World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399)

by Mason, Richard

  “How much you were hurting me. I’ve cried myself to sleep every night.”

  “I’m sorry, Rodney.”

  He kept his face in his hands. “All right,” he said. “You win. You’re the only friends I’ve got and I need your friendship. So I’ve got to take it on your terms.” He lifted his face and stood up, feet together, and extended his hand with military formality. “All right, let’s shake on it, Bob.” We shook hands solemnly, then he shook hands with Suzie. “I wish you both luck. I hope you’ll both be very, very happy.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said awkwardly.

  “And now thank God that’s over.” He shook his head as if he was coming round from a nasty dream, scratching his bristly crew-cut scalp with both hands. Then he looked up at Suzie with a coaxing grin, like a little boy who has been naughty but knows he can win everybody round again with a little charm. “Now, supposing a fellow wanted a cup of tea—how would he set about getting round you?”

  Suzie glanced at me, then went inside for another glass. Rodney sat down again, puckered his brow, and leaned across the table towards me. “Look, Bob, there’s something I want to ask you,” he said, with the earnest humility of a student addressing a learned professor. “Now, don’t get angry with me—remember I’m just a stupid hysterical American. But I confess it’s got me beat. All right, now to start—how far would you say it is from here to the China border?”

  “I suppose about thirty miles,” I said.

  “About thirty miles. O.K. Right. And what’s the population of Red China?”

  “Say four hundred million.”

  “Say four hundred million. O.K. Right. So that makes four hundred million Reds thirty miles away across the border—as against a few thousand of you British sitting here in Hong Kong. And yet to judge by that race track this afternoon, there’s not a goddam one of you turning a hair. Well now, Bob, what I want to know is this. Just how the hell is it done? And are you crazy—or am I?”

  He was still there after an hour. Suzie had retired into the room and was sighing heavily, banging down glasses, and throwing me challenging looks that said, “If you were half a man, you’d throw him out!”

  Finally I rose and began to pace the balcony impatiently. Rodney ignored the hint, and also the mounting crescendo of angry noises from Suzie within, and continued to talk and ask me absurd questions, as though defying me to reject his olive branch and again offend him.

  I gave him ten more minutes to leave of his own accord. And when the ten minutes were up and he had still not moved I told him bluntly that I wanted to work and must throw him out.

  The glazed, hostile look returned to his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Bob, I was enjoying our discussion. And I thought that maybe you’d want to show me that my friendship meant something to you. But evidently I was mistaken.” And without looking at either of us, he marched from the room.

  I quietly bolted the door behind him. Later Suzie went out for an hour to see her baby, and after she came back we had dinner sent up from the restaurant round the corner. We were in bed about ten.

  Twenty minutes later there was a knock on the door.

  I gripped Suzie tightly. We closed our eyes, tensed, trying to fortify ourselves against the interruption and keep our mood intact. I knew that Rodney could see the light through the ventilator but there was nothing to be done.

  “I’ve brought you a bottle of Scotch,” Rodney said. “I thought it might come in handy.”

  Pause. We lay in agony.

  “I’ll just hand it over—I won’t stay,” Rodney said.

  Please go away, we silently begged him. Please, please go away. But we could hear him standing there outside, his breathing growing heavier, more emotional, more hating.

  “All right, if that’s the way you want it,” he said. “And this time let’s make it final.”

  He went away. We heard his door close. We were still held by the lingering tension. We did not speak for a long time.

  II

  I did not go out for the next two days because I did not want to break the spell of enchantment, and Suzie only went out for odd hours to see her baby. In the mornings she brought the baby back to the room, and we spread the blanket for it on the balcony. It was beginning to walk, and we crouched on either side and let it stagger between us, waving its arms and dribbling and sometimes sprawling on its tummy. It choked with delight as Suzie grabbed it and tickled its ribs.

  “Hey, you got to learn to walk properly if you want to be a film star! Yes, you got to grow up big, strong, good-looking, like Gary Cooper! And talk with a deep voice like my boy friend, and tell your girl friend, ‘Hello, darling’—boom-boom, like that!”

  At twelve o’clock she took the baby downstairs and handed it over to the amah waiting below on the quay. And then the coolie came with our lunch on his carrying-pole, and Ah Tong brought the bottle of rice wine which we had given him to warm.

  The second morning Ah Tong stayed for five or ten minutes talking to Suzie in his native Cantonese, which by now Suzie herself spoke about as well as English; and after he had gone I asked her what they had been saying.

  At first she was evasive; but when I pressed her, she told me that Ah Tong had been curious to know why, although we had been friends so long, we had only just become lovers.

  “And what did you tell him?” I asked.

  “I told him the truth. I told him I wanted to go to bed, only you said, ‘No, not while you go with sailors.’”

  I was silent. This came too near to breaking the spell. What were we going to do? I had tried to give Suzie money but she had refused it; and when I had slipped some notes into her purse, they had turned up later in one of my pockets. I knew that she must be spending her own savings; dipping into the tin which she kept hidden under the floor boards of her room. This tin contained about three thousand dollars—money carefully husbanded for her child’s education, to keep him from growing up illiterate like herself. She even had dreams of saving enough money eventually to send him to the University of Hong Kong. She liked to add something to the tin every week. And it upset me to think that now on my account she was taking money out.

  Then Ah Tong returned with a fresh pot of tea, providing a welcome distraction. I put the awkward problem out of my mind, and abandoned myself once more to the spell. There was only Suzie and myself and this room and nothing outside existed. And I remained in this state of illusory bliss for the rest of the day.

  The next morning we sat in bed drinking tea until nearly eleven, and then Suzie got up and dressed.

  “Suzie, you’ll bring your baby again this morning, won’t you?” I said.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Not today.”

  I watched her in puzzlement as she finished her dressing. She went to the door and paused. “All right, I come back tonight.”

  “Tonight? Suzie, what on earth are you talking about?”

  “Holiday finish.” She held my eyes with that level gaze. “Now I go back to work.”

  “Suzie, don’t be absurd! Come here and sit down. We’ve got to talk.”

  “No good talking.”

  She opened the door. I jumped up and slammed it shut.

  “Suzie, you’re not just going like that. We’ll think of something. We’ll borrow some money from somewhere. We could borrow from Ben.”

  She shook her head again. “No. We borrow money, and maybe our holiday will last one more week—then finish again, just like today.”

  “It’d give us time to think. We might find you a job.”

  “Yes, one hundred dollars a month.”

  “You could get more than that.”

  “No. I can’t read, can’t write. One hundred dollars.”

  “I could make it up to
three hundred. You could just manage.”

  “Yes—manage. And watch my baby grow up a coolie boy. Watch him carry lunch for people. Get hard shoulder from carry-pole.”

  “Suzie, we must at least think it over—think what’s best to do.”

  “No, I think too much already. I think all day, all night, about what to do. But there is nothing to do.” She opened the door again. “All right, I go now. I come back at ten o’clock. Or maybe eleven, it depends.” And the door closed behind her.

  I lay for a long time on the bed. Then I could not stand being alone in the room any longer, and I went out and walked about the streets until it was time for lunch. I did not want any lunch but it was something to do. I went into a cafe and ordered a dish of fried meat dumplings for a dollar. There were a dozen dumplings on the plate but I could only eat two. I sat for an hour drinking tea. I paid the bill and went out again into Hennessy Road. I did not know what to do with myself. I was afraid to go back to the Nam Kok in case I ran into Suzie with a sailor. Then I saw a cinema and went in and bought a ticket. I thought the film might distract me. It was an American film and had just begun. Soon the hero caught his girl kissing another man and went nearly berserk. My God, I thought, if that’s what a bit of kissing does to you, how would you feel if you knew your girl was upstairs with a sailor? Then there was a newsreel, with a naval review at Portsmouth and the sailors lined up with beautiful precision on the deck of a cruiser, and I thought: I wonder how many of you have been out East. I wonder how many of you have been to the Nam Kok. I wonder how many have been with Suzie. And then there was a Donald Duck, and I thought: well, ducks are promiscuous. I suppose they don’t mind their girls waddling off for short-times.

  After the cinema I went back to the Nam Kok. The lift was waiting and I went up without meeting anybody and closed my door with relief.

  Later business began to warm up and I could hear the lift gate clanking every few minutes and couples coming down the corridors and going into rooms and the doors shutting. Sometimes I could still hear them after the door was shut. I knew that Suzie would not come to my floor if she could help it. But every time I heard a girl’s voice it sounded like Suzie’s, and finally I could not stand it any more and went out to another cinema. I came back at half-past nine and sat out on the balcony. But the balcony was worse than the room for noises, because the doors onto the neighboring balconies were all open, so I moved back inside. A few minutes later there was a tap on the door and Suzie came in.

  She came in naturally, as if nothing had happened, like any ordinary girl returning from work and feeling glad to get home. Only I knew that she was only acting to try and make me believe it was like that, and that inside she was tensed up, waiting to know how I felt.

  “I finished early tonight,” she said. “That bar was too noisy. I got tired.”

  I did not say anything. She took off her brocade jacket and slipped it on a hanger. She hooked the hanger over the rail in the wardrobe, on the left side where she always hung her clothes. She closed the wardrobe door, avoiding my eyes. She pretended to examine her hand.

  “I got a splinter this morning, only I can’t find it. Can you see a splinter?” She held her hand out to me.

  I said, “Suzie, it’s no good.”

  She withdrew her hand and lifted her face, and looked at me with her eyes steady.

  “You don’t want me?” she said.

  “Of course I want you, Suzie. But not like this. Can’t you understand?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. You loved me yesterday, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “And I am just the same person as yesterday. I went away to do my job, and now I come back, and nothing has changed. I am just the same person.”

  “I still can’t bear it, Suzie.”

  “All right—we finish.”

  She turned and went back to the wardrobe. She pulled open the door and removed her jacket. The hanger swung emptily on the rail. She put on the jacket without looking at me. She closed the wardrobe again and went to the door.

  “Suzie!”

  “Yes?”

  We stood looking at each other. “Suzie, this is awful.”

  She turned away and opened the door, then hesitated and looked at me again.

  “I love you very much, you know, Robert. I love you as much as my baby—maybe more. Only you’re a big grown-up man, and my baby is just small. My baby needs me. So I must think of my baby first. You understand?”

  “Yes, Suzie.”

  “All right; I go now.”

  She went out and closed the door. I listened to her steps fading down the corridor. A sailor raised his voice, arguing truculently with Ah Tong. “Sonofabitch, you . . .” The clank of the lift gates. A sudden muffled outbreak of giggles—Little Alice. Nobody else giggled quite like Little Alice. I went out onto the balcony. The wicker chair creaked as I sat down. The giggles suddenly stopped. A door slammed. A merchant ship slid silently out of the harbor, trailing pale ghostly smoke like ectoplasm under the great cool quicksilver disk of the moon.

  The next day I did not see Suzie. I stayed in my room all day waiting for her knock but she did not come. I did not go down to the bar. I was afraid to see her with the sailors.

  The next day was the same. And the next. But on the following day I could bear it no longer and made up my mind to go and find her. I went to the door. Just then there was a knock and Ah Tong came in with a fresh teapot. He looked uneasy and avoided my eyes. I asked him what was the matter.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Then why daren’t you look at me, Ah Tong?”

  He turned his eyes to me reluctantly. “You know Mr. Tessler has left, sir?”

  “Rodney—left?”

  “Yes, this morning, sir.”

  I said, “Go on, Ah Tong.”

  He dropped his eyes.

  “He has taken your girl friend, sir. They have gone to Bangkok.”

  Chapter Seven

  Actually Ah Tong was mistaken because, although Rodney intended to take Suzie to Bangkok, they had not yet left the Colony. I heard this later from Gwenny, who had seen them just before their departure from the Nam Kok. It seemed that Suzie, not trusting Rodney, and foreseeing the possibility of finding herself abandoned in a strange country, had prudently insisted on a trial period with him first; and so they had gone to stay at a small hotel in the New Territories, about twelve miles outside Kowloon. This hotel was on an attractive part of the mainland coast, and was popular with Europeans and Chinese alike, especially with honeymoon and weekending couples. Suzie had taken along the baby and amah, and had installed them in a room in a fishing village near by.

  In a way it was worse that they were still in the neighborhood, and I think I would have preferred it if they had gone right away. Every night I dreamed of Suzie. I dreamed that she had come back, and that I stood working at my easel while she sat cross-legged on the bed with mischievously twinkling eyes. And one night I dreamed that we were at the races again, holding hands in the crowd, and that Rodney appeared ahead of us—a huge lean grotesque Rodney like some half-starved bird of prey—and that I clung to Suzie in terror of him taking her away; but he went past in the crowd and the terror left me, and I was happy again with Suzie still at my side—until I awoke to find it was morning and it had all been a dream. I felt out across the bed to make sure. Yes, empty—gone. I thought of the new day stretching bleakly ahead without her, and the familiar ache came back into my heart; and I closed my eyes and tried to sleep again, to make the day shorter and anesthetize the ache for another hour.

  And then when sleep would no longer come I would feed myself on the hope of her dropping in—for since she was only a few miles from Kowloon, surely she would be coming into town for shopping or a film? And in that case wasn’t she certain
to pay me a visit? And each day, finding half a dozen plausible reasons why she should have chosen this particular day to come into town, I would listen for her arrival, stiffening with tension at every clank of the lift gate, and again and again seeming to recognize her approaching steps. And when once the steps came on right up to my door and were followed by a knock, my heart flew into my mouth, and I dashed across the room in wild grinning excitement, knocking a glass to the floor where it exploded in smithereens, and flung open the door—only to be confronted by Ah Tong, gaping as though he thought I must have gone off my head.

  And then one morning I woke up possessed by a new mood—a mood of revulsion for the Nam Kok, and for everybody and everything concerned with it. It was a mood that lasted a long time.

  Hitherto I had looked upon the Nam Kok through romantic eyes. I had felt a real affection for it, and above all for the girls; for though it was true that their occupation, the repeated and meaningless offering of their bodies for sexual intercourse with strangers, was essentially degrading, I had never ceased to marvel at how stubbornly they had resisted that degradation; at how they had retained their good manners, their sensitivity, their pride; at how from the supposedly barren soil of commercial sex there could spring such flowers of kindness, tenderness, generosity, love. Nor was it only in Suzie that I had found innocence of heart.

  And I had felt no less tolerantly disposed toward the sailors—I had seen their crude sensual search as being not so much for sexual gratification as an end in itself, but as a means to another end: a respite from loneliness. And I had taken no offense at their drunkenness, their carnality; for one had in one’s own heart the seeds of all men’s behavior, and if one’s life had been different—if different circumstances had fertilized those seeds, if they had been blown upon by different winds, known a different and less kindly sun—it might easily have been that one set of seeds would have grown instead of another, that one would have been as crude and as drunk as the worst of them. I had once seen a drunken lout nearly throttle a girl who had refused to go upstairs with him, and had thought, “It could have been me,” and so been able to feel pity. Afterward the girl had pleaded with the bar manager not to hand the man over to the naval police, saying, “He’s just done thirty days in the cells, and we don’t want him sent back.” And I had been touched to the depths; because it was not only the sailor that she had saved from going back to the cells. It was also me.