World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (26 page)

“No, but I gathered that it was a pick-up place.”

“But I don't understand,” I said. “If she was going to do that sort of job again, why didn't she come back to the Nam Kok?”

Rodney was about to say something but changed his mind. He dropped his eyes and said with a careless shrug, “I couldn't tell you.”

Just then there was a crackle from the loud-speaker on the wall, and a woman's voice requested all passengers on the Pan-American flight for Bangkok, Rangoon, and Calcutta to proceed to the Customs. Rodney got up, hitching the airbag over his shoulder. “All right, good-by, Bob.”

I said, “Rodney, are you sure you don't know why she didn't come back to the Nam Kok?”

“I just told you I didn't know, Bob.”

“I just wondered.”

“I'm sorry you should think I'm a liar.” He turned away but then hesitated. “Oh, what the hell, anyway. If you want to know, it was because of you that she didn't go back.”

“Because of me?”

“She'd heard that you were having an affair with Betty Lau. She didn't like it.”

“I see. Thanks for telling me, Rodney. So now we're both in the same boat.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she now despises me, too.”

“Of course she doesn't,” he said quickly, almost jealously, as if being despised was an honor that he could not allow me to share. “If that's all it was, she'd have gone back. No, don't worry, she's crazy about you. I'm the only one she despises.”

“Well, if you insist,” I laughed. “I don't want to spoil your fun.”

I held out my hand to him. He ignored it, his eyes hostile again. “I don't think I like that remark, Bob.”

“Rodney, come off it. I was only—”

“That was a very, very nasty remark, Bob. And I'm sorry you made it, because I thought I was leaving behind a friend in Hong Kong—just one friend. But evidently I was mistaken.” He turned abruptly and disappeared through the door into the Customs.

I smiled grimly to myself. No, of course, I thought, he couldn't have gone away thinking he'd left behind a friend. His self-pity was a jealous mistress. It wouldn't allow him any friends.

I went outside and stood at the wire-mesh fence, and when the passengers came out of the building and started across the tarmac to the aircraft I called “Rodney!” and waved, to give him the option of a friendlier memory to take away; but although several passengers turned their heads, Rodney did not look round. He continued doggedly towards the aircraft. I waved again as the aircraft took off, in case he was watching from a window. It climbed steeply, circling at the same time, and flew back parallel to the Hong Kong water front, its shadow following it across the harbor like a swift skimming fish. I watched until it was out of sight. Then I took the bus back to Kowloon to look for Suzie.

II

There were many pick-up bars round Nathan Road and I went first to one called the Windmill. I had been to a cinema to pass the time, because nothing happened in the bars until the evening, and it was now seven o'clock. The Windmill was a poky little place with a dozen cramped glass-topped tables, with cheap cruets on the tables and a blackboard on the bar counter chalked with the prices of fried fish, eggs-and-bacon, eggs-on-chips. A gramophone played with tinny desperation. Two soldiers and a bored-looking Chinese girl sat at a table in gloomy silence as if waiting for something to happen. There were no sailors in Kowloon. It was out of bounds to matelots, who had to seek their enjoyments on the Hong Kong side, and reserved as the playground for soldiers stationed out in the New Territories.

The girl watched me as I sat down. She caught my eye and gave me a discreet smile of complicity, like a wife's smile to her lover when tied to her husband's side, because there was nothing doing with the soldiers. A minute later she excused herself to the soldiers and came over, now with a smile which contained about the same mixture of the friendly and the professional as the smile of the air hostess outside the Air Terminal this afternoon. I supposed that their jobs called for many of the same qualities; only the bar hostess did not get a uniform thrown in, and had to go on being nice to amorous patrons beyond the point at which the air hostess was expected to draw the line.

“I'm looking for a girl called Suzie,” I told her. “There's no Suzie working here?”

She shook her head, but said that at the O.K. Club, where she sometimes worked if business at the Windmill was slack, there was a new girl who had started only two weeks ago; and though she could not remember the new girl's name for certain, she thought it was Suzie. Yes, now it was coming back. Yes, she was sure it was Suzie.

I suspected that this recollection came only from her anxiety to please, but since the O.K. Club was near by I went there next. It was bigger than the Windmill and at the bar counter half a dozen girls stood idle. I sat down, and three came up at once with stiff false smiles. The others hovered just behind as alternative choice, with the same false bright smiles and their eyes all ready to be caught like the eyes of auctioneers. I explained my mission, and on the discovery that I was not after all a prospective client they abruptly shed their professional manner, and relaxed, and were no longer stiff automatons who at the press of the right button would mechanically smile, catch your eye, take off their clothes, lie down on a bed, but quite nice human ordinary girls. I asked them about Suzie and there was a shaking of six heads; and then I asked which of them was the new girl, and one of them answered, “Me—my name is Lulu.”

I burst out laughing, and the six little painted Chinese faces stared at me in perplexity.

“You must be Monday Lulu,” I said.

I told them about Wednesday Lulu and Saturday Lulu at the Nam Kok; and when I explained the reason for the choice of days there was such a twittering of laughter behind hands, such blushes, that one might have taken them for a bunch of little virgins. Then they put their heads together over the problem of finding Suzie. They were very anxious to help because they were all romantic, perhaps more romantic than most girls owing to the anti-romantic nature of their professional love-making; and there was nothing more romantic than a man looking for a certain girl and refusing to settle for any other. One of them fetched pencil and paper, and I wrote down the names of bars while they stood round ransacking their brains. Then a second list had to be made, with the names in convenient order for me to visit; and this completed, I set out for the topmost on the list under the escort of Lulu, who had insisted that by myself I should never find it. She took me to the entrance, said good-by on the pavement outside, giggled “Monday Lulu!” behind her hand, and scuttled away.

I went into six or seven more bars. They were all small, each with only a few girls and soldiers, and not attached to hotels like the Nam Kok. The girls were paid commission on the drinks bought them by the soldiers, so-called cocktails that were neat Coca-cola but the price of neat gin; and sometimes the soldiers would take them round to some near-by hotel. In one bar I waited for half an hour while a girl called Suzie was fetched from outside, only to be confronted by a girl about four feet tall and fatter than any Chinese I had ever seen. Her body was perfectly spherical, and surmounted by another smaller sphere that was her head, while from the sleeveless armholes of her cheongsam extended the exuberant rounded flesh of her arms, with creased joints at the wrists like a doll's, and then plump miniature hands covered with rings. She gave the impression that she had been blown up with a bicycle pump, and that with another blow she would have burst. She looked about forty. She also had a very nasty temper, and was not at all pleased at being disturbed for a false alarm, and I left her giving the manager a piece of her mind. Outside I took a rickshaw, because by now I was footsore after so much tramping around—and it was at the next bar that my search came to an end.

It was called the Happy Room, and was the smartest place I had yet visited. It was like a small night club, with dance floor, alcove tables, and subdued rose lighting. Not more than two or three tables were occupied, and one of these only by waiting girls, and two girls dancing together were in sole possession of the dance floor. I sat down and a girl came over; and when I asked her my usual question she said, “Yes, there is a girl called Suzie here.”

“Suzie Wong?” I said, remembering the time I had waited at my last port of call before the little blown-up football bladder of a Suzie had appeared.

“Yes, Wong Mee-ling. She is out at the back playing mah-jongg with the other girls—it is so quiet tonight, it is terrible. I will fetch her.”

She went out through a velvet-curtained doorway. A minute or two later the gramophone behind the bar began to play “Seven Lonely Days,” the perennial favorite at the Nam Kok which Suzie and I had come to regard as our signature tune, and which I could not hear without being swamped by nostalgic memories. It was too improbable to suppose that it was being played now only by chance, and I was certain that Suzie must have requested it; and I was filled with happy relief, for she would not have made this sentimental gesture unless she had been glad to hear I had come.

Then she appeared. She paused for a moment, holding up the velvet curtain; and although she was visible only in silhouette, against a dirty backstage brick wall lit by a single naked bulb, her very outline, with the hair loose on her shoulders, and the curves of her waist and hips, was so familiar that it instantly brought her as close as if she had already walked into my arms—and I was overwhelmed by a flood of emotion beyond all my expectations for this moment of reunion.

She came into the room, dropping the curtain behind her and shutting off the bleak little passage, the damp-stained bricks. She could not see me in the subdued light. She paused again, looking round. I stood up and caught her attention. She came slowly across the dance floor.

“Hullo, Suzie.” She stood stiffly without speaking and I was suddenly no longer sure of her mood, no longer sure that “Seven Lonely Days” was being played at her bidding. And to reassure myself, I said, “Listen, our signature tune.”

She cocked her head a little, listening. She had not even noticed it. And now that she did so, she was indifferent. It had been a coincidence after all.

She said coldly, “Why you come here?”

“Suzie, sit down, and then we can talk properly.”

She hesitated, then sat down stiffly and tentatively on the edge of the seat. Her face was indistinct in the roseate gloom, but I guessed from her mood that it was expressionless, and her eyes watchful, secretive, betraying nothing of her thoughts. The waiter came up and asked what we would drink, and Suzie shook her head; but I ordered a cocktail for her, and a San Mig for myself.

“A bit of Coca-Cola won't do you any harm,” I said.

She said, “Why you come here?”

“Because I've missed you, Suzie. You've no idea how much I've missed you.”

“Why you lie to me? You have got some girl friend to keep you company, haven't you?”

“You mean Betty Lau?”

“I don't know,” she said, her pride demanding the pretense. “I only just heard you had some girl with you. I never heard her name. I didn't care. It doesn't bother me if you have a girl.”

“Suzie, that's all rubbish about Betty.”

“It wasn't rubbish, what I heard. And I think it was that girl I heard about: yes, I remember now, it was that Canton girl. I heard she was your regular girl friend.”

“She was nothing of the kind. It's quite true that she came to my room once, because I was terribly lonely after you'd gone away, and I couldn't work, and I knew she was about the only girl who wouldn't refuse me out of loyalty to you. But it was awful. I hated every moment of it. And she's never been inside my room again.”

“Why you tell me so many lies?”

“I'm not telling you lies, Suzie.”

“Yes! Lies! You always wanted that Canton girl. I remember you told me once, ‘That Canton girl excites me very much. She is very sexy, that girl. I go nearly mad with excitement when I see that show-off way she walks!'”

“I didn't put it quite like that,” I said. “Anyhow, I was out of my mind, because it was like going to bed with a sack of rice. And now I can't even look at that waggling walk. It makes me quite sick.”

“Then why you keep her for girl friend?”

“I don't, Suzie.”

“Yes. Everybody tells me you keep her.”

“And so that's why you didn't come back to the Nam Kok?”

She hesitated. Then she lifted her face, so that although I could not see her eyes I knew they were fixed on me boldly, and said, “Yes, all right. That is why. I was too ashamed to go back. I would lose too much face. I would sooner die than go back to the Nam Kok.”

The waiter came with the drinks. He put the cocktail glass in front of Suzie, with an olive on a stick in the dark red liquid to make it look more like a cocktail, and filled the beer glass from the bottle of San Mig and put the glass and bottle in front of me, and went away.

“Suzie, please listen to me for a minute,” I said. And I told her again about Betty, and about my feelings for her, and about her pretense that I was still her boy friend, until I had made Suzie understand that I was speaking the truth. But it seemed to make no difference.

“All right, I believe you,” she said, her tone no warmer than before. “There, are you happy now?”

“No, I'm not, Suzie—not while you're still bristling at me like a hedgehog. And I don't feel very happy about you working here, because you can't be making much money.”

“Today is Friday. It is only empty because it is Friday.”

“Is it much better on other nights?”

“Yes, some nights it is very busy. I get plenty of money. I get I don't know how much just from drinks, without even going to a hotel.” She realized that her voice had lacked conviction, and added, “Anyhow, I saved plenty of money from that butterfly man. I saved nearly two thousand dollars.”