“How charming he is,” Lotus said, once he was out of earshot.
“Yes, but don’t you also find that he’s not all there with you?” Jade took another sip of her whiskey. “His story for instance. It’s like he wasn’t telling it for us, not really. He’s told that story to anyone who asks. He doesn’t really care about us knowing, ultimately. Why are you smiling? Am I too cynical?”
“I’m smiling because I love you so dearly. My oldest friend.” Lotus embraced Jade with one arm.
“But do you agree? Don’t you think I’m right?” Jade was thinking of the story of the owl HanChol had told. He’d always made her feel that he was telling that story only for her. He’d wanted to be understood by her. She missed him terribly.
“Yes, you are right. But you were always pickier with men. Oh, listen, Jade!” They both stopped speaking; it was Lotus’s record that was put on the gramophone. The poet-owner waved at them from across the room. Couples were starting to get up and dance, as if the music had awakened them from sleep like enchanted people in a fairy tale. The liquid light of the lamps spilled over them and their shadows whirled around the walls.
“I’m so glad you brought me here.” Lotus put her head on Jade’s shoulder. “You know, President Ma doesn’t love me and hasn’t for a long time. He doesn’t even pretend to love Sunmi—a fourth daughter and a bastard at that, when he’d really wanted a son. I’m pretty sure too that he’s been sleeping with that whore of a secretary.” Lotus actually hadn’t thought about the last part, but once she’d spoken it out loud she knew it had to be true.
“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.