Ghost Month (27 page)

“Do you know her?” asked Nancy.

“You don’t recognize an old schoolmate? That’s Lee Xiaopei. Peggy.”

“Your year?”

“Yeah. I was too surprised to wave.”

Nancy pulled me in close. “Well, you guys can talk later,” she said.

Gee, I’d thought Peggy and I were cool. Something was up.

N
ANCY DIDN
’
T HAVE A
lot of stuff in her apartment. Not to the naked eye, anyway. Every five feet of wall space concealed some kind of storage bin that opened with a handle and folded away seamlessly in the wood grain.

“I like how there’s no clutter,” said Nancy as she gestured to the wall, “but everything’s right here at your fingertips.” She slid out a CD rack and vinyl album shelf to show me. She lifted up a panel
and pushed it in to reveal a home-theater system. Then she bent down to open a bottom drawer before exclaiming, “Whoops!” and slamming it shut before I got a good look at it.

“What was that, a pet cobra?”

“It was just something. I don’t open that drawer often.”

Nancy fast-walked to the bar area. “Want some ice water?” she called.

“All right.” I went over and fiddled with the wall that had the forbidden drawer. I could tell where the handle was, but I couldn’t pop it out. “Nancy, how do you open this thing?”

“You’re so nosy,” she grumbled as a piece of fancy machinery let out a metal mouse whine and scraped crushed ice into a glass.

“Show me,” I said.

She came over and gave me my drink. “This is mountain-ice water. It’s never been brought down to room temperature since it was harvested.”

I took a sip. It tasted like any other glass of water I’ve ever had, although it was impressively cold.

“Nancy,” I insisted. “Show me.”

She sighed and lifted the handle while twisting it. The drawer opened, revealing stacks of folded men’s socks and briefs.

“Ah-ding’s, right?”

“Yes.”

“Still hoping he comes back, huh?”

“No. I just don’t feel right throwing away his things.”

I took too big a gulp of water. It slit my throat lengthwise like a steel sword.

She shifted the cup of water in her hand and stood on her tiptoes. “You said you didn’t want to fall in love.”

“I’m not talking about that,” I said. “I just think it’s weird that you’re still attached to this guy, weird on a purely intellectual basis. You said you don’t love him.”

“I feel obligated to him. After all, he did buy this place for the two of us to hang out in.”

I held my glass with both hands, feeling my palms and fingers begin to burn from the cold. “You did more than just ‘hang out,’ Nancy.”

She flapped her arms twice. “I get it. You’re making a stand for morality.”

“Not so much morality, but personal dignity.”

“
Dignity?
You’ve been taking me to love hotels! What a hypocrite you are!”

I wasn’t sure who’d slipped me the stupid pill or when it began to take effect, but the way I was going it was going to be a quick, lonely ride down to the lobby. What an asshole I was being! I put my glass down on what looked like a coaster on the closest side table.

“I’m sorry, Nancy. I’ve been talking like a crazy person.”

“Don’t forget who paid for KTV tonight.”

“Thank you so much for taking care of me. I’m such a chump.”

“You’re jealous of Ah-ding, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am jealous. I just wanted to be alone with you, and his boxers suddenly popped up between us, like a fucking spring-loaded crotch.”

That made her smile. She punched my arm just hard enough to hurt.

When a Taiwanese woman is mad at you, if she is able to forgive you, she will punch you. If she remains quiet and doesn’t hit you, you are in big, big trouble. Death-penalty big.

I put an arm around Nancy and tried to pull her to me, but she twisted away in the same practiced way that I broke free of Dwayne’s holds.

“I want to show you something special,” she said. She opened a drawer, took out a box the size of a birthday cake and ducked into what I assumed was the bathroom.

I sat on the designer couch and toyed with my phone as I waited. No voice messages, but there was an email in my junk folder from a Gmail address I didn’t recognize. I heard a clicking sound from the bathroom before the door opened.

Nancy came out in a red teddy thinner than a facial tissue. She had a pair of red-plastic horns on her head. She sashayed over to me and sat on my lap.

“Do you like this? It’s my devil-girl outfit.”

“It looks uncomfortable. We’d better take it off.”

“Hey, you have to get me into the mood. You were mean before, and I was thinking that I should probably go straight to sleep.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want a good, hard massage.”

“All right.”

“My entire back and my legs.”

“I’ve never massaged legs before.”

She sighed. “Well, you’re going to learn. Trial and error, but make the errors minimal.”

“Back first,” I said. She slid onto the coffee table and stretched out. No wonder the top was padded. I put my hands on her shoulder blades.

“Not like that!” she exclaimed. “Wash your hands first! Use hot water!”

“All right,” I said, heading for the room she had changed in.

“And get the oil! On the shelf under the sink!”

I turned on the water in the sink.

“Warm up those fingers, Jing-nan! Nothing’s a bigger turn-off than cold hands!”

It might be a long night, but I was sure it was going to be worth it in the end.

I
DREAMED
I
WAS
in a shadowy hall in a temple, standing before a fiery brazier. I heard Julia tell me to do something, but I didn’t want to do it. I looked down at my hands. They were full of reams of bamboo joss paper with small patches of gold foil in the center that were traditionally burned to send money to deceased loved ones. A Western Union to the dead.

I peeled off a sheet of paper and a friendly flame caught in the middle, below the gold mark. I saw letters in the soft little light, but I couldn’t read them. What did they say?

Julia was now standing above me, pointing at the paper in my hands and indicating that I needed to feed it into the brazier. A breeze began to blow, and her full-length, translucent dress flowed back like a jellyfish in a current.

No, I won’t. That would be playing into the whole myth of the underworld I refused to believe in.

She insisted.

I love you, Julia, but I can’t.

The wind picked up. I hung on to the single fiery sheet. Everything around me was being swept into the mouth of the brazier. Now I had a howling wind at my back.

I realized there was only one way I could prevent this joss paper from going into the brazier.

I folded it like a flour tortilla and fought to shove it into my mouth. It became soggy. I began to choke.

I woke up and yanked the sheet out of my mouth.

I
N THE MORNING
I slid out of bed, trying not to wake Nancy up. I checked my email and my phone promptly died. I fumbled and dropped it on the wooden floor, making the loudest sound in the world. Nancy didn’t even flinch. I had been planning to clean my face in the kitchen sink, but since she was in such a deep sleep, I decided I could wash up quickly without bothering her.

Nancy’s shower fixtures were American, and her shampoo and soap were Japanese. I came out and dried myself off with a big quick-dry towel. My skin had never felt this soft. Even my bruise was looking better. Maybe it was time to ditch the old house, or at least get a new bathroom installed.

I dressed and touched my lips lightly to Nancy’s. In her sleep she reached up and rubbed off my kiss.

I rode the MRT back to the market around noon. I was glad to find my moped where I’d left it. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Cars and motorcycles made much better joyrides. Frankie and Dwayne weren’t due for a couple hours, so I went into a Family Mart for a strawberry milk and sipped slowly as I charged up my phone.

The main market wasn’t open yet, but I picked up a fried chicken leg from a sidewalk vendor and took a few bites. It was old and tasted like it had been fried three times. The meat had hardened into jerky. I soldiered on because I only rarely experience bad food. As I ate, I had an almost transcendent experience. I didn’t register how much I cared about the food we served at Unknown Pleasures until I realized how deeply ashamed I would be to serve something
as terrible as this chicken leg to my customers. I picked the bones clean, undeterred by a strip of calloused flesh that lodged between my molars. I even crunched down and ate the cartilage that connected the thigh and leg bones. My disgusting little snack had given me oil-trap breath but left me feeling extremely satisfied. A little bit proud, too.

I checked my email as I walked down Daxi Road to Unknown Pleasures. Nothing in the inbox. Just that one that had popped up in the junk folder last night. The subject line simply read,
WARNING
. It didn’t offer a Nigerian lottery prize or Viagra, so I opened it.

I will call you soon
, read the email
.

Creepy. I shrugged it off and opened up the metal gates to my stand.

I took a deep breath and scratched the end of my nose. Suddenly, my nostrils were tickly. It could only mean one thing. I cranked out the three canopies all the way.

Seconds after I finished, raindrops fell in moving sheets. I stood and watched the animated dot-matrix impacts make a story in the empty street. In fifteen minutes, the sun was out again and the air smelled of hot garbage. Or maybe it was stinky tofu.

Frankie the Cat came strolling down Daxi Road and nodded to me. Silently, he unloaded boxes of animal parts from the hand truck he was pushing. Despite the fact that I was never at the stand this early and that I was wearing yesterday’s clothes, he didn’t ask me a thing. Hell, he had probably put all the clues together already, so there was nothing for him to ask.

I helped him wash out grisly intestines and stomachs. Dwayne came in about half an hour later.

“Whoa, Jing-nan, what are you doing here so early?”

“I’m the owner,” I said. “I have a responsibility.”

“If you’re so responsible, then how come you haven’t changed clothes? Look at him, Frankie. What a dissolute man! Carrying on with women during Ghost Month! What nerve! Jing-nan would make the Eight Immortals keel over and die with his insolence!”

Frankie walked to the street and lit up a cigarette before speaking. “The kid’s getting laid and you’re not. Deal with it.”

The rain never came back, and throngs of tourists choked the
streets. I called out to a middle-aged male tourist wearing a Clash shirt from the
Give ’em Enough Rope
era and told him that Joe Strummer should have begged Mick Jones to come back.

“I saw that last tour without Mick, and it sucked!” he roared.

“Mick went on to do great stuff, though,” I said. “Big Audio Dynamite’s first album was awesome.”

He smiled and waved his whole group of six over. Three couples of old punk rockers. The Clash guy came around the grill and hugged me like an old friend.

Over his shoulder I saw Peggy Lee in a black linen pantsuit enter and sit at one of our tables. I had a pet peeve about people putting their bags on empty chairs, and she indulged my annoyance when she plopped her Louis Vuitton down next to her. When I glanced at her again, she was holding her lipstick in a fist and smearing it on.

The group bought up a lot of stuff I wouldn’t normally be able to trick white people into trying: chicken hearts, gizzards, whole cuttlefish. They settled in at a table near the back.

I sat down next to Peggy as soon as I could.

“Did you just get out of work, Peggy?” I asked.

“I did. It’s quite a quick car ride here,” she said. “Could I get a napkin, Jing-nan?”

I swiped some from under the front grill and handed them to her. I thought she was going to kiss off the excess of her lipstick but instead she lifted her bag, wiped the seat under it and then put it back down.

“Are you hungry, Peggy?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to go somewhere?”

“You can have anything you see here.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll get something at home.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “Speaking of which, funny seeing you this morning,” I said.

“Yes, funny seeing you in my building.”

“It was almost five in the morning. Pretty late for you to be going out.”

“I was going in to work. The market closes in New York at four
A.M
. our time, and the most relevant financial news comes out shortly after.” She folded her legs under the table and kicked me,
maybe by accident. “I need to be up on the latest news before the Asian markets open.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to say hi or introduce you to Nancy.”

“You two seemed to be in a rush.” Her eyes narrowed as my silence fed her imagination. “Are you having something serious with her?”

“Peggy, I don’t see how she’s any of your business.”

“I’m here to save you.” She lowered her head and whispered, “You know about her, don’t you?”

“Sure I do.”

“She’s not a good girl.”

“I think she is.”

“You don’t have money, but you do have morals. You would never have cheated on Julia.”

“That’s right.”

“A girl like that has no standards,” said Peggy as she folded her hands in her lap. “How do you think she lives in a place like that even though she doesn’t have a real job?”

“Peggy, Nancy is a graduate student, and I know about her past.” I put my hands together and built a small wall of fingers on the table to shield myself.

“Look! I don’t want my old classmate to be seen associating with a call girl. Wang Ding-yu would come to stay with her. You know who he was, right? That tech executive who went to jail two years ago?” She slapped my finger fortress hard. “He’s married, and his kids are almost as old as us!”

“Ow!
Gan!
Well, so what, Peggy? Nobody’s perfect. Look at you! You’re divorced. There’s a stigma to that. Look at me! I’ve been living with a ghost, and this was years before Julia actually died.” I planted my elbows on the table as reinforcements. Even though I was talking to her, I was really speaking to myself. “You can plan on living a great life with someone you love, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work out that way.”