanent. I’ll even take a lesser share if they want.

A salty taste rises in Marcel’s throat. I would have thought that you’d want to go back, he says. Five years is a long time.

Ford gives him a slow, appraising look, and for the first time Marcel notices the puffiness around his eyes, the pouches at the corners of his mouth. Not so long, he says. Not when you’re my age. I feel like I’m just getting started.

Marcel nods, wondering if he’s supposed to understand what that means.

Peabody Stein needs a new strategy for Asia. Ford tears off part of his napkin and divides it into little squares, scattering them around the tablecloth. There is a faint buzz of anger in his voice: like a wasp trapped by a window. Right now we’re operating on an outpost model, he says. We go wherever our American clients go. But the thing is, for every American company looking for a market in Asia there are three Asian companies that want a toehold in the U.S. You’ve got lots of young executives here that were educated at Harvard and MIT. They speak English just like we do, they eat pizza, they watch the Bulls on satellite. The problem is that we’re not going after that market. The only people we’re interested in are the Americans who think that the rest of the world is waiting to buy what they have to sell.

A breeze rises through the windows, smelling of oyster shells and seaweed.

But that’s our primary client base, Marcel says. We’d have to do that without alienating them, right? That wouldn’t be easy.

You know what I like about Hong Kong? Ford says. People here are smart. You see the stock indexes and the exchange rates right on the front page of the newspaper. He brushes the napkin fragments into his palm, and lets them fall over an empty dish, like tiny snowflakes. They aren’t hypocrites the way we Americans are. They understand that money is like water: it flows everywhere, but it never changes. Doesn’t matter what language it’s in, or what country it comes from. If you can trade it, sell it, or exchange it, it’s all the same. That’s why they call it
liquid
assets, right?

Marcel presses his lips together to stifle an answer:
Aren’t you
forgetting the regulators? We’re still members of the bar, right?
Hold on, he thinks. Why is he making this easy for me?

But enough about that, Ford says. Tell me about you, Marcel. How’s the firm working out? Are you happy?

He forces himself to smile. It’s hard to say, he says. Sometimes I wonder where the last five years have gone. This is my first time off in I don’t know when. I didn’t take a week off all last summer. Working on the Geosynch bankruptcy. Thirty thousand pages of depositions.

I heard about that. They said you guys were logging all kinds of hours.

Sure, he says. The biggest severance payment in California history. Full entailment.

I remember what it was like, Ford says. Eighty, ninety hours a week. It’s a heavy price you pay. I don’t think Sheryl ever forgave me for it. All those years when she would keep the dinner for me in the oven and then I would come home and fall asleep before I could eat it.

That isn’t the right metaphor,
Marcel thinks. A price is fixed; you know what to aim for, you know when you’re finished. This kind of work is just the opposite. The question is, will you give this much, and then more, more than you ever knew you had?

I don’t regret it, though, Ford says. And you won’t, either.

Marcel pours himself a cup of tea, drinks it in one gulp, and gets up from the table without a word. His briefcase lies on a chair at the far end of the room; he takes the folder out and carries it back to the table in two long strides. In his hands it feels like a single sheet of onionskin, as if it might slip out of his grasp and drift away.