The Interior Read online

  “I never wanted all this.” Mary Elizabeth’s gesture took in the gardens, the mansion, the view, the life she and Miles had built. “But he wanted it. He wanted it badly.”

  “How much did you know?”

  “I only knew his dreams,” she answered. “And even those were always…I knew he was unhappy. Remember back when Michael Ovitz left CAA and moved to Disney? He was arguably the most powerful man in Hollywood, but he still had to fetch Julia Roberts a glass of mineral water if she asked for it. Well, that’s how Miles felt. He made tons of money, but he had to be available whenever a client wanted him.”

  David remembered what Doug had said about Miles. “Is it true that Tartan had offered him a job?”

  “Yes, as general counsel. He would have been the client, don’t you see?”

  There seemed nothing more to say, and they turned back toward the house. Mary Elizabeth reached out and put a trembling hand on his arm. “Did he…” She began in a quavering voice, but she couldn’t finish.

  “No, he didn’t suffer. He didn’t even know what happened.”

  In early September, Hulan was resting on a chaise longue in the central courtyard of her family compound when Neighborhood Committee Director Zhang paid her customary call. The old woman, wearing a black jacket and black trousers, hung onto David’s arm and wrinkled her face up at him in delight as he escorted her outside. She sat down opposite Hulan on a porcelain garden stool. As soon as David went inside to make tea, Madame Zhang said, “He is funny, that one. I see he is practicing his Mandarin, but aiya, to my ears it is frightful and hilarious at the same time.”

  Hulan had been trying to teach David basic sentences: Welcome. How are you? Okay. How much? That’s too expensive. How is your son? Can you tell me…But he was as competent as a toddler in split pants. Lately she’d begun to think it would be better for him to forget the project entirely because his tones were abysmal, and, as Madame Zhang noted, they resulted in some amusing mistakes.

  “What did he say today?”

  “Qing wen…” Madame Zhang said, purposely missing the fourth tone of wen and replacing it with a third, thereby changing the meaning from “Please, may I ask” to “Please kiss.”

  Hulan smiled as the Neighborhood Committee director cackled in pleasure.

  “He could kiss me if he wants,” the old woman added. “He is not so ugly as I once thought.”

  David returned with the tea, set it on the table, and retired to the other side of the courtyard, where Hulan’s mother, her nurse, and Vice Minister Zai sat under the twisting branches of the jujube. Jinli didn’t understand who David was, although she accepted his presence without question; nor did she understand that she would soon be a grandmother. But she seemed to find comfort in her childhood home and, while still not appreciating the raucous cymbals, gongs, and drums of the yang ge troupe, had grown more accustomed to the cacophonous morning ritual. David had found another way to deal with it. He’d joined the troupe.

  “He is a foreigner,” Madame Zhang continued. “This we can never forget. But he isn’t so bad.” This compliment was of the highest order, and the old woman moved quickly to ward off any evil that might result by cautiously explaining herself. “He minds his own business. He knows enough to sweep the snow in front of his own doorstep and not bother about the frost on top of his neighbor’s roof. And yet he has shown high regard for our neighborhood and our neighbors. He is polite and respectful. And you should know”—she leaned forward and put a gnarled hand on Hulan’s knee—“the neighbors are appreciative of the way he cares for you.”

  “I’m pleased that they’re happy,” Hulan said diplomatically.

  A gauzy look came over Madame Zhang’s wrinkled face as she gazed over in David’s direction. Despite all of her attempts to remain critical, she was as smitten with David as if she were a schoolgirl.

  “For so many years,” the Committee director continued dreamily, “the government has talked about what is good for the masses. But these days I wonder. What if individual happiness can serve the people more than anything else?”

  “I would never argue with our government,” Hulan said.

  The old woman frowned at her neighbor’s stupidity: always this girl was mindful, so careful of every word. Madame Zhang had come here not completely in her official position—although she never forgot her duty—but as an old woman who had seen her neighbor happy and at peace for the first time since she was a small child. This house deserved to have joy and tranquility again, and she would do what she could to make that happen. So, instead of debating with her obtuse neighbor, she went on as though Hulan had not spoken at all.

  “In this spirit,” Madame Zhang said, “I’ve been thinking about a marriage certificate. Your David is a foreigner, yes, but I think I can make a recommendation that even the old-liners will accept.”

  Did the Committee director expect Hulan to believe that these were her own original thoughts? It had probably been the old men from the compound across the lake who had sent her here today. But what use was there in pointing this out? Instead Hulan folded her hands over her swelling stomach and looked across the courtyard at David. He chanced to look up and cocked his head as if waiting for her to ask him a question. With their eyes locked, Hulan said softly, “We’ll see, auntie, we’ll see.”

  Her duty done, the old woman paid her respects to Jinli and left. David came to sit at Hulan’s side and, as they had repeatedly over these last few weeks, went back over the events leading to the conflagration at Knight. His orderly mind had boiled everything down to greed. The old men in the Silk Thread Café had been greedy, getting their kickbacks from Doug via Amy Gao. Tang Dan and Miles Stout had clearly been motivated by greed. And it had all started because Henry Knight was greedy in his own way.

  Unwilling to share his company with his less talented son, Henry had unwittingly set the whole catastrophe in motion. And as much as David liked the man, he couldn’t help but acknowledge that greed was what was keeping Henry going now. A makeshift assembly area—based on Doug’s plans—had been set up in the Knight warehouse, and even now women were working overtime to get boxes of Sam & His Friends in the stores by Christmas. With all the additional publicity, the supply really couldn’t meet the demand. More than that, the articles in the papers—and there’d been countless—had portrayed the Sam & His Friends technology as so revolutionary that it had caused…Well, the whole thing sounded positively Shakespearean.

  In the meantime, Knight International’s stock had gone through the roof, and Henry had, to considerable acclaim, unveiled a plan to link executive pay to fair labor practices, especially regarding child labor, since, as he kept repeating, “We’re in the toy business. We create toys for children, not jobs!” Community groups, a reorganized board of directors, as well as a consortium of international watchdog organizations would carry out inspections. (This one action, if it was to be believed, wiped out half of Knight’s workforce. Peanut and so many others had been sent “home,” meaning that they’d simply moved on to other factories with less discriminating owners.) Henry’s actions were not as noble as it seemed at first glance. When he wasn’t giving interviews or testifying before Congress, he was talking to studios and conglomerates all over the world for what the international media was calling “the largest global out-licensing campaign of all time.” It seemed that Doug’s predictions had been frighteningly accurate.

  Of course, all the attention had spurred the media to cover a different aspect of the story. Chinese woman migrant workers were changing the face of the countryside. Unlike their male counterparts, these women either sent their earnings home to their peasant families, increasing the household income by forty percent, or were saving their salaries so they might return to their villages to open little businesses. It was estimated that women who’d returned from foreign factories owned nearly half of all shops and cafés in rural villages. Suddenly Chinese peasant girls were seen by their families as leaders of social and economic chan
ge; as a result, in the last calendar year female infanticide had dropped for the first time in recorded history. As a Ford Foundation scholar noted, female migrant workers were the single most important element transforming Chinese society. “This is happening on a scope unprecedented worldwide, and it means radical, revolutionary changes for women.” If anything, these stories soothed the consciences of parents around the world who needed to have Sam and Cactus and Notorious and the rest of the Friends in time for the holidays. Or, as Amy Gao might have put it, if there was one thing Americans admired, trusted, and believed in more than democracy, it was capitalism.

  Hulan had heard all this before and once again repeated her view. “This wasn’t caused by greed. It was love.”

  When she’d first said this back in the hospital, David hadn’t believed her, for she was not a woman given over to mushy sentiments. But she had stuck to her theory now for weeks without much other explanation. In fact, since his return from Los Angeles, he’d noticed a certain bitterness in her thoughts, but perhaps after what she’d been through this was to be expected. That day in the factory she’d drawn on her last bit of strength to save not only David and Henry but all those other women. She’d been left so physically weak and emotionally frail that her usual defenses were in tatters.

  “I’ve never experienced unconditional love like Suchee’s for Miaoshan or even Keith’s for Miaoshan,” she said, finally expanding on her idea. “She had a lot of faults, but she must have been a remarkable woman to elicit that kind of devotion.”

  “Maybe they weren’t so blind,” David interrupted. “Yes, she was manipulative, but somewhere along the line she shifted. She had nothing personal to gain from trying to organize the women in the factory, and the way she divided up the materials tells me that she really wanted to make sure that information got out. She had energy, brains, and in other circumstances things might have turned out differently for her.” He paused, then asked, “What about Doug? You can’t believe he acted out of love.”

  “Him most of all. Think of what he did to prove himself to his father. Then think of how on that last day, Henry was willing to take the blame for everything—the corruption, the murders—to protect his son. He begged us to bring him back to Beijing to face the consequences. And in our own ways we deceived ourselves and each other despite love, for love….” She closed her eyes. When she opened them, he saw nothing but sorrow. “I look back at my parents and the way I was brought up, and I wonder at all of it. I think of my work and how I see the very worst in people. But for me it’s easier than the alternative.”

  “The alternative?”

  “To give myself over fully to love,” she said, at last admitting her deepest fear. She looked away again and stared over at Zai, her mother, and her nurse. “Suchee says I’ve run away my entire life. Maybe I have, because staying opens up the possibility of losing love and being hurt.” When she turned back to him, her eyes glittered with tears. “I don’t think I could stand losing you or the baby.”

  “You’re not going to lose us,” he said. “I’m here and the baby’s coming.” He tried to be light. “You’re always so good with your proverbs. Well, I have a few of my own. You can run, but you can’t hide. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. You don’t know if you don’t like spinach unless you’ve tried it.”

  “Those aren’t proverbs! They’re clichés.”

  “Well, hear this, then.” He took her hand and kissed it. “I’ll never leave you, Hulan. That’s just the way it is.”

  Epilogue

  THE DEAD HEAT OF SUMMER FINALLY PASSED, AND A KIND of languid somnambulance fell over the countryside as the crops ripened and the people readied for harvest. The heads of the sunflowers, drooping from the weight of their seeds, could no longer look up to the sun. The fields of millet and sorghum had already been harvested, the land cleared, and some farmers had begun preparations for their winter crops, for every day the sun rose less high in the sky and daylight waned minute by minute. The cicadas had grown quieter in recent days as the humidity, stickiness, and thick air disappeared as it always did at this time of year. Ling Suchee imagined—for by any measure temperatures were still warm, hot even—a coolness drifting on the air.

  Suchee tore an ear of corn from the stalk, peeled back the outer leaves, and examined the kernels. They were plump and a pleasing shade of yellow. There were no bugs and no diseases. She took a bite and the raw corn felt fresh and sun-warm in her mouth. Yes, in another day or two this field would be ready for harvest and she would hire a couple of boys to help her. She walked on, passing through the rows, feeling the rustle of the stalks against her arms and the warmth of the soil beneath her bare feet.

  But inside, where her heart kept its steady, relentless beating, she ached. Not a day, not a minute went by that she didn’t wish for a hardness to form over that delicate but persistent organ. She knew, of course, that the physical heart—the chambers and valves and aortas that she’d seen in a book—did not really suffer from loss, but then how else could you explain the pain, the sickness that lay heavy in her chest every morning when she woke up and that she carried with her as she went about her chores?

  The barefoot doctor had recommended that she leave this place and move into the village. Instead she’d come away with a packet of herbs and instructions to boil them, strain them, boil them again, then drink one cup three times a day for ten days. She’d done as the doctor ordered, but that bitter liquid could not cure her.

  Nor would her neighbors’ suggestion to join them in the village. Tang Dan had been right in his assessment of the Tsais. Everywhere they looked they saw reminders of their son—the kang where he’d slept, the well where his body had been found, the land where he’d been with them literally every day since his birth. So within days of Tsai Bing’s death, his parents, without completing the harvest, had handed their land back to the government and had moved to the village house for end-of-the-liners.

  “It is not so bad,” Madame Tsai said. “We have our own room. They tell us it is dry in winter and that the local government will provide all the coal we need to keep our old bones warm when it gets cold. We get rice three times a day. Every day is a banquet. Breakfast, lunch, dinner—always we are with other people. There is a communal television set. At night we have more companionship than we ever had on our land.” Suchee understood what her friend was saying. That television, the yakking of the other end-of-the-liners, could not actually fill the void, but they did make a noisy cover for it.

  But how could Suchee leave this land? As she looked at the uncompromising red earth all around her, she thought of the decomposition of vegetable and animal matter that gave the land its fertility. She thought of the lies and deceptions that insinuated themselves into the soil as surely as water and sunlight. She thought of how so many of those lies and deceptions had come through her, had radiated right through her from the sky, into the human and down through the soles of her feet into the earth.

  Suchee had always believed in her government’s policies. Her life, like so many in the countryside, had improved from the days when her parents and grandparents had worked the fields in this region for landlords who’d sucked the very life out of them. Now she looked around her and saw that whatever advances had been made were eroding as easily and ruthlessly as the way a dust storm swept away the earth. They said she now could have electricity and television, but they only gave her a window into the outer world where she could see exactly what she didn’t have and would never, ever have.

  They say there are nine hundred million peasants working the land in China, one-sixth of the world’s population, Suchee thought, and somehow—amazingly, ridiculously—her government believed she should accept her lot as her ancestors had accepted it before her. Miaoshan had seen this. She understood it in a way that only the young can. She understood what the leaders of China didn’t when they said to the country’s peasants, “You are the life blood of China. Don’t come to the ci
ties. Stay where you are.” She understood that the foreign outsiders were engaged in their own lies and deceptions. It was too late for Suchee, but there were hundreds of millions of others like Miaoshan who would not sit back any longer and let the world do to them. They would eventually rise up, as Chinese peasants had in the past, and make the world come to them by giving their blood, by sacrificing their respect for the past, by looking out to the horizon, by demanding what was theirs by human and political right.

  But all that was almost too large for Suchee to contemplate, because her world had always been and always would be confined to what she knew was a very small and insignificant life. And in that life she had told herself numerous lies.

  She had believed in the ideals of friendship, but Liu Hulan and Tang Dan had not been true friends. Yes, they were in the same place in her damaged heart, for they had both acted coldly with no respect for the consequences. Tang Dan’s deceit had stemmed from avarice, and the consequences had been tangibly recognizable and condemned by the larger society. But Hulan’s crimes had been done without thought to the consequences and would never be punished. If Hulan had never come to the Red Soil Farm, had never turned in Suchee and Shaoyi, had never introduced Suchee to the larger-world concepts of privilege and deprivation, Suchee’s life would have been very different.

  Suchee had believed in love, but her love for Ling Shaoyi had only been a matter of bad circumstance. The lies Suchee had told herself about Miaoshan were the most cruel and devastating of all. Her daughter, for all of her supposed idealism, was a liar, a cheat, a loose woman of no morals, and greedy almost beyond words. Suchee had deliberately chosen not to see it, and that had caused more bloodshed and more suffering than she ever could have imagined.