Last Days in Shanghai

by Casey Walker

  She expelled all her breath in a long sigh, which turned into a cough when she inhaled the hanging exhaust in the city air.

  “Still I call them, and I have to arrange,” she said. “The men go to dinner, the men go to massage. The men go to a banquet, and the men go to karaoke. The important visitors from everywhere need to be entertained. Government men. Business associates. For all of them, ‘entertained’ is girls. The girls are poor and they fall in love with money. They get money and they want more money. One girl says she would rather be crying in a man’s BMW than laughing on his bicycle. Other girls, their stories I cannot talk about. The places they come from. What has happened to them.”

  It was a destitute evening as the sun sank. I nodded at what Li-Li said but had nothing to add. The man in golf attire refused the grilled oysters and chose shrimp rinsed at the curb in tap water. He gnawed them effortfully and spat the shells on the ground. Li-Li asked me for paper. I reached my sweating hands under my pant legs to wipe them on my socks and then gave her my notebook.

  “I know the girls Mr. Lightborn will use,” she said. She wrote down an address from out of her phone. “The girl he likes calls herself ‘Rose.’ If he is in Shanghai, you can find out from her.” Li-Li pointed at the corner of the notebook and added: “I will tell her you will come speak to her. She is not a good person.”

  The way she said the last phrase made me realize we were parting ways: she warned me now about Rose because she could not do it later. She looked miserable, but there was no reason for her to look otherwise.

  “I have concern for you,” she said. She’d seen the look of abandonment spreading on my face. “But what other help I can do? I am no one.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked so much from you,” I said. “It’s selfish. It’s not right.”

  She hailed a taxi. It added to my guilt that her situation was as without promise as mine. The taxi seats were covered in white fabric that looked like bedsheets. My hands were shaking.

  “Perhaps I will call you from Tunxi?” she said.

  “From where?”

  “Home,” she said, not looking at me.

  Earlier, she’d made it sound like she wasn’t going away for the holiday—or I’d just assumed.

  “To Anhui Province the trip takes overnight,” she said. “The trains fill to every corner. It is a very unpleasant obligation.”

  She said something else I didn’t hear. The driver grumbled through the passenger window.

  “If you do not find Mr. Lightborn . . .” She broke off.

  “It’s okay, Li-Li,” I said.

  I thought of her winding farther and farther away from me on a slow provincial train. It filled me with panic I tried to conceal. I held out my hand for hers, but before I’d thought much about it, I grasped her into a hug. Maybe this confused her, but she responded by clawing back into me, her small fingers like pincers.

  “I would prefer not to go,” she offered.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I know that about you.”

  She pulled away.

  “You do not know it,” she said. “And you do not know why.”

  She kneaded her hands and stared into them.

  “I think you are a person who is very . . .” she said. I watched her mouth move, rejecting phrases, swallowing words, like she was trying to get beyond business English and into a more fraught and shaded usage. “A person who is very agreeable to me,” she said finally.

  I met her dark eyes. Her hair had come unstuck from its pins.

  “I hope I can see you again,” I said.

  She took off her glasses to wipe her eyes.

  “Maybe in better conditions.” She smiled thinly.

  “It’d be hard to find worse ones,” I said.

  I kissed her on the forehead. I wondered where she would find herself, a month from now, a year from now—whether still pushing back against Shanghai, or unemployed and evicted, back home in Anhui Province, living with her father. I wouldn’t know. Also unknown to me: her last name, her apartment address, what extra codes I needed, if I left the country, to dial her mobile phone. Or if I didn’t leave, or couldn’t, whose custody she would find me in when she returned—if I was in Shanghai, would she know? And if she knew, would she find me, or could she? Nobody knew the answers to these things. Behind her departing taxi, a street sweeper scraped down the street squealing a song like an ice-cream truck. The tune was “Happy Birthday.”

  DRIVER WEI CIRCLED back into a Shanghai I recognized, past vendors saddled with baskets of cherries and lychees, up Hengshan Road into the corridors of the old French Concession, with gracious trees and wrought-iron balconies.

  “You are fellating with her, but she has no smell,” Wei said, trying to find my face in his rearview mirror.

  “Excuse me?” I asked. His smile was ugly and sincere, and he spoke the line again. I picked the sentence apart, repronouncing every word to myself until I had molded the taffy of his syllables into a comment that seemed to me more reasonable: You are flirting with her, but she has no smile. I assumed he was referring to Li-Li.

  “You like no smell?” he said.

  “Smile,” I said.

  “Smile,” he repeated.

  “Yes, I like her,” I said.

  “Very not special face,” he said. He waved his good hand like he was shooing flies. He dragged a finger up his cheek, and I understood him to be speaking of Li-Li’s scar.

  “You’re going to make me angry, Wei,” I said.

  We passed a stubble of British-themed bars, empty but for a few paunchy white men with shaven heads. Wei looked at the address in his lap and then threw my notebook back at me. He caught me unaware, and the book spun into my chest.

  We came to a halt at the edge of an estate. Above a high iron fence grown over with ivy poked the top of a mansard roof and a row of dormer windows. Some colonial-era banking magnate would make an appropriate ghost of the house—Western adventuring, dancing courtesans. Maybe the new owners still detected an ancient poppy incense in their walls. The commotion coming through the ivy, barely dampened, sounded like the voices of a hundred people.

  “Here is the other girl place,” Wei said. He indicated not the estate building, but a grim alleyway alongside it. “You go take girl with more special face.”

  He held out the hand on his bad arm and gently curled his fingers. He tripled the fee we had agreed upon earlier. I thought some allowance should be made for his suffering, for the medical expense of his twisted arm. But as I counted out what he asked for, I watched his scowling face and thought of Li-Li. I slapped the cash hard into his hand. He doubled over and held his elbow like it would detach if he didn’t hang on. He remained that way long enough for me to feel I’d really hurt him, then got back into his car and nearly crashed as he jerked without signaling into the fast lane of Hengshan Road.

  The estate housed a nightclub in its garden—a band, two bars, an open-air dance floor. People inside were enjoying themselves on this clear, high-mooned evening of mild spring weather. It was an entirely expatriate crowd, incomprehensible Finns and fast-talking French, and I even heard a few phrases of regional American English—a real Texan. The Chinese had all gone home to their families and entrusted the city to the care of its foreign population. I wished my evening took me that way, into a carefree embrace. Calm winds from the west blew out to sea, toward California, my side of the Pacific.

  A few minutes of melancholy shuffling brought me to a crook in the alleyway and a bar where two girls in the neon entry beckoned for my attention. They jumped from their perches to take each of my arms. The one to my left dressed the part of a schoolgirl. She wasn’t quite that young, I didn’t think, but she must have found it in her monetary interest to blur the line between adult and child. Saddled with the attentions of the schoolgirl, I was pawed, too, by her friend, who was exactly as attractive as she needed to be for a clientele of drunks. She had a puckered, slightly misshapen face, with her nose and eyes scrunched together and
a painted-on dress that didn’t hide what was either a corset or a girdle underneath. I took a guess about how old they were—eighteen for the schoolgirl, maybe younger for the vamp. Neither looked Chinese—not Han, anyway—and it wasn’t Mandarin they spoke to one another. The girls had well-lotioned skin the color of polished teak. I showed them the address in my book, but they pulled me toward the neon doorway. I shrugged them off and caught a delivery boy on a bike. He looked at my book. His hands zigged and zagged miming several turns down the alley. He made it seem very far.

  I walked the delivery boy’s way until I found a long lane, too narrow for a car to enter. Ground-floor industry spilled onto the tiny pathway. A bike repairman glowered at me, greasy and reattaching a fallen chain, and then turned his unhappiness back to his splatter of scrap parts and rusty tools. The hunkered woman sweeping the street with a brush of twigs looked at me with no kindness, as did four men playing cards and drinking yellow rice wine. Three-quarters of the way down the lane, I found the building, a three-story apartment with two lit windows. The bottom floor was a closed scrap shop showcasing a miscellany of bolts and canisters behind barred windows. The second floor housed a whole family—grandparents, parents, and kids alternating at the window, calling past me to their neighbors. It was the top room I was interested in, lit by a star-shaped paper lantern. I climbed a rusty staircase, bolted to the side of the building like a fire escape. With every step, it squealed like it might fall. The sound echoed between the buildings. My tongue felt swollen to the roof of my mouth.

  Before I reached the top of the stairs, a woman opened the door. She watched me climbing loudly toward her. She wore a canary-yellow dress belted with a white sash. Her straight hair was long and dark, and she had coddled pale skin and heavily made-up almond eyes.

  “You’re Rose?” I said. I introduced myself.

  She didn’t shadow my movements with suspicion or even show much curiosity. Rose lived in a single room, with a barred-in balcony off the kitchen and a translucent beige curtain separating the front half of the apartment from the bedroom. I scanned the full square footage and felt an instant affinity with her priorities. She could box up and be on the run inside ten minutes and not have left anything behind.

  We sat at a plastic folding table next to her single-burner range. Rose put on water for tea.

  “You look like a man I know,” she said. Her English was halting but nicely enunciated.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “He’s American,” she said. “He looks like you.”

  “Like me how?”

  “Like an American,” she said, “like all of you.”

  I could only guess her idea of the American look. I assumed she meant some wide-eyed aspect that money and naïveté paints on your face.

  She poured our tea to steep and lit a cigarette. I thought she was perfect for her profession: she’d made herself over into an idealized construction of Chinese femininity. I waited for signs her stage-managed beauty would wear at the edges. But even her cigarette smoke didn’t want to leave her and instead rolled off slowly like a fog. She didn’t hurry me, but I felt her time would prove expensive, that not a minute could be had for free.

  I put my elbows on the table, cupped my tea.

  “You and Li-Li?” she said. “Old friends?”

  “Not old,” I said.

  “She speaks very little,” she said.

  “I admire that,” I said.

  “My feeling about her . . .” Rose said, then she stopped. “It is not important. She is your friend. We are different people.”

  “There’s been a series of misunderstandings,” I said, “and now it would help me to speak to Mr. Lightborn.”

  “She says Mr. Lightborn is your boss,” Rose said, “but he is not a boss you can call?”

  She looked more amused than anything else. She might never have had a pimple or turned her face down for anything more sour than a lemon.

  “I work for him indirectly,” I said, which felt true enough. “It’s a complicated business.”

  I watched her take a hard-boiled egg from a bowl on the table and break off the brown shell. She tore the white open and, with a spoon, scraped the powdery yolk into a glass of milk. I tried to explain my situation a different way, but she stopped me.

  “What you say is good enough,” Rose said. “I do not care about this, not one way or the other way.”

  She drank her egg and milk and noticed me watching.

  “For my skin,” she said. And her skin was flawless, glowing glass.

  “Has Mr. Lightborn contacted you?” I asked.

  She hesitated.

  “Tonight there is a small party,” she said.

  The moment this fell from her lips, I felt the confirmation alone as a victory—Lightborn collected from uncertainties into a local space and time.

  “We settle business,” she said quickly.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “For my risk?”

  “Okay, the business,” I said.

  At the part that mattered to her—the money—she was like a diamond jeweler, teasing out what I might have to spend so she could push past it. She didn’t want Chinese currency: she asked for five thousand American dollars. If she was paid to be discreet about her clients, that seemed to mean her discretion had a price on one end, and so breaking it had a price, too.

  I didn’t care about negotiating. She wasn’t even surprised I produced the amount in immediate cash from suit and pants pockets.

  Once she’d counted, she asked me to stand up. She fingered my sweat-through suit coat and complained we didn’t have time to find me another.

  “This jacket does not even fit you,” she said. “Your masseuse can be blind, but not your tailor.”

  She yanked at my wrinkled, dirty tie.

  “Clean up,” she said. She pointed behind the sheer curtain that separated the bedroom from the kitchen. “Try your best.”

  I went into her bathroom and wet down my hair. I tried to rub a stain from my shirt and dragged a wet finger across my eyebrows. When I emerged, she ran her hands over my shoulders and down my sleeves.

  “No better,” she said.

  I said I was sorry, though I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for. She dashed my tea into the sink and turned out the lamp and lantern. We glowed in ashen light from the street.

  “We can have a little bit more time,” she said, “if you would desire.”

  She tucked her chin toward the spill of her dress. She nestled close to me, the first time our skin touched. She rested her head on my shoulder, and when I found my voice, I was answering directly into the half-moon of her ear.

  “I’m under so much pressure,” I said. She reached her hand into my pants pocket, and I don’t know if she was expecting my wallet or expecting to feel the rest of me, but what she got was the rest of me. She might not know how much more money I had, but she was groping for the cord she thought might lead her to it.

  “You would not?” she said. “Are you that kind of man?”

  I took her to mean abstaining, as against the kind of man I actually was. She made sure to push against me, so that I felt her body through her dress.

  “I’m looking for my way back home,” I said, “and I don’t think you’re the way.”

  “You make me sad,” she said.

  “I’m sure you’ll get over it, Rose.”

  “You make me cry,” she said.

  She drew her hand from my pocket and steadied her body against mine. Maybe there’d be satisfaction in stealing a moment with a woman Lightborn had singled out this evening for his. But I’d been down that path before. Sleeping with Theresa had given me no power over Leo; it only made me feel wounded and strangely more beholden to both of them.

  “I don’t understand why you will pay so much to go see a man,” Rose said, “and nothing to have a woman.”

  I was grateful to feel a phone call shaking my pocket. The number on the screen came up long and jumbled, and I th
ought finally it was Polk, his call routed through local satellite towers. Rose let me out onto her back balcony for a modicum of privacy.

  “Luke Slade?” the voice said.

  “Speaking.”

  “Now you listen to me,” he said. “My name is George Szczepanski, okay? That’s S-Z-C-Z-E-panski. Got it? Now I’ve voted for Congressman Fillmore in the last four elections. I’ve written checks when I could afford to, and it just burns me up that you people aren’t listening.”

  “I’m sorry?” I mumbled. “This is a bad time.”

  “It’s my time! I pay your salary! So you tell me how the congressman expects me to make a living if he’s not going to enforce the law on the Mexicans?”

  “Call our office and ask for Glenn,” I said.

  “That boy told me to talk to you,” he said. “Now you people are just jerking me around. I’m telling you I can see the Mexicans from my porch.”

  I hung up on him. Rose’s balcony gave out on an eyeful of concrete wall. She had a potted ficus, wrinkly brown—if it were human, you would hear it wheezing. We left her apartment, and the men playing cards were still in the lane, siphoning out their plastic gallon of yellow wine in wincing gulps. Two old men squatted nearby, selling medicinal herbs. They didn’t pay us any attention, talking with one another above the traffic noise in warm Shanghai air that smelled like fireworks.

  III.

  THE ONLY INDICATION of the party at the Shanghai Fortune Yacht Club were two men, fierce as the painted statues that guard imperial tombs, who stood at either side of a distant pier. My body was in messy revolt, head swaying and feet heavy as we approached the docked boat. The guards greeted us. Actually, they greeted Rose, looking past me to any place her skin escaped her dress. Certainly my eyes were large and searching, my face flushed. What they said I found indecipherable, but soon they were no longer imposing, only chatty. They let us aboard. Rose and I parted, strangers again.