Charles ignored him. “What do you mean, ‘sort of’? You have boyfriend?”
“No! Dad, no! What do you mean?” Andrew dropped his voice to a whisper. “Do you think I’m gay or something?”
“You might as well be,” said Grace.
On either side of him, the southern goons mirrored Grace’s smirk. What was this?
“Well?” Charles asked.
“No!” Andrew repeated. “Why are we talking about this here?”
“Hey, hey,” Artie interrupted. “There’s nothing wrong with that if that’s the way you are. Nothing to be ashamed of, right, Dad?”
Charles didn’t reply, just kept his eyes on Andrew.
“I had a girlfriend, her name is Emma, she’s really pretty.”
Okay. Charles relaxed. Okay. Andrew didn’t know how to lie to him.
“Why did you say that, Gracie?” Charles asked.
“Yeah, Gracie??” asked Andrew.
She opened her eyes wide. “Oh, I don’t know. I just meant that Andrew was very . . . gentlemanly.”
Ah. Charles had never set out to be secretive about sex with his children, but over the years, that was what happened. It always seemed like something that should have been the mother’s job, but he couldn’t expect Barbra to bear the responsibility for explaining things, so it somehow became the subject that wasn’t raised. They had never come to him with any questions, so he had never given them any answers.
Maybe he had failed his son. Charles himself had never needed any instruction on that front—even without movie-star looks, even before he had any real money, Charles had wanted things, and women had responded to that—but maybe, put in vulgar American terms, Andrew simply didn’t know how to close the deal.
He looked at his son. “Andrew. Girls very easy. Listen. You always tell smart girls that they pretty and pretty girls that they smart.”
“Dad. I don’t . . . it’s not . . .”
“Hey, Mr. Wang, what do you do if a girl’s pretty and smart?”
Charles smiled at Bodie. That skeletal southerner probably needed all the lady advice he could get. “Easy. You just tell them you think they are a very good person.”
Andrew laughed at that, at least. “I don’t have a problem with girls, it’s just, I want to find the right one, you know?”
“You don’t have a problem with girls not want to go out with you because you are Chinese?” he asked.
“God, no! Dad, it’s not like that anymore. Or it is, but it’s not like that for me.”
Charles nodded, proud. Of course it wasn’t like that for his son, his handsome son. Sometimes it was hard to understand this generation of boys—they had so little to rebel against that it made them soft. No wonder they had sold out of the special-edition guyliner that Andrew had convinced him to market.
Bodie nudged him. “The boy is holding out for love! Your son ain’t gay, Mr. Wang. It’s worse—he’s a romantic.” Bodie and Artie caught each other’s eyes over Andrew’s head. “And probably a virgin.”
Andrew blushed immediately. “Why is it such a big deal to everyone? I don’t see why this is even something to discuss! And, anyways, what’s wrong with wanting to fall in love? Don’t you all want that?”
Charles shrugged. “Love is easy. Daddy in love with every woman!”
“Dad! Why do you always have to say that? Why can’t you just love one woman? You’re married!”
“I say love any that’ll have you, right, Mr. Wang?” Charles laughed along with Bodie as he watched Andrew cringe.
“Okay, I’m going to go to the bathroom. And when I come back, maybe we’ll talk about something else.” Andrew twisted his way out of the bench.
Always so sensitive, his son.
Andrew stayed away. Hours later, when even his little Gracie was probably drunk, Charles and Nash ended up side by side with a bottle of whiskey between them, their feet kicked up on the edge of the table. He spotted Andrew across the room talking to a woman, thank god, though probably not one the boy would ever fall in love with. Tall and dead pale, like the deracinated endgame of generations of milk drinkers, with a battlefield of frizzy red hair stuck out all around her, she was at least a decade older than Andrew.
Nash followed Charles’s gaze. “Dorrie Van Sleyd. She’s still living in her family’s old plantation house as well, though half of hers is open to snap-happy tourists at the weekend. Maybe that’s what I should be considering.”
Charles turned his attention back to Nash. His friend. His compatriot. Proud member of a dwindling southern aristocracy made up of Anglophiles and drunks. If the world had continued the way it should have, if Charles had stayed in the China he was meant for, he never would have met Nash almost thirty years ago, when this brother in arms was one of the only white men living on a tree-lined block of Monterey Park in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley.