Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

She got into the car to head for Apsara. She had named the spa for those celestial nymphs whose name evoked grace and beauty, but she had, in fact, been thinking of their other attribute — their shape-shifting powers, their ability to constantly evolve at will, gambling with fate’s fortune. She had thought it fitting, given her circumstances, even if she was someone with “style issues.” In any event, the name seemed to have brought with it the blessing of the deities, for the spa had been fully booked virtually from the day the doors opened. Yinghui even thought that she might soon sell the business if someone offered her the right sum of money.

It was early in the afternoon when she arrived, and she did not expect the spa to be busy. But she was shocked, nonetheless, to find the reception area in a state of obvious neglect — the flowers in the large vase on the counter were nearly dead, the water honey-colored and slimy; there was no one at the reception desk, but two of the beauticians were sitting in the silk-upholstered armchairs reserved for clients, reading magazines and listening to music being played on one of their mobile phones. A third was sitting on the floor, painting her toenails. Only one of them was wearing her uniform.

“Where is Miss Xu?” Yinghui demanded.

The girls stood up quickly, tidying the magazines into a neat stack and plumping the cushions. “We don’t know where Phoebe is,” one of them said. “She hasn’t been coming in very much.”

“I think she must be sick,” another girl added.

“How long has this been going on?” Yinghui said, walking toward the office.

The girls shrugged. A few days, a week — they weren’t really sure.

The office was in similar disarray, with boxes of beauty products lying heaped in random piles in the middle of the room, unopened envelopes and nail files lying across the desk. When she sat in front of the computer, Yinghui found that someone was in the process of downloading the latest Hollywood films from the Internet. There were empty noodle cartons piled in the sink and jars of tea everywhere. The computer booking system still showed a number of clients booked, although half the number from the previous month. Yinghui rang Phoebe Xu Chunyan. The phone was turned off, so she left a message instructing Phoebe to return the call as soon as possible.

She left the spa and headed home, where she would work on her future with Walter in order to forget such petty problems as the running of the spa. It frustrated her to think that she would have to spend a whole day or two sorting out this mess, which detracted from the delicious possibilities of her situation with Walter, but this was the problem with hiring girls from the provinces. She was sorry to say it, but they always required far more supervision than you thought. It was proof, if ever she needed it, that she had outgrown such small-scale businesses, that she was ready for something befitting her swelling ambitions. As soon as she could, she would find a buyer for the spa — and, who knows, perhaps for the other businesses too. She would invest herself entirely in Walter’s project: in their project.

She had barely settled down to a cup of Anhui white tea and a spreadsheet of figures when her phone rang. She knew who it would be even before she answered; it was as if fortune had decided to bestow itself entirely upon her, as if all her stars were organizing themselves in perfect alignment. Sometimes, she thought, life was so easy.

“Hey, I was just thinking,” Walter said without identifying himself, “I’m pretty much alone in Beijing this weekend and I don’t have all that much to do, so I was wondering if you might like to join me. Just a spur-of-the-moment thing. I completely understand if you need to look after your businesses. I’m sure you must be very busy.”

“Actually, funny you should say that, but I’m feeling sort of … fatigued by work at the moment. I could do with a break.”

“Really? I don’t want to drag you away from your obligations. But if you can come for just a night or two, I’ll get my PA to organize flights and hotels. When would you like to come?”

ONCE IN BEIJING, YINGHUI found that she was charged with an easy energy. She enjoyed the scale of the long, wide avenues, unerring in their straightness — their grandeur suited her current state of mind: full of light and life and possibility — and she found herself thinking about the development project in a similarly grandiose manner. Already she imagined her name and Walter’s attached discreetly to the project, so that for years to come, every time the building was mentioned, her name would be whispered reverently too. While Walter attended to meetings during the day, she spent a few hours watching TV in the hotel, a luxury she rarely allowed herself. She went downstairs and sat in the café, a light-filled space on the ground floor of the avant-garde hotel built by the architect Walter was hoping to engage for their project — their project — in Shanghai. There, sipping lemongrass tea, she read a novel: Camus’s The Plague , which she had seen standing incongruously on the racks of the used section of a bookstand in Sanlitun during her morning walk. A young Chinese American man at the next table leaned over and said, “I read that at college — it sucks.”

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, smiling charmingly. “I just never got into all that existentialist stuff. It didn’t seem … relevant to the world.”

They chatted for a while about which authors they liked and hated, and as they ordered another coffee for him and an herbal infusion for her, she tried to remember when she had last had a conversation with a complete stranger about books — an exchange that did not involve business or money or marriage. It was a way of being that came back so easily to her — now, that was like riding a bike — and she remembered something else: that she could be good company, lively and receptive and provocative. After they bade each other goodbye, she went downstairs to the swimming pool, a silent, shadowy rectangle lined in steel the texture of sharkskin, lit by a rich amber glow. She was the only one there, and she splashed languidly on her back, allowing herself to drift into an arc of light that fell through a glass panel over one end of the pool. With her ears in the water, she could hear only a vast hollowness punctuated by an occasional clicking; she felt a lightness to her body that was entirely new, at once exciting and soothing — it was cosseting to be borne by the water and have it turn her body gently in directions she could not control. It seemed pointless to plow up and down the lengths, as she would normally have done when squeezing in her forty laps each lunchtime, so when she was bored of floating on her back, she frog-kicked her way underwater, watching how the thin strips of light at the bottom of the pool reflected on its surface.

Walter collected her early that evening, and they went to dinner at a restaurant with views over the Forbidden City.

“I was thinking about what you said about formalizing our partnership,” Walter said as they sat down. “Although I still think it’s early in the day, I agree that we should get some paperwork drawn up. I’ve instructed my lawyers to get moving, so you should have something to look at later this week.”

“Great.”

“I wanted to address your concerns,” he said, gesturing to the waiter. “About security.”

“Thank you,” Yinghui said, suddenly feeling embarrassed at having ever mentioned her need for security.

“Now that we’ve gotten business out of the way, can we start enjoying each other’s company?”

Yinghui smiled. “We always do, even while conducting business — don’t we?”