Braised Pork Read online

‘A glass of the best champagne you have, please,’ she told him.

  ‘This one?’ He opened the menu and pointed it out to her. ‘It comes by the bottle usually. But I can give you a glass. Looks like you’re in a celebratory mood today.’

  ‘Oh, let’s have the whole bottle then!’ She laughed and tapped her finger on the name of the champagne.

  If she were to support herself with her art, she wanted to feel free to walk around her home in an oversized T-shirt, face unwashed, hair trimmed short. Though even there, she imagined someone who would provide her with comfort regardless and bring her food from whichever restaurant she desired in that moment, even if it was on the other side of town. Yes! She would make new memories with someone else, memories that would give her a home and fuel her work.

  Leo returned with the bottle and opened it discreetly, releasing a soft hiss. He poured a glass out for her – cool, golden.

  ‘Do you like art?’ Jia Jia asked.

  ‘I’ve always been more into music.’

  ‘Will you write a song for me then?’ She laughed.

  Usually she was courteous with her laughter, but she wanted to be flirtatious, playful. She could not remember the last time she had expressed herself like this, not with a reaction to something but with an initiation. Leo smiled back to match her. His laugh was almost a chuckle.

  ‘Have you ever written songs for your girlfriends?’ she asked.

  ‘Once, for my most recent ex. But she didn’t like it.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘Well …’ He searched for a succinct way to answer a broad question. ‘She was like a bad hangover.’

  ‘So she gave you a headache.’

  ‘Many. Bad ones.’

  ‘Did you understand her? I mean, did you really understand who she was and why she did what she did?’

  ‘Just because you understand someone doesn’t make them any easier to deal with.’ He placed the bottle in the ice bucket and draped a napkin over it.

  Jia Jia considered that for a moment. ‘I never understood my husband,’ she said.

  ‘Was he a complicated man?’

  ‘Oh, not at all. He grew up in a poor but normal family, worked hard, did well in business, married me, and then died. Sounds like a simple life, right? But I didn’t even understand his simplicity.’

  ‘Is that what you want? Simplicity?’

  ‘I’m not sure any more.’ She took a sip of the champagne. The bubbles were intense at first, like a loud chord at the beginning of a symphony, but almost immediately afterwards, harmony came to the tip of her tongue.

  He gave her a questioning look, requesting an elaboration.

  ‘It’s like I’ve been walking up the walls of a tower my whole life,’ she explained, putting the glass down. ‘My body parallel to the ground, and then, the world turns and I’m standing straight up, and the tower is lying flat on the ground. Everything is now distorted but my head is up again, I’m walking forward. But the truth is, I don’t even know which way is up. Do you understand what I’m getting at? The champagne is good, very good, I must tell you.’

  Before Leo could answer, some other customers walked in, and Jia Jia gestured to him that it was all right to pause their conversation. It was a party of four: two men and two women. Both men wore suits beneath their overcoats, one grey, the other navy; they had taken their ties off after work. The smaller of the women removed her fur coat and revealed a colourful halter top with a low neckline. She was loud. Before she even sat down in her seat, she had announced that she was a lawyer.

  ‘Those boys didn’t have a chance against me,’ she bragged. ‘I don’t care if you’re fighting in front of the club, but if you’re going to punch my friend in front of me, then you’re being foolish. I made sure that the kid got the sentence he deserved.’

  ‘He was pretty young though, right?’ the other woman asked.

  ‘The kid was eighteen. Drove a Maserati.’ She took out a thin cigar. ‘His parents came to apologise and asked to settle. “We’re so sorry, our boy needs to be taught a lesson,” was what they said to me. So I responded, “Perfect, he’s getting the correctional education he needs.”’

  She laughed loudly.

  ‘You should’ve seen their faces!’ she added.

  And then they all laughed and ordered their drinks. Leo returned and quietly asked Jia Jia whether the loud group was bothering her.

  ‘Quite the contrary,’ she whispered back. ‘Let them talk, they’re funny.’

  *

  Jia Jia was still sitting in her seat when the bar closed. The four had left and the woman had never managed to light her cigar. Leo had remained occupied for the rest of the night, concentrating on making his cocktails. Jia Jia would occasionally observe his fingers while he was working: he was quite average-looking, but she found a certain appeal in the way he moved his hands. He must be a committed man, she thought, so dedicated to what he loved to do. His movements looked effortless – the kind of ease that was only attained after years of practice.

  He cleaned up the last table and returned to the counter. Then he moved Jia Jia’s bag and sat on the stool next to her – a surprising act of intimacy from a man who sustained a polite distance from others. Jia Jia turned her stool to face him.

  ‘I’ve finished with the bottle. It’s about time for me to go,’ she said.

  ‘Stay for another drink with me.’ He reached over the counter for brandy and two glasses.

  They drank in silence.

  ‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’ Jia Jia asked.

  ‘You’re like water. Your beauty is soft and quiet.’

  ‘Will you stay with me tonight then? It’ll be a good memory, I think, for us both.’

  The pavement was wet with melted snow and parts of it were freezing over again as the temperature dropped. Leo closed the bar and the two of them walked in the direction of Jia Jia’s apartment. The cleaner air from the day was gone now, and the city hid behind its mask.

  4

  Jia Jia sped up her footsteps as she passed the concierge, leaving Leo trailing behind. The doorman greeted her but she kept her chin slightly tucked into her scarf and did not stop until she was at the lift.

  They were silent on the long ride up. Away from his bar, Leo’s confidence had faded and his demean-our was uneasy. He seemed to be shorter and smaller. Inside the apartment, he slowly removed his coat and held on to it as Jia Jia threw hers on the sofa.

  Sensing his mood, she took his coat with one hand and touched his arm with the other, encouraging him. He responded by pulling her into him as if he could now stop pretending to be timid. She felt her breasts against his chest; his lips reached out to meet hers. His breath tasted like fresh mint and she felt self-conscious that her own probably reeked of alcohol. She did not remember seeing him eat a mint.

  The touch of his hands on her skin seeped into her pores like water. It was as if there was a place inside her that no one had reached before, and it had been shaken awake by this man’s warm embrace. She had never felt such yearning for another person’s body – it was beyond the flesh and the consciousness, it was not merely lust, neither was it love. Perhaps the best way to describe it, she thought, was like being a lone traveller in a desert, exhausted and desolate, when the most beautiful and fruitful peach tree blossomed in front of her.

  But just as Leo lay her down in bed, a wave of guilt broke over Jia Jia. Someone else was invading Chen Hang’s space and she was the only protector of it now. She wanted to ignore the thought, to chase it away, but with her back against the cold silk of the sheets that she had shared with her husband, she felt as though she was cheating on Chen Hang. Leo did not have the same moment of hesitation; he took off his bow tie, his vest, and finally his shirt, but he kept his trousers on, waiting for her to take them off for him. She ran her hands around his hips to his erect penis, all the time avoiding his eyes.

  Everything about Leo made her husband’s presence more tangible. Leo’s skin was fir
mer, his bones were sharper, his hands were bigger. The outline of his body in the dark was strange and alien to her. He removed her trousers before unbuttoning her shirt – the opposite of what Chen Hang would have done. The feeling of him inside her was different. The feeling of her taking him in was different. The way he moved on top of her and the way his muscles tensed were, somehow, all so different.

  Still, she pulled him hard towards her – this stranger who touched a part of her that had been entirely isolated from the world.

  When Jia Jia woke up, Leo was gone from the room. Her first thought was that he had left, but then she heard him in the kitchen. She had wanted some time alone. She quickly washed her face and got dressed, and when she walked into the living room, she saw that Leo had already bought food and was boiling eggs.

  ‘I have eggs in the fridge, you know,’ Jia Jia said.

  ‘I bought other food too.’

  She looked at the clock, it was already past eleven.

  ‘What time do you have to be at the bar to prepare?’ she asked.

  ‘Not until four or five. Nice painting over there.’ He pointed towards the wall behind the sofa.

  ‘Oh,’ she hesitated. ‘Thank you.’

  She was unsure why she chose not to tell him that she was the artist. It was not a piece that she was particularly proud of, anyway. No one had complimented it before – she had only hung it two days ago to replace one that Chen Hang had bought from an art gallery off Rue du Bac in Paris.

  Her painting was of a brown horse on a beach, looking back at something beyond the frame. The beach was muddy and rocky, and the waves were strong. She was never very skilled at making waves look realistic, although it was her favourite scenery to paint. As a student, she had saved up all of her money from her part-time job and gone on a trip to London, where she had spent hours in the National Gallery studying and trying to copy paintings that had waves in them. Still, she could not do it. Not in the way she wanted to, at least. There was something about the movement of the ocean and the semitranslucency of the water that she could not grasp; some balance between mystery and simplicity. After she graduated, she had even gone so far as to spend a week in a Taoist temple to learn about the behaviours of water.

  So she was surprised that someone acknowledged her painting as a good one.

  ‘Who chose the picture?’ Leo asked.

  ‘I did,’ she said.

  ‘I actually don’t really like the ocean,’ he said. He passed over a takeaway bowl of warm soya milk, a bag of fried dough sticks, and a plate of stir-fried lotus roots. ‘There isn’t really a particular reason, just never liked it as a kid.’

  ‘My husband didn’t like water either. He said that it was a dangerous and wild substance. It’s very challenging to paint.’ Jia Jia took a bite of a dough stick and studied her bite mark as she chewed.

  ‘I can imagine.’ Leo hesitated briefly. ‘It must take a lot of practice. An old acquaintance of mine grew up near the coast, his dad is a fisherman. He studied art and paints incredible oceans, so that makes a lot of sense. He’s been in and around water all his life. The guy sucks at everything else he paints though.’

  ‘His dad is a fisherman? He allowed his son to study art?’

  ‘Oh, no, of course not.’ Leo laughed and shook his head at the recollection. ‘His dad told him never to set foot in his house again.’

  Jia Jia’s own father had never opposed her studying art, but neither had he supported it. Worse – he was indifferent. Her father had left her mother when Jia Jia was five years old, and after that, when she lived with her mother and then with her grandmother, he would only invite her out for lunch once or twice a year. When she told him that she had been admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he merely acknowledged it and smiled, and continued to order food from the waitress. He might also have made a congratulatory remark, but it did not matter, because a year or two later, he had forgotten all about it again.

  ‘I went to art school as well,’ she told Leo.

  He walked behind her and touched her shoulders with his hands.

  ‘I overheard you talking about it in the bar once,’ he said.

  Leo’s affection suddenly made her uneasy. The intensity from the night before had faded now, and the contact felt out of place. She quickly finished her breakfast and started going through the post. The monthly maintenance and heating bills had come – the first ones she had received since her husband’s death. The electricity bill was also in the pile. The building’s management must have felt sorry for sending the bills while she was mourning, so they had given them to her two weeks later than the usual date. The payment deadline, though, was still the same.

  She opened up the envelopes and was almost offended to see that the total charges amounted to four thousand yuan. Heating constituted the bulk of it. Chen Hang would complain about spending too much on heating in the winter, but Jia Jia had always insisted on keeping the room temperature warm because she did not like to wear sweaters indoors. He was indignant at being a victim of the smog, too, not so much because of its health implications but because purifiers consumed a lot of electricity and that increased their monthly spending. It was she who had insisted on keeping the purifiers turned up high, and he had not denied her such indulgences.

  Now that he was gone, paying four thousand yuan per month for the rest of the winter meant that Jia Jia really had to start making her own money. Had Chen Hang planned for her to be in this situation? Did he even consider it? Was it madness, her brief sliver of hope that she could support herself with her paintings? She had been out of work for years, lost her contacts, settled into life as the wife of Chen Hang. Perhaps there was nothing that she could do out there.

  Leo must have noticed the concerned look on her face.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said without looking up at him, unwilling to continue the conversation further. She took out a pen and started doing calculations on a separate sheet of paper.

  ‘Do you live around this area?’ she asked Leo as she added the months up, pen scribbling.

  ‘Not in the CBD. It’s too pricey. I live a bit further away, near the embassy area. Still expensive, but—’

  ‘You’re right. I don’t need four bedrooms for myself,’ she said. ‘It’s awfully difficult to clean,’ she quickly added, justifying herself.

  Leo began telling her about the neighbourhood he lived in, but Jia Jia was absent-minded and responded with either short acknowledgements or nothing at all. She turned off the heat and the air purifier and threw on a sweater. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, all the time looking for cheap apartment rentals on the Internet. Eventually, Leo said goodbye and headed to the bar.

  After the door closed behind him, Jia Jia pulled her laptop screen down and felt both relieved and abandoned once again. She thought about what was going on beneath her apartment; what other people were doing with their days. Office workers would be taking their lunch breaks by this time. In the past, Jia Jia would visit Chen Hang near his office and have lunch together with his employees. She had never really enjoyed it – the meals were rushed and the conversations filled with flattery – but now, she almost wanted that again. She missed that sense of routine.

  She picked up the plates Leo had left on the table and began washing them. The ghost faces of the lotus roots glared up at her. Leo had not eaten all the fried dough, unlike her husband who would have finished everything on the table, even if he had not been hungry. No matter how much money Chen Hang made, he never ordered too much food unless it was for business, and when he did over-order, he would make sure to force everything down. With all his wealth, he never felt rich.

  Jia Jia noticed that she smelt like cigarettes and turned on the shower. As she took off her clothes, she saw the plum-sized, greyish, kite-shaped birthmark on her left inner thigh. She had not thought of it with Leo, which was odd, because she never forgot about it. Though Chen Hang had never spoken about this mark,
Jia Jia vividly recalled his expression when he first saw it. As if it were a pothole in the middle of a highway, he had steered his glance around and away from it. From then on, she had tried to cover up the stain with her hand or a piece of clothing every time it was exposed, especially when they were in bed, until after they got married and it became something that was unbearable for her to sustain, so she found sex positions that she thought would better shield the imperfection from her husband. She had pleaded with him to try them with her, pretending it was for her own pleasure.

  She dug her fingernails into the birthmark as she closed her eyes and retraced Chen Hang’s body with her mind, from his balding head, to his flat nose, to the hair below his navel, and to all that she had tried so desperately to please. To her surprise, she could barely remember his naked body any more, only the ugliness of it in that bath. Her thoughts returned to Leo, relieved that he had not turned on the lights the night before. She could almost convince herself that the distorted, dark patch of skin on her leg would not matter to him, that maybe, if he was the one holding her, it might even fade and disappear. She could not say why, he just seemed like the kind of man who healed, rather than wounded.

  5

  Jia Jia visited Leo’s bar less often through December; she had to save her money. The few times she did go, she spent the night with Leo. Occasionally, he would stay for the day too, but mostly, he left after breakfast. Jia Jia’s intense craving for his body continued to consume her each time, as if this empty cup of hers would never fill up.

  She had not been able to move out of the apartment since the night she had fallen into the dark sea. On days when she did not see Leo – most days – she drank at home and stayed awake until dawn, waiting for it to appear again. She could not forget the deep waters and the little silver fish – did it have some connection to the fish-man? She thought that she would have to be alone to see the water again, but even when Leo was not there, the apartment did not transform and all she could feel under her feet were the stubborn wooden floors that she had picked out from an Italian vendor. She tried everything: wearing the same two-piece pyjama set that she had had on; putting the fish-man sketch on the floor. But nothing happened. Apart from staying in and waiting, she could not think of anything else to do.