My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

He laughed. She made him laugh. She made him laugh more than anyone he had ever known.

  ‘No, I’m okay,’ he said, the relief filling him up. ‘And you know why?’

  Silence. She was probably shaking her head. ‘No,’ she said eventually.

  He could hear her mother’s voice in the background, pulling her away. She’s my child too, he thought.

  ‘Because if ever I’m down or scared, all I have to do is think of you and then I always feel better. Always. I remember that you’re my little girl and that makes me feel so happy.’ His blinked angrily. There was silence at the other end, not even the shuffling sound of the handset being passed like a baton in a relay.

  ‘Holly?’

  ‘I have to brush my teeth.’ No note of apology, just a statement of fact. It was the way things were. ‘Before you go –’

  ‘Night-night,’ she said briskly, and the panic flew up in him. This was no good.

  ‘Wait, wait – before you go…’ He stopped, not knowing what to say to his faraway daughter. And then he knew. ‘Just remember that I’m your daddy,’ he said. ‘And I will never stop loving you. And whatever happens, and wherever you are, and wherever I am, no matter how far apart, I love you now and I always will and I’m so glad that I’m your daddy. And I am so proud that you’re my daughter. So proud. Remember my face. Remember my voice. Okay,

  Holly?’ Nothing. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Okay, but I really do have to go now.’ Sounding like his girl again. ‘Night-night, Daddy.’

  ‘Goodnight, angel.’

  THIRTEEN

  He paced the floor of his apartment with the counterfeit Lakers baseball cap in his hands, watching the light in her window.

  Pathetic, he thought. Another married big nose eyeing the local talent when the wife has her back turned – what a cliché. Oh, you are such a cliché.

  Just look at you. Calculating how long you should wait before you make the next move. What are you doing? What do you think you’re doing? Nothing, he told himself, the cap in his hands. I’m not doing anything. I’m just working out the best time to give back her Lakers hat. And I’m lonely. It’s okay to be lonely, isn’t it? Being lonely doesn’t break any of the wedding vows, does it?

  It’s all perfectly innocent, he lied to himself.

  But he didn’t go over there. He felt too shy, too nervous, too stupid. As far as he could remember, those kinds of feelings always put a girl off.

  So on Saturday night Bill just waited, and he watched the light in her window, and then it was too late anyway because the silver Porsche arrived and after a while the light went out in her apartment. He turned away from the window and went to look inside the refrigerator. He didn’t watch her leave. He wasn’t going to put himself through that.

  He threw aside the Lakers hat and lay down on his single bed, the master bedroom abandoned now, and he felt ridiculous. He had imagined that JinJin Li was just like him, that most nights she was home alone, the table set for one and the phone not ringing. Missing someone. That’s what he thought she did with her time – sat around missing someone. But perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps JinJin Li was just fine.

  Perhaps it was the man’s wife who was the lonely one.

  The next night he went to her flat.

  It still felt too soon, but when the weekend was over he would be working late or out with clients and the chance would be gone until next weekend. She would probably have a new baseball cap by next weekend. And what was the big deal anyway?

  He was only returning a bloody hat.

  He went over there, to the opposite block of Paradise Mansions, and caught the lift to her floor and then paused outside her door. He remembered the last time he was here – the girl drunk and sick, and him struggling to hold her up as he fumbled for her keys.

  That should have been the end of it. That should have been enough.

  But he rang the doorbell anyway.

  Nobody came. Thank God for that. He could hear music inside, but nobody came and Bill was about to escape back to his safe lonely life when the door suddenly flew open and there she was in all her wide-eyed beauty, and he knew that it was simply not true that the Asian face is unreadable because on those high-cheek-boned northern features, on that Dongbei ho face, he could see surprise, and a bit of pleasure and a lot of wonder. Her eyes seemed to shine when she looked at him. Maybe she liked him, he thought. Or maybe that was just the way she looked at the world.

  Bill had never seen a face that was so expressive, a face where so much was happening, a face that said so much. And it said, What is this big-nosed pinky doing at my door?

  He held out his yellow-and-purple excuse. ‘You forgot your hat,’ he said.

  She took it from him. She had small hands. Extraordinarily small hands for such a tall woman. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Tse-tse.’

  ‘Bu ke-qi,’ he said. And then the awkward silence. He defensively struggled to fill it. ‘What do you know about the Lakers anyway?’

  She thought about it. ‘NBA. Magic Johnson. Yellow shirts,’ she said. ‘The Lakers are basketball. Kobe Bryant. Shaquille O’Neal.’

  ‘That’s more than me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about the Lakers.’

  ‘LA,’ she said. ‘LA, California.’

  He really liked her. He felt as if she had just opened up her eyes and seen the entire planet. ‘You didn’t have to leave, you know,’ he said.

  A flash of irritation in her eyes. ‘That lady,’ she said. ‘That lady, she said I’m Manchu.’

  He didn’t know much about Manchuria. About as much as he knew about the LA Lakers. He knew Manchuria had been in the Dongbei, the north-eastern region she came from, and that it had been colonised by Mongols, Manchus and the Japanese. But although he didn’t know much, he knew enough to know that Tess Devlin had a point.

  JinJin’s face was not typically Chinese. It was easy to believe she carried the blood of some high-cheekboned invader, and easy to understand why she was so touchy about it. It was like telling someone on a kibbutz that they looked like a cossack.

  ‘I think she said you look a bit Manchu,’ he said, playing it down.

  Now he was really getting on her nerves. ‘But I’m not Manchu.’

  He held up his hands in surrender. This wasn’t going great. But then she tossed her baseball cap on to the back of her head and smiled, a smile that somehow broke the enchantment cast by her looks. It was a bit of a goofy grin because her teeth stuck out slightly, and the dentists of the Dongbei had been careless with her, or maybe her parents had other things to worry about, like finding food for the table, but that smile was full of warmth and humour. And if that toothy, goofy grin took the edge off the classic beauty that resided on her face when she wasn’t smiling, then it replaced it with something better – or at least something that Bill liked a lot more.

  ‘Please come in,’ she said, with the scrupulously polite formality she was capable of, stepping back to invite him into her apartment. And suddenly he felt very married. Did he really want this to happen?

  He wasn’t cut out for this game. That was the truth of it. All his plotting, all his calculating, all his watching from his window – when it came to the crunch, when it was time to go into her flat, he just didn’t have the heart to go through with it. You see, he loved his wife.

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Early start tomorrow.’

  But she had made her mind up.

  ‘Please come in,’ she insisted. ‘I want you to try my dumplings.’

  This was too much. Just too much.

  ‘Oh no, I can’t, I couldn’t,’ he said in a weak voice.

  ‘Please,’ she said, and he was struck again by her adherence to form, as though there was a strict code of etiquette here that had to be obeyed, and somehow it made her impossible to resist. In a daze, he found himself entering her apartment, and it took his brain a few moments to realise that when JinJin Li offered you dumplings, that really was all she was offering.


  The smell of dumplings filled the air and the flat was full of people. All of them young women. Apart from a child, a tiny child, a sturdy crop-haired toddler who staggered between the legs of the girls of Paradise Mansions. There was a gap at the back of his trousers where his fat little bum stuck out to make it easy for him to do his business.

  They were cooking dinner, which seemed to consist exclusively of dumplings, all these small packets of dough that were being filled with pork, fish or vegetables, and then fried or steamed.

  Most of the faces he recognised. These women were not strangers. The tall taxi dancer from Suzy Too was at the stove, pulling dumplings from a steamer with one hand, and fast frying a pan of dumplings with the other. She waved at him.

  The woman who had tapped a number into her mobile phone and offered herself for peanuts was playing on the floor with the small boy. She pointed at the child and laughed. She seemed a lot happier than the last time he had seen her, and he realised that he hadn’t seen her smile or laugh when he met her before, surrounded by all that fun.

  There was another one he thought he recognised but could not place, an alarmingly thin girl in a mini-kilt who was washing up dishes in the sink. Where was she from? And then he saw the monogrammed handbag nearby and got it. It was one of the Louis Vuitton-addicted teachers, who he guessed had perhaps found a sponsor since the last time they’d met. She glanced up at him, but gave no sign of recognition. Why would she? He had been just another guy in Suzy Too.

  And there was someone else – not one of the young women he remembered from out in the night, but a face he had seen when she was putting the rubbish out, or chatting to the porter, or strolling the aisles of the local Carrefour supermarket, or when she was going off with her father. At least he had thought it was her father.

  She was the plain girl in glasses that he had seen leaving with the old man in his BMW, and she had seemed to be from a different world to the rest of them. She was knitting now, and it made her look more like a fifties housewife than a kept woman. But she wasn’t from a different world to the rest of them. She was from the same world.

  ‘Neighbours,’ JinJin said, ever the perfect host. ‘All the neighbours. Making xiao long bao. Shanghainese dumpling. And jiaozi dumpling from Changchun. Like ravioli. You know?’

  He knew. ‘I know.’

  ‘Please to try.’

  JinJin found him a seat between the girl in glasses and the woman with the kid and brought him a cold Tsingtao. The child held up a scratched metal car and Bill took it. ‘Ferrari,’ he said, ‘very nice.’

  The one in glasses was called Jenny Two. Jenny Two? Yes, Jenny Two. The one with the boy was Sugar. ‘I think we met,’ he said, unsure if mentioning it was the right thing to do. He was sure JinJin could have told him. ‘How are you?’ he asked Sugar, and unfortunately she told him.

  ‘Sometimes I have to lock myself away from my family,’ she said, quite matter-of-fact, watching Bill play with her child. ‘My mother and father and son. I can’t be with them. Because of my work.’ She paused, taking a breath. This was what they did, he thought. They bottled everything up for so long that when they finally let go, it all came pouring out. ‘Last night there was a man in Suzy Too,’ said Sugar. ‘An Australian. And when we left he wanted to go to casino. And I said – oh no, no casino, we just go to your hotel. But he wanted casino and he lost.’

  Bill nodded. He lost at the casino. What were the chances of that?

  ‘Then this morning he gave me ten US dollar,’ Sugar said, and at first Bill thought he hadn’t heard her right. Ten dollars? ‘And he said, “What can I do? Everything else is gone.” And I was good to him.’ The tears came and she blinked them back. Her child looked up at her, the little metal car in his hand. ‘It’s not enough, is it?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Bill said quietly. ‘It’s not enough.’

  She nodded. Her son held out his toy as if to comfort her. ‘So sometimes I have to lock myself away from my family,’ she said, taking the scratched toy Ferrari.

  Jenny Two put a protective arm around her and Bill looked away, unwilling to intrude on this personal grief and unable to offer any words of comfort. Ten US dollars for your body. Sugar was the poor relation, he learned, bouncing between Jenny Two’s spare room and her parents’ apartment. The rest of them all had someone. The rest of them all had some kind of sponsor. And while the world he lived in would certainly disapprove, having some kind of sponsor was better than being paid ten US dollars for your body.

  He looked over at JinJin and she smiled and he immediately felt better – he was getting used to it now, that toothy grin that revealed her soul in a way that the cool, poker-faced beauty she wore when climbing into a Porsche never did, and never could. He was getting used to her smile but he thought that he could never get tired of it.

  He had been wrong about her, he realised, pulling a book of crossword puzzles from beneath him. He had been wrong about all of these women, the jinseniao in the niaolong of Paradise Mansions. All the pretty canaries in their golden cage.

  They might spend nights alone waiting for the call. And when they were back from the jewel-box of the Shanghai night, back from the restaurants and the cocktail bars and clubs of the Bund, back from it all and finally home alone, they might sometimes feel second best, and they might suffer all the indignities of being a married man’s mistress, of going to bed with someone but usually waking up alone.

  But they would never be lonely, not in the way that he was lonely. This was their city. And the girls of Paradise Mansions had each other.

  It was a different kind of karaoke bar to what he was used to.

  Bill had accompanied Shane and clients, all of them Asian, to glossy joints in the old French Concession, but the karaoke bar that the girls of Paradise Mansions favoured was just a warren of plain little boxes in a Gubei backstreet, and the neon sign above the door was not in English, and there were no pretty girls employed to applaud middle-aged Taiwanese businessmen for drunkenly murdering ‘My Way’ in Mandarin.

  Bill and the girls crammed into a room the size of his wife’s walk-in wardrobe and ordered fruit juice all round, and a Tsingtao for Bill.

  Sugar had stayed home – she had a spare room in Jenny Two’s place that she shared with her son – but the rest of them were there, studying the songbook menus in earnest silence, like famished souls who had unexpectedly found themselves in a five-star restaurant.

  He leafed through the leather-bound book on his lap and understood none of it. There were hundreds of Mandopop and Cantopop standards, but nothing – he realised with profound relief – that would require him to sing.

  Watching JinJin seize the microphone and stare intently at a screen where an Asian man and woman were walking hand in hand down a beach with tower blocks in the background, Bill at last understood the attraction of karaoke bars to the Chinese.

  The karaoke bar offered privacy in a country where privacy was scarce, and freedom of expression in a culture where expressing yourself too freely could get you a bullet in the back of the head, and the bill for the bullet sent to the folks back home.

  JinJin launched herself into a tearful Mandarin ballad, a song that he deduced could only be about undying love.

  When the song was over, the taxi dancer – Jenny One – leapt up and tried to wrestle the microphone from JinJin, who refused to let it go. They barked at each other in Shanghainese. JinJin won, kept the microphone and began emoting her way through another overwrought ballad, flushed with delight, watching the little ball bounce across the Chinese characters as a woman on the TV screen gazed mournfully out of a window. JinJin’s voice was not bad, but it had a tendency to crack at the big climax.

  Jenny Two looked up from her knitting.

  ‘She has a beautiful voice,’ she murmured, her eyes gleaming behind her glasses. ‘And a beautiful face.’

  Bill nodded politely. He certainly agreed about the face.

  ‘I have neither,’ said Jenny Two, smilin
g happily. ‘But my husband likes me anyway. I am very lucky. He is very old.’

  Bill marvelled at his own naivety. ‘North block, right?’ he said, and she nodded, showing teeth that protruded beyond cute and into dental disaster.

  Bill could see the 7-series black BMW parked in the courtyard of Paradise Mansions, and the well-groomed, sixty-something driver who never got out. He had seen Jenny Two running to the car, a look of innocent delight on her face, and had always assumed it was a wealthy old man taking his plain student daughter out for dinner on the Bund.

  Jenny Two just didn’t carry herself like the others. She didn’t have the look. But Bill liked her a lot. There was a gentleness about Jenny Two, and she seemed to quite enjoy playing the ugly duckling of the group. And when she stood up to hold a formless length of blue wool against his chest, he saw that she had a hard, compact body, and that she was the only one of them with real curves. And she was nice. Bill could understand why some old taipan would take a shine to her.

  ‘Eet eez always these way with JinJin and the karaoke,’ sighed Jenny One, flopping on to the cracked sofa.

  ‘Where’d you learn to speak English?’ he asked her, already guessing the answer. The answer to almost every question in Paradise Mansions was ‘a man’. I met a man. Or more than one man.

  ‘I took language class,’ Jenny One said. ‘In bed. Best place to learn language, no? I have two French boyfriends. The first – he eez young and poor and I love him very much. But he eez young and poor so I finish.’ Tears sprang to her eyes, undermining the casual harshness of her words, and she dabbed at them with a little paper napkin. They were boiling with emotion, these women. It was always laughter and tears with them, Bill realised, often in the same sentence. ‘The second eez rich and married and then he go back to Paris.’

  Bill guessed that the Paradise Mansions flat must have been a goodbye gift from the rich and married Frenchman. That’s why Jenny One could afford to live there and yet still go home alone. She had a sponsor, even if he was long gone. ‘He called for a year and then he didn’t call any more.’ She looked at Bill searchingly. ‘Why do you think he stopped calling?’