And then it came. The fatal flaw. Emotion slunk into the picture.
J. Marshall Weymouth made Charles feel small, like he hadn’t made his first million by the time he was thirty-three years old, like he didn’t have a flaming redhead named Saoirse on call, like he hadn’t blown out of Taiwan with nothing but a urea pipeline and lucked himself into the most ideal wife-and-children combo possible. Made Charles feel like five thousand years of Chinese culture didn’t stand up to a few generations of penitent nobodies who thought a single act of tea-soaked rebellion was enough to crown a nation. Nobodies who took pride in being nicknamed for a winged parasitic bug. Fucking WASPs.
“Fine,” said Charles. “Personal guarantee. This is not some sort of multi-culti show, this is a strong and serious business investment. Here—”
Charles reached for the loan papers and uncapped a black Sharpie. Across the section that began LOAN AND DELIVERY OF COLLATERAL PURSUANT TO PROMISSORY NOTES, he penned 836 Glover Circle.
“My home,” he said, shoving the papers back across the table. “You wonder how much money I expect to make for you? Enough that I stake my family house on it. Personal guarantee. This tell you enough?”
Hot. Charles remembered being burning hot, the tiny points on his scalp jumping and prickling.
Weymouth had simply raised an eyebrow, and said, “Alright, Mr. Wang. I’ll choose to believe in the numbers.”
And then, to add insult to stupidity, Charles had said—oh, how he hated himself now!—“Right, then. I believe in the numbers, too,” and opted for a fixed-rate loan.
And then interest rates dropped step by step as surely as they had climbed in the twenty-two months before he locked in his loan. Every day Charles watched them fall as he bit his knuckles and told himself that he was about to be so successful that none of this would matter. Nothing would matter. The point of making so much money was so that money itself would no longer matter. He’d pay off the whole loan at once and beat the rates at their own game.
He was, of course, wrong.
All of it mattered; mattered so much that it wiped out everything else that had ever mattered before.
All it took was two years. Charles secured that loan and opened two ten-thousand-square-foot, no-expense-spared flagship stores in San Francisco and Chicago—cities that, he thought, were underserved by beauty—and filled them both with a flotilla of makeup-artists-slash-salesgirls who ranged in hue from champagne gold to glistening obsidian, each possessed of the ability to transform a customer’s face with a few sure strokes, raising cheekbones and defining jawlines using creams and ointments that melted smoothly into the clientele’s variegated complexions.
It should have been a success. Charles knew it was brilliant. And necessary. At its core, good makeup involved nothing more than a technical knowledge of skin tone and facial structure—it had as much in common with taxidermy as it did with art—and no one else was bringing that knowledge to the millions of nonwhite women who were walking around with chalky faces.
But from the start, it was a mess. His factories were focused on supplying the new stores, which made them late on shipments to a few long-standing clients. Some of them were understanding, and some were ungrateful pricks who forgot that Charles was the one who had believed in them when they’d first walked in with lint in their pockets and a meager little dream in their hearts.
And the stores weren’t drawing in customers the way they should have been. Charles himself had masterminded the ads for the Failure and, just as he’d predicted, they had created a sensation: five beauties, glistening and nude, covered only in images inspired by their cultures. The black woman, a regal Ethiopian model who had grown up in a tiny brick row house in Astoria, had a tribal pattern that ran from knee to hip; that leg was slung across the lap of the Asian woman, a fiery Tibetan girl whose favorite word was balls and whose breasts were painted with a fire-breathing dragon; it panted flames towards the Latina model, actually an Italian who took care never to let her tan fade, who faced away from the camera, her back entirely covered in an Aztec sun; the rays of which were obscured only by the smooth brown head of the Indian model, a well-behaved Orange County girl who had never been seen entirely naked by a man until the makeup artist disrobed her and whose arms were intricately patterned with mehndi; wrapped in those arms was the final model, a mixed-race girl so beautiful that Charles almost, almost, began to feel a bit more sanguine about the prospect of grandchildren that were not 100 percent Chinese. Her name was Opal and she was the face of the store, an exclusive contract that took a not-insignificant bite out of the Failure’s generous ad budget. Thanks, in part, to that very, very generous ad budget, the beauty press was quick to lend Charles their support, but their readers didn’t follow suit.
They were self-haters, all of them, slavishly buying makeup formulated for other faces.