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whores: that’s the litany I expected. But Frankie said nothing, he just stared. He stared at me the way I must have stared at him that first time.
    “You’re from there, aren’t you?”
    And I knew, from that instant, I had power over him. I was what he wanted, what he aspired to, and could never have. And I’d revealed it all to him, so casually, almost carelessly.
    “That’s it!” Frankie snapped his fingers. “I knew there was something exotic about you. A touch of Merle Oberon.”
    I didn’t go to foreign movies, didn’t know the names of foreign stars. From the way he said it, I assumed he was paying me a compliment.
    “It’s your eyes,” he went on. “It’s the way you walk. Like women in Burma balancing jugs on their heads …”
    “Hey,” I objected, “I don’t do jugs!” I didn’t give a damn about what women in Burma wore for hats. “I’m adopted.” My voice sounded firmer, bolder, the second time. Not I was adopted , but I am adopted , meaning I want you to know that we’ve both invented ourselves, youcouldn’t have found another woman as much like you as I am if you’d taken out personals.
    That night what must have started out for Frankie as a one-night stand clotted into codependency.
    The not-quite-American playboy had plans on a grand scale for the not-quite-Asian novice playgirl. He wanted me to model for Chinese couturiers in Paris and London; to travel with him as his personal assistant to Honolulu for an FHP Board of Directors meeting. I could be the Elastonomics Girl, I could do half-hour infomercials.
    “Trust me, my lovely little foundling,” he said. “A new Hollywood star has to be made, not born.” Blondes were dead; they’d been sent to rerun hell. My un-beach-bunny look was what California was dying for but didn’t know yet. He got so carried away with the plans that he decided he’d make a new Flash movie, costarring me as an orphan who looks for, and with kick-boxing help finds, her long-lost parents. “The world’ll fall in love with you!” he promised.
    “What do you mean, Frankie?” I didn’t need the world to fall in love with me.
    “We’ll call it Farewell, My Fond Foundling ,” he shouted. “That’s it!”
    And later that night, Frankie confided in me his dreams of the Fong Empire he would build by catering to American wants with Asian needs. Chinese need rhinoceros horns and tiger bones and prostitutes for potency. Americans want potency too, but they have to call it love, and they’ll settle for Elastonomics to bring them both.
    Americans convert needs into wants; Asians wants into needs. That was Frankie’s point. It made enough sense. “So when I’m saying Elastonomics on the phone, I’m really saying tiger balls?”
    “Absolutely.” He stroked my cheeks, my throat, my collarbone. “I want to hear tiger balls and rhino horn in everything you say.”
    “Grrr, Mr. Elastonomics.”
    He called me Tiger from that night on.

Frankie Fong was my first mature lover, the first one I didn’t need to get drunk to do it with, my first older-but-shorter man, my first non-Italian, nonclassmate hunk, but that doesn’t explain mesmerism. I didn’t want to manipulate him, like poor old Wyatt. I was putty for him. The charm of Frankie Fong started out as the charm of foreignness, of a continent I couldn’t claim but which threatened to claim me. It ended up the opposite.
    If it had all gone right in those hot last two weeks of August, if Frankie had been genuinely impulsive and asked me to marry him, I would have. Even if he’d just kept me around as his upstate concubine (delicious word), I’d have accepted. I’d have adjusted to his gifts of jade brooches and coral bracelets (“trinkets of value,” he called them, “sew them into your suitcase”). And when the good feelings ran out, I’d have left him so he wouldn’t have to leave me. I am not a jealous person. Whatever I did to Frankie or to others, jealousy was never my