“You’re quite wrong about that.”
It’s the way men treat women, she was thinking, I could see.
“I didn’t expect any special consideration,” she said tersely.
It was a futile exchange, in the end.
“It’s money that fucks everything up,” I said.
“Never mind. Do you like chocolates?”
“Not in the morning.”
“I seem to eat them round the clock,” she said.
“But you never get fat.”
“No. Nothing makes me fat.”
The tray of chocolates arrived. She impaled one on the end of a fork. It looked a little strange eaten this way, and I had to watch. Perhaps she didn’t know any other way to eat chocolates, or she thought it was the correct way. Her hands looked powdered. The chocolate smeared the corner of her mouth. She dabbed it away with a stiff napkin. From afar came the music of the rain, hissing against the fifteen-foot-high glass, and the streaking water cast a metallic luminosity against the granular surface of her cheeks. She seemed satisfied with her night, or the money made, and in her eyes I could see as if reflected in a tiny convex mirror the middle-aged Chinese businessman asleep upstairs in an unlit bed. She wore a Patek watch with a crocodile strap, customized for her by one of the shadowy men who had taken a shine to her. A Chinese ring with a pigeon stone, shoes with stiff bows on them. The vulgarity of the first encounter had been smoothed away by someone. She told me in Mandarin that her business, as she called it, had looked up in recent weeks and she had made many new clients in the real estate sector. The commissions were flowing in and life among the glass towers was looking up, insofar as it could ever look up in the realm of the hungry ghosts. She had adapted and she had begun to thrive, she said.
“But what about you,” she went on. “What brings you over to Kowloon?”
“I rarely do come,” I admitted. “I got nostalgic for the Intercontinental last night and just decided to hop over on the ferry. You know.”
“So you came up for breakfast?”
Her eyes lifted to greet the view yet again, and there was a hint of green in them, of neutral submission.
“I’m the impulsive sort,” I added.
“Yes, I remember.”
“I wasn’t losing or anything.”
She shifted slightly, and her smile was slanted, foxy. I had lied.
“But for a moment,” she said, “looking at you there, I thought you might be broke. You seemed to be having trouble paying the bill.”
She laughed.
“Yes,” I said.
She leaned back, and there was again a glitter of the imaginary eye-green.
“We’re a couple of charming amateurs, your lordship.”
“If you like.”
I saw that a pot of tea had arrived, Dragon tea, and there was a jasmine flower laid on the saucer next to the gingersnap biscuits.
I remembered now that she had given me her card at the time and that I had not called her. I had not been expected to call her, but all the same I had not. There lay the source of the reproach that I could plainly see in her face, even though it was forgiving and minimal. Was it even a reproach? It was perhaps something else. A plain sadness at human forgetfulness and egoism. But she had not known that I had been preoccupied with the drama of losing everything bit by bit. She had felt slighted, but she must have been used to such situations with men. Things might have become tetchy, and to avoid that I said I liked the way she stabbed the chocolates with a fork.
“It’s my way,” she laughed.
“I can’t believe you were here.”
“Please.”
She pushed the plate toward me.
I said, “I feel hungry all over again.”
“Why don’t you order something? It’s my treat.”
“I couldn’t possibly order anything more on you. I really couldn’t.”
“Oh go on, I don’t care. I’m flush.”
The word flush came out in English, as if there weren’t a Chinese equivalent.
“All the same,” I said.
“Go on, like I say I don’t care. If you’re hungry.”
“I might,” I stammered.
She beckoned to the waitress, who was incredulous.
“The gentleman would like something else. What about pancakes?”
“Excellent idea,” I said without shame.
“With fruit?” the girl asked.
I nodded.
“And yogurt.”
“Very well, sir.”
Dao-Ming ate a gingersnap, holding it with two fingers. She spoke with a controlled, understated voice that seemed to have found its ideal pitch. The tense nervousness I remembered in her was gone.
She went on:
“I stopped playing a while back. I was losing and it made no sense. I never really liked it anyhow. I always thought it was a waste of time.”
“That’s exactly what it is.”
A few moments of silence later, she said, “Have you ever been to Lamma?”
I said I had been there a couple of times.
“It’s more than just seafood tourist traps, you know.”
It was an island a half hour from Victoria Harbor by slow boat.
“Are you headed back to Macau now?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“I’ve no plans in particular.”
“Well then,” she said. “Come to Lamma for the day. It’s where I’m living now.”
“A boring place for a girl to live.”
I could, I thought. It was a way out. Lamma—
“And do what?”
“Whatever you want. You don’t have to pay me.”
“I didn’t intend—”
She shook her head.
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to pay me. Come as a friend.”
“I might,” I said.
“I want to show you my house.”
If you’d called, her voice seemed to suggest, I would have shown it to you a long time ago. But you didn’t call.
She leaned forward and there was a friendly nonchalance in the way the offer turned into an inviting pout, a widening of the eyes, and I thought, Yes, it might be quite pleasant after all, a few days in Lamma while I extricate myself from my mess and decide what to do. The sexual offer was muted, but it was there. It wasn’t relevant now that I was down and out and almost dead.
All that morning, in fact, I had expected to be dead by midday, and as that hour approached I found myself to be alive, continuing onward toward yet another opened door, and I began to wonder on the statistical odds that had placed Dao-Ming in the Lobby Lounge at the very moment I was trying to pay my bill. Millions to one against. We took the ferry to Wan Chai in the downpour and waited for a boat to Lamma.
The city disappeared behind mists. The terminal with its arrested fans, its posters for Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Kindergarten, its stalls selling Tim Tam bars and cans of green tea. We talked while standing on the jetty, unnerved by the high waters, and she said she had been wounded by my disappearance but that she understood that gaming was the principal activity of my life. That, and not having relationships with casino girls like herself. All the same, it was rare that she liked a man, let alone a client, though she was not surprised that a man like me would ignore her. It was to be expected, she added, that a man like me also needed help. She understood that. I was sick and I needed help.
But all the same, she said, there was that irrational expectation that she could defy the odds. Life wasn’t all money and rank, and she could help a sick man who needed it.
We went into the boat. It rocked already, even so close to the shore. The crossing was going to be uncomfortable and nobody was going to join us. The outside chairs soaked, the inside area air-conditioned, chilly.