Five Star Billionaire: A Novel (53 page)

She could not remember most of what she’d said, but one or two sentences would come back to her now and then, making her freeze with terror and shame at the things she might have revealed about herself. She recalled saying at one point, “… and my most hated thing of all is when men lie about being married or having a steady girlfriend. If you are already attached, who cares? I can just use you for sexual relations, so why hide it? You think I’ve never experienced casual sex acts with men? Huh! Men always think that women only want love, but do you really think I want love? You truly think I need a man to love me? Hey, big brother, I’m okay by myself, you know.”

She had felt his immobile body next to her, his breathing deep and heavy but steady. By then she had lost her composure, she knew she had. All of what she had learned from her books and practiced over the last nine months in Shanghai had vanished into the early-summer air. She could hear the quality of her voice becoming rough, the coarse nature of her pronunciation creeping through. When she sat up, she felt her shoulders hunch and her back slump, the way lazy girls in rural coffee shops sat while waiting for customers who would never come. She did not have the strength to keep up her perfect posture, so she lay down flat on the bed again. That way at least he would not see the silhouette of a harsh village girl. And she had said, “I only came to this city to find love. I don’t care about the rest; I don’t care about money or handbags or an apartment. All
I want is to find someone who will love me and look after me.” She waited in silence for his response. There was a problem with the automatic dimmer on one of the table lamps—it would light up brightly, casting the room with blinding light, before dimming to near darkness. It really gave Phoebe a sick feeling. Then she realized that his breathing had gotten sharper, noisier. His nose was blocked; he was snoring softly. She got up and turned off all the lights before coming back to bed.

She crept next to him and put her head on his chest. She listened for his heartbeat, which was quick and strong. But then she thought that maybe it wasn’t his heartbeat she was hearing but the pounding in her head, the blood coursing through her temples. She held her breath and tried to locate his heartbeat again, but it was gone—it was like a radio frequency that she had briefly tuned in to but then lost. She could feel only the warmth of his body through his shirt; it was burning, sticky. She realized she was falling quickly into a heavy sleep. It felt as if she were stepping off a cliff, dropping like a stone into warm, dark water.

When she woke up, daylight was flooding the room—the pale golden light in the minutes just after dawn. She found that she had somehow become wrapped up like a steamed dumpling in a blanket, which was gathered around her neck. Walter was asleep on the far side of the bed. His back was turned to her and he was wearing the same clothes as last night. She, too, was fully clothed. She found her shoes on the floor and gathered her handbag before leaving the apartment. She walked for a while before she was able to find a taxi. As the cab sped through the empty streets, she sent Walter a text to say,
Unexpected work call—new business proposal, sorry
. Even though it was very early in the morning, the day was already warm and she could feel the humidity gathering in the air. She wound down the windows of the taxi and thought, Alcohol really gives me a bad feeling.

Not only was she ashamed at her nonclassy behavior (all her books were clear that excessive consumption of alcohol was a huge barrier to attaining feminine elegance), she was also worried about what she had revealed about herself. She had not only lost face, she had lost control. That was the most worrying aspect of the evening—maybe she had given away too many clues that she was a liar and a fake, an illegal immigrant from a poor background and not the sophisticated girl he thought she was. It was so embarrassing to think that she might have divulged her secrets by
accident—she could not be sure of what she had said or how much he had heard. Therefore, she no longer knew how she should behave with him, whether she should be shy or forthright, seductive and sexually wanton, or cool and educated. She spent all her time thinking about it, trying to devise a strategy to cover her lies, but the shame of being revealed for who she really was felt too crushing; it blackened her days completely. Her head felt as if it would explode with all the conflicting thoughts spinning around in her brain.

Of course, her distracted and unstable mood immediately began to affect her work. She tried to hide it, but the other girls noticed her lack of concentration, her fatigue, the way she started nervously every time her mobile phone rang, the way she remained slumped in the office in front of the computer, no longer sitting proudly at the reception or making half-hourly rounds of the spa to check every smallest detail, such as whether the towels had been folded and stacked with the beautiful precision for which their establishment had become famous.

“Phoebe, you must be very tired these days—are you sleeping well?” the girls said. They could not conceal their sly pleasure at her shabby and unprofessional appearance. Once, when she unexpectedly came out to the reception area from the office, she interrupted a whispered conversation between the receptionists: “… and her unwashed hair …” she heard them say, huddled together. When they saw her, they pulled away abruptly and pretended to look through some papers, but they could not suppress their smirks, which remained drawn on their faces even though they had their heads bowed.

Phoebe went straight to the bathroom and locked the door. It was true: Her immaculate styling had evaporated in the heat of the Shanghai summer. Lit by the unforgiving fluorescent bulbs, her complexion looked dry and powdery, her makeup uneven. Her eyes were bloodshot, and when she tried to smile she saw none of her usual radiance, only the beginnings of fine lines along her temples, like the skeletons of frail paper fans. Usually she would go to the salon twice a week to make sure her hair was blown and set exactly as she wanted it, but it was now nearly two weeks since she had been, and the constant heat and humidity that hung in the air had made it flat and damp. Her eyeliner and eye shadow had been applied too thickly. The worst thing was, she didn’t really care.

She tried to reimpose control over the spa. She sat at the reception desk
to make sure that all the girls knew she was still the manager, but somehow it did not work. The girls lounged on the silk-covered sofas normally reserved for clients, drinking tea and gossiping. Once, even when there was a client waiting for her treatment, one of the beauticians sat on the other end of the sofa, chatting loudly to her boyfriend on her mobile phone. Two masseuses walked in with their takeaway lunch, the smell of their noodles overpowering the delicate fragrance of the waiting room. Phoebe watched them as they sat down in the guest waiting area, snapping apart their chopsticks and slurping on their iced bubble tea. She could not find the words to reprimand them or move them away. In front of her, on the smooth granite reception counter, the huge bouquet of flowers was beginning to wilt. The water in the vase was turning murky and a bit slimy. It smelled of blocked drains. It should have been changed days ago, but Phoebe could not be bothered.

The girls said, “Poor Phoebe, she got dumped by her boyfriend.” But they were not sad for her; they were happy because she no longer had a rich boyfriend, because she was now just like them. When she was arranging the bathrobes in the laundry room, she heard someone say, “That’s what happens when you go after rich men.”

She began to stretch her lunch breaks, staying out longer and longer until she was spending almost two hours away from the spa. The pavements were sticky with heat, and even in the shade of her special reflective umbrella she could feel the strength of the sun, burning her everywhere she went. As she walked without direction through the streets, she realized that the buildings she had only recently found fascinating and impressive now looked identical in their silvery blandness. Every road, every alley seemed the same to her, empty and unyielding. Around her, everyone was complaining about the heat. There was no air, they said; Shanghai in the summer is really suffocating; it gives us heatstroke. She went into a shaved-ice drinks store she liked—it gave her a nice cooling sensation as she entered the shop, and it was far enough from the spa that none of the girls would want to walk there in this weather. She was sitting there one afternoon when her handphone rang, startling her. When she checked, there was no voice-mail message, just a text from Boss Leong Yinghui, who on a whim, had visited the spa and was shocked to find it in such a sorry condition, obviously due to Phoebe’s neglect and unprofessionalism. Unless there was a good explanation, Phoebe should not expect to be employed
there much longer. She was leaving for Beijing but demanded a meeting with Phoebe upon her return. She did not sign the message, but there was no need to—only Boss Leong wrote in language so dry and robotic. Phoebe stared at the message … 
should not expect to be employed
 …

But all she could think of was the feeling of dread and sickness that she had experienced when she woke up that morning in Walter’s apartment—the feeling that she had shamed herself and thrown away a golden chance to improve her life status. She could not stop worrying that he now looked down on her.

“You should ring him back,” Yanyan said late that night. She was sitting on the bed eating pumpkin seeds, stopping every few seconds to split one with her front teeth. “That is the only solution. He obviously loves you a lot; he is a really romantic guy.”

“Huh? Romantic? The guy doesn’t even want to kiss me—holding my hand is the highest form of his romantic expression. I want a soul mate, Yanyan, not just some boring … 
practical guy
.”

“In this world, everyone is always looking for something better. Nothing they have is good enough. As soon as they achieve their goals, they want something more. Always more and more and more.”

Hmph, what would you know, Phoebe thought. Yanyan’s last employment was as an office girl in a baby-food company that went bust because its products were full of silicon, and even that was more than a year ago now—she did not have the right qualifications to lecture Phoebe on ambition.

“This is the problem with China these days, everyone is so arrogant,” Yanyan continued. “No one can take criticism anymore. Look at you, willing to sacrifice love because you lost face. He doesn’t judge you; he knows you are a decent person. You behaved like a slut with him and he didn’t even take advantage of you. I don’t know why you think that’s a loss of face. Just ring him.”

Phoebe turned over and closed her eyes, listening to the sharp splintering noise as Yanyan split open the pumpkin seeds one by one before dropping them into an empty tin. She had not told Yanyan that she was probably going to be fired and that soon they would not be able to eat crabmeat dumplings and Australian grapes, that they would be back to where they were before, unable to pay the rent. “You only want me to get back with him so that he can give you concert tickets.”

Yanyan laughed. “Who doesn’t want to hear Chang Chen-Yue live? You’re really crazy. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. Anyway, I think my time in Shanghai is over.”

Phoebe sat up and looked at Yanyan. She was still eating her pumpkin seeds, one by one, like a machine in a factory, each movement identical to the last.

“You’re not joking,” Phoebe said quietly.

Yanyan shook her head.

“But where will you go? To … your village?”

Yanyan nodded.

“But you can’t do that, you said there’s nothing there.”

“What else can I do?”

Phoebe got up and sat on the bed next to Yanyan, watching her thin dry fingers cling to each pumpkin seed. “When you first left your village, when you first went out—didn’t you dream of seeing the world? Didn’t you want to make lots of money and achieve great things?”

Yanyan bit into another seed without answering.

“If you give up now and go back to your village, there will be no dreams, nothing.”

Yanyan picked at bits of shell that had fallen on the bed. She stood up and dusted off her trousers. “Where else am I supposed to go?”

BY THE TIME PHOEBE
reached work the next day, she had decided what to do. She had not slept; all night she had listened to Yanyan’s slow, even breaths. Yanyan did not move at all during the entire night—she lay curled up with one hand resting against her cheek, the other flung out wide as if reaching for an invisible object. Her eyelids did not tremble; her brow was not frightened by nightmares. She didn’t have dreams, Phoebe thought; her life was sheltered from ambition. It was better that way.

As Phoebe walked along the streets of Jing’an, the early-morning sunlight glinted off the mirrored glass windows of the office blocks like daytime stars, and the branches of the plane trees were hanging heavy with heat. The people who ran the small food shops that lined the back alleys were setting the plastic stools outside their stalls, the smell of pancakes and griddled bread filling the air. The streets were already busy with crisscrossing lines of traffic.

She thought, There is no real decision to be made, for true decision requires true choice, and I have no choice.

She arrived at work a whole two hours before the spa was due to open, surprising the cleaning staff, who were halfheartedly sweeping the floor of the reception. One of them was even digging through the bowl of sweets on the counter, trying to find her favorite flavor. Phoebe gave them firm instructions and stood by as they carried out their tasks. She needed the place to return to its usual condition of perfection. Once they had gone, she checked the time—there was still half an hour before the first of the girls would arrive, and since they were never on time these days, it gave her plenty of time to organize herself.

She locked the doors and retreated to the office. The fluorescent strip lights flickered into life row by row as she turned them on and settled down in front of the computer. First she checked the accounts—it was true, the last two weeks had not been healthy; there had been too many cancelations and too few new bookings while she had neglected her duties. But the important thing was that there was still plenty of money in the bank account. They had already started to break even, and there was always cash in the account these days—Boss Leong left it there as a sign of confidence. Good businesses run themselves, she would say in her robot manner. Phoebe wondered which book she’d read that in—it didn’t sound very convincing. Maybe Boss Leong should have bought better books, which would have advised her on personal style and elegance too. If Phoebe were in charge of the business, she would not have left so much money sitting in the bank like that. She would have withdrawn it every week; she would not have trusted the people who worked for her. Phoebe had learned not to place confidence in anyone but herself, and maybe this was the difference between Boss Leong and her. Boss Leong had never been hurt or cheated the way she had. Rich people were always more trusting because they could afford to protect themselves against life. That was why rich people did not suffer.