by Paul Theroux
‘It’s painful,’ I said. ‘I find it painful.’
‘You young people.’ He raised his head at me. ‘When you get cancer it goes right through you. You burn up very fast. It’s usually a matter of weeks, not months. Days, sometimes. You just burn.’
‘Please.’
He said, ‘She was very fond of you.’
‘I knew her father. I was the US Consul in Ayer Hitam. What a home town for someone like Mei-lan!’
‘You don’t have to tell me anything. I know about you. She spoke about you a great deal. What are you looking at?’
The waiter had slipped behind Whiting to inquire whether there was anything we wanted.
‘Nothing for me,’ I said.
Whiting exercised his right as a guest of the hotel and ordered a whiskey – it was after three-thirty. He did not speak again until it arrived, and then he merely held the glass, sometimes lifting and inhaling its fumes, but not drinking. It seemed to allow him to hide his glance in an innocent gesture. His eyes seldom left me and they scorched me with aching heat wherever they rested. They were deceptively dangerous, like dull metal that looks the same hot or cold.
‘She greatly enjoyed her time in London.’
‘The old man’s customers were British – always talking about London. It was home for those colonials. Sentiment can be catching. People had so little to be sentimental about in Malaysia. I mean the Chinese. He wanted Mei-lan to come to London.’
‘It wasn’t London – it was you.’
Whiting, a banker, did not have the heavy-faced and chair-bound look of a banker. No paunch, no watch chain, no money-moralizing, nor any apologies that were in reality sneers. He had a lawyer’s alertness showing through his bony face of grief. He had watchful eyes, the pretense of repose, the pounce (‘It wasn’t London –’). Bankers are bullfrogs; lawyers are lizards. And his tongue was quick for a grieving man.
He said, ‘We were in London together when we first got married. It seems like yesterday. It was yesterday. Two years ago. Funny’ – he didn’t smile – ‘she didn’t mention you then.’
‘The old man liked me to keep an eye on her. He was my first friend out there. He worried about her.’
‘You call him the old man,’ Whiting said, and raised his glass and looked at me over its rim. ‘He and I are the same age.’
I said, ‘We did some business with him. We were winding up the Consulate. I needed office equipment. It would have been expensive for me to buy things outright and sell them two years later. He leased everything to me, at a fair rate. He was one of the first in that part of Malaysia to go in for leasing in a big way. He was progressive. So were his children. Very modern-thinking. They were stifled there.’
Whiting pushed at his face with his fingertips as he listened to me.
‘I left my wife for Mei-lan.’ He looked at me through spread fingers. ‘I have grown-up children.’
‘Her father was a bit upset about that. Strife in a Chinese family can be violent. Threats, fights, suicides. It’s all or nothing. The old man was worried.’
‘My eldest son was Mei-lan’s age,’ he said.
‘How did he take it? Some kids never come to terms with their parents’ divorce.’
‘Didn’t bother him.’
‘He’s unusual.’
‘He’s divorced,’ Whiting said. ‘Three years ago. But he loved Mei-lan. Everyone did.’
I said, ‘She was the sort of woman who inspired men to make sacrifices for her. They’d do anything.’
He merely looked at his whiskey and at me. He drew his lips up in a mock smile, like a man with a bad pain hiding his distress, and after I’d said They’d do anything, one of his eyes widened on me.
I said, ‘Her father gave her everything. It made him a little uneasy – he knew he was in danger of spoiling her. I’m proud to say he trusted me. I liked him.’
Whiting gave me his sideways look. I noticed that his gray-white hair was yellowing in places, as it does in certain aging men. It gave his head a strange heated appearance.
He said, ‘Frankly, I found the old man a bit slippery.’
‘He was a businessman.’
‘I don’t mean that. I’m a businessman myself. He seemed sly.’
‘A lot of people respected him for being careful.’
‘A double-entry man. Hong Kong’s full of them. Twisters.’
‘I found him truthful. I knew the whole family.’ As I said this, Whiting raised his head, lifting his chin at me, seeming to reject what I said. I paused, then said, ‘The family must have been very sad about Mei-lan.’
‘Shattered. You see, Mei-lan wasn’t very truthful. All along she had denied that she was seriously ill. She claimed it was hepatitis.’
‘That takes courage.’
‘No.’ His bright eyes challenged me to deny this. ‘She found it easy to lie.’
I said, ‘Perhaps in unimportant matters.’
‘Unimportant? I am talking about her death. But not only that.’ He now sat like a man on a wagon traveling over a bumpy road. He worked his shoulders as he spoke. ‘She told lies because truth bored her. She didn’t know that a good liar needs a good memory. She was always contradicting herself. It could be rather touching sometimes – like my daughter, who used to swear she hadn’t touched the sweets and then would show me her purple tongue. God, I loved her.’
‘You’re saying she was deceitful.’
‘No. She was virtuous. She didn’t really know what the truth was. Lying was just a bad habit with her.’
‘So she was innocent,’ I said. ‘She looked innocent.’
‘She looked like a child,’ he said. ‘She was tiny. She had such a simple clean face. Some Chinese women never grow old. They have skin like silk. It grows finer, more beautiful with the years. Mei-lan was like that. A person ages and dies – the aging is a kind of preparation. But if there is no decline, no aging process – if the person looks ageless and beautiful – they seem immortal.’ He glanced behind me as if a new thought had come into his head. ‘Then they die and it is like the end of the world.’
‘Didn’t you know she was ill?’
‘Having cancer isn’t being ill,’ he said. His head was turned toward me, but his eyes were glazed with memory. ‘This is going to sound horribly naive to you, but I thought she was pregnant. It took my first wife that way. In bed all the time, that sort of ravishing pallor, the tears. I thought she was below par. It made her more beautiful.’
‘She seemed fine when she was here,’ I said. ‘It must have been London.’
‘Perhaps it was your company.’
‘I saw very little of her, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Somehow, she was satisfied.’ He drank half his whiskey in a sudden gulp and breathed hard. He said, ‘She wanted to be well.’
‘Mei-lan wasn’t desperate,’ I said.
‘It’s not desperation I’m talking about – it’s urgency. Do you know anything about death?’
‘A certain amount. My parents were killed in an air crash when I was five. I was old enough to miss them.’
He said, ‘With all respect, I’m talking about a different kind of intimacy with death. I mean, a dying woman will do anything to save herself.’
‘So will a dying man.’
‘For a man, death is a door. Everyone dies ugly, but that ugliness makes it terrible for a woman. You can’t imagine. And there are worse things. A woman will do anything to get well, but she’ll also do anything if she knows she’s not going to get well. What are your restraints if you know you’re doomed?’
‘Mei-lan was a rational person. She was studying law,’ I said. ‘She had sense.’
‘Law was only one distraction. She became obsessed about her appearance. She had beauty treatments. Injections. She did all the hospitals, she was tested again and again. She traveled, she needed old friends, she saw you.’
Whiting still sat solidly across from me with a patient intensity. He was large, his gaze was s
teady, and yet it was not a stare. He glanced from my eyes to my lips when I spoke, and at my hands when I moved them. We were not alone in that little Connaught parlor. It seemed to bother him. Whenever someone entered, Whiting flicked his eyes at them and dropped his voice.
I said, ‘I hadn’t really expected to hear from her.’
‘She liked to startle people, show up without warning, catch them off-guard.’
‘That can be charming,’ I said.
‘It gave her the upper hand. She could get anyone to do anything. I had never met anyone like her. Do you know, I lost most of my friends when I married her. I was glad. I didn’t want them. She was everything. And such greed! I wanted someone who was greedy, who wanted me in a fiery way. That is passion. To me she was a friend, an enemy, a mother, a child.’
I must have looked puzzled.
‘Wife, too,’ he said slowly. ‘I felt like an old man before I met her. After we married, I felt younger – she gave me youth. I had never had a real childhood. Some of us don’t, you know. An English childhood can seem as serious and gray as middle age – all that silence, all those exams, we’re always indoors. Mei-lan set my spirit free. My only regret was that she would outlive me – she would be on her own. I knew she had to be provided for. She gambled, you know.’
‘I wasn’t aware of that.’
‘No?’ He sat straighter. He seemed glad that I didn’t know. I wondered how he got such a close shave – his skin was pink, not a hint of whiskers. It made me think of razors.
‘She’d bet on anything,’ he was saying. ‘On an ant crossing a carpet. Very Chinese, that. I didn’t mind the expense. It gave me something to spend my money on. It made her happy. Past a certain figure it’s impossible to know what to do with your money. I had everything when I had her. I don’t mean it was all good – it was diluted, that was the best of it. She kept my feet on the ground. You look blank.’
‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about.’
He shrugged. He didn’t smile, yet he looked pleased – confident. In the past half-hour he had grown larger but less menacing. He said, ‘When she died, nothing mattered. I came close to death myself then. What was the point in carrying on? I wanted to turn to wood. I spent a week in a chair with my mouth open. I suppose that sounds a bit crazy to you.’
I denied that it did. His eyes never left me and there was watchfulness even in his two hands, poised like crabs on his knees.
‘When I finally got out of the chair, I wrote my letter of resignation. Now I want to find a smaller flat. I don’t want anything more if I can’t have Mei-lan.’
He turned away but glanced back at me quickly, as if he expected to catch my expression changed.
He said, ‘Sometimes I can’t bear to think of her.’
‘That’s only natural.’
‘You don’t understand.’ He flung that sudden gaze on me again. Was he sinking, was he drowning? He said, ‘But I had to trust her. I came here yesterday and realized that I was looking for her. That’s not good. Don’t you agree?’
‘You’ll never find her,’ I said.
I had hesitated, and now he gave me his lizard look of scrutiny.
He said, ‘No, no. That’s not the point. I could find her – I could know her better. But it might be very upsetting.’
He wanted me to agree with him. But I said, ‘People should be allowed to have secrets.’
‘People’s secrets are the most interesting thing about them,’ he said. ‘How could you love anyone who didn’t have a secret?’
I said, ‘How is it possible to go on loving someone after you know the secret?’
He was watching me very closely now. He seemed to want to trap me, lowering his judge’s face on me and exerting pressure with his eyes.
He said, ‘I want to think of her as I knew her – like a little flame, burning, burning, slightly malicious, tempting, loving, doing harmless damage. The coquette is a tormentor in a good cause. I want to think that she would always have been mine.’ His face moved closer to mine. ‘What color was her dress?’
I made a memory-prodding gesture, showing my effort by masking my eyes with my hand. I experienced a slow moment of grief, and it seemed to pinch a bruise onto my soul.
In this darkness, Whiting spoke to me. ‘You don’t remember,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t have liked that. She went to a lot of trouble to buy her London clothes.’
I said, ‘She was here only a few days.’
‘A week,’ he said.
‘I only saw her one day.’
‘A day has twenty-four hours in it,’ he said.
‘We had tea,’ I said. ‘One hour. I didn’t see her dress. She never took her coat off.’
Whiting frowned at me in pleasure, and lapsed into a comfortable silence. He said, ‘In a hurry, that was Mei-lan. Hello, good-bye. What a life. It’s perfect when you think about it. She was a little flame. She –’
At first I thought he was about to cry, but then I saw the flicker of a smile on his mouth. He had not smiled at all.
He said, ‘The chaps at the bank think I’m stupid. “You’re wrecking your career – throwing it all away, everything you worked for.” But they didn’t know Mei-lan. A woman’s secret is the essence of her character, isn’t it? She is what she tries to hide. They didn’t know her.’
His eyes changed in focus, leaving me and peering into a greater distance.
He said, ‘If I thought for a minute that she had betrayed me, I wouldn’t have left the bank. I’d carry on as normal. And I don’t think I’d ever trust a living soul again.’
He invited my attention with a beckoning of his head, lifting it at me and saying, ‘What would you do if you were in my shoes?’
‘Just what you did,’ I said. He was surprised into a short silence by my prompt reply.
‘She was rather special,’ he said. ‘What?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
And then he smiled. He said, ‘And you hardly knew her!’
Fury
One of the first Americans Mary Snowfire met in London was a girl named Gretchen, who told her she was doing graduate work on the European Economic Community, and then smiled and smoothed her chic velvet knickerbockers and said she also worked for an escort agency. ‘You have to, here. It’s the only way you can manage financially.’ Gretchen had a Saab Turbo and a big apartment in Fulham. She talked about ‘Saudis.’ ‘I’ve met some really interesting people. It’s not what you think. I’m not a hooker.’
But escort agency meant hookers for hire, didn’t it?
‘You have dinner usually. Or you go to a play. After that it’s up to you.’
Gretchen was also a tennis player. She spoke French. She had a tan. She owned a sun-bed. Some weekends she went to Paris.
‘Do they pay you?’
‘You wouldn’t believe how much! Some of those girls could retire. They make a fantastic amount.’
‘Sure,’ Mary said, ‘but what do they have to do for it?’
She said ‘they’ but she meant Gretchen.
Gretchen said, ‘They do everything.’
Everything seemed frantic, pleasureless, repetitive, exhausting.
Gretchen said, ‘They’re really well paid.’
‘Doesn’t that mean it’s prostitution?’ Mary asked.
‘Oh, no. It’s much more than they’re worth,’ Gretchen said. ‘That’s why it’s not prostitution.’
Gretchen offered to introduce her to the manager of the agency, but Mary laughed and said no thanks, and she did her best to hide her disgust. She was also shocked by the easy way that Gretchen confided this matter. If you had to do these things to live here, why live here?
Gretchen changed the subject. She began talking about the EEC in a dull and knowledgeable way, and wasn’t it a scandal that the French farmers were paid a subsidy to produce butter that was sold cheap to the Soviet Union in order to keep the prices high in the European butter market?
Mary listened to the pretty girl an
d later got a nanny job, looking after three small children. She lived at the top of the house, which was just off the Fulham Road. She could hear the buses. For this job she was paid ten pounds a week – less than twenty dollars. Her room was part of her salary. Some girls were not paid at all, the woman said: they were jolly glad to have a place to live in return for helping with the kids! And Mary thought: No wonder girls like Gretchen meet Arabs in the Hilton and go to bed with them. (‘At midnight you say, “I’ve really got to go. I’ve got a heavy day tomorrow at the Institute,” and you walk out with three hundred pounds.’)
Mary had wanted to live in London more than she wanted a husband or a lover. She was from Gainesville, Florida, an English major from the university there. She had very little spare money, but the standby fare to London was a hundred and fifty dollars. After a month at the Fulham Road house she saw that a bookstore near the cinema had a card in the window saying SALES STAFF WANTED. She was interviewed by the manager, Mr Shortridge, and hired. When she resigned from her nanny job she did not tell the woman that her husband had made an improper suggestion (kept pinching her hard and saying, ‘How about it?’) and that this was the main reason she was leaving.
In her new job, Mary discovered what many people like Gretchen already knew – that there was a great deal of good will toward Americans in London. We had style, we worked hard, we were full of life, we understood money, we succeeded where others failed. We were associated with luck.
By planning her life and measuring what she wanted against what she could afford, Mary established herself. She had moved to a bed-sitter that was directly over an Italian grocery store. She painted her room; she sewed new curtains; Mr Shortridge gave her Penguin posters – portraits of Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and William Faulkner. Each one said A PENGUIN AUTHOR. Their orange matched her orange room. She had a bike (five pounds from a junk shop – she fixed it up), a gas fire, and a plug-in radio (batteries made radios expensive). Her geraniums, her small avocado tree, her pots of ivy she had all grown herself. The bright ferny tub of marijuana that thrived in a sunny corner of the room had been left by the last tenant.
