The Ten-Year Nap

  But always her mother would shoo her away; the girl did not know how to do anything useful. Chu Hua did. She was the only one in the family who could work this hard. Even her husband, still at the restaurant for the cleaning-up, had a stubborn, ungiving way about him; the girl got this quality from him, certainly. But Chu Hua was not like them. She was hardworking and fast; her hands worked the pork into a big pink pellet, then crimped the dough around it and dropped the thing into the pot without any thought. Her hands “flew,” someone had once observed in the restaurant kitchen. If my hands could fly, she had replied in Chinese, they would fly away.

  It did not matter, though, that she hated it here in San Francisco. It did not matter that she did not like California or Stockton Street or the Ideal Dumpling Palace. Or that it was not a palace, only a restaurant with mirrors on the walls. For some reason, whenever there were mirrors in a restaurant, people said “palace.” She did not like it, but she was working steadily, and she did not care that she did not like it. With her money she bought a big jug of vitamins and pulled out the cotton that clogged the top of the bottle, and then she forced the vitamins down her children’s throats. “Leave me alone! I just want to do my math!” Karen said. “I am trying to memorize as many digits of pi as I can.”

  No, little girl, no, Chu Hua should have said. You cannot sit and dream for your whole life. You cannot memorize pi. You have to take your vitamins and get strong and go out and work. Unless, of course, you find a man who is rich. A rich American business guy—that would be okay. You could live in a real palace, not a restaurant. There will be mirrors on the walls of your living room, and I will come visit you there, and I will sit down and put up my feet. But that is probably not going to happen. So I will keep making dumplings, and you will set the table, and we will move around our little rooms doing our work, and our hands will fly.

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  THE ISLAND of St. Doe’s sat at the heel of the British Virgin Islands; all the islands in this chain had a similar rough and glorious topography, and all were steeped in the same warm wind and breaded with the same blanched sand. But on those other bigger, louder, and more commercial islands, men and women and their children felt simply lucky and happy to be there, able to spend the money required to leave their urban or suburban backdrops at the time of year when car exhaust and litter and ice scalloped the streets.

  On St. Doe’s, almost everyone was more than lucky and more than happy. They had a secret: Their whole island was unknown to most people and unavailable to all but those who could manage it. Amy Lamb had learned about it and edged her way in, though her friends did not approve of this trip, and now, lying on a linen lounge chair beneath an umbrella like the interloper she was, with the sun and the trees and the occasional paraglider dotting the sky above her, she wondered if she could possibly stop feeling overstimulated and worried, and start having what she might recognize as a good time.

  All around her were strewn the supine bodies of men and women from the States and from France and England, with a small minority from Scandinavia. A covey of nearly identically ethereal, albinic Danish women occupied the next block of chaises, reading novels like Danielle Steel’s Sikker Havn. Some of the European women untied the tops of their bathing suits, exposing hide-colored nipples to the sun. A middle-aged Frenchwoman stroked lotion into her breasts, which moved slightly beneath her hand, as if animate. Mason and Holden had taken one look at her and run away, yelping. Now they were off on the beach up to their waists in the nearly transparent water, with snorkels pressed into their faces. Beside Amy was Penny, her eyes either closed or open behind her dark glasses. The women lay quietly, but once in a while someone would say something. If Penny spoke, it usually concerned Ian.

  “I guess he’s managing,” she said.

  “I would imagine.”

  “But he’s very dependent,” Penny said. “He said he’s always been like that. He had a girlfriend in London for a few years named Jemima. He would walk past her flat just to look at her window, to see the way the shade fell or something, even if he knew she wasn’t home.”

  “What will you do when he goes back to England?”

  “We don’t really talk about it yet.”

  The husbands were elsewhere, though not together. Since they had all arrived here two days earlier, Greg Ramsey had disappeared for most of the day, going off for solo aquatic activities or, mostly, just heading to the business center that had been set up in a centrally positioned hut or to the fitness center that occupied the hut right beside it. He appeared only in the evening for dinner at the thatch-covered outdoor dining room, with its long torches and bongos and boatloads of langoustines. At the dinner table he’d been in a pressed white cotton shirt, his hair freshly washed and still wet, but Amy thought he could not lose the essence of the office, the distant, dark perfume of the deal.

  “Do not talk politics with him,” Amy had warned Leo before the trip. “He will say things that will be upsetting. We’re all on this tiny island together, and Penny was the one who invited us to join them, and I do not want it to be tense.”

  Leo agreed. “Sure. He’s not my friend,” he said. “What do I care?”

  Greg Ramsey carried an air of impersonal courtesy about him; he looked beyond everyone he talked to as if poised in thought—as if he were a poet. He was not an overly hateful person, at least in terms of the things he said, Amy realized, though she had rarely seen a man as self-satisfied and impatient. At the table he scooped up a fresh mash of avocado and lime on a fried plantain, and stretched his mouth wide to receive it.

  “…then we got some new investors from Iceland, but I really didn’t want anyone new,” he was saying to Leo, who sat there looking like a dope, Amy thought, his face not even adopting the appropriately shifting expressions it was meant to when someone else told you a story. Instead, his head was tilted a little, his mouth puckered, his eyes squinted, as though he did not understand a word of this language. “My partners did, though,” Greg went on, “and they convinced me. Have you ever been to Iceland?”

  Leo blinked, then glanced at Amy briefly like a child who is not sure how to answer when an adult has spoken to him. “No,” Leo said after too long a pause.

  “Amazing place. Amazing vodka. Amazing bands. The best indie rock is coming out of there.”

  “Don’t say ‘indie rock,’” Penny said quietly.

  “What?” He turned toward his wife.

  “You sound like you’re eighty years old, Greg, and trying to be young. Like you’re out to dinner for the white-belt special.” Everyone laughed politely at her meanish joke.

  “Do you think I sound old?” Greg Ramsey asked the boys.

  Mason and Holden, who until that moment had been engaged in a thumb wrestle, unwound their hands long enough to both tell Holden’s dad that no, he did not sound old. Greg Ramsey seemed satisfied with the opinions of two ten-year-olds, and he regarded his wife as if he had won an obscure battle that they had been fighting for a very long time. “The boys don’t think I sound old,” he said, and then he took another curling plantain chip and pushed it into the bowl of avocado.

  “But you look old,” Holden said, and Greg made an expression of mock rage and pretended to swing a punch, which Holden ducked, laughing. Mason laughed too. Amy saw that for them it was fun when a father sparred with a son; for a moment, there was a faint metallic blood-taste of true aggression but no actual danger.

  In the torchlight, a gamelan ensemble played. The water in the distance was black now; the entire night was black, though far away on the horizon the lights of a cruise ship moved slowly past. Inside it, unseen passengers were dancing to an unheard orchestra.

  “We are nowhere,” said Greg.

  “What’s that?” Amy asked.

  He turned his big head toward her. He seemed, in that second, to become aware of her for the first time: Oh, right, the friend of my wife. He didn’t know that she knew far more than he did about his own marriage. But because
he didn’t know this, he had no interest in her. She ran no hedge fund, she had no job; she was not a potential investor, she was not beautiful, she was not a husband; who was she?

  “I said we’re nowhere. Out in the middle of nowhere. And the connections are pretty iffy.”

  “The connections?” she asked.

  “Cell phone. I had three calls get dropped in the middle today. It’s only recently that you can even pick up service here, and of course you have to sit in that hut they call the business center to get Internet. But we’re practically inside a volcano, so I shouldn’t complain.” He nodded in Penny’s direction. “My wife collected all this information in advance and prepared me for the primitive conditions that lay ahead.”

  “Yes, Greg,” said Penny mildly, looking over. “The thread count of the sheets here is so primitive.”

  “You know what I mean, Pen.”

  At that moment, Leo put an arm across the back of Amy’s cane chair, and she was suddenly grateful for the tiny gesture, even though it might have been coincidental, not signifying intimacy so much as an establishment of teams. The Ramseys could be lightly hostile with each other, but Amy and Leo would not be. Watching another family up close was always alarming; their ways seemed tribal and unfamiliar and somehow wrong, as though if you looked even more closely you might detect hints of incest or some other aberrance. Greg Ramsey was a cuckold; that was the word that Ian Janeway had suggested over lunch at the Met. But he was also a shit, a prick, Roberta might have said, highly involved in himself and his fund and his investors. Amy compared all this with the image of Ian Janeway’s sweet, freckled hand curved around a glass. She could hear Ian’s British accent, and remembered that she’d never once even heard him talk about money. When you were married to Greg Ramsey, Ian Janeway must be a tonic, a dunk in clear water.

  At the table now, Greg spoke to his wife in a shallowly attentive but distant manner about their evening plans and the arrangements for Holden and Mason’s surfing lesson later in the week. In the moments when he addressed his son, he seemed to feel the need to reach across and rumple Holden’s hair. It confused Amy a little that Greg was such a demonstrative father; it clouded the image. He seemed proud too of both of his teenaged daughters, with whom he talked in tender tones.

  Amy and Leo were far out of their element here on St. Doe’s. The whole island and the layout of its resort overwhelmed Amy. She had seen wealth and its consumption as she and her little family fought to stay buoyant in New York City, but this was different. The Europeans here spoke only to one another. The elegant women bared their breasts openly during the day and then turned their backs in the evening, revealing the bones at the base of a beautiful neck and the clasp of a good necklace. Families traveled here each winter from Big Sur and Malibu, their skin already a slightly baked color upon arrival. Their children jumped into the water without ceremony, as if stepping into a daily bath, hardly seeming to notice the extravagant drama of this rock formation that provided them with their annual vacation. Above everyone in the sky, the distant, bright figures of paragliders sometimes dangled from their parafoils, like children casually hanging on to the branch of a backyard tree.

  The staff laid out fresh exotic fruits all day on long tables in the shade. You could just point to something, and within moments it would be hacked to bits, skinned with a blade, and then laid out on your plate. It was understood that there was nothing here that you couldn’t have. If you wanted the furniture of your bungalow changed, it would be done. If you wanted a small tree uprooted and replanted a few feet away, so as not to hamper the view (according to Penny, this had been done for a telecommunications-titan guest in the recent past), it would happen. But the stories themselves were satisfying; like a child, you were meant to be shocked and titillated by other people’s demands, usually so much worse than your own. The level of solicitude had been established right away, as soon as the airplane from Newark had landed in San Juan on the day after Christmas. Amy, Leo, and Mason had been still slightly weary from the holiday and from the trip as they switched to a tiny, jerking little flight to Tortola, where the three of them then waited briefly at the tiny airport in the haze and stink of fuselage and the marination of their own travelers’ stink, until they were approached by three staff members from St. Doe’s.

  The staff members were dressed in white, giving them the appearance of admiralty. One of them was white, blonde, and Australian, and the other two were black and from the islands. All three were beautiful.

  “I’m Hamish,” said the Australian, “and this is Thomas and Pierre. You must be whacked from all your travels. From here on in, leave everything to us.”

  Bags were taken by strong arms, Mason was handed a packet of “chocko-flavoured” Bing-Bongs, and the family was ferried from airport to dock, where they were then loaded into a skiff. Off they went with their three caretakers. During the thirty-minute trip over pale green chop, Pierre spoke about the kind of weather they had been having on St. Doe’s during the preceding days. “Not a cloud in the sky,” he said in his French accent. “So beautiful it could make you cry.”

  In the mornings on St. Doe’s, Pierre and Thomas could usually be seen setting up tables and covering them in tablecloths; always there was to be a barbecue in the afternoon, a pig roast, a cocktail hour with Cosmopolitans and fried conch accompanied by four dipping sauces. Drinks were continually handed round, along with plates of tiny, delicate crustaceans that had been tricked into entering puff pastry.

  Certainly, Amy thought with increasing intensity each day, she and Leo and Mason shouldn’t have taken themselves to this piece of volcanic rock, with its ambient gamelan music and ovoid fruits and outdoor tables laid with silver by beautiful black men. Instead, they should have stayed in the city over break, doing every cheap or free family-type activity that Amy could find in the newspaper listings under the wishful heading “Family Fun.” That was what they had done in earlier years, going out in a big, ungainly herd along with Roberta and Nathaniel and their kids—“all the homebodies,” Roberta had said one Christmas with a light laugh, though she never complained about their modest means. They’d gone to the winter wonderland at the Bronx zoo; to the tree-lighting in Rockefeller Center; to the caroling in the park—all of these outings providing ways to celebrate the city at the holidays and also to ease up the financial fear of one day not being able to cope anymore and having to pack up and leave, like many people did each year. When Mason was younger, they had gone to see Nathaniel’s puppet shows on occasional weekends, but now, of course, Mason’s interests had expanded exponentially, and he could not be contained inside an auditorium on a weekend morning.

  Increasingly, Mason wanted an array of things that Amy could not give him, things that had to do with technology and freedom and the larger world. Really, she didn’t know exactly what he wanted anymore, though he seemed so happy to be here on St. Doe’s with the dominant, future world-beater Holden Ramsey. The boys, shirtless, ran together on the sand during the day, their little penises evident beneath the wrinkled wet sculpting of their trunks. Because you were a mother you weren’t supposed to notice, but of course you did anyway, even though you hadn’t really seen your son’s penis in a long time. Once it had been your right to see it. You had diapered him and been squirted in the face more than once by him, and in these moments the penis had seemed somehow to be yours too. There was enough of it for everyone; it was a small, tender prop in the family constellation. Then, over time, Mason had become healthily modest in the bathtub, hiding it when she entered the bathroom to bring in a plastic action figure that he had requested, warning her, “No looking.” She would drop Zapman or Deathrayman into the tub with a little resounding plip, turning away, but even as she did she saw something in her peripheral vision that floated upward to the surface like a tiny lily pad.

  Now, years later, it might look like anything. It might have sprouted wings by now; she really had no idea. He was no longer hers.

  ONE MORNING on St
. Doe’s, Penny accompanied her to the gift shop to look for a present for her mother, Antonia, who would be staying in the apartment this week, and would still be there when they returned from their trip. The gift shop was a little hut filled with expensive glass and beaded and silken things. A tall black woman in a batik blouse stood behind the rush surface of a counter as Amy and Penny browsed among the long rippling scarves, the bottles of lotion with tropical scents, and jewelry and items that would probably have been classified as “miscellany.” “This is pretty,” Penny said, pointing to a paperweight that contained branches of pale blue and green coral, along with a whirl of turquoise trapped inside. “Your mother could keep her manuscript pages under it.”

  “Well, it’s not like she sits and writes in a windstorm,” said Amy, but after the woman behind the counter unlocked the glass case and drew out the dome, she saw the way Penny held the object in her hand, turning it around to see it from all angles. Somehow the rotation of the piece of delicate glass made Amy able to appreciate it. She felt as though her mother would appreciate it as well. “It is nice,” she conceded.

  “Two hundred tirty-tree,” pronounced the woman, without seeming at all scandalized at the price.

  But it was a scandalous price. Still, did Amy have to make every moment refer once again to money? Did that have to be her only theme, she thought, her little repeating aria? The scale was off here; you had to get used to it, just the way you had had to get used to the scale of life in New York City, and just the way you had to get used to the scale of modern life, if you hoped to survive in the world. She smiled and nodded to the woman, and the transaction was completed.

  It was on day four of the six-day vacation that the boys took their surfing lesson with the handsome, masculine Pierre. She watched as he waded into the surf with a board under his arm, the boys following behind. Later on, Amy would remember the surfing lesson as if it were representative of the last moment of beauty and ease: the boys and the man roaming in the loose waves.