Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

All the best —as if signing off on a letter to an acquaintance.

He listened to the whole message at least ten times, tracking every nuance of emotion — sadness, nostalgia, friendliness, forgiveness — and for the first time he felt an intimacy with her. In a single phone message she had opened herself up to him far more than she ever had during those years they’d spent together. The sudden closeness he felt for her frightened him, and now it was his turn to be reticent about returning her call. Half of him wanted to savor the message; the other half was terrified by it. It was thrilling to hear her say, “You knew me better than I thought.” But then he felt a raw grating in the pit of his stomach when she said, “I’ve experienced worse in the past.” The deliberate flatness of her voice seemed to contain an accusation of hurt that neither of them could ever forget, and it made him ashamed to think that he could have simply rung her out of the blue and imagined that she had moved on and forgotten all that had been inflicted on her. She might never realize that Justin had never been in control of his past, that he had been a mere actor playing out his role.

He remembered how C.S. had played his role too — that of the weak younger brother, so sensitive that his breakup with Yinghui caused him to fall ill with the flu for three whole weeks. He had ignored the family’s disapproval of his relationship with Yinghui — the nature of her father’s death and the attendant rumors of his involvement with the Lim family’s property business made for unwanted publicity — but when it was suggested that C.S. place some distance between himself and Yinghui, C.S. made little attempt to argue against his parents. He’d moved on — he shrugged as he explained his nonchalance to Justin; they’d gotten stuck in a rut, he wasn’t excited by the relationship anymore, he was too young to settle down. And yet, after C.S. rang Yinghui to tell her he was breaking up with her (she wasn’t in, so he left a message on her answering machine), he began to feel sick. A fever set in, and his joints felt so painful that he could not make it downstairs for meals. He stayed in his room, shivering in damp sheets, trembling every time she rang to ask for him (the maids politely told her that he wasn’t around). He felt like a real bastard, he said to Justin. He felt so bad for her — he guessed he must really have loved her after all. And yet he could not face her to explain why he had broken up with her.

“Please, Justin, you go,” he’d mumbled into his blanket. “Just tell her anything you want. Blame it on the family — anything.”

And so Justin had driven over to Angie’s, knowing he would find Yinghui there, even though the café had ceased operating for some weeks. The shelves, chiller cabinets, and refrigerators had been stripped bare, and the light fittings had been removed. There were a couple of plastic stacking crates with pots and pans in them lying in the middle of the floor. What remained of the furniture had been pushed against one wall, but the space it created made the café look smaller rather than bigger. The only decorations that remained were the meaningless signs that she and C.S. had had lovingly painted and hung: ALL GREAT NOVELS ARE BISEXUAL. In the middle of the damp, airless space sat the long gray sofa, which C.S. had occupied virtually every night since the café had opened. It was the only thing that had not moved in the café.

Yinghui was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, poring over some papers containing lists of numbers. She leafed through them, occasionally going back to one. It was obvious to Justin that she did not understand what she was reading. There was music playing from a portable stereo set at her feet — the Tom Waits CD that she and C.S. liked so much.

“Need some help with those figures?”

She looked at him and shook her head. She held his gaze, as she always did — that calm, expectant seizing of his attention, waiting for him to say something. But it was she who spoke first. “Don’t bother,” she said, smiling. “Nothing you say will make sense to me. I will never understand anything you tell me. So please don’t speak to me again.”

He stood there for a few moments while she continued to read through the papers. She did not meet his eyes the entire time he delivered the speech he had prepared — about how he was genuinely sorry about what had happened, that it was difficult for C.S. too, that their family was not an easy one to grow up in, that they, too, lived with certain pressures. He had planned a lighthearted joke or two to show his human side, make it seem less painful for her. But the timing was wrong, so he left them out, merely delivering the salient points as quickly as possible: the apology, the finality of C.S.’s decision, the lack of any malice or ill-feeling at all toward her.

As he stood there looking at her on the sofa, the music on the stereo seemed the only thing alive in the concrete space. The late-night bluesy tinkling of the piano made him wish he were somewhere else, in a smoky bar in a cold country, where he would step out into the street and find it snowy and calm, the sky indigo-colored with the promise of dawn.

She was now sitting with her feet up on the sofa, one knee raised, the other stretched out. Her head was still bowed over the papers on her lap, but he noticed, as he was leaving, that she had closed her eyes.

Those expansive qualities of time again: He knew, even then, that those moments would fill the canvas of his memory and seem longer than they actually were. He had once heard Yinghui and C.S. arguing about memory: What we retain in our minds is not necessarily what matters the most, C.S. had said; we are conditioned by our times and the petty pressures of the world we live in to hang on to certain images and feelings, things that are ultimately trivial. The passage of time exaggerates these fragments of memory, he said, accusing Yinghui of being juvenile and girly. If you pine for a long-lost love years later, he argued, it is just sentimental fluff, not really love at all. But Yinghui had not agreed. If someone really matters to you, if you really really love them (she’d clenched her fists as she said this, holding them tightly under her chin as if grasping something precious), the memory of that person would always be true and clear; she didn’t care if people thought she was soppy.

“Hello, sir, what are you thinking about? Your eyes have gone blank,” Yanyan said as she finished the last of the red-bean ice cream, her spoon scraping against the cardboard tub. “I hope you’re not dreaming of that stupid building. If you ask me, it’s a wreck and you were lucky you didn’t buy it. Fate was kind to you.”

Justin eased the phone from his pocket and looked at it cradled in the palm of his hand.

“Oh, I see, it’s that woman you were telling me about. Are you going to call her back?”

“I don’t know.”

Yanyan stood up and yawned. “Just remember, women don’t hang around waiting forever, you know.”

Long after Yanyan had left, Justin remained sitting on the steps, staring at the empty street and the recently planted sycamore saplings, each one supported by a low wooden tripod. In the distance he could just make out the tops of the towers of Pudong. There were faint trails of summer clouds around the peaks of the buildings, visible only because the light from the towers made them glow white against the night sky. The view had not changed since he’d arrived in Shanghai, Justin thought: It was comforting in its predictability. He liked that there were things in the world that never altered their form or habit; that way, he could measure himself against them and would always know where he stood, would always know if he was moving or rooted, like those silent, immutable buildings.