NVK

by Temple Drake

  Though she looked European, he decided to speak to her in his own language. “What kind of person brings a suitcase to a nightclub?”

  “You saw him too?” Her Chinese was unfaltering, and almost without accent.

  “In the men’s room. He spoke to me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “It was strange. He was talking about the way your life can change, in unexpected ways.”

  “You don’t actually know him, though.”

  “No.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Something about change being scary.”

  “It was his suit that was scary.”

  Zhang smiled.

  When he first walked up to her, she’d had her back to the bar, the points of both elbows resting on its gold surface. Now, though, she turned towards him. Her eyes were dark, almost black, but her hair was like a fall of light.

  “Your Chinese is excellent,” he said. “Have you been in Shanghai long?”

  “I like learning languages. I’ve always been good at them.”

  “How old are you?”

  “How old do you think?”

  He looked at her for several long seconds, and she met his gaze, unblinking.

  “Twenty-four.” He hesitated. “An old twenty-four, though.”

  “Meaning what?” Her look had tightened. He had said something that interested her.

  “You were born old. It’s there in your face. How do they put it in English? An old soul.”

  “And you?” she said. “How old are you?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Of course.”

  “But your wife lives in another city, and you hardly ever see her.”

  He smiled, then glanced at his phone. Three new messages, but nothing that couldn’t wait. “Are you with anyone?”

  “No,” she said. “What about you?”

  “I came here with some business colleagues. They wanted to see Shanghai at night—the bars, the girls…”

  She was watching him, amused. Her teeth were white and even.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” she said. “This place is getting loud.”

  He finished his cognac, then followed her through the crowd. Black leather jacket, short black skirt. Black ankle boots with chunky heels. Everything she wore seemed a setting for the blonde hair that fell in gleaming tangles to her shoulders. She turned down a narrow passageway. The left-hand wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling fish tanks, and small sharks swam this way and that, their sinuous gray bodies gliding through the brightly lit blue water.

  “Your colleagues won’t miss you?” she said.

  “They’ve been drinking all evening,” he told her. “They won’t even realize I’ve gone.”

  They took a lift to the ground floor.

  Out on the narrow street it was dark and warm and clammy, and the air smelled of cabbage that had been boiling for hours. September in Shanghai was still a kind of summer. As they crossed the pavement, a white Lamborghini pulled up outside the club. Its doors lifted like insect wings, and three Chinese girls in knee-length boots and miniskirts got out. She glanced at him. He kept his face expressionless. Upstairs, in the air-conditioned air, the whites of their eyes glowing in the ultraviolet, it had almost felt as if they had met before. As if they knew each other. Down here, in the murk and steam, they were strangers.

  “Should we get a taxi?” she said.

  He took out his phone. “I have a car.”

  He called Lu Chun Tao, his driver. Seconds later, the black Jaguar drew level. Chun Tao was twenty-six, with a pearl stud in his left ear and hair that was shaved at the sides and swept back on top, and he had been in Zhang’s employ for almost a year. So far, he had proved himself reliable.

  They climbed into the back, and Zhang gave Chun Tao an address. He looked out of his window, and she looked out of hers, but the gap between them was so charged that it seemed they were already touching. The city slid past, the molded concrete sides of flyovers floodlit by pale green or lilac neon, the hundred-story buildings topped with horns or spikes or balls. She didn’t appear to be impressed by any of the usual things—or even by Shanghai itself. His chauffeured Jaguar would not be enough, nor would his $2,000 Prada suit. No, it would be something else, something he did not intend. A phrase he used. A gesture. Some look that came and went in his eyes. He had been stripped of all his advantages, but it didn’t bother him. He liked having to rely on chance and intuition. He liked the not-knowing. He shouldn’t talk too much, though. He should make her talk.

  “Did you go to the club by yourself?” he asked.

  “I was there with a friend,” she said. “He left early. He met someone.”

  Her face was still angled away from him, and he could only see the bright gold hair, one cheekbone. The edge of her mouth.

  “But you stayed on,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “It didn’t worry you, to be alone?”

  She gave a little shrug. “Shanghai’s safe enough.”

  “Even so. Men can be annoying.”

  She turned to him, and as they held each other’s gaze mauve light washed through the car’s interior. The whites of her eyes seemed silver then.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Somewhere quiet,” he said.

  The car eased down off the Yan’an elevated highway and into the dark tree-lined streets of the French Concession. She opened the window. Stagnant air flowed in.

  “Do you mind?” she said. “The city smells so good at night.”

  “If you like drains,” he said. She smiled.

  The chatter of cicadas came in waves, louder and louder, like something that might explode.

  * * *

  —

  The Jaguar dipped down a steep concrete slope and into an underground car park, where the shiny dark green floor was slick with water. The car’s tires squealed as Chun Tao turned right, past a pillar.

  “This is where you live?”

  For the first time, she sounded wary, and Zhang felt he should reassure her.

  “No,” he said. “This is a private members’ club.”

  Private members’ clubs were places where politicians and entrepreneurs could meet discreetly, without being interrupted or observed, places where gifts could be exchanged and deals could be done. There was no entrance as such, only an unmarked lift.

  Zhang asked Chun Tao to wait. He didn’t say how long they would be.

  “I thought private members’ clubs were only for men,” she said as they stood by the lift.

  He nodded. “Usually.”

  Once upstairs, they were shown to a room that was at the end of a long, hushed corridor. There were vases of fresh lilies and cedarwood armchairs upholstered in gold brocade. Traditional lute music tinkled out of hidden speakers. A picture window framed a little spotlit forest of bamboo and a wall of rough brown bricks with water running down it. At the foot of the wall was a rectangular pond filled with carp. He sat down on one of the chairs and watched her move towards the window.

  “This is perfect,” she said.

  “Not too quiet?”

  “No.”

  Two glasses of Hennessy X.O arrived. As she stood with her back to him, looking out, he once again sensed the force field that surrounded her, invisible, magnetic.

  He asked what her name was.

  “Naemi,” she said.

  “Where are you from?” He was aware of the need to keep his questions simple. His unpredictability would come from somewhere else.

  “I’m Finnish,” she said. “My mother was Sami.”

  Zhang wasn’t familiar with the word.

  “The Sami are nomads,” sh
e told him. “They can be found in the northernmost parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and also on the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. Sami people used to make a living from herding and hunting reindeer. From fishing too. They were believed to be skilled in the art of magic. Laplanders, they’re sometimes called.”

  Zhang tasted his cognac. “But you grew up in Finland?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve never met anyone from Finland,” he said. “What are Finnish people like?”

  “We’re supposed to be undemonstrative. Reserved. There’s a myth about us—the myth of the silent Finn.”

  “But it’s not true?”

  “I don’t think you can generalize.” She turned from the window. “Are Chinese people really inscrutable?”

  Zhang smiled.

  “And your family?” he said. “Are they still there, in Finland?”

  She shook her head. “My parents are both dead.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No.”

  “You’re alone,” Zhang said. “I’m sorry.”

  She was suddenly next to his chair, and leaning over him. The heat of her mouth came as a surprise, almost as if she had a temperature. She didn’t seem ill, though, not in the least. His heart speeding up, he put his hands under her jacket and drew her closer.

  Later, she moved back to the window and looked out into the garden.

  “I like the wall with the water running down it,” she said. “I grew up near the water.”

  He joined her at the window.

  She used to swim in a river, she told him, about half an hour’s walk from her parents’ house. The river was cold, even in the summer. The shock of it tightened your skin against your bones. But afterwards you felt so alert, so alive. They had lived in the country—the middle of nowhere, really. Her eyes lost their focus, and she seemed to swallow.

  “You were a child, then,” he said.

  She nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  There was a stillness, and he thought he could hear water trickling, like the sound you make when you run your tongue over your teeth without opening your mouth. He couldn’t have, though. The window was closed. And anyway, soft music was being piped into the room. “I should go,” she said. “Already?”

  “I have to be up early, for work.”

  “You work?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “I didn’t see you as everyone.”

  She was standing so close that he could feel her breath against his face. There was a single faint line at the edge of her left eye. Otherwise, her skin was unblemished, clear. He moved his hand to the back of her neck, beneath her hair. Then they were kissing. Once again, he noticed the heat of her mouth. Once again, the wild racing of his heart.

  As they took the lift to the basement, they stood against opposing walls, looking at each other, the space between them charged and tingling, just as it had been earlier, in the car.

  Everything they hadn’t done as yet.

  Everything they might still do.

  When the door opened and the car park lay before them, vast and warm and windowless, he asked if she wanted a lift back to where she lived.

  “I’ll take a taxi,” she said. “It’s not so far.”

  His car was waiting, engine running, but he turned his back on it and walked her up to the street.

  “I’d like to see you again.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “Can I give you my card?”

  “No need,” she said.

  “How will you find me? You know nothing about me—” He bit his lip. He hadn’t meant to say so much.

  “I found you tonight,” she said. “I’ll find you again.”

  In a city of more than twenty million, he thought. How was that possible?

  A green light appeared.

  He waved the taxi down and opened the door for her. She climbed in. One hand on the top of the door, he gazed at her. The night smelled of cordite and sulfur, as if people had been letting off fireworks. As if there had been a wedding.

  “Was I right when I said you were twenty-four?” he asked.

  “In a way,” she said.

  “You like riddles, don’t you.”

  “It’s not a matter of liking them. We live with them.” She looked up at him, her lips black in the yellow light of the streetlamps. “We’re all riddles, aren’t we, even to ourselves.”

  He closed the door. As he watched the taxi pull away, he felt oddly torn between regret and relief, and had no idea why.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Zhang reached his apartment complex, it was raining hard. The security gate lifted, and Chun Tao drove through the landscaped grounds and down into the car park in the basement of Zhang’s building. It was almost three thirty in the morning. He asked Chun Tao to pick him up at ten. Chun Tao would probably park outside the complex and sleep in the car, though Zhang didn’t encourage it. He didn’t like the smell of slept-in clothes and exhaled breath. He was particular about such things. But it was hard to see what other option Chun Tao had, given that he lived more than an hour’s drive away, near Hongqiao airport.

  Zhang climbed out of the car and closed the door. It was hot in the car park, but the white lights in the ceiling gave off a muted chilly glow, like ice cubes. The Jaguar moved smoothly away. All was still. A dripping at the edge of his hearing again. The frosted lights unblinking. His phone vibrated, letting him know he had a message. His heart flared like a struck match. Naemi. But it was just a text from one of the European businessmen he had been entertaining earlier. What a night, Mr. Zhang! Thank you. The lift door opened. He stepped inside and pressed 39.

  Once in his apartment, he poured himself a glass of water and stood at the floor-to-ceiling window in his living room. In a neighboring tower, a window clicked from dark to light. Far below, Puming Road was deserted. How could Naemi have texted him? He hadn’t given her his number. She hadn’t given him her number either. She had told him she would find him, though, and he knew he wanted to be found. It reminded him of a game he used to play at school. You stood with your feet together and your arms folded over your chest, then you closed your eyes and let yourself fall backwards. The idea was, someone caught you before you hit the ground. He had always been slender, and his classmate, Wang Jun Wei, who was almost twice his size, would squat behind him, only catching him when he was inches from the ground. He liked to imagine that he was standing on a precipice, his heels on the very edge, a thousand-meter drop behind him. When he let himself fall backwards, he would sometimes have the feeling that he might fall forever.

  IT WAS YEARS since something like this had happened. How many, she couldn’t have said. She leaned against a pillar in her living room, all the lights still off. A glow from the streetlamps fell across the varnished floorboards, the burnt orange broken into blocks by thin black lines. Cool air closing round her. The smell of rich dark earth.

  Zhang Guo Xing.

  She had seen him first, standing at the edge of the dance floor in his dark suit and his crisp, open-necked white shirt. He watched people dancing the way you might watch cars passing on a road, his face relaxed, attentive. She wanted him immediately. Even before he noticed her, she wanted him.

  When he approached her, as she had felt he might, he underwent a kind of change. It was subtle, like the lights dimming in a fancy restaurant. His expression became more subdued, more intimate. He hadn’t imagined he would meet anyone that evening—that wasn’t why he had come out—but he adjusted to her presence in an instant. The unexpected didn’t trouble him. Then he did something that took her by surprise. He spoke to her in his own language. In that moment, he appeared to know things about her that he shouldn’t have known. Things he shouldn’t even have been able to guess.

  She pushed away
from the pillar. Moving across the living room and on into the small room she used as a study, she opened her laptop. She typed Zhang’s name into Baidu, the main Chinese search engine, and was able, in the space of an hour and a half, to assemble a rough outline of his life. Born into a privileged family in Beijing—his father was a high-ranking Party member—he had studied economics at the university. After graduating, he relocated to Vancouver, where he took a master’s degree in business. On his return, he worked for various financial institutions in Hong Kong. In 1998, his mother had a severe stroke that left her incapacitated, and the family put her in a nursing home. At the age of twenty-nine, Zhang moved to Shanghai. At present, he was the senior vice president of a Chinese-owned private equity firm that was based in Pudong. He was married, with one son.

  She clicked Sleep and sat back in her chair. It was almost five in the morning. The rain on the window blurred the city skyline, one shade of neon bleeding into another. If only I wasn’t attracted to anyone, she thought. If only there was no such thing as desire. But she got lonely. She was only human. She smiled to herself. A wistful smile, not much humor in it. Still, she felt reassured by the information she had unearthed. It would be normal for a Chinese man of Zhang’s wealth and privilege to have lovers. He would understand the rules, namely that affairs should be clandestine, finite. He would be adept at dividing his life into self-contained compartments, accustomed to the subterfuge involved. Perhaps, after all, she could afford to take the risk.

  In the bathroom, she removed her photochromic lenses. She knew how her irises must look, the green so pale it was almost colorless. Over the years, her eyes had become more light-sensitive, and there had been a time—decades, in fact—when she’d had no choice but to live at night. Recent developments in science had liberated her, though. Opening the mirror door on the cabinet above the sink, she placed the contact lenses in a small plastic receptacle. Slowly, she closed the door again. The mirror stayed blank as it swung back into position in front of her. She liked the fact that she did not appear. It was a virtue, not a lack or a deficiency. Other people seemed to need the validation a reflection brings, even if that validation was deceptive, illusory, but she wasn’t in any need of proof that she existed.