Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [6]
A marketing major, I didn’t need the boss to tell me I was very good at pushing his exercise gizmo, but he did. On my last night shift in June. He phoned me at my cubicle from somewhere overseas where tonight was already tomorrow. A kittenish voice came on first. “Hello, this is Cynthia, Mr. Francis’s personal assistant …” I stopped the voice right there. “I don’t accept an order that isn’t called in by the client himself or herself.” I heard a choking noise, then a click, a couple of smothered snorts or laughs and finally “Mr. Francis does not dial calls himself. He is a very busy man.” This time, Cynthia’s words had a speakerphone echo to them. Kids at a slumber party having fun at my expense. “Then he should have known not to waste the time of a busy career woman,” I snapped. “We aren’t your give-us-your-credit-card-number-and-we’ll-ship-you-hard-body-equipment kind of sleazy phone-order operation. If your Mr. Francis can’t get off his butt to place the order himself, he can’t be motivated to lose weight, shape up, turn his life around. You don’t think that we sell Elastonomics to any and every plastic-dropping Joe Schmo, do you? Mr. Francis has to prove to us he’s the kind of client Elastonomics wants. Get that message across. Then have him call us.”
I didn’t hang up. It was a slow night, which meant that a telephone tussle with Cynthia & Her Slumberettes was better than no call at all.
“Jolly good, Miss DiMartini!” A man’s voice came over the phone. A man with a silky, Britishy accent was on the other end of the line, and not a prepubescent partybeast lowering her voice into a manly growl. “Splendid performance!”
“What did you just call me?”
“Anthony Tucciani was correct about you. You have a future with FHP.”
“You know Tony Tucciani? You work for Tony? Is he monitoring us employees? Listening in without my permission, that has to be a felony.”
“Tony? That’s interesting. What if I said Mr. Tucciani is my employee?”
“Who are you, anyway?”
“What if I said I was Francis A. Fong, founder and CEO of Elastonomics? How would you address me?”
“Frankie!” I retorted. “But seriously, who told you …”
The man emitted long, tinkly laughter into the mouthpiece. Then he said, “For an American you have class, Miss DiMartini.”
“DiMartino,” I corrected. “Ends with an o, not with an i like Tony’s.”
“I’ll be in touch. I’m calling from Kuala Lumpur, but Cynthia’ll let you know when, Debby. I may call you Debby, mayn’t I?”
The boss hung up without waiting for a yes or no from me. Given his Masterpiece Theatre voice and vocabulary, I pictured Mr. Francis A. Fong as Bruce Lee playing Hugh Grant.
I didn’t have to wait more than a week to meet him, and when I did, at the Indigo Club, the newest jazz place on Caroline Street in Saratoga Springs, the Chinese part of Frankie wasn’t the first thing I noticed.
Okay, I have to call time out for a confession. Frankie Fong took me to dinner and to bed on the first date. And handed me keys to my first apartment three nights later. It was mesmerism at first sight. Not love; love’s the surrender to guys you grew up with, and Frankie wasn’t like anyone upstate. Let’s say he leveraged me into dependence. You took in the hair, which was blue-black and wavy. You stared. The man had cheekbones, shoulders till Tuesday, a ballerina waist, bulging little buns: all of this you registered in a flash. Then you caught yourself staring, because he was smiling at you.
Frankie hadn’t always been in the fitness equipment business. In his last incarnation, he’d been Francis “the Flash” Fong, star/director/producer of dozens of Hong Kong kick-boxing extravaganzas.
He was born Francis Albert Fong, named for you-know-who, in Hong Kong or maybe in Manila or Surabaya (catching him in a consistency meant he’d fallen in love with one of his wilder inventions), to Aloysius and Baby Fong. Every time he told his life story, he gave himself the luxury of a different hometown. I loved his made-up childhoods. His father,