Flings (21 page)

There was a Thai restaurant in a small shack at the edge of the beach. Danielle ordered pad Thai and a spring roll—unimaginative choices, perhaps, but her favorite—and took her dinner down to the sand. She had a blanket and a bottle of wine in her satchel: a sweet, lonely sunset picnic. There wasn't usually anyone out at this hour, but today she spotted a family on their way back from a walk along the shore. At first they were silent silhouettes, but as they got closer she could hear the little boy's
vroom
noises, could see that he was kicking up sand and tearing away from his parents, careening ahead. The man let go of his wife's hand and started to jog after his son, but he was a beat too late. The kid had already closed the distance, hopped right over Danielle's wine bottle, and landed in her arms.

“Aunt Rachel!” he said. He was American. She hugged him back.

“Hi there,” she said to him while looking over his head at his dad.

“I'm so sorry,” the dad said to Danielle. And to his son, “Dylan, honey, that's not Aunt Rachel.” To Danielle again: “I'm so sorry. You look, it's actually funny, kind of like a friend of ours. She lives in the States, Dylan knows her from Skype, and we've been telling him how she's coming to visit later this summer and—well.” He shrugged and grinned, as in, You know how kids can be. Dylan was pudgy and warm—she could feel his heart humming in his chest against hers. The man stepped onto Danielle's blanket. He leaned in close. She could smell his cologne or else deodorant, felt his strong fingers slide between her body and his son's. Dylan giggled as he was pulled from Danielle's arms, found himself hoisted up onto his father's shoulders. “Ellen,” the man said, turning away from Danielle and toward his wife, who was still a few yards off. “Honey, you're gonna get a kick out of this.”

Before he took his most recent leave, Danielle had complained of her loneliness to her father. She felt isolated, she said, hoping he might cancel his trip or invite her along. Neither of those options, he explained, was feasible. But if she liked he could e-introduce her to some of his employees, people with whom she might, in his words, “have something in common.” By this Danielle thought he meant that they were in their thirties, most of them, which she supposed was better than nothing. Back upstairs, the memory of the boy's warmth and the man's grazing fingers still faintly on her skin, Danielle fired off a BBM to the one named Colin. She had her fingers crossed he'd turn out to be English or at least Australian. He pinged back a couple minutes later, said he was out with some people in Lan Kwai Fong and she was welcome to join up if she liked. Danielle rolled her eyes. LKF was an endless expat frat party crammed into a few blocks of bars and restaurants at the edge of downtown. It was like a bizarro Bourbon Street where all of the tourists were finance people and also weren't tourists so the same ones came back every night.

“Cool,” she replied. “U got an address?”

“Place called Stormies. White bldg at bend of d'aguilar st elbow. Big pink neon sign, boat theme, u cant miss.”

She guessed it would take her a half hour to get there.

“From Repulse that's optimistic,” he replied, “but no worries. Here for the long haul.” It was a Monday.

Colin was fit and sandy-haired, maybe with some gray mixed in but it was hard to tell. He wore black slacks and black loafers, a white shirt with silver cuff links, his collar and the next button down both open. He was sitting with a small group at a table near the door. “Heya,” he said—American; oh well. The bar was a nightmare. When he'd said “boat” she'd thought yacht club, but this was more like Jersey Shore. They were blasting Bon Jovi. People were doing Jell-O shots out of plastic syringes. She hadn't sat down yet and she was ready to leave. Colin leaned in and shouted in her ear: “Comforts of home, eh?” They made her a spot at their table and he made introductions: Rajiv, Hugh, Megan, and Thao. They were all eager to know how Danielle was enjoying her visit, what she'd eaten, where she'd been. She told them about the Buddhas at Sha Tin, then asked how they all knew one another. Colin explained that they all worked together, or rather had worked together until a recent shake-up. Megan had been recruited for executive management and her reconfigured portfolio was taking her out of the division, which itself was being scaled down, as a side effect of which Rajiv had been let go and Hugh was about to announce that he would quit; he was joining Colin, working for Danielle's dad. (One of the things Danielle had learned about expats was that since their jobs were their only reason on earth for being where they were, it was rude not to let them go on a bit about the minutiae of their office lives.) Thao—Vietnamese by way of London and Berlin, though all his degrees were from American schools—believed that he would soon be doing what amounted to both Rajiv's and Hugh's jobs. He was pressing Megan as to whether she thought, in her freshly executive opinion, he might be offered a salary bump and/or new title. Rajiv was going back to Kerala so his in-laws could spend some time with their granddaughter before he moved his family to the States, where he hoped to buy some American real estate before the economy got better and interest rates went back up. So these were not just drinks Danielle had stumbled into but good-bye drinks. But in Hong Kong, Colin said, leaning close again, his lips brushing her ear as he struggled to make himself heard over Bono and then Fred Durst, everyone was always coming or going, so nobody got too worked up. Everything here was a stepping-stone to something else—the Singapore or Beijing office, a new job with a different firm in London or New York or Mumbai or wherever home was or wherever you wanted it to be next.

Danielle stared into her “Dark and Stormie”—the house special, her second or maybe third one—and wanted to say something but didn't know what it was. She wanted to ask them questions about her father, whom she gathered they all knew or at least knew of. Was he open in his dealings, free with his anger, generous with his time? Did he remember people's birthdays? Did he have a girlfriend and what was her name? Had he ever set foot inside this particular awful fucking bar? But none of those questions was the real question, or if one was it would cease to be as soon as she asked it. There was something great and shapeless alive inside her and to speak it would be to distort its essential character. Its truth abided in the fact of its remaining forever suspended, unborn. Danielle drank her drink.

People took their money clips out, started to say their good-byes. Danielle reached for her purse but they stopped her. She tried to insist but Colin put his hand down on top of hers, said, “Danielle, please.” She made a mental note to give a good report to her father, whenever she saw him again.

“I'll see you 'round,” they all said to one another, though in several cases there was no particular reason to believe that this was so.

Hugh and Colin, luckily, were still up for action, and Danielle was feeling comfortable enough at this point to tell them what she really thought of LKF, so they hopped in a cab and made for a place on Johnston Road called the Pawn. There were love seats and overstuffed leather chairs clustered around low black tables. They had a walk-in humidor, a whiskey list so long it came in a leather-bound book. Another of her father's employees met them there. Like many native-born Chinese who dealt regularly with Westerners, he'd adopted a Western first name and introduced himself as Ned Chu. They were on a third-floor balcony, the men all sipping Laphroaig 16, Danielle with a Grey Goose and cran.

“This used to be an actual pawn shop,” Ned said.

“No shit,” Hugh said.

“It's true,” Ned continued. “My father was a beat cop in the seventies. He walked these streets every night. Talk about a different world.” But then he didn't talk about it, and none of them pressed him. He stared past the railing and out at the busy street, looking at the strolling people and passing cars as if he didn't quite believe in them. Danielle thought of the mountain dragon exploding through the hole in her father's building. Hugh, rolling a pin joint, let out a small contented sigh. “Hong Kong,” he said, “is whatever you want whenever you want it, all the time.”

“Ask my father about that,” Ned said. “I always say to him to write a book.” But again, nobody bit. These guys weren't interested in history, Danielle thought. They were barely interested in the present. She felt that this fact explained something essential about who they were or the circles they ran in or the world they were forging, or something, but she couldn't decide whether this essential thing was what made them fundamentally different from her, or whether it was rather the basis for whatever little common ground they shared. Danielle knew one thing: it was a million degrees out and humid as a swamp. She knocked her drink back, shut her eyes against the welcome clatter of ice cubes on her nose.

“How's it going over there?” Colin said.

“Ready to call it a night, I think.”

Colin walked her downstairs and hailed her a cab. It crossed Danielle's mind that Colin might share the cab with her, though she doubted they lived near each other. Her father's place wasn't near much of anything. Still. Maybe he'd slide in beside her and see if she balked. That was ridiculous of course, with Ned and Hugh standing right there on the balcony, looking down at them, glasses raised in mock salute. Colin ignored them; Danielle waved back. They stood with the open cab door between them. Colin said, “I'm glad you made it out, Danielle. We should do this again sometime—or something else.”

“Yeah,” Danielle said. “Let's do whatever we want all the time.”

Colin shut the door, put his face up to the window, winked once, then stood upright and slapped his hand on the trunk. The driver hit the gas. Danielle was drunk and alone on the wrong side of the planet, a strange city streaking past a window that might as well have been a movie or computer screen. Or maybe, she thought, the window was a camera and she was the one in the movie: The radio blares Chinese pop music. The pretty girl slumps alone in the backseat as highways yield to mountain roads curving through foreign dark. Cut to:

Danielle woke up hungover, popped a coffee pod into the Keurig, hit the button, held her head while the machine wheezed and clugged. She sat on the porch with her mug and stared out at the bay. It was late morning, hot and hazy. She took a long shower, then went back to sleep. When she woke up there was a BBM from Colin: “Heyagain. Hike this weekend if yr free?”

“Why not tomorrow?” she fired back. “Not like my old man's there to crack the whip.”

“Touche but 2morrow no good. Could do thurs tho. Meet at Central Pier, 1230. U need directions?”

“I can always use direction,” she wrote. Thinking,
If this doesn't do it . . 
.

They took the one o'clock ferry to Lamma Island, disembarked at Yung Shue Wan, a village of seafood restaurants and narrow poured-concrete homes on narrow roads. Men drove puttering flatbeds the size of golf carts, hauling stacks of pressboard and sections of pipe. Frayed strips of sun-bleached tarp rose in the hot breeze like fingers. Construction dust rimed branches and fronds. They walked past cloudy fish tanks full of razor clam, lobster, eel, and prawn.

The walking path would take them south across the ridge of the island along Ha Mei Wan Bay, which was scenic despite a three-stack coal-fired power plant that, like a dark spot on the retina, occupied a small corner of every otherwise perfect view. (Colin said it powered all of Hong Kong—Danielle thought reflexively of the frigid air forever bleeding from the storefronts all over town.)

They made their way out of the village center, wound through the trees, past the mouths of cart-scale driveways that led to tucked-away bungalows. Danielle had a Nalgene in her satchel. She unscrewed the cap, took a big swig, offered the bottle to Colin, who accepted it with evident gratitude. “There's nobody out today,” he said as he handed the bottle back to her. “I bet we don't see another person till we get to Sok Kwu Wan.”

“Lucky us,” Danielle said.

They emerged from the forest—or was it jungle? Or were both these terms too grandiose? Was it maybe just some trees? They mopped their foreheads on their sleeves, walked over green slopes dotted with broken white stones. Danielle said that the landscape felt Scottish and when he laughed at her she faked a little pout. They took the optional detour up Mount Stenhouse and high-fived at the viewing platform, thrilled to have found a vista untroubled by the power plant. Danielle wanted to take a picture together but he got weird about it, like employing the technology of the camera phone would somehow tarnish their experience of nature. She was about to call him out on his affected Luddite bullshit when it occurred to her that he must be worried about people from the office, her father, seeing the picture, so she put her BlackBerry away and finally, finally, he kissed her. They fooled around like high school kids up there at the top of the path.

The descent took them through stinking marshes and more wooded land, then finally into a village that seemed a mirror of the one they'd set out from, though this Tin Hau temple was a little bigger and had a turtle pond. The turtles had red markings on their pointy, wizened heads. They paddled around their oval pool and swam through algae and bumped into lily pads. They hauled themselves slowly from the water. With their webbed feet and small claws they struggled for purchase, then laid themselves out on the hot gray stone.

They took the ferry back to Central, then a cab to Colin's building. In the elevator they saw themselves reflected in the dull gold finish of the doors. Danielle thought they looked like they were trapped in amber. The elevator sighed to a stop and the doors slid open. There were shoes on a rack in the foyer of his apartment: loafers, sandals, little blue sneakers with Velcro straps, a scuffed pair of mary janes. As Danielle knelt to unlace her own sneakers she noticed a framed photograph on the far wall—Colin, a bottle blonde (the eyebrows gave her away), and a little boy. They were all wearing white golf shirts and khakis on a lawn somewhere, big grins, soft-focus lake and tree behind them.