A waiter took the complicated drinks order: beer, cocktails, gin, wine. Now that we were settled, with drinks on the way, everyone was re-introduced. One of Li’s friends turned out to be her sister.
‘You don’t look at all alike,’ I said. Her face was angular, sharp, almost hard.
‘She is not real sister,’ said Li. ‘She is cousin-sister.’ The cousin-sister was a dancer, though she looked too tall to be a dancer. And she’d just had a baby. The waiter came back with a tray loaded with glasses, bottles, ice, drinks. Li had ordered a Singapore Sling (‘whatever that is’); I was drinking beer. Min proposed a toast to me and Jun. As soon as we had all clinked glasses I offered one back—‘To the Chinese century!’—and we all clinked again. The beer was only Tsingtao but it was cold, wonderful, tasted OK. For the first time since leaving the Forbidden City, I was able to give myself entirely to the moment. But if a moment is this perfect there is a need to preserve it, to photograph it. When people are having a good time they take pictures to show and prove they’re having a good time. Everyone was taking pictures, not just the people in our group, but all around. What’s the point? These pictures never capture the magic of magical evenings, they just show people getting red-eyed drunk and taking pictures of each other, but the act of taking the pictures is part and proof of the moment. It was something I associated with the young, but Jun was at it too. The difference was that he was using a proper camera, not just a phone, and taking considerable care, altering the focus and aperture. At one point he changed the lens in an unobtrusive, unfussy way, still holding his beer, not talking. Then he got up and left the table and walked away, continued photographing at a distance. When he sat back down he passed around the camera so that everyone could see the results.
They were fantastic. I had never been in a situation where something I was experiencing had been caught so perfectly on film. These were pictures of the inside of my head. The photographs were beautiful but, everyone agreed, the best ones were of Li’s cousin-sister. The colours were slurred, gorgeous, drenched. In one picture there was a yellow smear of light and, to the right, a string of blurred blue dots stranding her in shadowed clarity. Had Jun known what the result would be? If so, how had he done it?
‘He must be in love with her!’ I said, answering my own question. This romantic and technologically ignorant reaction was also a vicarious declaration and attempted deflection of what might have been obvious to everyone. If you were to fall in love with someone, on a rooftop bar in Beijing, this was what it would look like. Or was it just the camera that was in love with the cousin-sister? I’d read that Muhammad Ali, along with his other attributes, had the perfect face for a boxer, with rounded features that made him less susceptible to cuts. Li’s cousin-sister had the opposite kind of face: angular, sharp-featured. The camera didn’t glide or slip from her face in the way that punches slid off Ali’s. It clung to her as you hang on someone’s every word when you are falling in love with them. The shutter speed, presumably, was however-many-hundredths of a second, but something about her face meant that the camera held it fractionally longer and, in the process, softened it. Her face allowed, even encouraged the camera to do this, to bring her inner life to the surface. She was removed, not quite there. Maybe she was thinking of the child at home? She looked — and again the softened sharpness of her features played a part—abstracted. Maybe this was what Jun had noticed, that her face had that special quality or capacity.
I was glad to be able to concentrate on the pictures, to avoid directing my attention completely on Li — especially since, as we had bent forward together to study the camera, our shoulders had touched. They were still touching — my shirt against her bare skin — as we clicked though the images and came to one taken five minutes earlier, showing the two of us sitting where we were now, surrounded by a blue like the blue of oceans seen from space, with the moon above my head. (I glanced around — yes, there it was, peeking out from behind a building.) At first the picture was a little confusing: Li was twisted round, her head was hidden behind me so that only her left shoulder could be seen. I had leaned forward while she reached behind me to retrieve her bag from the end of the sofa, so it looked like she was jokily hiding from the prying camera. There was a subtle intimacy about the interplay of bodies and limbs, what was revealed and hidden. Again, was this an accident— something the camera had accidentally caught — or was it something Jun had noticed and quickly captured? Everything was blurred and coloured by the fairy lights: slow yellows, stretched reds. The softness of the night was implied, its heat and promise, and the uncertainty as to whether I was responding to something that existed in a haze of intangible and unspoken signs. That was also there in the photograph as we looked at it, forearms damply touching, certainly.
Li pointed at my face on the screen, clicked to enlarge it.
‘Ah, you a-rook rike George Crooney!’ she said, eyes wide. She had never ‘r’-ed her ‘l’s like this before. By breaking the spell, she cast me into it more deeply. And she had out-pubbed me too.
Li handed back the camera to Min — having first taken care, I noticed, to click back to an unincriminating wide shot that showed the whole group together. Min passed it to Jun. The waiter came back with another trayful of drinks. More people were arriving, some of whom knew Li’s friends. The bar filled up; the music grew louder but not loud enough to cover up the way that time, which had already ticked away pointlessly in the car, was continuing to tick away, more loudly and pointedly by the minute.
Then, everyone agreed, it was time to go. It was two in the morning. My flight was eight hours from now. The bill was paid — by the Chinese; my money was stuffed back into my hand, as it had been every time I’d tried to pay for anything. We stood up and left the roof. The dismal elevator returned us to the still-busy street with its crude lights and lusts. There was much milling around, waiting for taxis, as everyone in the now-expanded group worked out who was going in which direction. Li was by my side. With a little contrivance I could whisper to her, ‘Can I come home with you?’ or ‘Will you come back to my hotel?’ It was premature to propose such a thing and, at the same time, almost too late. And even if she said yes, how to navigate the complications of taxi taking, how to avoid the assumed arrangement of sharing a taxi with Min, Jun and Wei? There was, in addition, the gulf between the polite reasonableness of the question—‘Can I come home with you?’—and everything the answer to it might allow, all that could become unforbidden. Why was it — what law of the barely possible decreed — that these situations only cropped up on one’s last night, so that instead of falling asleep and waking up with her, instead of eating breakfast and spending the day getting to know her, I would get on a plane a few hours later and leave with an even greater sense of regret because, instead of having missed out on all of this totally, we would have experienced just enough to make us realize how much more we had missed out on by not missing out on it entirely? Li was still by my side. I turned towards her, spoke in her ear. Two taxis pulled up, one behind the other. Hours and minutes had ticked by. Doors were opening, goodbyes being said. There were not even minutes left, only seconds before she would turn towards me so that I could kiss her goodbye — or turn towards me and not say goodbye, not turn away.