Barbra lugged her own bags down the steps and waited for Charles to come open the back. He was behind her, grunting as he tried to lift the last of Ama’s suitcases—a matched pair of classic Vuitton wheelies that had also once belonged to May Lee—over the threshold. Barbra didn’t want to help. Let him do it. Ama shouldn’t even be here with them. How much was she still being paid, Barbra wondered, and for what?
It was early still. Seven thirty. The quiet time after the dawn joggers had put in their miles and just before the housekeepers started their long walk from the Sunset and Beverly Glen bus stop. A weathered white pickup full of gardeners and lawnmowers sputtered up the street, spewing exhaust onto the same topiaries that they watered and trimmed daily.
Housekeepers and gardeners, dog walkers and pool men, they were the front lines, the foot soldiers. Later would come the private Pilates instructors and the personal chefs, the assistants sent from the office to pick up a forgotten cuff link or script. A home theater consultant, a wine cellar specialist, a saltwater fish tank curator—necessities all.
Charles and Barbra had never understood their neighbors’ obsession with bringing services into the home. Why have some masseuse carry in a table when you could just go to the Four Seasons? Why open your life up to more strangers than you had to? Now, of course, there was no need to think about any of that. Luisa and Big Pano and Gordon and Rainie had all been let go, fired, weeks ago. Barbra hadn’t told them why. Let them think that she had finally turned into a crazy, demanding Westside wife, unsatisfied with Luisa’s immaculately ironed sheets and Gordon’s bright, abundant blooms, maybe even pathetically sure that her husband was eyeing Rainie’s swinging breasts. She was positive that they’d be rehired immediately, even in these unhappy times. She was equally certain that her former household help had already jointly developed some theory of the Wangs’ downfall, something scandalous and unflattering that would doubtless be pried out of them by each of their new employers.
The worst moment for Barbra and Charles was the reveal. The Reveal. That’s how she thought about it in the days after—like they were on one of those makeover shows, but instead of finding that their house was beautifully revamped, the hosts had removed their blindfolds and made their whole charmed life disappear.
“Why?” Barbra had asked.
“What why?”
“All our everything?”
At that moment the word our rankled. Charles had never had a problem with generosity—he’d cultivated a casual way of picking up the check before he’d even made his first million—but just then the way that his wife said our brought out something small and sour that he forced himself to swallow, along with the true word: Mine. Barbra had given nothing but her bullish charm to this family—she hadn’t made the money or borne the children or even decorated the house or cooked the food. He’d done the first, his dead first wife had done the second, and they’d hired people to do the rest. Nothing was our.
“Yes,” he’d said. “All.”
“But how? How could you? Don’t we have anything saved? We had so—”
“So much. And now, not so much.”
He’d said that, and then he’d spread his arms out in a leaden swoop, like an aging showgirl. It had severed something between them, that gesture. Charles had never done anything awkward or unsure in his life. Not in front of her. Not in her eyes. But now her broken heart saw every wrong-footed step he’d ever taken.
“How could it happen?”
“It happened!”
“But how did it?”
“How, how, how! You never ask how it get good, how I make so much money, how I know what everybody want, only how now that it go away! No how!”
Had they always sounded so stilted and childish? After sixteen years in America, speaking English to the children and her American friends—whose company and mah-jongg rules she preferred to those of the mainlander wives of Charles’s friends—her own speech had attained a smooth perfection, but when she spoke to Charles, she found herself picking up his broken grammar, and the two of them gradually dropped the private Chinese they had once shared.
“Okay,” she’d said. “No more how.”
And for then, and for now, that was it. No more how. No more how, and no more house.