My Favourite Wife (18 page)

He really liked her. He felt as if she had just opened up her eyes and seen the entire planet. ‘You didn’t have to leave, you know,’ he said.

A flash of irritation in her eyes. ‘That lady,’ she said. ‘That lady, she said I’m Manchu.’

He didn’t know much about Manchuria. About as much as he knew about the LA Lakers. He knew Manchuria had been in the Dongbei, the north-eastern region she came from, and that it had been colonised by Mongols, Manchus and the Japanese. But although he didn’t know much, he knew enough to know that Tess Devlin had a point.

JinJin’s face was not typically Chinese. It was easy to believe she carried the blood of some high-cheekboned invader, and easy to understand why she was so touchy about it. It was like telling someone on a kibbutz that they looked like a cossack.

‘I think she said you look a bit Manchu,’ he said, playing it down.

Now he was really getting on her nerves. ‘But I’m not Manchu.’

He held up his hands in surrender. This wasn’t going great. But then she tossed her baseball cap on to the back of her head and smiled, a smile that somehow broke the enchantment cast by her looks. It was a bit of a goofy grin because her teeth stuck out slightly,
and the dentists of the Dongbei had been careless with her, or maybe her parents had other things to worry about, like finding food for the table, but that smile was full of warmth and humour. And if that toothy, goofy grin took the edge off the classic beauty that resided on her face when she wasn’t smiling, then it replaced it with something better – or at least something that Bill liked a lot more.

‘Please come in,’ she said, with the scrupulously polite formality she was capable of, stepping back to invite him into her apartment. And suddenly he felt very married. Did he really want this to happen?

He wasn’t cut out for this game. That was the truth of it. All his plotting, all his calculating, all his watching from his window – when it came to the crunch, when it was time to go into her flat, he just didn’t have the heart to go through with it. You see, he loved his wife.

‘I’ve got to go.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Early start tomorrow.’

But she had made her mind up.

‘Please come in,’ she insisted. ‘I want you to try my dumplings.’

This was too much. Just too much.

‘Oh no, I can’t, I couldn’t,’ he said in a weak voice.

‘Please,’ she said, and he was struck again by her adherence to form, as though there was a strict code of etiquette here that had to be obeyed, and somehow it made her impossible to resist. In a daze, he found himself entering her apartment, and it took his brain a few moments to realise that when JinJin Li offered you dumplings, that really was all she was offering.

The smell of dumplings filled the air and the flat was full of people. All of them young women. Apart from a child, a tiny child, a sturdy crop-haired toddler who staggered between the legs of the girls of Paradise Mansions. There was a gap at the back of his trousers where his fat little bum stuck out to make it easy for him to do his business.

They were cooking dinner, which seemed to consist exclusively of dumplings, all these small packets of dough that were being filled with pork, fish or vegetables, and then fried or steamed.

Most of the faces he recognised. These women were not strangers. The tall taxi dancer from Suzy Too was at the stove, pulling dumplings from a steamer with one hand, and fast frying a pan of dumplings with the other. She waved at him.

The woman who had tapped a number into her mobile phone and offered herself for peanuts was playing on the floor with the small boy. She pointed at the child and laughed. She seemed a lot happier than the last time he had seen her, and he realised that he hadn’t seen her smile or laugh when he met her before, surrounded by all that fun.

There was another one he thought he recognised but could not place, an alarmingly thin girl in a mini-kilt who was washing up dishes in the sink. Where was she from? And then he saw the monogrammed handbag nearby and got it. It was one of the Louis Vuitton-addicted teachers, who he guessed had perhaps found a sponsor since the last time they’d met. She glanced up at him, but gave no sign of recognition. Why would she? He had been just another guy in Suzy Too.

And there was someone else – not one of the young women he remembered from out in the night, but a face he had seen when she was putting the rubbish out, or chatting to the porter, or strolling the aisles of the local Carrefour supermarket, or when she was going off with her father. At least he had thought it was her father.

She was the plain girl in glasses that he had seen leaving with the old man in his BMW, and she had seemed to be from a different world to the rest of them. She was knitting now, and it made her look more like a fifties housewife than a kept woman. But she wasn’t from a different world to the rest of them. She was from the same world.

‘Neighbours,’ JinJin said, ever the perfect host. ‘All the neighbours. Making
xiao long bao
. Shanghainese dumpling. And
jiaozi
dumpling from Changchun. Like ravioli. You know?’

He knew. ‘I know.’

‘Please to try.’

JinJin found him a seat between the girl in glasses and the woman with the kid and brought him a cold Tsingtao. The child held up a scratched metal car and Bill took it. ‘Ferrari,’ he said, ‘very nice.’

The one in glasses was called Jenny Two. Jenny Two? Yes, Jenny Two. The one with the boy was Sugar. ‘I think we met,’ he said, unsure if mentioning it was the right thing to do. He was sure JinJin could have told him. ‘How are you?’ he asked Sugar, and unfortunately she told him.

‘Sometimes I have to lock myself away from my family,’ she said, quite matter-of-fact, watching Bill play with her child. ‘My mother and father and son. I can’t be with them. Because of my work.’ She paused, taking a breath. This was what they did, he thought. They bottled everything up for so long that when they finally let go, it all came pouring out. ‘Last night there was a man in Suzy Too,’ said Sugar. ‘An Australian. And when we left he wanted to go to casino. And I said – oh no, no casino, we just go to your hotel. But he wanted casino and he lost.’

Bill nodded. He lost at the casino. What were the chances of that?

‘Then this morning he gave me ten US dollar,’ Sugar said, and at first Bill thought he hadn’t heard her right. Ten dollars? ‘And he said, “What can I do? Everything else is gone.” And I was good to him.’ The tears came and she blinked them back. Her child looked up at her, the little metal car in his hand. ‘It’s not enough, is it?’ she said.

‘No,’ Bill said quietly. ‘It’s not enough.’

She nodded. Her son held out his toy as if to comfort her. ‘So sometimes I have to lock myself away from my family,’ she said, taking the scratched toy Ferrari.

Jenny Two put a protective arm around her and Bill looked away, unwilling to intrude on this personal grief and unable to offer any words of comfort. Ten US dollars for your body. Sugar was the poor relation, he learned, bouncing between Jenny Two’s spare room and her parents’ apartment. The rest of them all had someone. The rest of them all had some kind of sponsor. And while the world he lived in would certainly disapprove, having some kind of sponsor was better than being paid ten US dollars for your body.

He looked over at JinJin and she smiled and he immediately felt better – he was getting used to it now, that toothy grin that revealed her soul in a way that the cool, poker-faced beauty she wore when climbing into a Porsche never did, and never could. He was getting used to her smile but he thought that he could never get tired of it.

He had been wrong about her, he realised, pulling a book of crossword puzzles from beneath him. He had been wrong about all of these women, the
jinseniao
in the
niaolong
of Paradise Mansions. All the pretty canaries in their golden cage.

They might spend nights alone waiting for the call. And when they were back from the jewel-box of the Shanghai night, back from the restaurants and the cocktail bars and clubs of the Bund, back from it all and finally home alone, they might sometimes feel second best, and they might suffer all the indignities of being a married man’s mistress, of going to bed with someone but usually waking up alone.

But they would never be lonely, not in the way that he was lonely. This was their city. And the girls of Paradise Mansions had each other.

It was a different kind of karaoke bar to what he was used to.

Bill had accompanied Shane and clients, all of them Asian, to glossy joints in the old French Concession, but the karaoke bar
that the girls of Paradise Mansions favoured was just a warren of plain little boxes in a Gubei backstreet, and the neon sign above the door was not in English, and there were no pretty girls employed to applaud middle-aged Taiwanese businessmen for drunkenly murdering ‘My Way’ in Mandarin.

Bill and the girls crammed into a room the size of his wife’s walk-in wardrobe and ordered fruit juice all round, and a Tsingtao for Bill.

Sugar had stayed home – she had a spare room in Jenny Two’s place that she shared with her son – but the rest of them were there, studying the songbook menus in earnest silence, like famished souls who had unexpectedly found themselves in a five-star restaurant.

He leafed through the leather-bound book on his lap and understood none of it. There were hundreds of Mandopop and Cantopop standards, but nothing – he realised with profound relief – that would require him to sing.

Watching JinJin seize the microphone and stare intently at a screen where an Asian man and woman were walking hand in hand down a beach with tower blocks in the background, Bill at last understood the attraction of karaoke bars to the Chinese.

The karaoke bar offered privacy in a country where privacy was scarce, and freedom of expression in a culture where expressing yourself too freely could get you a bullet in the back of the head, and the bill for the bullet sent to the folks back home.

JinJin launched herself into a tearful Mandarin ballad, a song that he deduced could only be about undying love.

When the song was over, the taxi dancer – Jenny One – leapt up and tried to wrestle the microphone from JinJin, who refused to let it go. They barked at each other in Shanghainese. JinJin won, kept the microphone and began emoting her way through another overwrought ballad, flushed with delight, watching the little ball bounce across the Chinese characters as a woman on the TV screen
gazed mournfully out of a window. JinJin’s voice was not bad, but it had a tendency to crack at the big climax.

Jenny Two looked up from her knitting.

‘She has a beautiful voice,’ she murmured, her eyes gleaming behind her glasses. ‘And a beautiful face.’

Bill nodded politely. He certainly agreed about the face.

‘I have neither,’ said Jenny Two, smiling happily. ‘But my husband likes me anyway. I am very lucky. He is very old.’

Bill marvelled at his own naivety. ‘North block, right?’ he said, and she nodded, showing teeth that protruded beyond cute and into dental disaster.

Bill could see the 7-series black BMW parked in the courtyard of Paradise Mansions, and the well-groomed, sixty-something driver who never got out. He had seen Jenny Two running to the car, a look of innocent delight on her face, and had always assumed it was a wealthy old man taking his plain student daughter out for dinner on the Bund.

Jenny Two just didn’t carry herself like the others. She didn’t have the look. But Bill liked her a lot. There was a gentleness about Jenny Two, and she seemed to quite enjoy playing the ugly duckling of the group. And when she stood up to hold a formless length of blue wool against his chest, he saw that she had a hard, compact body, and that she was the only one of them with real curves. And she was nice. Bill could understand why some old
taipan
would take a shine to her.

‘Eet eez always these way with JinJin and the karaoke,’ sighed Jenny One, flopping on to the cracked sofa.

‘Where’d you learn to speak English?’ he asked her, already guessing the answer. The answer to almost every question in Paradise Mansions was ‘a man’.
I met a man
. Or more than one man.

‘I took language class,’ Jenny One said. ‘In bed. Best place to learn language, no? I have two French boyfriends. The first – he eez young and poor and I love him very much. But he eez young
and poor so I finish.’ Tears sprang to her eyes, undermining the casual harshness of her words, and she dabbed at them with a little paper napkin. They were boiling with emotion, these women. It was always laughter and tears with them, Bill realised, often in the same sentence. ‘The second eez rich and married and then he go back to Paris.’

Bill guessed that the Paradise Mansions flat must have been a goodbye gift from the rich and married Frenchman. That’s why Jenny One could afford to live there and yet still go home alone. She had a sponsor, even if he was long gone. ‘He called for a year and then he didn’t call any more.’ She looked at Bill searchingly. ‘Why do you think he stopped calling?’

Bill shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ He supposed the man’s wife must have had something to do with it. Jenny One was crying openly now, and Bill saw that the girls of Paradise Mansions were regular young women. Back home they would have been accountants and teachers, girlfriends and wives. But not in Shanghai. Not in times like these. He watched JinJin, reluctantly surrendering the microphone to the Louis Vuitton addict in the mini-kilt.

‘You know that girl?’ Jenny One asked him. ‘She is Annie – you know?’ Bill shook his head.

‘She is new,’ Jenny Two said, her knitting needles clacking. She nodded knowingly at Annie as though they were gossiping over a garden fence. ‘Man from Taiwan!’

Annie began screeching some awful Cantopop song.

‘Big apartment in west block,’ Jenny Two continued, her eyes wide, and magnified further by her milk-bottle spectacles. ‘Three bedroom! And the man will be in Shanghai for two years! Long contract!’

‘His family are here?’ Jenny One asked, and when the other Jenny nodded, she pulled a philosophical
c’est-la-vie
face.