‘His dad is a fisherman? He allowed his son to study art?’
‘Oh, no, of course not.’ Leo laughed and shook his head at the recollection. ‘His dad told him never to set foot in his house again.’
Jia Jia’s own father had never opposed her studying art, but neither had he supported it. Worse – he was indifferent. Her father had left her mother when Jia Jia was five years old, and after that, when she lived with her mother and then with her grandmother, he would only invite her out for lunch once or twice a year. When she told him that she had been admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he merely acknowledged it and smiled, and continued to order food from the waitress. He might also have made a congratulatory remark, but it did not matter, because a year or two later, he had forgotten all about it again.
‘I went to art school as well,’ she told Leo.
He walked behind her and touched her shoulders with his hands.
‘I overheard you talking about it in the bar once,’ he said.
Leo’s affection suddenly made her uneasy. The intensity from the night before had faded now, and the contact felt out of place. She quickly finished her breakfast and started going through the post. The monthly maintenance and heating bills had come – the first ones she had received since her husband’s death. The electricity bill was also in the pile. The building’s management must have felt sorry for sending the bills while she was mourning, so they had given them to her two weeks later than the usual date. The payment deadline, though, was still the same.
She opened up the envelopes and was almost offended to see that the total charges amounted to four thousand yuan. Heating constituted the bulk of it. Chen Hang would complain about spending too much on heating in the winter, but Jia Jia had always insisted on keeping the room temperature warm because she did not like to wear sweaters indoors. He was indignant at being a victim of the smog, too, not so much because of its health implications but because purifiers consumed a lot of electricity and that increased their monthly spending. It was she who had insisted on keeping the purifiers turned up high, and he had not denied her such indulgences.
Now that he was gone, paying four thousand yuan per month for the rest of the winter meant that Jia Jia really had to start making her own money. Had Chen Hang planned for her to be in this situation? Did he even consider it? Was it madness, her brief sliver of hope that she could support herself with her paintings? She had been out of work for years, lost her contacts, settled into life as the wife of Chen Hang. Perhaps there was nothing that she could do out there.
Leo must have noticed the concerned look on her face.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said without looking up at him, unwilling to continue the conversation further. She took out a pen and started doing calculations on a separate sheet of paper.
‘Do you live around this area?’ she asked Leo as she added the months up, pen scribbling.
‘Not in the CBD. It’s too pricey. I live a bit further away, near the embassy area. Still expensive, but—’
‘You’re right. I don’t need four bedrooms for myself,’ she said. ‘It’s awfully difficult to clean,’ she quickly added, justifying herself.
Leo began telling her about the neighbourhood he lived in, but Jia Jia was absent-minded and responded with either short acknowledgements or nothing at all. She turned off the heat and the air purifier and threw on a sweater. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, all the time looking for cheap apartment rentals on the Internet. Eventually, Leo said goodbye and headed to the bar.
After the door closed behind him, Jia Jia pulled her laptop screen down and felt both relieved and abandoned once again. She thought about what was going on beneath her apartment; what other people were doing with their days. Office workers would be taking their lunch breaks by this time. In the past, Jia Jia would visit Chen Hang near his office and have lunch together with his employees. She had never really enjoyed it – the meals were rushed and the conversations filled with flattery – but now, she almost wanted that again. She missed that sense of routine.
She picked up the plates Leo had left on the table and began washing them. The ghost faces of the lotus roots glared up at her. Leo had not eaten all the fried dough, unlike her husband who would have finished everything on the table, even if he had not been hungry. No matter how much money Chen Hang made, he never ordered too much food unless it was for business, and when he did over-order, he would make sure to force everything down. With all his wealth, he never felt rich.
Jia Jia noticed that she smelt like cigarettes and turned on the shower. As she took off her clothes, she saw the plum-sized, greyish, kite-shaped birthmark on her left inner thigh. She had not thought of it with Leo, which was odd, because she never forgot about it. Though Chen Hang had never spoken about this mark, Jia Jia vividly recalled his expression when he first saw it. As if it were a pothole in the middle of a highway, he had steered his glance around and away from it. From then on, she had tried to cover up the stain with her hand or a piece of clothing every time it was exposed, especially when they were in bed, until after they got married and it became something that was unbearable for her to sustain, so she found sex positions that she thought would better shield the imperfection from her husband. She had pleaded with him to try them with her, pretending it was for her own pleasure.
She dug her fingernails into the birthmark as she closed her eyes and retraced Chen Hang’s body with her mind, from his balding head, to his flat nose, to the hair below his navel, and to all that she had tried so desperately to please. To her surprise, she could barely remember his naked body any more, only the ugliness of it in that bath. Her thoughts returned to Leo, relieved that he had not turned on the lights the night before. She could almost convince herself that the distorted, dark patch of skin on her leg would not matter to him, that maybe, if he was the one holding her, it might even fade and disappear. She could not say why, he just seemed like the kind of man who healed, rather than wounded.
5
Jia Jia visited Leo’s bar less often through December; she had to save her money. The few times she did go, she spent the night with Leo. Occasionally, he would stay for the day too, but mostly, he left after breakfast. Jia Jia’s intense craving for his body continued to consume her each time, as if this empty cup of hers would never fill up.
She had not been able to move out of the apartment since the night she had fallen into the dark sea. On days when she did not see Leo – most days – she drank at home and stayed awake until dawn, waiting for it to appear again. She could not forget the deep waters and the little silver fish – did it have some connection to the fish-man? She thought that she would have to be alone to see the water again, but even when Leo was not there, the apartment did not transform and all she could feel under her feet were the stubborn wooden floors that she had picked out from an Italian vendor. She tried everything: wearing the same two-piece pyjama set that she had had on; putting the fish-man sketch on the floor. But nothing happened. Apart from staying in and waiting, she could not think of anything else to do.
She did start painting again. She dug out some of her old brushes and unused canvases from the storage room on Christmas morning while Leo was making breakfast.