“I’m afraid he will leave me. Or I think about leaving him. It sounds like two completely different things but the end result is the same—he’d be fine, better than fine, and I’d be destroyed. So I dread both options . . . but I’m so unhappy now. What should I do?”
“You don’t have to stay with him forever,” Jade said, taking her friend’s hand.
“But no one else will ever love me again. I will be an old and abandoned woman, a cast-off mistress.”
“You see that painter, the one who was married to the diplomat.” Jade indicated with her glance at the woman in a crimson velvet dress, who was now dancing with the poet-owner. “She was thirty with four children by the time she was having affairs in Paris and Berlin. You’re only twenty-five and with one child.” The painter whispered something in her partner’s ear and then they threw their heads back in laughter. It was possible to believe that she didn’t care about her ex-husband, or his best friend—her lover—who had also abandoned her.
“And now no one in her family acknowledges her and people jeer at her behind her back. No, that’s not for me.” Lotus sighed. “The luckiest one among us is my sister, right?”
“Right.”
Luna was thirty years old and still as lovely as ever. She had bought herself out of the courtesan guild registry and worked as a secretary at the American consulate. It paid her decently and allowed her to be independent. Her supervisor was besotted with her, but she pretended not to notice. Unlike the two younger women, Luna seemed content to be left alone. Solitude became her like a beautiful coat.
The pretty waitress returned with two glasses of golden-brown liquor. “Cognac, compliments of the gentleman in the corner booth,” she said, pointing with her glance. “Not the officer. The one with the bow tie,” she added. Jade froze when she recognized his face. He was no longer in uniform but still wore the same arrogant smile while studying her from across the room. He said something to his friend, picked up his own glass, and started heading to their table in his confident, quick strides.
18
Rainy Night
1933
“WHY DON’T YOU COME WITH ME? DON’T BE BORING,” COUNT ITO said to Colonel Yamada, putting out his cigarette on the crystal ashtray.
“What is this about? I can’t keep up with your whims.”
“Don’t you have eyes? You can see that there are two women at that table. One of them is quite beautiful, maybe even extraordinary. I actually met her years ago.”
“I don’t understand your fascination with these café girls and prostitutes.” Colonel Yamada smiled coldly, shaking his head. He was on leave from the war in Manchuria and was meeting his brother-in-law for the first time in three years. After the harshness at the front fighting both the Chinese and the Korean armies, the carefree and ignorant ways of Ito and society in general rankled him.
“She’s not a café girl. She’s a movie actress,” Ito countered, already slipping out of the booth.
Ito was one of those men who obsess over a woman and then forget about her quite completely and suddenly. Since walking out of Jade’s dressing room eight years ago, Ito had not thought once about her. That encounter had satisfied his appetite, and he’d found other cravings. Some of that was for other women, but he never was truly interested in women or even people in general. There was always an element of lowering himself when he got too near another person—this, indeed, was why he preferred Yamada, in whose company he felt the debasement the least. Instead of people, Ito liked beautiful objects, ideas, and the empty space between things and ideas. He would have been perfectly happy to slip inside that white void and breathe in the cool, fresh air for the rest of his life.
Occasionally, however, Ito became interested in others almost in spite of himself. Jade had completely changed since the last time he’d seen her. It wasn’t just that she was wearing a Western dress or that she’d cut her hair and curled it with tongs. Even her features looked quite different and somehow more captivating. Yet he’d recognized her by her immutable essence, a certain halo around her physique. He wanted to study her up close.
“It’s been a very long time since we last saw each other,” he said as he sat down next to her in the booth. She glared at him with eyes that seemed even brighter than before. Her friend, fashionably dressed but unquestionably homely, also looked insulted by his overture. He paid her no more attention than to a piece of counterfeit antique.