Little Reunions

by Eileen Chang

  •

  Over a decade later in New York, she made an exception to her usual practice and bathed in the afternoon. Bathing while waiting for the abortionist to come was like those housewives in the West tidying up the house before the maid arrived.

  It’s a desperate situation. Four months already. She had read in novels that it was too dangerous to have an abortion after three months. It was so difficult to find someone willing to do it.

  Her breasts became fuller while she was pregnant, but now as she lay in the bathtub they flattened out. She already looked like a female cadaver, drained of blood, pale, bobbing up and down in the water.

  Every woman’s destined to risk her life.

  She wore a black, sleeveless pullover vest and light-brown twill pants that tapered at the bottom. Rudy preferred her to wear long trousers or casual skirts. She could no longer fasten the skirt, despite having moved the button, though Bebe assured her no one would notice.

  “A little Sheng would be nice,” Rudy initially said, though his voice faltered as he spoke.

  “I don’t want one,” she replied. “Even in the best circumstances—enough money and a reliable nanny—I still wouldn’t want a child.”

  The doorbell rang and Julie went to open the door. They were living in a large apartment they had rented for the summer, the owner gone on vacation. A tidy-looking pudgy man in his thirties stood at the door. Pale complexion, dark brown hair, neatly dressed and carrying a briefcase, like an insurance broker. He looked fully alert as he entered.

  “There’s no one else here,” she said. That was one of his conditions. Rudy had left.

  She led him into the bedroom and he examined her on the bed. He took off his jacket, revealing the short-sleeve shirt he wore beneath it. He retrieved an array of vessels, then sterilized his hands.

  So it’d be the suppository method. “Old woman Wong’s suppository string” was mentioned in the Republican-era novel Tides of the Hwang-poo. Living in a foreign land while being killed by a suppository at the hands of a midwife in early Republican-era Shanghai—the overlap of time and place in her mind veered into the absurd.

  “What if it doesn’t come out,” she asked anxiously.

  “You want me to cut you open?”

  She didn’t respond. She thought a curette involved a minor surgical procedure. He made it sound like the ancient Chinese punishment of death by dismemberment, which she took as a veiled threat, though she had no solid knowledge of such things.

  As he was about to leave she reiterated her concerns: “I’m just afraid it won’t come out and will get stuck inside there. I’m already at four months.”

  “That won’t happen.” But he paused for a moment to ponder the situation again. “If you’re still worried you can call this number.”

  He gave her the telephone number for a Marsha, who worked in the largest department store in town, if she encountered any problems. Julie thought Marsha probably wasn’t her real name and she wouldn’t necessarily be waiting at home for telephone calls.

  He left.

  Not long after, Rudy came back. He opened a cabinet and returned a kindling ax to its original location. The fireplace in the apartment was only used to create a cozy atmosphere, as the building had central heating in the winter.

  “I didn’t really leave,” he said. “I was just waiting in the stairwell. I heard the elevator come and watched him get in. Earlier I had looked around for a weapon and found this tomahawk. Just in case something happened to you, and I could kill the son of a bitch.”

  Julie wasn’t surprised. Judging from Rudy’s big build this was believable. Maybe their relationship was somehow connected to her addiction to movies as a teenager and his drifting around Hollywood for many years.

  “I’ve always been cheap,” said Rudy.

  Well, he’s never saved any money. He’d buy a house after winning a poker game and then sell it later for no good reason. He often mocked himself, saying, “What a joke, everyone says, ‘Rudy’s good with money.’” At script-writing sessions he was always asked to handle scenes about money.

  “I’m a coward,” he said. People like him felt an affinity for old westerns and would start a fight at the drop of a hat.

  “We have the damnedest thing for each other,” he said, bewildered, with an embarrassed smile.

  She never felt any regrets for having met him so late in life. He was old, but if they had met several years earlier he would not necessarily have liked her and their relationship would not have lasted long.

  “I always hit and run,” he said.

  She could feel the string of the suppository hanging down and brushing against her thigh like the fuse of a bomb. After several hours nothing had happened. They called Marsha. The saleswoman sounded like a chubby thirtysomething Jewish woman. Obviously her job was only to offer comforting words. “Hold her hand,” she advised Rudy. Julie did not call her again.

  For dinner Rudy bought a chicken at the rotisserie across the road. Deep pains churned in her belly but he still encouraged her to eat while he himself devoured the food with gusto. She felt a bit resentful. Did she really need him to hold her hand?

  That night, under the bathroom light, she saw a male fetus in the toilet bowl. In her terrified eyes it was at least ten inches long, leaning upright against the white porcelain, partly submerged in the water. The thin smear of bloody liquid on its skin was the light orange color of newly planed wood. Fresh blood accumulated in its hollows and outlined its form distinctly. A pair of disproportionately large eyes protruded and its arms looked like the retracted wings of the wooden bird that used to perch above the door in Shanghai so long ago.

  In that moment of horror, Julie flushed the toilet. At first she worried the fetus would not flush away, but it soon disappeared into the billowing vortex.

  “So did anything come out?” asked Bebe about the abortion. But when Julie told her, Bebe was incredulous and suspected that Julie had simply imagined it all and wasted four hundred dollars.

  •

  “We walked into this with our eyes wide open; we were never irrational,” said Chih-yung.

  Perhaps he too felt something perched above his head, observing them.

  “I have some business to attend to tomorrow,” he said. “I won’t be coming.”

  That weekend, Julie went to visit Bebe. Bebe had transferred to the same university as her younger sister. The two sisters were very amiable, but the prejudice against Indians was much greater in Shanghai than in Hong Kong because Shanghai lacked the British connection that existed in Hong Kong.

  Most Indians in Shanghai belonged to different religions and did not intermarry. Believers invariably preferred to return to their hometowns in India to find a bride, suspecting the Indian girls in Shanghai of having picked up bad habits and not being sufficiently conservative. The British and Americans were all interned in concentration camps. In the living room of Bebe’s home hung large portraits of two Muslim monarchs. After the Shah of Iran divorced Princess Fawzia, the royal daughter of Sultan Fuad I of Egypt, because of a lack of a male heir, Bebe’s family added his portrait to the wall, as if they considered the Shah a suitable candidate for a prospective husband. Bebe explained to Julie that by her family’s standards King Farouk was not fat—of course that was before he became truly rotund.

  Farouk later married a commoner, Narriman Sadek, the daughter of a Cairo shopkeeper. They lived in a world far less isolated than wartime Shanghai. Julie found them strange, but the Muslim world had always been mysterious to her. A goat tethered in the small courtyard by the rear gate of Bebe’s house was waiting to be slaughtered for a religious festival; its throat would be cut open. The goat, as large as a pony with dirty wool that curled like a fur coat, stretched its neck though a kitchen window to eat vegetables stored in a basket.

  That day they didn’t have anywhere to go—it was a torment in Shanghai without any good movies to watch. Then Julie remembered that Hsü Heng, the artist, had given her hi
s address and told her to visit any time to look at his paintings. She asked Bebe if she wanted to go, and together they set off for Hsü Heng’s home to view his paintings.

  The Hsü household wasn’t far, located in a typical alleyway house. They entered from the rear kitchen door into a spacious, dark living room with a dozen or so unframed oil paintings hanging on the wall or on the floor leaning against the wall. Hsü Heng gave them a tour but didn’t say much; he seemed both servile and overly polite. He was only in his thirties but around the house wore a faded dark green suit of the kind the aesthetic-movement types used to wear—in places it had faded to a paler light green.

  Suddenly Chih-yung walked in. Julie knew he was close with Hsü Heng but never expected that he would be there. Chih-yung had once met Bebe at Julie’s home so everyone began nodding their greetings. In the darkened room, she caught a glimpse of his broadly smiling face that betrayed a hint of unease. Bebe’s Chinese wasn’t good enough to discuss art in any depth, so she switched to English. Julie thought Chih-yung felt awkward because of the language issue. Conscious of Chih-yung’s and Hsü Heng’s pride, she bravely filled in the gaps by talking nonstop. Julie didn’t like Hsü Heng’s paintings at all, which made her even more reluctant to leave after a cursory view, so she made two full circuits.

  Then Hsü Heng brought in two more paintings from another room. The family seemed to occupy only two rooms on the ground floor. After viewing the paintings, Julie and Bebe announced their departure. While the host and Chih-yung escorted them out through the kitchen, they passed some people playing mah-jongg at a table set up in a small passageway leading to the kitchen. Julie didn’t get a chance to look closely, but it appeared that all the players were women.

  The next day Chih-yung visited and Julie learned that one of the mah-jongg players was his wife.

  “You had a lot to say,” he chortled, “babbling on endlessly like that.”

  “So terrible,” she confessed, giggling. Then she recalled a woman seated at the table who appeared to be fuming. Julie had passed by quickly and only remembered she seemed tall and young.

  “She said to me,” reported Chih-yung, “‘Surely you don’t think I can’t compete with her?’”

  He once said to Julie, “Everyone says my wife is beautiful.” Julie had seen a small photograph of her taken outdoors. She was beautiful by any standard. Long, angular face. Tall and curvaceous. She appeared to possess a strong personality. In the photo she stood frowning in front of a banana tree, her eyebrows plucked into parabolic lines. She used to be a sing-song girl from the Ch’in-huai River entertainment district of Nanking. Chih-yung had promised himself, “This time I’m going to marry a beautiful woman.” When he took her as his wife she was only fifteen, but it wasn’t until several months after their nuptials that their affections for each other blossomed and the marriage was consummated.

  “I loved her even more when I got out of jail, but she, however, she became cold toward me.” Then he chuckled. “It was as though she wanted to negotiate terms with me! I was very annoyed.”

  He didn’t mention, of course, that his wife had slapped him in the face in front of everyone at the Hsü residence, saying to Julie only, “If it were someone else, our relationship could have grown stronger after such a fuss. But nothing’s changed between us.”

  Julie had inadvertently worn an especially garish outfit that day—a claret-colored long vest over a peacock-blue cotton gown. The vest was fashioned out of a large old scarf from the early Republican era, with its original fringe swaying from the hem of the vest. She must have left a very bad impression, Julie thought. And worse, she caused him embarrassment. She felt disheartened. They should have ended their relationship long ago. But of course they shouldn’t let that happen simply because his wife had caused a scene—that would be laughable. Julie wasn’t plagued with guilt, nor did she harbor any bad feelings toward Chih-yung’s wife; she felt she had nothing to apologize for. She hadn’t stolen anything from his wife because her relationship with Chih-yung was different.

  Chih-yung again stayed until late in the evening. The next day he returned. Julie served him tea, then planted herself on the carpet beside his armchair.

  “You’re actually very attentive,” he said, somewhat surprised, “like a Japanese woman. Your innate allure must have sublimated into a purer form.”

  She laughed, as if long accustomed to such flattery.

  “Yesterday, when I left, the doorman was annoyed at having to open the gate for me at such a late hour. He swore at me. I became angry and hit him.” With a look of contempt in his eyes, he raised his head and inhaled on a cigarette. “Oh, I hit him hard, yes I did! He tumbled and fell right across the pathway. A big guy, and completely useless. I’ve practiced tai chi, you know. Actually, I often give the doormen tips, especially the one who operates the elevator.”

  The apartment building’s two doormen were both burly men from Shantung Province who had retired from some sort of militia. They wore khaki uniforms, switching in the summer months to English-style short pants. They reclined on cane lounge chairs, blocking the way with their yellow knees exposed.

  “That gentleman isn’t tall,” the elevator operator told Judy, “but he’s very strong. He hit the doorman so hard the man’s got a big bruise on his face and has been too embarrassed to show up for work the past couple of days.”

  For some reason, Julie felt differently about Chih-yung after he hit the doorman. She no longer needed to fantasize about their romance.

  “I’ve fallen in love with Mr. Shao and he’s looking for a way to getdivorced,” Julie eventually told Bebe in a breezy tone while they were clinging to the rubber hoops hanging from the ceiling of the bus. She had chosen that moment to break the news, to avoid giving Bebe the opportunity to explode.

  Bebe smiled back. But it was that terrified smile of hers. “The first person to break through your defenses!” Bebe later scolded. “You’re completely devoid of feminine guile.” And then she chuckled. “If only I were a man, I would have saved you a lot of trouble.”

  Bebe met Chih-yung at Julie’s. She of course treated him with friendly chatter and laughter. Chih-yung found Bebe extremely charming.

  “Julie has split ends which can be pulled out into two strands,” he suddenly told Bebe.

  Julie was mortified. She knew Chih-yung was showing off just how intimate he was with her. Bebe’s expression changed, obviously considering it very ungentlemanly to say something like that, but then she simply changed the topic of conversation. That evening he departed with Bebe.

  One day, Julie and Chih-yung were discussing Julie’s reputation as a money-grubber, and that she bickered over trivial amounts of her remuneration as a writer. “I need to earn more money,” Julie told him, “in order to repay what I owe my mother.” She had told Chih-yung that her mother used to complain about the large sums she had spent on her. But this time she felt dreadfully embarrassed as soon as those words came out of her mouth—Chih-yung must have paid off the “debts” of his sing-song girl to buy back her freedom. It must have sounded all too familiar to him, a prostitute in a Shanghai brothel trying to extort more money just like in a Republican-era novel. But that was then, and she was fully aware of his present impecuniousness; she simply wanted him to understand her attitude toward money.

  Chih-yung’s expression changed slightly, too, but he quickly smiled in acknowledgment.

  Chih-yung returned to Nanking again. Julie assumed he had come directly from the train station to her house when he arrived in Shanghai that day in the early summer, carrying a medium-size suitcase. Perhaps he couldn’t mention it in a letter, but he told her after he arrived that he would be moving to central China to set up a newspaper. Then he smiled as he picked up the cheap leather-trimmed tweed suitcase. He set the suitcase down and opened it. It was full of banknotes. Knowing it must be part of the funds to finance the newspaper, she didn’t look closely. She casually shut the case and left it standing in a corner.
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br />   Julie waited until he left to reopen the suitcase. Unlike the eight hundred Hong Kong dollars Mr. Andrews had given her, there were no small-denomination notes. Julie couldn’t keep up with Hong Kong dollars let alone Chinese paper currency, especially after the innumerable changes to the monetary system. Then factor in inflation. She couldn’t tell the value of the money but knew, even taking inflation into account, it surely must be a very large sum.

  Julie showed the suitcase to Judy. “Shao Chih-yung brought me this to repay Second Aunt,” said Julie, grinning. Actually, he didn’t say that, but at the moment it didn’t occur to her to say otherwise.

  “Well he certainly knows how to acquire funds,” Judy commented.

  Now Julie had an excuse and didn’t feel awkward asking him to stay for dinner. But the next night, after eating a simple evening meal at her place, she nonetheless felt terribly embarrassed. As soon as she passed him a hot towel, she left the table, and turned her head to smile at him.

  Chih-yung stared at her, apparently enchanted. When she returned to the living room, he laughed, saying, “This towel is too dry and too hot. How can I possibly wipe my face?”

  Square hand towels folded into triangles were usually placed, cold and moist, onto dinner plates; they could easily be mistaken for two small sandwiches. Julie assumed he preferred a more comforting hot towel, which opened up the pores, so she had gone out of her way to prepare one specially for him. This involved walking over to Judy’s bathroom at the other end of the corridor. Worried that the small towel would cool down while she carried it back over such a great a distance, she had held the towel under running hot water and then wrung it out forcefully, scalding her hands in the process.

  “I’ll get another one.”

  When she returned, he said, “Shall we go out on the balcony?”

  The large balcony was empty of any furniture. High, bulky concrete balusters enclosed the rectangular space with its complex geometric design. There was hardly a night view of the city to speak of during the wartime blackout. Only the dusty purple sky glittered like agate above the darkened balcony. A faint smell of rust filled the air. And suspended in the heavens, a half-moon radiated pure light with a glowing halo.