The Lost Garden

by Ang Li

  She was sure that only Lin had her home phone number, and that his natural course of action on such an urgent matter would be to call to express his displeasure. Then he would find out that she was vacationing with a Mr. Huang.

  As predicted, Lin did hear all about her trip with Mr. Huang, but not via a phone call. It was the always responsible Mudan, who, believing that the documents were too important to hand over to someone from Lin’s company, insisted that she needed him, someone she knew, to come to pick them up himself.

  On the third day after she returned to work, she called to apologize for the unforeseen inconvenience she’d caused, making sure to add a languishing sweetness to her voice. Lin, who was holding a company meeting, asked that the call be transferred to his office, where he spent a quarter of an hour criticizing her for being irresponsible, indignantly mentioning Mr. Huang several times. He declared rudely that he would pick her up at eleven that night, before hanging up without waiting for her response.

  That happened to be the day for her weekly tryst with Teddy. Yinghong and Teddy usually met during lunch or dinner for an hour to ninety minutes, long enough for their activity at the hotel, but not too long, in case his wife called his office and could not find him. That night Teddy had a dinner engagement. Taipei banquets were often set for 6:30, but a 7:00 arrival would not be considered late. Teddy could leave his office at five, which would give them two full hours.

  But Lin would be coming to pick her up at eleven, a mere four hours after she had disentangled herself from Teddy’s body. She hesitated, unsure if she ought to cancel her date with Teddy and, in fact, terminate their hotel meetings. The thought made her smile, a bleak smile that emerged from thin, tightly shut red lips, a soundless expression of what she was feeling.

  Lin was jealous, and that put her in a state of heightened agitation; she was jittery all day, unable to settle down; losing her concentration, she frequently stopped working and stood up to pace her office. Luckily her uncle was abroad.

  In her mind, the trysts with Teddy were her only chance of stopping the extreme tension and calming her down; the physical exhaustion temporarily counteracted her anxiety and unease. So she waited for the gratification that came with the sensation of being filled, her excitement now turning into waves of urgent need. She felt an eager, burning expansion somewhere deep inside, as if inhaling and exhaling one mouthful of hot air after another. Between the intake and expulsion of hot breaths, she would absorb satisfying penetration and movement, feeling fire, heat, and a throbbing sensation, in and out, waiting, lurking.

  They knew each other well enough that, as soon as they were in the room, they began to take off their clothes. Even Teddy, a true believer in sexual theories, no longer felt the need for foreplay or taking off her clothes for her. On that late afternoon, she turned around and straddled him the moment they lay down.

  It might have been the position that made her feel that she was on the offense. Her insides, moving in and out rhythmically, felt like a long narrow passage that compressed, pushed, advanced, and exposed the outside while awaiting the moment of penetration. She could feel that part of her body swell up and move forward, rising up as if to snatch the man’s ready-for-action erection.

  Then the prey was completely encircled; she breathed in deeply from the tight, filling sensation, but what happened next made her feel cheated. The man was working harder because of her uncharacteristic eagerness, but she felt let down. It was like a sky full of exploding stars sinking into water, down to an unfathomable bottom, where the gratification of contact died off instantaneously. An urgent need remained inside, and it was not to be easily mollified by that thing between the man’s legs.

  So she became more demanding and the man responded accordingly. His familiarity with her body meant that he knew how to please her with the greatest result, but Yinghong felt like a beast with an unquenchable thirst, gulping down the source from the wellspring of life but never truly feeling sated.

  To be sure, she felt sexual pleasure, and the resultant lethargy and exhaustion began to spread to every part of her body from that particular spot. She laid down her weighty body, as the comfort from the pleasure surged in waves, rushing against her. She split into two people, one moaning and enjoying herself, while the other lurked and waited with a hunger somewhere inside, like a beast lingering in the dark with glinting eyes, announcing an anxiety and desire that was purely physical but could not be satisfied by mere bodily contact.

  Lin rang her doorbell that night at 11:05, and was greeted by the exquisite face of a languid woman who had just awakened from a nap. Her newly washed hair spread out loosely; she had pinned one side of the thick, unruly tresses to the back, leaving the curly hair on the other side to billow across an ivory shoulder exposed by her scanty summer dress. She had the lethargic look that came from a long soak in a tub; even without perfume she smelled refreshingly redolent, with a pleasant warmth.

  He gave the driver a street name, but she was too flustered to get it. He turned and said, clearly wanting to explain:

  “I’ve long wanted to take a break, so I flew to France, where I spent two days in Cannes and Nice alone. It wasn’t all that interesting, so I flew to New York to spend a day there before coming back here.”

  She laughed, despite herself.

  “Doesn’t that mean you spent your vacation on airplanes?”

  “That’s right. I love flying, first class, of course. Who says travel can’t be limited to flying in planes?”

  His familiar bombast put her at ease. She was willing to accept that he hadn’t come to see her for a while because he had been on vacation flying first class between Taiwan, France, and the United States. The Rolls Royce glided smoothly through the dark city with thinning traffic, the thick glass blocking out the noise outside, and she was feeling the same dreamy, unreal sensation again.

  His short-sleeved shirt, she noticed, was clearly from a well-known Italian designer. The rolled-up sleeves were obviously intended to give the shirt a casual flair.

  Streetlights and neon signs streamed into the car, painting his muscular arms in different colors. Those were not the chiseled muscles of an athlete who trained intensively, nor were they the strong arms of a young, inexperienced boy. They were simply the arms of a fully grown man, comfortable, mature, and solid.

  Wanting to break the ice, Yinghong asked casually:

  “Have you been exercising lately?”

  “I’ve played a few rounds of golf, but with my workload, I couldn’t gain weight if I tried.”

  He continued, as always, once he’d gotten into the mood of talking:

  “I went to a sauna once. It was a club where the usual customers were CEOs, but all I saw was a roomful of ugly male bodies, not a single chairman of the board.”

  That made her laugh.

  “So I told myself I can’t be like them, at least for now; I couldn’t stand it.”

  As the conversation continued, the car rolled out of the lit streets and entered darkness, while the ride got noticeably bumpy. Without turning around, the driver asked for more directions, and as he turned the wheel, she saw a large plot of quiet land under the brilliant moon and stars.

  The car slowed down and drove around the edge of land that seemed to go on forever in the dark. Without streetlights, the inky night only intensified the feeling that the land was boundless, as if it continued to expand, rising up in the city where an inch of land was worth an ounce of gold. It had an absurd but imposing air about it.

  Then Lin spoke up in the dark car, a note of agitation creeping into his voice:

  “Land is meant to be walked on. Come on, let’s get out and take a walk around.”

  They stepped out onto a flattened area that was still littered with crushed rock and chunks of sandy soil. She was wearing a pair of Italian sandals with thin, high heels, making her wobble as she walked and forcing her to hold on to Lin’s arm with both hands. His powerful muscles and the sensation from his warm veins gav
e her the feeling that he was a man she could depend on.

  As she steadied herself, she stood with him on the vast, newly paved land; he raised his head and said with smug satisfaction.

  “On the land beneath your feet, I will build a real Taiwanese landmark, a plaza for the Taiwanese people, like the Arc de Triomph and the Champs Élysées in France, or the Empire State Building and Fifth Avenue in America. But it will have Taiwanese characteristics, fully representative of Taiwan.”

  The land that appeared boundless in the dark night did have the impressive potential for a grand dream. Lin continued expansively:

  “This plaza will be surrounded by an eight-lane highway all around, with high rises lining each side. I don’t want people to think that Taiwan can only afford to build seven-story apartment buildings or housing units. We Taiwanese can build skyscrapers like everyone else; we will have a structure with dozens of stories, with Taiwanese characteristics as well as international flair.”

  “What will that be, something that is both Taiwanese and modern?” Yinghong asked cautiously, in order not to dampen his enthusiasm. “That has been a cultural issue in dispute for some time.”

  “That’s the architect’s job. I’ll give him the best working conditions, and if I can’t do it, no one can.”

  She laughed softly over his confidence, before continuing with a bit of a taunt:

  “Cultural issues can be hard to deal with, probably not things that money alone can solve; they need time to develop before you see results.”

  As she talked, she realized that Lin was not paying attention to what she was saying. Standing with his legs slightly apart under the evening sky, he planted his feet firmly on the land, looking determined, exact, and erect. They were surrounded by darkness, except for an occasional spot of light in the distance. It turned chilly on that late, midsummer night when a wind blew over the land, quietly and slowly flapping his light cotton shirt. When he took out his lighter to light a cigarette, she saw a different face in the flickering red flame. Behind the lenses of glasses that added a refined look to his face were eyes that betrayed a disturbing look of cold distance.

  That scared her a bit, and made her lean gently toward him.

  He reached out, spun her around and pressed her up against him. Before she had time to react, his lips were on hers.

  He was obviously skilled at this; his predatory style of kissing completely won her over. In the meantime he began to expand his territory, moving to her ears and neck; she could not and did not put up any resistance, except for her vague awareness that no man could give her such a thrilling sensation with his lips alone.

  I had just removed myself from under Teddy. After prolonged and violent movement, I felt somewhat raw down below; the physical gratification lingered. But under Lin Xigeng’s touch, a different surge of desire came from somewhere and reared its head like a snake.

  I shocked even myself. In the past I could not have imagined how bodily desire could be like a bottomless pit lying in wait somewhere in my body; as a woman, I had not known of its existence over the years, and it was only now, when aroused, that I knew it was there.

  It was such a special feeling of being aroused, surrounded, and satisfied that, at the moment of exploding pleasure, I sensed another self scrutinizing every part of my body before its eyes came to rest on a woman’s most private and secret part, attempting to find the inner source of that stirring.

  I experienced a kind of pleasure that came from something other than genital contact; I was breathing hard and my face was flushed, as a driving heat enveloped me, raising tiny beads of sweat all over my body. I thought I must be drenched, but not so; the sweat seemed to exist only in my imagination.

  So maybe the burning heat was not real either; the heat came from his palm. In Taiwan’s summer heat, his body pressed tightly against mine like a blanket. As his hands, seemingly burning hot, moved across my skin, I shuddered and felt as if I would melt. The shudder and his violent kisses stirred me somewhere deep down, and a numbing pleasure spread throughout my body.

  I went limp in his arms, as that other self examined and tested me with crystal clearness; in a flash I realized that the primal spot that had gone undiscovered and untouched, even under Teddy’s prolonged movements, was now unfurling, spreading out under Lin’s touch and his kisses. An anxious desire I’d thought could never be satisfied was finally soothed at that moment.

  I knew it was all because of love, my everlasting, profound love for him.

  Tears welled up in my eyes.

  Yinghong could not wait to tell him that her trip down south with Mr. Huang had simply been a ruse. She also felt like telling him how much she loved him. But she didn’t.

  What she heard was Lin’s self-satisfying boast:

  “See how good I made you feel. I bet no man has ever done that to you.”

  Then he followed up, in his usual style of adding further explanation:

  “I’ve not been doing so well in other areas lately. I guess I’ve played around too much in the past, so I have to work hard on this.”

  Still dazed, Yinghong disentangled herself from his arms and looked up at his face, only to be greeted by an impassive face devoid of sexual desire.

  ONE

  Father began taking photographs when he had nearly recovered, though he still needed time to mend. It was about a year after Yinghong had written “I was born in the last year of the First Sino-Japanese War” as a third-grader.

  Starting out with a Leica III camera, which he’d bought in Germany during his student days, Father took pictures of anything near Flowing Pillow Pavilion that was worth photographing. Mostly it was common landscape photos, usually in medium or long shots, but after they were enlarged and developed, the details were all visible, including the multileveled, winding veranda by Long Rainbow Lying by the Moon, or the swallow eaves on Lotus Tower that soared into the sky, or the undulating green lotus leaves by Flowing Pillow Pavilion.

  Back then Father had yet to develop his own film, and Lucheng had no photo studio with equipment good enough for him, so the negatives had to be sent to nearby Taichung, the largest city in central Taiwan. It took many days before they could be picked up.

  All she could see on these enlarged black-and-white photographs was dust, grayish dust that seemed to show up everywhere.

  She never could forget the dust. Fine grains of dusty sand traveled on the wind from the ocean near Lucheng the year long, roiling and flying around the small hill by Lotus Tower, like shifting sand, and turning into flying pebbles by the time they made their way to Lotus Garden. Winter was the worst, for it was the season of howling north winds, and the lack of rain turned the place dry and cold. Wind and dust were so strong and pervasive that you had to squint when stepping outside. You could never keep up with the dust that gathered on furniture and household items, and the garden seemed buried in layers of it.

  It was through a veil of floating dust under fluctuating sunlight that she saw Father’s lusterless face, gaunt after his long illness, looking as if gilded in a patina of gold, gloomy and melancholic.

  The entire garden seemed buried in dust. When she came home from school, she was virtually alone, since her mother was busy caring for her father. She liked to wander over to Lotus Garden, with its tightly shut doors and windows, where she would pick out, among all the dust-covered spots, one blocked by less carved wood—usually a large pane of glass on the latticed window—reach out with a slender finger and slowly and carefully write her name. Her handwriting would make the pane look brighter, as if it had been wiped clean, revealing three large, unruly characters:

  Zhu Ying Hong

  Besides her own name, she liked to add Father’s name, leaving “Zhu Zu Yan” on the dusty window. Sometimes, having to stay clear of the carved wood on the window frame, she was forced to allocate the strokes different sizes, and the last three strokes in “Yan” would be oversized, straying out of the normal frame, looking out of proportion.

>   She came once each day, at least once every other day, to tend to her calligraphy, so that new dust would not settle on the places laboriously cleaned by her finger and return them to their original, dusty state. When she returned each time, she would trace her earlier handwriting to reclaim some of the clean space. But her finger did not always fall on the exact same spot and the characters would be elongated or puffed up, seemingly floating on dust, like an ever-growing corpse nurtured and nourished by it.

  One day Mudan happened to stop by the garden for some used items. She mocked Yinghong when she spotted her busily writing on the windowpanes.

  “You’d need a barrel maker to loop your characters together. Otherwise they’ll fall apart so easily you could never put them back together.”

  Mother had been the first to poke fun at her handwriting, and when Mudan overheard that, she’d memorized every word and repeated it, even though, as an illiterate, she could not know what was being written.

  Upset, Yinghong reached out and erased the characters, spreading columns of floating dust, all but blocking out the light as it lingered in the air. The names had not completely disappeared; parts of the characters were still visible on the cleaner windowpanes, but now they were just fragments, an eerie sight reminiscent of broken limbs. Dust returned slowly and swallowed up the remnants until they were no longer visible. Yinghong ran off in a panic, never to return to trace the names again.

  It was during this time, when she was in the fourth grade, that her father recovered enough from his illness to take up photography. She saw the pictures of Lotus Garden when they came home from Taichung—small, black-and-white, glossy photos in which overcrowded houses and scenery seemed to overlap. The inadequate contrast of black and white presented a gray, dusty mess of light and shadows.

  The light-gray areas resembled the soft traces her fingers had made on the windowpanes when writing names. The grayish white spots in the middle were places where more dust had accumulated on the messier parts of her handwriting.