Beauty

by Christina Chiu

  “Will you look at me? Please?” he asks.

  I march to the bathroom and pack up my toiletries. When I return to the room, Jeff says, “Okay, then, you want to hear me say it? I don’t want anyone but you.”

  I toss the toiletries bag into the suitcase.

  “And, I don’t want you to want anyone but me,” he adds. “So there, I’ve said it. We’ve talked. Happy now?”

  “What time is the bus?”

  Jeff sighs, glances at his watch. “Wups. You missed it.”

  “Fuck.”

  “It’s that bad,” he says. “You can’t survive one more night?”

  I set the suitcase upright and sit at the edge of the bed. “What time does the bus leave tomorrow?”

  “Eleven,” he says, settling next to me, his shoulders slouching forward. “I’ll drive you over after breakfast.”

  “Well, okay,” I say. “Friends, then?”

  “With benefits?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  He hugs me, and the smell of him feels so good, so familiar, it nearly breaks my heart.

  I shower and get ready for dinner, and then we drive out to a place in Orleans called Land Ho, which is one of his favorite fried clams and oysters restaurants. It’s a little after 6:00 PM and it’s already packed. There’s a twenty minute wait. We consider leaving, but by now it’s likely the situation will be the same anywhere we go. Jeff and I wait at the bar. He orders a scotch on the rocks and I go with a Cosmo, which is high in calories, but delicious, especially after a long day of sun, love, and a sudden and intense breakup. The music is loud, and adds to the din of voices, making it difficult to hear.

  “To our last night,” he says, once we have our drinks in hand.

  “It’s been fun,” I say, trying not to get emotional.

  “You’re absolutely right, you know. You’re young, you’re beautiful. You don’t need to be saddled with me.”

  “Saddled? With the Great Jeff Jones? I’m not sure I’d put it like that.”

  “Well, I regret being such a cretin.”

  “Stop.”

  “Because I meant what I said.” He jiggles the ice in the glass. “The other girls don’t mean a thing to me.”

  “Why? They don’t fuck as well?”

  “Or get fucked as well.”

  The host arrives to take us to our seats. For the appetizer, Jeff orders raw Wellfleet oysters. I order a stuffed clam. For dinner, I choose fried clams. Jeff goes with the oysters. When the appetizers arrive, he adds sauce and forks an oyster into his mouth. On a bed of ice, each of the six wet, fleshy mollusks lies within the mother of pearl interior of its otherwise rough, layered shell. “You know what I love?” he whispers, leaning close. “I love the way you taste.”

  “Will you stop, already?” I say.

  “What’s with the prudery all of a sudden? Yes, it’s just ‘sex’. But sex is a microcosm of life. It’s a metaphor for everything.” He brings a shell close to his mouth and slurps the oyster into his mouth.

  “Everything?” I smirk.

  “Yes, and if you separate the good designers from the best, you’ll find it comes down to understanding that difference.”

  Was that true? I wondered.

  “You’ll see,” he says. “Oh, and by the way, my friend Josie Chu emailed to say for you to go in and speak with her. She said she may not have anything right now, but…”

  “Oh, Jeff,” I say. “See? You can be really sweet.”

  “Yes, well, let’s keep that our secret.”

  Jeff orders another round of drinks, and by the time dinner is over, I feel like we really can be friends. He tells me about women he’s been involved with, some one-nighters, others he’s dated for longer periods. What’s amazing is that he can not only recall funny anecdotes or meaningful details about each of these women, but he never says a negative thing about any of them. He doesn’t bring up his ex, and this time, I let it go.

  We return to the house early. We stink of fried oil from the restaurant, so while Jeff makes some calls for work, I clean up in the bathroom and step out of the hot shower wrapped in a towel. Steam is rising off my skin. Jeff watches me from the doorway. “You don’t believe me, do you?” he says. “We belong together.”

  “We’ll see,” I say.

  “Can we at least be together,” he asks, “one last night?”

  “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

  His eyes shine like flashlights.

  “I want to,” I admit. “It’s just—”

  “You’re afraid.”

  Afraid? My head whirs. I groan, hold my head in my hands. Too many emotions. Too many thoughts. I can’t hold onto it all.

  “You want me,” he says. “You don’t want to, but you do.”

  “Fuck you, Jeff.”

  “Fuck me? Really? Darling, I know how you’re feeling because I feel it too. It can’t be denied.”

  “It can’t be denied,” I mock.

  “Fine,” he says, moving toward the door. “I’ll sleep on the couch. But you love me, Amy Wong. That’s why you’re so scared.”

  “Jeff.” He turns.

  I throw him a pillow and shut the light.

  The next morning, Jeff and I drive to the General Store to pick up some breakfast. It looks rustic from the outside, but like a Balducci-type New York specialty store on the inside. Chef-prepared foods, deli meats, fresh produce, baskets of fresh fruit, bins of coffee beans with a commercial grinder, and a breakfast area where one can order bagels, pastries, and coffee to go. Jeff grabs the New York Times. We pick out our breakfast—protein shake with strawberries for Jeff and yogurt and a peach for me. For the ride home later, I also grab an iced tea and order curried yogurt chicken. Jeff approves because it’s labeled “Oprah’s Recipe,” and is both low fat and low calorie.

  We bag the breakfast separately from the meal I’m taking on the bus. On the way out of the store, we pass an old-fashioned gum ball machine. The kind that every grocery used to have at the front of the store. It’s filled with plastic bubbles, each with a different prize inside. Tattoos, stickers, rings, rubber balls. “Wait, wait,” Jeff says, tucking the newspaper under his arm and handing me the groceries. He reaches into his pocket for change. He pushes two quarters into the slots and turns the knob. There’s the sound of a bubble clambering down the metal shoot. He plucks off the lid.

  “What’d you get?” I ask.

  It’s a plastic ring. Pink and with a smiley face.

  “Here,” he says, kneeling and offering it to me. “You’re wedded to me for another week.”

  I laugh all the way to the car, and biting into the juicy peach, try to chew and swallow it down with the sweet-and-sour desire to stay longer.

  Jeff stops at the bayside beach. We get out of the car and sit at the top of the steps leading down to the ocean. The sun is up, but it’s still cool. A woman on the beach steadily walks toward Orleans. We watch the ocean and eat our breakfast. “Thanks for inviting me out here,” I say, finishing my peach and dropping the pit into the bag.

  “It’s going be lonely without you.”

  I smile. It’s too late to change my mind now. He’ll think my life is totally malleable. That he can always get his way. As soon as I think it, I worry if it’s already true. He can already get his way with me.

  “You can call, you know,” I say, opening the yogurt and spooning it into my mouth.

  He stares out at the water. “My father used to bring me to this exact spot at this exact time,” he says, sucking the shake through the thin straw. “We’d have breakfast and he’d tell me shark stories that made me afraid to go near the water without him.”

  The wind blows. I have to hold my hair back to keep from eating it.

  “I always thought I’d be bringing my girls here,” he says, shaking his he
ad. “But…”

  I tuck my hair into my shirt and continue with my breakfast. The night of the party, I’d seen baby toys in the storage ottoman. But since then, Jeff refuses to talk about them. I made the mistake of asking once, and Jeff responded angrily, the way he does at the mention of his wife. But today he’s brought it up on his own, so I ask, “Why can’t you bring them?”

  “They’re in London.” He explains that his ex wife moved shortly after the divorce went through. She, too, had met someone new. “I wanted to fight it, but her father happens to be J.C. Moorehouse, one of the top divorce attorneys in the U.S.”

  “Whether he is or not, you still have the right to see your kids,” I say, finishing the yogurt and tossing the spoon and plastic yogurt cup into the bag.

  He shakes his head again. “In order not to get fleeced financially, I was forced to sign away visitation rights.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “What’s crazier is that on my last business trip to London, I arranged to see the girls, but they clung to their mother’s legs and refused to come to me.”

  “They didn’t recognize you?”

  “I’ve become a stranger to my own children.”

  “That must be depressing,” I say.

  “Not as depressing as when one of your girls is too afraid of you to let you hold her and the other one tells you you’re bad, she doesn’t like you.”

  “Wow.”

  “She’s filling their heads with rubbish and lies.”

  I understand now why he can’t talk about it. He must hate her. I know I would.

  “There’s a heavy pain right here,” he says, tapping his breast bone. “It’s so dense, almost as if my heart is hardening, and sometimes I think at some point it’s going to stop.”

  Wave after wave. I take his hand in mine. The waves crash down on the sand and rush up onto the beach. The edges foam. The rest gets towed back into the ocean.

  “I need you,” he says. “You certain you can’t stay just a few more days?”

  I smile sadly. “Some of us actually have to find a job, and to find one, I actually have to, you know, look?”

  “Okay, then,” he says, finishing the last of his shake. I open the bag and he tosses the cup in with the rest of the trash. “I give in, darling. Forget professionalism. You’re hired.” He gets up and starts toward the car.

  “Jeff,” I call, hurrying after him. “Wait.”

  We get into the car. “Whatever you want,” he says, starting the engine. “You name it.”

  Whatever I want? I say to myself. What the hell does he mean by that? He takes my hand and sets it on his erection.

  “Personal secretary?” he offers.

  “You have a personal secretary.”

  “So?” He leans across to kiss me. He slides a hand beneath my skirt.

  “Oh, I know,” I say, clamping down on his fingers. “How about ‘designer who fucked her way to the top’?”

  He frowns. His erection instantly dies. “Why do you have to be like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Forget it.” He makes a disgusted, throaty sound as we pull out of the lot. Silence. There’s less than two feet between us, and yet, a vacant space sprawls out so wide, I don’t think I can possibly reach him. He turns off the main highway. The car wends its way up the sinuous road. When we arrive at the house, Jeff gets out, grabs my curry and iced tea from the back seat, and enters the house. He doesn’t shut the door on me, and yet, I hesitate to follow him inside.

  I stand there a moment, trash in hand, wondering what to do. Finally, I go inside. The bag with the curry and drink are on the sofa, the sliding doors drawn open. I watch as Jeff disappears down the steps to the beach. What exactly is going on here? The glare off the water stings my eyes. A tepid feeling sifts through my heart.

  I get my suitcase from the room and roll it out to the car. It’s too heavy to lift into the trunk myself; I manage to shove it in the back seat. It takes half and hour to forty-five minutes to get to the bus station. There’s still an hour before I need to leave, but maybe I should go next door and call a cab?

  When I return to the house and Jeff’s still not back, I head down to the beach where he’s sitting in the shade of the umbrella. I hug my knees beside him. It’s low tide. The oysters are there for the picking. In the distance, beyond the sheltered cover, the ocean looks like long shards of floating glass.

  “Give me the ring,” he says.

  I slip it from my finger and hand it to him. He gets to his feet, winds up, and throws it into the bay.

  “What was that for?” I demand to know. When he doesn’t respond, I get to my feet. “You know what? Fuck you.” I march up the stairs, through the house and out the front door to the car. See? I tell myself. You were right. You put yourself at his mercy coming here. Now, you’re stuck.

  I’m about to knock on the neighbor’s door when Jeff finally appears. He gets in, starts the car, and we drive in silence all the way to Hyannis. When we get to the bus depot, he asks me to wait, he needs to talk, but I shove the door open and get out. I tug my suitcase from the back seat. “Amy,” he calls, rushing around to my side of the car. “Please. I’m sorry, okay?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I say, marching toward the station, dragging the suitcase behind me.

  “I love you.”

  Three small words. Is he kidding me? In a movie, this would be the part when two quarreling lovers run into each other’s arms. I turn to face Jeff straight on.

  “I do,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to be that guy who needs the girl who doesn’t need him.”

  Heat rushes to my face. I feel sunburnt, even on the inside.

  “You know me, remember?” he says.

  “Well, you don’t know me.”

  “I do,” he insists. “I do.”

  “Really? Well, then go back and get my fucking ring back.” I tug the suitcase into the bus depot where I buy my ticket. He waits as I board, trying to hug me, but I push past him. He waves me off, but I shut my eyes until we’re moving at a steady, even clip. I spend both legs of the trip home—bus and train—replaying everything in my mind. It’s pure, unadulterated torture. I don’t want to ever see him again, and yet, maybe I’m going to die if I don’t. My eyes are swollen practically shut from crying. I don’t arrive at Georgie’s until 10 PM. Ma’s back from her cruise, so I put on my sunglasses and hope she’s already asleep. All I want is a shower, a shot of NyQuil, and a bed.

  As soon as I walk into Georgie’s apartment, I know something’s wrong. Ma and Georgie are sitting together at the kitchen table, each with a mug of Chinese tea. Ma’s wearing a silk nighty with butterflies that someone younger might pass off as an evening dress. She’s got a dour look on her face like maybe her boyfriend broke up with her. Or maybe something’s up with Dad?

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  Ma and Georgie exchange glances.

  “What?” I insist.

  Ma holds out a ring box, hand delivered from Tiffany’s, with a small card attached.

  “Maybe you should tell us,” Georgie says.

  I open the card. It says: I can do better than that—J.

  Damn right, you will, I think. No one’s ever going to treat me like that again.

  “You look terrible,” Georgie says, a line usually reserved for Ma.

  “Ni ku shen me?” Ma asks. What’s the crying about?

  “It’s just an apology of sorts,” I say, taking the box. “Just a guy I’m dating, that’s all.”

  “The boy just now at this Cape Cod?” Ma asks.

  “Friend,” I correct, worried that if Ma ever meets Jeff, she’ll automatically judge him for being so much older than me.

  “He wasn’t nice?” Ma asks.

  “A total jerk,” I
say, unwrapping the baby blue paper, and prying the box open. The cushion is white silk. Set inside it, a diamond ring. Rectangular-shaped. Framed by small diamond chips.

  Ma gasps.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that looks like an engagement ring,” Georgie states.

  “Like, duh.”

  Georgie frowns.

  Ma stares at it, then back at me. “What have you done?” she accuses.

  “Are you asking if I prostituted myself for a diamond ring so that I can scare off nice Chinese boys?” I ask, angrily, snapping the box shut. “Because that could be true.”

  Ma strikes me across the face, catching me totally off guard. The last time she slapped me was in high school. I press my stinging cheek. “I know it’s hard to believe that someone might actually want to marry me,” I say, grabbing the phone from the stand and locking myself in the bathroom.

  Jeff picks up on the first ring.

  “This is not funny,” I say, sitting on the toilet.

  “I didn’t intend it to be,” he replies.

  “You made me feel like shit. Like trash.”

  “I screwed up, okay? You’re dealing with a hopelessly screwed up person. You have me in knots, I’m scared.”

  I sigh. “I miss you. Why do I miss you?”

  He chuckles. “Have you tried it on?”

  I remove it from the box and slip it onto my finger. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Then marry me,” he says.

  “I never imagined I’d be proposed to over the phone while I’m sitting on the john.”

  “Well, you are. If it’s not romantic enough for you, we can see what we get out of the bubble gum machine.”

  “Do I have to come up for another week if I say yes?”

  “Absolutely. In fact, the dues have gone up to three weeks.”

  “Then, yes,” I sigh. “Yes.”

  How beautiful and radiant I feel in front of the three-way mirrors. Jeff’s favorite seamstress, Mona, makes the final alterations. It’s the strapless wedding gown he designed just for me. It took a year to create this dress. Since Jeff Jones is getting to be a household name, he wants more than ever to push the envelope. He’s certain the right dress would appear in the top fashion magazines. To his dismay, I asked for something more traditional—at least for the wedding itself. As requested, he created a modified A-line dress cut straight across the neck line, which drapes to the floor. The cut of the dress made it frightfully pedestrian, so he focused instead on the material itself. Using a lotus motif from a Chinese textile dating back to the Qing Dynasty, he designed a lace pattern and had it crafted by hand. The result was stunning. Jeff was so delighted that the lace became the dress.