She went and stood by the window.
“It feels strange to be looking down on it,” he said. “It’s still one of the tallest buildings in the world.”
She turned to face him. While they were kissing, she let the key drop to the floor. As always, he was aware of the heat of her mouth, a sensation so at odds with the coolness of her appearance that he doubted himself each time he noticed it. Their clothes coming away, they moved to the nearest bed. The aliveness of every inch of his skin. The beat of his blood in the dark. He had never been with anyone like her. What was so different? It was her elusiveness, perhaps. Her unapproachability. He had thought that if they made love she would become less of a mystery, but he was touching her, and then inside her, and she still escaped him. Her head tipped over the edge of the bed, as if she had abandoned her body. Her throat silvered by the neon that filtered through the window. He felt drawn into a void, swallowed up by it. He felt he might cease to exist. He didn’t care. The sex was so vivid that he forgot where he was.
Later, as he lay back, the air vibrated above him, seemingly made up of thousands of tiny moving particles. She was pressed close to him, her head against his shoulder, her body dark against the crisp white sheet. The world came back to him. The room came back. Not all at once, but gradually, like water soaking up into a paper towel. The air con’s exhalations, the low-level buzz of the flat-screen TV. The muted squawk and rumble of traffic eighty-eight floors below.
“I knew it would be good,” she said.
“When did you know?”
“When I first saw you, in the club.”
“You knew right away?”
“Before you even noticed me.” She turned to face him, her head propped on one hand. “I saw you first.”
“What was I doing?”
“Watching people dance.”
He had been thinking about the small man with the suitcase. Wondering who he was. Where he had gone.
“Then you walked up to me,” she went on, “and you had a kind of serenity about you.” Her face seemed to empty out as she thought back. “You were afraid of boring me—not like all the others…” She smiled. “I liked your eyes.”
Not like all the others.
He had known she would be used to being looked at, to being wanted. How could she not be? Still lying on his back, he pulled her closer, his left hand on her rib cage, below her breast. She drew up one of her knees until it rested on his thigh. Her hair smelled of a perfume he didn’t recognize.
“That small man with the suitcase,” he said. “Didn’t you say you saw him too?”
“Yes, but it was earlier. He was in the round bar, next to the restaurant.”
He had been sitting on a cowhide sofa, she said. He had a drink in front of him that looked like a piña colada. He seemed to be on first-name terms with several of the staff.
“Perhaps he works for the club as well,” Zhang said. “You think?”
“I don’t know.” Zhang remembered how the man had appeared beside him as he was washing his hands. He remembered the darkness in the men’s room, the kind of darkness out of which almost anything might feasibly emerge.
“It’s strange,” he said, “but when I talk about him I feel as if I made him up.”
“If you’d made him up, I wouldn’t have seen him.”
He was losing the feeling in his arm and had to move it out from under her. Drowsily, she turned away from him, onto her side. He turned with her. As he held her from behind, he thought he felt a ridge or roughness in the skin on the inside of her elbow.
“What are you doing?” she murmured.
“Nothing,” he said.
“It’s late. We should get some sleep.”
He kissed her shoulder, then leaned over her and kissed her on the lips. “You’re very beautiful.”
“So are you,” she said.
* * *
—
When he woke, he was alone in the bed. He glanced at the other bed. It was empty, undisturbed. The blind on the long window had been lowered, but a soft white glow came from the living room, where it looked as if a light was on. He remembered Naemi standing beneath the trees in People’s Square, and how time seemed to become suspended as she walked towards him. It wasn’t that she had been walking slowly. It was more as if the distance between them was greater than he had realized. As if she had been farther away than he had thought. He was still turning those moments over in his mind when she appeared in the room, already dressed. He glanced at his watch. It was 6:44. They had slept for less than three hours.
“Sorry if I woke you,” she said.
“Are you leaving?”
She came and stood next to the bed. He put an arm round the back of her thighs and pulled her close, his face pushed against her skirt. It smelled of the night before—perfume, alcohol, the faint trace of a cigar. He felt her rest a hand on his head, then she stepped back.
“Don’t you want breakfast?” he said.
She seemed to hesitate.
“Go to the restaurant,” he said. “I’ll join you.”
He thought she might say something else, but she only nodded and turned away. The door to the suite opened and closed. He got out of bed and crossed the room. He wanted to tell her that he would be twenty minutes at the most, but when he opened the door and looked down the corridor, towards the lifts, there was only the huge red painting and the beige walls and the intense, almost supernatural hush.
He had a shower and pulled on his clothes, then he texted Chun Tao, telling him to be outside the Park Hyatt at eight o’clock. As he traveled up to the 91st floor, he remembered waking in the night to see Naemi kneeling at the window, naked, looking at the view. Had she slept at all? He stepped out of the lift and checked his watch: 7:06. He wasn’t hurrying. There was no need. He didn’t believe that she’d be there.
But she was.
She had taken a table against the slanting window, next to a white pillar that soared up to the roof of the atrium two floors above. She was writing something on her phone. The city sprawled below her, the Huangpu River wide and mud-colored, and winding lazily through a mass of tall buildings. The sky was a flawless blue. Small puffs of white cloud lay close to the horizon.
“That was quick.” She placed her phone facedown next to a half-full glass of water.
He stopped a passing waiter. “Would you like coffee?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I don’t eat breakfast.”