FORTUNE COOKIE

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘But I have!’ I protested pathetically. ‘Up to now! It was just the warning, I —’

  Mercy B. Lord cut me short. ‘If I had agreed to be your wife, then, of course, that would be different. If I’d agreed to any plans that involve us, yes again, but I haven’t. Now, if you’ll please call me a taxi …’

  The wardrobe door was open and the black cheongsam was all that was left hanging there, with the red patent-leather high-heeled shoes placed neatly beneath it. If the brain forms permanent images, then the black cheongsam and red shoes were one for me. They had, in combination, burned themselves into my subconscious mind. While there may have been fifty delightful ways I saw Mercy B. Lord in the abstract, this was the one that thrilled me the most, gave me a mental frisson I could conjure up at will.

  I was conscious that this image wasn’t necessarily a truth, an absolute. As an artist and an ad man, I knew that images could be misleading, and that the secret lay in stripping them back to observe what was underneath and gave them their power. But for the most part, the human mind doesn’t work in this manner. It prefers to make pictures, and the sum of those pictures leads us to our beliefs. The Catholic Church has always known this. In order to avoid cultural chaos, we create visual stereotypes and infuse them with power. The black cheongsam on a young, slender oriental female sends all the right sexual messages to a male, particularly a Westernised male. With the red stilettos, two stereotypes join – the sexual mystery of the Orient coupled with the red high-heeled shoes that are pure femme fatale raunchy Hollywood – and create a Western fantasy.

  This image wasn’t all of Mercy B. Lord – in fact, she was only a very small part, but it was a part that brilliantly embodied a stereotypical fantasy, and I loved and cherished it. But now it was as if two important parts of the many parts of Mercy B. Lord I adored were deserting me. As if the gown and the shoes were about to step out and leave me forever.

  I picked up her suitcase and silently left the bedroom with her following. Maybe I should have begged, objected, persisted or promised, but my instinct told me she wasn’t going to change her mind, and that her survival depended on her leaving. Waiting for the lift and feeling pretty bloody shitty, I said, ‘Hey, you left your gown and shoes.’

  ‘You may keep them. I don’t have any further use for them.’ She sniffed back a tear and started to cry, then to howl. I’d never heard such despair, and knew it wasn’t just about us. What I was hearing was a far greater sadness.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  OF COURSE I BEGGED unashamedly. I’d fucked up and lost my girl. Not to a worthy competitor, but to an unworthy self. I called Mercy B. Lord at the Beatrice Fong Agency every day but always received the same polite answer from the switch – ‘Just one moment, sir’ – then a thirty-second pause followed by the same reply: ‘Miss Mercy B. Lord is not available at this time.’ I knew it was pointless yelling down the phone but I often did long after I had heard the click of the receiver at the other end. As my tiny office had no ceiling and the glass panels would have exposed me to the silent ridicule of the production staff, and more importantly of Ronnie Wing, I would make these calls from home, taking a taxi there during my lunch break.

  I sent Mercy B. Lord baskets of local orchids and roses, cards and, upon reflection, mawkish love letters written with what felt like my blood and tears, but that came from my heart and soul. Then I noticed that the splendid Noël Coward aspidistra in reception was missing and that a basket of Singapore orchids had taken its place. When I’d sent two dozen red hothouse roses, the following day the same numbers of red roses would appear, resplendent on the ornate stand. I questioned Alice Ho at reception. She had been with the Wings for twenty years and, like all switchboard operators, knew everything. But she was the classic inscrutable oriental and it was impossible to tell what she was thinking. With a face as bland as a boarding-house dinner plate, she claimed that the flowers were delivered addressed to the agency with no card or note accompanying them. Then, when summoned to Sidney Wing’s office about an invoice, something that could have been done over the phone, I saw the aspidistra on a new stand next to the ancestors’ cabinet. The message was clear. I stopped sending flowers, they stopped appearing in reception and the aspidistra duly reappeared in its rightful place. My letters were routinely returned bearing a post-office stamp that read Not at this address. While I didn’t bundle and tie them with ribbon, I didn’t throw them out either, keeping them in the drawer of my bedside table, all thirty of them, a testament to my pathetic love for Mercy B. Lord.

  She had always forbidden me to visit the Beatrice Fong Agency and I knew that to do so now would be unproductive. In an attempt to hang on to the final threads of my tattered ego, I resisted what appeared to be my last resort: to sit watching her building from a tea-house across the road. I had sufficient pride, but only just, to resist playing the grieving and uncomprehending dog who visits at the same time every day the place its master routinely frequented before he died. I tell a lie – I went once and sat for an hour between five and six o’clock, but she didn’t emerge, and I summoned sufficient dignity to leave the tea-house, dragging my shadow behind me like a sack of potatoes.

  Stupidly, in an attempt to ameliorate the agony and conjure up the ecstasy, I removed the wardrobe door so that the first thing I saw as I awoke each morning was the black cheongsam and the red shoes. I’d sit on the bed cross-legged, sometimes holding my head in my hands and shaking it from side to side, telling myself to get a life, then I’d groan and go to the bathroom and clean my teeth without looking in the mirror. I imagined her with me under the shower as I soaped and serviced my desperate need for her. I told myself every morning that today would be better, but it wasn’t.

  Chairman Meow came and went and it was the usual shitfight. She even asked me one night, ‘Simon, have you turned gay?’

  I felt about as far from gay as it was possible to feel, but I replied, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a new expression I heard on the radio. It means are you … you know, a nancy boy?’

  The time dragged by until, curiously, Ronnie invited me to lunch at the Town Club one Thursday. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so, nevertheless we’d only been there on a couple of occasions. The last time had been after I’d explained fairly forcefully to Sidney that he couldn’t begin to make a TV commercial for Citizen watches on the budget he’d agreed to with Hercules Sun. Ronnie had invited me to lunch in an attempt to persuade me to find a way. The loss of face to his brother would be extreme and unacceptable, and – to use an expression familiar to Australians – Sidney was between a rock and a hard place. He couldn’t go back and admit his error, and he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pay the difference out of agency funds. If I didn’t somehow find a way to make the commercial, it would almost certainly destroy his brother’s relationship with me. I recall thinking that the relationship wasn’t much chop anyway; if it wasn’t already in tatters, certainly the edges were decidedly ragged. I was also loath to share the beginnings of the idea I’d had for filming the commercial. Let them sweat.

  ‘Ronnie, I can’t squeeze blood out of a stone, mate. This has nothing whatsoever to do with relationships. I don’t give a shit where the money comes from but I can’t make a commercial on what Sidney’s quoted. There’s barely sufficient funds to buy film and pay for processing!’

  ‘Simon, please understand, it’s not about money!’ Ronnie cried.

  ‘It’s a Chinese thing,’ I said, a touch acerbically.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, missing the irony in my voice.

  ‘Okay, whatever you say, but only money can solve the problem.’

  ‘No, you must find a way!’ he’d insisted.

  ‘What? Pay the difference myself?’ I’d asked.

  ‘Yes, if that is what it takes,’ he’d replied.

  Come to think of it, there was a precedent for my footing the bill. I’d insisted that Sidney do something about the state of the staff toilets, but this too had resulte
d in a stalemate and I had ended up personally paying for two fans to be installed after holes in the brick wall for the flue had been knocked in.

  I’d arranged for this to be done secretly on a Sunday for both the male and the female toilets. It was the Sunday before Dansford was due to arrive and I didn’t want him to walk into an agency that smelled of shit. While nothing was said and no one, as far as I knew, realised who’d paid for the fans, Ronnie informed me that his brother was furious. Several of the staff had thanked him when they’d come into work on Monday.

  ‘Hey, wait on,’ I’d said. ‘He could have taken the credit. I don’t care. Nobody knows who did it. I arranged it for a Sunday. There wasn’t a soul in the office all day. The workmen had cleaned up and gone home before five o’clock.’

  ‘This is Singapore, Simon. The whole goddamned staff knew before lunch on Monday,’ Ronnie said, emphasising his American accent. ‘Hell no! Serious loss of face, man!’

  ‘What about the people who thanked him?’

  ‘It’s a Chinese thing. They knew it wasn’t him.’

  ‘What? They were sending him up?’

  ‘Yeah, the Chinese way.’

  ‘Well, bugger me,’ I remember saying. But I quite liked the idea of the sycophantic staff having a giggle behind their hands at Sidney’s expense.

  However, despite this loss of face, the two toilets still couldn’t cope, and there remained a semi-permanent miasma within sixty feet of them. I continued to pay for air freshener every week until I got smart and buried it as a taxi, bar or lunch expense.

  So I knew that this luncheon invitation to Ronnie’s club wasn’t a casual or generous gesture on his part.

  If British-inspired men’s clubs have any value, it is that they never appear to change. There are no unpleasant surprises: the same people are always at the bar, the same smell of floor polish and brass- and silver-cleaner persists, the familiar starched linen and monogrammed cutlery lie on the dining-room tables. The menu is always neatly typed with its equally predictable ‘daily special’ inserted on the inside flap, usually some oxymoron such as ‘Fresh smoked haddock flown directly from the UK’. The ambience of the dining room is unruffled, with the ceiling fans rotating at a level just below an unacceptable whir; lunch is always followed by the exodus to the afternoon lounge with its somnolent rustle of broadsheet newspapers and recumbent planter chairs and chalked wake-up times marked on the soles of stout brogues. Remarkably, even new staff members looked like their predecessors, the carefully obsequious Indian and Malay waiters. A British club is a male safe house and a solid tribute to the security of an unchanging and carefully tended world.

  Ronnie ordered his very dry martini and a beer for me and we chatted about nothing in particular. I had a sense of what was coming and he, no doubt, was rehearsing the phrasing. He downed the first martini in three gulps and immediately called for a second. This one he sipped more slowly, and then a third followed, by which time I’d downed my lager and we went in to lunch.

  At lunch he had red wine from a half-full bottle marked with his name. I abstained and had the waiter pour me a glass of water. Whatever was coming, I didn’t want to hear it half-tanked. Ronnie toyed with his food, allowing the liquor to quell his anxiety, while I ate steadily, deliberately saying very little.

  Then, pouring the last of the wine, he said, ‘She won’t be coming back, Simon.’ Clearly, he’d decided to drop the preliminaries I know he would have been silently rehearsing.

  ‘Oh? She told you?’ There was no point in pretending.

  ‘A message. I’m sorry to be the vulture man, Simon.’ It wasn’t an expression I knew and it could have been one of Ronnie’s specials, but it sounded apt.

  ‘You know this for sure?’ I was attempting to keep my voice even.

  ‘Believe me, Simon.’

  ‘Nothing I can do?’

  ‘Haven’t you done enough already? You were warned.’

  ‘Well, nobody’s bounced me over the border so far.’

  ‘Big Lather saved you, man. Count yourself lucky.’

  ‘Lucky? This sounds like a conspiracy, rather than one individual’s decision. Are you telling me —’

  ‘I’m telling you nothing. Just that it’s over.’

  ‘And you’re the messenger?’

  ‘I told you that already, I’m the vulture man.’

  ‘Delivering a message from big brother.’

  ‘Simon, don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Yeah, right, as the vulture man once said, you can’t knock two holes in a shithouse wall on a Sunday without everyone in Singapore knowing.’

  Ronnie chuckled. ‘Good one. Touché. I can see you’re taking it on the chin, buddy.’ He suddenly brightened. ‘Hey, man, let’s head over to the Nite Cap. The mama-san says she’s got a new chick to replace Veronica; Vietnamese. Her name is Mai Khiem Ton – in English, Modesty. Must have come as a surprise, Veronica up and leaving, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, of course!’ I said with more than a touch of sarcasm. ‘Thanks, Ronnie, but if you don’t mind, I’ll give the Nite Cap a miss. Heaps of work back at the agency.’ The very fact that Ronnie knew the name of the new Vietnamese bar girl clearly indicated that meeting her was a set-up that would prove Mercy B. Lord had been simply a convenient sex object.

  The weeks trundled by like a slow goods train but things didn’t get any better. Mercy B. Lord and I had only been together for a few months but it might as well have been a lifetime. Whatever had happened before her was inconsequential, and everything that had happened since was as dark and miserable as dragging my potato-sack shadow behind me that day as I left the tea-house opposite the Beatrice Fong Agency, in other words, heavy going.

  I hated coming home and worked late at the agency most nights, although the weekends were the worst. There is something quite wrong about going in to work on a Sunday that has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity. Then one Sunday I picked up a brush and started to paint the portrait I’d started of Mercy B. Lord. She’d sat for me only three times and I’d done a dozen or so preliminary sketches, simply details of her hands, eyes, the tilt of her head, the angles of her body. Thinking there was plenty of time, I hadn’t committed anything to canvas.

  Now I prepared a life-size canvas and began to outline in paint her shape, and the slight tilt of her head when she would look at me as I approached her. It was a winsome look that never failed to touch my heart. I’d felt it perhaps most powerfully the night I’d walked into the reception area at Raffles and seen her in the black cheongsam seated in a peacock-tail wicker chair. This had been one of the defining moments of my life, a glorious vision I would never forget. I’d come from a forced inspection of my minuscule future office, convinced I’d made a huge mistake coming to Singapore when, seemingly in seconds, she’d changed everything.

  It was arrogant on my part, but what I was going to attempt to do was to capture that moment, the sense of overwhelming feminine beauty that could create such a miraculous metamorphosis in a man. That Sunday morning I blocked out the basic planes, the shape of her face and hair and the lines of her body. I’d taken several colour photographs during those first three sittings so, at the very least, I had some whole-body references as well as the details in the sketches. The difference between a portrait that looks and feels natural and one that looks artificial or false can often be a matter of a few lines or a shift in perspective. In layman’s terms, if the artist lacks the ability to draw really well, he won’t be able to make up for this deficiency with paint. If you don’t get the framework correct at the very beginning, it can be almost impossible to correct later in the painting, even if you’re using oils. I was using acrylic, mainly so the paint would dry quickly, but also because it was something new.

  I’d purchased a beautifully elaborate cane chair similar to the ones at Raffles, and Mercy B. Lord had wriggled into the black cheongsam and red high heels but remained fresh faced without make-up, and with perhaps only a casual brush run through her h
air. While I loved her with a bit of this and that added to her eyes and lips, Mercy B. Lord was a beautiful woman even when she was completely unadorned, and I made a mental note to follow this full-length portrait with a head-and-shoulders study of her without a skerrick of make-up and with her hair in the disarray of morning.

  The portrait progressed slowly over the next few weeks, and deliberately so, as I didn’t want to complete it. On the other hand, neither did I want to overwork it, something every artist has to be careful to avoid. Gilding the lily can turn a decent painting into a cliché. You have to know when to stop.

  Then, picking up the Straits Times one day, I saw an advertisement reminding artists that entries for the Hong Kong International Portraiture Prize being held by the Hong Kong City Hall Museum and Art Gallery had to be submitted within three weeks. Obviously, I’d missed the original announcement some four months previously. I decided on the spur of the moment to enter my portrait of Mercy B. Lord, thinking it might distract me from my self-absorbed misery. No, I lie – I told myself it was perhaps a way of bringing our affair to an end in my mind and eventually my heart, that by sending her image away I might begin to heal. It was almost like a funeral. By sending her image to Hong Kong, to what amounted to its final resting place, where it had no chance of winning – of being resurrected, as it were – I was, in effect, letting go of Mercy B. Lord. When it was returned to me, I hoped I would have the strength to be able to destroy it. Or that’s what I thought, anyway. I’d just have time to complete the painting if I took a week off work, using some of my holiday entitlement. When the entry form arrived I filled it in, and in the place where it called for the name of the painting I wrote, ‘Thursday Girl’. Bloody pathetic, really, but there you go – those were the two words that, in effect, had cooked my goose.