Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

They had been going out for over two months, so she had been expecting him to attempt something of this nature anytime now. Even a man with sexual problems surely could not resist her female qualities for this long. It was not that she desired more-intimate relations — she still found him sexually blank, like a page with no words, impossible to read. It was just that all her books had told her that a healthy sexual relationship was the key to keeping your man, and recently she had started to worry that if she did not make him addicted to her feminine charms, he would soon begin to look elsewhere. All the girls at the spa agreed that this was not a good situation. They asked Phoebe whether he had proposed to her yet, whether she had moved in with him — and she realized that up to this point she had not succeeded in obtaining anything from him at all, apart from a few luxury fashion items and expensive meals in restaurants, and these would not support her in old age.

Even though he was not a soul mate, she knew she had to get closer to him, maybe get enough money to buy a car or an apartment or even a lease on a shop where she could start her own business. She would be happy being his concubine; she didn’t care if he had someone else, as long as her future was secure. So she’d begun to drop certain hints, such as leaving her hand on his arm for longer than usual whenever she greeted him and pressing herself closer to his body when they hugged goodbye. Once she pretended to have a small tear in her tights as she got into the car, so that she would be able to lift up the hem of her skirt and expose her thigh. She knew that before long he would find an excuse to get closer to her.

“It’ll only take a few minutes — sorry.” He said it very casually, as if he had really forgotten his phone; his brow was even wrinkled with a worried look, but she could not be fooled so easily.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m not working tomorrow, anyway — it’s Sunday, my day off, remember?”

“Yes, otherwise I would not suggest going out late. I’d make sure you were home in bed early.”

Even though she was a little concerned about how she would respond to his sexual advances, she was excited because it was the first time she was visiting his luxury apartment. They had driven past it once, a discreet eight-story condominium block just south of Xintiandi public garden, which everyone knew to be where rich foreigners lived, especially the single men with large disposable incomes who wanted to be close to Western-style entertainment facilities. When he first pointed it out, she had wondered for a second if he was lying, if he was just a fantasist who made up crazy stories about himself, or, even worse, a fake like her, whose story was entirely believable and yet entirely untrue.

But now, as they drove up to the same address, she could see that her fears were unfounded. They paused at the entry while a pair of security guards hurried out to flank the electronic gates that were opening very slowly. People who lived here lived leisurely lives, Phoebe thought; even their gates open gracefully. As the car passed through, she caught the eye of one of the security guards, a young man barely past his teens. He watched her with wide eyes, a look of admiration and even fear of something he would never be able to obtain. She saw herself through his eyes: the beautiful girlfriend of a millionaire; the kind of expensive, classy woman who strolled in to hotels and restaurants as if blown in by a warm breeze; the kind of woman who would be rude to you without even knowing it, and you wouldn’t mind her rudeness because she was pretty and rich and you were nothing. In the brief moment when she caught his gaze and held it for a heartbeat, then two, she felt a great distance opening up between him and her. It was as if she were perched on the top of a mountain and he was sliding away, down a rocky slope to the river valley below. And when he fell he dragged a part of her with him — as if she were being torn into little pieces. She felt not only a great chasm between them but also separated from herself. She thought, Maybe this boy was her soul mate; maybe he was the one the fortune-teller had spoken of, the romantic person she would spend her life with. She blinked and closed her mind to clear away his image. No, he was not the soul mate she was searching for; he was nothing to her.

The car rolled into the underground parking lot, the tires squealing on the smooth polished concrete floor. As she walked with Walter to the lift, she noticed that even the air was fresh and smelled of flowery perfume, unlike the usual stink of fumes and burned rubber that filled most parking lots. She pressed the “up” button on the lift, but Walter beckoned her over to another, more discreet lift. When the doors opened, she saw it was lined with glossy wood with a natural pattern of small dark swirls. Walter inserted a card into a slot and tapped a few numbers into the code lock, and the doors closed. There were only three floors, marked, “B1,” “G,” then, much higher up, “P.”

Phoebe thought, I am going to a real-life penthouse .

When the doors opened, all she could see was the city arranged in front of her, sparkling, framed by darkness. As they walked into the room, the lights came on automatically, and she saw that the wall of glass stretched the whole length of the apartment. She walked up to it and looked down at the tops of the trees; they looked soft and velvety in the early-summer breeze. There were some people taking their dogs for a late-night walk around the lake in the park. A tiny delicate brown puppy with legs like matchsticks leapt up to a sausage-shaped dog with huge floppy ears and ran circles around it, hopping up and down. Phoebe could not hear the puppy, but she could see that it was yapping as it played. An old couple strolled past, their arms linked at the elbows. The branches of the trees would catch the wind, and as they fanned across the streetlamps, their shadows cast pretty patterns on the pavements, flower shapes that danced and swirled but then disappeared.

Phoebe could hear Walter somewhere else in the apartment, his voice sounding urgent as he spoke on the telephone, a businesslike voice she had not heard from him before. She turned around and began to walk slowly around the huge space. There was barely any furniture in it, just two chairs placed at an angle to each other and, at the far end of the room, a dining table with no chairs. Halfway along there was an aquarium built into the wall, lit with a blue glow. There were no carpets anywhere, no rugs or cushions or anything soft. The clacking noise that Phoebe’s heels made on the floor echoed so loudly that she did not dare to walk quickly. It took her a few minutes to reach the other side of the room, where she paused at the chairless dining table. There was an empty Starbucks cup on it that filled the air with a stale smell, and on the side of the cup was a mark where some coffee had spilled over, like a long brown tearstain. She peered through a door and saw a kitchen that was about three times the size of the room she shared with Yanyan, with a gray floor and cabinets made of smooth steel. There was no food to be seen, no stray plastic bags or washing liquid, just a coffee machine and fridge made of the same cold steel as the cabinets. It reminded Phoebe of some of the factories she had worked in, only much cleaner.

She went back and stood in the middle of the apartment and gazed out at the never-changing view. She thought, If she lived here she would not know where to look. It frightened her to see the city like this, to be reminded of how big it was, how it would never change, how it would only get bigger and bigger. She wished there were curtains or blinds, but, no, there was only the vast expanse of glass, which did not hide anything. She could see Shanghai; Shanghai could see her.