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Most Favored Nation
Pat Dixon
1
On February 14, 2001, Professor Green Boyers kissed his wife Dorothy goodbye.
“I’ll miss you babe,” he whispered, wiping both his eyes with his rather soiled handkerchief. “There’ll never be another taking your place.”
Two years earlier, her doctors had been fairly confident that they had caught her uterine cancer in time. Then, just four months ago, Dotty’s brain tumor was confirmed and operated on. When she came to, she was completely blind and, worse, had to be informed that much of the tumor had been left behind.
As weeks passed, Green--who made it a point to learn such things--observed his wife go through the typical sequence of emotions which both professional thanotologists and pop psychologists had published hundreds of books and articles about. He compared Dotty’s spiritual growth to his own admitted shallowness and more than a dozen times wondered whether anything would lift him from his own morass of self-involvement.
On three occasions, standing alone in the hospital corridor listening to Dotty, he had wept with admiration, while she had made her earthly peace with various people she and Green had both detested. On seven occasions, at her request, he had personally gone to such people’s houses to tell them his wife wished to speak with them before she died. Four couples had made excuses in one way or another, two others had quite graciously agreed, and, of the remainder, the wife had hesitantly acceded while the husband flatly refused to be involved.
To those who came, Dotty’s preliminary statement was essentially the same: “I don’t have time to mince words, and you have other places you’d much rather be. We--you and I--have been thorns in each other’s sides for years, and for most of that time I’ve tended to see myself as being in the right and you in the wrong. Now I can see that some of the problem was created by me, too. I’m not asking you for anything except to hear me apologize. I’m not asking for your apology in return--or for your thanks--or for anything else. I feel that I have wronged you to some extent in my feelings, words, and deeds, and for that I am now very ashamed. I am not minimizing your part in the dispute we’ve had--I’m just owning up to my own childish part--because I’m ready to grow up and move on.”
The irony that Dotty’s death occurred on Valentine’s Day was not lost on Green. Not knowing that this was her final day, he had brought her a heart-shaped box of chocolates. When he had left the hospital without a word, he had handed the box to the elderly nun at the grief counseling office. Then he had walked for three hours before feeling able to drive their car home to their house.
The next evening Professor Boyers was invited to dinner by his department head. He declined that invitation but accepted one for three evenings after that. For the first two months, similar invitations flooded in from his neighbors and trickled in from colleagues at Witherspoon Academy where Green Boyers taught courses in political science and military history.
He was aware that he had “let things slide” for many months, and vaguely made repeated promises to himself to “shape up and get my act together.” Despite their high-option insurance, the bills were staggering, and for months Green often found himself making excuses for mislaying some bills without even opening them: “I’m sorry that it’s overdue, but I’ve just been through a rough time, losing my wife to brain cancer, you know, and I’m swamped with a hundred other bills as well. Can you find some way, perhaps, to remove the late payment penalty?”
Luckily, we didn’t have kids, he sometimes thought. Often, he wished that Dotty--or even he--had had the presence of mind to make full peace with each other. For one thing, she had been far more interested in sexual experimentation than he, and he wished that they could have discussed his reasons for his great shyness and embarrassment about many of the things she had wished to try. For another, he had known for years that his pack-rat mentality had grated on her neat-freakiness, and she must have known that her occasional scoldings and ultimatums had only made him even less willing to change. It would have been good, he believed, to have tried clearing the air on this topic, too.
Looking around his kitchen, living room, bedroom, and home office, Green Boyers was frequently aware that his clutter had gotten much worse since her final hospitalization. He had begun to covet her sewing room and closets shortly after her funeral, but for three full months he resisted the temptation to pack up all of her things and donate them to the Salvation Army or some other charity, for once that was done, he foresaw, “her” space would act like a vacuum or a black hole, sucking both his new purchases and his older clutter into itself.
“I may be a messy pack rat,” he had frequently admitted, “but at least I’m not a drinker or a gambler or a--philanderer.” And Dotty had granted that, but on one occasion, two months before her brain tumor was detected, she had said, “True, very true, but you’re pathological nevertheless. I believe that your acquiring and hoarding behavior is just another form of ‘self-medication,’ similar to that of an alcoholic--or a drug addict. Have you ever thought about seeking counseling?” And he had honestly replied that this thought had never crossed his mind. Now that she was dead, Green began to wonder some evenings whether she might have been right.
Through the sort of male logic that existed before the story of Adam, Green felt that he was able to keep his promise of fidelity to his wife while still gratifying his amatory impulses. One night, two months after Dotty’s death, he found himself staring at the breasts of the redhead who gave the local television weather report. As far as other women were concerned, he decided that it would be all right to “look--and even videotape--so long as I don’t touch.”
The next day, after Green’s classes were over, he drove twelve miles to another Connecticut village and purchased copies of Playboy and Penthouse at a small drug store. On his way toward check out, he noticed a rack with dozens of comic books whose covers resembled those of his magazine--young, pretty, huge-breasted females, cavorting either with virtually no clothing--or with clothing that looked painted on.
The next week, he found himself in a local comic-book store purchasing back issues of a dozen such publications. It was then that he noticed “action figures” for the first time. When he left the shop, besides what he jokingly called his “paper dolls,” he carried busty five-inch-tall plastic figures of Catwoman, Danger Girl, Angela, Lara Croft, and Fathom. At home, while he took them off their “cards” and arranged them near his computer, he smiled to himself that he would certainly be careful never to put any of their tiny weapons (which their cards’ warnings said “may present a choking hazard”) inside his own mouth.
The following week, Green did an Internet search for similar plastic figures and, for the first time, found himself on elBay, an electronic auction site. Within half an hour, he had discovered the wide-eyed, helium-breasted plastic figures of Hong Kong, with their huge hairdos of every imaginable color, apparently representing females found in some kind of Japanese comic books. Roughly half of them carried one or more samurai swords. Within an hour, he had bid on six of these. Within the week, he had bid on twenty-seven and “won” fifteen. Twice in that time, it crossed Green’s mind that Dotty would not have been pleased, but (he reasoned) he was not hurting her, nor was he being unfaithful to her memory by touching another woman. He also consoled himself that each one of these figures, despite the high charges for shipping and handling, cost him less than dinner for one at even a cheap local restaurant.
“If I can’t spend my own money on what pleases me, what should I do with it now?” he said aloud the second time that her hypothetical displeasure came to mind.
He found himself checking his various electronic auctions during the day while working at Witherspoon and, whenever some like-minded person outbid him, he “prudently” used the elBay search engine to discover if identical items were being auctioned elsewhere at--“for the time being”--a lower amount. Almost invariably that was the case. Not only did the same seller have the same item “coming along just a few days later,” but often four or more different sellers had identical items wending their ways “through the pipelines” of the auction process.
It was while consulting some of these other sellers’ “other auctions” that Green learned for the first time that R-rated plastic figures existed, and once he had signed on specifically “as an adult,” he discovered that similar pneumatic figures existed, which were partly or wholly nude and which were even more provocatively posed than his previous purchases. And with the assistance of this newly discovered “mature search” engine at elBay, Green slowly began to understand what he imagined Dotty had been trying to unlock inside him. While part of Green’s brain thought the use of the word “mature” was misapplied, with another part he imagined his soul expanding or growing toward a greater toleration and acceptance of diversity--such as Dotty might have approved--and he half-consciously associated this change with an undefined Zen influence that these small plastic Chinese figures of Japanese comic-book heroines might be radiating to him.
“At any rate, what I’m doing is a lot better than what Roger Gallon does,” he told himself, recalling that his former office mate took the train to Manhattan every summer--as soon as his wife, Ilsa, flew to Germany to visit her folks--and spent a week riding on the Circle Line boat, “picking up chicks.” Roger kept hundreds of photographs of himself and his teenage companions in his desk--and would boastfully show them to selected colleagues.
In his morally compartmentalized way, Green Boyers often lectured his students about the ironies of “our” democratic nation’s practice of granting special privileges to a wide range of totalitarian regimes because it has suited “our national interests” to do so--and China was high on Green’s list of countries he believed should not be favored thus. Once, in 1998, Green had been told by an adjunct teacher, whose own doctorate was in modern Chinese economic history, that many Chinese businessmen believed that their special status had been granted by President G. H. W. Bush because Beijing had blackmailed him. “Hundreds of high-placed people I spoke with think their government tape-recorded the president’s lovemaking with his secretary/mistress while he was their guest,” the adjunct had said--and Green had often repeated this hypothesis to his own students.
His own “trafficking with the enemy” never occurred to him. Green did feel a bit let down when the first shipment of his Chinese figures arrived after a two-month wait. Both the descriptions at the auction sites, despite their faulty English, and the photographs posted there had led him to expect something better than what he at last received. The “flesh tones” of the figures were quite bizarre, he thought, and the paint itself had been hastily and rather too thickly or too thinly applied in most cases. Only the eyes of the figures uniformly showed a level of painting skill that exceeded what he could easily have done himself.
If only better materials and more care could have been used, he thought, touching the bare breasts of his new possessions. Clearly this was a market-driven item, and clearly other sellers must have better quality, he decided, and so he began looking yet farther afield. At last, in both Germany and California he found what he sought. These figures were eighteen inches tall, not the usual three-to-seven inches of Hong Kong figures, and they were said to be made of something much better than plastic called “cold-cast resin”--whatever that might be, he thought with a little shrug, vaguely imagining that it was porcelein, strengthened in some way with the sticky material from spruce trees or pines.
Apparently other bidders thought they was special, too. The bidding wars often were quite intense, especially in the closing minutes. Green himself thought of these competitions as “pissing contests,” adopting a phrase that Witherspoon’s newest superintendent had often used during his faculty convocations.
On several occasions Green found himself suddenly bidding five to six times higher than his opening bids, partly to secure a painted figure for himself and partly to keep “her” from being possessed by another man--or woman. He had, during his first week of bidding on elBay, initially decided what he wanted to pay for an item and had stayed with that, win or lose. Soon, however, he had noticed that for some “especially desirable” items a stealthy bidder would suddenly appear in the final two or three seconds and snap it up. It was as if--after Green and one or two others had slowly over the course of five or six days bid up to their maximums--some unseen sniper, crouched in some tree, had suddenly outbid them all and swooped off with “their” prize. In reaction to this sort of thing--and in anticipation of its happening with other items--during the final ten minutes of some auctions, Green often bid far higher than he had planned. On a few occasions he half wondered if this was what it was like to be a compulsive gambler or a slave to cocaine.
The result, for better or worse, was that he found himself the “winner” of several of these larger and more expensive figures: eight sold from San Francisco and three sold from a German city whose name he had never heard or read before. Within seconds, Green transferred payments from his bank account in Connecticut to the sellers’ accounts thousands of miles away, and, feeling rather pleased with his bidding prowess, he printed copies of the pictures of each of his eleven new trophies and taped them to the edge of a bookshelf beside his home computer.
Nine days later Professor Boyers was moderately amused when a large package from Germany arrived for him--along with a smaller one from San Francisco. He opened the one from San Francisco first, and discovered that it contained six slabs of styrofoam taped together, similar to the packing style of his figures which had arrived from Hong Kong. Inside the hollow cut in these slabs, he found a large painted figure of a bare-breasted woman wearing an unfamiliar kind of Japanese helmet with a metallic grid in front of her face.
What the--? thought Green Boyers to himself. At the top of the packing box he found a plastic sheet covering a label with his name and address on it. This, he discovered, was an invoice for the item he had bid on and won. Yet the enclosed figure was not that item. He compared the pictures hanging along his bookshelf with this figure and saw that it resembled his expected figures only in the area between its shoulders and its waist. Everything else about it was different--helmet, boots, gloves, weapons--and, he felt, far less desirable.
With some hesitation Green opened the package from Germany and found that the order was correct. The packing style of styrofoam chips and tiny airbags was similar to what American sellers often used, and these were the items he expected--and they were almost as attractive as what he had thought they would be. The colors were almost the same, and the features were only slightly coarser than what the small digital photographs had planted in his mind. But, he thought, at least these are an improvement over what I bought from Hong Kong. He shrugged and reminded himself that Dotty had often remarked that real life is full of compromises and “settlings for”--for people and things that are far, far less than perfect. On several occasions Green had been certain that he was on Dotty’s mind when she had said this.
It took Green four days of e-mailing San Francisco to receive instructions about returning the figure which he had not won. Somehow, he was told, his item and that of another buyer had been shipped out incorrectly. Ultimate Earthly Treasures Inc. would “strife for correcting” this matter as soon as possible, wrote their representative in English far more broken than that used by the German company or any of the Hong Kong sellers. And, yes, Green Boyers would be compensated for shipping and handling costs, including insurance for two hundred U.S. dollars, if he would kindly return “these” item to UET Inc. as quickly as possible.
He did so. A week later, inside a huge cardboard box, three more purchases or “winnings” arrived for him from UET Inc. Again Green found layers of styrofoam that he associated with Hong Kong. Luckily, all of the figures were items which he had paid for and expected. Unluckily, two of them had damage.
A boot and a glauntleted forearm of one beautifully painted, bare-breasted figure were separated from the bare limbs where they had once been glued. Small problem, thought Green, looking at the deep sockets in the boot and the glove; I can easily reglue them.
The other damaged figure presented a greater problem: its head and left arm had been snapped off cleanly where they had not previously been glued, and the surfaces of the broken areas--the middle of a neck and the elbow of an arm which held an oriental sword--were too small to guarantee a strong join.
The relative perfection of Green Boyers’ third bare-breasted figure did little to settle his feelings. He waited two full days before sending UET Inc. an e-mail describing the problems he had found. By then it was Friday, and he had the weekend ahead of him to consider whether he would attempt any repairs.
By the following Tuesday evening, when Dimitri, UET Inc.’s representative responded, Green had already tested his abilities to be handy. With a series of small drill bits he had made four holes in the centers of the broken neck and elbow joint surfaces of his “injured little lady,” and, using plastic tubing cut from ear swabs, he had “pegged” or “splinted” the injuries from the inside to provide structural support for his repairs. In fact, looking at the results, Green felt quite proud of himself and would not, had such an offer been made, have accepted a substitute figure for this one. What Green did receive was Dimitri’s personal apology and a vague promise of a partial future refund.
In reply Green wrote a detailed 1500-word narrative about his restoration activities, making no attempt to conceal his pride at the result and concluding, “the lines where the breaks occurred are still visible, like scars that will never fully heal to look like normal skin tissue, and I may decide to go to a hobby shop some day and buy paints and a small brush to touch them up--but I may also just leave them ‘as is,’ as a testament to the successful ‘micro-surgery’ that I have performed.”
Three weeks later, the remainder of his order--including the “lost” figure that was sent to another buyer by mistake--arrived from UET Inc. Again Green’s reaction was mixed. The figure that had been sent elsewhere was in perfect condition and was exactly what Green had hoped it would be. All of the others had various problems with their condition--one had a leg separated at the hip socket where glue had given way, while the others were all decapitated like the figure in his second shipment--and had, as well, an array of other “glue breaks” or “clean breaks” of the cold-cast resin. This time Green waited four days before e-mailing Dimitri the news, deliberately using short words. At the end of his message he added:
“I like these figures. I want to fix them myself, but I find this very sad--some person did very nice hard work to make them look so good. They are very nicely painted. And somebody broke them. I am sure that they were broken BEFORE the box was sent. Some broken pieces are inside a different hole carved in the styrofoam that you pack with. Maybe you have a person in your San Francisco company who is careless. Or one who is trying to make trouble for you. I bet other buyers have similar problems. Many buyers are not handy like me. Many will want all their money back, plus shipping. You might look at the people who pack--or talk to them. Thank you. Green Boyers. P.S. We are having a very cold January here. Lots of snow. Hope you are warm but don’t have mud slides--or earthquakes there!”
Two days later Dimitri e-mailed Green that he was sending him a twenty-dollar refund and thanking him for being such a “clam and good El-buyer”--and Green thanked Dimitri for the refund and posted strongly positive feedback for other elBay members to read about his eight transactions with UET Inc.
Two years in the future, Green Boyers, totally by chance, would notice a tiny printed sticker attached to the bottom of one of his three German figures: “Made in China.” No stickers were on any of his UET Inc. figures, nor had Green ever noticed, either while unpacking them or while disposing of their packing, that the cardboard that had been taped securely around their styrofoam sheets had a single small word on it, printed in capital letters: CHINA. If he had noticed it, he would have assumed it was merely another term for cold-cast resin.
2
On February 14, 2002, three Tibetan monks who worked in a figure assembly and painting plant were given a quick but fair trial. They all, when asked, admitted that they had occasionally packed broken figures for shipment to San Francisco, although they denied breaking any of them.
They were, within fifteen minutes of sentencing, taken outdoors, and, with forty-seven of their fellow prisoners as witnesses, they were shot in the backs of their heads. The irony of its being Valentine’s Day went unnoticed by all.
