She turned back toward the sideboard for the next bottle, and that was when the sound came β small, dry, and unmistakable, cutting through the strained quiet like a struck match.
Richard Vance snapped his fingers at Jasmine.
Chapter 3 β One Complete Sentence
The snap of his fingers was still hanging in the air when Jasmine turned around.
She had been snapped at before, in three years at the Marble Quay, though never quite like this β never as punctuation, never as a way of saying that her name, her attention, and the wine bottle in the next room were all the same category of thing: his, on demand, without the trouble of a sentence. She set her face the way she set a table. Carefully. Without expression doing any unauthorized work. Then she crossed the Harbor Room at an ordinary, unhurried pace, because hurry would have agreed with him about what the sound had meant.
"Yes, sir."
"We're dry down here," Vance said, though two of the four glasses in front of him and his guests were not dry at all, and he did not look at her when he said it. He looked at Mr. Chen, to make sure the lesson in service had been witnessed. "This is the problem with this city now. Beautiful room, nobody trains the staff anymore. You β what's your name?"
"Jasmine, sir."
"Jasmine." He said it the way a man reads a label he intends to peel off. "Jasmine, my guests have flown six thousand miles. Six thousand. And they've had to flag down their own wine like it's a cab in the rain."
"I'll bring the next bottle right away, sir."
"Bring it, yes. And then β " He finally looked at her, and she saw that the wine had not made him careless; the wine had only given him permission to be the thing he already was, in front of an audience he was losing and needed, suddenly, to win by other means. "Actually, wait. Hold on. I want to understand something. You're an educated girl, aren't you? I can tell. The way you talk. Where'd you go to school β or is that just an act you put on for the tables?"
It was not a question with a safe answer, but a direct question, in her mother's house, had always gotten a direct answer. "Boston University, sir. Economics and East Asian Studies."
Vance's eyebrows went up in a performance of delight so exaggerated that Zhang Rui, down the table, lowered his glass to watch.
"Boston University," Vance repeated, for the table. "Economics and East Asian Studies. Listen to that." He turned to his guests with the grin of a man producing a card from his sleeve. "The waitress has a degree in East Asian Studies, gentlemen. In Boston. Isn't that something?" Then back to her, and the grin thinned. "Sure you did."
Two words. He dropped them almost gently, which was what made them land the way they did. Sure you did. Not an argument β there was nothing in it to argue with β just a public adjustment of her, downward, in front of four men and a harbor full of lights, as if her whole education were a story she told at tables for tips and he had kindly decided, on everyone's behalf, not to believe it.
The room went quiet in a way Jasmine felt in her teeth. Wang Zhiqiang studied his plate. Marco, at the door, had gone very still. She was aware of her own breathing, and of the towel over her arm, its weight absurdly tripled.
"You know what, Jasmine-from-Boston-University," Vance said, "I think the floor is a little crowded in here. Why don't you go find something to do in the kitchen. Polish something. We'll wave when we need β " he searched for the word and found the cruelest available one " β service."
She should have gone. Every rule of the job, every therapy invoice folded into the envelope drawer at home, said go. Bow out, let Di handle it, survive the evening the way she had survived all the others, by being smaller than the moment required her to be.
But she had not yet moved when Vance, glancing down the table for the laugh his joke had failed to buy, found the table's faces closed to him β Mr. Chen grave, Zhang Rui expressionless, Wang Zhiqiang's courtesy stretched to transparency β and Jasmine watched him make the decision men like him make when a room is slipping: not to retreat, but to raise the stakes until the room has no choice but to watch him again. He leaned back. His smile returned, broader, a showman's smile, and she understood with cold clarity that she was about to stop being a person in this room and become the entertainment.
"Actually," he said. "Wait. Don't go. East Asian Studies. Let's put the degree to work, shall we? Entertain us." He gestured down the length of Table Twelve, taking in his guests like a ringmaster taking in a crowd. "Mandarin. That's what they'd have taught you, isn't it? Or was it calligraphy and β whatever?" He turned to Mr. Chen, expansive, generous with other people's dignity. "Mr. Chen. Help me out here. Our waitress says she studied your language at a great American university. I say β " he spread his hands " β I say she can count to ten and say thank you, like the girls in the airport lounges. So let's make it interesting."
He looked at Jasmine then, fully, for the first time all evening, and she wished immediately that he hadn't.
"One hundred thousand dollars," Vance said. "Cash. Transfer. Whatever you want. One hundred thousand dollars, Jasmine, if you can speak β " he held up one finger, and his voice took on the slow, clean diction of a man dictating terms he has already won " β one complete sentence. In Mandarin. One. Real words, real grammar, not menu talk, not ni hao off a takeout box. One complete sentence, and a hundred thousand dollars is yours." He glanced at his guests. "Gentlemen, witness that. A hundred thousand. She can't do it, but witness it anyway β it's the principle. A man honors his bets."
His laugh came a half-beat later, alone.
Jasmine stood with the harbor at her back and felt the architecture of the moment settle into place around her. The hundred thousand was not money to him; it was scenery, a number so large it was meant to be unreal, chosen precisely because he believed he would never pay it β because a waitress who had lied about a degree could no more speak Mandarin than she could fly home across that black water. And it was real money to her. Her mind, unbidden, began to itemize it: the rehabilitation program paid in full; the mortgage brought current in one stroke; the debts burned off like fog. Her hands, she noticed, were perfectly steady. Her heart was not.
She could not afford to be humiliated for free anymore. That was the thought that came, quiet and complete, in her mother's cadence. If this man wanted to make a spectacle of her in front of witnesses, then there would be witnesses β real ones, bound by the word he himself had just used. Witness that, he had said. Very well.