‘The kid was eighteen. Drove a Maserati.’ She took out a thin cigar. ‘His parents came to apologise and asked to settle. “We’re so sorry, our boy needs to be taught a lesson,” was what they said to me. So I responded, “Perfect, he’s getting the correctional education he needs.”’
She laughed loudly.
‘You should’ve seen their faces!’ she added.
And then they all laughed and ordered their drinks. Leo returned and quietly asked Jia Jia whether the loud group was bothering her.
‘Quite the contrary,’ she whispered back. ‘Let them talk, they’re funny.’
*
Jia Jia was still sitting in her seat when the bar closed. The four had left and the woman had never managed to light her cigar. Leo had remained occupied for the rest of the night, concentrating on making his cocktails. Jia Jia would occasionally observe his fingers while he was working: he was quite average-looking, but she found a certain appeal in the way he moved his hands. He must be a committed man, she thought, so dedicated to what he loved to do. His movements looked effortless – the kind of ease that was only attained after years of practice.
He cleaned up the last table and returned to the counter. Then he moved Jia Jia’s bag and sat on the stool next to her – a surprising act of intimacy from a man who sustained a polite distance from others. Jia Jia turned her stool to face him.
‘I’ve finished with the bottle. It’s about time for me to go,’ she said.
‘Stay for another drink with me.’ He reached over the counter for brandy and two glasses.
They drank in silence.
‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’ Jia Jia asked.
‘You’re like water. Your beauty is soft and quiet.’
‘Will you stay with me tonight then? It’ll be a good memory, I think, for us both.’
The pavement was wet with melted snow and parts of it were freezing over again as the temperature dropped. Leo closed the bar and the two of them walked in the direction of Jia Jia’s apartment. The cleaner air from the day was gone now, and the city hid behind its mask.
4
Jia Jia sped up her footsteps as she passed the concierge, leaving Leo trailing behind. The doorman greeted her but she kept her chin slightly tucked into her scarf and did not stop until she was at the lift.
They were silent on the long ride up. Away from his bar, Leo’s confidence had faded and his demean-our was uneasy. He seemed to be shorter and smaller. Inside the apartment, he slowly removed his coat and held on to it as Jia Jia threw hers on the sofa.
Sensing his mood, she took his coat with one hand and touched his arm with the other, encouraging him. He responded by pulling her into him as if he could now stop pretending to be timid. She felt her breasts against his chest; his lips reached out to meet hers. His breath tasted like fresh mint and she felt self-conscious that her own probably reeked of alcohol. She did not remember seeing him eat a mint.
The touch of his hands on her skin seeped into her pores like water. It was as if there was a place inside her that no one had reached before, and it had been shaken awake by this man’s warm embrace. She had never felt such yearning for another person’s body – it was beyond the flesh and the consciousness, it was not merely lust, neither was it love. Perhaps the best way to describe it, she thought, was like being a lone traveller in a desert, exhausted and desolate, when the most beautiful and fruitful peach tree blossomed in front of her.
But just as Leo lay her down in bed, a wave of guilt broke over Jia Jia. Someone else was invading Chen Hang’s space and she was the only protector of it now. She wanted to ignore the thought, to chase it away, but with her back against the cold silk of the sheets that she had shared with her husband, she felt as though she was cheating on Chen Hang. Leo did not have the same moment of hesitation; he took off his bow tie, his vest, and finally his shirt, but he kept his trousers on, waiting for her to take them off for him. She ran her hands around his hips to his erect penis, all the time avoiding his eyes.
Everything about Leo made her husband’s presence more tangible. Leo’s skin was firmer, his bones were sharper, his hands were bigger. The outline of his body in the dark was strange and alien to her. He removed her trousers before unbuttoning her shirt – the opposite of what Chen Hang would have done. The feeling of him inside her was different. The feeling of her taking him in was different. The way he moved on top of her and the way his muscles tensed were, somehow, all so different.
Still, she pulled him hard towards her – this stranger who touched a part of her that had been entirely isolated from the world.
When Jia Jia woke up, Leo was gone from the room. Her first thought was that he had left, but then she heard him in the kitchen. She had wanted some time alone. She quickly washed her face and got dressed, and when she walked into the living room, she saw that Leo had already bought food and was boiling eggs.
‘I have eggs in the fridge, you know,’ Jia Jia said.
‘I bought other food too.’
She looked at the clock, it was already past eleven.
‘What time do you have to be at the bar to prepare?’ she asked.
‘Not until four or five. Nice painting over there.’ He pointed towards the wall behind the sofa.
‘Oh,’ she hesitated. ‘Thank you.’
She was unsure why she chose not to tell him that she was the artist. It was not a piece that she was particularly proud of, anyway. No one had complimented it before – she had only hung it two days ago to replace one that Chen Hang had bought from an art gallery off Rue du Bac in Paris.
Her painting was of a brown horse on a beach, looking back at something beyond the frame. The beach was muddy and rocky, and the waves were strong. She was never very skilled at making waves look realistic, although it was her favourite scenery to paint. As a student, she had saved up all of her money from her part-time job and gone on a trip to London, where she had spent hours in the National Gallery studying and trying to copy paintings that had waves in them. Still, she could not do it. Not in the way she wanted to, at least. There was something about the movement of the ocean and the semitranslucency of the water that she could not grasp; some balance between mystery and simplicity. After she graduated, she had even gone so far as to spend a week in a Taoist temple to learn about the behaviours of water.
So she was surprised that someone acknowledged her painting as a good one.
‘Who chose the picture?’ Leo asked.
‘I did,’ she said.
‘I actually don’t really like the ocean,’ he said. He passed over a takeaway bowl of warm soya milk, a bag of fried dough sticks, and a plate of stir-fried lotus roots. ‘There isn’t really a particular reason, just never liked it as a kid.’
‘My husband didn’t like water either. He said that it was a dangerous and wild substance. It’s very challenging to paint.’ Jia Jia took a bite of a dough stick and studied her bite mark as she chewed.
‘I can imagine.’ Leo hesitated briefly. ‘It must take a lot of practice. An old acquaintance of mine grew up near the coast, his dad is a fisherman. He studied art and paints incredible oceans, so that makes a lot of sense. He’s been in and around water all his life. The guy sucks at everything else he paints though.’