Little Reunions by Eileen Chang

Author:Eileen Chang [Chang, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681371283
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2017-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

5

JUST WHEN she thought her torment was over, he reappeared. She didn’t ask him why he had not come to see her for so many days. Later he confessed, “At the time I thought if it really couldn’t work out then I should just forget about it.” She smiled, a little dazed.

On another occasion he said, “I thought if you turned out to be a fool, we wouldn’t have a future.”

Before that he had said more than once, “I think it will be hard for you.” Which was to say it would be difficult for Julie to find someone who’d love her.

“I know.” Julie smiled. Actually, she wanted him to leave.

In Hong Kong she had once said to Bebe, “I’m afraid of the future.”

She didn’t say what she feared, but Bebe knew. “Life has to be lived,” Bebe said with a sad smile.

“I can’t stop myself telling people about you,” said Chih-yung cheerfully. “I asked Hsü Heng, ‘Do you think Miss Sheng’s beautiful?’” Hsü Heng was a painter she had met at Hsiang Ching’s place. “And he said, ‘Her disposition is quite good.’ I was furious.”

Julie kept smiling. The searchlight on the other side of the harbor found her. Inside the niche at the temporary shrine she felt the blue mist freeze her from head to toe.

He gave her several albums of Japanese woodblock prints and sat beside her as they looked through them together. When they finished, he once again held her hand and examined it. She suddenly noticed her very thin wrist inside her peacock-blue bell-shaped sleeve. She realized that he was also looking at her wrist and couldn’t help saying in her own defense, “Actually, I’m not usually this thin.”

He paused. “Is it because of me?”

She flushed and lowered her head. All the clichés in old novels flashed through her mind, like “She was unable to raise her head. It felt as heavy as a thousand pounds.” Now she couldn’t raise her own head. Was this really the case, she thought to herself, or was she acting?

He gazed at her for a long moment then kissed her. The peacock-blue sleeves timidly climbed up his shoulders and wrapped around his neck.

“You seem to be very experienced.”

“I saw it in a movie.” She giggled.

This time, and repeatedly, again just like in the movies, he only kissed her on the lips.

He embraced her as she sat on his knees, cheek to cheek. His eyes, so close to her cheek, sparkled like diamond pendants.

“You have piercing eyes.”

“They say I have ‘droopy eyes.’”

Who could have said that to him? She thought it must have been a classmate or a colleague when he was a teacher.

In the silence she could make out a popular love song playing over the radio some distance away. To hear a folksy love song at that moment made them both burst out laughing. It was not the sort of music one usually heard in the upper floors of an apartment building—it belonged in the streets. Yet at that moment, even the hackneyed lyrics sounded profound.

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