Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (51 page)

“You see, we managed to get through an entire dinner without even once talking about our project,” Walter said.

“Yes.” Yinghui laughed.
Our
project. That’s what he had said; she liked the sound of it.

“You didn’t always want to be a businesswoman, did you?” Walter asked, pouring himself some water. “I mean, when you were a child.”

“Is it that obvious?” Yinghui smiled. “I wanted to be a doctor working in Africa, or an anthropologist. I really
really
wanted to be a vet at one point. And then when I was a bit older, in my late teens, I thought I would be a charity worker in India.” It was the truth, but it seemed comical to admit this now—which was why she was confessing it. “What about you? Let me guess—carpenter?”

“Wrong” he said, smiling. “Actually, it was pretty obvious to me from quite a young age what my life would involve.”

“Oooo, that sounds soooo deep.” Yinghui’s laughter rang out more loudly than she had expected; the restaurant was empty now, the waiters hanging around by the bar, pretending to wipe down the wineglasses. Through the window, the roofs of the pavilions in the Forbidden City were lit against the powder-black sky, the eaves curling gently toward the heavens.

“And your parents,” he continued, “were they encouraging in your quest to become Mother Teresa?”

Yinghui looked into her empty glass. “I guess.” She sensed a sudden change in the tone of his voice, a sharp, probing edge that caught her off-guard.

“Meaning?” he asked.

“Meaning, sort of.”

She should have expected that the conversation would take a turn this way—after all, they were talking about themselves, so it was entirely natural for him to ask about her family. If she felt a sudden deflating of her energies, it was because she was disappointed in herself—annoyed that she should still feel closed to the subject and defensive about the past.

“What about
your
parents?” she said as brightly as she could manage. “Were they encouraging of your business ventures?”

“They died before I accomplished anything,” Walter replied matter-of-factly. “I lost my mother when I was an infant. My father died when I was quite young—about nineteen.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He looked at her for a while, holding her gaze until she felt uncomfortable and looked away. “Don’t be,” he said. “Life doesn’t treat all of us equally, does it?”

At Yinghui’s suggestion, they decided to have another glass of champagne instead of dessert—she needed a way to cheer up for the remainder of the night—and when they finished, they decided to go for a stroll, skirting across the vast perimeter of Tiananmen Square and aiming vaguely for the outer waterways of the Forbidden City. The air was much drier here than in Shanghai, and Yinghui’s skin began to feel cracked and brittle. The pavement was crunchy underfoot with a layer of gritty dust, and when a breath of wind occasionally swept along the avenues, it carried an imprint of warmth, even though it was late at night. The cheery banter they had fabricated over dinner had crumbled away now, and it felt once more as if they were trying to bridge a void between them.

As they walked along the silent stretch of water under the feathery reaches of the overhanging willow trees, Yinghui moved close to Walter, hoping that their physical proximity would make it easier for him to reach out and and take her hand. It was a gesture of desperation, she knew, trying to establish physical closeness in order to replace a widening emotional gap, but it would reassure them nonetheless, she thought. The water appeared black and utterly still in the dark, but on the surface there were flecks of dust and froth that glimmered in the night light. There were old men sitting passively with their fishing rods poised over the water, motionless as statues. Even though it was nearly midnight, there were small groups of people playing
xiangqi
, sliding the chess pieces across grid-patterned paper laid out on the paving stones. Young lovers wandered slowly in the dusky moonlight, pausing now and then to peer into the water—just as Yinghui and Walter were now doing.

Yinghui felt Walter’s hand brush hers as they walked; his pace had slowed to a stroll, as if he wanted to speak and did not wish to be hurried.
They came across a small stone bench and paused to sit down. He looked her in the eye. She thought maybe he was going to kiss her now. But instead he said, “Is it true that your father was murdered?” His voice was clear and insistent; the question seemed to hang in the air, refusing to budge until it was met with an answer.

“I guess it’s not the sort of thing one can keep secret forever.”

“Yes, someone told me,” he said calmly—too calmly, she thought, as if he had been waiting for an opportunity to bring up the topic. “There was a scandal. I remembered the incident—it was all over the papers at the time. There were photos of you and your mother too.”

“Yup, that was my dad. That was us.” She felt a numbness settling over her, the urge to answer in grunting monosyllables until he changed the subject. It had been so many years since she had thought about it; she didn’t even know what to say now. “I hate the way people say it was a scandal, as if he had anything to do with it.”

“Mmm,” Walter said, waiting for her to go on.

She felt the weight of his expectation for answers growing with each second, a sense of shame replacing the numbness. But what was she ashamed of? She had done nothing wrong. And yet she could not shake the rising humiliation she was experiencing.

“I suppose you don’t want to do business with me now—and I guess that’s why you were hesitant about taking the plunge. You thought there might be something
wrong
with me. Don’t worry, you won’t be the first to do so. Funny how people don’t like trouble even when it’s long gone. You get into trouble and everyone avoids you forever, even though you’ve done nothing wrong. It must be an Asian thing. Shame, loss of face, that sort of shit. Someone fucks your life up and somehow the shame becomes yours.”

Walter put his arm briefly around her shoulders before withdrawing again. “The business side of things is fine, don’t worry. I’m just interested to hear about your past, that’s all.”

The closeness of his body—the unexpected weight of his arm, the slight sour notes in his breath—made her breath quicken; the warm, witty responses she might have come up with in a similar situation suddenly felt choked in her throat. She closed her eyes, and the first image that came into her mind was of Shanghai, of driving home at night along the Bund section of Zhongshan Lu after a long day’s work, tired but glowing with satisfaction. The lights of the skyscrapers in Pudong would be off now, but
there would still be light coming off the river, and a breeze too, which would ruffle the surface of the water and make it choppy; in the summer months, when she drove along with the windows down, alone, the wind that eddied and swirled in the car would be soft and reassuring, with whispers of the tropics. She wished she were back in Shanghai, back in her comforting routine; she did not want to be in this arid northern city anymore.

“I just wanted you to feel comfortable with me,” he continued. “You do trust me, don’t you?”

She nodded again, allowing herself to rest more heavily against him. They remained this way for a while, awkwardly poised against each other, their elbows, shoulders, and hands seeming to get in the way, their bodies never able to gain greater proximity, no matter how hard she tried to maneuver herself.

“So,” he said after a time, “what happened?”

What happened—Yinghui thought for a moment. It was so long ago, maybe she had forgotten. It was so long ago, she had traveled so far, changed so much, changed completely; maybe she no longer remembered what happened. But, no—it was all still there, playing in a never-ending loop in the background of her life every day, like an insidious TV ad that gets into your head and refuses to go away. It had accompanied her every second of her day and night, she realized now, and though in the bright light of her office she had been able to banish it to the shadows, it had remained there, ready to announce itself at any moment.

Of course she could remember what happened. Of course she could remember arriving at her parents’ that Sunday evening, after a day tidying up and taking stock at Angie’s. It had been a quiet day at the café—Sundays always were, but that day was even more so because her friends had begun to distance themselves from her following her father’s court case, as if the shadows of suspicion that continued to hover over her family might somehow infect them like a virus if they continued to hang out with her. She had had an argument with C.S.; they’d been having quite a few of those of late, disputes that seemed more profound and troubling than their usual squabbles. They’d always been a tempestuous couple, and fierce debates were part of the way they expressed their passion for each other; it was their way of showing commitment to their relationship.

They had not argued this time about Milosz or the illusion of free
democracy—that kind of argument felt as if it belonged to a much distant past—but about something much more bourgeois. It was so petty, Yinghui had thought at the time, but she couldn’t help herself; it had seemed so important. They had gotten engaged on a trip to India the previous month—bought each other rings in Udaipur and exchanged them on the banks of Lake Pichola. They had treated themselves and spent an extravagant night at the Lake Palace hotel, marooned on an island in the midst of a teeming city—it was as if they would always be alone in their couple-dom, and they loved that feeling. But now he was dragging his heels, refusing to tell anyone about the engagement—hiding it, in fact, by making jokes to their friends about being engaged. “
Ya
, look at me, I never notice pretty girls now, because I’m pretty much engaged, aren’t I? Ha-ha.” She couldn’t say, in front of all their friends, Yes, you are engaged. And then, just that day, he’d said to his brother and some friends, “Marriage is a disgraceful institution; it forces people into an unthinking and unquestioning social arrangement. I’d never do it.” She’d laughed along at the time, made it seem as though it were one of his witty jokes. But afterward, when they were on their own, she asked him if he’d meant what he said. To which he’d replied:

“Don’t ask me such dumb questions.”

“What do you mean by that?” she retorted.

“I mean don’t be so damn boring. Marriage, marriage, marriage—that’s all you talk about these days. You’re turning into one of those boring women you’ve always hated.”

The argument got worse: She accused him of a lack of commitment, of being ashamed of her. He accused her of being a pre-feminist woman, which enraged her. He left her in the stockroom, holding her clipboard in front of a stack of organic kidney beans. After he left she stood there for a while, listening out for the front door in case he came back, but all she could hear was the low murmuring of the chiller cabinets.

When she arrived at her parents’ house, she was almost grateful for the routine that lay ahead of her—the disjointed conversation around the dinner table, with her mother fussing over the price of food or the lack of time she’d had to prepare dinner that day, and her father nodding in agreement like an automaton. Sometimes he would refer to his life in the past tense, as if resigning from his job had meant the end of time for him.
I was
quite a sporty fellow. I liked Penang a lot, nice atmosphere
. But Yinghui did not mind; it would allow her to do the same, to rest in her own thoughts and be present without actually participating. Her parents wouldn’t notice the absent look on her face, nor would they see the obvious signs of fatigue—the dark puffy circles around her eyes, the pinched smile, the worn fingernails that she had been nibbling constantly.

Her mother was just dishing out some lotus-stem soup (“The stems are so small nowadays; remember when they were so fat and cheap?”) when the doorbell rang. The neighbor’s dog started to bark, a monotonous
oof-oof-oof
that betrayed little interest—the same call it made when the postman came around on his scooter every morning. It was a fat, pampered German shepherd that ate boiled chicken and long beans for lunch—it wasn’t there to guard against anything. It barked for a few seconds as the doorbell rang again, but then the dog fell silent. Yinghui didn’t stir from her thoughts—she’d grown so accustomed over the years to her father having late-night meetings on governmental matters, men calling late at night for a friendly drink to discuss the week’s developments at work, her father keeping unsociable hours. At that precise moment, she was thinking: What if she broke off her engagement with C.S.? What if she broke up with him altogether? That would take him by surprise.

“Who’s that?” her mother said, looking up at her father. She dipped the ladle into the soup; Yinghui watched the thin circles of oil separate into little greasy pearls on the surface of the cloudy broth. “So late at night. On Sunday, to boot.”

Her father looked in the direction of the door. He did not seem surprised. “I don’t know.”

Yes, Yinghui thought, she would break up with C.S. He would not be expecting that at all.

“Darling, don’t go out,” her mother said.

“
Aiya
, don’t worry,” her father said, laughing.

“Darling, be careful.”

Yinghui thought: What if she just suddenly announced to her parents, there and then, that she was going to break up with C.S.? Would they be pleased? They had never been very keen on him. But how would they feel about a daughter who, approaching marriageable age, split up with a boy she’d practically lived with for nearly six years?

Her mother was looking out the window, soup ladle still in her hand. “So dark outside,” she said. “Can’t see anything.” She returned to the table and continued to dish out the soup.

The thought of breaking up with C.S. had given Yinghui a few moments’ exhilaration, but it evaporated as soon as it had appeared, and suddenly she was alone with her doubts again. She could not break up with him, could not imagine a life in KL without him. If ever it happened, she would have to move a million miles away, retrain as an astronaut so that she’d never have to inhabit the same planet as C.S. Tomorrow she would patch things up with him. She would go to the café as usual, and he would appear, just before opening time, with a bouquet of flowers, which is what he always did after a fight. Once, he’d appeared bearing a bunch of roses and a first edition of
Lolita
, with a note saying,
If I had a nymphet, it would be you
.