The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

She made him order cakes and coffees at the Starbucks in the lobby of his office building. Yanzu felt strange speaking English to the Chinese kids behind the counter; he could see them straining to understand him. Two coffees, please. What kind? Normal kind. Their earnest frowns unsettled him. Why was a Chinese guy speaking to them in broken English? One of them tested him with pidgin Japanese, her expression brightening as if expecting greater comprehension. He nodded, still without understanding. The girl behind the counter was only a teenager, but he could see her polite serving-staff smile turn first to bemusement and then, swiftly, to scorn. From her vantage point midway between the revolving-door entrance and the lifts, she would be able to see him come in every morning, dressed in his expensive suits and carrying the new calfskin attaché case Violet had given him; and she would giggle each time she saw him because she would know that he couldn’t even say what kind of coffee he wanted.

  He turned back to look at Liz; she smiled and nodded encouragement. They sat down at the little round tables and had their lessons there, away from his office, surrounded by teenagers surfing the net on their laptops. There was breezy music with guitars playing in the background, and Yanzu thought he could understand the words of the chorus.

  She took him to a café, just off Hollywood Road, run by a friend of hers. His English was coming along in leaps and bounds, she said, but he needed to use it in new situations, speak to other people; he was getting too accustomed to her speech patterns. The owner of the place was there when they arrived, an Italian. “Darling,” he said, his vowels expansive and confident. He leaned in to kiss her on both cheeks, his hand resting on her waist even after she had pulled away a little. “I haven’t seen you for months—where have you been?”

  “Franco, this is my new student,” she said, moving aside to introduce Yanzu. “Actually, not that new anymore. We’re going to have our lesson here today—isn’t that fun?”

  They were shown to a table in a quiet corner, from which Liz could survey the rest of the room. Yanzu could look only at her; the wall above her head was painted with a grapevine trailing through a pergola. She was talking excitedly, flitting from one subject to another—about things on the menu, how they reminded her of trips to Italy; about the impending typhoon moving across from the Philippines; the new scooter she was thinking of buying. Occasionally she would wave at someone but Yanzu did not turn round. He felt comfortable like this, visible yet unseen. He liked the idea of people wondering who Liz was having lunch with; the possibility of recognition emboldened him. As he watched her trace her finger down the wine list he realized that she, too, was excited by the novelty of being here with him in this shady alcove. There was a glinting quality to her laughter, a sunniness he had not discerned before.

  “It’s been an eternity since anyone took me out to lunch,” she said. “Although I suppose this is technically a lesson and not a social occasion!” She closed the wine list and then brought it to her chest, holding it against her as if guarding a secret.

  “Why don’t we pretend this is a date?” she said at last, smiling, the corners of her eyes creasing into crow’s feet. “Is that all right with you? It’ll be more fun that way. You’re going to do all the ordering, communicating with the waiters—everything. Just take charge!”

  He took his time studying the menu. Each item was accompanied by a brief explanation; it wasn’t so difficult to understand what everything was. The waiter, another Italian, took the order without fuss. Liz whispered, “Your English is miles better than his.”

  At home that evening, he tried not to sound boastful as he related this triumphant episode to Violet, but there was no disguising it: he heard the pride in his own voice as he repeated what Liz had said, in English.

  “Your English has definitely improved,” Violet said. “She sounds like a good teacher. Is she old? She looks old. That’s what your PA says.”

  10.

  Yanzu cannot pinpoint the exact moment their affair began. Was it the accidental meeting of fingers—an awkward clash—over the bread basket? Or perhaps while waiting in the cab rank at rush hour, feeling the first heavy drops of rain that would soon become a thunderstorm, foreshadowing the typhoons that would come later in the summer. Or did it occur in the middle of a sentence, when, arranging subject, object and verb, he found that everything fell into place and he was finally speaking?

  Beijing is a city that I miss. I miss Beijing. It is cold but beautiful in the winter. It is where I grew up.

  Yes, I understand.

  Really?

  Yes. It’s difficult being far from home. It’s hard for me too. You’re doing really well—carry on.

  Hong Kong does not suit me neither. Hong Kong does not suit me either. I am not, not—sorry. I don’t know the word.

  As he fell into silence Yanzu recognized in the expression on her face a quality he knew too well: she was alone in a foreign place, and this is why she would fall into a relationship with him.

  11.

  “Come to my book club,” she said one day.

  They had slept together four or five times by then, usually in the afternoon when it was easy for him to be away from the office. They got together in her cramped apartment in Happy Valley, their ankles and wrists and elbows knocking painfully against the bookshelves that stood on either side of the bed, only a foot away. Her bed smelled of milk. They lay naked, on top of the rumpled sheets, listening to the air conditioner drip onto the ledge outside the window, a staccato ta-tap, a miswired heartbeat. When he looked at her, he thought he could see the same expression of solitude he had recognized at the beginning: she was adrift, and this comforted him.

  It was July now and the air-conditioning was too weak to cool them properly.

  At first their times together felt like a gift which he accepted gleefully, childishly, but like all children, he soon wanted more, and when she turned down his dinner invitations he was surprised by the strength of his disappointment, by how quickly he had outgrown the newfound thrills of their midafternoons together. He wanted to go out with her, accompany her. The excitement of their outing to the Italian restaurant remained with him, but that had not technically been a date, as she had pointed out at the time. He needed to correct that imperfection. In the rest of his life he would not have tolerated this lack of satisfaction. He thought of how he behaved in meetings, calmly insisting on the execution of every last detail, on the absolute nature of success. It was the only way he knew how to conduct himself. Yet now he was staring at a ragged mass of unachieved aims, staring at failure.

  He wanted to know her foreign friends, wanted to risk being seen with her; he wanted to be part of her life. He tried to ignore the prick of annoyance he felt at her evasiveness and his inability to pin her down. “Restaurants in Hong Kong are such terrible value,” she said, “certainly the ones you’re suggesting. Bad French food at those prices? In this heat? I don’t think so. Much prefer some back street noodle shop. That’s more my style. No gwailos around.”

  When she had friends visiting from abroad, she never explained who they were.

  Sometimes she promised to call but didn’t.

  He would text but get no reply.

  She would forget to turn her phone back on, or fall asleep early—sorry, so disorganized, so tired.

  When, therefore, she unexpectedly issued the invitation to her book club, Yanzu was not sure if it was a battle he had won, if he had bent her to his will, or if it was merely a favor she was granting. But it didn’t matter. As she wrote the address down on a piece of paper and handed it to him, he tried to feign nonchalance. He kept the piece of paper folded in his wallet all week, looking at it from time to time to check that he had memorized the address. At the top of the torn-off fragment of paper it said “Conduit Road Ladies’ Reading Group.”

  It was just to practice his comprehension skills, she’d said; he could just sit and listen, see how much of the discussion he could understand—an extended, relaxed lesson. But he knew it was not merely a
n informal class—it was a declaration of sorts, her way of showing that she, too, wanted a more public existence with him.

  He arrived late that evening—a meeting that had gone on too long. Liz winked at him and raised her glass when he came in, but there was no space next to her, so he had to slump on a beanbag on the far side of the room. There were five women there, spread out over a sofa and two armchairs; four nearly empty bottles of wine stood on an Indian chest in the middle of the room. Yanzu tried to scribble down words and expressions that he’d never heard before, especially when Liz spoke. She was speaking with a freedom and rapidity he found unfamiliar—with him she was deliberate, careful, caring. Here she rushed ahead, talking over everyone else, which made him smile at first; but soon he found he could not keep up with what she or anyone else was saying. Sometimes one of them would raise her voice, insisting on a point; other times they would all break into laughter, sharp and brilliant as shattering glass, but Yanzu would never be sure of the reason for their disagreement or joy. He would discern individual words here and there, the odd phrase, but all of a sudden, Liz was no longer speaking a language he could understand—the language they had shared. Occasionally she would catch his eye and smile—a flash, here now, then gone—but then her attention was swept up again by her friends, the book, the wine: her life. None of the others looked at Yanzu, and yet he continued to pretend to jot down notes, and sometimes even nod as if in agreement. He looked at what he had written: lines remembered from his lessons, nothing to do with where he was now.

  There was a lull in the conversation, someone flicking through the pages of the book. Liz looked at him, and he thought maybe this was the moment she would introduce him to her friends; maybe someone would ask him what kind of work he did, where he was from. Answers to imaginary questions began to form in his head. I am the CEO of a group of companies I founded myself. Yes, I suppose you could consider me successful. Our turnover? Oh I don’t know, I’d have to check with my PA. No, no, of course I’m not a billionaire, but I’m comfortable. Property, mainly, and renewable energy, but I’m always open to new ideas. I am building a house in Clearwater Bay, designed by a famous architect. Right now I live on the South Side of the island. Yes, it is very agreeable there.

  But the woman found what she was looking for and began to read. It began with “The passage of time …”

  That was all Yanzu could discern before the words and the conversation began to slip away again.

  The answers he had prepared remained poised on the tip of his tongue; he could feel the words rest there, heavy, redundant. He looked at Liz. She was talking loudly, both arms waving, her face flushed with wine. He had been wrong. She was not lonely in Hong Kong, she was bored. She was a foreigner, she was passing through, she was bored, she wanted adventure. That is why she was with him.

  12.

  “Is it safe?”

  “Yes, of course it’s safe to swim, you big sissy, just jump.” She raised one hand out of the murky sea and tried to splash him. If her swimsuit had not been bright yellow he would not have been able to make out her body. The smog was thick and he could not make out whether her face was pulled into a smile or a frown. He hesitated, pressing his foot against the rope that ran in a low circle along the side of the deck. “The water looks cold,” he said.

  The yacht was anchored in the shelter of a small bay; the island was small, rocky, unapproachable; its vegetation a drab green. The water seemed dark to Yanzu’s eyes, almost opaque. He looked at Liz in the quiet sea, bobbing gently, as she kicked to stay afloat. She was still waving at him, her arm popping out of the water now and then, like a toy, something inanimate. They were far from the noise of Central, far from all the gwailos she claimed to detest, even though she was one herself; far from all the things she hated. They were alone at last.

  She had borrowed the yacht from a friend. “Oh, someone you don’t know,” she’d said with a merest shrug of her shoulders, a gesture that did not countenance further discussion of the matter. “Just concentrate—the sooner we motor off the better. God, you look adorable in your life jacket!”

  He listened as she gave him the safety brief, how to turn the engine on and off, how to work the radio and fire the flares—he would need to know these things, just in case she fell overboard and drowned, she said, or if she got hit on the head and fell unconscious. It would be up to him, then, to keep them alive. They would float, undrifting, on the cold foamy water, swallowed by sea mists, the tops of the high-rises jutting just over the peaks of the steeply sloped islands around them, frustratingly out of reach. And when they perished—from dehydration and exhaustion—their story would be one of those freak tragedies that filled the nether pages of the South China Morning Post, sandwiched between world news and features, one of those chilling but faintly comic episodes that people would talk about in the office for days afterwards: did you hear, those people died, were shipwrecked, just five miles from Chek Lap Kok; and in the gutter press there would be speculation—maybe they were lovers, why else would they be out there, alone. And some people would wonder: who died first, and was he or she forced into cannibalism?

  “Will you pay attention?” she yelled from the helm. “I said cast off aft. No, the back—the other end, at the back!”

  He stumbled over ropes, bruised his knee on a hard metallic thing whose purpose he couldn’t discern, felt his leg deaden, then tingle. He did not know where to place himself, whether to stand or sit. When they were clear of the harbor she gave the order to hoist the sails, but as he fumbled with them she darted beside him, nimble, her face flushed with concentration and he could tell that she was impatient to be free and on the move, impatient to be beyond the reach of land. The wind picked up, swelling the mainsail, and she let out a cry, a woooo yeaa as they cut through the waves. He wiped the spray from his face and turned back to look at the marina receding slowly into nothingness. He knew he ought to feel exhilarated, but didn’t. Couldn’t. He tried to remember what she had told him but still he wound the rope the wrong way round the winch. He was a smart guy; this shouldn’t be happening, he thought. He had thought he understood her when she spoke, followed her crystalline vowels and steady rhythms, but now she spoke in a language that left him for dead. Tack, ready about, helm’s a-lee. Let draw. She repeated things, cheerily at first, encouraging, then briskly, as if he were a hindrance, which—there was no point denying it—he was. “Never mind, I’ll do it,” she said, and he knew that her smile was a pretense, betrayed by the frown that cut deep ruts in her brow.

  They sailed through the low cloud and smog that was especially thick that day, obscuring the cheap tower blocks that lined the shore, arranged in dense rows that backed on to each other in terraces. Stretches of mud lay exposed on the hills, bulldozers perched on the slopes. Pile drivers and pylons jutted from the indistinct landscape, but he could hear no noise, just the rushing of the wind. They were leaving all this behind now, sailing further into the fog. It was better like this, he thought, better that he could not see what he was venturing into. He realized that he was in her hands, that she could take him anywhere she wanted, and that would have to be okay with him. Maybe that had always been her idea.

  It was his task to drop the anchor, she said; of course she trusted him. “You’re doing just fine.”

  He watched it slither off the deck, disappearing noiselessly, serpentine, into the water.

  “All gone?” she cried from the helm. “Is it holding?”

  He shouted something—not really a yes, nothing committal, enough to make her think he had done his job, enough to assuage her.

  The yacht took its time to settle, even though there were no waves in the inlet, just a low swelling of the sea now and then, never breaking the surface.

  Of course there were things that he wanted to discuss with her, for example: did she think they could possibly have a life together; did she think about him when they were not together; whether she would stay in Hong Kong for much longer; the fact that he
was planning to divorce his wife; all the places he wanted to visit with her, the countless lists of countries and sights he had drawn up, including Beijing, which he wanted to return to after all these years, now that things had changed there—now that he had changed. They were silly things that were not easy to say in the middle of an English lesson when he was trying to remember the difference between object and subject and clause and subclause. As they sat cross-legged on the deck eating their prepacked BLT sandwiches, she began to talk and he could not find an opportunity to interject. The fog reminded her of her childhood, she said, of all the times she went sailing with her father in the Channel. It wasn’t fog, Yanzu said, it was actually pollution. But she ignored this, said it didn’t matter, it looked like fog. She had learned to sail when she was very young, and her father would take her across to France, to places like Honfleur and Deauville and Le Havre. She could still remember those little towns of sheltered harbors and cobbled streets and shops that sold fancy chocolates that nowadays one could buy in Hong Kong. Tiny overheated cafés that served mussels and crepes, the damp mustiness of her cabin, the smell of seawater and creosote, the warmth of her sleeping bag. Back then it seemed so magical. She remembered, in her teens, sailing back from Brittany and getting lost in thick fog at night. All of a sudden the weather closed in, the wind rose violently and there was heavy rain. She couldn’t see anything except for the occasional glint in the dark when the raindrops caught the light from the cabin below; but all the time she could feel the freezing spray on her face and her hands, numbing her fingers. Her father was getting older then, and was afraid. But she had not been scared, she had loved the sensation of not knowing where they were. It had emboldened her, made her sure of herself. She knew it sounded stupid but she loved the feeling of being between places, of being nowhere. It made her feel she could go anywhere, anytime she wanted, on her own. She would never be pinned down; she would always be her own woman, never dependent on anyone. Being on that yacht had made her realize she would always hate a sedentary life. Sedentary, it means, um, staying in one place, inactive, boring, that sort of thing. She could never stay anywhere or be with anyone for too long. She wanted constant adventure, moving from one place to another.