Born Slippy Read online

  “Get the hose,” Frank said.

  “Right, jefe.”

  “And get that thing off the pad,” Margie said, still quietly. “Now.”

  She turned, silently demanded that Paul look her in the eye, and as soon as he did, she turned and walked away. Paul then looked at Frank imploringly.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll move it,” he said.

  He started it up, backed it off the pad and left it in the middle of the drive, which was the most level spot around. He vowed that if she griped about it being there he would get a motel room and charge it to the project. Fuck it.

  Dmitry dawdled back trailing the hose, singing some silly British sea shanty, smiling broadly. He seemed to get more fun out of driving Margie crazy than he should.

  “Rinse it quick and then finish the soffits,” Frank said.

  “Jawohl, mein Kommandant.”

  Frank started back up the ladder to finish putting in the roof vents when Paul returned from whatever kowtowing he had been doing to Margie.

  “Franky and I,” Paul announced to no one in particular, “are going to Menard’s to get the roof fan I ordered.” News to me, Frank thought. “Anybody need anything?” He shouted loudly enough for Margie — who was somewhere inside the house, no doubt finding more work she wanted to tear out and start over — to hear. He waited a three-count and got in his station wagon — his brand new station wagon, by the way, which couldn’t help but make Frank think buying a used one and a few nights for them in a motel would have been the more considerate gesture. He blamed Margie for this, too. Margie would never have agreed to a used car. He came off the ladder and got in the passenger seat.

  “What’s this about?” Frank said. It was a twenty-minute ride to Menard’s, but he figured they might as well get started.

  “Margie is having a real hard time right now, Franky?” he said as soon as they were out the drive.

  “Who isn’t?” Frank asked. And then a second later: “And when isn’t she?” A hard time. She didn’t have a job, their kids were all in school, they had plenty of money — what was so hard? Paul was good at waiting out any comment he didn’t want to respond to, so they were silent for a minute or two.

  “Seriously, Franky. Frank? I really need you to be nice to her,” he said after that. “If I’m going to get her to go along with selling the house?”

  “If.”

  “You know? I mean, it will help if she doesn’t hate you?”

  The percentage of statements framed as questions went up when he was agitated.

  “If…” Frank mulled it over. “Wait, she hates me?”

  “No, she doesn’t hate you.” He thought for a minute. “But she really hates Dmitry? Isn’t there any way you can get him to lay off her?”

  “Probably not,” he answered, thinking that if Paul had been putting in the hours he said he was going to maybe they could let Dmitry go. Thinking about that made him come to a boil again. “You said, If we sell the house.”

  He waited thirty seconds, the whole time looking like he was about to speak, opening his mouth, then closing it again.

  “I thought Dmitry was leaving this week?” he finally said.

  “I got him to stay for two more.”

  “Oh, god…”

  They pulled into the Menard’s parking lot and started walking the mile into the store.

  “What do you want, Paul? You want to take a couple weeks of vacation time and fill in for him?”

  “I just wish…” he trailed off, and it hung there. Frank wasn’t about to help him out by saying anything.

  They picked up their few items and drove back to the site, Paul very carefully threading his gleaming Buick down the lane through the trees. The house came into view and it really did look good. Impressive, stately, a classic-lined beauty. It was shaped like a Cape Cod, but outsized, so it had that thing Kant talks about; it somehow fell into two opposite categories at the same time, tiny like a beach cottage and yet enormous; modest like those old Cape Cods from the 1930s and yet ostentatious; old-fashioned and yet new-fangled like a McMansion. Kant says that this kind of doubleness makes things sublime, and this house was becoming sublime. The suburban sublime. He didn’t bother sharing this thought with Paul.

  Off to the right, as they drove closer, partially obscured by saplings, they saw the door of the motorhome open and Margie come out, hastily, eyes to the ground, tucking in her shirt. She didn’t look over her shoulder at us, and skirted around behind the house. Then the door opened again and Dmitry came out. He was putting his t-shirt back on, carrying his tool belt. He looked up to see the car, then immediately looked away.

  Holy shit.

  Frank hoped for a second that Paul hadn’t noticed. But he glanced at him, and his face was so slack it looked like his skin might fall off.

  Jeezus.

  Frank hated Margie, but he felt bad for both of them. Paul was a weakling but not a bad sort. Margie? Wow, Margie. He needed to think through all the possible ramifications of this. He walked around the rest of the afternoon in bafflement.

  Paul and Margie, surprising everyone, stayed around until the first intimations of sunset, Margie doing the books and pretending nothing was wrong, Paul looking like he would burst into tears any moment, spending nine out of every ten minutes looking for his tape measure. Usually he only spent five out of every ten.

  “What the fuck, Dmitry?” Frank said when they finally left.

  “What?”

  “For starters, Margie!?”

  “She’s quite hot, you know, Franky, for a woman her age.”

  “Oh, God, she is not!”

  “You’re blinded by your distaste for the rather horrible kind of person she is. But she’s not in bad shape, and she has that angry smoldering je ne sais quoi of the improperly fucked.”

  “You cuckolded my business partner. You fucked his wife practically in front of him.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t, Franky. You ought to win some points back there.”

  “Ah, fuck you, Dmitry,” he said and walked away. It’s not all fun and games, you little twit, he wanted to say, it’s not all a big laugh party, these are real people. But he was too depressed to even bother.

  He went into the motorhome to take a shower before heading to town for a drink. If Paul sells the house. Fuck. If. If he doesn’t, this whole stupid summer, barely seeing the kids, them getting more remote with each call, living like an animal in the woods, homeless, frill-less, spending every second on this great scheme — all of it would be for naught. If, he thought under the piddly showerhead in the tiny, yellowed, moldy fiberglass enclosure, banging his elbows against the flimsy walls, the water going hot and cold — how did he ever think, for a second, that this stupid fucking shower was a kind of luxury? — if he doesn’t sell it, maybe Frank would be living like this for the rest of his life, living in Dmitry’s corroded land yacht, watching the progress of the mildew, drinking in front of low-rent strippers, playing out some sleazy, two-bit, dumb-ass version of The Rockford Files.

  All those hours he’d spent designing his own house in his head, rooms for everyone and everything. Designing his boat! Pipe dreams. Dead.

  He came out of the shower to see Dmitry sitting in the kitchen, his work boots up on the table.

  Pig.

  “Yeah,” Dmitry said sadly, his smirk, his constant goading companion, finally gone. He added, with hurt in his voice, “Really.”

  Frank stood staring at him, at his aberrant frown.

  At least, he thought, for once he is contrite. It doesn’t change much. But it’s something. Fuck.

  PART TWO

  2013

  It all seemed so long ago, the building site.

  Five years into his life in Los Angeles, he was in clover, so when Dmitry sent an email saying it was a good time to visit him in Taipei, a few months after he’d seen him in the States, he jumped at it. It was unusual for Dmitry to reach out like that, so he had to assume there was trouble.

  One o
f Frank’s projects had dried up — a guy who was already spending money from his next film, but whose next film had a habit of disappearing before it got made, had put off building his home studio once again — which freed up some time, and the other projects were humming along without him. He and Isa were in one of their semi-annual fights about whether they were going to get married and have kids, and maybe some time to cool down was a good idea. He told Isa Dmitry needed his help, grabbed a cheap last-minute ticket, and left the next day.

  Landing at Taipei International, his first time out of the country, was a letdown. The gleaming airport was ultramodern, and it could have been almost anywhere, except for the Chinese characters on the ads for Armani and KFC and other international brands. He wasn’t sure what he expected, but it looked considerably less Asian than the average American Chinatown. As he came out of passport control a man in a chauffeur’s suit and hat was holding a Credit Lyonnais sign with Franky Baltimore on it. Very funny, the Franky. Dmitry had sent the company car. Nice. Not particularly personal, but nice. As he was driven into town, the scene out the window could have been anywhere. Forced to make a guess he might have said Ohio.

  He knew it was Taipei, not Beijing, but he somehow assumed the streets would be crammed with bicycles like every picture of China ever published in National Geographic when he was a kid, not like an oversized Cleveland full of Chinese people. His hotel was the one thing that gave him a little buzz of being a stranger in a strange land. The Grand Hotel sits on the city like a huge, bright red wedding cake. Built by Chiang Kai-shek right after he arrived from the mainland escaping Mao, it looked the way Frank thought a Chinese grand hotel should — the enormous lobby lofted by red lacquered columns, gold-leafed metal chandeliers with red tassels hanging down, red carpet everywhere, all the staircases and counters and planters massive, sweeping. Dmitry and his companions, when he met them later, wrinkled their noses at the mention of it. Apparently it was a tourist trap. Well, Frank was a tourist. It was pretty grand.

  He joined Dmitry in the evening for a business outing, the car picking him up again. Dmitry apologized for forcing him to come along, but said he was committed, and Frank might find it amusing. A new man was joining the Taipei office, another Brit, and this was his welcome dinner with the rest of the bankers. Don’t worry about your clothes, he said — and Frank hadn’t been worried until then — bankers there don’t dress like London or New York, everything is more relaxed.

  The rest were standing in the bar at Ruth’s Chris Steak House when Frank and Dmitry arrived, waiting for a table, drinking. In the nature of chains, the Ruth’s Chris was exactly like every Ruth’s Chris everywhere. The guys were all speaking English, and Frank felt like he was across town rather than halfway around the globe. They were all young, the bankers — the selling side, one of them told him, is a young man’s game; by the time you’re forty, you have to semi-retire to buying, or maybe it was vice versa, that buying was the young man’s game, Frank wasn’t even sure what was being bought and sold. The only Asian among them was a Korean kid born and raised in Nashville with an accent to match. All of them, except the new guy, were in short sleeves.

  They were there to welcome this odd new colleague, perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, sandy-haired with pretentious glasses, wearing clothes that were way too big for him, a too formal and clownishly untailored floppy suit and tie, like a kid wearing his father’s clothes. But Dmitry, as the head of the office, was the real center of attention, the other guys either mildly sucking up to him or unconsciously combative, both modes increasing as the night wore on. More sedate than usual, Dmitry wasn’t drinking at all and was uncharacteristically quiet. At Lucille’s Dmitry had sucked beers at a very normal, three-hour-march-to-oblivion pace, smoked countless Marlboro Reds, and talked a mile a minute, but here he was doing none of that. He had decided, he told Frank later, that he needed to give up either drinking or whoring, because the combination got him in trouble, and since he would never give up whoring, the drinking had to go. He explained that because knowledge is power — “as you taught me so effectively back in the woods,” he added — everything said in such circumstances can and will be used directly or indirectly against you, and so saying as little as possible is the only reasonable strategy. Not for the first time, Frank wondered if he should have been a teacher; every time Dmitry mentioned something he learned from him, he was filled with overweening pride. At the bar and during dinner, the conversation was often about the pussy, all the bankers agreeing this was what had drawn them to Asia. One of them demurred, said he was drawn by the culture at first. Everyone turned and looked at him and stared until he added, and the pussy, after which they all laughed somewhat mechanically. Most of them were married to American or British women, or single. They were unremittingly boring. Frank proceeded to get drunk, a process accelerated by the jet lag.

  A certain kind of British man had always pissed him off — the aristocratic, Oxbridge-accented sneerer, the overprivileged windbag. It awakened some almost prelinguistic, deep, pitchfork-and torch-wielding peasant id, and this new guy was of that ilk: he explained, in the bar, that his suit was loose because he had recently lost five stone, and Frank couldn’t remember how many pounds that would be, but his suit suggested a hundred. He hadn’t had time to get a new wardrobe before coming out to Taipei — and he called it that, a new wardrobe, a phrase that in his posh accent was absolutely insufferable — but he was planning to hop over to Hong Kong first chance and get properly fitted — yes hop over and properly fitted. Then, at dinner, he said he had just lost five stone and hadn’t had time to see his haberdasher, but was going to hop over to Hong Kong and get properly fitted first off, and then after dinner, at the whorehouse, he said it all again, slurring it and forgetting what he was saying halfway. Frank wanted to throttle him.

  Calling it a whorehouse gives the wrong impression. They had left the Ruth’s Chris and taken a fleet of waiting cars to a newish steel high-rise. The elevators whooshed them up to the twenty-sixth of some fifty floors, and they were met in a corporate wood and glass reception area by two prim, pretty, business-suited women who bowed to Dmitry and showed the eight or ten of them down a hallway into a good-sized room with a rectangle of couches surrounding a large, low coffee table. Mirrors on the walls and moderately elaborate crystal chandeliers gave the otherwise bland space a little sparkle and made it hard to gauge its size. The coffee table was set up with platters of meats and hors d’oeuvres, ice buckets and bottles of whiskey, ashtrays and water. Several of the guys warned Frank off the meat trays, saying they were decorative, that there was no telling how long it had been since they last saw refrigeration. Dmitry and a short, boyish Irish thug with reddish-blond hair set down eight or ten hefty stacks of Taiwanese dollars, one for each of us to use as tips, he explained when asked, all Credit Lyonnais money. The thug seemed to be Dmitry’s second-in- command, and he was clearly in the combative rather than ass-kissing camp — by the end of the night he would challenge both Dmitry and Frank to a fight. At 30 TD to the dollar, the stacks of money didn’t amount to much, maybe a few hundred bucks each, maybe a little more, but it seemed somewhat profligate as tip money — the food and drink were already there, they couldn’t eat the food, and they were all putting the whiskey on rocks themselves. A large TV screen covered one wall, and when it popped on, proved to be hooked up to a closed-circuit camera that roved around the room. Korean pop music played at moderate volume — Frank didn’t recognize it, but the Irish guy, red in the face, said “I fucking hate this K-pop!” with such vehemence the two guys he said it to stopped talking. Frank, already too many drinks in, with no idea what was going to happen next, sipped his whiskey unconcerned. The guys were strewn about the couches, a few talking to each other, but most staring at nothing, especially after the Irish guy’s outburst, in dazed expectancy.

  Without warning, the room went black and then rotating colored spotlights and a large strobe snapped on, causing frantic reflections off the
mirrors and chandeliers, while the music tripled in volume and turned into heavy dance electronica. More as if materializing than entering, ten young Chinese women in tiny, shiny dresses and high heels pranced around smiling and dancing. A couple grabbed mikes and started singing along with the music, while the rest made the rounds of the bankers, sitting briefly in laps, smiling alternately shyly and playfully, touching the men’s faces, their arms, then flying up to greet the next mini-mogul. After a few minutes of this, maybe on a music cue, maybe a light cue, each guy found himself with a girl wrapped in his arms, and they all watched as part of the table was quickly cleared and one of the women, now in nothing but a G-string, went through a slow, beautiful routine, part standard exotic dancing, part downtown art dance, part some primal ritual, part pure desire itself. The tempo was halved, the lights low, the strobe now more background than foreground, and even the other girls seemed mesmerized as the dancer, lissome as a snake, moved across the table morphing from one tormenting, charming, improbable position to the next, moving her hairless and, save two pert teacup breasts, fat-free body around the table, not teasingly, but promisingly close to each of them, almost weightless, effortless yet taut, the one triangle of cloth between her legs, no larger than a summer moth, somehow constantly pushed beyond the plane of her torso, locked on by a dozen sets of eyes.

  With no warning, the room changed once again, as if a stage manager stood behind one of the mirrors, choreographing the whole thing. In a flash or two of the strobe, the whole crew of shiny-dress girls was gone, replaced by a new squad, all in lingerie versions of maids’ uniforms, each with a multi-colored feather duster. All were bleached blonde and their faces much rounder than the last group. During the course of the night different cosplay battalions kept coming through, a crew of skinny schoolgirls in pigtails followed by one of zaftig nurses with metallic blue hair, the schoolgirls uniformly short, the nurses uniformly tall. He knew he shouldn’t objectify these women, but arranged in these cookie-cutter groupings, it was hard not to think of them as interchangeable parts in a fantasy machine rather than individual people. How, Frank wondered, could they keep finding sets of ten and fifteen all with the same body, give or take a couple centimeters? Each group went through three or four set-pieces, sometimes with two or three girls dancing on the table, the others snuggling, sometimes doubling or tripling up on the men.