My Favourite Wife (27 page)

‘He speaks no English whatsoever,’ JinJin said dismissively.

Her father had not prospered in the years since leaving his family. The gambling and the violence had ruined two more little families, and now he lived alone in a wooden shack, troubled by his lungs and the damp, existing on a diet that JinJin said consisted of congee, roll-up cigarettes and whatever brand of tea had stained his teeth that dark brown colour.

There was a noodle shop next to the bus depot and Bill watched the pair of them as they noisily slurped their meal while he -suddenly wary of the local fare – ate nothing. Even locked out of their conversation by language, he could see that the balance of power between them had shifted. The father answered his daughter’s questions almost bashfully, unable to maintain eye contact for very long. It was the daughter who called the shots.

‘My father says the local government are very bad,’ JinJin told Bill. ‘After the flood, there was a relief fund set up for the village by the central government. But the village did not even know about it until they sent representatives to Beijing to protest.’

Her father grinned with embarrassment below his Clark Gable moustache.

‘My father says he would like to invite you to his home,’ JinJin said. ‘But they are very poor here, and he is ashamed to invite you to such a low place.’

Bill lifted a hand in protest. ‘Please, sir, there is no need to be ashamed, I am happy to meet you.’

They shook hands, enthusiastically, pointlessly, and before Bill knew what he was doing, he had taken out his wallet and was pushing a grubby wad of RMB into her father’s hand. He made a token protest, but then waggled his eyebrows happily, staring at the money with disbelief.

‘I this girl father!’ he proclaimed, and JinJin looked away, as if she could not stand to look at either of them.

His parents had made it look easy. You find someone and then you stick with them forsaking all others until you are parted by the grave. You kept the big promises you had made in bed and in church and on all the days you would never forget. That’s what you did, and your life was simple, and the future was clear. It did not seem impossible, unimaginable.

So why couldn’t he do it?

What was wrong with him?

They had flown back from the shockingly modern airport at Guilin and he was sick of it. Already sick of it. He didn’t want an affair, and he didn’t want to be the kind of man that kept a bit on the side. He did not want to be the Chinese man in the silver Porsche. He didn’t want arrangements made, bargains struck, secrets shared. He wanted the one who would make him forget about all the others. That was what he wanted. That was all he had ever wanted.

You find the one that obliterates all the rest and it immediately solves all problems, it resolves everything and puts an end to all the wanting, because once you start the wanting, it’s never enough until your heart stops beating, and there can be no rest and no peace and no real happiness. All you had to do was to find the one that would blind you to the rest of the world. That’s all he wanted, the same as everyone else. It didn’t seem too much to ask.

And this girl who had sat in the window seat next to him, frowning over the in-flight magazine – this fabulous girl – she filled his heart. But when he switched on his phone when he was alone in the apartment, it told him all the calls he had missed. MISSED CALL. HOME, it said. MISSED CALL. HOME.

His parents had made it look easy and perhaps in the end it was easy. As long as you kept the promises. If you broke the promises then suddenly everything else was breakable too.

He came home late from his first day back at work and saw that all the lights in her apartment were out. He knew that
she wasn’t sleeping. He knew that the car had come for her.

He was angry and jealous and glad. Good, get it over with, end it now. Did he think that she was going to sit by the phone waiting for his call? Did he think that Guilin meant that there was nobody else who could make demands on her time? Did he expect her to sit at home, curl up those endless legs, and spend the evening with
Crossword Work-Out?
Yes, yes, yes – in his madness in their double-locked, do-not-disturb hotel room he had expected all of these things, even though he knew he could only be let down. JinJin was out for the night, the only place she could be, and he was glad about it – end the thing now – even though it was like being kicked in the stomach.

He was sitting on the stairs outside her apartment when she came home at midnight. He had thought about what might happen if the man came back with her. It would not be pleasant. But the Porsche decanted her back at her rented apartment, and then it left, and Bill was rising to his feet as she pulled out her key.

‘I’m not doing this,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it. I love my wife and our little girl. I’m not leaving them. And I don’t want a woman on the side. A permanent girlfriend. That’s not for me. I can’t take it – you out with him and me waiting for you to come back. How does that work? How does that make me feel?’ He was raising his voice now. A woman called out a protest in Chinese from behind a closed door. They both looked in the direction of the complaint, and then back at each other. ‘How could it work?’ Bill asked again. ‘Do we get you on alternate nights?’

JinJin let herself into the flat, not looking at him. He followed her inside, grabbing her by the shoulder and pulling her round.

‘Or are you going to see both of us the same night?’ he said. He had never seen her look so sad. ‘You know what that would make you, don’t you?’

‘I end it,’ she said. She always slipped into the present tense when she was tired, or stressed, or hurt. ‘I end it with that man.’

Bill stared at her. He didn’t know what to say. He felt like he was always rushing to judge her, and always getting it wrong.

‘Tonight I tell him,’ she was saying, ‘We
can’t go on.’
Now she looked at Bill. ‘Because I don’t want to go that way.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t want to go that way. And because I love you all the time.’

Then she was in his arms and his mouth was on her face, kissing away her tears, refusing to allow them, no more tears, and he was mad for her, starved for her, moaning his love and apologies, sorry again, endlessly sorry for everything, and endlessly grateful, and all his wise decisions obliterated by the touch of her mouth on his mouth, and everything tasting of salt.

I don’t want to go that way
.

I love you all the time
.

He loved her all the time too.

Outside her window they could hear the unbroken buzz of the city going about its everyday business, but in JinJin’s room he felt that the world had entered a different time.

Everything about her was a source of wonder. He cupped her knees and ran his hands along the endless flanks of her legs and it seemed to take for ever. He wanted it to take forever.

‘Measuring me again,’ she laughed. There was a lot of laughter. The long afternoon felt light-hearted and deadly serious all at once. They were giddy with joy, punchdrunk with happiness. She pressed her mouth against his, her brown eyes alight, and then those eyes closing, and he could tell she felt it too. This hunger that was more than a hunger, this craving that could not be satisfied if they stayed in this room for the rest of their lives.

She rose naked from the floor where they had been lying and looked at herself in the mirror, her arms and legs long and gawky as she examined herself, her small hands cupped across even smaller breasts.

‘Too small,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Ugly me.’

‘Yeah,’ he smiled. ‘Ugly old you.’

‘Not even A cup,’ she said, and when she arched her back he saw the ridges in her ribcage, and they made him ache with tenderness. It was just a ribcage – he knew that. But the ridges of her ribs against her skin tormented him, and he wanted to touch them, and no other man to ever touch them.

‘Double A!’ she cried, eyes wide, as if she had just discovered her bee-sting breasts. ‘Yes, you are right – ugly old me.’

‘Well, everyone has body issues,’ he said, propping himself up on one elbow. He reached out a hand and idly stroked her foot, looking up at her. She stared down at him seriously, her hands falling away. It was true. Her breasts were very small. Even in this room, even now, he could see that she was not perfect – her bum was too flat, her breasts were too small, her skin was too troubled for perfection to be considered.

But she was perfect for him.

He didn’t want to change a thing about her. He loved the imperfections as much as he loved her greatest hits – those eyes, those legs and – why not? – those double-A cup breasts. That was her. That was who she was, and he revelled in it all.

‘Take me, for example,’ he said, sitting cross-legged and casting down his eyes. He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if I want to talk about it.’ She knelt beside him, a consoling arm draped across his shoulder, encouraging him to go on. ‘I – I worry that I’m just too big,’ he said, looking up at her concerned brown eyes. ‘You know. Down there. Too big for any woman…’

She stood up and slapped his shoulder. ‘Hah,’ she said. ‘English joke!’

He rolled on his back, chuckling to himself. ‘You wouldn’t look right with large breasts, JinJin. Your legs are too long. You’d look top heavy – like Jessica Rabbit.’

She laughed shortly. ‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘Beatrix Potter.’

When he looked up at her she was smiling. That toothy, goofy
grin that he could never get enough of. He nodded. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Chinese joke.’

When the night came they did not leave the room but lay entwined and wrapped up in each other, as if they were closer than any couple in the world, and closer than anyone had ever been, as if they were one flesh now. He looked at her looking at him and he knew that nobody else in his life had ever looked at him in quite that way.

As if he was special.

As if he was – and he had to smile at this – exotic.

But it was true. He was a different kind of man and she was a different kind of woman. He explored her long, almost hairless body and it was like discovering another planet. She ran her fingers through the light covering of blond hair on his arms as if he was some strange new species.

‘Very hairy,’ she said. ‘My goodness. Like a monkey. Help, help – there’s a monkey in my room.’

‘This isn’t considered hairy where I come from,’ he said, but he knew that she didn’t really know anything about where he came from. She knew how to conjugate verbs and she knew about writers and she could use all the antique idioms, but that was all she knew. His eyes were an unremarkable shade of green and yet she looked into them as if they were Solomon’s treasure.

And he knew that Becca did not and could not ever look at him with eyes like that. His wife loved him – he was sure of that – but she looked at him the way a sister would look at a brother, with a kind of amused familiarity, an affection that was unclouded by mystery.

But JinJin Li looked at him with new eyes, eyes so brown that they were almost black, eyes so large that they shone from her face, and he loved being looked at like that.

His first Asian woman. Her first Western man. And as the night moved on and the city slept, neither of them doubted that they
would also be their last. What more could you want beyond this room?

She slept and he placed his hand on her stomach and it was as flat and hard as a table. He smiled to himself. You could bounce ping-pong balls off that belly, he thought to himself. Instead he placed his lips softly against it, and kissed her as lightly as he could before putting his arms around her and snuggling up against her long, beloved body, and soon he was also in the bottomless sleep of happiness and exhaustion.

If he had gone to the window of JinJin’s room then he would have been able to see across the courtyard of Paradise Mansions to his own apartment, and the windows of his other life. But he never did.

When he awoke in the milky Shanghai dawn he watched her sleeping, and he studied her skin, her limbs and her face until he knew them better than his own. He never went to the window.

And he got lost in her.

‘Granddad’s going to die, isn’t he?’ Holly said.

‘No, angel,’ Bill said and he felt the distance between them throbbing like a fresh bruise. ‘Your granddad’s not going to die. He’s still young. He’s got some great doctors looking after him.’

‘Martin said that everyone dies in the end.’

Martin was the oldest of the sister’s children. Bill felt a sudden surge of hatred towards him, immediately followed by a twinge of guilt. Sara – he was trying hard to think of her as Sara, and not
the sister –
was going out of the way to accommodate his frequent phone calls to Holly, and always had her standing by the phone when he was scheduled to call, or not too far away.

‘Listen to me, angel,’ he said gently. ‘Nothing lasts for ever. A flower doesn’t last for ever, does it?’

Holly thought about it. He could hear her thinking. ‘Penguins don’t last for ever,’ she said.

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought about that.’

‘And dinosaurs didn’t last for ever.’

‘The dinosaurs. That’s right.’

‘There was a change in the earth’s temperature that killed the dinosaurs.’

‘Wow,’ he said, genuinely impressed. ‘Where did you learn that, Holly?’

‘At school.’

‘That’s very good.’

‘Grandparents don’t last for ever,’ she mused.

The philosophy was new. A year ago, at three, Holly’s conversation had been an endless round of questions and orders, sentences that began either with, ‘Why…’ or ‘You have to…’ As in, ‘Why does Tony the Tiger wear a bib if he’s a grown-up?’ and ‘You have to be the prince now, Daddy.’ But at four Holly was wrestling with the big issues, and he did not know what to tell her. The truth seemed too hard, and lying seemed wrong.

‘We all die,’ he said. ‘But not for a long, long time.’ A pause. ‘Are you listening to me, angel?’

But her attention had been distracted. Bill could hear that the commercials had come on the TV that was playing in the background. There was a persuasive adult voice, followed by children squealing with excitement. Bill waited patiently. He could hear other noises. All the sounds of Sara’s crowded, unknowable house. Children arguing. Doors slamming. Sara pleading at the dinner table,
Just one more…eat one more…just a little bit…
That was what he shared with Holly, he thought. It was different when you were an only child. You were not constantly surrounded by all the clamour and clatter of siblings. You were left alone with your thoughts.