by AnonYMous
You painted the story of us with your words; how we would always be connected by an invisible thread of love and that nothing would ever break such a strong union. To prove it, you had given me a silver ring earlier in the day and, when I asked which finger I should put it on, you had replied, ‘Whichever one it fits. Your choice—entirely up to you.’
I placed it on your lips instead, forcing you to make the choice. You slid your mouth down the fourth finger on my left hand, expertly placing it before moving your lips to mine.
It was the early 1980s—the end of our final year of school and our worlds were about to separate. While I was still figuring out which course I was going to take, you had already been selected for yours.
You climbed onto the bed, licking my calf muscles and reaching for my upper thighs, your fingers massaging the inner muscles and making me writhe. You reached my stomach and licked my belly button, watching me closely the entire time. I was shivering with lust and tried to reach for you, but you took my wrists and held them down above my head on the bed.
You knew I loved that, Tomas, and you smiled into my eyes and watched my helplessness.
And then you stopped.
This was our game. That you stopped there without going further, for a little while.
I woke at dawn and lay flat on my back and stared at the ceiling. It was obvious I had to leave Henry and move away from our blatant lie of love. In retrospect, I began to see that our relationship had started to slide when Chrystal started working for Henry. His late-night meetings had become more frequent as had his business trips interstate, always with Chrystal in tow. I eventually got up and showered, letting the warm water soothe my sadness while I stood motionless, angry and very much alone.
In the foyer downstairs I placed my black Amex on the counter, to test whether Henry had cut it off yet. The sweet smile on the clerk’s face proved otherwise and, as I signed the docket and waited for the receipt, I smiled, too, but for a different reason.
I was thinking about the Christian Lacroix dress in one of the Hilton shops I had seen a few weeks ago. Ha, that could be a departing gift, a goodbye to my history with Henry. I knew if my sister Lili were here, she would have encouraged me to spend the $3000 by telling me I was worth every cent of it. It was tempting, but I decided that what might ensue would be bittersweet.
I wasn’t ready to go home. It also was too early to go to my favourite teahouse in the Old Town, so I caught a taxi to Fuxing Park to lose myself in the extraordinary theatre played out by the older residents of this district.
I sat and watched in awe as an orchestra played Beethoven in perfect rhythm, as red sashes swirled around ballet dancers, as a single man displayed impressive strength with slow controlled yoga poses and hundreds of people performed their tai chi. Chairman Mao believed this form of martial arts was crucial for the health of his people and they still continued to practise it here, long after the end of his regime. I knew that tai chi was essentially a defence discipline, performed in slow motion, and realised that I was practising my own version, in my head.
My bag vibrated and I saw a notification from Facebook on my mobile phone. There was a private message from my closest girlfriend, Emma. I noted her updated avatar showing her newly acquired cottage on a beach near Byron Bay, near the border between New South Wales and Queensland. I felt such a strong longing to be able to dive into the surf in the photo and swim with all my heart.
‘What’s news Evie? Can’t reach you on your mobile and your landline answers with that droll voice of what’s his name—zzzzzzzzzzz. Message me when you get this. Miss you.’
I inboxed back with, ‘Do you want to chat on Skype tonight?’
Her reply was instant and we agreed on a 6 p.m., China time, link-up.
I wondered if I should I go back to Australia. Or even back to Canada, our family’s original home. Perhaps I should take a flight over to Lili and finally see the old village house in southern Turkey that she had painstakingly brought back to life; she’d sent me a photo showing the wonderful ruins she’d fallen in love with its walled garden of fruit and olive trees.
I tapped to update my Facebook profile and changed my ‘relationship’ to single, while thinking cynically that I should be able to change my ‘place of residence’ to ‘it’s complicated!’
It was more than complicated and I knew I was just further delaying going home. I thought gym would be a great way to start and exorcise Henry from my mind. Remembering I had left clean gear in my locker, I walked the six blocks and took a shortcut through Hair Lane, as I called it, because in summer street barbers would set up makeshift salons and cut people’s hair for 10 kuai—under two US dollars. I reached Huaihai Middle Lu and crossed over to my gym on the corner.
The instructors were pleased to see me and, because of the way I was dressed, they assumed I had been on a trip. I guess I had tripped in a way. I smiled, and said hello as I walked past them and into the change rooms. Then it was straight over to the row of running machines. I plugged in my iPod, stood on the treadmill and started walking. After three minutes I turned the dial nearly to the far right and started to run. Fast.
Dates, times and scenarios were flooding my head. I wanted to run faster to outdistance the jumbled mess, but I realised I was going at my capacity and that trying to run any faster could not fix what was broken.
Henry’s trips to Europe had been more recurrent in the past year, I realised; his mood swings I had simply put down to exhaustion. Then again, I was probably right with that thought. He and Chrystal had no doubt been spending every waking moment together when he was over there. Bastard.
Seeing eight kilometres on the indicator, I turned the speed to a slow walk, lifted the towel from the front of the machine and wiped the sweat from my face, neck and arms. A couple more minutes to cool down then I made my way back to the change rooms. I was so deep in thought, walking with my head down, I literally bumped into my close friend Ben.
‘My god, Eve,’ he said. ‘I was getting worried about you. Did you get my texts? Are you okay?’
I lied and said I’d misplaced my phone and had only just found it. He clearly didn’t believe me, so I said, ‘Let’s meet in Rehab in, say, half an hour?’
He smiled at our private joke, but his eyes were questioning. He nodded and walked towards the weights room.
We had named the breakout area ‘Rehab’ when we had first met two years ago. I had dropped a weight on my foot and Ben had been the first to help. I had limped into the breakout area and he had tended to the injury with genuine concern. The swelling was almost immediate and we’d sat and talked while waiting for the ice pack he had placed around my ankle to reduce the swelling so I could ease it back into my gym shoe. When I said we talked, I mean we chatted non-stop.
I discovered that Ben had been living in Shanghai for seven years and had become quite established as a travel and portrait photographer. Our friendship developed quickly and, whenever he was in town and I wasn’t travelling with Henry, we spent most of our time together. He had the sense of humour that I adored and was so wickedly funny and cheeky that, in the beginning, I had thought that if he were heterosexual and I had met him at a different time in my life, my attraction to him may have been played out very differently. The more frequent Henry’s business trips were (and now I knew why), the more time I spent with Ben and we had become very close friends.
My studies at Jiao Tong University had extended into a journalist course and Ben had landed me a few freelance writing jobs with some of his clients. The first time we worked together he had asked me, on a whim, to accompany him on a photography assignment to Hainan Island in the South China Sea. He told me he was photographing butterflies and he watched my enthusiasm without understanding the meaning behind my smile. The three days in the Jianfengling rainforest there were extraordinary—we saw some of the most rare and brightly coloured butterflies, while Ben captured the magic of it all so beautifully.
On our second night, as
we were scrolling through the photographs on his digital camera, I saw the iridescent green in the wings of a butterfly. I don’t know if it was the heat or the light, or the whisky that he had placed in front of me, but suddenly, amidst a storm of tears, I told Ben about my love of butterflies, about Tomas—and about our baby, Ezra.
My friendship with Ben was secured in that very second and that’s when he decided to nickname me Papi, short for his favourite French word, papillon—butterfly.
While waiting for him now and rehydrating on water, I grabbed my iPhone out of my bag to check my email. There were twelve new messages and I saw they were from sites promoting various products that my online buying had linked me to. As I was deleting them, I saw one from my friend Amelia who was living in Beijing with her partner and pregnant with their first child. I touched ‘reply’ and asked whether winter would be a good time for me to visit, before the birth of her baby. I wrote briefly about my current situation, and that I had left Henry.
I had met Amelia and Tony at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend a few months before Henry and I were married. Those days seemed a long time ago, when Henry was still in love with me. At the time he owned a boat and Amelia and Tony had joined us on a number of weekends motoring around the canals and barbecuing freshly caught fish on whichever part of Moreton Bay we decided to anchor for the evening. Before we left for China, Amelia told me she and Tony were trying for a baby and I was thrilled when I found out she was pregnant. I knew they both would be fabulous parents.
There was also a long email from my sister Lili in London. This one I wanted to spend time reading a little later, because her stories were always filled with hilarity; I wanted to be able to distance myself, however briefly, from my emotional chaos and to savour her words.
Ben bounded in as he always did, his energy nearly exhausting me. He kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘Now tell me your news. I’ve felt so miserable not being able to speak to you over the last few days. So, I’m not going to let you out of my sight until you tell me something very bad and devilish.’
I laughed and said, ‘Well, how bad would you like me to be? I could make something up and you could continue it. Want to play that game?’
Ben burst out laughing and said, ‘Oooo, yes please!’
‘Okay. Once upon a time there was a devastatingly drop-dead gorgeous man called Ben. Ben met an even more devastatingly drop-dead gorgeous girl, Eve, at the gym and they became BFFs. They shared so much time together that they could almost second-guess what the other was going to say next.’
I sighed and looked sadly at Ben.
‘Oh my god, Eve! Has that bastard done something to you? What happened?’
Ben had disliked Henry when they’d first met; he had apologised to me at the time, saying he didn’t like Henry’s arrogance. Our meetings had subsequently always been just the two of us, with the occasional guy that Ben had picked up along the way.
‘Remember Chrystal? Yep. More’s the point, he did something to her, and it’s been going on for a long time.’
‘Whaaaat?! Chrystal? I never did like her. I knew she was trouble when I met her last year. You two are total opposites. I can’t believe he’s done that to you. She’s a moronic ugly toad!’
Even though I was terribly sad, his words made me laugh. I grabbed his left hand and kissed it and said, ‘I do so love you. You always say the right thing at the right time. I only just found out. And now for the devilish part.’
I proceeded to describe the scene the previous night at Face Bar.
‘Fantastic. Brilliant. How perfect, to say that in front of his old boss. What are you going to do? Apart from staying with me until you decide.’
I sighed and replied truthfully, ‘Right now, Ben, I don’t know what to do. I might go and see Amelia in Beijing before she has her baby. Then I’m not sure. I might have to go back to Australia, unless I can possibly organise some work here.’
‘We’ll sort something out,’ he said as he hugged me. ‘But right now, I’m going to take you back to your place and we can pack up your stuff. I’m cancelling all plans for the rest of today and we’re going to nut this out together. You’ll be safe with me. Come on, lovely, let’s go.’
All of a sudden I lost the anxious feeling that had been making my stomach churn for the past two days. I knew Ben was right: I had to move out straightaway and make some decisions about what my next move was going to be.
We drove across the river and, as Ben pulled up outside the gate of our home, I suggested that I go in first, just to make sure Henry hadn’t returned.
Opening the front door, I took off my shoes and stared across the marble floor past the antique Chinese cabinets and silk rugs to my enormous oil painting which filled a third of the wall. I named the painting The Wise Man because of the wisdom depicted in his eyes; I spent a minute staring into those eyes, then I stepped on a splinter from the smashed Ming vase. The rest of the vase had been swept into a cardboard box and placed under the entrance table; Henry’s travel bag was missing from its normal place beside the telephone chest. There was a cold feeling in the house.
Feeling by now like an intruder, I tiptoed into the kitchen and, suddenly strangely starving, I opened the fridge and dunked my finger into the honey jar. The smooth sweet taste was comforting, and a contrast to the frigidity I sensed all around me. I texted Ben the all-clear.
We went to the bedroom and I instructed him to place my red suitcase on the bed and what clothes to pack while I sat in a kind of trance on the old chair with my arms wrapped around my bent knees and my hands clasping my elbows. Dragging myself off the chair I walked into the bathroom, picked up a towel and pressed it to my face. I was sobbing into it when Ben walked in. He enveloped my body into his and I let all the sadness fall into the towel. We stood like that for some time before I stopped heaving and my sobbing stalled into little gasps.
‘Come on, Papi, let’s just go. We can come back and get the other things you need later.’
Feeling like a lost child, I picked up my handbag and followed Ben, pulling my red suitcase out the front door and down the stairs to the laneway.
Ben’s penthouse apartment was in an old converted Chinese house up one of the tiniest lanes off Maoming Lu in Luwan, not too far from the Face Bar. His charm was reflected in his furniture and his books; his creative brilliance was on display in the origami miniature statues he had made. On every wall he had hung photos taken on his assignments. The large black and whites were my favourites. One photo of me, which he had taken on my birthday the previous year, was hanging in his foyer. I studied it and thought about how much my expression had changed over the course of two days.
There was a pergola over the rooftop garden and Ben had installed a retractable louvre roof that would automatically close when the rain fell on it. I smiled at the red silk embroidered cushions on the day bed, remembering how I had pleaded with him to buy them, even though he had wanted the green cushions instead. To me, Asia represented reds and oranges and butterflies, yet Ben was more inclined to choose the greens and blues that reminded him of the freshness of the rainforests he had photographed all over the world.
We sat there with a glass of wine each and I tried to relax in the sun while Ben plugged his iPod into his supersonic music system. Slow jazz played out of the six speakers that he had hidden around the garden. If it was any other day, I thought, we would have been laughing about Ben’s love antics or discussing his next photographic assignment. Today, though, Ben had other things on his razor-sharp mind.
‘So, I think the plan for today, my darling, is to work out what you are going to do.’ While we’d been driving, Ben said, he’d been thinking about how I could earn some extra cash. ‘Do you remember Alice from Malaysia? She’s my friend who commissioned me to photograph the devastation in Aceh after the tsunami. I could chat to her and see if somehow you and I could collaborate on my next gig. You could write the words for my photographs. What do you think?’
‘Oh Ben, I think your photographs tell their own stories. Words would lessen the power of them.’ I was touched by his offer, though, and it sparked an idea. Perhaps, I suggested, he could ask Alice if she had anyone covering the Eurasian Art Exhibition in Beijing in about six weeks. ‘It could be good timing,’ I added, ‘as I might be going up there anyway to visit Amelia.’
Ben immediately picked up his phone and, when she didn’t answer, he left a message for Alice to call him. Then he turned back to me. ‘What are the dates for the exhibition? I’m wondering if there’s a chance I could do something up there as well. We could travel together. Eeek!—Watch out Beijing! Perhaps I could shoot the “behind the scenes” of the exhibition to go with your story?’
I gave him the details for the exhibition and having sorted that out in his mind, his thoughts returned to my financial needs. ‘My cleaner is useless. I know you won’t let me give you any money. So, would you consider doing some light housework in the short term? Helps me, and gives you a salary.’
‘Thanks, that’d be great. The whole divorce thing is going to be horrific, and I know Henry will draw it out as long as he can.’
Ben picked up the backgammon board with eyebrows raised. This was our ritual and sometimes we played countless matches well into the night. We always started out with the same moves, Ben protecting his home base while I played a racing game.
At one stage I had two pieces off the board waiting to come back on and then my next throw showed a double four. I had studied a little feng shui and believed that the number four was inauspicious, which it is for some Chinese people, as its pronunciation is similar to the word for death. I looked pointedly at Ben as I placed the two pieces on the fourth triangle in his home base. ‘Coincidence?’
Ben laughed and scolded me for choosing to see this as a bad sign. ‘Stop it, Eve, you’re being superstitious. Four can be a positive number. Anyway, it totals to an eight, so there!’