Born Slippy Read online

  Frank saw that the bankers were handing bills to the young women, either randomly or based on some perceived perfection, and so he started handing out tips as well. Every once in a while one of the men would get up, grab a fistful of cash and leave the room with one or more of the girls. The Irish guy, red in the face, snapped into focus in front of Frank at one point, saying, “What the fuck are you doing here?” Frank thought it was male camaraderie, which made him nervous, although later he could see that the guy was trying to pick a fight with him — he was just too drunk to notice.

  “I’m an old friend of Dmitry’s,” he said, loud, over the music.

  “I know that, you old sod!” the Irishman said, giving him a shove that laid him out flat on the couch. Three girls came over and expertly disengaged them, one nuzzling and giggling into Frank’s neck, two distracting the Irish guy.

  As Frank watched two stewardesses in microskirts do an intertwined dance (you couldn’t call them flight attendants, they were so clearly fronting an out-of-date, stewardess-era fantasy), Dmitry appeared near his ear. “You know, you can pick anyone you like and they will take you to a room. Do you like to have your bum licked, Franky?” he asked, somewhat rhetorically. “These girls will lick your bum for you.” He managed to sound less lewd than appreciative. Either out of faithfulness to Isa, or because Dmitry was right and he had some lurking reserve of American Puritanism, or (and in retrospect it was probably this) because he was too drunk and frightened — in any case he said no, no. Were these two girls even dressed as stewardesses? Who knows, maybe those were Taiwanese metermaid outfits. This was the first time he had ever been in Asia. What did he know?

  He woke up in the Grand the next day with no memory retrievable between the stewardesses and his stumble into his hotel bathroom at noon. Splayed on the bed, half-sleeping, in pain for the next hour, he started having little flashes that suggested he had let the new guy know he thought he was a putz — he seemed to remember yelling at Dmitry, over the music, Putz! That’s an interesting word! Putz!, and the new guy, also drunk, trying to focus on him, wondering why he was yelling putz! while scowling at him, as if Frank had become the Irish guy. Based on the lapses in his memory and the horrible headache still poking through four aspirin, he assumed there were other things he should be embarrassed about.

  Dmitry was picking him up at two o’clock, and they were to stop off and meet his wife and kids, and then go to his latest hobby, an Ultimate Fighting club. It seemed crass, somehow, to go drop in on his everyday family life with all these images of profuse dissipation floating through his head, but there was no way out of it now. He stood under the water trickling out of the showerhead, changing temperature every few seconds like the old motorhome — the bankers were right, the hotel sucked — and tried to wash the night away. He wasn’t successful. In the bathroom mirrors he looked disgustingly white, old, and huge, almost fat, nearly oafish. An evening with an endless parade of ninety-five-pound eighteen-year-old girls, he learned, wasn’t that good for his body-image. He would need to avoid mirrors for the rest of the trip. He got dressed and went down to the lobby.

  Dmitry’s driver was standing near the concierge desk with a hand-lettered sign that said FRANKY, and Frank followed him out to the black BMW. Dmitry was sitting in the car, reading the paper.

  “I hope you don’t mind I sent Ralph in after you, Franky. There may be a few businessmen in the Grand I’d really, really rather not see.” Once he said that, Frank flashed on a couple moments the night before, at the steakhouse, when Dmitry seemed to be looking over his shoulder. “Bad shower, right?”

  “Terrible. Are you in trouble again?” Dmitry’s eyes shot up.

  “You are always so perceptive, Franky.” He said something to the driver in a language Frank didn’t recognize and slid the window closed.

  “Why do you call him Ralph? He tells me his name is Prabam.”

  “A little joke between my wife and me. When I was first in Jakarta I couldn’t remember anyone’s name — Ralph has been with me since Jakarta — and so I gave all the servants Anglicized names meant to amuse her. Doesn’t he look like Ralph Kramden? As to the other, I may be in a bit of hot water, I may not. Time will tell, although I guess I’d have to admit the water is already quite warm.” He looked, for the first time, but only for a split second, truly worried. “Still, let’s forget about all of that for now and go bask in the bosom of me family.”

  “Does your wife — I’m sorry, what is her name again? — know that you go to places like that, last night?”

  “Her name is Yuli, and you have to understand, Franky, things are different here.” He looked at Frank for a minute as if deciding where he should start his explanation. “It is the custom of the country. Her father goes to places like that, her uncles, her teachers, her co-workers. We never mention it — part of the bargain is that these things are never thrown in one’s face. Occasionally her gynecologist will have to tell her that I’ve been up to something, and we have a little row, and then we move on.” This made Frank nauseous and left him dumbstruck. Not that it mattered to Dmitry. “And Yuli and I have sex every day, Franky, rain or shine, when I’m in town. So she really can’t complain.”

  “Lucky her.”

  “Yes, indeed. The thing is, Franky, you know all my secrets, and I want you to, and although I won’t tell you everything this time, I will eventually — I’m of course talking about business now, not sex — and I might as well tell you that I may, indeed, need you, at some point, to help me, to do me a service or two.” He looked at his American friend, as if sizing him up all over again, shook his head slightly, and went on. “I have money in very many places. I told you what happened to me in the last crash, so this time I’ve diversified so widely it might perhaps constitute overreacting.” In the last Asian financial turndown, he lost all of his considerable fortune, having made, he said, “a rookie mistake” and kept all his assets in one currency and all his debt in another. The values of the two currencies flipped and it wiped him out. It took him two years to build his millions back up. A different world he lived in. “I have money onshore, offshore, metals stashed here and there, trading accounts everywhere, some in my name, some under other names, some, in fact, under yours.”

  “Mine.”

  “Yes, Franky. You remember the account I opened in your name. Well, now that I have Yuli and the boys, I’m glad I can trust you to see to their needs from the monies there. If something were to happen to me, you can easily make sure that they are well cared for with what you’ll find there in a safe-deposit box — it’s in your name at a bank in Tokyo — I mean, don’t get me wrong, there is plenty right here, legal, and plenty of insurance and everything else, but you know, I’d count on you to see that they had everything they deserved, if, by some improbable concatenation of events the House of Heald comes tumbling down.”

  “A bank in Tokyo.”

  “Yes, Shinjuku. Do you know Shinjuku? It’s the place with all the neon. Bank of Tokyo, Shinjuku. Say it.”

  “Bank of Tokyo, Shinjuku.”

  “Password: bornslippy.”

  “Bornslippy. That crap song — I’ve heard it now. Why are you talking like this? How bad is it?”

  “Up! No time now, here we are!”

  The car had stopped. They got out and took the elevator up to his apartment, up to Frank’s unforeseen enrapturement.

  Dmitry’s place was nice enough: a floor in a leafy building outside the city bustle, the kind of thing that would be a pretty good attorney’s apartment in Manhattan, although it didn’t seem the scale of a place with a house staff of eight, or anything like the ancestral manse in Liverpool with its uncountable bedrooms. The elevator opened onto a large foyer with an oversize pot holding a tropical plant with orange flowers. When they arrived, a butler answered the door, wordlessly took Dmitry’s attaché and keys, and quietly left.

  They entered a living room strewn with a few kids’ toys. Seconds later Yuli came into the room. She was Indo
nesian and had a beauty that left Frank quite speechless. Her eyes were large and dark, with little specks of gold, shockingly alive with intelligence and something more than intelligence, a kind of shamanistic knowingness. Her smile managed to express infinite warmth and yet, at the same time, to give no ground. The combination overwhelmed him with a sense of the woman’s power, with what seemed to him immediately and ever after a self-mastery and competence and acuity almost superhuman. It felt more like being ushered into the presence of an ancient deity than meeting the wife of an old friend. Her features were achingly fine, and the color of her skin, Frank thought, was not a surface phenomenon, but something that smoldered, radiating from a deep dermal level, in a shade it would take an infinite number of oil painters with an infinite palette to ever capture, more gold than tan, more cream than coffee. She was dressed simply, in a Jackie Kennedy large-collared, white, men’s-styled blouse and lithe Capri pants, suggesting a body that would seem almost fragile if she wasn’t so obviously vigorous. He realized with a start how smitten he must look and felt embarrassed. But he was smitten. Acutely. Painfully. He mumbled “Hello.” He could barely stand to look at her, except in the briefest of glances.

  Dmitry filled the time with chatter about Yuli’s mother, who was recovering from an operation, his own schedule — he was going to take Franky to his gym, and then he needed to stop in his office — and blah, blah, Frank wasn’t listening. Yuli pleasantly took in what Dmitry was saying, occasionally throwing Frank a mild, polite smile that just floored him, he still wasn’t sure why. Maybe because she seemed so flawlessly autonomous, and so, well, sublime: ethereal and earthy, colossally vital and astonishingly calm, her every gesture perfect, unbroken. It wasn’t true, what people said, that there were only the pursuing, the busy, and the tired, because she seemed to be none of those. He knew, because Dmitry had told him, that she was brilliant and accomplished. And he knew that she was fearless, that she had risked being shunned by her family to be with him. He knew, hopelessly, that he knew nothing.

  He stood in her living room tongue-tied. He thought forever after how implausible, how remarkably demented even, his tumbling into obsession was, how little evidence he had for the impossible conclusion he had reached, the conviction that standing before him was the complete, perishable incarnation of his every ideal. A nanny, also Indonesian, appeared with the two boys, and Yuli introduced her and them. The boys were over a year apart, the younger three, the older four and a half, but the same size. The older, Peter, took after his mother in coloring, size, and the fineness of his features, the younger, Rodney, enormous for his age and very white, was a mini-Dmitry. They had perfect manners and stepped forward one at a time to shake Frank’s hand and then step back. Dmitry promised to take them for ice cream when he got back.

  “Because the desire for ice cream is what, Petey and Rodnicks?” Dmitry asked.

  “A human universal!” they said in unison, the younger’s version a bit garbled.

  “Atta boyz!” he said in his gangster accent, and they looked pleased with themselves, turned, and left the room with their nanny.

  Yuli held her hand out to Frank and thanked him for coming, leaned in for the slightest, polite buss goodbye, more European than Asian, and smiled directly at him.

  “I see what you mean,” she said, clearly to Dmitry rather than to him. What? What had Dmitry said about him? Whatever it was, somehow she seemed to know him, impossible given these few moments, and know him in a generous way, like she saw some version of him that had yet to be realized. What a blockhead he was being!

  Did he say anything? He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember leaving the house, or what scenery passed as they rode to the gym. On the way there, Dmitry talked about the various people in his fight club, the rules of the sport, strategy, but most of it he didn’t hear, still hypnotized by the fact of Yuli. He registered that Dmitry and his friends were all training to compete in actual Ultimate Fighting matches, a brutal combination of wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, and brawling in which the only rules are no biting and no gouging, a sport Frank had been introduced to during Dmitry’s last visit to the states, when they had gone to a bar, a Hooter’s, no less, to watch a pay-per-view championship bout. That was when Dmitry had first started fighting himself.

  “Why?” was the obvious question, and Frank asked it. He assumed Dmitry gave an answer, but it didn’t matter: Frank was at sea, floating on an eternal image, adrift in some hypnotic fantasy — if someone had slapped him and said snap out of it! he would have been at a loss to explain where he had been. He could still smell her scent, still feel the slight brush of her perfect cheek against his as she said goodbye. Even the idea of men smashing elbows into each other’s faces — which was legal in Ultimate Fighting — could not encroach upon this fragrant, tender world.

  Prabam dropped them outside yet another unremarkable office building, and they took an elevator up twenty floors or so — all of Taipei seemed distributed vertically — and walked down a nondescript hallway to a door on the left. Not for the first time it occurred to Frank that he was getting no real sense of the city, that he was forever stepping off of elevators into blandness — except for his meeting with Yuli. They entered a gym-sized room smelling of its vinyl-and-foam floor mats and old sweat. He watched Dmitry and two other guys, one Danish, one Dutch, get instruction from an Australian expat, mostly about wrestling. Dmitry was doing very well in his local competitions, he told Frank during a break, and was hoping to compete internationally. His current goal was to retire from finance within three years and do nothing but fight. “It turns out, Franky, that I can take a really massive blow to the head without losing my concentration, and this gives me an incredible, incredible edge in competition.”

  The object in ultimate fighting, he had explained as they watched the televised match, was to get your opponents to “submit,” and the way you did this, most of the time, was to hyperextend one of their limbs. Just before a knee or elbow actually popped out of its socket, the pain is so intense that even the toughest guys, the hardest cases, will pat the mat to signal surrender, submission. Getting an opponent’s arm or leg into the proper hold to snap their joints was difficult, since defensively, it was the main thing everyone concentrated on avoiding. The trick was to daze them with blows to the head, so that you could get the wrestling advantage that would give you, in turn, the proper death hold. Or so he understood.

  The day’s training focused on spin moves for escaping holds, followed by some skirmishes, the four of them switching opponents after each 120-second sparring session. Frank kept time for them. Dmitry wrestled the way he worked construction, methodical, slow, almost plodding, and before the grapple he would stand in front of his opponent, hunched over, his arms hanging low like a gorilla’s, swaying back and forth. He was strong, and he slowly brushed aside the darting hands and legs of the faster guys as he worked to snare a limb and crank it back centimeter by centimeter.

  “There are two basic ideas, Franky,” he explained as everyone packed up to leave, the others all nodding in agreement. “Maximum strategy and maximum exploitation. It is exactly the same as business. You make sure you have the right strategy, which, when it boils down to it, means primarily two things — although I predict you will say it is three or more — one, having the right offensive and defensive posture, and two, having the right array of tools.” He was right, Frank would have said that was three things. “And then you exercise Maximum Exploitation, which is no more and no less than discovering weakness and attacking it. Good businessmen are good strategists. Great businessmen are great exploiters. You can teach strategy — Bernard here has taught us a little more today. But exploitation is a gift, a talent, an intuitive, almost artistic thing.” He finished tying his shoes and stood up and smiled. “You see, Franky, I know you love it when I talk shite like that,” and he and the others laughed, although Frank wasn’t sure about what.

  It was all very odd, and Frank couldn’t help thinking that despite t
he fact that Dmitry had the most dazzling wife in the world, without doubt still had a few mistresses stowed around town, had his men’s club (he took Frank there after his fight club and did the baths for an hour, each of them getting a remarkably thorough massage, professional in the oldest sense of the word, from two young women each in private rooms; Frank’s two were very confused when he asked them to stop) — yes, despite his brothels and girlfriends and his sex trips to Thailand and everywhere else, despite all that, he somehow did not feel he had enough physical stimulation, enough touch, enough bodily contact, and so spent a couple hours every other day writhing around on mats intertwined with very active, muscular men who were trying to hurt him.

  Very odd.

  2000

  As the building of Paul and Margie’s house in Connecticut entered its third act, about a week after the Great Event with Margie, Dmitry left in the motorhome. The guy at the lumberyard finally came through and found an actual carpenter, a pro, and Dmitry — Frank suspected he had never shut down the pimp operation and had plenty of money — was happy to leave. Paul had been scarce, and Margie had stopped coming up from New Haven altogether, which was more than fine by Frank. The new guy made everything go much faster. They repaired the stuff screwed up by the plumbers and electricians — two tribes that have no respect for framing, trashing whatever’s in their way — and finished sheathing it. By the end of August they were doing the exterior trim while a subcontracted team of French Canadians swept through inside throwing up drywall. About a month later, around Labor Day — an unintentional irony, he assumed — Dmitry returned from his cross-country trip.