She said, “No, not like this.” He’d never spoken to her the way he had this night, nor had he ever looked at her this way, though how would he know that—he couldn’t see his own expression. Then she added that he’d never kissed her and caressed her the way he had this day. She knew he might misunderstand, might think she was trying to shrug off responsibility.
He held her tighter, until she was gone. She wondered what kind of wretch she was. When newly engaged to Glen, her passion for her ex-husband had flared. Could she only find satisfaction within the wreckage of a ruined relationship? Why was it only at this moment she saw clearly that she’d never stopped loving Jianjun? One man wasn’t enough for her, would never be enough. She’d always need to weave tangled, complex webs of emotion, jumbling the respectable and the unseemly, the open and the secret. Jianjun had swapped places with Glen, becoming the lover to be occasionally enjoyed. This thought alone was bizarre enough to set all her senses tingling. The feeling was amazing, flowing smoothly to the tip of every hair.
She started pulling on her clothes. Jianjun got up to help her with the zipper on her sweater. She turned back to look at him, tears flowing. This Jianjun was no longer the Jianjun of the past but a lover she’d newly acquired, one she loved madly but would shortly have to leave. She felt as if her mind was divided into several secret compartments, storing various types of love or emotion, and she had to distribute them among different men.
She wasn’t a good woman, Hongmei frankly admitted to the secret talker. She was holding a bright red cosmopolitan, a cherry stuck on the thin rim of her glass. She’d mixed it herself, changing the proportions so this one had more vodka than usual. As she read through the message she’d just finished writing, she found that the late hour and the alcohol had made her honest. Before her was a gentle soul. Whether male or female, they were kind, not easily offended, and kept their feelings to themselves, like all great priests or psychiatrists. She could pour her heart out to this unseen figure and feel she wouldn’t be judged, only accepted. For a moment, she forgot that she was the one repenting, and the person accepting her repentance was the secret talker in the depths of the computer. Only she felt that the two of them got on well, one standing, one kneeling. Whatever roles human beings played by day, if they didn’t have a moment like this when they could reveal themselves, they’d surely be driven mad.