Little Reunions

by Eileen Chang

  Two days later, he stopped by after attending someone’s dinner party. When Julie served him tea, she could smell alcohol on his breath. After chatting for a while he sat beside her.

  “Let’s be together forever, all right?”

  Julie was sitting on the sofa in the dim lamplight. She turned her head and looked at him with a smile. “You’re drunk.”

  “When I’m drunk, I feel good things are even better and bad things are even worse.” He took her hand, turned it over to study the lines on her palm, and then examined the other one. “This is ridiculous.” He laughed. “It looks like I’m reading your palm.” Then he repeated his earlier entreaty: “Let’s be together forever, all right?”

  “And your wife?”

  Did he hesitate?

  “I can get a divorce.”

  And what would that cost?

  “I don’t want to get married right now. I’ll come find you in a few years.” She couldn’t tell Chih-yung that would happen after the war—after a long and arduous journey, she would find him in the small town he had fled to, their reunion taking place also by the dim light of an oil lamp.

  He smiled and said nothing.

  Then he began to tell her about asking a guard in the detention center to buy him a copy of the magazine where he read her newest work. “I recommended your writing to the guard and he became very friendly to me.”

  He continued, “Your name sounded so feminine, and yet it didn’t seem to be a nom de plume. I thought it might even be a man hiding behind the name. But even if it had been a man, I still would have sought him out. Any relationship that can be forged must be forged.”

  He stopped her in the doorway on his way out. With one hand on the door he gazed at her intently for a long time. His face appeared quite broad from straight on, a little feminine, with the aggressiveness of a boorish woman. She didn’t look at him but smiled vaguely off into the distance over thousands of miles of rivers and mountains, where, in a few years, they would meet again under dim lamplight in a remote small town.

  He finally spoke: “Your eyebrows are so high.”

  After he left, Julie smiled as she told Judy. “Shao Chih-yung said, ‘Let’s be together forever, all right?’ and that he could get a divorce.” There had to be a good explanation for the many hours they had spent together. Julie didn’t like telling people anything unless she felt a real need to. She told Bebe nothing at all. There was a time when Julie and Bebe could talk about anything; while still in Hong Kong, Julie even wrote long letters to Judy. But ever since she started to publish her writing, she felt she would be understood no matter what she wrote, and if not understood, she felt confident that at least someone would understand. Once you’ve fallen in love with someone, no one else can compare. Now she felt even less capable of expressing her true feelings in conversations so she spoke to no one about how she felt. Each time she tried, she felt no comfort, only regret.

  When Judy heard the news, she laughed. “I’ve always wanted to know what people really say when they propose. Once Brother Hsü said, ‘Why haven’t you married?’ I was lying in bed and didn’t hear clearly. I thought he said, ‘Why haven’t you married me?’ I replied, ‘You never asked me.’” She lightheartedly told this story in English, just like a bit of witty repartee in a Hollywood movie, though what came next had to be an anticlimax. “He said, ‘No, I mean why haven’t you married?’”

  Julie was extremely embarrassed for them, but Judy didn’t seem to mind, and Brother Hsü, apparently, survived the awkward moment too.

  “Of course you realize,” Judy continued after their pleasant exchange, “concerning marriage, your situation is different from his.”

  “I know.”

  Chih-yung didn’t show up the next day. A few weeks later, Judy commented out of the blue, “Shao Chih-yung hasn’t visited for quite a while.”

  “Yes,” replied Julie, forcing a smile.

  The leaves on the French plane trees lining both sides of the road were just beginning to bud, each tree lifting up a bowl made of light green spots. The spring chill felt slightly damp. Julie appeared to be carefree, spirits high, as she walked along the road. Something had come to a perfect conclusion, she hoped, but at the same time she still felt something was missing.

  5

  JUST WHEN she thought her torment was over, he reappeared. She didn’t ask him why he had not come to see her for so many days. Later he confessed, “At the time I thought if it really couldn’t work out then I should just forget about it.” She smiled, a little dazed.

  On another occasion he said, “I thought if you turned out to be a fool, we wouldn’t have a future.”

  Before that he had said more than once, “I think it will be hard for you.” Which was to say it would be difficult for Julie to find someone who’d love her.

  “I know.” Julie smiled. Actually, she wanted him to leave.

  In Hong Kong she had once said to Bebe, “I’m afraid of the future.”

  She didn’t say what she feared, but Bebe knew. “Life has to be lived,” Bebe said with a sad smile.

  “I can’t stop myself telling people about you,” said Chih-yung cheerfully. “I asked Hsü Heng, ‘Do you think Miss Sheng’s beautiful?’” Hsü Heng was a painter she had met at Hsiang Ching’s place. “And he said, ‘Her disposition is quite good.’ I was furious.”

  Julie kept smiling. The searchlight on the other side of the harbor found her. Inside the niche at the temporary shrine she felt the blue mist freeze her from head to toe.

  He gave her several albums of Japanese woodblock prints and sat beside her as they looked through them together. When they finished, he once again held her hand and examined it. She suddenly noticed her very thin wrist inside her peacock-blue bell-shaped sleeve. She realized that he was also looking at her wrist and couldn’t help saying in her own defense, “Actually, I’m not usually this thin.”

  He paused. “Is it because of me?”

  She flushed and lowered her head. All the clichés in old novels flashed through her mind, like “She was unable to raise her head. It felt as heavy as a thousand pounds.” Now she couldn’t raise her own head. Was this really the case, she thought to herself, or was she acting?

  He gazed at her for a long moment then kissed her. The peacock-blue sleeves timidly climbed up his shoulders and wrapped around his neck.

  “You seem to be very experienced.”

  “I saw it in a movie.” She giggled.

  This time, and repeatedly, again just like in the movies, he only kissed her on the lips.

  He embraced her as she sat on his knees, cheek to cheek. His eyes, so close to her cheek, sparkled like diamond pendants.

  “You have piercing eyes.”

  “They say I have ‘droopy eyes.’”

  Who could have said that to him? She thought it must have been a classmate or a colleague when he was a teacher.

  In the silence she could make out a popular love song playing over the radio some distance away. To hear a folksy love song at that moment made them both burst out laughing. It was not the sort of music one usually heard in the upper floors of an apartment building—it belonged in the streets. Yet at that moment, even the hackneyed lyrics sounded profound. Every so often they could clearly make out a line or two.

  “Hey, these songs are actually quite good.” He was listening, too.

  Although Julie couldn’t be sure, she thought it resembled an English song Second Aunt and Third Aunt used to sing:

  Down the river of Golden Dreams

  Drifting along

  Humming a song of love

  Julie had never felt this safe since childhood. Time became drawn out, boundless, and infinite, a golden desert, majestically devoid of everything except vibrant music, and the palace doors to the past and the future flung wide open—surely this is what immortality must be like. She had never experienced time like this in her whole life, the moment totally unrelated to anything else in her life. She would merely accompan
y him a short distance—in a rowboat on the river of golden dreams. She could disembark and go ashore at any time.

  He gazed at her. “You are beautiful,” he said. “Why do you say you are not?” And then added, “Your smile wasn’t quite right, but now it’s perfect.”

  “Simply because the smile is unaffected,” she thought.

  He was thirty-nine. “When people reach my age, they all become apathetic.” He chuckled.

  From his tone of voice she could tell he feared adversity. But of course he meant he was unlike other people, that he had the determination to start a new life. She also vaguely knew that without the aura of enduring love, her golden eternal life would never be as she envisaged.

  He calculated the age difference between the writer Lu Hsün and his wife, Hsü Kuang-ping. “They were only together for nine years. Too short, really.

  But Hsü Kuang-ping was his student,” he continued. “Lu Hsün always saw her as a young woman worthy of being cherished.”

  Chih-yung constantly analyzed their relationship. He also talked about Wang Ching-wei and Ch’en Pi-chün. When they were comrades in the Nationalist Party, Ch’en Pi-chün went to see Wang on official business. She stood in the rain the entire night, then the next morning he opened the gate and invited her in.

  Julie had seen a photograph of Ch’en Pi-chün. She was short and fat, wore glasses, and was quite ugly. People said Wang Ching-wei was very handsome.

  “We like each other equally, so there’s no issue of who is pursuing whom.” When he saw Julie laugh without responding, he added, “I’ve probably gone six steps and you have gone four steps,” as if he were bargaining, which made her laugh even more.

  On another occasion he said, “Women with too much initiative tend to scare away most men.”

  It is because I simply want to express my feelings for you. We’ll never have a future together. This relationship won’t go anywhere. But at the time she couldn’t think of how to respond. And even if she were able to defend herself to him, it felt like the wrong time to bring it up. Later he would understand—not much later. How much more time would there be?

  She ran her fingertips around his eyes, his nose, his mouth, to sketch the same profile of him in silhouette she had seen before when sitting across the room, smiling vaguely and looking down. But there was a trace of desolation in his smile.

  “I’m always wild with joy,” she said, “while you seem mournful.”

  He smiled. “I’m like a child who has cried a long time for an apple, but continues to sob after he’s received it.”

  She knew he was saying that he had always wanted to meet someone like her.

  “You look like a Six Dynasties Buddhist statue,” she once said to Chih-yung.

  “Yes, I love those Buddhist statues with their willowy, thin waists. I don’t know when it began, all those big-bellied Buddhas.”

  Those stone statues were specifically from the northern dynasties. He claimed his ancestors were descendants of ancient nomadic Chiang tribesmen.

  “Hsiunan says she’s never seen me like this.”

  Hsiunan was his niece. “My niece has always been with me; she looks after my household affairs and is very good to me. She realized my life will always be unsettled, and to help with my daily expenses, she married a lumber merchant, a Mr. Wen. He’s also from my hometown. A good man.”

  Julie had met Hsiunan once when she visited Chih-yung’s residence in Shanghai. A pretty, fair-skinned, angular face. Long wavy hair draped down her back; blue cotton overcoat. She appeared to be in her twenties at the most. Mr. Wen was there, too. He bowed awkwardly to Julie. He wore a suit and appeared to be in his thirties. His face was pockmarked—hardly a good match for Hsiunan.

  “She loves her uncle,” Julie thought to herself.

  Chih-yung told Julie he had written in letter to a friend. “Miss Julie Sheng and I, are in love.” There was a slight emphasis on the last three words.

  Julie didn’t say anything but she was delighted. She itched to share the news. And this letter was publicity.

  Her legs weren’t particularly skinny. A band of skin, smooth and white, remained exposed above her socks.

  He caressed that part of her leg. “Such a wonderful person to allow me such intimacy.”

  A gentle breeze caressed the palm fronds. The tide rose on the sands as the meandering white line stretched to the horizon, imperceptibly ascended and then retreated, yet seemingly motionless. She wanted this feeling to last forever, or at least to let her luxuriate a little more in this golden immortality.

  One day she found herself sitting on him again, when suddenly something below began to lash her. She couldn’t believe what she saw—a fly whisk fashioned out of what looked like a lion’s or tiger’s tail connected to a police truncheon wrapped in fabric. She hadn’t seen such an object in the two erotic albums she had perused, and for a moment couldn’t understand what she was seeing. She ought to have jumped up and giggled, acted like she didn’t care. But before she could execute this strategy the whipping ceased. She didn’t immediately slide off his knees. That would have been too obvious.

  Later that day she told him, “Hsiang Ching wrote some disapproving things about you in a letter to me. He warned me to be wary of you.” She let out a small laugh.

  “Hsiang Ching is a good person who really understands me. He said it wasn’t easy for a person as poor as me to have accomplished as much as I have. He said he couldn’t do that.”

  He doesn’t trust me! She couldn’t believe it. Why would I want to say bad things about Hsiang Ching to him? Maybe he thought I was trying to show that someone else cares for me in order to sound important. Julie was confused, but sensed Chih-yung had a lot of faith in his own ability to influence people and simply couldn’t believe anyone would betray him. He was very possessive about his friends and didn’t want to lose a single one.

  She kept the letter in her desk drawer. First Hsiang Ching praised her short “masterpiece” then went on to warn her to be careful of “the demons in this society who eat people alive.” Of course he didn’t mention any names, but even Wendy by this time observed, “Everyone’s saying that you and Shao Chih-yung are extremely close.”

  Julie didn’t retrieve the letter to show Chih-yung. She was always afraid of embarrassing people, and him even more so, though she shouldn’t have been. Perhaps she was unwilling to face the fact that he was rather unquenchable when it came to romance.

  In the end, she asked Judy to help her write a polite yet obscure reply to Hsiang Ching.

  Chih-yung returned to Nanking. He wrote to say he was meeting with friends as usual, playing chess, and taking walks on Mount Ch’ingliang, “But everything feels wrong. Life is like a fish writhing in my hands—I want to grab hold of it but I’m repulsed by the fishy smell.”

  She wasn’t fond of this metaphor—for some reason the tiger-tail fly whisk flashed into her mind.

  But his long letter seemed respectable; she showed it to Judy to prevent her from suspecting that something inappropriate had taken place.

  “It’s about time—you deserve a love letter,” Judy observed with a wry smile.

  •

  “I love traffic lights,” said Julie to Bebe as they crossed a road.

  “So wear one in your hair,” retorted Bebe.

  The next time Chih-yung came to Shanghai she said to him, “I love Shanghai, even the curbstones are so clean that you can sit anywhere you like.”

  “Um,” responded Chih-yung smiling, “that’s not really true.”

  Why not? He’s the one who said, “Tall buildings sometimes feel intimidating.” Isn’t that just as subjective?

  “You don’t actually make people feel inferior,” he once said to her.

  Chih-yung rang the doorbell and Julie opened the door. “Every time I visit I feel like there’s someone actually in the door,” he said. His tone of voice seemed to suggest that a female spirit resided behind the door and even the door was beguiled. She did
n’t like the idea of that.

  “You two have decorated this place very well,” he said. “I’ve been to many chic homes but none of them can compare with this one.”

  “It’s all the work of my mother and Third Aunt,” she said, smiling. “Nothing to do with me.”

  “How would you decorate it?” he asked, appearing somewhat surprised.

  A deep purple cave, she thought. She loved all vivid colors, but she had never seen a deep purple wall, except in a dance hall. She wanted a color that wouldn’t invoke any memories, memories inevitably leading to sorrow.

  “Different from any other place,” she replied softly, still smiling.

  He looked worried and didn’t pursue his line of questioning.

  His nervousness made her feel slightly resentful. Is he already thinking about finding us a new place?

  He said he still dearly cherished the memory of his first wife who had died while living in the countryside. The marriage had been arranged, and they only saw each other once before the wedding.

  “I don’t like courtship, I like marriage.” With his face buried in her shoulder, he then said, “I want to settle down with you.”

  She couldn’t understand him. How could they marry if he didn’t divorce his current wife? She didn’t want to raise the matter of divorce with him and, in any event, without money it was simply impossible. At the same time his words sounded a little jarring, maybe because she sensed that what he called marriage was something else entirely.

  He repeated himself twice but she didn’t respond. Then one day Chih-yung said, “Let’s just let things follow their own course, all right?”

  “Oh.” She knew this relationship could end at any time. He would leave and never come back.

  They embraced on the sofa. A carved wooden bird perched above the doorframe. The tawny double doors were open flat against the wall. What was the foot-high bird perched on? Even though she had her back to the doors, she knew the bird was three-dimensional, not simply painted on the wall, and that there wasn’t an eave or shelf above the threshold. It looked like a primitive sculpture. Was it an idol of sacrifice in ancient times? The bird watched her. She was ready to stand up at any moment and walk away.