Ghost Month (20 page)

“I still like Joy Division a lot,” I offered, “and other bands, too.”

“What about your recent love life?”

“Oh, that?” It was my one cut-and-dried area. “Nothing to speak of, really.” I played with the straw in my drink. “To be really honest with you, Nancy, the only girl I ever loved was Julia. I’ve never even considered anybody else. If she hadn’t been murdered, I would have spent the rest of my life trying to make something of myself and get back to her.”

“Oh, God, that is so heavy.” Her eyes filled to the brim with tears and quivered, threatening to overflow. “So romantic, too.” Nancy grabbed the table as if it were slipping away.

I patted her arm. I felt bad for traumatizing her with my life-lived-in-vain story, but it was only right to be up-front.

“I really wasn’t expecting something like that,” Nancy said. She dabbed her eyes with the edges of her napkin. “I once thought about going to UCLA because you went, but they jacked up the tuition for foreign students. I could never afford that.”

My heart sank. I wondered how much tuition was now. I could never afford to finish my degree there. I brushed some crumbs off the table.

“Now it’s your turn,” I said. She probably had an asshole-boyfriend story.

“My story is pretty simple. As you know, or maybe you didn’t know, I had the biggest crush on you in high school.”

“I didn’t know, but I’m very flattered, Nancy.”

She hunched over her soda but kept her voice at a conversational volume. “Well, after school, during my first year at Taida, I became a mistress to an executive at a laptop manufacturer. He bought me a really nice condo and gave me a lot of money and even some stock in the company. All the officers had mistresses and did the same. The company was doing really well, taking market share away from all the American computer makers, and Ah-ding’s career was taking off.”

She coughed and rubbed her nose before continuing.

“Of course he had two kids—they must be out of college by now—and his wife was so mean. He used to play me her messages and she’d be screaming at him for being out at night.”

She rubbed her eyes with both hands and cleared her throat. “Anyway, Jing-nan, my junior year, Ah-ding was arrested for supposedly bribing some officials for government contracts. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and that ended things between us.”

I looked at her askance, and she took that to mean I wanted to hear her academic record.

“Also, I finished undergrad this year with honors and now I’m in the graduate program for biomedical electronics and bioinformatics. Well, it’s all biomedical engineering, in simple terms.”

I laughed out loud when she was done.

“That’s a funny one, Nancy. Did you make up all that just now? The biomedical stuff is too involved to say off the top of your head, but the rest was very creative.”

She crossed her arms. “I didn’t ‘make up’ any of it.”

Two minutes ago she had been ready to cry her eyes out. Now she looked ready to gouge mine out.

“Wait, everything you said was true?” I asked.

“Of course!”

“The whole mistress thing?” I whispered.

“I was!”

“You don’t reveal all this to many people, do you?”

“No. I usually just say my family is rich. In fact, my family isn’t rich and I don’t talk to my parents anymore. I’m telling you the truth because I thought we had some history and a good vibe between us.” She pointed at my nose. “Then you have the nerve to question my honesty.”

She picked up her purse.

“Please don’t go,” I said.

She undid the snap and took out her keys. She showed me a small black tab and pressed a button.

The souped-up sports car chirped and flashed its lights.

“W
AS
I
RIGHT?
D
OES
this get boring?” I asked from the passenger seat. She chuckled and eased the car away from the curb. It moved as smoothly as freshly ground soy milk and had the restrained power of a stalking lioness.

“Only when there’s traffic. Even then, it’s not so bad.”

I touched the dashboard and tried to remember the last time I’d been in a car. It sure was a quiet ride. “You don’t usually park this on the street, do you?”

“No, I usually keep it in the garage under my building. I was thinking of driving into the country after work.” She glanced at me. “You’re not free, are you?”

I shook my head. “I’m not. I’m a prisoner of the night market.”

“Oh.”

“Nancy?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we continue being really honest to each other?”

“Of course,” she said, tightening her grip on the steering wheel.

“I think it’s really amazing that I ran into you again and I think you’re really incredible. But I don’t think I’m ready to begin a relationship right now.”

We slid to a stop at a red light.

“Well, I’m definitely not ready. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.”

“You had a crush on me, though, right?”

She shrugged and touched her throat, drawing my attention to her chest. “When I saw you in the music store again, everything came back like a wave. I was lifted up.” The light changed and we were moving again.

“Did you love Ah-ding?”

“God, please don’t use that word for him and me!”

We turned the third corner of a big loop.

“I’m glad we’re both not ready to start anything serious,” I said. “It would also be bad luck during the holiday.”

“I don’t believe in good or bad luck or ghosts. I thought you didn’t either.”

“I don’t.”

“Jing-nan, you know I had a schoolgirl crush on you. I guess I still do. What do you think about me?”

I wormed the tips of my fingers into my front pockets. “I think you’re very beautiful, Nancy.”

She scoffed. “No, you don’t.”

“I do so!”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t? Well, listen. If you didn’t have to get back to work, I would take you to a love hotel right this very moment.”

She kept her eyes on the road but raised her chin, challenging me. “Oh, you would, huh?”

“Of course. Look, it’s almost one thirty. I guess we should have skipped the pizza and just had sex. Too bad.” I was feeling playful and lucky. I could see us having sex at some point. I already dreamed of it.

We hit another red light. Nancy licked a finger and wiped something off the rim of the steering wheel.

“I might have two hours off for lunch,” she offered casually. Ah, she was trying to call my bluff. I could keep it up longer than she could.

“Oh, look over there,” I said. “There’s a love hotel up on the left. Why don’t we go?”

“You wanna go?”

“Yeah, let’s go,” I said. “Right now.”

She scratched her right knee. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Nancy crossed her arms. “You’re scared,” she said, showing me her clenched teeth.

“So are you.”

We laughed. She lurched the car to the right.

“I’m parking.”

I tapped the clock on the dashboard. “We better hurry. You only have an hour.”

“It’s a perfect fit—right here.” She shut off the engine and I unsnapped my safety belt first.

“Let’s run in like we have no time, Nancy!”

She undid her belt and narrowed her eyes. “I’m warning you,” she said. “They’re going to think we’re boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“Let’s tell them right up-front that we’re only sex partners.”

O
NCE WE GOT IN
the room, Nancy said, “Are you sure you wanna …”

I cupped the back of her head with my left hand, kissed her forehead and moved down from there as we did a stunt fall to the bed. I was dimly aware of slipping off my shoes and then my pants. Suddenly Nancy stiffened.

“What is that?” she asked, her face right next to the bruise. It seemed bigger than this morning and somewhat oblong. The original baseball-sized injury looked like it was splitting in two now.

“I got that from work. A crate slammed into me.”

She touched a finger to it. “Does that hurt?”

“No.”

“How about this?” she asked, jabbing it playfully with her thumb.

“Ow!
Gan!
” I yelled and laughed, grabbing both her wrists.

Laughing was a big part of the release. So was crying. We shivered in the cold air from the blasting AC. I pulled the sheet over us. I held her to me and told her I was broken inside.

“You were in love,” she told me.

“I was,” I said.

I came after her anew.

I
WAS GIDDY AS
I hopped on my moped, but my mood darkened as a light rain began to fall.

Damn. I had planned to see the Huangs this afternoon to tell them what little I had found out, but instead I had chosen to go to a love hotel to fool around with a young woman.

Was I done with Julia so quickly?

First thing tomorrow, I’m going to see the Huangs, I promised. It would probably be the last time ever.

When I dismounted at the night market, I realized how sore I was. At least the rain had stopped.

Jenny was tied up with some business types at the counter, so we shared a wave and mouthed greetings.

Kuilan offered her condolences for Julia and held both my hands.

“I was talking to Jenny, she told me all about it. It’s not fair at all. That poor little girl. I’m going to pray for her and her parents. They were good people.”

I nodded somberly, feeling even guiltier for my romp with Nancy.

“Thank you, Kuilan,” I said, firmly shaking the clump of our four hands.

When I stepped into Unknown Pleasures, Dwayne cast a look at me. “Jing-nan?” he asked.

I made an innocent face.

“You’re half an hour late! You get your pubes trimmed?” Dwayne was referring to the illegal and legal houses of prostitution that operated behind barber-store fronts.

“No,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets. “Not
there
, Dwayne.”

“Are you serious?” He threw down a pair of skewers on the grill and they sizzled with indignation. “Can you believe this, Frankie? We’re busting our humps here and little Jing-nan goes out for an afternoon of planting his sugar-cane stick.”

The Cat nodded and smiled, not missing a beat in his prep work of cleaning out intestines, removing veins from shrimp and squeezing out beaks from squid.

“Dwayne, I’ll be back in about half an hour,” I said.

“Now he’s going on break already!” Dwayne shook his head in mock indignation.

“Relax. It’s work-related.”

About once a month, I go on a pre-opening market inspection. I walked south on Daxi Road, made a right on Danan Road, a left on Xiaoxi Road and finally onto Jihe Road. One big zigzag south. Jihe Road essentially took me straight to a bi-level indoor area under a giant roof. The building had an inhuman, generic strip-mall feel. Taking a good look at it now, I had to admit the building resembled something straight out of LA. Over the facade that faced Jihe Road were giant letters reading “Shilin Market” in English under four big Chinese characters saying the same. This open-air building was more than one hundred years old and had reopened in December 2011 after a ten-year renovation. For a decade the vendors were in a temporary spillover market, a
juancun
for food. Some tourists think this is the Shilin Night Market itself, rather than just a part of the larger beast. The soul of any night market is walking in the open air and being with the crowds. You just can’t get that indoors.

The ground-floor outlets weren’t my competition. These stands sold fresh-cut fruit, T-shirts, watches and boxes of candy perfect for tourists to bring home for gifts.

I stopped at a fruit stand to get a cup of chilled and cut
atemoya
, which is a type of
cherimoya
, that prehistoric-looking fruit that resembles a small human head painted dark green, with the drips of paint still visible. The
atemoya
is literally called “pineapple Buddha head.” Breaking the fruit open yields milky-colored flesh and black pits staring back like multiple Mickey Mouse eyes.

A middle-aged woman, wearing a bamboo farmer hat for authenticity, brought me a small plastic bag along with my cup of
atemoya
, peeled from the thick rind and cut into wedges. I picked up the first piece with a long toothpick and slurped it up. It was so ripe I could feel the grains of sugar on my tongue as the flesh readily broke up. The overall taste was close to vanilla pudding flavored with pear juice. As I swallowed, I stored the seeds—as big as playing pieces in the board game
Go
—in my right cheek. I spit them into the bag I was provided with. It’s a perfect fruit: sweet as dessert, and it comes with fun seeds.

I hungrily ate up the rest of the fruit as I made my way to the escalator to the below-ground level, where things were literally cooking. About a hundred stands were arranged into blocks separated by narrow walkways. Reflected light from illuminated menus pooled on the metal ceiling as ventilation panels loudly sucked in their breath.

Many vendors didn’t have English translations, but for most of the food, that wasn’t a problem. Still, people who couldn’t read Chinese would have a hard time figuring out the small-bun-wrapped-in-large-bun stand. The woman at the counter takes what looks like a fried fillet, partially covers it with something close to a flour tortilla and crushes it with a mallet. Then she reopens it, sprinkles some fibrous crap into it and rolls it up. She couldn’t tell an American that the fried fillet was filled with shredded pork and that the stuff she sprinkled on was dried shredded pork and that the whole thing was delicious. At only one US dollar each, it wasn’t worth her time to go through the effort to explain in English. There are Chinese and Japanese tourists right behind you who have no problem reading the menu, and they’ll probably buy a lot more than you.

“Dude, that looks cool, but I don’t know what it is,” I overheard some Americans saying.

Music to my ears. I—or rather, Johnny—moved in for the kill, giving them directions in guy-talk to Unknown Pleasures as they stepped away from the pork-bun lady. Johnny is that friendly, English-speaking bro you want to bring your money to. Some guy recorded a video interview with me last year, but it hasn’t shown up online yet.