The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee

says.
    â€œYou’re beautiful,” I say.
    â€œDo you mean that?”
    I hate it when she goes intense on me. She starts to lift off the Press-On Nails from her thumbs. Her own nails are roundish and ridged, which might be her only imperfection.
    â€œBlanquita the Beautiful.” I shoot it through with melody. If I were a songwriter I’d write her a million lyrics. About frangipani blooms and crescent moons. But what I am is a low-level money manager, a solid, decent guy in white shirt and maroon tie and thinning, sandy hair over which hangs the sword of Damocles. The Dow Jones crowds my chest like an implant. I unlist my telephone every six weeks, and still they find me, the widows and orthodontists into the money-market. I feel the sword’s point every minute. Get me in futures! In Globals, in Aggressive Growth, in bonds! I try to tell them, for every loser there’s a winner, somewhere. Someone’s always profiting, just give me time and I’ll find it, I’ll lock you in it.
    Blanquita scoops Marcos off the broadloom and holds him on her hip as she might a baby. “I should never have left Manila,” she says. She does some very heavy, very effective sighing. “Pappy was right. The East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet.”
    I get these nuggets from Kipling at least once a week. “But, baby,” I object, “you did leave. Atlanta is halfway around the world from the Philippines.”
    â€œPoor Pappy,” Blanquita moons. “Poor Joker.”
    She doesn’t give me much on her family other than that Pappy—Joker Rosario—a one-time big-shot publisher tight with the Marcos crew, is stuck in California stocking shelves in a liquor store. Living like a peon, serving winos in some hotbox
barrio.
Mother runs a beauty shop out of her kitchen in West Hartford, Connecticut. His politics, and those of his daughter, are—to understate it—vile. She’d gotten to America long before his fall, when he still had loot and power and loved to spread it around. She likes to act as though real life began for her at JFK when she got past the customs and immigration on the seventeenth of October, 1980. That’s fine with me. The less I know about growing up in Manila, rich or any other way, the less foreign she feels. Dear old redneck Atlanta is a thing of the past, no need to feel foreign here. Just wheel your shopping cart through aisles of bok choy and twenty kinds of Jamaican spices at the Farmers’ Market, and you’ll see that the US of A is still a pioneer country.
    She relaxes, and Marcos leaps off the sexy, shallow shelf of her left hip. “You’re a racist, patronizing jerk if you think I’m beautiful. I’m just different, that’s all.”
    â€œDifferent from whom?”
    â€œAll your others.”
    It’s in her interest, somehow, to imagine me as Buckhead’s primo swinger, maybe because—I can’t be sure—she needs the buzz of perpetual jealousy. She needs to feel herself a temp. For all the rotten things she says about the Philippines, or the mistiness she reserves for the Stars and Stripes, she’s kept her old citizenship.
    â€œBaby, Baby, don’t do this to me. Please?”
    I crank up the Kraftmatic. My knees, drawn up and tense, push against my forehead. Okay, so maybe what I meant was that she isn’t a looker in the blondhair-smalltits-greatlegs way that Wendi was. Or Emilou, for that matter. But beautiful is how she makes me feel. Wendi was slow-growth. Emilou was strictly Chapter Eleven.
    I can’t tell her that. I can’t tell her I’ve been trading on rumor, selling on news, for years. Your smart pinstriper aims for the short-term profit. My track record for pickin ’em is just a little better than blindfold darts. It’s as hard to lose big these days as it is to make a killing. I understand those inside traders—it’s