Fiction from The Literary Review

The Art of Love

Xu Xi

Their last night together was spent on a beach. Sonny was not to see Victoria again for eighteen years until November of ’99, the year his work was honored by the Academy of American Poets.
           She was in the audience the evening he read from his latest volume at the University of Hong Kong, in English and Chinese, as the press took pains to note the next morning. Sonny Pessoa performed, pretending not to see her. Afterwards, Victoria Chang-Howell waited till the crowds had thinned.
           “I thought it was you.” He air-kissed both cheeks, with just enough distance for fame.
           “You look the same,” she said. At fifty seven, she passed for younger. Her hair was coal black, dyed to match her eyes; crows’ feet, however, were harder to hide. She had dressed for the occasion, uncharacteristically sensual, imitating an earlier self. At fifty seven, she felt their age difference, the way they hadn’t, eighteen years earlier.
           “And you’re,” he took in her expensive appearance—quirky, almost artistic, but less effective than he remembered—annoyed because, yes, she still provoked desire. “You’re marvelous to see again. What are you doing with yourself these days? Are you still at the ad agency?” His sentences weren’t even poetic.
           “I left big agency life ages ago.” She rarely thought of those days, Sonny being the vestigial exception. “We have our own creative boutique now, and handle mainly luxury and travel accounts. We keep a home in Bali.” Realizing he might not know, she added, “by the way, I did marry . . . ”
           “Howell?” He said it for her.
           Eighteen years ago, Bruce Howell had been the highest-paid advertising “creative” in town and a painter—British, divorced, childless, older, a worthy partner for Victoria—against whom Sonny, a third-rate copywriter and unknown poet, paled, despite his richer tan.
           Then he did know, she thought, miffed. Sonny had been the jealous type. Surely, some spark remained. “And yourself? Are you married?”
           “Was. Split up over two years ago.” If he could he would have held back time, but the moment for amends was already past.
           “I’m sorry to hear that.” Yet she was strangely pleased.
           “Don’t be. I wasn’t the faithful type.” It felt like an accusation—unintentional—as was his confession—glib, a pose to impress—but despite her half smile—suggestive—he tried to move on and asked. “And you. Do you still paint?”
           But she was handing him her card, saying, “I mustn’t hold you up,” even though no one was displaying any urgency and it wasn’t late. “We must see each other while you’re here. Have you a card?”
           “I don’t carry any,” he replied, but obliged by dictating his number, giving her, as their history demanded, the perpetual upper hand, with which she touched his, before departing.

           On that beach, sand pebbles chafed. Sonny had been twenty four. Victoria liked being on top, exposing her breasts to the night.
           It was just spring, too cold for the flocks of summer. Besides, no one will be around she insisted, frustrated by two months of furtive trysts, unsatisfactorily consummated in the back seat of her car. Victoria was in between husbands; with her first marriage not quite over and her relationship with Bruce Howell indeterminate, she had need of, if rarely a bed for, an easier love. Discretion was all she asked. But that night he gave more, far greater than her imagination could begin to absorb. His heart succumbed to the song of the tide, indulging the art of love.

           In the morning, he flung aside the South China Morning Post in disgust.
           Their coverage of his reading included the following, “His latest volume, Love’s Exile, is a cri de coeur of the emigrant, who leaves but never arrives, tracing song-lines for trans-national lives. Pessoa exhibits only a grudging respect for his origins, the result, no doubt, of an American life. The poet, whose father is the linguist Dr. Antonio Pessoa, is by now only marginally a ‘native son,’ despite his return to our shores. Nonetheless, his affair with the language tantalizes, even as it irritates.”
           The local English journalist concluded on this note, “Sonny Pessoa has proven almost his father’s equal as a translator.”
           He wanted to shriek. Could he help his love of the English language?
           From eighteen years earlier, his father’s voice carped. You should be ashamed of your betrayals, meaning his abandonment of Chinese and Portuguese. His Macanese parents were both Eurasian. After his mother’s death, Sonny had been removed from Macau at age four to Hong Kong, where English surpassed both mother tongues.
           Coming home now—surely Hong Kong was still home, this city that bestowed “permanent” residency, at least on his identity card—he came armed with a bilingual volume of poems which included his own translations into Chinese, but not Portuguese.
           The Chinese press, unlike their English language counterpart, were surprisingly unstinting in their praise. Lavish, almost fulsome, because his poetry paid homage to China but not Britain. Sonny savored it, comforted, even as he worried if this could sustain.
           He did not call Victoria.
           Homecoming stirred regrets. Vague, even pointless, they lingered. At night, waves pounded through his dreams, and he awoke, drenched in memories, afraid.
           When she rang two days later because he hadn’t, she accused in Chinese. “You promised you’d stay in touch. I wondered where you were. I don’t follow Poetry, I’m afraid, but would have replied had you written.”
           Could it be that she’d never received his letter? Love plays memory for a fool, it read. Work honors me—I have won an important American poetry prize and have been granted a fellowship to work on Chinese translations. Had her silence, then, been ignorance and not rejection? Now, remembrance, with its bad habit of arriving always too late (sometimes, inconsequentially so), stirred the muddy hole and fished out Victoria’s precise instructions of eighteen years earlier. I don’t have a forwarding address yet but Penny Wong, my assistant, will know where I’ve gone, she’s not the moving type, because Victoria had also been in between jobs. He hadn’t dared ask Penny, though, not since fucking her after a party—he promised but never called, to the profound chagrin of young Penny, ignorant of being the rebound. His letter, when it arrived on her desk from New York, was not forwarded. Penny had not initially connected him with Victoria, the troublesome.
           Victoria was still speaking. “What brings you back?”
           “This and that. The handover.” Her familiar phone manner was disconcerting, recalling their long ago trysts. His hand grazed his son’s photo, which sat beside the phone.
           “Aren’t you a little late?”
           “Not for Macau.”
           But she was back on that beach, and unconcerned by the politics of his birthplace. The return to China she cared about had already passed. “I thought you were here for your father.” That Dr. Antonio Pessoa was to be honored next week by the Law Society (for his precise and useful translation of a significant body of local legalese into Chinese—imperative since the British no longer prevailed) did not escape her notice. Victoria’s father, Sir Albert Chang, OBE, deceased, had been a prominent solicitor and she followed Law.
           He bristled. “That, too.”
           “You must be proud of him.” It was not what she meant to say but Bruce was within earshot, having returned unexpectedly. Her husband knew a little Chinese, enough to follow some of her conversations.
           “I thought pride was reciprocal,” he retorted, because his father, the retired Head of Linguistics at the University, withheld praise, having not forgiven the divorce. That failure, profound. You shame the Pessoa name, he accused in private. What is Poetry without Love?
           “Not for Chinese sons,” she responded, amused. Sonny was the same, after all, clumsy in his passions, ill-fitted, even now, to his half-Chinese skin. Yet this refusal to accept things as they must be impressed her, ignorant, as she was, of truth.
           Eighteen years had not diminished their short-speak, although in matters of propriety, she remained superior. Discretion might have preserved his marriage. His American-Chinese wife reviled his infidelities. You, she accused when her tears had dried for good, can go fuck your dilettante girls. Your son deserves a real father. His own eyes remained dry. Persona, after all, and a public titillated by the passions of fame. But that was before time played its tricks, exposing the lonely ache of his soul.
           But now, in this present tense, the only imperative, the one thing he needed to know, was, “and you, Vicky, do you still paint?” No one else called her “Vicky.”
           Victoria was distracted. “Sorry, what was that?” Bruce Howell was leaving again. It was often his way, to forget, return and leave a second time. Usually, his antics did not intrude.
           “Your painting. You must be able to afford a nice studio by now.” Howell, he would later hear someone remark, oh, him. “Art” for the rich and tasteless.

           A year before that night on the beach, he gazed across a desk into coal black eyes and imagined Victoria in this bed. She was reading his copy for her designer eyewear account. “This is good,” she told him. Their hands met briefly as she returned the sheet.
           Sonny crossed his legs. “I have better.”
           “Show me.” His gaze intruded. Her not-yet-ex-husband provoked less disturbance during intercourse.
           “It’s too good for ad copy.”
           “Why?”
           “Because I’m a poet.” He rolled his chair away from her desk—propulsion—and rose.
           Her eyes devoured the curve of his hips. “I’d like to paint you.”
           “What would your husband say?” He pretended calm, but was betrayed by the blush of his cheeks. Two days earlier, he had overheard Bruce Howell utter at the urinal, Victoria? I’d do her. She’s too hot for that husband of hers to handle. He hadn’t dared but wanted to kick Bruce right then in the crotch. She moistened her lips. “My husband . . . approves. He calls it my ‘hobby’ that keeps me amused.” Stirred by the momentary freshness of her utterance, she declared. “All I want to do is paint.”
           “So why don’t you?”
           Startled by her lusts, she said the first thing that came to mind. “He would say I’m doing it to spite him,” and blushed.
           Which was why Sonny started to tell her his heart. To leave this city, to go write, to fall in love for real. To fall in love. He told and told, while posing for her, and she listened, while capturing body and soul.
           Two months later, Victoria Chang and Bruce Howell became an “item.” Sonny waited another six to bed her, which she allowed when she knew he would be discreet.

          
           “Your painting,” he repeated, sensing inattention.
           “The painting? Oh, those. You needn’t worry. I painted over your poses years ago.”
           “No,” he said, slightly stunned that she could have destroyed them. “Do you still paint?”
           “Oh, that. Now and then. Bruce is the painter. I haven’t much time, you know.” She was impatient for her husband’s departure.

           A month before that night on the beach, he flung the proofs of his first chapbook at her and fumed. “He says I shouldn’t go to America, that I’m wasting my time with poetry.”
           Victoria was put out by his unexpected visit that evening. She leafed idly through his volume, The Science of Love. Sonny was proving tiresome as a lover, more so as a poet, and she did not entirely regret his departure. “You need your father’s blessings.”
           “Or his curse. He says I ought to write in Chinese.”
           “It is your mother tongue,” she said, in Chinese.
           “Et tu?”
           Despite her protests, he forced himself on her right there, and apologized afterwards, ashamed of his anger. “I didn’t know how good I was till now.” She lay on the desk, exhausted, her eyes half shut. “Oh, trust me, you’re good.” Her almost-ex-husband would be by in less than an hour. He tugged at her long hair, marveling that her mascara hadn’t smeared. “I was talking about my poetry.”
           In answer, she pushed him on his back to the floor.
           My light, my path, he whispered afterward. Give me strength for my art.
           In fall of that year, he left without his father’s blessings. His letter to Victoria, written that winter from New York, also read, Love plays memory for a fool but I strive to rise above that. I am determined to be The Poet; that is my rightful destiny. It would be best if you do not reply. I don’t intend to see you again.
           When she did not reply, he had broken down and called. Bruce Howell answered, and Sonny hung up, furious.

           “You don’t paint at all?” Having imagined a finer path, he was humiliated. To have wasted love, even then, on a dilettante!
           “Time marches on,” she replied, meaning to continue the conversation, trusting he would understand. She watched her husband close the door, only to open it again and remind her of some inconsequence.
           Sonny became distracted. “Time isn’t money, you know,” he quipped, wanting to hang up, now. Another face loomed: his wife in love, in tears. Coward, she accused, but he shut her out, unwilling to hear, while treading a path to regrets.
           “Such a wit.” Bruce having left at last, she could concentrate for a moment. Her voice turned dreamy and she said, in English. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Sonny?” Saying his name conjured tenderness. His absent voice invited romance. “I haven’t forgotten our beach,” she continued. “The moonlight, the waves, the rain.”

           That night, clouds threatened rain. Lie as still as you can, she commanded. Reciprocate. He hung on while she gorged herself, and when she, spent, provoked his turn, he howled, in gratitude, at the absent moon.
           Time stopped, trapped in that howl. He chafed at all women to come, unforgiving.

           “It was a long time ago, Victoria.” Escape! He had left her once.
           She had not left, but her guilt belonged to other sins. “You’ll see me while you’re here, won’t you?”
           “You and . . . Bruce? Perhaps after Macau,” he replied, adding, “I’m going as a Portuguese son.” His laughter disguised the uncertainties he felt.
           Her voice sank to its seductive alto. “Why not just me? This afternoon, perhaps?” Desperation underlined her plea. These moments were all she had. “You’re married.” There, he’d ended it.
           “That never stopped you.” She wanted, no, needed, this game of love. Her nights were plagued by Bruce’s snores, exhaling the weight of success.
           Closing his eyes, he repeated. “It was a long time ago.”
           She was disappointed, even a little piqued, but a Bali home loomed, with all its choice possessions. “We’ll be away after you get back, I’m afraid. House guests.”
           “What a shame.” He glanced at the photo of his son, who was young yet, only four. Surely there was time for another path. Time enough for language, life and art. For a less fragile future with fewer regrets. A path of easier love.
           Victoria was already abandoning regrets. It was enough to have recalled the hour. “Then, perhaps next time. Don’t be a stranger.”

           We are both artists, she had told him that night. It was her moment of splendor before destiny took hold. We will follow the path.

           “I won’t,” he replied.