Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

A plate of baklava was brought to the table. They hadn’t ordered it but happily tucked in. A few minutes later the owner emerged from the back. A thick man with olive skin and a creased face, wearing a sauce-spotted apron over a golf shirt and chinos. Danielle’s father stood to greet him. The men shook hands, called each other by their first names. Danielle stood up also, cleared her throat. “This is my daughter,” her father said, turning toward her and making a small gesture of introduction with his hands.

“Ahh, so wonderful,” the man said. “A daughter. I had no idea.”

In Sha Tin she walked the concrete path uphill toward the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas. The Fodor’s said the project had been undertaken in 1949, the infancy of the postwar, and completed in ’57, the same year her father was born. Was this history then? Buddhas lined both sides of the path, life-size on red pedestals that doubled as planters. They sat amid greenery and behind them rows of trees reached twenty, thirty, forty feet up like canyon walls. The Buddhas were bald of course, but most of them were skinny, which was a surprise. Excepting their black swoop eyebrows and crimson lips they were gold from head to toe. Many were tranquil, reserved, dignified, but others had wild expressions and seemed alive with anger or sorrow; some appeared to leer. The farther Danielle walked, the higher she climbed, and the more ornate the Buddhas became. They held staves and lotuses, boasted haloes and filigreed robes, rode animal familiars, wielded swords. Some were freaks. One stood eight feet tall on Gumby legs. Another had white eyebrows so long they coiled ropelike in his lap. Her favorite had a black Fu Manchu framing pursed lips, a blue cap that matched his robe, and muscular baby arms growing out of his eye sockets. On the hands of these arms, thumbs were pressed to third fingers as if in meditation. Small colorless eyes like cauterized wounds stared out from the proffered palms.

Stan Ross had come out to Hong Kong with Lehman Brothers but by the time the shit hit the fan with the market he’d left the company to start his own thing. Ross Investments was a fund that specialized in mainland Chinese real estate. He got the rights to things — lands, development deals — that were next to impossible for non-Chinese citizens to get the rights to. What could not be done, he did. He had divorced his wife, Lynne, when Danielle was a junior in high school, five — no, six — years ago and left the States maybe two years after that. When Lynne took her maiden name of Melman back Danielle insisted on taking it, too. She saw her father when he came stateside on business, once or twice a year. He’d build a few extra days into his schedule, rent a car in New York, and drive out to the Pioneer Valley: see the college, take her and her girlfriends out to dinner, shake hands with whichever indifferent boy she threw in front of him, weather her moods. If he so much as mentioned her mother she turned to stone. It wasn’t until Lynne got engaged to Cliff that Danielle realized she was the last man standing on the battlefield of her parents’ marriage — the war was over, won and lost, and there she was in the smoking ruins, waving a flag. Why? Because she’d been doing it so long she didn’t know what else to do, how else to be with her father. Their relationship had narrowed to her anger at him. She finished school at the beginning of May, and her mother’s wedding was in Peekskill on Memorial Day weekend. The following Tuesday, the three of them drove to the airport together. Mr. and Mrs. Cliff Sutphen had gone to Majorca for twelve days and Danielle, still a Melman — now the only Melman — had come here for the summer.

Her father’s apartment was on the far south side of the island in the Repulse Bay, a combination hotel and residence. The building was baby blue with yellow and peach highlights, long and skinny like a flag. The paint job reminded her of downtown Miami but the rolling lawns and white stone walkways were straight colonial nostalgia chic. Across the street were the bay and its half-moon beach. Her dad said the design of the Repulse Bay epitomized Hong Kong logic: a modern luxury building for the international business and leisure class but built with a several-stories-high feng shui hole through its middle to ensure that the dragon who lived in the mountain still had access to the water.

The sunsets were incredible. Air pollution blown down from Shenzhen warped the light into something out of Coleridge — blustery, beautiful, unreal. She often went down to watch from the sand, would look away from the water and back through the hole in the hotel to the green slope dissolving in shadow. In her mind she saw the dragon blazing through the gap like a rocket, leaving hot wake behind him in his plunge from the mountain to the sea.

Ross Investments was developing golf courses across the Chinese countryside, the logic being that as the Chinese middle class inevitably suburbanized itself in the American style (which to them would, presumably, not seem stultifying or hopelessly quaint) the courses — and the roads that led to the courses — would make natural anchors for housing developments. Her father was forever taking trips to meet with businessmen or view promising sites. Danielle regarded her father broadly as a visionary. At the same time she found his particular vision unsettling, even ugly. But if he didn’t do these things surely somebody else would. She tried to love her father unconditionally, even as she was coming to understand that she hardly knew him. She knew he was considered an innovator in his field, that he liked shawarma with spicy ketchup. She knew what his iPod was loaded with — Clapton, Hendrix, Eagles, Beatles, Stones — but she had never seen him listening to it. He didn’t always remember to take it when he went on trips. She knew he preferred the elliptical to the treadmill, but only exercised at all because his doctor had advised it. She knew that the woman who wrecked his marriage — or, rather, for whom he’d wrecked his own marriage — was named Erica, but that their thing had ended well before he’d moved to Asia, and that he seemed to have been alone since then, or at least to be alone now. She knew he always took his golf clubs with him when he went to Beijing.

There was a Thai restaurant in a small shack at the edge of the beach. Danielle ordered pad Thai and a spring roll — unimaginative choices, perhaps, but her favorite — and took her dinner down to the sand. She had a blanket and a bottle of wine in her satchel: a sweet, lonely sunset picnic. There wasn’t usually anyone out at this hour, but today she spotted a family on their way back from a walk along the shore. At first they were silent silhouettes, but as they got closer she could hear the little boy’s vroom noises, could see that he was kicking up sand and tearing away from his parents, careening ahead. The man let go of his wife’s hand and started to jog after his son, but he was a beat too late. The kid had already closed the distance, hopped right over Danielle’s wine bottle, and landed in her arms.

“Aunt Rachel!” he said. He was American. She hugged him back.

“Hi there,” she said to him while looking over his head at his dad.

“I’m so sorry,” the dad said to Danielle. And to his son, “Dylan, honey, that’s not Aunt Rachel.” To Danielle again: “I’m so sorry. You look, it’s actually funny, kind of like a friend of ours. She lives in the States, Dylan knows her from Skype, and we’ve been telling him how she’s coming to visit later this summer and — well.” He shrugged and grinned, as in, You know how kids can be. Dylan was pudgy and warm — she could feel his heart humming in his chest against hers. The man stepped onto Danielle’s blanket. He leaned in close. She could smell his cologne or else deodorant, felt his strong fingers slide between her body and his son’s. Dylan giggled as he was pulled from Danielle’s arms, found himself hoisted up onto his father’s shoulders. “Ellen,” the man said, turning away from Danielle and toward his wife, who was still a few yards off. “Honey, you’re gonna get a kick out of this.”