He suggested that they go to the hotel, as if to stop her from shedding tears in public. She got to her feet without giving it much thought, following him out the way she had in the past.
They walked into the alley and entered the motel, unlike before, when they had arrived separately and registered under false names. While getting the key and waiting for the elevator, she saw couples leaving after their trysts, but made no effort to avoid them.
Teddy began taking off her clothes the moment they got into the room, and she did not try to stop him; nor did she respond. He touched her with a triumphant air, obviously playing with her body. Not worried that someone might be watching or filming them in secret, he turned on all the lights, examining her naked body with a mocking look.
Then he thrust himself into her, unconcerned whether she was ready, and began to move. Within a minute or two he finished and withdrew.
“I told you you’d come back to me one day.”
He got up and looked down at her with a smug sneer.
“A woman like you is insatiable; you open your legs wide and let a man, any man, mount you. See, didn’t you come back to ask me to fuck you?” He spoke so forcefully that the corners of his mouth curled. “But who do you take me for? Your sex tool? No way! Let’s get this straight. I’ve been the one screwing you, not you screwing me.”
He dressed at lightning speed, as if afraid she’d talk back, though he continued to mock her cruelly.
“Didn’t I just screw you?”
He picked up his jacket and walked to the door, where he turned and said:
“Let me tell you this, don’t call me again. Go find someone else if you need to be fucked. I won’t be back.”
A reflexive reaction to the extreme humiliation made her sit up, but before she could get to her feet, she felt a sticky substance oozing down the insides of her thighs, followed by a nauseating odor.
Yinghong thought about how the semen must have squirted deep into her uterus, where it soiled Lin Xigeng’s baby. She thought she ought to be tearing up, but no tears came when she raised her hand to dry her eyes.
She stood up, sending the sticky secretion flowing down her legs to her feet; warm at first, it quickly turned cold and clammy like snot. It felt like the first time she realized that a man could leave such a large quantity of semen in her.
While she was trying to find something to wipe herself off, she happened to look up and saw a naked woman before her in a ridiculous posture, standing with her legs wide apart. Her heart raced before she realized that it was a mirror.
A hotel that prided itself on its Mediterranean flair had a large oval bed that took up half of the room and faced a mirrored wall. The other three walls were plastered in paper featuring huge red-and-yellow flowers that seemed to engulf the room in fiery passion. With all the lights on, a white glare was reflected in the mirror, which contrasted with her disheveled black hair and displayed her naked body in an eerie, embarrassing posture. In the mirror, the ridiculously large oval bed behind her, with its full pretension to romantic exoticism, appeared to fill up the room, as if serving as a constant reminder that a carnal encounter had just taken place there.
She turned the water on full and scrubbed herself repeatedly, but she knew she would never wash off the soiled feeling of violation; she was even more keenly aware that, for the rest of her life, she would have to live with the unclean feeling that the baby inside her was contaminated by another man’s semen.
She left the bathroom and quickly got dressed. When she reached the ground-floor reception desk, she was, to her surprise, stopped by the staff; it turned out that Teddy hadn’t even paid for the room.
After hailing a taxi at the alley entrance, she settled in before calmly giving the name of an ob-gyn on Zhongshan North Road. The young driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror, but she just turned her head to look out the window.
It was already dark outside on a cold, drizzly winter evening. Yet it was only when the driver reached the street and began to search for the sign of a clinic lit up by fluorescent lights that she was startled awake by the sight of neon signs dazzling the streets in the misty evening.
The doctor was a man in his fifties who had studied in Japan. Yinghong had recently accompanied a female friend for a procedure that had gone smoothly. She asked for a general anesthesia, to which the doctor agreed with an understanding nod.
When she woke up to find herself in the recovery room, she placed a call to Lin’s office. A familiar male voice answered with a hint of fatigue after a long day’s work. She told him in a measured voice, with little elaboration:
“There’s no need for you to worry that I will hang on to you. I want to tell you that I just aborted our child.”
He raced over. What greeted him was an ashen-faced Yinghong devoid of makeup. She was noticeably thinner but peaceful, with a relaxed, even indifferent composure, as if everything that had supported her in the past was gone. She was no longer the daughter of the Zhu clan, nor was she his most competent assistant. She was, simply put, a woman; she had even lost her intimidating beauty.
Pulling her tightly into his arms, he said:
“I’ll make it up to you. I’ll do what’s right.”
At that moment, he obviously had no idea how to react to a self-possessed woman who wanted nothing from him, and all he could do was instinctively mumble a promise.
A few days later, he put all business aside and returned with Yinghong to spend some time at Lotus Garden. In the cassia grove on a hill, in his usual conceited tone, he asked her to marry him.
With an evident decline in the real estate business, construction companies had stopped or delayed work on new projects, which in turn cooled a market that had already been leveling off. While staying at Lotus Garden, Lin continued to run the company in Taipei via telephone, but showed no sign of anxiety over the situation, for he knew he had the edge over the others. The large amount of ready cash meant he could re-launch when the moment was ripe, particularly because, in his estimation, this was just the beginning of the depreciation of the housing market; he had all the time in the world to wait it out.
Because of the certainty of his future success, he held off on new projects and gradually finished the old ones.
“We must wait now so we can maintain our edge over others.”
He explained this to Yinghong in a decisive but calculating voice. But he sent secret messages to reliable and viable real estate brokers, who would immediately notify him if they knew of any real estate firm with a shaky financial structure that could no longer hold out and must sell its land units at a low price.
Which was why he had lots of free time while staying at Lotus Garden. The decay in the dying garden bothered him and made him uneasy.
At the time, the tallest structure, Sea-gazing Tower, had suffered damage during an earthquake that destroyed the top floor and reduced the bottom floor to broken walls. Several typhoons over the past few years had blown the roof tiles off most of the pavilions, towers, and terraces, including the second story of Lotus Tower, which leaked every time it rained. Only Flowing Pillow Pavilion, under the aging Luohan’s painstaking care, managed to retain its original form and remained habitable.
In the beginning, Lin followed her around the garden and watched as she devoted her time to various tasks: picking up fallen wood carvings from the windows and putting them away after carefully noting the location; reinforcing the finials on posts; and giving additional support to slanting doorframes to hold up a wall.