5
CHARLIE
WUTHERING TOWERS, HONG KONG
“Mr. Wu? It’s 9:00 a.m. in Italy now,” Charlie’s executive assistant said, poking her head into his office.
“Thanks, Alice.” Charlie reached for his ultra-private phone line and called Astrid’s cell phone. She picked up after three rings.
“Charlie! Oh my God—thanks for calling me back.”
“Am I calling too early?”
“No, I’ve been up for hours. I guess you heard about last night?”
“Yes—I am so sorry—” Charlie began.
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said a thing to Isabel.”
“Nonsense—I’m the one who screwed up. I should have communicated better with my wife.”
“So you talked to her? Did you explain that my cousin Alistair was with us the whole time in California?”
Charlie paused for a few seconds. “I did. Don’t worry about it anymore.”
“Are you sure? I couldn’t sleep at all last night—I kept imagining that I had gotten you into trouble and that Isabel thought I was some philandering home wrecker. I was trying to find ways to contact her myself.”
“Everything’s fine. Once I explained how our California road trip was last-minute—that we all just happened to be there at the same time—she was fine.” He wondered how convincing he sounded.
“I hope you told her that the most romantic thing that happened was watching Alistair projectile vomit out the car window after stuffing down too many In-N-Out burgers.”
“I left that part out, but don’t worry—it’s all good,” Charlie said, trying to add a little laugh.
Astrid let out a deep sigh of relief. “I’m so glad. You know, I should have been more circumspect. After all, she was meeting me for the first time, and I am the woman who—” She paused, suddenly unsure of how to put it.
“You’re the woman who dumped her husband,” Charlie said matter-of-factly.
“Yes, that’s right. I hope she knows that we’re much better friends now than we ever could have been before. My God, we were a terrible couple,” Astrid said with a laugh.
“I think she realizes that now,” Charlie said cautiously. He desperately wanted to change the subject. “So how’s Venice? Where are you staying?”
“I’m staying with Domiella Finzi-Contini. Her family has the most spectacular palazzo near Santa Croce—I walked onto my balcony this morning and thought I had stepped into a Caravaggio. Do you remember Domiella from our London days? She was at LSE, but part of that whole crazy set that ran around with Freddie and Xan.”
“Ah yes—messy blond hair, right?”
“It was platinum blond then, but she’s back to her natural chestnut now. Anyway, we were having the most marvelous time together until last night.”
Charlie groaned audibly. “I’m sorry again.”
“No, no, it’s nothing to do with Isabel. There’s another drama brewing back home—I have two stubborn boys who are refusing to behave.”
“They probably miss Mommy.”
“Now, don’t you start on me too! I feel bad enough as it is that Cassian’s getting locked up in a closet.”
“Who locked him in a closet?”
“His father.”
“What?” Charlie said incredulously.
“For four hours yesterday, apparently. And he’s only five.”
“Astrid, I would never lock my child in a closet, no matter what age.”
“Thank you. My feelings exactly. I think I need to cut this trip short.”
“Um, sure sounds like it!”
Astrid sighed. “When is Isabel coming home?”
“Friday, I think.”
“She’s incredibly beautiful. She looked so elegant last night—I adored the necklace she was wearing. And she was perfectly civil to me even after I must have given her quite a shock. I’m so glad everything’s okay now.”
“I am too,” Charlie said, forcing himself to smile. He heard somewhere that people could sense the smile in your voice, even over the phone.
Astrid paused. She felt she needed to make one more gesture to make up for her faux pas. “The next time Michael and I are in Hong Kong, we should go on a double date. I want to get to know Isabel under better circumstances.”
“Yes, we should do that. A double date.”
Charlie ended the conversation and got up laboriously from his desk. He was light-headed, and his stomach suddenly felt like someone had poured a gallon of bacon grease into it.
“Alice, I’m just going to pop downstairs for some fresh air,” Charlie said into the intercom. He took his private express elevator to the lower street level and walked through the parking garage toward a side exit door. The moment he was outside, he leaned against the concrete wall and began inhaling and exhaling deeply. After a few minutes, he lumbered toward his favorite spot.
Sandwiched between Wuthering Towers and its neighboring skyscraper on Chater Road was a pedestrian alleyway where there was a small makeshift drink stand. A blue-and-white-striped plastic tarp stretched over the stall, anchored by two refrigerator units filled with soft drinks, packet juices, and fresh fruit. Under the single tube of fluorescent lighting was the owner, a middle-aged woman who stood all day preparing fresh soybean milk and juicing oranges, pineapples, and watermelons. There was always a queue during lunchtime and in the evenings when people left work, but in midafternoon, it was quiet.
“Playing hooky again?” the woman asked, teasing Charlie in Cantonese. She knew him as the office worker who always came down from one of the buildings for a drink at odd hours.
“Every chance I get, auntie.”
“I worry for you, son—you take too many breaks. One day your boss is going to find you here and fire your ass.”
Charlie cracked a smile. She was the one person in the vicinity that had no idea who he was, let alone that he owned the fifty-five-story tower that shaded her all day long. “Can I get a cold soybean milk, please?”
“Your color is no good today. Why are you as pale as a ghost? You shouldn’t be drinking anything cold—you need something hot to help awaken your chi.”
“I get like this sometimes, when I’m feeling a bit overworked,” Charlie explained rather unconvincingly.
“You spend all day in air-conditioning. Bad recycled air. That’s no good for you too,” the woman continued. Her cell phone rang, and she began jabbering for a few minutes. While she spoke, she poured some hot water into a FIFA World Cup mug and filled it with a few slices of ginseng root. Then she stirred a few spoonfuls of grass jelly and sugar syrup into the concoction. “Drink this!” she ordered.
“Thanks, auntie,” Charlie said, sitting on the plastic milk crate by a little folding Formica table. He took a few measured sips, too polite to tell her he didn’t care much for grass jelly.
The woman finished her call and said excitedly, “That was my stockbroker. Here, let me give you a hot tip. You must start shorting TTL Holdings. You know TTL? Owned by Tai Toh Lui, that fellow who dropped dead of a heart attack two years ago in a brothel in Suzhou? My stockbroker knows for a fact that his good-for-nothing son who inherited the empire has been kidnapped by the Eleven Finger Triad. Once everyone finds out, the shares will collapse. You should start shorting it now.”
“You should let me check on that rumor before you start shorting,” Charlie advised.
“Hiyah, I already told my broker to start shorting. If I don’t jump on it, I won’t make any money.”
Charlie took out his cell phone and called his chief financial officer, Aaron Shek. “Hey, Aaron—I know you’re golfing buddies with the CEO of TTL. There’s some rumor going around that Bernard has been kidnapped by the Eleven Finger Triad. Can you please check on that for me? What do you mean there’s no need?” Charlie paused for a moment to listen to Aaron, and then burst into laughter. “Are you sure? Man, that’s way better than the kidnapping rumor, but if that’s what you’re telling me, I believe you.”
He ended the call and looked at the woman. “I just spoke to my friend who knows Tai Toh Lui’s son very well. He has not been kidnapped. He is very much alive and free.”
“Really?” the woman said in disbelief.
“Cover your shorts before the end of the day and you’ll make a good profit. It’s just a vicious rumor, I promise. You may trust your stockbroker, but I’m sure you know there are others out there who are not so honest. They spread rumors just to move the price of the share a few points to make a quick profit.”
“Hiyah, all these people and their rumors! I tell you, this is what’s wrong with the world. People lying about everything.”
Charlie nodded. Suddenly his father’s words from a long time ago echoed in his head. It was one of the many occasions when Wu Hao Lian was in the hospital and thought his time was almost up. Charlie would stand at the foot of the bed while his father issued his final dictums, which went on for hours. Among the various exhortations about making sure his mother never had to move out of the big house in Singapore and that all his younger brother’s Thai ladyboys needed to be paid off was this constant refrain: I worry that when you’re in charge, you’ll run everything I’ve built over the last thirty years into the ground. Stick to the innovation side, because you’re never going to manage on the finance side. You need to make sure management is always stocked with the biggest motherfucking assholes—only hire Harvard or Wharton MBAs—and then get out of the way. Because you’re too damn honest—you’re just not a good enough liar.
Charlie had proved his father wrong when it came to running the business, but what he’d said was true. He hated being dishonest, and his stomach would feel like it was being put through a vise whenever he was forced to tell an untruth. He knew he was still feeling sick because of the lies he had told Astrid.
“Finish your drink—it’s expensive ginseng I gave you, you know!” the woman admonished.
“Yes, auntie.”
After braving the rest of his medicinal drink and paying the stall owner, Charlie returned to his office and sat down to compose an e-mail:
From: Charlie Wu<[email protected]>
Date: June 10, 2013 at 5:26 PM
To: Astrid Teo<astridleongte[email protected]>
Subject: confession
Hi Astrid,
I don’t quite know how to begin this, so I’ll just go for it. I haven’t been completely honest with you. Isabel is furious at me. She called me up in the middle of the night screaming bloody murder, and then she had our daughters taken over to her parents’ house. She refused to listen to my explanations, and now she won’t return my calls. Grégoire told me that she’s conveniently sailed away on Pascal Pang’s yacht this morning. I think they are heading for Sicily.
The truth is, Isabel and I were not able to patch things up even after that Maldives second honeymoon. Things between us have been worse than ever, and I’ve been back at my Mid-Levels flat for a while now. The only agreement we’ve had is that I not do anything that would publicly embarrass her, anything that would give her a loss of face. Unfortunately, that happened last night. Her image of being happily married was shattered in front of Pascal Pang, and you know whatever he knows the rest of Hong Kong will soon know. I’m not sure I even care anymore.
You have to understand something, Astrid. My marriage to Isabel was a mistake even before it began. Everyone thinks I was sent to Hong Kong to take over my family’s operations there, but the truth is I fled. I was devastated after our breakup and depressed for months. I was a complete failure at business, and my father ended up shoving me into a role in our R&D department just to get me out of the way, but that’s where I began to thrive. I got lost in developing new product lines rather than just being a copycat contractor that steals from the best Silicon Valley tech firms. As a result, our business grew exponentially. I have you to thank for that.
I met Isabel at a party on a yacht that was thrown, coincidentally, by your cousin Eddie Cheng and his best friend Leo Ming. Eddie was one of the few people who actually took pity on me. I have to confess—I initially stayed far away from Isabel because she reminded me of you. Like you, she was constantly being underestimated because of her looks. Turns out she was an intensely smart lawyer, University of Birmingham Law School grad, and fast becoming one of Hong Kong’s top litigators. And she had a sense of style and breeding that set her apart. Her father was Jeremy Lai, the distinguished barrister. The Lais are an old-money family from Kowloon Tong, and her mother is from a rich Indonesian Chinese family. I did not want to fall for another unattainable princess who was chained to the rules of her family.
But then as I got to know her, I found that she was nothing like you. No offense, but she was your polar opposite—wild and uninhibited, completely carefree. I found it exhilarating. She didn’t give a damn what her family thought, and as it turns out, they thought the sun and moon orbited around her and she could do no wrong. And to top it off, her parents liked me. (I think it was partly because her last three boyfriends had been Scottish, Aussie, and African American, respectively, and they were just so relieved when she brought home a Chinese boy.) They welcomed me into the family even during the early days of our dating, and it was such a refreshing change to be accepted and even liked by my girlfriend’s family. After six months of our whirlwind romance, we got married, and you know the rest.
But actually, you don’t.
Everyone thinks that we got married so fast because I got her pregnant. Yes, she was pregnant, but it wasn’t with my child. The thing I initially loved about Isabel—her unpredictability—was also her curse. Three months after we started dating, she suddenly disappeared. Things had been going so well, I was actually beginning to heal from our breakup. Then one day Isabel was gone. Turns out she had met up with one of her Indonesian cousins for a drink at Florida (you remember that ghastly bar in Lan Kwai Fong), and he had another friend tagging along. Some Indonesian chap who was a model. Before her cousin even knew what was happening, Isabel had disappeared with the guy. After a few days, I found out they had gone to Maui and were holed up in some private villa having a torrid romance. She wouldn’t come back to Hong Kong, and she broke off contact with all of us. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was distraught, as were her parents.
Then it came out that something like this had happened before. Not once, but several times. The year before, she had met this African American guy on a plane on the way to London, and suddenly she quit her job and moved to New Orleans with him. Two years before that, it was the Aussie surfer and a condo on the Gold Coast. I soon realized that the problem was bigger than any of us could have fathomed—my sister was studying psychopharmacology at the time, and she thought Isabel might have borderline personality disorder. I tried to talk to her parents about it, but they seemed to be in denial. They could not face up to the fact that their darling daughter might have any sort of mental illness—albeit one that can be managed with proper treatment. Through all her episodes, they never made her see a psychologist or get a proper evaluation. They just put up with her “dragon phases,” as they called it. She was born in the year of the dragon, and that was always the excuse they had for her behavior. They implored me to go to Hawaii and “rescue her.”
So I went. I flew to Maui, and it turns out the male model was long gone but Isabel was now living in some sort of commune with a bunch of Radical Faeries. And she was pregnant. Four months pregnant, no longer manic, but too embarrassed to come home. It was too late to have an abortion, she didn’t want to give up her child, but she couldn’t go back to Hong Kong like that. She told me no one ever loved her like I did, and she begged me to marry her. Her parents begged me to marry her quickly in Hawaii. And so I did. We had one of those “intimate weddings with only close family” at the Halekulani in Waikiki.
I want you to know that I went into this marriage with my eyes wide open. I saw the good in Isabel underneath her illness, and I desperately wanted to help her. When things were great, and when the full sunlight of her being shined on you, there was nothing like it. She was a magnetic, beautiful soul, and I was in love with that part of her. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I thought that if she had a stable husband by her side, a husband who could help her properly manage her mental health issues, everything would be okay.
But things were not okay. After Chloe was born, the hormones really messed with Isabel, and she struggled with horrendous postpartum depression. She started hating me and blaming me for all her problems, and we stopped sleeping together. (I mean in the same bedroom, because we hadn’t been physically intimate since before she took off for Maui.) She only wanted the baby in the bedroom with her. And the nanny. It was an unusual arrangement, to say the least.
One day she woke up and it was as if nothing had happened. I moved back into the bedroom, the nanny and Chloe went into their own room. Isabel was a loving wife for the first time in over a year. She went back to work, and we went back to being the social couple about town. I could focus a little more on my work again, and Wu Microsystems went through another terrific growth phase. Isabel became pregnant with Delphine, and I thought the worst was behind us.
Then suddenly, things turned on a dime again. This time it was less dramatic—there was no sudden whirlwind romance with a mysterious stranger, no fleeing to Istanbul or the Isle of Skye. Instead, Isabel’s new behavior turned out to be more insidious and destructive. She claimed she was having secret affairs with married men. Three of them at her law firm—as you can imagine it made for insane office politics. She was also involved with a high-profile judge, whose wife found out about the affair and threatened to go public with everything. I will spare you the rest of this story, but by this point, Isabel and I were for all intents and purposes living totally separate lives. I was at the flat in the Mid-Levels, and she was at the house on The Peak with our daughters.
When you came back into my life, I realized two things: First, that I never stopped loving you. You were my first love, and I have loved you since the day I met you at Fort Canning Church when we were fifteen. And second, I also realized that, unlike me, you had moved on. I saw how much you loved Michael, and how you wouldn’t give up on your marriage. I knew that I had been unfair to Isabel from the start—since I wasn’t truly over you, I had never given all of myself to her. But I was determined to change things. I was ready to let go of you at last, and that would be the key to saving my marriage, to saving Isabel. I wanted to be able to love her free and clear, and to love my daughters as much as you love Cassian.
And so I redoubled my efforts, and you became my de facto marriage counselor. All those e-mails we’ve exchanged over the past two years were a beacon in the night for me as I tried to rebuild my marriage. But as you can clearly see, nothing has worked. The mistakes are all mine. Isabel and I might finally be heading to the bottom of the ocean once and for all, but it has been a long time coming.
This is my rambling way of trying to explain to you that you should not feel a single ounce of regret about what happened between you and Isabel in Venice. And more important, I want you to know the real story, because I can no longer live with any dishonesty between us. I hope that you’ll be able to forgive me for not being truthful with you from the start. You are one of the few bright spots in my otherwise fucked-up life, and now more than ever, I count on our friendship.
With all my heart,
Charlie
Charlie sat in front of his computer, reading over his e-mail again and again. It was almost 7:00 p.m. in Hong Kong. It would be high noon in Venice. Astrid would probably be having lunch poolside at the Cipriani. He took a deep breath, and then he hit the delete button.