poker with men on four continents and sleeps with men on two. She spends a week in San Diego with a girl of astonishingly varied appetites whose heart she breaks, despite their up-front agreement. She falls pretty much in love with a married guy on another hockey team who is ever so gentle when checking her into the boards. They meet once, in Helsinki, in December, for a magic three-day alternate life in the noonday dark. She never sees him again.
She almost gets married. Immediately afterward, she can’t remember how it ever came so close to happening. She turns thirty. Then (dependable engineer) thirty-one and thirty-two. In her sleep, she’s forever passing through epic airports, in the middle of teeming crowds, when her name is paged.
THE COMPANY MOVES HER into HQ. The nine-thousand-dollar raise does almost nothing for her but make her hungry right away, again. But she graduates from a cubicle in a production facility to a corner office with a floor-length window looking out on a stand of pines that in her head somehow becomes the destination at the end of a very long family car trip. The world’s smallest, most private wilderness stand-in.
She decorates the office with things her mother doesn’t know she’s stolen. A suitcase covered in pennants—CARNEGIE INSTITUTE, GENERAL MEIGS, UNIVERSITY OF NANKING. A steamer trunk stenciled with an unpronounceable name. Framed on her desk is a photo of two people, reportedly her grandparents, holding a photo of their three inexplicable grandchildren. Next to that, there’s a print of that same photo-within-a-photo: three little racially ambiguous girls sitting primly on a couch, pretending they’re Wheaton’s Own. The oldest seems ready to bully her way into belonging. Ready to punch out anyone who thinks she’s lost.
Around the walls of the office, like a classical frieze, runs her father’s scroll. It’s wrong to expose the paintings even to the tiny amounts of Northwest sun that trickle through her floor-to-ceiling window. Wrong to apply an adhesive to the backing of art so old and rare. Wrong to leave something priceless where anyone on the night crew might roll it up and pop it into an overall pocket. Wrong to hang the thing where it reminds her of her father’s suicide, every time she lifts her eyes.
People who step into her office for the first time often ask about the Junior Buddhas in the foyer of Enlightenment. She hears her father, on the day he showed her the scroll for the first time. These men? They pass the final exam. There are days at her desk, in her furious professional success, looking up at the scroll from the rising tide of invoices and estimates, when she sees herself getting the same final grade her father did. When the drowning feel tightens up under her breasts, she looks out through the floor-length window onto her grove, where three briefly free and wild girls collect pine cone currencies on the shores of an ancient lake. Sometimes it almost calms her. Sometimes she can almost see the man, squatting on his haunches and writing everything there is to say about this campground into his copious notebook.
Her colleagues use her office as a lunchroom, during lunches when she isn’t eating thousand-year eggs. Today her menu is chicken sandwich, so the place is safe for all ethnicities. Three other managers and a punk from HR pile in for penny ante Up and Down the River. Mimi’s in. She’s always in for any game involving pointless risk and temporary oblivion. Her only stipulation is that she gets the Commander’s Chair.
“What exactly does it command, Captain?”
She waves toward the window. “This view.”
The other players look up from their cards. They squint and shrug. Okay: A small parkway across the shallow lot, filled with trees. Trees are what the Northwest does. Trees everywhere at every elevation, crowding each other out, creeping in, closing out the sky.
“Pines?” the VP of marketing guesses.
A QC manager who wants Mimi’s job declares, “Ponderosas.”
“Willamette Valley ponderosa pine,” says Britannica Man, director of R&D.
Cards float across the office table. Penny piles change hands. Mimi fingers her jade ring. She wears it carving-inward, so no one’s tempted to hack off her finger to steal it. She gives the ring a twist. The gnarled mulberry of Fusang—the tree she drew when the sisters divvied up her father’s possessions—spins around her finger. Her palm cups toward the dealer, all business. “Come on. Give me something to work with, here.”