The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [18]
You’re being stubborn, she said. She lit a cigarette—a habit she’d picked up again in Hong Kong, after quitting six years before —and stared at him, her eyes darting from his forehead to his jaw to his sweater. How many other couples like us live here? she said. Why is it so difficult for you? What’s wrong with not working for a little while?
He sat back in his chair and looked up into the glowing haze that hung over the city, blotting out the sky. If I said that to you, he said, you’d call me a sexist bastard.
That’s not fair, she said. Being a freelancer is different. You’ll always have slow patches.
This isn’t a slow patch, he said, more loudly than he’d intended; an old woman with a basket of hibiscus flowers, who had been approaching their table, turned and hurried away. Haven’t you been listening? If I don’t work, not at all, what good am I to anyone? It isn’t about the money. I don’t want to wake up one of these days and realize I’ve turned into a hobbyist.
So, she said, I guess this is what they call an impasse.
Is it Hong Kong, he wondered, or is it what we’ve known all along, that we’re too different, that our lives will never really match? She had lost weight, even in the last few weeks; in the dim light he could see the faint blue paths of veins along her wrists, and the dark half-moons under her eyes that always reappeared in the evening, no matter how much concealer she used. Things will be all right, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t see how they possibly would be, and there wasn’t any point in lying.
No one could say they hadn’t been warned. An office workday ran from seven until eight, and Saturdays were workdays; an affordableapartment meant living in a series of walk-in closets; the summers were furnacelike, the winters endlessly dreary; there was no such thing as having a social life. And listen, an Australian woman instructed them at a cocktail party, on her third glass of chardonnay, forget this international city claptrap. Hong Kong is one hundred and ten percent Chinese. They may be the richest Chinese in the world, but they still throw their garbage out the window and kill chickens in the bathroom. And you have to accommodate them because, after all, it’s their home, isn’t it? It belongs to them now.
We’re not like her, Melinda said to him, in the taxi, heading back to their hotel. Are we? It’s different if you come here because you want to. We can explore—we’ll make Chinese friends, won’t we? And you’ll study Cantonese.
Right. Of course.
And you can do amazing work. She rested her head against the window and stared up at the Bank of China passing above them, silhouetted against the night sky like the blade of a giant X-Acto knife. I mean, my god, this is the most photogenic city in the world, isn’t it?
I shot fifty rolls yesterday, he said. You should have seen it.
He had wandered the backstreets of Kowloon for hours, a side of the city he’d never imagined: streets like narrow crevasses, the signs stacked one over another overhead, blotting out the sun. Old women bent almost double with age, wearing black pajamas, their fingers dripping with gold. This was what he loved about her, he thought, her absolute certainly about these things, the way she moved instinctively, always knowing that logic would follow.
Now he thinks, I was young. I was so, so young.
The pain is always with him: prickling in his ankles, needles in his knees, a fiery throbbing in the muscles around the groin. In every forty-minute session he waits for the moment when sweat beads on his forehead and his teeth begin to chatter, and then rises and stands behind his cushion until the clapper strikes. Walking, climbing the stairs, squatting on the Korean toilet—a dull ache in his knees registers every effort. He sleeps in its afterglow. Make friends with pain, Hae Wol advised him, then you’ll never be lonely. And he realizes now that he feels a kind of gratitude for it, late in the evening sitting, when it is the only thing that keeps him awake.
Whole days pass in reverie, in waking dreams. A camping