by Robert Daley
HIS PHONE had just rung, waking him up. The sun came through the glass doors and stung his eyes.
“Did I wake you?”
“No.”
“Have you had breakfast yet?”
“No.”
“How about meeting me in the coffee shop? We’ll have breakfast together.”
Silence.
“Look,” said Carol, “I’m sorry about last night. I’ll meet you in the coffee shop in thirty minutes, okay?”
After a pause he heard himself say: “Okay, thirty minutes.”
When she came into the coffee shop her face, in the early morning light, looked doughy. She can’t have slept much either, thought Powers. His anger and fear had passed in the night. This morning the story did seem as much hers as his. As she said, she had been machine-gunned; this did seem to give her certain rights. She had not set out to hurt him, and perhaps had not done so. Law enforcement was no exact science. One learned to be fatalistic about it. Cases seldom went according to plan. Carol might even have supplied the pressure to break this one wide open. It was possible, or so he told himself.
At any rate, she seemed contrite, and this pleased him. What’s done was done. He didn’t want to fight with her. Their lives were bound together, were as inextricably intertwined as coarse-fibered rope - you could not pick the strands apart no matter how you tried. They belonged together, at least today. And by sticking close to her he could keep her from going near Koy.
“What are you doing today?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Today is Sunday.”
“We could go sightseeing.”
“I did a lot of thinking in the night,” she said. “From now on we’ll just be friends, okay? I’m not going to go to bed with you anymore.”
“More coffee?” said Powers, and poured it out. It was amazing - she surprised him constantly.
“Because I’m just not in love with you anymore,” said Carol. She was buttering a piece of toast. “It’s over.”
“Fine,” he said. “You’re not in love with me anymore.” He was amused - this was the way teenagers talked.
“I’ve already been sightseeing.”
“We could go shopping.”
“Yes, we could go shopping,” conceded Carol. “I haven’t done any shopping yet.
They nodded at each other. They flashed each other tentative smiles, the way teenagers did, and Powers asked his teenaged question.
“How come you aren’t in love with me anymore?”
She responded briskly, as if she had feared he would never ask, as if she had rehearsed her lines in advance. She responded around mouthfuls of toast. She considered herself a special person, she said, and began enumerating her virtues. She was more intelligent, better looking, and more successful than other women. Any man ought to be proud to have her, and to consider himself lucky. She did not have to accept second-best at anything. She was also a woman who, when she loved a man, gave everything, held back nothing. She loved totally, and expected to be loved back in the same way. But Powers didn’t prize her enough, and as a result the flame of love had extinguished itself inside her. It had gone out.
She spoke of herself as if describing someone not present. She spoke matter-of-factly, and she did not sound immodest to Powers, since everything she said about herself was, to him, true. But he was distracted by the thought that he could never have spoken of himself this way, probably because he had been raised to hold modesty as one of the most admirable and also most manly of virtues. And partly because he simply did not think of himself in such terms anymore. Only young people were forever contemplating and measuring their virtues and their faults, because they were uncertain of where they stood in the world. Whereas Powers knew where he stood or at least imagined he did. He considered himself neither a good man nor a bad one. He did not think of himself often at all and, when he did, saw himself as one compelled by background, by training, and now to a large extent by inclination, to act in certain ways. If some woman - if Carol - chose to fall in love with him, this to Powers was startling. It was not something he had earned or deserved. It was purely and simply a miracle. Love was a miracle. And if he had been under the sway of Carol Cone for so long, it was partly because somehow such a miracle had taken place between them. It was this state of love between them, this miracle, that so captivated him. Of course the miracle was all bound up in the apparent perfection of the woman herself, but basically it was the miracle rather than the woman that he found so difficult to let go. He knew he had fallen in love for the last time. It would never happen to him again.
Carol, he realized, was still explaining why their relationship, being no longer satisfactory to her, had changed. She liked Powers very much, and was sure she always would. She was simply no longer in love with him. If he wished her to believe that his feelings toward her were stronger than she had supposed, then he should prove it. He should divorce his wife and marry her.
“Carol, that’s not what you want,” Powers said. “If I did that, you’d run a mile.” Having perceived a good deal in the last few minutes, he felt surprisingly calm. The miracle was either there or not there. Neither one of them could change that, whatever she might think or say. Her words, far from threatening him, only fascinated him more.
She was not trying to break up his marriage, Carol said. A good marriage could not be broken up by her or anyone else. If his marriage, or anyone’s marriage collapsed, it was a failed marriage already. Perhaps his own marriage was over and he didn’t realize it yet. She had had some experience in the matter. “It’s happened to me twice before,” she said.
“What’s happened to you twice before?”
“Two marriages ended over me.” Had he detected a note of triumph in her voice? Was she bragging?
“You mean two husbands got divorced? But they didn’t wind up married to you.”
“I seem to have the misfortune to keep falling in love with married men. I never promised I would marry either one if they got divorced. I’m not promising you either. If you want me, get divorced, and we’ll see.”
This conversation ought to be traumatic to me, Powers thought. Why isn’t it? And then he realized - or thought he did - that the miracle, for the moment at least, no longer existed. He was free at last to walk away, provided he did it quickly.
“Finish your coffee,” he said. “And let’s go see the shops.” He was smiling, and somehow felt quite happy. He felt he was very close to discovering one of the central mysteries of life. Could the miracle come back again? He did not know and could only wait to find out.
They walked along Gage Street through an outdoor market choked with stalls, with cart and pedestrian traffic. The street was narrow. The buildings pressed in from both sides. The stalls were pushed out to the curbs, all neatly stacked with produce they could not name: chive shoots, angled luffa, flowering white Chinese cabbage, matrimony vine, leaf custard. Ducks, pigeons and other birds hung by the feet at eye level, necks dangling, and at the curbs stood washtubs in which food fish swam lethargically. It reminded Powers of Mott Street in Chinatown, except that it was even dirtier, even more crowded. The air reeked of rotten food, and sudsy rivulets ran in the gutters. As they moved through the market, they listened to the voices of hawkers, watched vegetables weighed on hand-held balances, watched marketing women prod the fruit, prod even the live fish held out for their inspection. Above their heads balconies hung off every floor. The balconies were crammed with plants, with birds in cages. Bamboo poles stood out from windows like flagpoles, and bore the universal flag of mankind, drying wash.
They rode the Star Ferry across the harbor to Kowloon, standing on the open deck in bright, warm sunshine, the wind in their faces, as the ferry surged bluntly through busy harbor traffic. They looked down into junks, sampans, motor launches, sailed under the prows of anchored cargo ships.
On the other side Powers phoned Sir David, who had nothing to report. Powers said he would phone in every hour.
With Ca
rol he entered the Ocean Terminal, a vast, two-storied indoor shopping mall. Smart shops. Hundreds of them. Jade, ivory, carpets, porcelains, antiques. Although it was Sunday all were open, and they joined the crowds of people who moved along the corridors staring in at treasures displayed.
“The reason I’m not going to sleep with you anymore,” said Carol, “is because I might fall back in love with you. You have no idea how much I’ve suffered over you at times, and I don’t want to go through pain like that again.”
“Excuse me a minute.”
Spying a public telephone, Powers again dialed Sir David. “What’s Koy doing now?”
“What are you doing?”
“Shopping.”
“That’s what he’s doing too. Got his wife with him. Seems to be buying her everything she wants. One thing does seem out of the ordinary. He’s making a lot of telephone calls. At every shop he asks to use the telephone. They let him, of course. They give him access to a phone we haven’t tampered with. He’s communicating with someone. We just don’t know who.”
“And the other three sergeants.”
“Same thing. All three of them are out on the street using the public call boxes.”
“Something is about to go down,” said Powers.
“Whatever they’re setting up, they’re doing it very discreetly.”
Powers went back to Carol, who took his hand, and they strolled along past jewelry shops, statuary shops, art galleries, shops selling expensive woolens. From time to time, when something particularly beautiful attracted her she gave his hand a squeeze, and pointed like a Chinese woman with her chin. Although she was supposedly no longer in love with him, her attitude today seemed to him no different from what it had ever been, and Powers, as he became more and more confused, found her ever more beautiful, ever more desirable as well, and so became less and less sure of what his own attitude should be.
A Chinese screen inlaid with jade, coral and other semi-precious stones caught Carol’s eye. Like any wife, she dragged him into the shop to study it more closely. Four panels. A royal family, or perhaps only a wealthy family, seated in a garden, being ministered to by servants while musicians played. The background was black. Most of the figures were carved out of ivory. Carol asked the price, which was $4,000 - a shocking sum to Powers, and he said so. But she pretended to be much taken by this screen. She pretended to consider buying it.
“It’s really quite cheap,” she told Powers.
“To you, maybe.”
“I think I’ll buy it.” The dealer assured her he could ship it to her house in the States at virtually no extra cost. Where did she live?
Powers could scarcely believe his eyes. She was really going to buy it, and he could not decide why. Because she really wanted it? Because she had that much money to squander? Or was her chief desire to impress him?
As he pondered this last possibility he felt ashamed. What devious motives we sometimes ascribe to others, he chided himself. This came from age. After a certain age it was difficult to trust anyone very much. Nothing was ever precisely what it seemed to be. Human beings saw life in a straightforward manner only up through childhood and adolescence - sometimes even until well into their twenties. But then everything changed, and life was not nearly as pretty anymore, and hardly anything after that remained predictable.
Carol had her checkbook out. He watched her write out the big check. When they left the shop she was hugging his arm.
“Isn’t that a super screen?” she demanded. “I mean, isn’t it gorgeous?”
What was he supposed to say to this? “Where are you going to put it?”
“In my living room. It will look lovely.”
“You mean between the barber chairs, or what?”
She studied him briefly. “I may have to do a little rearranging. Would you like a cup of tea? Let’s find a tea shop and get a cup of tea.”
They sat down on the terrace of a kind of outdoor cafe in the center of the indoor mall and watched the crowds stroll by. As soon as they had ordered, Powers excused himself. “Do you have to call in again?” She had asked no other question about these calls.
“Yes, I better call.”
The pay phone was beside a jewelry shop, in whose window lay a gold chain necklace, such as Eleanor liked, bearing a $125 price tag. While waiting for Sir David to come on the line, Powers studied it through the glass.
Sir David had gone to lunch leaving a message: nothing new. Hanging up, Powers entered the shop and bought the necklace. He asked the dealer to gift-wrap it for him, then carried the package back to the table where Carol still sipped her tea, where his own tea was cooling. He handed it over, saying, “I bought you a present.”
It was money he could not afford and he felt he was cheating Eleanor, but he had never given this woman anything and he wanted her to have it, whatever might become of their relationship afterwards. Call it only a sentimental gesture, but he didn’t see where sentimentality was as monstrous as all that. I want to give her something to remember me by, he thought.
Her reaction surprised him. She was as delighted as a child. She turned the unopened package in her hands, and cried, “I wonder what it could be.” She leaned over and kissed him. “Thank you. Do you want me to open it now?”
“Open it,” said Powers. “Maybe you won’t like it.” He had never had much success giving Eleanor presents. Why should he hope for better from this woman here? “Take me out of my misery.”
Having exposed the necklace, Carol clasped it to her neck. Her eyes were very bright. She was beaming and she thanked him profusely, turning her back to him so he could fit the chain around her neck. The necklace was beautiful, she told him, and gave him a whole series of kisses to prove it.
He was very pleased with himself, absurdly pleased.
“What do you want to do next?” he asked her.
FEW OF Hong Kong’s smart shops faced onto sidewalks. Hong Kong was so crowded, its streets and sidewalks so congested with cars and people that it was difficult, if not impossible, for shoppers to stroll browsing past shop windows. Railings were necessary along the curbs to keep the pedestrians from spilling out into the street and choking off the cars. People couldn’t walk around other people. There wasn’t room. The flow had to keep flowing. In many cases it was impossible even to cross streets except by underpasses or by bridges that linked major buildings in the central district. As a result the best shops were not at street level at all, but facing onto mezzanine corridors in office buildings, and it was possible to walk from building to building, to walk a mile or more, along corridors lined with shops on both sides.
In one such shop, in a skyscraper known as Prince’s Building, Koy sat on a straight chair in the manner of husbands the world over, while Orchid tried on expensive dresses. She would disappear into the changing booth for a moment, then reappear wearing still another unique creation.
“Which do you like better?”
“The first one.” But Koy was preoccupied and glanced again at his watch.
“I think I like this one.”
Koy gave her an indulgent smile. “Take them both. Excuse me, I have an appointment. Try on a few more. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Moving out into the corridor, he strolled briskly along toward the elevators. A man and a woman, who had been gazing into the antique-shop opposite, turned and followed him. All three waited for the elevator together. No one spoke. When the doors had opened, all three boarded. Koy punched the button for the seventh floor, and the other man reached over and punched eight. As the elevator climbed, all three stared straight ahead.
Koy got off at seven, and the couple one floor higher. Quickly they found the fire stairs, and descended one flight, opening the door carefully and listening for footsteps. It was Sunday. There were not likely to be many people on this floor, and they were being very, very careful. After waiting about five minutes and hearing nothing, the woman withdrew sunglasses from her handbag, and a white silk scarf
which she tied around her neck. She had been carrying a handbag and a package, and she handed both to the man. Her appearance was now sufficiently altered, she judged, that Koy, if she met him, would not notice her. In any case, it was the best she could do. She was an agent of the Corruption Commission, and she stepped out into the corridor and walked along trying to decide which office Koy might have entered.
AT DUSK Powers and Carol sat on the patio of a restaurant on top of Victoria Peak watching the sun go down over islands set like jewels into the silver surface of the South China Sea. Presently the sea turned black. They watched the lights come on all over Hong Kong.
It had been for Powers a splendid, lazy Sunday spent following Carol around just as, at home, he might have followed Eleanor around. He found he was as totally comfortable in Carol’s presence as in Eleanor’s, as if he had been married to her twenty-three years too. There was no tension between them, sexual or otherwise. In fact, there were moments - even hours at a time - when he accepted her as his wife, in the deepest, most spiritual sense, because there was no other role into which, in his experience, she seemed to fit. He forgot that he had not known her very long, forgot that he exerted no ownership over her, nor she over him, forgot that in truth their relationship was a tenuous one, and as brittle as an icicle or a crystal glass. And he sensed all through the long afternoon that she felt the same as he, as if it was absolutely right that they be together, as if they had always been together, and would always remain together. They did not speak of Carol’s story or Powers’ case and this was not because the subject was a dangerous one, but rather because they were concentrated on each other and on discovering all the wonders that this day might have to offer them.
From the peak they watched the night deepen. As individual points of light began to glow like stars on the ships and boats in the harbor, it was impossible for Powers to believe Carol’s declaration that she was not in love with him anymore. It was equally impossible for him to believe that he was not in love with her either. Nor could he imagine a time when she would not be part of his life.
