The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [20]
Lewis rubs his eyes; he feels a dull headache approaching.
I’ve got a new question for you, the teacher says. Are you ready?
Lewis straightens his back and takes a deep breath.
You say you love your wife, right? What’s her name?
Melinda.
You say you love Melinda. But what is love? Show me love.
Lewis strikes the floor and waits, but no words come. His mind is full of bees, buzzing lazily in the sunlight. Don’t know, he says.
Good, the teacher says. That’s your homework. He rings the bell, and they bow.
The housekeeper’s name was Cristina; she was paid for by Melinda’s company, part of the package that all expatriate employees received. Two days after they moved into their apartment, she arrived with three suitcases and a woven plastic carryall, and occupied the bedroom that Lewis had wanted for his studio. She was polite and efficient, and cooked wonderful food, but the apartment was small even for two people; they took to arguing in whispers, and gave up making love, feeling self-conscious. It took three weeks for Melinda to convince her supervisor that she didn’t want or need an amah, even though every other couple in the firm had one, and the contract had to be broken at extra cost, taken out of her salary. When they told Cristina she wept and begged them not to send her away, and they were at a loss to justify themselves. I’ll be more quiet! she said. Not even any telephone calls! Finally Lewis threatened to call her agency and complain, and she went to the elevator crying and wailing in Tagalog. All along the hallway he heard doors opening and closing, the neighbors talking in low tones.
Afterward Melinda couldn’t sleep for days. She might have been sent back to the Philippines, she said. That’s what she was afraid of. Anytime they’re out of work they risk losing their visas. Maybe we could have kept her on.
What did you want me to do? Not work?
No, she said. I know. But I don’t know how we can live with ourselves.
It isn’t our fault, Lewis said. Who thought that an American couple would be comfortable having a live-in housekeeper in a tiny apartment? Couldn’t they at least have asked?
Everybody else has one.
Well, I’m not interested in having a servant, Lewis said impatiently. I don’t want some kind of colonial fantasy life.
I want my life, he wanted to add, our life, the one we promised each other, the one we had in Boston. He remembered what she’d said to him in the airport, when they were standing in line at the gate, clutching their tickets and carry-on bags and staring out the window at the tarmac, as if seeing America for the last time: she’d turned to him, wide-eyed, and said, no matter what happens, we’ll still be the same, right?
That was how it began, he thinks, staring at the ceiling, on the nights when the throbbing in his knees keeps him awake. The things they couldn’t have predicted, and couldn’t be faulted for. In the first month he visited the offices of a dozen magazines and journals, after sending slides and a portfolio in advance, and found himself talking to assistants and deputy editors who seemed not to have heard of Outside, Condé Nast Traveler, or Architectural Digest, and who regretted to inform him that there was a glut of photographers in Hong Kong at the moment. For the first time in six years he was officially out of work. On the bus, in the subway, in restaurants, he had moments of irrational rage, hating everything and everyone around him: the women who brayed into their mobile phones; the insolent teenagers with dyed-blond hair and purple sunglasses; the old men in stained T-shirts who stared at him balefully when he paid with the wrong coins. Cantonese was an impossible language: even people who’d lived in Hong Kong twenty years couldn’t speak it. He couldn’t master the tones well enough to say