IT started because she was angry at God.
She was angry at David, but she was angrier at God. She had trusted him, and he had let her down. She had made a pact with him, the details of which only became clear to her as she lay in her hospital bed: he was to let her keep the baby, in return for which she was to be a good mother, she would be good. Pact broken, she was released from any moral imperative to be any such thing. The life she had been leading up to now appeared to her as uselessly safe, she saw herself, at twenty-nine, a hostage to her parents’ expectations, David’s love. They clearly expected her, all of them, to leave the hospital and resume her former life as though nothing had happened. But something had happened. Her life had been taken up and trampled on, for no reason that she could see except divine wilfulness, and she wanted retribution. Someone had to pay.
David seemed the likeliest candidate. Creeping into her room, trying to be unobtrusive and sympathetic, and succeeding only in being loud and jarring, she’d detested him those first few days; she’d refused to look at or speak to him. Even her parents had noticed and been embarrassed for him. She wished he wouldn’t come. She no longer knew what she felt about him; she had a memory of the mad feeling she’d had for him, but it seemed remote and contained now, like something boxed up in a corner. When he was in the room, she feigned sleep, the easiest defence. He said nothing about the funeral, an event which her mother had recounted to her in gruesome detail, thinking Li would want to know that everything had been taken care of, until Li had said, I don’t want to hear any more, and her mother had stopped in mid-sentence, hurt. Yet he was also her accomplice, her fellow-conspirator: among all the kind, useless, well-meaning people who wandered in and out of her room, maddening her, he was the only one who even guessed at her submerged fury.
She never wanted to leave the hospital, but she had to. David brought her back, carried her bag, drove the car. He did all this with a grim dutifulness; it was what was expected of him. He took care not to touch her. The apartment was a mess; without her, he lived in squalor. Her first instinct, quickly suppressed, was to clean up. What did it matter, how they lived? Housework had never struck her as more futile. She wanted to re-define her life, not scour its surface. She said she was tired, and didn’t want any dinner; she sensed his relief, when she went into the bedroom, and closed the door.
On Sunday, she refused to follow her mother to church.
There was her mother’s heavy pause over the phone.
“Things happen for a reason,” her mother said at last.
Did they? In the church’s scheme of things, there was no such thing as a senseless act. They were at pains to deny the concept of senselessness. There was always an explanation for the headlines in the papers, all those terrorist bombings, the massacres on scales too staggering to contemplate. Either God was testing your resolve, or he was giving an opportunity to those who’d survived to mend their ways. It was an arrangement that had never struck her as fair, particularly to the victims who were supposed to provide an example to others. At this moment, it struck her as positively ludicrous. If she went to church, in her frame of mind, she wasn’t sure what she would do: get up in her pew, perhaps, and denounce the mild, old, blameless pastor for perpetuating a fraud.
“I’ll meet you and Dad for lunch,” she said, briefly, and hung up.
She was prepared to meet David’s mockery at the fragility of her principles, the way they snapped at the first real test, but he said nothing. He was a monument of tact nowadays.
She had wanted, perhaps for the first time, to fight, she’d been marshalling her arguments. Obscurely, she felt cheated.
She had no-one to talk to, or rather, no-one she wanted to talk to. She couldn’t talk to David: he was the problem. She saw, or imagined she saw, that she made him uncomfortable, and strained, and that he was glad to go away on business trips because it meant he could be free of her, even if only for a short time. She couldn’t really blame him, yet she was stung; stung, she held aloof. In the games they played, or rather, which he forced her to play, this was supposed to be his cue: he was supposed to come after her, abase himself a little, and bully her, chivvy her back into loving him. But he did nothing of the sort, leaving her stranded. Floundering.
Nor could she talk to her friends. They meant well, but she was frequently depressed and low, and they were blithe and bursting with spirits; they grated on her and she cast a pall on them. It seemed to her that she was making everyone around her stiff and ill at ease, when she had no intention of doing so, yet it was beyond her to do anything about it. She lacked what others had in such heedless spades, warmth, an effortless ability to connect. As was her way, she retreated, rather than attacked; she withdrew, into the shell of her marriage. Like David, she had her pride, though it manifested itself differently in her.
So it was in this low, dangerous mood that she rounded the corner one morning on the way to her office and ran into him. Literally. Her papers flew out of her arms; he bent, and gathered them back for her.
“So you’re out,” he said. Of hospital, he meant.
She said, “Yes,” and felt the colour mount, unstoppably in her face.
Seeing her tongue-tied, he said, “Take care,” and was gone.
She had intended to skip lunch; she was dieting, furiously, to get her figure back, she hated the stretch marks, the loose flesh at her waist that seemed like a mocking reminder of what wasn’t. Yet the idea had already lodged in her brain: at twelve, she called him on impulse, Hello, it’s me, thought you might be free for lunch, speaking very fast so as not to prolong her expected humiliation.
There was a pause, and she was ready to hang up the phone, to consign the call to history and bathe her temples with water, like a rebuffed Victorian woman steadying herself, when he said, I’d love to. He named the place, one that she had never heard off, but which she guessed to be good. He always knew about such things.
It was by the river, its black and white striped awnings testifying to its bistro pretensions and a tablefull of expatriate traders from her bank sitting outdoors, perspiring gallantly into the noon sun. Not wanting them to see her, she’d stood a little aside; it was very hot, and she’d closed her eyes, briefly, behind her sunglasses. Someone tapped her on her shoulder; she swung round. “Ready to eat?” he said.
She smiled at him, in simple gratitude that he’d showed up, and saw him bite back a smile, in that new wariness of his, the first thing she’d noticed about him when they last met. He was trying, it occurred to her, to keep his poise. Be cool. She knew then it had been wrong to call him, and that she ought to leave him then and there if her intentions towards him weren’t entirely honourable. But she wasn’t sure what her intentions were, and she allowed him to lead her into the restaurant. It was the thing she regretted most, later.
She wasn’t hungry; it was too hot to eat. She discovered that she wasn’t nervous in his presence; she sat, arms propped on the table, observing him with a new frankness that she’d learned from David. She asked him questions about his life. He had been with the same large law firm for several years, doing corporate work. He had started out in litigation, but discovered he had no stomach for it, he always sympathised too much with the other side.
Do you enjoy it? How long do you intend to stay? I never thought you would stay that long, you always hated law. Her flood of questions made him blink. He said, trying to field them, that it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, that he’d got used to it. It was only a job, after all, and all work became tedious after a time. A human being could get used to anything, and she’d nodded, unsurprised, this was what she’d always thought, though the maxim had always driven David wild. He faltered, a little, under her steady gaze.
“I hear David’s doing very well,” he said.
He had been silly to mention David. She drew back. “He is,” she said, a little stiffly.
A pall seemed to hang over the table.
“I wanted to visit you in hospital,” he said. “But—” He shrugged.
She said, wanting to spare him, them, “It doesn’t matter.”
He blundered on. “I sent you a card,” he was saying, “about—” he was too embarrassed to go on. “I hope you got it,” he finished, lamely.
“What card?” Li said, and knew immediately that David had intercepted it and thrown it away. She hoped her face didn’t show what she knew.
He had stopped eating as well. Unlike her, he was made uneasy by their meeting like this; his uneasiness seemed to cast a shadow of the illicit over them. Which was ridiculous. She said, pitying him, trying to be lively, “I hear you’ve got a girlfriend.”
“That’s over,” he said.
“Oh.”
He started to say something, and stopped. She was almost afraid that he would bring up London, their time together, and she began rehearsing, automatically, the defence speech she’d prepared in her mind all these years. But all he did was ask for the bill, which he insisted on paying.
She thought then that that was the last time she would ever see him.
But he called again, two weeks later, and asked her if she was free for lunch. He said, simply, that it would be nice to see her again. She held her hand up to the light; her hands were getting veiny, blue tributaries wending their way from wrist to fingers. She wondered why David couldn’t say something like that, directly, without the sense that he was building up to some devious, ultimate purpose. She said yes.
They went to another restaurant, their conversation was less awkward, and he insisted on paying again. She said, “I don’t want to bankrupt you.” He grinned, and looked a little guilty. She suspected that, like her, he spent too much on eating out; he was like her, too, in his belief that money was meant to be enjoyed. Neither of them shared David’s parsimony.
She was heartily tired, then, of everybody in her life. She was not the same person; lying in that hospital bed, helpless, like an animal stripped of all dignity, or privacy—to Li they were the same thing—a steel core had annealed in her, which no one seemed to notice; she was turning outward, from the life she had known for the past few years. He was there, he was convenient, he was familiar and yet outside the suffocating circle. It had begun like this, her innocent relief at being with someone who thought as she did in most things, with whom she didn’t have the sense of pitting her whole being, day after day, in an invisible, sapping struggle of wills. (Forgetting, for the moment, that it was this very easiness, his too easy accommodation with the world, that she had chafed at when they were going together.) And it was, after all, only lunch, it’s only lunch, she kept telling herself, even as they met more frequently.
She should have known better; she had always been the stronger, more clearheaded character. He had said, once, “Let’s go for a walk,” in the old, unthinking way, and she’d said, quickly, too quickly, “No.”
“What, scared of meeting David?” he suggested, and saw from her face that it was so. His office was just round the corner. She always insisted that they arrive and leave separately.
The words hung between them. What was there to be afraid of, if she wasn’t up to anything? And she wasn’t up to anything. “You know how he is,” she said, by way of apology.
He said, “He thinks I must hate him. But I don’t.”
She couldn’t protest that David didn’t hate him either, because David did. Or rather, it wasn’t Wai Keong that he hated, but the fact that Wai Keong reminded him of the past, and of the fact that he might, conceivably, have behaved better in winning Li. He would never admit this, therefore he couldn’t admit that Wai Keong existed. It was his sort of logic.
They talked about ordinary things. Their jobs, people they knew, items in the news, films. He was still interested in films; he wrote reviews for a magazine, which didn’t pay anything, but got him tickets to previews. She listened, indulgently: men and their enthusiasms. They avoided the personal. She had a hunger, then, for the stuff of ordinary life, the inconsequentialities of everyday conversation. Living with David had deprived her of all this. He had cast her for a role she didn’t feel up to playing; he persisted in seeing her as other than she was. She was ordinary. She wanted to be ordinary.
Breaking their unwritten rule, Wai Keong asked her once, diffidently, not expecting that she would tell him, though surely he could guess how things were from the fact that she was meeting him even for something as anaemic as lunch, “So how is it? Being married?” Adding, hastily, “You don’t have to tell me.”
He was curious; they had always, for as long as she had known them, been rabidly curious about each other’s lives.
She said, surprising them both with her slashing tone, “He’s a thug. I can’t stand him.”
They had stopped making love. In the beginning, she’d been grateful for what she saw as his tact; she’d felt, then, that if he touched her she would fly apart. Later, much later, she began to see that he was avoiding her. Probably he thought it was what she wanted. Sometimes he had exaggerated notions of delicacy where she was concerned. (Princess, he’d always teased her; she’d always taken it to be an insulting shorthand reference to her background, but now she saw he must have had the story of the princess and the pea in mind as well. She was irrationally rankled; she’d always considered the character a nincompoop.) She was surprised by her own resentment; she had no idea she could want him this badly, or, more correctly, want him to want her. Lying in bed at night, she willed him to turn to her, she was too proud to turn to him; he never did. But none of this could she say to him; she could never, even when things were going well between them, talk to him about something like that.
He’d been fiddling, idly, with a box of matches on the table. At her words, he stopped, and said they had better go. She guessed that he was sorry that he had asked; she’d told him more than he wanted to know, at least for now. She gathered her bag, blindly.
At the door of the cafe, he turned to her and said that he’d meant to tell her, he’d bought his own place. With his father’s help. Actually it was two thirds his father’s place. He said this, wryly, the way he always did when speaking of his father. She said, automatically, that he would be making more than enough to pay his father back in a few years’ time. He said, stating a fact, without heat, “I doubt it; they’ll never make me partner.” And she did wonder, fleetingly at this fatalistic acceptance; she had become used, too used, to David’s blindness to limits.
He said, casually, too casually, that he would like her to see it.
He had his hands in his trouser pockets and was squinting out across the river when he said this, the glare from the water, perhaps, or an obstruction in his eye. He wasn’t looking at her. She had wondered, the past few weeks, why he agreed to meet her, though it wasn’t a thought she had pursued very vigorously She liked seeing him, he made her feel light, and herself again; in her present mood of self-absorption, it was all that mattered.
She had been thoughtless. She saw that now, and she was afraid to hurt him twice. She said, carefully, “I’ll let you know?” her voice curving away into a question, light, conversational, and he smiled, a little bitterly: “Yeah, let me know.”
As was her way, she considered the offer for days, during which she neither heard from nor saw him. She and David continued the farce that their lives had become; on Friday, they went again to her mother’s place, to meet her side of the family. The ranks had become decimated over the years, various cousins taking advantage of adulthood to excuse themselves from the weekly ordeal, but Li never missed a gathering. Her mother would have held it against her, and Li was careful not to let her mother amass too many grudges.
At these gatherings, David either sat silent, bread-crumbling his way through the meal, or attached himself to Li’s father, the only person he could bear to talk to. Over the years, the aunts had decided that the best way to deal with him was to ignore him, an arrangement that suited all parties. Since the loss of the baby, however, they’d visibly thawed. In their eyes, he had become interesting again. They showed it in little ways, with little auntly pats on the arm, the continual heaping of food on his plate. It set his teeth on edge. That night, one of the uncles insisted on trying out a new camera which he had bought. Everyone was arranged, fussily, into a group, and the uncle called on David to put his arm around his wife. He blinked, and Li hoped, prayed, that he wasn’t going to refuse and embarrass her. He didn’t, but the arm lay stiff, resisting, around her waist; he was carefully holding the rest of himself, bodily, from her. She made excuses to leave as soon as possible; her only thought, then, was to get out of her parents’ house before she burst out, in tears or anger, she wasn’t sure which.
The next night, Saturday, he asked her if she wanted a divorce. He had gone to a disco with some people he’d met in a bar. He claimed to have known them from England. Still. She interpreted his going correctly—he wanted not to be alone with her. She refused to go. He said, Fine, and left. He came back late, drunk; she always knew when he was drunk because he became very quiet and walked with a slow, catlike deliberation, as though he didn’t want to fall off a mountain precipice visible only to him. She’d been watching TV, unseeingly. Coming out of the bathroom, water dripping from his neck where he’d splashed it, he’d asked her, How long are we going on like this? Oddly, it had never struck her before that he was also affected by the way things were between them; she’d assumed that things were the way they were because that was how he wanted it. She saw now she’d credited him with too much omnipotence.
She’d turned to him, a half-formed question on her lips, and caught the whiff of some woman’s perfume. A scent she particularly disliked. She registered, coolly, that he’d been flirting. She still believed he would never betray her, at least not in the physical sense, but she knew he liked women, and that women, certain women, liked him. She’d caught them looking at him, their eyes sliding over her in some puzzlement, what does he see in her? She had tried not to mind, and she thought she had succeeded; what she couldn’t believe was that he would pick this time of all times to humiliate her. She fell back on what was becoming a rather tired gambit: I’m going to bed. It was then he asked her whether she wanted a divorce.
She said no; the idea, the gossip, her mother’s reaction, were all unthinkable. But she understood what it meant for him to ask that question. Their lives were disintegrating, and she had no energy to piece them together again. A small, impudent voice kept urging her, Walk away. On Monday, she called Wai Keong. She said she was looking forward to seeing his place.
One thousand square feet built in area, fifteen years old but recently upgraded, with potential for an enbloc sale. A walk-up, the lack of lifts was a constraint on the value, but at least the place got the morning sun...
He sounded like an estate agent. He had been waiting for her; the door had swung open with a suspicious promptness, after just one knock. He’d looked at her for a few seconds, not seeming to register who she was: she realised he hadn’t really expected her to show at all. He seemed tense, not quite meeting her eyes; tense, he spoke almost nonstop, as was his way, showing her around the living room before he even remembered to offer her a drink. Keeping up the patter. Silence an abyss into which he would fall, and never emerge. She followed him, unthinkingly, into the kitchen. It was tiny, and they had to manoeuvre, elaborately, to avoid bumping into each other. Her proximity unsettled him; he dropped the ice-tray ice- cubes rattling across the floor like dice, swore, and apologised. Accepting a Coke, she was surprised at her own calmness; she had decided, and even if it was the wrong decision, it was a relief to have decided anything at all. She had lost the faculty of believing that she could control her own life.
He showed her the inbuilt cupboards in the kitchen, the new granite tiling in the bathroom, the carved wooden table he had bought at a garage sale for fifty dollars; everywhere there was the raw, sawdusty smell of a place newly done up. The pocket handkerchief pool, good for suntanning and not much else, with its water slide. It had just rained, and the deckchairs were wet; a glistening, dewy sheen covered the trees and plants in the tiny landscaped patch of grass near the gate. They met no-one, trailing round the complex. It was late afternoon. She’d duly admired everything. And that, he said, trying for a light tone, completes the grand tour.
Back at the apartment, even though he was the one who’d invited her, instigated this, he seemed clearly at a loss; he held his hands loosely, like fish, at his side, not knowing what to do with them, with her. She said, wanting to put him at ease in his own home, “How about another drink?” and he lurched into the kitchen again, glad to have something to do. She wandered about the living room, hands clasped behind her back, like a visitor at a museum, peering at photographs on a side-table (clearly his mother’s touch), the books on the shelves.
He brought her her drink, and sat on the steps that divided the kitchen area from the sunken living room, hands dangling between his knees, watching her. He looked unhappy; he was thinking he’d botched the afternoon, talked too much, and soon she would go. She asked him questions about the photographs, he answered mechanically.
He said, at last, “What time do you have to get back?”
She shrugged. David was in Indonesia for three days. He had taken the Friday afternoon flight to Jakarta. She’d deliberately chosen a day when he was away She told him all this, with unnecessary, emphatic detail.
He said, “Li,” drawing her name out, the first time, it occurred to her, that he’d used her name that whole afternoon. It sounded like a question, or a reproach, she wasn’t sure which. She had been examining, or pretending to examine, his movie poster collection, which he had stacked against the wall, intending to sort it out when he had the time. She turned round; he’d come up behind her, his hands in his pockets, his new, defensive gesture against her.
He said, “I know you’re using me. But I don’t care.”
It hadn’t occurred to her that that was what she was doing. That was supposed to be David’s specialty, the manipulation of others. The accusation pricked her. Yet she had to agree: someone reviewing her behaviour over the past few weeks would think she had deliberately contrived to be here, in this spot, at this time. How it must look. Her chief, perennial worry.
She must have said something to defend h erself; her palm came up, flat, against his shoulder. He mistook her gesture: his arms went round her, his fingers wound themselves into her hair. She had forgotten the fit of his body against hers: he was David’s height, but bigger, fuller. Eyes closed, mouth seeking hers, his face had that same, remembered, blind look, the look that had troubled her before. She stiffened in his arms. He said, voice thick, unsteady, “What is it? Do you have to go?”
She thought of leaving: she saw herself walking to the door, doing the right thing. Sparing everyone the mess that was certain to follow. She’d had a horror of mess. She’d lived her whole life leaving no traces; she’d prided herself on a kind of fanatically clean anonymity, and she had gained nothing by it.
She shook her head.
She woke in the dark, not knowing for a moment where she was. The bedside illuminated clock, a strange one, gave the time as ten P.M. She dressed, with fingers suddenly turned thick and fumbling, not wanting to wake him.
She’d made it halfway across the sitting room when he flipped the switch and she nearly screamed. Always a heavy sleeper, he looked befuddled, dazed. “I have to go,” she said; she’d just remembered that David normally called her the first night away of any trip he took. If she wasn’t there to answer the phone, he would think something had happened.
He nodded, and looked away, at the mention of David’s name. Conceding first right to the other man. She stood, irresolutely, wanting to make it up to him.
“Go,” he said, giving her the release she craved. She smiled at him, and fled.
She was right about David calling: coming into the apartment, the phone was shrilling off the hook. She dived for it. Where the hell were you? She could almost see him pacing up and down beside the hotel bed, wielding the phone like a blunt instrument, the cord on the verge of being yanked from the wall socket. She discovered she was trembling; she had to sit, and collect her breath. She improvised. I went for a walk. She seldom exercised; she heard his disbelieving tone, A walk? She thought, then, that he must know.
Incredibly, he did not. He calmed down, confirmed flight details with her. She barely listened. Why are you here? he’d asked her, when there was still time for her to slide out from under him, and leave. He was giving her a chance. In answer, she’d slid her arms around his neck.
He’d felt cold, his hands, against hers, were cold. He was remembering, she knew, all the times that she’d refused to sleep with him; he was still wary, suspecting a trick, a last minute, haughty withdrawal of favours. Her nakedness, what he saw as a new, uncharacteristic boldness, David’s imprint, had frightened, dazzled, him; he confessed, I’ve thought about this for so long. She felt her first twinge of guilt towards him. Guilt had its pleasures, seductive, wallowing.
David was saying, So I’ll see you when I get back, and she nodded, forgetting that he couldn’t see her. She cleared her throat. Yes, when you get back.
David made it so ridiculously easy for her; he was away a great deal, and when he was there he seemed purblind, absorbed in his own thoughts. They lived like strangers. His blindness gave him a vulnerability she hadn’t thought possible in him. Watching him perform the simplest actions—adjusting his tie in the mirror in the mornings, rummaging for a clean t-shirt in the cupboard—she felt protective and tender towards him, as though she needed to guard him from herself. Once, she’d driven back from Wai Keong’s place at night, to find that David had taken the early flight back from wherever he’d been to. I wanted to come home, he said, offhandedly She was horrified; her hair was dishevelled, she could still smell the other man on her, and she thought that David must as well. He asked her where she’d been; fear made her lie, easily, glibly.
She feared discovery, yet in some way craved it. She was bad at secrets, a double life. She would have made a terrible spy. The anxiety made her stomach roil, the back of her throat dry. Nor did she like deceiving David; oddly, it was the lies that bothered her, not the infidelity. In her naivete, she hadn’t anticipated that quite so many lies would be necessary. She had wanted to defy David, and God; she hadn’t realised that the mechanics of it would be so daunting. Often, out of sheer fatigue, she was tempted to blurt out her secret; weirdly, she wanted David to share the burden with her.
Yet she wouldn’t, couldn’t, stop, the simplest stratagem. These things had a momentum of their own; after a while, you simply lost the facility to apply the brakes. The secrecy wore her out, but was also like a drug; she kept going back, to get her fix. And then, too, though she tried not to admit it, she liked being adored. Unlike David, he was good at that: adoration. He demanded nothing, gave everything. She had forgotten how much this used to annoy her, back in London; now it seemed merely restful, a haven. She deserved it. She was in a greedy, wanton, importunate mood, a mood where she blocked her mind to consequences. It was true that a small, priggish voice, the voice of her old, rigid self, sounded in her from time to time, This is bad, this is wrong; she took the words, bad, wrong, examined them like stones in her hand and threw them away. If anything, she felt a bad, wrong sense of exhilaration.
It wasn’t chiefly, or even secondarily, about going to bed. After the first time, a time that made her feel slightly used, and ridiculous, because it so clearly had a totemic significance for him, she’d almost thought that was the end of it. He’d fulfilled some interior need, some score, she suspected, he wanted to settle with David. For weeks after that, although they continued to see each other, he made no move to touch her. When he did, it was always with a tentative wariness, the diffidence of someone who had no right to her, and knew it. She felt with him what she never felt with David—a not unpleasant sensation—that she was in control, she knew what she was doing.
Often, when she went over, they ended up just talking in bed, lying fully clothed atop the bedspread, until she fell asleep or said she had to go. He never tried to stop her when she left; it was part of some ancient code of manners he’d been taught, one she’d never heard of. He would sleep with another man’s wife, but he wouldn’t prevent her going back to him. He said, once, I feel like a mistress, and they’d laughed but it wasn’t really funny. He waited for her, she came, she left, he suffered, without saying anything. She felt guilty about him; guilty, she continued sleeping with him.
He asked her once, “Do you feel bad?”
She parried, “Define bad.” Once, she would have played along, analysing, dissecting, but these conversations were a self-indulgent trap; after a while they became fundamentally dishonest, an end in themselves, the reality of whatever it was they were discussing receding with every repetition.
He said, withdrawing, “You sounded just like David when you said that.”
He never forgot that David was there between them. It was unavoidable; she was used to him, his way of doing things. Unconsciously, she expected certain gestures, certain responses. When they did not come, she had to stop, and think, and make an effort to adjust. But he overstated the case, finding signs of David’s influence everywhere, as though she’d lost her personality and become subsumed in him. It annoyed her; she wondered why he couldn’t see that.
He said, trying to explain it, “I always envied him.”
“He always envied you.”
She lost interest: these ridiculous male rivalries. She left early, that evening, she wanted to be alone. David called: he was going to be late. They were wrapping up some deal. The spurious concern behind these calls didn’t fool her; it was true he didn’t want her to worry, but she knew it was also his way of tracking her, he always wanted to know exactly where she was, at all times. My property.
David suspected. She didn’t know what had tipped him off, but he had started questioning her, aggressively, about her movements. Where was she last Tuesday night when he was in Bangkok. He called Marian, on the pretext that he couldn’t get Li on the phone, and asked if she knew whom his wife was lunching with. Marian related this to her, with a funny look. Li shrugged, trying to be matter of fact, while her hands became ice-tipped, We had a fight.
They were going away on holiday. Some harebrained scheme of her mother’s, she’d practically foisted the tickets on them. Her mother was worried about her. She knew, she always knew, when Li had a secret; she watched her daughter like a hawk. She hadn’t wanted this marriage, but now that it was a fact it was her duty to uphold it at all costs. Her belief in the institution of marriage was unshakable. She saw the way they barely looked at each other when they had Sunday lunch with Li’s parents; she saw the way they flinched when their bodies accidentally touched. She did what she thought best: she sent them to the beach. They couldn’t say no. “I can’t stand it,” Li told Wai Keong over the phone. “He hates holidays. We fight all the time about what to do.”
She was talking to him in the same tone she used with her girlfriends. From the silence over the line, she judged that it was a mistake. He couldn’t stand the idea that she was going away with David. “Got to go,” he said, abruptly, and hung up. She resisted the urge to call him back.
David was in a quietly foul mood. At the airport, on the plane, he buried himself in magazines, refusing to talk to her. They landed in a shimmering haze of heat, the ocean cobalt blue beneath them, the white lacy strip of sand clearly visible from the sky. It was a place they had been to years ago, just after they were married. At customs, there was a long, somnolent queue. “Fucking holiday,” he said, audibly. Li stood aside, hoping not to be associated with him.
The days continued like that. The hotel was spectacular, but the immediate beach was bad; in the mornings they trudged along the shoreline to a spot where the sand mellowed out to the fine white sand of the brochures. She swam a little, slept mostly, in a cocoon of heat; sometimes he fell asleep beside her, other times she woke to see him jogging along the beach in the noonday sun, or swimming in the sea at a distance that seemed perilously far from the shore. He couldn’t stay in one place for more than a minute.—Perhaps he would drown. She imagined herself, the grieving widow, throwing herself on the body, everything between them miraculously restored by death.—He came trudging up the sand, dark from the sun. He said, coldly, “Are you going to sleep all day?”
At night they had silent dinners in the restaurant, while a Filipino band worked its way around the tables, serenading. Li hoped, fervently, they would stay away; she was always embarrassed by having to smile, fixedly, while they played in front of her. She wondered how they could bear the ignominy of playing to people who were barely listening to them.
The band arrived at their table. David said, “Would you mind?” The leader said, jocularly, “Not in a good mood today, no?”
“No,” David said.
“Not one little song?”
He muttered something under his breath. Left the table. Cheeks burning, Li hurried after him.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.
He stopped, and she took a step back; she was afraid, at that moment, of him. He saw that, swore softly and strode on, the second time he’d abandoned her that evening.
They were at breaking point. She hated him.
She felt his knowledge rising, poisonously, in him, testing the surface. The following day, oversleeping on the beach, they had to hurry back before the sun sank; rather, she had to hurry, there was a channel which filled, rapidly, at high tide and she was inordinately afraid of being trapped in it in the dark. The night before, she had dreamt of it, the waters closing above her head. In reality, the water barely reached her waist, but she was a physical coward about certain things. They were too late; wading across, the lights of the hotel a tantalising white thread in the distance, she panicked midway, and he chose that moment to torture her, eels, she heard him say, water snakes. She almost wept in fear, and anger. In the end, he carried her across.
In the room, she locked herself in the shower. She wanted to hide from him. She stayed a long time, letting the hot water run. She had no idea how she had come to this; she vaguely remembered she had been angry, someone had to pay. It had been a boy. They’d told her that much. She brought her hands to her face, and realised it was wet, but not from the shower. For months she had felt it would be impossible ever to cry. Now she stood, eyes closed, cramming her fists into her mouth so that David wouldn’t hear her. She realised she was the one who was paying.
“Sorry?” he asked her, when she arrived with her suitcase at his place, a fugitive, an alien on the run.
“No,” she lied; what she wanted, as she always did in times of stress, was to sleep. She wanted to sleep her life away. During their fight, David had broken all the crystalware they’d been given for their wedding. A delirious gesture: they’d paused for a moment, awed at the extravagance of it. He’d cut his hand, which had bled all over the carpet. She’d resisted the impulse to bandage it for him.
“I have to tell my parents,” she said. That was the worst part, the part she would have done anything to avoid.
“Do it tomorrow,” he said. He wanted to nurse her, like an invalid, he wanted to make her tea, and run her baths and put her to bed. His hovering made her want to scream.
Ignoring him, she went to the phone. The conversation was short, and quick. Her father was curt, her mother explosive. They told her she would come to her senses the next day.
“I’m sorry,” she said to him.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. An odd choice of words; it made her think that he meant the opposite. He offered the bed to her; he would sleep on the couch. She said, Don’t be absurd. His body against hers was heavy, languorous, unmoving, a stranger’s; several times she woke, and nudged him away In the morning he said, I love you. She had the suffocating sense, again, of waters closing above her head.