SO HERE THEY WERE, the three of them. Barbra, Charles, and his Ama. No longer so young.
And here was the car, a 1980 model, both bumpers intact, gleaming still from the weekly wash and wax that Jeffie, the gardener’s son, gave all the Wang family cars.
Cleaned more than she was ever driven, this car was a lady. Her cream-colored seats and sky-blue carpeting made her impractical for anything beyond a polite spin around the block or a tootle over to a neighborhood association meeting four estates down. She might, might consent to a weekend spree down the coast, provided an air-conditioned garage at a La Jolla villa was waiting on the other end. Even after nearly thirty years, her perforated leather interiors remained uncracked and the wood burl along her dash still shone. Her only blemish, really, was one little carpet stain, a resolute Angelyne pink, where Charles’s first wife, May Lee, had once let an open tube of lipstick melt in the bright white L.A. sun.
Never, not once, had the gears of her clockwork German engine been asked to cogitate on the notion of driving all the way across the country, rear end sagging with baggage, oil lines choked with cheap Valvoline. But, like the family, she suited herself to her circumstances.
Barbra lugged her own bags down the steps and waited for Charles to come open the back. He was behind her, grunting as he tried to lift the last of Ama’s suitcases—a matched pair of classic Vuitton wheelies that had also once belonged to May Lee—over the threshold. Barbra didn’t want to help. Let him do it. Ama shouldn’t even be here with them. How much was she still being paid, Barbra wondered, and for what?
It was early still. Seven thirty. The quiet time after the dawn joggers had put in their miles and just before the housekeepers started their long walk from the Sunset and Beverly Glen bus stop. A weathered white pickup full of gardeners and lawnmowers sputtered up the street, spewing exhaust onto the same topiaries that they watered and trimmed daily.
Housekeepers and gardeners, dog walkers and pool men, they were the front lines, the foot soldiers. Later would come the private Pilates instructors and the personal chefs, the assistants sent from the office to pick up a forgotten cuff link or script. A home theater consultant, a wine cellar specialist, a saltwater fish tank curator—necessities all.
Charles and Barbra had never understood their neighbors’ obsession with bringing services into the home. Why have some masseuse carry in a table when you could just go to the Four Seasons? Why open your life up to more strangers than you had to? Now, of course, there was no need to think about any of that. Luisa and Big Pano and Gordon and Rainie had all been let go, fired, weeks ago. Barbra hadn’t told them why. Let them think that she had finally turned into a crazy, demanding Westside wife, unsatisfied with Luisa’s immaculately ironed sheets and Gordon’s bright, abundant blooms, maybe even pathetically sure that her husband was eyeing Rainie’s swinging breasts. She was positive that they’d be rehired immediately, even in these unhappy times. She was equally certain that her former household help had already jointly developed some theory of the Wangs’ downfall, something scandalous and unflattering that would doubtless be pried out of them by each of their new employers.
The worst moment for Barbra and Charles was the reveal. The Reveal. That’s how she thought about it in the days after—like they were on one of those makeover shows, but instead of finding that their house was beautifully revamped, the hosts had removed their blindfolds and made their whole charmed life disappear.
“Why?” Barbra had asked.
“What why?”
“All our everything?”
At that moment the word our rankled. Charles had never had a problem with generosity—he’d cultivated a casual way of picking up the check before he’d even made his first million—but just then the way that his wife said our brought out something small and sour that he forced himself to swallow, along with the true word: Mine. Barbra had given nothing but her bullish charm to this family—she hadn’t made the money or borne the children or even decorated the house or cooked the food. He’d done the first, his dead first wife had done the second, and they’d hired people to do the rest. Nothing was our.
“Yes,” he’d said. “All.”
“But how? How could you? Don’t we have anything saved? We had so—”
“So much. And now, not so much.”
He’d said that, and then he’d spread his arms out in a leaden swoop, like an aging showgirl. It had severed something between them, that gesture. Charles had never done anything awkward or unsure in his life. Not in front of her. Not in her eyes. But now her broken heart saw every wrong-footed step he’d ever taken.
“How could it happen?”
“It happened!”
“But how did it?”
“How, how, how! You never ask how it get good, how I make so much money, how I know what everybody want, only how now that it go away! No how!”
Had they always sounded so stilted and childish? After sixteen years in America, speaking English to the children and her American friends—whose company and mah-jongg rules she preferred to those of the mainlander wives of Charles’s friends—her own speech had attained a smooth perfection, but when she spoke to Charles, she found herself picking up his broken grammar, and the two of them gradually dropped the private Chinese they had once shared.
“Okay,” she’d said. “No more how.”
And for then, and for now, that was it. No more how. No more how, and no more house.
Charles couldn’t. He couldn’t tell Barbra what had happened, how their personal assets—their home!—had gotten wrapped up in the bankruptcy. It was something a true businessman never would have done. That was the worst of it. And now here they were, creeping out of the driveway under cover of dawn with their meager belongings stashed in the back, a troupe of Chinese Okies fleeing a New Age Dust Bowl. He’d always respected this home, kept it sacrosanct. He may have betrayed his wives in body, but he never did so under their shared roof.
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.