Peter Davies - The Fortunes

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?”

“No, no, nothing.”

He’d hung up but lain there befuddled with fury — good service was one thing, but calling in the middle of the night! — until he remembered an entry from his guidebook. A prostitute, he thought, a so-called ding-dong girl. He’d unplugged the phone, but by then he was wide awake. He’d gotten up, left Nola to sleep while he sat at the window gazing out at the city — drab and dusty by day, now shimmering with light — through the plate glass.

He tried to work out a new Kung Fu plot, something about Chinese railroad workers staging a train robbery, using their expertise with nitro to blow the safe, the loot smuggled back to China amid the bones of the dead, but the details refused to gel; worse, the idea seemed somehow glib here. He’d actually been thinking of naming a character Eastwood Ho.

He shook his head. The opposite of fast asleep, he decided, must be slow awake.

He should have slept on the flight out, god knows, but he never slept on planes. He made an effort to have a couple of drinks this time but succeeded only in getting buzzed and keeping Nola up. “ Falling asleep just feels wrong on a plane,” he told her. The heavy head drop jarred him awake in a panic. It’s not that he’s afraid of flying. He flies all the time without anxiety. It’s sleeping on planes he’s afraid of.

His father, John Smith Sr., had been a pilot (a Korean war veteran), his mother a stewardess (an original Singapore Girl) — they’d met on a layover in the mid-sixties, and she still occasionally referred to her husband affectionately as the Captain — so staying alert in the air was genetic, John claimed. That and his father, who’d taught flying out of his local airport into his seventies, always liked to regale him with tales from “the hairy edge” of everything that could go wrong in the air. The Captain had called his shakier students “Chinese aces” after the old air force joke about Chinese landings—“One Wing Low”—and he’d always considered it a professional affront that so many routes to and from China incorporated the lucky 8’s into their flight numbers: “This is your captain speaking… cross your fingers!” The old man had died two years earlier, and John wondered what he’d think of their flying China Air.

As they climbed over San Francisco, he felt the shudder of the undercarriage retracting and imagined the wheels like giant balls being drawn back into an abdomen. He made the mistake of telling Nola, but she only gave him a look of forbearance. Everything’s about sex with him now, she’s noted. He’s tried to rationalize it. Friends with kids have said they never have sex anymore, they’re too tired. “That’s because they have babies, ” Nola reminded him. “Newborns. It’s not like I’ll be breastfeeding.”

Still, he can’t escape a feeling of something ending, a nostalgia for the life they’ve lived up to now, for themselves, which has manifested itself as desire. He’s tried to make a joke of it, if only to pull the sting of her condescension. On the highway to the airport they passed a sign for an Oriental spa and he lisped, “Me wub you wong time.” “Wrong time is right,” she told him, taking his hand off her knee and then patting it.

“You’re already acting like a mom,” he complained.

On the plane he’d tried to stop talking about sex, stared out the window instead as California receded. Below, the winter sun rippled across the windshields of a parking lot like sequins on a dress. A little farther over there was a municipal lot, yellow school buses lined up like pencils in a case. Is that the reason they’re yellow? he mused. He knew why pencils were that color. Supposedly China was where the best pencil lead had come from in the nineteenth century. His fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Beasley, told him that, proudly — though whether he was proud of his knowledge or thought John should be proud of Chinese lead wasn’t quite clear. “I hear you put the lead in yellow pencils,” Jordison, the bully, sneered in the playground at recess. “And I thought you all had teeny dicks,” his sidekick Farley yapped. John shrugged. “I guess I’m not as knowledgeable about dicks as you.”