World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (37 page)

Suzie had also noticed the man in the chair and I had felt her stiffen on my arm, but they had exchanged no sign of recognition, and I thought this strange after they had sat together at the table, and won money together, and looked as intimate as lovers.

I said, “That was your friend.”

“What friend?”

“Your friend from the casino.”

“Oh, I never noticed,” she said vaguely. I only just saw him in the casino across the table.”

“I thought he'd sat with you.”

“No.”

But she had no sooner made the denial than she realized that I must have seen them, and I felt the tension in her arm again, and I knew without looking that the blood had rushed to her cheeks. I opened the door of our room and she detached herself from me with relief, and kept her face turned away in case it should further betray her. She undressed quickly and got into bed, and lay with her back turned and her eyes closed as if utterly exhausted.

“We played fan-tan too long,” she said. “We stayed too long in that smoke.”

“Yes, it was silly.” I glanced at her as I undressed, trying to make out if her exhaustion was genuine or if she was only pretending. There was a knock on the door and Ah Ng entered with a flask, saying with a false seedy grin, “I brought some hot tea, sir.” It was the first time he had ever done this without being asked.

“Put it on the dressing table,” I said.

“Yes, sir.” But he ignored the instruction and went quickly across the room to put it on the pedestal table by the bed, at the same time fixing Suzie with the greedy burning eye and breaking into rapid Cantonese. The walleye gazed upwards with mocking innocence like a gray blob of jelly. I knew the numerals in Cantonese, and I heard him say a number and then repeat it. It was a three-figure number like the number of a room.

I said angrily, “Get out.”

“Sir, I only just—”

“Get out!”

He went out grinning. Suzie closed her eyes again with a long weary sigh. I said, “What did he want?”

“I don't know—nothing.”

“Now tell me the truth.”

“He just talked about the heat. He said Macao was so hot.”

“And particularly hot in Room No. 343?”

She opened her eyes and stared at me miserably. “Why do you hate me today?”

“I don't hate you.”

“Yes, you hate me. I knew this evening when I came into the bar, and you looked at me, and I thought, ‘My husband hates me.'”

“I hate you to tell me lies, that's all.”

And then she began to cry, and she admitted that the Eurasian had joined her at the table, and had paid her compliments and tried to arrange a meeting; and she had meant to tell me all about it, but had been too frightened to do so after finding me in such a nasty mood at the bar. And it had also been from fear of upsetting me, and spoiling our last evening, that she had pretended not to recognize the man at the lift. The floor boy, of course, had come on the man's behalf, with an offer of five hundred dollars for the night. He had suggested that for a half-share I might be willing to relinquish her—for such deals to accommodate all parties concerned were commonplace in Macao.

I laughed and forgave her, and said, “My God, what a town! It's a good thing we're getting out before it corrupts us—and before I wring Ah Ng's neck.”

“I'm sorry I lied,” Suzie said, still crying. “But I am so scared.”

“Scared?”

“Scared to lose you. Oh, Robert, I'm always so scared.”

I slipped beside her into bed, and she clung to me very tightly, but without passion; and she said that she was ashamed because she was so exhausted and on her last night was failing me.

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “I don't think I'd be much good myself tonight.”

I turned off the light. I was really feeling worn out and I began to fall off at once. I was vaguely aware of Suzie lying wide awake beside me. I thought she must be worried because she had told lies, and with a last effort of consciousness I whispered that I was so happy with her, and I kissed and caressed her, and then sleep shut down its lid; and then I knew nothing more until a noise in the room penetrated my ears, and I half-woke and felt for Suzie, and I found that she was gone and I was alone in the bed. And then I woke properly and opened my eyes, and in the dim light from the window saw Suzie over by the dressing table, standing rigid with suspense as if afraid that I had been wakened by the noise she had just made. I opened my mouth to ask what she was doing but my tongue froze in my mouth: for at that moment I noticed that she was wearing her cheongsam. She was dressed.

No, I thought. No, she can't be going to him. No, it's impossible.

My body had become petrified by the suspicion. I could not utter a sound. I watched her move again cautiously. I recognized the familiar shape of her silhouette as she stooped, slipping her foot into a shoe.

And then suddenly with great joyous relief, I understood. She was just going to the bathroom. She was using the cheongsam as a dressing gown. She had not been able to lay her hands on the cotton wrap that she usually used for the purpose, and had not wanted to wake me by turning on the light. So she was using the cheongsam.

And now she was softly opening the door. She hesitated as a narrow shaft of light from the corridor penetrated the room. She glanced toward the bed. Then she opened the door quickly and slipped through and closed the door again, pausing outside to release the handle without sound. And I knew that in a moment my mind would be set at rest—that I should hear her take a few steps to the left, enter the bathroom next door.

I strained my ears. I had stopped breathing. Then I heard her footsteps, uneven because of the missing heel. They did not go to the left, but to the right. Not towards the bathroom, but towards the lift and stairs. I heard them fading down the corridor. Then silence.

I lay for a minute without moving, not yet really believing. Then I sat up and turned on the light. The sight of the empty bed beside me gave me a new pang of dismay, as if I had still hoped to find her there. Then I thought: perhaps the bathroom was occupied. Perhaps she tried the door and found it locked and so went upstairs. In that case it must still be occupied, or I would have heard somebody come out. I jumped out of bed and went outside into the corridor to look. But the bathroom door was open, the room in darkness. My heart sank again. I returned to the room and put on my trousers and shirt, and then went down the corridor to the lift. Ah Ng was asleep behind his desk, his head tilted against the key-board. I leaned over and shook him, and one of his eyelids opened and there was nothing behind it but the gray jelly. The other lid opened in a muzzy slit.

“Where is she?” I said. “Where's my wife?”

“Hah?”

“My wife—where's she gone?”

He began to sit up, eager and interested, thinking for a moment that I was an accomplice. Then he saw that I was hostile and retired again behind the defense of muzziness. “I don't know. I just sleep.”

I suddenly thought of her handbag. If she had gone to a man she would have taken it with her. But hadn't it still been in the room? I couldn't remember. I hurried back down the corridor. I went into the room but I could not see the bag. It was not on the dressing table or the chair or the table by the bed. I began to search the room, pulling open drawers and feeling behind the bed and tearing off the bed sheets, and thinking, Oh God, please let me find her bag, please let it be in this room. And then I had turned the room upside down, and it was not there, and I knew that she had gone to the Eurasian slicker, and had taken her bag because she would need her comb and cosmetics afterwards for tidying herself up. She would also need the bag for putting in money as she did with the sailors. And I dropped into the chair, and felt the great ache spreading from my heart, and I laid back my head and groaned.

I do not remember how long I remained in the chair. I remember only the ache, and not thinking of anything but the ache, not even of Suzie, and then finding myself staring at the painting of Suzie on the bed, and the painting coming into focus, and seeing her lying there among the rumpled bedclothes, and saying aloud at the painting all those words that you call women who behave like that, and then thinking that for Suzie you needed something worse, because it was simply like calling an actress an actress, or a shopgirl a shopgirl, and you couldn't revile somebody by calling them what they already admittedly were. I wondered vaguely why she had done it; I supposed it was just reversion to type. You couldn't keep a good whore down. Or at least up. Because at the first sight of a slicker with money and a Waikiki tie down she goes again, whoosh!

And I was still sitting there when the door began to open cautiously, and then stopped—she must have seen that the light was on, and realized with dismay that I had waked. Then it opened wider and she stood there in the doorway, and she looked very white and shaken, because she was afraid of what I was going to do, and she closed her eyes for a moment holding on to the handle. Then she went to the bed and sat down and closed her eyes again and said, “I told you I was no good. I told you I would just give you trouble.”

I noticed that under her eyes there were great blue smudges. Well, no wonder, I thought. No wonder. And I got up, and called her all the dirty names that came into my head, and then went out and closed the door.

I walked through the empty streets without caring where I was going. The air was heavy and humid and my trousers stuck to my legs. I noticed the pier where we had landed and the big white silent steamer waiting for tomorrow. Later I noticed the façade of the old cathedral with the gaping windows and nothing behind but the sky. It was all that remained, the lone wall. The rest had been destroyed by fire. Probably self-ignited, I thought. Probably the cathedral had given up in despair and committed suicide, because not even a cathedral could hold its own against the evils of this vicious hole. Then I did not notice anything more until there was somebody barring my way and it was a small African soldier with a rifle and bayonet and behind him was the barrier across the road and behind the barrier was Red China. Red China, where they had closed the brothels and put the girls into factories. Good for Red China. If Suzie was in Red China she would be tightening bolts on tractor wheels instead of selling her body to slickers in Waikiki ties and silk shirts.

I turned and went back down the road, and there was the cathedral again with the gaping windows like the gaping eyes of a skull, the cathedral that had committed hara-kiri because it was no match against sin. It was growing light. I felt tired and sat down under the lone wall of the cathedral and I did not move until the sun was throwing shadows and my watch said half-past eight. Then I got up and went back to the hotel.

I went upstairs in the lift and turned down the corridor to the room. Suzie was lying on the bed. She had been crying and her face was red and ugly and swollen, and her eyes were dull and empty as if life was finished and she wanted to die.

I said, “The boat goes at ten-thirty. Will you be ready?”

She was about to reply but started crying again and the words were lost in her throat. The tears began running down from her eyes as suddenly as if a tap had been turned on, and I remembered a Madonna I had seen in Italy and the priest turning on the hidden tap, and the tears leaking out of the Madonna's eyes and running down the white glazed cheeks, and the priest saying proudly, “The Weeping Virgin!”

The weeping virgin. That was good.

“I'm going to have a shower,” I said.

I collected my razor and toilet things and went out, leaving her weeping on the bed. The bathroom next door was engaged so I turned back along the corridor past the floor boy's desk where Ah Ng was quarreling over commission with one of his whores, and went upstairs to the bathroom on the next floor, and locked the door, and undressed, and started the shower over the bath—and it was only as I was about to step over the side of the bath and go under the shower that I noticed the red spattering on the bath, and the pink smears where the spattering had been wiped away, and the water from the shower trickling pink along the bottom of the bath to the outlet, and I wondered grimly if somebody had cut his throat, and I thought, “Well, after all, that's nothing for Macao.” And then I caught sight of the yellow enamel spittoon, and the red-soaked woman's handkerchief in the bottom of the spittoon, and my knees went weak, and I thought, “It's Suzie's,” and I picked it out of the spittoon to make sure, and saw the embroidered flower in the corner that I had once said was a rose and Suzie had said was some other flower whose name she had only known in Chinese. It was stiff with congealed blood.

Oh, Christ, I thought. Oh, Christ, oh, Christ.

I stood staring at the red crumpled bit of material in my hand, and now I knew that she had not gone to the Eurasian at all, but had been ill, and had not wanted me to know she was ill, so she had come to this bathroom upstairs where I would not hear; and she had been all alone up here being ill and perhaps nearly dying. And I thought of her coming back into the room, and standing in the doorway with the white ravaged face, and saying, “I told you I would give you trouble,” and I thought of the dirty names I had called her and the way I had walked out.

Oh, God. Oh, Christ.

I felt so weak that I had to lean for support against the wall. I closed my eyes with my head against the damp perspiring plaster. I heard the water from the shower drumming in the bath and gurgling away down the waste.

Oh, Suzie, I thought. My poor sweet Suzie. How can you ever forgive me?

And then I opened my eyes again and saw the red little handkerchief in my hand, and I thought, “Perhaps she's going to die,” and I noticed that my hand was trembling as though from fever and I felt chilled with fear; and I grabbed my clothes and began to dress, struggling to pull down the wet sticky shirt over my shoulders, and glimpsing my face in the mirror with the perspiration and the night's stubble of beard and the eyes full of fear, and then I pulled on my trousers and fastened them and ran down the stairs.