“Hello, Gao Lan.” His voice had a heavy quality. He didn’t want to hear from her. She dropped as fast and deep as a stone anchor.
Still she was warm and cheerful and said they should get together. “I don’t know,” he said, politely perplexed, as if they were on a business call. “Appointments all day… I have something on tonight…” She heard him turning pages. “Gao Lan, I’m sorry. This doesn’t look good.”
She was shocked by his rudeness. Her opinion of him plummeted.
“Hey,” he was saying, “I’m only here for a couple of days.”
A torrent of curses burned in her throat, but she limited herself to a few cool sentences. “My opinion is like this. We did too much already for you to leave it that way. Whatever you have to say to me, you may say to me directly.”
There was a silence. She heard a long, heavy breath.
“Meet me at four o’clock at Anthony’s on Wangfujing,” she went on, stronger. “It’s right behind the Pacific Hotel.”
A long silence, and then he said, “All right.”
She was waiting there when he arrived. He came in ready, as if he’d rehearsed, which he no doubt had. He moved his big, square body with ease into the seat opposite her. “Before I say anything else,” he began, “I want you to know our night together was special to me. Exceedingly special.”
She was not moved. He seemed so shallow now. “But?” she said.
“But that’s it. I can’t do it again. I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” she said. “All right. But you can tell me. To my face. That’s all.” It almost didn’t matter what she said. The toxic jolt she had felt when he dismissed her on the phone needed to be aired in order to be erased.
“Okay,” he said, chastened. Suddenly he looked helpless. “It’s my wife,” he said, as if bewildered by the force of his own emotions. “I belong with her. I love her so much, I can’t lie to her. She would never know, she would probably never find out, but I still can’t do it.”
“The night we were together you didn’t think this way.”
“I didn’t think about anything else but you! I’m sorry. I take responsibility. But I can’t do it again. Can’t turn off reality twice. I’m sorry.”
“Bu yong,” she said, Don’t be sorry. “I don’t care,” she added, which was not entirely true, and then, “But I wanted you to say it,” which was.
A short time after that she found out she was pregnant. Late the following summer Shuying was born. To Gao Lan, she was always the child of the other man, for he was the one who had vexed her and hurt her and also carried her to the heights. He was the one who against her creeping knowledge of what was right and wrong had become part of the pattern of her life. There had been only the one time with Matt. One time, and then the insult of his dismissal. What were the chances? None. Next to none. No more.
Gao Lan stayed away from Beijing for almost a year. She returned with a story about having gone home to help with a family illness, but work was spotty. The world had moved on. She was not in demand as she had been before. It was difficult to make money enough for herself, much less enough to send home so her parents could care for the baby.
She was also tormented over her inability to identify Shuying’s father. Because of that one night with Matt she could not be sure. It was as if she were being punished over and over for that night. This doubt had kept her from telling either man there was a baby. She knew this was a mistake. At first, though, she had felt that the best thing was simply to wait a little, until Shuying grew into herself and began to look more clearly like one or the other. Then she would approach the man. Meanwhile she kept working.
She lost her job. She didn’t get another one. She refused to give up. She went out every day on interviews until she lost her apartment, too, and then she moved in with women friends, first one, then another. Her parents were calling. They needed money. Shuying, her little yang wan wan, her sweet foreign-doll baby – she was the sun and the stars, but she needed so many things. Then her girlfriend told her she would have to find another refuge, for she was giving up the apartment and moving to Shanghai. And that was Gao Lan’s last stop.
She remembered meeting a woman – not someone she knew well, a friend of a friend – who told her she could do well working for a man, as a woman who was kept. The woman meant this partly as a compliment to Gao Lan’s beauty; not all women were qualified for this work, only women for whom certain men would pay. At the time Gao Lan had laughed, embarrassed. She had waited until another time and place entirely to ask someone what such a man took, and what he gave, and how working as an ernai might be arranged.
She still saw clearly the first man who took her, Chen Xian from Hong Kong. Fifty-six, hair dyed black, rich, careful about how much he spent on everything, including her, yet fair. He used her for his pleasure, used her hard sometimes, but that was his right. That was what he paid for. He was always kind to her. Him she remembered with affection.
He had met her for the first interview in a bar off Sanlitun. It was a dim place, and they lounged on a couch together while they talked. She could feel him looking at her. Finally he asked her if she would like to dance. She said yes and they went out on the floor. At first they danced apart, but then he pulled her to him and she felt him feeling her body. She could tell that he liked her. She liked him too, well enough. It would be all right.
They went out together a few more times, and on their fourth meeting he made an offer.
“Here’s how it works.” They were in a bar. He signaled for another round of scotch. His was empty, though she had barely touched her own. “I pay you three thousand ren min bi a month, plus an apartment. You’ll have a membership at the gym downstairs. I’m in Beijing only a week and a half a month, maybe two. The rest of the time I expect you to keep my face.”
She swallowed. The pay was far more than she could make at a job, especially considering that she’d have no living expenses. He was old. About that she didn’t care. She saw his hand come up from his lap, brown, assured, perfectly manicured. For a second she thought he was going to reach for her, but instead he counted out money, three thousand, the first month. She couldn’t take her eyes away from it. “What do you say?” he said.
She said yes. They were together eight months and then he left her, but only because his wife insisted on it. He let her stay two more months in the apartment. That was the sort of person Chen Xian was, kind.
Since then she’d had her education. Some of it had been cruel, and some of it had been satisfying – like the money she’d been able to send home. That was satisfying. It was good to know Shuying was taken care of.
As the little girl grew, she looked frustratingly like herself, and not really like either man, but Gao Lan still felt pretty certain she was not Matt’s. She was not developing Matt’s type of body, for one thing. Gao Lan had to approach the other man, and she knew it. She kept planning it, and putting it off. She could not stand to see him now, given what she was selling to survive. It would cost her more than she was prepared to pay. She could not bear to tell her parents, who loved her; how could she tell him, who had toyed with her for months and then dropped her so cruelly? When he ended their affair with a terse, abrupt phone call, she demanded he meet her to talk in person. It had worked with Matt, and even though their liaison was over, the fact that they spoke face to face made her feel better. She at least received a minimal level of human respect from Matt. The other man gave her no such thing. When she asked, he hung up on her. She could not tell him about the child.