If You Can Get It Page 6

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  It was still fully dark when the alarm began to bleat at 4:00 A.M. With the familiarity of routine, Jen got out of bed and trudged across the room to turn it off, then headed into the bathroom without giving herself time to stop moving. Four A.M. in Guangzhou meant 1:00 P.M. in San Francisco, and she had to be on the phone with Bryn at 2:00 P.M.

  Forty-five minutes later found her in front of her laptop, a steaming pot of room-service coffee at her elbow to help her face the day. The laptop had become her lifeline during her stay in China. Alone in a sea of 1.3 billion people, e-mail, Skype, and Facebook provided the only connections to all that was familiar. And this, more than anything, kept her, whenever possible, at her downtown hotel, with its privileged tourist access through the Great Firewall, by which modern China kept out the barbarian hordes of the outside world.

  She skimmed the work e-mail that had accumulated while she was asleep, then snuck a glance at Facebook. The site had become a peculiar form of torture to her as her trip dragged on. At first, she had posted frequently: places she had visited, pictures, new foods tried. This, however, seemed to give others the idea that she was on an extended vacation, or at least wrapped up in some experience beyond their ken. Now she simply pored over everything posted by her friends. She hoped to see some evidence that she was missed, that there remained an empty slot in others’ lives that only her presence could fill. What she found instead was that their lives continued just as before, despite her absence. It was like the sort of dream in which the sleeper finds herself dead and watches with increasing anxiety as everyone moves on and forgets her life had ever occurred.

  It was thus with near delight that Jen saw an update from Katie: “Got hate mail from the city. Sister forgot to put the trash bill on auto-pay before she left. PANIC!!!” At least in some prosaic fashion she was missed. She left a comment reminding Katie that she’d put her name on the checking account and reassuring her that nothing dire would happen until the bill was more than forty-five days late.

  Then she pulled up Skype and called Bryn at work.

  Bryn’s rounded features and close-cropped blonde hair appeared on the laptop screen. “Rise and shine, campers! How’s the Far East this morning?”

  The ritual greeting was starting to grate in the way that anything heard repeatedly at five in the morning would, but it was at least familiar and spoken in unaccented American English. “Doing all right. What’s yesterday’s news?”

  “Those cases finally came in with the first-production-run samples for the line. I guess the Trade Winds people were telling the truth the last time they told you they’d shipped.”

  Jen felt significant relief. The often-promised, always-delayed first production run had been one of the prime things keeping her in China longer than planned. “So, that’s good, right? I really will be coming home on Saturday?”

  Bryn shook her head fractionally. “Nope. Started a total shitstorm. You should be glad you were on the other side of the Pacific.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes, I’m afraid. The three o’clock call is going to be a fun one. I don’t know what they’re thinking, but we’re going to have to go all the way down their throats: make them take you to each factory and find out why they’re not producing product that looks like the prototypes. Some of these aren’t even close. I had Travel go ahead and cancel your flights. And they’re having your visa extended through the end of the year.”

  “End of the year? Bryn, I’ve got a condo and bills and—I was supposed to be here five days, and it’s already been almost three weeks.”

  “I know. I know. Calm down. You’re not staying through the end of the year. This just saves time and money on extensions. China hands out six-month visas like candy, so why make paperwork? Two to three weeks, and you should have this all squared away and be sipping gin and tonics in business class on the way back.”

  The three o’clock was, as Bryn had predicted, quite a scene. The Courier line had been planned to include six initial designs, each of these available in several leathers and also a “cruelty free” material. The manufacturing was being sourced and coordinated by a Chinese company, Trade Winds, and the initial prototypes had been everything that one could wish.

  As initially envisioned, Jen’s visit was to have included meetings with the Trade Winds executives, a tour of one of the factories, inspection of the initial production run of product, and then handshakes and paper signing. With the product of this initial short run, the Aspire Brands sales force would have proceeded to win the hearts and minds of buyers for department and specialty stores everywhere, making them eager to participate in the triumphant return of the Courier brand—resplendent in memory even if recently sold at bankruptcy auction by the holding company, which had bought but failed to turn around the struggling company.

  That was the vision. But, as with so many apparitions, this vision was suffering difficulties in realization. Trade Winds had been curiously reluctant to show the products to Jen upon her arrival, taking her to dinners and tours aplenty, but providing no wares for her inspection. Then they had announced that the products had been aired directly to Aspire Brands. And now, as Bryn had revealed, in the latest episode of this melodrama, it proved that Trade Winds had exercised an unacceptable degree of creative license in the products they had sent: Nine designs had been sent rather than six, and yet some of the original six were not even among this superfluity. Moreover, on the four designs that corresponded, to varying degrees, to their legitimate forbears, the materials and designs were subtly (or even distinctly) different from those in the prototypes, invariably in ways far more beneficial to Trade Winds’ costs than to the potential acclaim of the brand.

  “It is at times like these,” Alexia intoned, for the benefit of all those on the conference call, “that we are allowed to prove our enduring passion for the Brand.”

  It was with feelings of endurance, but little passion, that Jen, after business hours in California, went down to confront the hotel’s breakfast buffet and meditate on her fate.

  At first, the manager of their account at Trade Winds, a middle-aged man who insisted on being called Eddy, made himself unable to understand the problem.

  They had wanted to see the first product samples, yes? The samples had been sent. More samples had been sent than had been asked for. Very good samples. When could he expect an order? The production samples did not match the prototypes? Of course they didn’t! These were off the production line. The prototypes were merely prototypes. Scale up to production always involved changes. Surely it was the job of Trade Winds to execute these changes. It was their expertise.

  Finally, Jen pulled rank: either he could take her to visit the factories where these production samples were made and help her sort out why the production samples did not match the prototypes, or else the president of Aspire Brands would call the owner of Trade Winds and say that Eddy was not meeting their needs. Which did he prefer?

  This, at last, focused Eddy’s attention on the problem, and he promised that he and a driver would pick Jen up at her hotel the next morning and go to visit one of the factories.

  Once the arrangements for the trip had been made, including calling up Sue, her independent translator—Jen had quickly learned that translators provided by Trade Winds took the good of the company to heart when deciding what to translate—Jen decided to give herself an hour or two off from business concerns before things became impossibly late in California.

  The indefinite extension of her stay weighed heavily, and she felt the need to talk to someone back home, but as she sat staring at her phone, she found herself hesitating over whom to call. Other than Katie, who was left to struggle with bills and other condo maintenance in her sister’s absence, there was no one, she realized, who would find it particularly unusual not to hear from her for a month or more at a time.

  She flipped backward and forward through her contacts and at last called Dan Fischer. It stretched to three rings, and s
he was on the point of canceling the call when he picked up.

  “Jen. Are you back in the States?”

  “No. I’m stuck. Aspire just canceled my tickets and extended my visa again. There’s no leaving China for me till these folks can get the bags right.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “Anyway . . . I’m sorry, I should have asked: Can you talk now? I just wanted to hear a familiar voice.”

  “I can talk for about ten minutes,” Dan said, a barely detectable hint of reserve in his voice. In the background, Jen could faintly hear traffic.

  “Where are you going?”

  There was the slightest of pauses before he replied. “Picking up a date for dinner.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it. Right now I’m just stuck in traffic. It’s you or Terry Gross.”

  “My conversations aren’t so renowned.”

  “But you said you wanted to talk to me, and I don’t think Terry knows whether I’m listening or not.”

  “Well . . .” She found herself suddenly without anything to say. Then they both spoke at once.

  “Who’s the date with?”—“How’s China?”

  They laughed.

  “Let’s not talk about China,” Jen said. “How’s California? How’s the law practice? Who’s this date with?”

  “One of Mom’s ‘nice Jewish girls’. First date, but she sounded nice when we talked the other night. So I guess I could use a little distraction to keep me from feeling nervous.”

  “Wow. I can’t imagine being set up by my mom.”

  “It’s a little weird. But she’s not just any mom; she’s a Jewish mom. It’s different. Besides, it’s not like I’ve had a stunning dating life on my own the last few years.”

  “Yeah, but . . . Does she do this often? Does she do a good job? Pick girls you’re interested in, I mean?”

  “Three or four times over the last few years. They’ve all been really nice girls. I did date one of them for almost six months. But I’m single right now, so it hasn’t been as successful as Mom would like.”

  “I suppose, with my mom and dad getting all religious again, they’d love it if I found some ‘nice Catholic boy’, but I can’t imagine trusting my mom to pick a date for me.”

  “It depends on the mom. And being Jewish is different anyway. It’s not just something you do; it’s something you are. I’m not as observant as my parents right now, but I can see why they think it would be important to marry someone Jewish.”

  Jen was not sure how to respond to this, and Dan cut off the silence before it could stretch for long.

  “Anyway. I’m getting off the freeway and will be there in a minute. I hope your stay goes well. If you get lonely again, feel free to call me.”

  “Thanks, Dan. It’s good to hear your voice. Hope the date goes well.”

  She had intended to call Katie next—hear another voice from home—but the first call had soured the experience, and she felt the need to do something else and purge her mind. She began putting on her running clothes. There was time to get some exercise before lunch and afternoon work.

  What sat badly was that she had called Dan with no particular thought of how he might be spending his evening. Indeed, now that she cast her mind back, she saw that since their Stanford days, she had seldom contacted Dan unless motivated by some reason of her own—something that she wanted. He kept up with her: sent invitations, called to ask how things were going, all the small elements that constitute friendship. But unless she had some specific object in mind, it was always he who made contact. Nor, perhaps due to reclusiveness on his part, perhaps due to lack of interest on hers, did she normally learn much about his personal life when they talked. Here he was on his way to a date. He’d had a girlfriend for six months, someone he met through his mother. Had she seen him during that time? When had he been single or dating?

  All this came painfully into view because she had called him, not out of any real desire to know what was occurring in his life, but to give her a distraction from what was happening in her own. She’d sought to use him as a reminder of the home to which he formed a background element.

  Her running clothes on, she resolved that she would make a change. If she had to live in China, she would live there. She would go down to the street and take a real run in the open air, rather than repairing to the treadmills in the gym. She took the elevator to the lobby, where the young man behind the desk seemed to give her an appraising look as she passed. She went out through the doors and found herself among the press of humanity. The sidewalk was crammed. Even though Guangzhou’s motorcycle ban removed the usual developing-world sight of innumerable bikes zipping between the cars in already crowded streets, cars were packed fender to fender in the street, honking insistently at one another. All around was the faint, background buzz of a language that remained impenetrably foreign to her.

  Suddenly she yearned to be back in the impersonal and sheltered silence of the hotel. She plunged back in through the lobby doors and took the elevator back up to the gym, where she mounted a treadmill and ran to the sprightly though incomprehensible tones of a pretty young television announcer on Xinhua. She ran until her body was tired and sweaty, and her mind was at last clear, then retired to the showers.

  The expedition, when it left the next morning, was not without certain comic undertones. Eddy had brought a young female assistant with him. Sue, Jen’s translator, had arrived as requested, and in addition, Jen had all of the prototype bags to bring with her: six designs, each in a variety of materials. Eddy’s S-series Mercedes was spacious, but it also came with a driver. There was some question of bringing a second car, but at last the prototype bags all went into the trunk, the three women into the back seat, and Eddy sat in front with the driver—the glassed-off front compartment gradually clouded with cigarette smoke.

  With traffic, the trip took nearly two hours, though it was only seventy miles to the smaller city in which the factory was located. None of the car’s occupants were the more cheerful for their journey, nor was the guard who stopped them outside the chain-link-fence surrounding the factory visibly glad to see them. He argued for a while with Eddy and the driver. Then the three reached a compromise that involved standing around smoking together while the car idled. At last, the guard opened the gate, Eddy and the driver returned to the car, and the guard waved them through.

  The factory was a large structure of corrugated metal. Jen, Sue, and Eddy and his assistant were met outside by a middle-aged woman in a navy-blue suit who assured them repeatedly that they could call her Tina. She led them into the factory, where perhaps a hundred workers were busy. At one end of the hangar-like building (brilliantly illuminated throughout by the blue-white glow of fluorescent lights) was a bank of cutting tables at which a dozen workers were cutting out shapes from huge rolls of imitation leather. Most of the building was filled with sewing tables, at each of which a man or woman in an identical white uniform bent over a heavy-duty sewing machine, assembling pieces.

  Accustomed as she was to the electronics factories she had visited while working on the PocketDJ Player, Jen was surprised at the lack of complexity. There were only four stages to the building of each bag: cutting, assembling the external pieces, inserting and attaching the lining, and attaching the straps, buckles, and other fittings. Nonetheless, progress seemed rapid and efficient.

  After they had toured the production area, with perfunctory explanations of various points by Tina, they were led to a back room that was dim in comparison with the brilliantly lit factory and furnished in relative luxury with deeply piled carpet and overstuffed leather couches. An assistant brought in a tea service, and Tina served them with some formality.

  The tea was drunk, and some small talk was awkwardly attempted through the mediation of Sue’s translation. Then Tina summoned an assistant, who brought a selection of production samples for the bag that this factory was making: a satchel-style design
made to fit a fifteen-inch laptop and emblazoned with a brass-finish buckle in the form of the Courier brand’s “CR” logo.

  Jen retrieved the relevant prototype from the car and set it next to the production-run samples.

  Tina pointed proudly at the bags.

  “She says that they look very good. You will sell a lot of them,” Sue translated.

  Jen pointed out that the strap on the production bag was not the same as that on the prototype. It was made of fabric rather than leather.

  Tina considered the strap for some time, until Jen began to think that she would refuse to respond. Finally, she countered, explaining that the fabric strap was stronger.

  Stronger or not, Jen objected, it was not what Aspire had requested. The exterior of the bag was to be entirely leather.

  The bag was entirely leather. This was only the strap. A strap must be strong. Tina would not build a bag that did not have a strong strap.

  They circled the topic and considered it from every angle. Tina sang the praises of a fabric strap. She denied that the original design had specified the nature of the strap. She suggested that a leather strap would look ugly. When all this failed, she warned that the bags would cost more.

  This, Jen advised, was something she would have to take up with the senior vice president of Procurement when he arrived to sign the final purchase orders. Jen’s job was to ensure that the production bags were like the prototypes.

  But the production bags were like the prototypes.

  Exactly like the prototypes.

  Tina waved her hand in dismissal of this detail.

  Nearly twenty minutes had now passed, and Jen was fully ready for the interview to be over. Unfortunately, the bag presented more sources of conflict.

  Why had the piping been removed from the edges of the flap?

  What piping?

  Jen pointed out the feature. Tina insisted that she could see no difference. Time passed, voices were raised. The piping was at last admitted.

  There remained only the matter of a pocket. The prototype had four pockets on the inside of the flap: two sized for pens and two larger ones. The production sample had a single large pocket and two sized for pens. Jen needed the missing pocket to be restored to the design.