“Maybe Ming-Ming is like a foreigner now. Milk in his tea and socks to bed.”
“Wouldn’t you like to be the one who knows what he wears to bed,” said Xiao Jong, waggling his eyebrows at her. Jong always had been too stupid with his own intelligence. Just a few months after those boys had all graduated, he was picked up in one of the Kuomintang sweeps of student leaders with suspected Communist sympathies, and not even his meek little wife ever heard from him again. Served him right.
Barbra flipped the light switch outside her closet door and stepped in, letting out her breath as her bare feet, toes freshly painted, sank into the smoke-blue silk rug.
This, this was her favorite room in the house.
Let Charles talk endlessly about the hidden wine cellar that he’d retrofitted for whiskey. Let their friends marvel over Ai Wei Wei smashing a Han dynasty urn in a triptych of photos that hung on the wall behind a considerably less valuable Ming dynasty vase. Let the other rooms of the house be photographed for that new California magazine with its condescending editor who described Charles as a “small but gracious man.” This closet was the only corner that mattered to her.
Having this romantic inner sanctum in a house full of polished glamour gave Barbra the same sensation—something halfway between lust and power—as wearing a red silk peignoir under an austere dress by one of those Japanese minimalists that Charles hated so much.
She was supposed to be packing—“Quickly!” Charles had said, clapping his stubby hands together. “Quickly!”—but she didn’t feel like it. Barbra pulled out the little upholstered stool she’d always loved for its brass claw feet and sat down in front of the mirror. She closed her eyes and let the crisp 68° air settle into her skin, then raised her eyelids and held her own gaze for a long moment.
First, the forehead.
Good, still good. One thin line just barely etched across, just enough to show that she wasn’t using Botox.
The eyes. They’d always been too round, but now she skipped over that thought. The eyelids were beginning to look loose, but not so much that eye shadow disappeared in the folds. A few wrinkles on the edges and one curved line under her right eye because, though she had been trying for years, Barbra simply could not fall asleep unless she was lying on her right side. Cheekbones still high. Nose, same as always. Small and upturned. All those white women a generation older who went and got nose jobs that ended up looking like her own lamented-over nose made her laugh. How had that become their chosen shape? Her tiny little skull nose?
Her lips were undeniably starting to thin, and lipstick had started bleeding into the fine wrinkles that edged out from them on all sides like tiny tributaries of age, sapping her of the best semblance of youth.
And those naso-labial lines that dropped down either side of her nose and skipped a beat before continuing along the sides of her mouth, dragging it down into a disapproving bulldog frown. “What are you doing on my face?” she whispered at them.
Barbra placed her fingers gently on her hairline, encircling her forehead, and tugged up. Then she reached her thumbs down onto either side of her cheeks, softly, slowly, and pulled the skin back, stopping just before her nose began to splay out. There. This was the face she should be looking at. Like this, she looked better than young—she looked ageless.
“Ah bao! Are you almost done?” Charles called from the bedroom door. Barbra dropped her hands and the years came rushing back—five, ten, fifteen, twenty, until here she was again, a fifty-year-old woman married to a ruined man, sitting in a world that she had built up only to toss away again. Seeing her rumpled jawline reemerge, losing the image of her real, ageless self, was almost worse than knowing that she was going to lose the world she had put together so carefully. The venal optimism that had enabled her to immigrate to America and scoop up Charles and his almost empire as soon as she heard about the helicopter crash that killed his first wife was limited to desperate island girls with no fear or knowledge of the world.