World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399)

by Mason, Richard

  I could not say anything for a minute. I just squeezed her hand and said, “Suzie, my sweet.”

  “‘My sweet.’” She giggled.

  “Suzie, the only reason I looked proud was because I really was proud of you. In fact, I think that’s why I couldn’t tell a lie about you. I was so proud of you as you were, that I couldn’t pretend you were anything else.”

  “Ben was not proud of me. He was ashamed. Once we went out to a restaurant, and he was so scared and ashamed that his face got wet with fright, and he kept dropping things, and saying, ‘Suzie, I think that’s somebody I know! Suzie, you better hide! Suzie, what shall I do! Suzie, you think they’ll know you’re a bad girl?’”

  “I know, Suzie, but it was different for Ben. He was in business here and he’d got a wife, so he had to worry about things that I don’t.”

  “But he never felt proud, not even alone with me. He never felt love, happiness, anything very much. Oh, I got so bored with that man! He never had anything to talk about!” I remembered Ben’s identical complaint and burst out laughing. She gave me a puzzled look. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, I just remembered something Ben said. And that reminds me, Suzie—you’ve heard of Winston Churchill, haven’t you?”

  “Say that again.”

  “Winston Churchill.”

  “Where’s that? America?”

  “Suzie, really! It isn’t a place, it’s a person.”

  “I never heard that name.”

  I remembered that English names were often pronounced so differently in Chinese that you could not recognize them, for the pronunciation depended on whatever written characters were chosen to represent them; and this choice was made arbitrarily, with aptness of meaning often counting for more than phonetic resemblance. So I repeated “Winston Churchill” with random variations of pronunciation and tone.

  Suddenly light dawned on Suzie’s face.

  “You don’t mean ————?” She said something that sounded like “One-shoe Chee-chee,” but with inflections running up and down the whole gamut of the Chinese scale.

  I said, “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  She looked at me as if I must be very stupid. “Then why didn’t you say so? Why did you give him that funny name?”

  “Well, anyhow, who is he?”

  “One-shoe Chee-chee? He is England’s Number One Top Man—only he is finished now. He always smokes a big fat cigar. And he is a big fat man with a big white face. Oh, yes, I told Gwenny once, when we saw him at the cinema, ‘That One-shoe Chee-chee looks just like my baby!’”

  I laughed and put an arm round her and kissed her, and said, “Bless you, Suzie! I wish Ben could have heard that!” She snuggled against me. We were silent for a minute. And then she said:

  “Robert? You know what Ben used to say?”

  “What was that?”

  “He used to say, ‘Suzie, you aren’t in love with me. You’re in love with Robert. You must be crazy about Robert, the way you talk about him.’”

  “Yes, he told me that. But I’m afraid it isn’t true.”

  “Yes—true.”

  “Suzie, here’s the ferry. If we don’t look out we’ll be whipped off to the depot.”

  We caught the last Wanchai ferry. The illuminated signs along the Hong Kong water front had nearly all gone out, but there was a cruise ship in the Kowloon wharf strung with colored lights from stem to stern, and the name of the ship glowed on the funnel in green neon script. We sat a little apart, keeping our clasped hands out of sight on the seat between us, because Suzie said that the Chinese considered it very ill-mannered to show affection in public. We slid alongside the Wanchai pier and I followed Suzie down the gangplank and out through the turnstile. She paused on the way for me to catch her up. Her hair was invisible in the darkness and I could only see her white face and white dress and white shoes.

  I took her hands and said, “Suzie, will you come back to my room?”

  She turned her white face up to me. She said, “You mean to sleep? You want me to sleep with you?”

  “Yes, that’s what I meant. I’ve wanted you so much all evening. I was rather ashamed of myself earlier, because it was so soon after Ben. But we’ve been so close tonight that nothing else matters, and I don’t feel ashamed any more. So will you come?”

  She laid her forehead against me so that the top of her head was under my chin. She said, “I want to come,” but uncertainly, as if only in order not to disappoint me.

  “What’s the matter, Suzie? Is it Ben?”

  “No, not Ben. It’s so silly, I don’t want to say.”

  “Tell me, Suzie.”

  “All right.” She paused. “Say I had been an ordinary girl you had taken out this evening—an ordinary English girl. And say you liked her and wanted her to come back and sleep. You think she would have come?”

  “I don’t know. No, I expect she’d have refused.”

  She nodded her head against me. “I know it’s silly. But I want to be like an ordinary girl for you. I want to refuse.”

  I laughed, “Suzie, you’re adorable.”

  “I knew you would laugh.”

  “I’m not really laughing—not like that.”

  “I will accept tomorrow. I only want to refuse once, so that I can remember I did it. You understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I am sorry I must refuse, Robert,” she said formally. “It was a lovely evening, and I like you very much. But I am a good girl, you know. I am still a virgin. And so I am sorry, I can’t sleep with you.”

  “I’m terribly disappointed, Suzie. You’re sure I couldn’t persuade you?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “You wouldn’t like to come up just to look at my pictures? That is, if I promise to behave—well, to try and behave myself.”

  “No, Robert, I like you too much. I am scared of myself. I must go home.”

  “I suppose I can see you home?”

  “Yes, you can take me home. You can take me just to the door.”

  IV

  And so it was not that night but the next that we walked together along the water front to the Nam Kok to become lovers. We had been to the cinema, and afterwards had walked back along Hennessy Road under the arcades, past the crowded cafes and electric-lit shops, and down Lincoln Street with the hissing of pressure lamps in the food stalls and the men squatting like chimpanzees along the benches noisily sucking at soup, and along the water front past the workshops and the mah-jongg rooms and the naval tailors and “WELCOME TO ALL MEMBERS OF H.M.S. Athene,” and through the shadows at the edge of the quay; and then I had stopped, my heart in my mouth, to watch a drunken man tottering up the gangplank of a junk, sprawling headlong on the narrow plank but somehow not falling in, then picking himself up and lurching onward, like the circus clown on the tightrope when he pretends to miss his footing to scare you and saves himself by a hairsbreadth. I watched until he had gained the deck and sprawled out of sight into safety, then turned away to rejoin Suzie, but stopped as I caught sight of her—and stood rooted.

  For she had paused to wait for me a few yards along the quay in a pool of pale livid light from an electric street lamp—a light that had the same mysterious quality as the shaft of light that thrusts like some heavenly illumination through a gap in a thundercloud, and that, shining on her face and hands and her legs below the skirt of her cheongsam, invested her with a complete unreality; and the sight of her provoked in my mind some shadow of a memory, like a flitting bird that for a moment or two I could not catch to identify. Then all at once I trapped it: it was the memory of a picture from my childhood—a rather sickly colored plate in the illustrated Bible that I had been given when I first went to school, showing a miracle performed in a street of Jerusalem. In the foreground was th
e shoulder and lifted hand of Jesus, and beyond him a white wall with a barred window, with two ragged lepers squatting at its foot, their bodies disfigured and eaten away by disease, and in front of them a third begger who a moment ago had been like them, but who now stood straight and whole—and illumined by this same livid, unearthly light in which Suzie stood under the street lamp.

  And I was momentarily seized by the fantastic notion that another miracle had occurred; that Suzie, who had wanted to love as a virgin, had had her innocence restored, that she now stood there in perfect purity, miraculously cleansed of her uncle’s rape and the contamination of her trade as the leper had been cleansed of disease. For her face was luminous, it shone with a virginal beauty; and she seemed to wear that same expression that I remembered on the face of the beggar, an expression partly of humility, partly of wonderment.

  And I was so moved with wonderment myself that for a while I could only stare. She did not move, but watched me as if she understood.

  And then I went to her and held her, and began to kiss the white upturned virginal face, and she accepted the kisses without returning them, holding her face still and smiling a little—until a sudden loud resonant burping from the ferry’s hooter made us both glance over toward the pier, and reality returned, and I knew that there had been no miracle, no physical restoration, no super-natural cleaning of the slate.

  Yet as we continued along the quay, out of the lamplight and into the shadows again, I was still aware of some luminous quality about her, some radiation. And then, as if her own thoughts had been following some similar train to mine, though I had not once spoken since I had turned to see her under the lamp, she said:

  “Robert, you know something? I have been pretending all day that you are my first man. I know it is not true—but I feel it is true.” And she added with a shy little laugh, “And I feel scared. Isn’t it funny? As if it was the first time, and I didn’t know what to do.”

  I said, “I feel rather scared, too.”

  “I am very scared.”

  And I thought: there has been a miracle after all. Not a miracle in her body to make her intact again, but a miracle in her heart. Because love is a miracle: a miracle that rubs out the past, cleanses the heart, fills it with a virginal mystery and wonderment. It is Suzie’s own miracle, the miracle of belief. And because she wants me to be her first man, I am the first, and for me, too, the past is nothing.

  We crossed the road towards the Nam Kok. We walked a little apart. For now that we were soon to become lovers our old sense of familiarity had gone: we seemed almost strangers to each other, as familiar houses will seem strange when approached by new paths. We entered the hall, and I saw thankfully that it was empty: our mood was so delicately balanced that I was scared of it being upset, and as we stood waiting for the lift I prayed that no sailors or girls would come out of the bar, and that we should get upstairs without meeting any dull-eyed love-emptied couples coming out of rooms—without any reminders of Suzie’s past. I only wished now that I had thought of taking her to another hotel, where we would have avoided all such risks.

  The lift came down, the gate opened—it was empty except for the liftman. I breathed a sigh of relief and followed Suzie inside.

  And then to my anguish, as we clanked past the first floor, we heard the sound of raised angry voices. The noise grew louder and more jarring as we rumbled upward—until the gate opened on the third floor and we were hit by the full force of it, and stepped out into the midst of the most violent and impassioned scene that I had ever witnessed at the Nam Kok.

  The row involved, of all people, Wednesday Lulu, who was struggling to free herself from the grasp of the bar manager and two other girls, who were only just succeeding with their combined efforts in keeping her pinioned. Her face was ugly with rage as she screamed abuse at a sailor. The sailor, who was also purple-faced with rage and half drunk, was trying to shout her down with a methodical repetition of that single four-letter word which means simply love-making, and yet which for some reason is commonly used for the most violent expression of insult or contempt.

  The corridor was blocked by girls and sailors who had emerged from their rooms to watch in various states of undress. It was impossible to get past to my room, and we stood outside the lift gazing at the scene in dismay. I had never before seen Wednesday Lulu anything but quiet and self-controlled, nor heard her speak other than gently. And now, as her rage rendered her almost inarticulate, she resorted to that same four-letter word as the sailor, hurling it back at him with the same methodical repetition.

  The manager was also shouting in his effort to make peace, but his voice was drowned by the other two. The four-letter word flew senselessly between them, slashed harder each time, like a tennis ball between two demented, epileptic players.

  The sailor began to move away, still shouting the word. Just then Wednesday Lulu broke free and threw herself at him. He staggered under her unexpected assault: she battered wildly at his face with her hands. The manager and girls and a couple of matelots grabbed at her, ripping her cheongsam. They dragged her off. The sailor spat and brushed himself disdainfully. Little Alice, who was watching from the doorway closest to the lift, suddenly broke into giggles. She pulled at the hand of her matelot, a small crook-boned youth with darkly tanned chest, saying, “Hey, come on, Jackie, what’s so interesting?” She pulled him back into the room. The matelot began to close the door, but noticed Suzie and stuck out his grinning face again.

  “Hey, Suzie!”

  Suzie turned and looked towards him, her face expressionless.

  “Jack,” he grinned. “You remember me—Jack. Jackie Boy. Athene, last June. Well, be seeing you, eh?”

  He closed the door. Suzie turned her expressionless face back to the scene in the corridor. The sailor was moving off again. He stopped and hurled his parting shot over his shoulder, to the effect that so far as he was concerned Wednesday Lulu, the manager, the whole mucking lot of them, could go and make love to themselves in four letters. He went off down the stairs.

  The spectators began to disperse. The manager and Wednesday Lulu and a few others stood in a group in the corridor holding a post-mortem, angry and red-faced and shouting. We pushed past. I followed unhappily behind Suzie, feeling jarred and soiled, and wondering if we should ever recapture our mood.

  But I had no sooner closed the door of my room, muffling the voices in the corridor, and turned to see Suzie standing there in the middle of the room, white-faced and half shy as though she had never been in the room before, than I knew that we should quite easily do so, and that the scene outside had not been the disaster I had feared; for there was still that luminous quality, that wonderment about her, that meant that the miracle had withstood the assault: that it had survived the ugly rage-distorted face of Wednesday Lulu, the half-dressed sailors, the four-letter word, the encounter with Jack from the Athene last June: that her feelings were still intact.

  I rang the bell and the No. 2 floor boy brought tea. We took our glasses out onto the balcony and leaned on the balustrade. Across the harbor lights glowed in the windows of the Peninsula, and hung in garlands on the cruise ship. The neon name on the funnel was a smudge of green.

  “That ship is still there,” Suzie said.

  “Yes, I think it goes tomorrow.”

  She said, “I am still scared.”

  “So am I. But we’ll be all right, won’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go to bed, Suzie.”

  She did not move, and presently I went inside and pottered for a while and then got into bed myself. Suzie was still at the balustrade. She came in without looking at me and stood at the dressing table, idly touching my hairbrush, my books, the new ash tray with which Ah Tong had replaced the one she had broken yesterday. She picked up the brush and pensively brushed her hair, looking at herself in the mirror. Then she put do
wn the brush and began to undo the hooks and eyes of her collar; and after she had freed the collar, she felt for the zip-fastener under her armpit. She drew down the zip a short way and then stopped.

  “Robert, please put off the light.”

  I laughed. “You aren’t shy about undressing?”

  “Yes, shy—with you.”

  I turned off the switch over the bed. I could see Suzie’s silhouette against the sky in the open balcony door—the sky over the mainland, the sky of China.

  She stepped out of her cheongsam. Her hair fell forward across her face as she leaned to remove her stockings. She came and slipped into bed beside me. Her body was cool and unknown, and nobody had touched it before, because it had been cleansed by a miracle and remembered no touch. And I thought: this is the moment of beginning, and it is the loveliest moment of all. And then the two imperfect halves had come together again to make their whole.

  And then a strange thing happened; for at the moment of perfect unity, the moment at which there is no self-consciousness and no division of joy, Suzie burst into great sobs, so violent and cataclysmic that it was as though she was being shaken by some force outside herself; and I was half afraid, for her body seemed too tiny and fragile to be able to bear it.

  And then the sobs had passed, and we had fallen apart into our halves again, and she was lying alone and abandoned and gently crying.

  Later she stirred and felt for my hand. She said, “Robert, that was funny, I never cried like that before.”

  “It was rather wonderful.”

  “But of course, I forgot—I never had a man before, did I? You are my first man.”

  “Yes, no wonder you cried.”

  “I was all right for a virgin, wasn’t I?”

  “You were marvelous for a virgin.”

  “The best virgin you ever had?”

  “I never had a virgin before. I never had any girl before.”

  “I’m the first girl you ever had?”