"Guts of a beggar?"

"Shakespeare. 'A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.'"

"The worms would all be frozen, too," said Grace. And then she realized that she'd forgotten about poison. Maybe OD'ing on heroin or something would be the best way of all. Then at least she would have gotten to try it out before she died.

As wrong as Rachel proved to be about boys and music and understanding anything beyond how to kiss Mr. Taylor's ass so that she was cast in every single play, she was right about the suicide thing.

It's not that Grace actually wanted to flail around and lose control of her bowels and lie there with her eyes cranked open until she was carted away and incinerated-actually, that was exactly what she didn't want to do. She wanted to die young and beautiful, not all messed-up looking. It's just that, well, with suicide you got to choose-what you were wearing, what kind of note you left, how the whole thing actually went down when you slept that sleep of death. If life was all about making choices and taking responsibility for them, like adults were always saying, then why did death get to be something that just happened to you?

Bel-Air, CA.

YEARS AGO, Barbra had picked Charles out as the one among all the young men in his class who would make the most of himself. That was before she'd picked out her English name, before she'd learned to pluck her eyebrows and smooth her hair, before she'd yanked herself out of Taiwan and set out for America.

They were still Wang Da Qian and Hu Yue Ling then, just two on a campus of two thousand. Half of Charles's classmates had been born in China, sons and daughters of tea merchants from Guangdong and government officials from Beijing. And the other half? Mostly children of mainlanders, too, but deposited headfirst, scrunch faced, and squalling, covered in a sticky film of blood and viscera, into the waiting arms of Taiwanese midwives who cooed over them all the same.

Not Barbra. There was no China in her blood. Her mother came from Taiwanese hill people who rode to town on an ox-drawn wagon loaded down with the daikon radishes that the Japanese occupiers pickled and grated and boiled in nearly every dish. She met Barbra's father when he was a delivery boy, picking up produce and freshly plucked chickens for the kitchens of National Taiwan University. He went from pedaling around the markets on a rickety bicycle to keeping watch at the foot of a perpetually bubbling stockpot to presiding over the students' communal lunches, which eventually underwent their own change, going from noxious oden stews to hearty rice porridges when the Japanese were defeated and a new Republic of China government took over.

Barbra had grown up in the college's employee quarters, a too-smart girl with a too-round face, who cursed under her breath in her parents' native Hokkien but still learned to trill out the smooth hills and valleys of Mandarin as easily as she'd mastered driving the university's old Datsun and smiling at the college boys with just enough intention to keep them guessing despite her funny little nose. She could critique Marxism and mock Teresa Teng's overwrought love songs and do most of Audrey Hepburn's beatnik dance and ride a bicycle without touching the handlebars and take a puff of a cigarette without coughing-everything that was important for a poor but ambitious high school girl to do in Taipei in 1973. The only thing she hadn't managed to do was turn the head of Charles Wang.

Barbra had spent the summer working as a secretary at the cannery in Tamsui where her uncle was a supervisor, a summer in which she'd managed to keep her skin pale and lovely by walking to work swathed in a cotton overshirt and hidden under a straw visor. Not once did she venture onto the beach in the bright hot afternoon, even though she'd learned to swim there, where the sands were always crowded with young people. She'd refused any rice at dinner, even though her uncle's wife urged fluffy spoonfuls of it upon her. Instead, she'd restricted herself to a single egg beaten into a cup of boiling water for breakfast and a tin of the cannery's sardines for lunch, and she'd worked all summer for enough money to order the sleeveless qipao that she was finally slim enough to slip into.

When the graduate students returned to campus that fall, she walked into the library off of Zhoushan Road, hair a cap of neat waves, proud of her legs in new flared trousers-the qipao was much too formal for someone else's first day of class-heart pounding at the thought of seeing Wang Da Qian again. Except that she didn't see him. Not through the window of the economics class that he should have been taking as part of his master's degree, not in the cafeteria where her father was shouting at his assistants as they rushed to wipe up a pot of sweet mung bean soup that someone had knocked over when she walked in. Nowhere.

Everyone said he'd gone to America-not to study but to work. It made Barbra love him even more, a love that lasted even though he never responded to her too-carefully worded letters, sent care of his mother, that wished him ten thousand years of luck and praised him for his courage while wondering if he'd be back to honor the new year with his revered parents. Not so much as a Golden Gate Bridge postcard.

She heard nothing more about him at all, despite the fact that she dated one of his former best friends for weeks, discreetly probing for news about Wang gege and receiving, instead, long disquisitions on the possibilities of praxis in a democratic society and endless replays of A Hard Day's Night as they sat side by side on a brown plaid comforter that was all stiff from being dried in the sun.

It wasn't until the last week of the semester that Barbra's detested boyfriend showed up one morning holding a light blue airmail envelope plastered with American stamps engraved with a portrait of Einstein. Philately was popular at the time and several of the boys Barbra was sitting with tried to lay claim to the stamps, but he'd shushed them all by unfolding the letter and showing off a photo of a girl ripped out of a magazine. The captions were in English, but the girl was unmistakably Chinese. She was smiling straight out at Barbra, her head turned towards the camera and her hands holding up the collar of her paisley-patterned shirt as her legs splayed out in a leap.

"Wang Da Qian says that he is getting married to her. She's a model. Wah, just look at her-I should have moved to America, too!"

"I thought you had better taste," Barbra had said, shoving the page back at him.

"It's true," said bookish little Tuan, who later surprised them all by becoming the mayor of Taichung, as he leaned over to pick the page up. "Those long, slanted eyes and those tiny little lips, she's the kind of girl lao wai likes."

"Maybe Ming-Ming is like a foreigner now. Milk in his tea and socks to bed."

"Wouldn't you like to be the one who knows what he wears to bed," said Xiao Jong, waggling his eyebrows at her. Jong always had been too stupid with his own intelligence. Just a few months after those boys had all graduated, he was picked up in one of the Kuomintang sweeps of student leaders with suspected Communist sympathies, and not even his meek little wife ever heard from him again. Served him right.

Barbra flipped the light switch outside her closet door and stepped in, letting out her breath as her bare feet, toes freshly painted, sank into the smoke-blue silk rug.

This, this was her favorite room in the house.

Let Charles talk endlessly about the hidden wine cellar that he'd retrofitted for whiskey. Let their friends marvel over Ai Wei Wei smashing a Han dynasty urn in a triptych of photos that hung on the wall behind a considerably less valuable Ming dynasty vase. Let the other rooms of the house be photographed for that new California magazine with its condescending editor who described Charles as a "small but gracious man." This closet was the only corner that mattered to her.

Having this romantic inner sanctum in a house full of polished glamour gave Barbra the same sensation-something halfway between lust and power-as wearing a red silk peignoir under an austere dress by one of those Japanese minimalists that Charles hated so much.

She was supposed to be packing-"Quickly!" Charles had said, clapping his stubby hands together. "Quickly!"-but she didn't feel like it. Barbra pulled out the little upholstered stool she'd always loved for its brass claw feet and sat down in front of the mirror. She closed her eyes and let the crisp 68 air settle into her skin, then raised her eyelids and held her own gaze for a long moment.

First, the forehead.

Good, still good. One thin line just barely etched across, just enough to show that she wasn't using Botox.

The eyes. They'd always been too round, but now she skipped over that thought. The eyelids were beginning to look loose, but not so much that eye shadow disappeared in the folds. A few wrinkles on the edges and one curved line under her right eye because, though she had been trying for years, Barbra simply could not fall asleep unless she was lying on her right side. Cheekbones still high. Nose, same as always. Small and upturned. All those white women a generation older who went and got nose jobs that ended up looking like her own lamented-over nose made her laugh. How had that become their chosen shape? Her tiny little skull nose?

Her lips were undeniably starting to thin, and lipstick had started bleeding into the fine wrinkles that edged out from them on all sides like tiny tributaries of age, sapping her of the best semblance of youth.

And those naso-labial lines that dropped down either side of her nose and skipped a beat before continuing along the sides of her mouth, dragging it down into a disapproving bulldog frown. "What are you doing on my face?" she whispered at them.

Barbra placed her fingers gently on her hairline, encircling her forehead, and tugged up. Then she reached her thumbs down onto either side of her cheeks, softly, slowly, and pulled the skin back, stopping just before her nose began to splay out. There. This was the face she should be looking at. Like this, she looked better than young-she looked ageless.

"Ah bao! Are you almost done?" Charles called from the bedroom door. Barbra dropped her hands and the years came rushing back-five, ten, fifteen, twenty, until here she was again, a fifty-year-old woman married to a ruined man, sitting in a world that she had built up only to toss away again. Seeing her rumpled jawline reemerge, losing the image of her real, ageless self, was almost worse than knowing that she was going to lose the world she had put together so carefully. The venal optimism that had enabled her to immigrate to America and scoop up Charles and his almost empire as soon as she heard about the helicopter crash that killed his first wife was limited to desperate island girls with no fear or knowledge of the world.

Stupid. How could Charles be so stupid? How could a man who'd made himself so wealthy be so stupid about finances? That was the one thing she'd never suspected of him. Everything else, but not that. She'd known for years that he was unfaithful, but as long as she never betrayed him with her knowledge, that was nothing they'd have to lose a house and a marriage over. She suspected that his factories were not as scrupulously safe as he claimed, but that wasn't something that concerned her. She knew about his prejudices and knew that they probably extended rather further than he let on-especially about the native Taiwanese, especially about her own parents-but those were easy to indulge. Money made everything easy to indulge.

"Wang tai-tai, kuai yi dian la! Ni je me hai mei you kai shi shou yi fu? Mei shi jien le!" Ama shout-whispered as she appeared over Barbra's shoulder in the mirror, a slash of coral lipstick under her beauty parlor perm.

"Yes, I know," Barbra replied, staring back. "I'll be ready in a moment."

Ama, who had been Charles's own wet nurse when he was a child, claimed that Barbra's perfect Mandarin was too tainted with low-country squawk to understand, so in retaliation, Barbra spoke to her only in English, a language that the older woman barely spoke at all. It worked out perfectly well because Ama never wanted to hear Barbra's replies to her faux-polite comments and commands anyway.

"Ah bao." It was Charles. Talking to her in that vaguely disappointed tone that he'd used ever since he first came home and told her what had happened. As if she had been the one to let him down.

"I don't need both of you here telling me what to do. I know, I know, only the important things."

"Ah bao, we leaving soon."

"Wo nu er zai deng wo men."

Barbra burned inside. She didn't care if Ama's daughter was waiting for them. Her last moments in her dressing room and they refused to let her have a moment's peace. She picked up a photo of herself and Charles at the dinner that Hermes sponsored for Saina's last show in New York, the one with all those refugee women and scarves that had gotten Saina in so much trouble. They were turned towards each other, smiling, Charles's eyes half hidden behind the giant Porsche Carrera frames that he'd insisted on getting when he started developing cataracts-how unfair that every middle-aged Asian man in glasses now gave the impression of looking vaguely like Kim Jong-il-her own eyes opened wide, still looking at him flirtatiously after all these years. Well. Maybe she'd feel that way again, but she doubted it would happen packed in an aging car with Ama, Grace, and dunce-headed Andrew.

Bel-Air, CA.

CHARLES'S CONVERSATION with Ama had been humiliating.

In the Mandarin that they shared: "Rong-rong," she said, calling him by the pet name she'd given him when he was a downy little baby wrapped in a fur blanket, "it is good that we have daughters and that they have homes. I am going to go to my daughter's house."

"Oh, Ama, it's nothing. We'll be fine. But perhaps it would be best if you did go stay with Kathy for a little while. Until things blow over."

"But I am an old woman, and I cannot get there on my own. I have the car you gave me, but I don't drive it anymore."

"Maybe Kathy can-"

"No, no, Kathy has too much work. You drive me, and then you are already on your way to your daughter's house, too."

And that was how she gave him the car, the powder-blue Mercedes station wagon he'd bought for his first wife when she'd gotten pregnant with Saina. It was the only car that hadn't been repossessed because he'd sold it to Ama for a dollar sixteen years ago; she drove it once a fortnight to a mah-jongg game in the San Gabriel Valley.

And that was how she told him that she knew he'd lost everything and would be running into his own daughter's reluctant arms. The worst part is that he'd known that she would turn over the old Merc, counted on it.

Charles couldn't have been more embarrassed if he'd woken up to find that he'd regressed half a century and was sucking on her nipple again, a grown man in Armani trying to draw milk out of her wizened breast.

Bel-Air, CA.

SO HERE THEY WERE, the three of them. Barbra, Charles, and his Ama. No longer so young.

And here was the car, a 1980 model, both bumpers intact, gleaming still from the weekly wash and wax that Jeffie, the gardener's son, gave all the Wang family cars.

Cleaned more than she was ever driven, this car was a lady. Her cream-colored seats and sky-blue carpeting made her impractical for anything beyond a polite spin around the block or a tootle over to a neighborhood association meeting four estates down. She might, might consent to a weekend spree down the coast, provided an air-conditioned garage at a La Jolla villa was waiting on the other end. Even after nearly thirty years, her perforated leather interiors remained uncracked and the wood burl along her dash still shone. Her only blemish, really, was one little carpet stain, a resolute Angelyne pink, where Charles's first wife, May Lee, had once let an open tube of lipstick melt in the bright white L.A. sun.

Never, not once, had the gears of her clockwork German engine been asked to cogitate on the notion of driving all the way across the country, rear end sagging with baggage, oil lines choked with cheap Valvoline. But, like the family, she suited herself to her circumstances.

Barbra lugged her own bags down the steps and waited for Charles to come open the back. He was behind her, grunting as he tried to lift the last of Ama's suitcases-a matched pair of classic Vuitton wheelies that had also once belonged to May Lee-over the threshold. Barbra didn't want to help. Let him do it. Ama shouldn't even be here with them. How much was she still being paid, Barbra wondered, and for what?

It was early still. Seven thirty. The quiet time after the dawn joggers had put in their miles and just before the housekeepers started their long walk from the Sunset and Beverly Glen bus stop. A weathered white pickup full of gardeners and lawnmowers sputtered up the street, spewing exhaust onto the same topiaries that they watered and trimmed daily.

Housekeepers and gardeners, dog walkers and pool men, they were the front lines, the foot soldiers. Later would come the private Pilates instructors and the personal chefs, the assistants sent from the office to pick up a forgotten cuff link or script. A home theater consultant, a wine cellar specialist, a saltwater fish tank curator-necessities all.

Charles and Barbra had never understood their neighbors' obsession with bringing services into the home. Why have some masseuse carry in a table when you could just go to the Four Seasons? Why open your life up to more strangers than you had to? Now, of course, there was no need to think about any of that. Luisa and Big Pano and Gordon and Rainie had all been let go, fired, weeks ago. Barbra hadn't told them why. Let them think that she had finally turned into a crazy, demanding Westside wife, unsatisfied with Luisa's immaculately ironed sheets and Gordon's bright, abundant blooms, maybe even pathetically sure that her husband was eyeing Rainie's swinging breasts. She was positive that they'd be rehired immediately, even in these unhappy times. She was equally certain that her former household help had already jointly developed some theory of the Wangs' downfall, something scandalous and unflattering that would doubtless be pried out of them by each of their new employers.

The worst moment for Barbra and Charles was the reveal. The Reveal. That's how she thought about it in the days after-like they were on one of those makeover shows, but instead of finding that their house was beautifully revamped, the hosts had removed their blindfolds and made their whole charmed life disappear.

"Why?" Barbra had asked.

"What why?"

"All our everything?"

At that moment the word our rankled. Charles had never had a problem with generosity-he'd cultivated a casual way of picking up the check before he'd even made his first million-but just then the way that his wife said our brought out something small and sour that he forced himself to swallow, along with the true word: Mine. Barbra had given nothing but her bullish charm to this family-she hadn't made the money or borne the children or even decorated the house or cooked the food. He'd done the first, his dead first wife had done the second, and they'd hired people to do the rest. Nothing was our.

"Yes," he'd said. "All."

"But how? How could you? Don't we have anything saved? We had so-"

"So much. And now, not so much."

He'd said that, and then he'd spread his arms out in a leaden swoop, like an aging showgirl. It had severed something between them, that gesture. Charles had never done anything awkward or unsure in his life. Not in front of her. Not in her eyes. But now her broken heart saw every wrong-footed step he'd ever taken.

"How could it happen?"

"It happened!"

"But how did it?"

"How, how, how! You never ask how it get good, how I make so much money, how I know what everybody want, only how now that it go away! No how!"

Had they always sounded so stilted and childish? After sixteen years in America, speaking English to the children and her American friends-whose company and mah-jongg rules she preferred to those of the mainlander wives of Charles's friends-her own speech had attained a smooth perfection, but when she spoke to Charles, she found herself picking up his broken grammar, and the two of them gradually dropped the private Chinese they had once shared.

"Okay," she'd said. "No more how."

And for then, and for now, that was it. No more how. No more how, and no more house.

Charles couldn't. He couldn't tell Barbra what had happened, how their personal assets-their home!-had gotten wrapped up in the bankruptcy. It was something a true businessman never would have done. That was the worst of it. And now here they were, creeping out of the driveway under cover of dawn with their meager belongings stashed in the back, a troupe of Chinese Okies fleeing a New Age Dust Bowl. He'd always respected this home, kept it sacrosanct. He may have betrayed his wives in body, but he never did so under their shared roof.

Now Charles wanted to curse the land somehow, to cry bitter salt tears that would curdle the earth and kill the thick wall of bougainvillea that shielded the lawn. Any child conceived in these rooms would be an insult to his children; any love found on these grounds would make his own loves into a lie. When some other family moved in, some family whose dollars flowed greenly from their hands, dark thorny vines should spew out of the ground, twisting through the iron gate and out across the grass, choking the magnolia tree, with its generous branches and sweet-smelling blossoms, snaking around the house until all the windows were blinded and all the doors taken prisoner. Gallons of overturquoised water would roil and churn and splash over the charcoal slate that framed the pool, rotting the impenetrable stone until it crumbled and sank, pulling the foundations right out from under the house.

Charles closed his eyes and mentally erased the house from top to bottom, scrubbing the whole thing out in wild strokes, leaving a white patch between the Leventhals' five-bedroom-plus-six-car-garage Spanish Mission and the Okafurs' seven-bedroom-plus-tennis-court Cape Cod. And in that blank space he pictured instead the mountainside estate in China that he had heard so much about as a child.

He could feel Barbra sitting next to him in the passenger seat and knew without looking that she was pulling her cashmere wrap tight around her shoulders though the morning was warm even for September in Los Angeles. A door slammed shut and that was Ama, settling into the backseat with a grunt.

Keeping his eyes closed so the estate stayed in place, Charles turned the key in the ignition and shifted into drive. At the edge of the darkness behind his lids, there was the cliff that had been waiting ever since his doctor warned him about the possibility of his ministrokes presaging something bigger and more devastating. But Charles wasn't afraid. He could negotiate the driveway by feel-the lazy 180-degree curve around the front lawn, then 900 feet of concrete and a pause at the automatic gates before the tires hit asphalt.

Lately, the gate had been slow to open. The crank mechanism groaned and he could hear it sticking, bit by bit. Charles sat, eyes still closed, and thought about a time when he might have noticed that and gone for a can of WD-40 himself, made a Sunday project of it instead of waiting for Pano to figure it out.

Barbra and Ama were both silent. After another moment, Charles lifted his foot off the brake and let the car roll forward. Forty more feet and he'd hit sidewalk, but Charles squeezed his eyelids tighter together. No one ever walked at this time of day. Most of the houses on their block didn't even have sidewalks in front of them, just dipped from lawn straight into street. The station wagon surged on, lowering itself out of the driveway and wheeling into the road. If he kept his eyes closed for long enough, Charles wouldn't have to look at the assessor's hearse of a black car parked hastily at the curb. Maybe he'd even be lucky enough to hit it. At the last minute, though, self-preservation kicked in and his eyes snapped open in time to catch Ama and Barbra looking at each other in the rearview mirror.

Santa Barbara, CA.