Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

“Let’s start this conversation over,” I plead. I’m tentative at the start of relationships, but this time I’m not throwing it away.

“Let’s,” she says.

“You’re beautiful,” I say.

“Do you mean that?”

I hate it when she goes intense on me. She starts to lift off the Press-On Nails from her thumbs. Her own nails are roundish and ridged, which might be her only imperfection.

“Blanquita the Beautiful.” I shoot it through with melody. If I were a songwriter I’d write her a million lyrics. About frangipani blooms and crescent moons. But what I am is a low-level money manager, a solid, decent guy in white shirt and maroon tie and thinning, sandy hair over which hangs the sword of Damocles. The Dow Jones crowds my chest like an implant. I unlist my telephone every six weeks, and still they find me, the widows and orthodontists into the money-market. I feel the sword’s point every minute. Get me in futures! In Globals, in Aggressive Growth, in bonds! I try to tell them, for every loser there’s a winner, somewhere. Someone’s always profiting, just give me time and I’ll find it, I’ll lock you in it.

Blanquita scoops Marcos off the broadloom and holds him on her hip as she might a baby. “I should never have left Manila,” she says. She does some very heavy, very effective sighing. “Pappy was right. The East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet.”

I get these nuggets from Kipling at least once a week. “But, baby,” I object, “you did leave. Atlanta is halfway around the world from the Philippines.”

“Poor Pappy,” Blanquita moons. “Poor Joker.”

She doesn’t give me much on her family other than that Pappy — Joker Rosario — a one-time big-shot publisher tight with the Marcos crew, is stuck in California stocking shelves in a liquor store. Living like a peon, serving winos in some hotbox barrio. Mother runs a beauty shop out of her kitchen in West Hartford, Connecticut. His politics, and those of his daughter, are — to understate it — vile. She’d gotten to America long before his fall, when he still had loot and power and loved to spread it around. She likes to act as though real life began for her at JFK when she got past the customs and immigration on the seventeenth of October, 1980. That’s fine with me. The less I know about growing up in Manila, rich or any other way, the less foreign she feels. Dear old redneck Atlanta is a thing of the past, no need to feel foreign here. Just wheel your shopping cart through aisles of bok choy and twenty kinds of Jamaican spices at the Farmers’ Market, and you’ll see that the US of A is still a pioneer country.

She relaxes, and Marcos leaps off the sexy, shallow shelf of her left hip. “You’re a racist, patronizing jerk if you think I’m beautiful. I’m just different, that’s all.”

“Different from whom?”

“All your others.”

It’s in her interest, somehow, to imagine me as Buckhead’s primo swinger, maybe because — I can’t be sure — she needs the buzz of perpetual jealousy. She needs to feel herself a temp. For all the rotten things she says about the Philippines, or the mistiness she reserves for the Stars and Stripes, she’s kept her old citizenship.

“Baby, Baby, don’t do this to me. Please?”

I crank up the Kraftmatic. My knees, drawn up and tense, push against my forehead. Okay, so maybe what I meant was that she isn’t a looker in the blondhair-smalltits-greatlegs way that Wendi was. Or Emilou, for that matter. But beautiful is how she makes me feel. Wendi was slow-growth. Emilou was strictly Chapter Eleven.

I can’t tell her that. I can’t tell her I’ve been trading on rumor, selling on news, for years. Your smart pinstriper aims for the short-term profit. My track record for pickin ’em is just a little better than blindfold darts. It’s as hard to lose big these days as it is to make a killing. I understand those inside traders — it’s not the money, it’s the rush. I’m hanging in for the balance of the quarter.

But.

If there’s a shot, I’ll take it.

Meantime, the barbecue fork in Blanquita’s hand describes circles of such inner distress that I have to take my eyes off the slaughter of the Abilene Christians.

“You don’t love me, Griff.”

It’s hard to know where she learns her lines. They’re all so tragically sincere. Maybe they go back to the instant-marriage emporiums in Manila. Or the magazines she reads. Or a series of married, misunderstood men that she must have introduced to emotional chaos. Her tastes in everything are, invariably, unspeakable. She rests a kneecap on the twisted Kraftmatic and weeps. Even her kneecaps … well, even the kneecaps get my attention. It’s not fair. Behind her, the Vanilla Gorilla is going man-to-man. Marcos is about to strangle himself with orange wool he’s pawed out of a dusty wicker yarn basket. Wendi was a knitter. Love flees, but we’re stuck with love’s debris.

“I’m not saying you don’t like me, Griff. I’m saying you don’t love me, okay?”

Why do I think she’s said it all before? Why do I hear “sailor” instead of my name? “Don’t spoil what we have.” I am begging.

She believes me. Her face goes radiant. “What do we have, Griff?” Then she backs away from my hug. She believes me not.

All I get to squeeze are hands adorned with the glamor-length Press-On Nails. She could make a fortune as a hands model if she wanted to. That skin of hers is an evolutionary leap. Holding hands on the bed, we listen for a bit to the lamb spit fat. Anyone can suffer a cold shooting spell. I’m thirty-three and a vet of Club Med vacations; I can still ballhandle, but one-on-one is a younger man’s game.

“All right, we’ll drop the subject,” Blanquita says. “I can be a good sport.”

“That’s my girl,” I say. But I can tell from the angle of her chin and the new stiffness of her posture that she’s turning prim and well-brought-up on me. Then she lobs devastation. “I won’t be seeing you this weekend.”

“It’s ciao because I haven’t bought you a ring?”

“No,” she says, haughtily. “The Chief’s asked me out, that’s why. We’re going up to his cabin.”

I don’t believe her. She’s not the Chief’s type. She wants to goad me into confessing that I love her.

“You’re a fast little worker.” The Chief, a jowly fifty-five, is rumored to enjoy exotic tastes. But, Christ, there’s a difference between exotic and foreign , isn’t there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me. The fact is, the Chief brought Blanquita and me together in his office. That was nearly six months ago. I was there to prep him, and she was hustled in, tools of the trade stuffed into a Lancôme tote sack, to make him look good on TV. Blanquita’s a makeup artist on the way up and up, and Atlanta is Executives City, where every Chief wants to look terrific before he throws himself to the corporate lions. I watched her operate. She pumped him up a dozen ways. And I just sat there, stunned. The Chief still had moves.

“You sound jealous, Griff.” She turns her wicked, bottomless blacks on me and I feel myself squirm.

“Go up to the cabin if you want to. I don’t do jealousy, hon.”

She starts trapping on defense herself now. “You don’t do jealousy! Well, you don’t have the right to be jealous! You don’t have any rights, period! You can’t change the ground rules!”

Maybe Wendi wasn’t all that certifiable a disaster. Come to think of it, Wendi had her moments. She could be a warm, nurturing person. We talked, we did things together. The summer we were breaking up, I built her kid a treehouse, which might be the only unselfish good I’ve accomplished in my life. Blanquita’s a Third World aristocrat, a hothouse orchid you worship but don’t dare touch. I wouldn’t dare ask her to help me knock together a bookcase or scrub the grout around the bathroom tiles. But Wendi, alas, never made me feel this special, this loved.