IN THE BASEMENT of a popular Taipei gym, two young women wrapped in nothing but plush white towels sat side by side on the wooden bench in a sauna room. Their eyes were half closed as they leaned back in the small space saturated with hot steam.
“It’s so hot I can’t breathe,” Angela said.
“You’ll get used to it. Relax.”
An older woman left, leaving Angela and May alone in the room. May moved to the bench where the older woman had been lying, removed her towel, spread it lengthwise on the bench, and lay down on it. She crossed her legs in Angela’s direction. Angela gazed idly at her friend’s naked body, slender with rounded breasts, the lower body slightly thick.
“How long has it been since a guy saw you naked?” Angela asked, observing the curved outline of May’s breasts.
May laughed. “It’s been a while. It’s not exactly convenient to have a boyfriend when you’re living at home. I’m almost thirty, but my gramps still watches me like a hawk. How about your parents?”
“Mine don’t really care. They’re too busy running the supermarket. They don’t bother me even if I come home late,” Angela said.
“Have you dated anyone since you broke up with Dennis?” “No. But hey, at least I didn’t forget his name this time.” “You loose woman, sleeping with men whose names you don’t know!”
Angela’s face reddened, but at least she could blame it on the steam. “Hey, watch it. That was my first boyfriend.”
“The older guy? Where the hell do you find these old men, anyway?”
“I ran into him a few times on campus and had asked his name twice but still forgot it. By the time he finally convinced me to go out with him, I could not for the life of me remember his name, and a few dates later, it was too embarrassing to ask him.”
“So how did you find out his name?”
“We were lying in bed in a motel room one afternoon, and I suddenly had a brilliant idea. I asked him what his friends called him, and he said Will. So I knew his name must be Will or William, and I could just call him Will.”
“Just how old was he?”
“I never asked him his age, but he must have been over forty.”
“How old were you?”
“Nineteen.”
“That’s nasty.” May made a face.
“Well, I didn’t think too hard about it. He was really weird and secretive, though. He always invited me on remote hiking trails outside of Taipei, and I never knew his telephone number or address. He always called me. I never called him.”
“That sounds really shady,” May said.
“Well, when I told my next boyfriend, the Irish guy, about how secretive Will was, he was certain that Will was some kind of spy working for the American government.”
“Spy? That’s ridiculous. I’m sorry, but that sounds paranoid and crazy. Why on earth would America need spies in Taiwan? Taiwanese love Americans.”
“I thought it seemed odd, too.”
“You want to know what I think, Angela?”
“Enlighten me.”
“He was married,” May said with conviction.
“Married?”
“Yes, that’s the most logical and obvious explanation.”
“Hmm, he did used to check the motel rooms for hidden cameras, which I thought was funny. Who cares if perverted motel owners got our naked butts on film? He said he wanted to protect me because I was so young. And he always, always insisted on using a condom and didn’t allow me to even touch him without one already on.”
“So there you go; he was married, simple as that. No spy conspiracy theories, nothing psycho or paranoid,” May said.
Angela’s face grew dark, and she felt herself sweating profusely, not just because of the heat. She felt nauseous and lightheaded. Perhaps it had occurred to her that Will might have been married, but she’d subconsciously blocked the possibility out, even after all the years. This was the man who took her virginity, the first man she was ever serious about, and it turns out he was only having her on the side, that he was married the whole time? Angela felt something snapping inside her.
“When I asked him where he lived, he said he lived with a Taiwanese family. I thought it was a language exchange type of setup.” Angela clenched her teeth.
“Maybe that’s a euphemism for I live with my wife and kids,” May said. “Yep, the asshole was so married.”
“He’s such a piece of shit!” Angela burst out. “I gave him my first time, my first everything! And I can’t believe it took five years after we broke up for me to figure this out.”
“Calm down, it’s okay, it’s all in the past. I mean, what are you going to do?”
“I’d like to slap him hard and tell him off,” Angela said.
“How are you going to find him if you don’t have his address?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can go hang out on the Taida campus and see if he’s still there trying to pick up young college girls.”
“Come on. Let’s go in the cold water pool to cool off,” May said, getting up from the bench and rewrapping her towel around her body. “You’re getting way too worked up.”
The two women exited the sauna. In the adjoining room, they plunged into the coolness of the tile-lined cold water pool.
“Wow, my skin feels all prickly,” Angela said.
“It’s nice, isn’t it? Feel better now?”
The next day, Angela spent her lunch hour on the Taida campus at the cafeteria benches, where she had run into Will many times five years ago. May would’ve told her to give it up if she knew Angela was stupidly waiting here in hopes of running into her ex to tell him off for being married and stringing her along, but this was just one of those things. Angela needed this. That she had inadvertently dated a married man, and that he had told her how much he loved her and actually wept, a grown man weeping like a baby when she came back from studying abroad in Europe for a year and dumped him—all of this made her angry. The more she thought about it, the more she fumed.
Sure, she had had the satisfaction of dumping him when she came back with the much younger boyfriend she replaced him with, but that was nothing compared to her new knowledge that he had a family. He would never be able to make amends for this insult, this injury, this wrongdoing, done to her as well as his wife.
She started eating lunch on the Taida campus daily. She bought lunch at the cafeteria, just like she did five years ago as an undergraduate, and ate it on the open benches beside the bike racks. It was like she was back in college again. The excellent food options had not changed much since she was there, and she enjoyed the variety—cold sesame noodles, steamed buns, sticky rice with chicken and tea eggs, delicious fried chicken patties, beef noodle soup, and savory pork meatball soup.
One whole year passed before Angela caught a glimpse of a tall, gray-haired man on a bicycle. She had reduced her visits from five days a week to one or two days a week, starting to believe she would never see him again.
The man locked his bike to the bicycle rack by the road, and when Angela saw his face, she froze. She dropped her steamed bun and stood.
He hadn’t seen her yet. She took large strides toward him. He had an envelope in his hand and was walking toward the post office. There were so many people coming and going in the plaza that he didn’t notice her. Without thinking, Angela cut in front of him and blocked his path. She watched as his pupils dilated with recognition and disbelief.
“Angela, it’s you! I thought I would never see you again! How are you?”
“I would be better if you had told me the truth about yourself,” she said.
She crossed her arms and tapped the right toe of her high-heeled shoes. When Will knew her, she wore sneakers, old jeans, and tank tops. Now she wore a nice blouse, fitted office pants, and expensive high heels with pointy toes as sharp as weapons. She wanted to dig them into his gut.
“What do you mean, the truth?”
“You know exactly what I mean. You’re married, aren’t you?”
“I’m not married now,” he said, dragging out each syllable the way liars do.
“But were you married then? When you fucked me and told me you loved me and cried when I was leaving and then cried when I dumped you? When I gave you my virginity? You were married, weren’t you, you piece of shit!”
“I . . . calm down, Angela, I didn’t mean to—”
“Answer my question!” she yelled, though all the Taida students nearby were staring, some gawping mid-chew, at the two of them.
She wasn’t a student here anymore, anyway. She did not care. Nobody she knew was here to gossip about her, and all she wanted was to make Will feel shame, as he had made her feel when she realized how naïve and stupid she had been to believe him and trust him.
“Yes, I was married,” Will said softly, “but I got divorced shortly after you and I broke up.”
“See if I care.”
“When I told you that I would have married you, I was sincere. I wanted to marry you. I really loved you,” he said quietly.
Angela tried not to let the old man’s words affect her. Marry her, indeed. Who wanted to marry him? She stared right in his face and was surprised to see what an old, graying, long-faced, and unattractive creature he was. She could not believe she had been naked in bed with this man, given him her affection, offered him her body. She really dodged a bullet, she thought to herself. When he opened his mouth he showed two rows of undoubtedly fake teeth so shiny and blindingly white they looked frightening against his receded, reddish-pink gums. Angela’s feelings toward Will shifted from anger to a kind of pity, which soon gave way to disgust.
“Get away from me. You don’t deserve to have anyone in your life, you dirty old liar. If I could take everything back, I would.”
The expression on Will’s face triggered in Angela the vivid image of her twisting a knife in his wound so it would never heal. But it was still not enough.
“You are a piece of shit, human scum, and I shouldn’t have wasted a single minute on you. I regret every second I spent with you, and I’m sure your ex-wife does, too.”
Will stood there, pruny mouth stretched into a flat line of dismay. Angela turned and started walking, her heels clicking loudly on the sidewalk. She walked toward the bus stop at the front gate of Taida. She imagined Will was following her, a mere arm’s reach away as she crossed the crowded campus, but she refused to look back. As she approached the bus stop, her bus, the number 60 Taipei bus, pulled up. She waved at the driver and quickened her steps, making it just in time. The door of the bus swung shut behind her with a whooshing noise. She dropped twelve NT into the coin chute and plopped down in the first seat behind the driver.
Angela looked out the window at the familiar Taipei scenery: couples on bicycles, mothers with strollers, elementary school students wearing school uniforms and banana-yellow hats. A sense of satisfaction and vindication flowed through her. At last, she had the closure she wanted. She only wished she had remembered to slap him while she was at it. Fishing her cell phone out of her purse, she dialed May’s number. She hadn’t spoken to May since her friend began a demanding new job answering telephones for a home shopping network. Even when May wasn’t busy, she no longer enjoyed talking on the phone—“occupational hazard,” she jokingly explained.
“Hey, May, you won’t believe who I just ran into,” she said when May picked up.