And things aren’t that great between them, I’ve picked up some hints. There’s a certain regret, even bitterness, about their lack of a family and it seems to have deepened over the years. He wanted children and grandchildren, and envies me mine. It’s like living in a cul-de-sac, he says. The stray dogs are her babies; she fusses over them and worries about them and they seem to be her main topic of conversation. They annoy the hell out of him, however, barking all night and shitting in the yard.
She’s also obsessed with ageing and needs constant reassurance about her looks. She sends away for expensive anti-wrinkle creams and then sulks if he doesn’t notice the difference. The humidity frizzes her hair and she spends hours with the blow-dryer when they’re due to go out – a situation with which I’ve been only too familiar.
I think he’s bored, too, with her insularity. Like many expat wives she has no curiosity about the outside world; she never reads the paper or listens to the news. Women in her situation live arrested lives; it’s the men who get out and about while they stay at home fretting over the servants or playing tennis, like women in the 1950s.
Bev’s not quite like this because she runs a successful business. However, it doesn’t seem to have broadened her horizons. Massage is of limited interest to Jeremy and though he submits to being used as a guinea pig, being rubbed with hot stones and whatnot, he can never think of anything to tell her afterwards – relaxation on a scale of one to ten? – and then she gets irritated.
I have a sense, too, that there’s a certain erotic pressure in all this. Bev told me several times that she was highly sexed. I’m a very sensual person, she said, as if the rest of us were made of asbestos, and in those days she had a manual called How to Please Your Man in Bed, with line drawings of couples engaged in bewildering varieties of foreplay. Towards the end of his visit, when we’re both drunk, Jeremy confesses that he’s found all this a bit of a strain. Worse, that there was something slightly, just very slightly, self-congratulationary about her gymnastics, as if she were performing in front of an audience. In recent years their lovemaking has dwindled to almost nothing, which to be perfectly frank he finds a relief.
The next morning he’s appalled at his disloyalty. ‘She’s a wonderful woman, forget everything I’ve said. Oh God, oh God.’ He buries his face in his hands.
And today he’s leaving. Neither of us has uttered the words, what are we going to do? We’ve been living for the moment and now I’m driving him to Heathrow through the rush-hour traffic, stupid when he could take the Tube but it gives us another hour together.
I stand in the departure hall looking at the board. We’ve said nothing and now he’s disappeared through the barrier, like Orpheus into the Underworld. I can’t bear to go, however. I keep imagining he’s going to burst through the doors saying, I can’t live without you, darling, let’s go back to your house. I’m even imagining him making some joke about his passport to Pimlico.
His flight was called some time ago. When the departure board rustles and flips – Flight NA26: Last Call – I burst into tears.
White Springs, Texas
MR WANG LEI has flown in for the twenty-week scan. It’s a big moment for both him and Lorrie. She’s nervous for so many reasons that after breakfast she throws up, though the morning sickness has passed.
She’s glad he’s not present during the scan itself; baring her belly is too intimate for a stranger. In the past, of course, her husband was there, squeezing her hand when their baby appeared on the screen. This time she’s alone with the nurse. They gaze at the blurred foetus, curled and pulsing like an elderly shrimp. That’s how she thinks of it. She’s locked her emotions; no doubt they’ll gush up later but just for now she feels nothing, just slimy snail-trails across her stomach.
They print out a photograph for Mr Wang Lei who’s smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. She gives it to him. She knows this is a significant moment but it’s getting late and she’s worried about getting home in time to collect the kids from school.
Mr Wang Lei holds the photograph in his hand. She tells him it’s a girl. If he wanted a boy he keeps it to himself. He takes off his glasses. Tears slide down his cheeks but he does nothing to wipe them away.
‘I shall email it to my wife when I return to the hotel,’ he says.
Lorrie can’t think what to say. This is a private moment between him and his wife, she feels excluded. I’m Just the Oven. Nor does the clinic feel as welcoming as last time. Sharlene is nowhere to be seen and the other staff seem preoccupied; Lorrie has the feeling that now they’ve signed up, she and Mr Wang Lei have been abandoned. The parking lot is almost empty; even at the gas station there’s no sign of life. Lorrie feels discombobulated; soon she’ll wake up and find the whole thing has been a dream. She should have become used to it by now but she’s been feeling this, off and on, for weeks.
‘May I ask you something, dear lady?’ He clears his throat with a harsh, alien, phlegmy sound; Indians do this too, it must be an Asian thing. ‘May I take this opportunity to visit your husband and family?’
Her heart jumps. Of course this is what he wants to do; it’s in the information pack. We encourage donor and surrogate to develop a mutually supportive relationship. He’s staying in San Antonio for three days, how else is he going to occupy his time? Pregnancy has dulled her brain.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘My husband’s away but you’ll be real welcome.’
Lorrie tells herself she’s simply an oven and most of the time she believes this. It hasn’t started kicking yet, which helps. So does calling it ‘it’. She writes the occasional entry in her diary but that’s for the future parents’ sake, not hers, and besides there’s precious little to report. She writes about the weather and her state of health – nothing worrying, she feels fine. She steers clear of any mention of husband and family; her position is so dangerous that she doesn’t want to wade in deeper by telling lies.
Basically, she’s trying to block any thoughts at all, otherwise she becomes dizzy with panic, with the weirdness of what’s growing so remorselessly inside her. It’s weird enough to carry a baby for someone else; weirder still, it’s half Chinese.
Despite her reluctance, she’s been going online to discover things about China. She’s so ignorant. Somehow she feels she owes it to the baby, and it makes it – her – feel more familiar. At night she sits furtively at her computer, as if she’s downloading porn.
China has 1.35 billion inhabitants (soon to be one more). It’s developing at a breathtaking speed and will soon overtake the United States as the number-one world power. Its communist leaders imposed a one-child rule which has brought heartbreak to families. Its language is Mandarin. ‘Hello’ is ni hao.
Lorrie looks down at her belly and whispers ‘nee how’. According to the website, this is how it’s pronounced. ‘Nee how,’ she whispers, walking round and round the bedroom, ‘nee how.’ She stops whispering and speaks it in her normal voice, as if she’s having a conversation.
‘Goodbye’ is zai jian. Zai rhymes with ‘fly’ and jian is like ‘jee-yen’.
One day, if all goes according to plan, this is what she’ll say to the departing bundle. ‘Zy jee-yen.’
‘This is Dean and this is Angelina.’ She shows Mr Wang Lei the photographs on the wall.
‘They are beautiful children,’ he says.
‘These were taken a while ago. They’re seven and ten years old now.’ Older and fatter. She hopes he doesn’t ask to see recent photos, he might worry that his own child will be obese. This makes her blaze with protective love for her kids and shame at her own disloyalty. ‘I’m real sorry you won’t see them. I forgot that they both have after-school activities.’
She can’t risk him staying long enough to meet her children. This would lead to all sorts of questions. Who was that man, Mom? Skyping their dad: there was a funny Chinese man with Mom when we came home from school today. Lorrie has arranged for them to go home with friends until the coast is clear.
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She pours Mr Wang Lei a soda. He’s driven all the way from San Antonio in a hire car. Its air conditioning was broken and he’s perspiring heavily. Her own lounge, despite the fan, is stiflingly hot.
How are they going to get through the next few hours? She has no idea what to say. He is painfully polite; do all Chinese behave like this or is it just the bizarre situation?
For it is deeply, unsettlingly bizarre to have him in her home. He is her other life, her secret life. For a moment she wonders if her husband feels the same about the army and his own split existence. This, however, is even more surreal. Mr Wang Lei’s presence in her lounge is as unlikely as having a moose here, or a tractor. She simply can’t connect him to the room. What are they going to talk about? We encourage donor and surrogate to develop a mutually supportive relationship. She can’t even fix him lunch because he’s already eaten.
Mr Wang Lei still hasn’t sat down. He stands, glass in hand, as if he’s at a formal function. Now he’s looking at Warrior, the lion’s head.
‘My husband shot that in Africa,’ she says. ‘I was real mad.’ More than mad, in fact. They nearly bust up over it but she can’t tell Mr Wang Lei this, he has to think her marriage is stable. Besides, the Chinese don’t mind killing wild animals, she’s read about that. ‘He’d been on active deployment, I guess he had to let off steam. He said they have some kind of quota, they have to keep the number of big males down.’
‘This isn’t a big male, madam. It’s barely mature.’ He fingers the mane. ‘They’ve woven in some hair extensions.’
‘They’ve what?’
‘See, here.’
She steps up to Warrior and feels his mane.
‘They have teams of taxidermists in the bush,’ he says. ‘It’s a big industry. Too many grown males have been killed, so they disguise these teenagers as adults.’
‘But why?’
‘Men have their pride, Mrs Russell.’ He suddenly barks with laughter. ‘Their pride! Understand?’
Lorrie tries to smile but she’s too upset. Mr Wang Lei sees this.
‘I do apologize,’ he says. ‘I’m just afraid that, where wildlife is concerned, a man’s desire for virility is big business.’ The word virility hangs in the air. Mr Wang Lei looks awkward.
Todd knew he’d shot a youngster and kept it quiet. Lied. There’s something deeply pathetic about this.
‘I’m not meaning your husband, Mrs Russell, I was making a general observation.’
But then she had lied, to her husband.
Lorrie pulls off the string of tinsel and drops it into the waste-basket. Mr Wang Lei apologizes again. He’s flustered by his own indiscretion and sits down abruptly on the settee.
‘Would you mind, dear lady, if I took off my jacket?’
His tissues are sodden so she fetches a length of kitchen roll and gives it to him. The informality of this relaxes them both. He thanks her, takes off his glasses and mops his face.
‘My wife is very anxious,’ he says.
‘I guess we all are.’
‘I suggested she flew out from Beijing to meet us here but she’s shy, and prefers to stay in the apartment.’
‘Apartment?’ Lorrie presumed, for some reason, that they lived in a pointy-roofed hut. She knows nothing about anything.
‘Instead, if I may, I could take some photographs of you and your delightful home?’
‘It’s not so delightful,’ she says. ‘We plan to move to a new home soon.’
‘She comes from a small village,’ he says. ‘She’s highly superstitious.’
‘I’ll give it up – give her up. Tell your wife not to worry, I’m going to go through with this.’
‘And your husband’s behind you, one hundred per cent?’
‘One hundred per cent.’ She beams at him.
‘Pardon me for saying this, but it might all change when you see the baby.’
‘Believe me, it won’t.’
From next door comes the sound of hammering. Carl, the guy, has lost his job at the abattoir and spends all day working on his house. Lorrie still hasn’t found out what crime he committed.
Is Mr Wang Lei still unconvinced? She can’t tell from his smooth face and hooded eyes. She blurts out: ‘You see, sir, I need the money. This baby’s going to set me free.’
She stops dead. She shouldn’t have said that.
But Mr Wang Lei nods his head. ‘Yes, and she will set us free too.’
Lorrie frowns. ‘Why is that, if I may ask?’
‘Because my daughter will be an American citizen.’
The hammering stops. Lorrie looks at him, puzzled.
‘My daughter will be born on American soil,’ says Mr Wang Lei. ‘She will be an American citizen, with a Green Card, and when she’s twenty-one her family, which means myself and my wife, will be legally entitled to come and live here in your country.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘I thought you might be aware of this.’
‘No.’
‘Your wonderful US of A, the land of the free.’
It takes a moment for this to sink in. Lorrie feels slightly used, but then who’s using whom in this whole enterprise? She feels dumb, that she hadn’t thought of this. And, very faintly, she feels as if she’s just discovered that a boyfriend was only dating her for the use of her car. This, of course, is crazy; anyone less like a boyfriend than Mr Wang Lei would be hard to imagine.
‘Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?’ he asks, getting to his feet.
‘Don’t go outside!’ She can’t risk the neighbours seeing him. ‘You can smoke it here.’
His gaze flickers to her belly. ‘But the baby …’
In fact, he’s been glancing at her belly off and on since he arrived. Lorrie can’t decide whether it’s because of the baby or because she’s fat. In fact the bump is barely visible to an outsider, and she’s wearing loose clothes.
She fetches him an ashtray and sits down on the other side of the room, away from the smoke. ‘If I may ask, why do you want to come here?’
‘My country is choking itself to death.’ He takes a drag; though he erupts in a coughing fit it seems to relax him. He settles himself back in his chair. ‘The pollution is terrible and it’s worsening every year. I’m a businessman, I believe in growth, but it will destroy us in the end. Our rivers are poisoned, our cities are poisoned, we’re in the grip of something unstoppable because industrial growth is what keeps our ruling party in power, and through it we can hold the world to ransom. And you need us to keep growing so you can fill your Walmarts with our cheap goods to clothe your children and live the American Dream to which you think you’re entitled, and so do we in China, we want it too. And in Africa, they want it too. And I’m a part of that process, I’ve made my money from it, but there’s a price to be paid and I want to get out before it destroys us.’ He sits there, exhausted, a little froggy man in a cloud of smoke. ‘I can tell you this, dear Mrs Russell, because you are enabling this to happen. You and I are in business together.’
Lorrie is taken aback by this speech. She’s trying hard to like this man with whom she’s so inextricably bound and it helps that he’s speaking to her frankly. And he’s right; it is a business transaction. But is she just growing him a human passport? She’s heard that the Chinese are a ruthless people, obsessed with money and gambling. They even eat dogs. What are they like as parents? Will this little girl be loved the way she loves her kids?
Mr Wang Lei says: ‘I want my daughter to live the American Dream.’
‘You sure about that?’ Something flares up inside her. ‘You really want to know about the American Dream?’
Mr Wang Lei raises his eyebrows. Outside, a power drill starts up.
Lorrie says: ‘The town I grew up in, it had this steelworks. It was the big employer but then they closed it down and all the guys lost their jobs. My dad went to pieces and drank himself to death. We grew up living on welfare stamps with my mom working nights just to get food on the table. Half the kids grew u
p to be junkies and the other half joined the army just to get the hell out of there.’ She pauses for breath. Her hand is in her brother’s as they hop and skip to the quarry. She doesn’t tell this stranger how Toller died, she still can’t bear to speak about it. ‘Folks tried to get the hell out of there but where could they go? And then they started the fracking and nobody could leave then, even if they wanted to, because the whole place became a toxic dump with their kids getting nosebleeds and gunk coming out of the faucet so who would buy their homes then?’
She stops abruptly. Now it’s Mr Wang Lei’s turn to be taken aback. But she isn’t thinking of him, she’s thinking of her new home. This is her American Dream, her and Todd’s – they’ll leave this flimsy little rental and move into Number 12 Lake View with its three bedrooms and its big kitchen gleaming with new appliances, even a dishwasher, but will they be happy there, and will their children have a future?
Her brain’s whirring. Is China to blame for this? For the death of her town with its boarded-up Main Street and its Walmart that’s sucked the life out of the place, and its population of young men who’ve gone to war because there’s nowhere else to go and who wake up in the night screaming and then beat the shit out of their kids? And so it goes round and round.
Mr Wang Lei stubs out his cigarette. ‘My grandmother had her feet bound so she could barely walk. I thought that was what happened when ladies grew old. My family were peasants, you see, and then … then Mao came to power. Dear Mrs Russell, you have no idea what freedom means.’
His words stir her. Nobody she knows talks about this sort of thing; Todd certainly doesn’t. Nor does she, in fact. She’s suddenly aware of all the countries in all the world, all the possibilities and languages, the cities she’ll never see with their towers and minarets. It’s bracing to have her mind opened up. She knows nothing about the Chinese but senses that their hardships were of a different order to hers. This man, however, has made a success of his life, jetting around the world and doing business in Africa, a continent as mysterious to her as China.