Little Reunions

by Eileen Chang

  Julie was shocked her father had become so impoverished. In the past, Judy frequently spoke in hushed tones: “His opium expenditure is exorbitant.” Inflation soared and the price of opium soared ever higher. The money they spent on the drug grew to an astronomical sum, as both of them smoked. But later they made good on their pledge to abstain.

  “Your second uncle is loaded,” Rachel intoned incessantly.

  But the last time Rachel returned to Shanghai she had absolutely no contact with Ned before the divorce, though she did have two huge fights with him over domestic expenses. Yü-heng had sent her reports while she lived overseas, but he was merely a servant, not a close confidant.

  Julie recalled the look of dread on the maidservants’ faces when they talked about her father and his paramour Euphoria losing at the tables for days in a row on their gambling sprees.

  Julie’s father never actually admitted that he didn’t have any money. He never would. That would be the same thing as someone else saying, “I’m really quite uneducated” or “I lack morals.” Who would give credence to that?

  He never told Julie about having insufficient funds for her overseas schooling, preferring instead to thrash her and lock her up. If he had said anything about his finances, people would’ve gossiped—Jade Flower especially could never know. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been such an affectionate couple, taking turns cajoling each other.

  A young female cousin from the Pien clan posted Julie a wedding invitation. Julie attended the ceremony but did not want to be present at the dinner reception. In the wedding hall on her way out she bumped into Nancy.

  “Julie,” Nancy gushed, “the beads are so pretty.”

  “A gift from Second Aunt,” replied Julie, removing the purple imitation-agate bead necklace as she spoke, “which I now present to my auntie Nancy.” Julie also felt in debt to Nancy and her husband, though Dr. Yang’s daily visits to treat her over the course of two months were principally because he was doing Rachel a favor. The necklace wasn’t worth much but was nonetheless a rarity.

  “No, no, no,” Nancy protested, “Rachel gave it to you. How could you think of giving it away?”

  “Second Aunt would be thrilled to know I passed it on to Auntie Nancy.”

  After further exhortations, Nancy finally accepted the gift. Julian wasn’t in Shanghai at the time and didn’t attend the wedding. He talked about the newlywed cousin on his next visit. The lowly ranked cousin was never coddled nor doted upon. Self-defensive from a young age, she was rather shrewish. Only Rachel liked her, and gave her the sobriquet Roundy.

  “That Roundy is so ferocious,” chuckled Julian. “Even as a child she was really fierce when we roller-skated around the alleyways.”

  Julie recalled the time when she and her brother lived in the same alleyway as Uncle Yün-chih. The older female cousins loved to tease the handsome little boy: “Roundy is betrothed to our little cousin Julian. You didn’t know?” They also liked to say, “Aunt Rachel adores Roundy. Roundy’s going to be her daughter-in-law.” As soon as they saw Julian they’d shout: “Roundy, your husband is here!” That was when Roundy was just seven or eight years old, though she was so small she looked no more than five or six. No matter what was going through her head she always put on a fierce expression of permanent condescension. Julian was three or four years older than Roundy, and Julie could see that he enjoyed listening to the mocking remarks of their cousins. From the tone of his voice it was now clear to Julie that Roundy was his first love, with all his fond memories of skating through the alleyways. Julie didn’t know how to skate. The male cousins in the Pien clan were always calling on Julian to join them to play outside. Ned referred to them as the “alleyway surveillance commissioners.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Julie asked casually.

  “No,” Julian stammered, “I think it’d be best to find one who has a job.”

  “Of course that would be ideal,” Julie agreed.

  Julian didn’t mention their father seeking refuge with his nephew, probably out of shame.

  Julie first began to apply cosmetics at the age of twenty-eight. It was all because Yen Shan once queried, “You never use makeup?”

  “A bit more here,” he suggested as he sized her up, hesitantly pointing to a small spot on her brow between her eyes.

  She had intended to retain some luster in the depression between her eyes, but now she applied more powder.

  “It’s like covering my face with a quilt,” she gasped gleefully, “it can’t breathe.”

  Yen Shan felt a little embarrassed.

  He set his head upon her thigh while she caressed his face. She didn’t know where the sadness came from but felt as if she were “cupping her hands to hold the water’s reflection of the moon,” the water slowly slipping through her fingers.

  His eyes were impenetrably deep. But then it occurred to her that when you love someone, your lover will always seem deeply mysterious.

  Julie had always been suspicious of handsome men. In her mind beautiful women can maintain their composure much better when facing their admirers because beauty is practically a duty for women and not being beautiful is unnatural. Handsome men, however, don’t maintain their composure as well as women and inevitably all kinds of twisted characteristics manifest themselves. When a handsome man becomes an actor, all the women in the world transmogrify into apparitions before his eyes, ready to ravish the pure flesh of the T’ang dynasty Buddhist pilgrim Hsüan Tsang in their attempts to acquire immortality.

  But to Julie, Yen Shan was like her first love, the one she had missed out on. Circumstances had changed by the time they finally met, making her feel even more melancholy and sentimental. She wished this moment would last forever. That too was exactly what he longed for, at least at the beginning.

  Yen Shan had a gloomy side. His family was in financial straits because his father had died when Yen Shan was small. Yen Shan had the mind-set of a “salary man” through and through. In his profession, if you didn’t know how to get along with people it didn’t matter if you were the best actor in the universe. But he always felt insecure. He reached the apex of his career just over the age of thirty, and yet wasn’t as remotely revered as a certain actor of Peking-style spoken drama who came from Chungking. His first attempt at directing was deemed a failure. Though at least One Night Stand didn’t lose money—a fact Julie attributed to the deceptive name of the movie.

  His father was a small-time businessman. “People said he had ‘a commanding presence,’” Yen Shan crowed.

  A petty merchant with an air of authority is how Julie envisaged his father. With an appearance a bit like Yen Shan—tall and skinny, large piercing eyes, high nose bridge, wearing a long gown and a wool hat.

  “My only memory of my father is of him holding me as we sat in a rickshaw,” recalled Yen Shan. “It was windy, and he wrapped my scarf around my face to protect me. ‘Close your mouth tight! Close your mouth tight!’ he kept shouting.”

  Yen Shan lived with his elder brother and sister-in-law. There were many people in the family who all depended on his earnings.

  His married elder sisters frequently visited. Julie had been to his family home only once. A vintage black-lacquered, keyhole-shaped clock hung on the wall in the living room. Yen Shan told her it was an electric clock. Apparently his second-older brother worked in the electric-clock business.

  Julie couldn’t see the point of wasting electricity on clocks when windup clocks already existed. Staring at the round face of the clock on the wall, she didn’t know what to say.

  Yen Shan sensed it. “Lots of people buy them,” he said, smiling apologetically.

  “Oh,” he said on another occasion with dawning realization, “you mean just the two of us?”

  “Yes,” acknowledged Julie with a smile.

  “We still should live with your third aunt.”

  Chih-yung had also suggested they should one day live with her third aunt. Apparently both of them were
terrified of living alone with her. She couldn’t help smiling at this thought.

  Julie never believed Chih-yung when he spoke of “our future,” and she just couldn’t imagine what the “love that endures to the end of time” that he wrote about in his letters would be like. She always felt a slight suffocating sensation when she tried, with much difficulty, to visualize what sort of house they would live in, and couldn’t get very far with this line of thinking. Instead, when thinking of Yen Shan, she figured, “I must find a small room for myself, so it could be like going to work every day. I won’t tell anyone the address, except Yen Shan, if he can be relied upon not to drop by. At night I’d return home, and then it wouldn’t matter if anyone visits.”

  Occasionally, after they went out in the evening, Yen Shan would accompany her home but refused to go inside for fear of Third Aunt witnessing his middle-of-the-night visitation. They sat in the staircase instead. She wore a dark green, puff-sleeve coat made of rustic wool. The narrow-waisted overcoat flared out onto the faux-marble steps. They were like teenagers with nowhere to hide to be alone together.

  “We should be called the ‘Two Innocents,’” Julie said with an exasperated smirk.

  “Yes.” Yen Shan giggled. “‘Two innocent childhood friends’—we should get a seal carved with the inscription: ‘Two Innocents.’”

  Julie smiled but didn’t say anything. She had little time for the refined pursuits of scholars like seal carving. Besides, when would there be occasion to employ such a seal, unless they sent New Year greeting cards they signed together?

  “You are made up entirely of defects,” he mumbled, “save for, perhaps, frugality.”

  She smiled, boasting in her heart, “That’s right, I’m like openwork gauze made entirely of defects.”

  Judy was always very reserved toward Julie and Yen Shan’s relationship. One day, Judy chatted with Yen Shan for a while and then he left. “At least it’s pleasing to the eye watching him sit there,” Judy remarked to Julie.

  Julie smiled but couldn’t think of anything to say. “I fear I’m getting too serious about him,” she finally confessed.

  Judy shook her head slightly. “It’s not at all like the way you were with Shao Chih-yung,” she said in an almost contemptuous tone.

  Julie was shocked but said nothing.

  A Mr. Niu began to pursue Bebe. He was a university graduate from a rich family and around the same age as Bebe. He was short, with a fair-skinned face that resembled a puppy dog. Apart from appearing somewhat clumsy and stupid, there wasn’t much more to say about him. Then there was the Cantonese Ah Leung, also a frequent visitor to Bebe’s home. He was already in his thirties. Julie vaguely heard he worked as a machine repairman, which pretty much disqualified him in her mind. She had met him in Bebe’s home. That day, Bebe directed him to the loose switch on the floor lamp. As she stood next to the light pointing out the problem, in an off-white pullover sweater, the light from the lamp formed a spotlight on her curvaceous breasts, which rose and fell as she spoke. Ah Leung’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets.

  Bebe told Julie that one day Mr. Niu and Ah Leung got into a fight that started upstairs and proceeded all the way down the staircase and out into the street. “I watched from the top of the stairs and laughed so hard I couldn’t stand up straight. What was I supposed to do?”

  “I just don’t understand,” Judy exploded one day, “why you insist on being so secretive all the time!”

  Julie didn’t respond. She knew a relative must have asked Judy, “Does Julie have any suitors?” Yen Shan wasn’t a married man, but because they wanted to keep their romance secret Judy had to reply in the negative.

  They had never actually discussed keeping their relationship a secret, but Julie knew that because of her own infamy—her reputation had already been tarnished for several years and the gossips were hungry for new ammunition—if word leaked out it would be a huge sensation and Yen Shan would certainly suffer. Two of his friends knew about them and probably didn’t approve, but they kept quiet. He had a secretive personality anyway—very few people knew about his past.

  Bebe telephoned. “That Bolero you like so much—I have a friend who has a recording of it. I’ll stop by with him and we can all listen to it.”

  “I don’t have a phonograph player,” said Julie.

  “I know. He’ll bring one.”

  Bebe rang the doorbell and a thin white man carrying a large phonograph player stood behind her. He cautiously followed her in.

  “This is Eugene,” said Bebe. Julie never learned his family name. He was an Australian reporter with hazel hair, very handsome.

  Julie stood next to the phonograph as the tango melody played, staring at the spinning record. When the song finished, Bebe asked, “Do you want to hear it again?”

  Julie hesitated. “All right, let’s hear it again.”

  They played it seventeen times in a row. The whole time Julie stood next to the phonograph player, leaning on the table and smiling.

  “Do you want to hear it again?”

  “No.”

  They chatted for a short while then Bebe said, “We should be going now.”

  From beginning to end Eugene didn’t say a single word. Stone-faced, he lugged the phonograph away.

  Bebe often talked about Eugene and showed Julie a chapter of a novel he was writing about a journalist in early Republican-era Peking who meets the daughter of a warlord—a delicate beauty of fifteen or sixteen who wore a rose-pink short jacket and black silk pants. They had a tryst in the library of the warlord governor.

  “Eugene married Fanny,” Bebe reported to Julie one day. “Fanny is twenty-one. He married her because she is twenty-one.” As she spoke, Bebe smiled, pressing her lips together as if relating a marvelous tale. From her tone of voice it was obvious she was quoting him, meaning he must have told Bebe himself.

  Julie saw Fanny once. She was a Chinese girl with narrow delicate eyes, an angular face, and a rigidly skinny body.

  “At least he found something close to his ideal,” thought Julie. Her family seemed wealthy as the wedding ceremony sounded quite lavish.

  Bebe had seen Yen Shan at Julie’s home several times. She hadn’t heard any rumors about them, but Bebe had her suspicions. “All women who engage in serial intimate relationships,” said Bebe one day, “quickly grow haggard.”

  Julie knew Bebe was deliberately provoking her, trying to trick her into defending herself, so she just chuckled indifferently.

  Julie never told Bebe anything about Yen Shan, and Bebe never asked.

  After Julie exited the cinema with Yen Shan one day, she noticed that he looked displeased. Later, when she peeked into the hand mirror she kept in her purse, she realized it must have been because of how she looked: her makeup had melted and oil seeped through the face powder.

  “I love Ginger Rogers’s insincere gaze,” Yen Shan said, laughing.

  Julie didn’t know why, but she felt as if a needle pricked her when she heard that and couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Before Yen Shan visited, Julie didn’t fetch ice cubes from the refrigerator and rub the ice on her face to tighten her skin, out of fear that Judy would see. Instead, she let the cold-water faucet in the bathtub run hard until the water was icy cold, but still Judy chanced upon her as she held her face close to the cold stream. They had both lived with Rachel and knew everything about the process of a woman past her prime, but Judy was dismayed when she observed Julie splashing cold water on her face.

  It rained for days without end. “Rain. It’s like living by a burbling stream,” Julie wrote in her notebook. “Hope it rains every day so I can believe your absence is due to the rain.”

  Sprawled over a rattan recliner, an endless stream of tears flowed down her face.

  “Julie,” Yen Shan moaned, looking at her with gentle concern, “you crying like that makes me feel terrible.” Yen Shan leaned forward in his seat with his elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped to
gether.

  “No one else will love you the way I do,” she responded.

  “I know.”

  But then she added, tears streaming down her face, “It’s really only because of your handsome face.”

  He walked over to the large, round mirror on the wall, looked at himself somewhat curiously, then combed his hair back with his fingers.

  Two months late again. She thought she was pregnant this time—Why now of all times? Well, I’ll have to tell Yen Shan.

  “There, there,” he said softly with a forced smile, “we’ll just announce… .”

  Julie gazed straight ahead and could see the road forward with him looked dismal; more tears streamed down her face. “To start our life together this way seems rather tragic.”

  “There, there,” he said, in a comforting tone.

  But he introduced her to an obstetrician, a Cantonese woman doctor, who examined her. It turned out Julie wasn’t pregnant, but her cervix had been torn.

  Julie thought it must have dated back to Chih-yung, as it had not hurt so much after him. She was a little startled to hear the news and didn’t ask a single question.

  The tiny, sallow face of the doctor’s taut Cantonese visage dissuaded her from asking anything. Plus, these matters had always been taboo for Julie. She had always associated sex and fertility with the primitive origins of mankind, thus embodying all the mysterious and terrifying qualities of life.

  Yen Shan came the next day for news. Julie had originally intended to say that it was only a false alarm and not mention the torn cervix, but since he knew the doctor and would sooner or later hear it from her, Julie had to tell him. It will certainly make him think of me not only as a fallen woman, a withered flower, but as one who has allowed herself to be ruined and rendered useless, infertile.

  He was expressionless as he listened. Of course he couldn’t show his delight at a lucky escape.

  After the communists took over, Julian lost his job. One day he visited wearing a brand-new suit.