Exciting Times(5)

5

October

I couldn’t bear living in an Airbnb forever, but I still didn’t have a two-month deposit saved. At the start of October, I moved my things to Julian’s. I told him I didn’t have time to go around viewing places. He said I could stay until I did.

‘Take the guest room,’ he said. ‘I get calls at night.’

We kept having sex.

In mid-October Typhoon Haima came, the last of the season. We were trapped indoors until the Hong Kong observatory gave the all-clear. Julian wore an unavoidably air-quoted ‘casual jumper’. He called many things casual and kept them in air quotes.

I asked why we’d taken so long to hook up.

‘I didn’t want to impose,’ he said.

The answer I’d been hoping for was that I made him nervous. I hadn’t thought he’d had the power to ‘impose’, and was startled that he’d felt he had.

His sheets were very white. I once left a blot he called a wine stain, either euphemistically or because he could more readily picture me sipping Merlot than menstruating. His interest in making me come felt sinister at first, which revealed to me my assumption that if he wanted something it would probably harm me. He liked when I bit him but you had to pick your moment and I sometimes thought: there are many things I will never become expert in and I chose this – which did not suggest to me that mine was an internal monologue one would select if one could.

I researched the science of biting, learned it would still hurt him later, and knew exactly how I felt about that information.

He enjoyed when I lampooned men who went for sexual flattery. It confirmed his view that he was not one of them, while ensuring their pet phrases still left my mouth. I’d be picky about menus and he’d say I lacked appetite. ‘Untrue,’ I’d say, plus facetious gesture. I felt I’d cracked someone too patrician for the you’re-so-good-at-sex spiel, he felt privy to my disdain for men susceptible to the you’re-so-good-at-sex spiel, and empirically I sat across the table, ran my foot up his leg, and said he was good at sex. Then I asked for water and watched his hands as he poured.

I wasn’t good at most things but I was good at men, and Julian was the richest man I’d ever been good at.

*

Joan often made me stay behind to ‘help her’ write vocabulary lists. In Hong Kong English, ‘helping someone do something’ could mean you did it and they did not assist. Joan was fond of this usage.

That week the twelve-year-olds’ list included the word ‘mind’. The dictionary gave four meanings: to be in charge of or deal with; to be offended or bothered by; the seat of the faculty of reason (Iris Huang looked between the chairs); an important intellectual (Iris Huang fixed on a chair).

The dictionary would not equip these children for Dublin. ‘Mind yourself’ upon leaving a house was different to ‘Mind yourself’ when using a serrated knife. ‘Don’t mind him’ meant he’d been teasing you, and ‘Mind him’ meant either to take care of him or to take care of yourself around him. And all your minding happened in one mind, hopefully your own.

I was forever minding things in Hong Kong, but I couldn’t always construe in what sense.

*

Julian liked being busy. He was so busy, I would say. Just one day I would like to be busier than him. I would like for him to suggest a plan and for me to not be free.

‘I’m not that busy,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to be busy?’

‘It’s a status symbol. It’s like, “I’m so in-demand in the skilled economy.”’

‘That’s not the rich, though. That’s people like me.’

‘But you’re rich.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You have to stop pretending you don’t know you’re rich,’ I said. ‘It’s unbecoming.’

Our wealth disparity was too wide to make me uncomfortable. It was a clownish level of difference that I could regard only with amusement. I also felt it absolved me of any need to probe the gendered implications of letting him pay for everything, which was just as well when I couldn’t afford for it to be otherwise. If something cost 1 per cent of his income or 10 per cent of mine, why shouldn’t he take care of it?

I googled the salary range for junior vice-presidents at his bank: €137,000 to €217,000 a year, plus bonus and housing allowance. I tried to take heart from this. That he could have that many zeroes and not consider himself wealthy surely showed that material lucre would not make me happy, ergo that I needn’t find a real job. But if money wouldn’t improve my life, I couldn’t think of anything likelier to.

Staying in his flat was possibly a rupture from the capitalist notion that I was only worth something if I paid my own way economically. Or maybe it made me a bad feminist. I could puzzle it out once the experience had passed. There wasn’t much point in dwelling on it until then. What if I decided I didn’t like staying with him? I’d have to do something else, and I mightn’t like any of the alternatives any better.

*

Mam always said: ‘That’s plenty.’ If you tweaked the heating above seventeen – that’s plenty, Ava. Grocery shopping, if you made to pick up a second punnet of cherries – that’s plenty. I hadn’t told Mam I was living with Julian. She’d regard him as more than plenty, which meant too much.