“But, Auntie, you know Hong GilDong just came out and it’s a hit. And last fall, the remake of One Lucky Day. It’s been only six years since the original, did they have to make a new one already?” Jade said, picking at her breakfast of pine nut porridge. “It sold out every night for almost six months.”
“That’s because it’s a talkie. People are mad for anything new. Your studio should have foreseen that. Can’t you talk to them?”
Dani folded her newspaper in half and looked up at Jade as though nothing could be simpler. Despite the trauma of her arrest and her heartbreaks, Dani didn’t understand defeat. To her, failure was like stockings with holes: it could happen to anyone, but if you allowed it to show in public then you were to blame. Taking care to contain and discard your failures was as much a matter of good manners as high principles. It was a kind of cool, aristocratic sensibility that made Dani a better role model than a friend. So Jade hadn’t been able to talk about her studio’s bankruptcy or her dwindling savings at thirty, the precise age at which she was supposed to be wealthy and independent, because her value as a woman had reached its logical expiration.
The only person who would understand her predicament was Lotus. Even though they hadn’t seen each other in months, Jade was certain that her friend would make her feel better. They would laugh about the old days, their girlhood dreams of becoming celebrated courtesans, the many handsome and rich lovers they were each supposed to have by this age. She even felt that they could take this moment of vulnerability to renew their friendship and plot out the future, whatever that may be. For all her faults, Lotus had always had an inspiring appetite for life. Whereas others thought of the world as a vast insidious sea or some such field of battle, Lotus took the approach that it was all just a game or a basket of fruits—to be played and to be tasted. That was her virtue—and she often had the effect of transferring her attitude to whoever was around her. Her thoughts thus gathered, Jade put on her hat and started walking toward Lotus’s house.
It was a lovely day, hot in the sun and cool in the shade, and she strolled on the road half dappled with shadows of the storefronts. People were ambling along, students were just getting out of school and flocking to the sweets shop. Delivery men whipped past on their bicycles. Light danced off the glass windows of the department store, and pasted on its walls were posters for new talkie films and singers. There were tables displayed outside the bookstore and she stopped here to leaf through the titles. These were mostly novels and periodicals, and in one literary magazine she found some names she knew from Café Seahorn. She flipped to a random page and found an illustration by the painter in the crimson velvet dress. It was not a drawing of women’s liberation and free love, which she was known for, but a painting of a little girl wearing a yellow headband, entitled Daughter. Jade closed the magazine and kept walking.
When she reached Lotus’s house, an unfamiliar housekeeper answered the door.
“Is your mistress home?” Jade asked.
“She hasn’t been home for the past three days,” the old woman replied grudgingly, as though Jade had asked the most inconvenient question.
“What do you mean, she hasn’t been home?” Jade frowned, walking in without being told. Looking around her and calling for her friend, she opened Lotus’s bedroom door. A faint ambiguous smell that she’d first detected in the hallway rushed over her like a wave. The room was empty, but that odor—floral and musky like young girls’ clothes just taken off, still warm with body heat—reminded Jade of the last time she’d visited Lotus. It had been a warm spring day, but Lotus had insisted on staying under a thick winter comforter as they talked.
“I want to go out somewhere fun, like we used to in the old days,” Lotus had said then. “But not today. Today I feel tired.”
“Okay, we’ll go out as soon as you feel better, I promise,” Jade had said, and Lotus smiled and grasped her hand. More than anything else, it was that lopsided smile that broke Jade’s heart. Lotus had grinned so much as a child, even while her mother and older sister treated her with disdain. There had been beauty in her innocence—Jade could only recognize that now, as a woman.
The housekeeper was waiting for her in the hallway with a look of annoyance. Jade suppressed the urge to yell and said as calmly as possible, “Did she say where she was going?”
“Not a clue, miss.” The old woman shrugged. “She wasn’t in her right mind for a while, as you know.”