The Secret Talker Read online

  “A college in the Midwest came up with this,” said Glen. “Never mind that we’re in the red, the administration bought three right away.”

  She reached out to hug Glen. These were the moments she loved him most, his childlike enthusiasm.

  Nini squeezed her way over to them, followed by two of her students aged fifty or sixty that she taught Chinese folk music to—this was her side job. She told Hongmei in Chinese that the secret talker was getting upset and had said that if Nini didn’t stop harassing her, she’d get someone to deal with her. Nini saw Glen looking inquisitively at her and trotted out the expression she usually used to torment him—a lifted chin, rolled eyes.

  As Nini began to leave with her overage students, she turned back to Glen. “You’re very naughty. You didn’t give me a dirty phone call last night!” To Glen’s blank stare, she laughed. “Look at him, useless! Doesn’t even know how to enjoy a joke!”

  Hongmei cried out suddenly, “Nini, have you found a new apartment?”

  “Still searching,” she called back.

  Each time an affair ended, she had to change her address. Hongmei said she knew a good place with cheap rent. Nini wanted to know if she could have pets. Hongmei said to call and ask for herself, then blurted out the phone number. Before she’d finished speaking, she had the thought that she had indeed been secretly longing for a private nest and had been thinking of running away. That’s why she’d quietly remembered the number on the flyer. She glanced sideways at Glen. The five o’clock sun tinted his eyelashes gold, making them look extra long, flicking up more than usual. Now he had a child’s eyes. She thought, How on Earth could he know what this woman next to him was planning all day long? Then she thought, This woman noticed a housing ad and wants to leave him, but for whom? No, for what? Was she running into the unknown?

  * * *

  The reply had been sent the night before, the night Hongmei had been tipsy. The secret talker told her that she happened to know the layout of Hongmei’s apartment: bedroom, two studies, living room, bathroom . . . 2,000 square feet, a standard middle-class dwelling. (No need to be mysterious about it; there were floor plans at the Realtor’s office—you only had to go in and pretend you wanted to rent a place.)

  She told Hongmei that the previous midnight she’d stood outside the building. Her eyes had climbed floor after floor until they reached the southeast-facing window on the sixteenth floor. She had been certain that the figure seated beside this brightly lit square was Hongmei. Sitting down on a bench, the secret talker had taken a small bottle of Courvoisier from her pocket.

  At this point, Hongmei’s chair squeaked and she felt a shiver pass through her. She’d been drinking too at that moment!

  That was her study—from the quality of the light, it was probably a drafting lamp. Right? she asked. She said she’d never realized how good alcohol could taste, when enjoyed on a lawn in the middle of the night. Facing Hongmei’s window, she had drunk slowly, now and then raising the bottle in an unrequited toast to the woman upstairs.

  Hongmei found this wraithlike woman terrifying. She pulled her legs up onto the chair and found her toes cold and white. No wonder the urge to unburden herself had been so strong last night—she must have sensed this. That bottle hadn’t been raised in vain, the amber Courvoisier along with her deep red cosmopolitan. The secret talker said her addictions of twenty years ago were under control now.

  The security guard’s patrol cart had passed by her once every ten minutes, slowing down as it did so, then speeding up again. Soon, it was every eight minutes, and then every five. The guard had been afraid she would murder someone, or get murdered herself.

  Then the light in the window went out, and she drank her last mouthful of cognac. She got up from the bench and went around to the back of the building, the security guard following in his cart.

  On the other side, she saw another window lit up, long and narrow—the bathroom. She had stopped there.

  Hongmei felt another tremor. That’s when she’d been looking sensually at herself in the mirror. No wonder she’d felt so strange—another pair of eyes had been staring through hers. Possessed by a strange body, which used her gaze to stare at her drunken flesh, watching as her private self emerged from the shadows. A strange body!

  Downstairs, the watcher had tilted her face up. The light in the narrow window had stayed on a full half hour. That’s when scalding water had poured over Hongmei’s head. In the lamplight, the water had turned into glittering crystals on her narrow shoulders and the slight protrusions of her breasts. It had felt good because of the little shock it imparted when it touched the skin. The secret talker told Hongmei that even the greatest comfort on Earth contained discomfort within it, and there was always a moment of surprise from the senses. She said in that half hour Hongmei had been in this state of shock, every strand of hair fully alive, her muscles swelling, the round scar on her arm as red and itchy as when she was seven.

  Hongmei hated her in this moment, the secret talker. Just as she used to suddenly find herself loathing Jianjun. She could also turn Glen into a temporary enemy.

  She wrote back immediately, saying, Enough! Stop exercising this obsession with me. She said, I’m not prey for seducers like you. I’d never have a fling with another woman.

  The response: Don’t be so sure.

  Hongmei said the secret talker left her mentally and physically exhausted, so she often dozed off in class, yet she stayed awake all night long. This was the last stage of her PhD, and she was already on the brink of collapse.

  Sure enough, this appeal to pity yielded results. The woman apologized and said, In that case, I’ll love you from a distance. If you feel stifled or despairing, just come outside and you’ll sense me. Your elegance will never flow away in vain; I’m the reason you’re beautiful.

  Afraid of getting stung again by pretty words, Hongmei quickly logged off and created yet another new email address, which she told only seven people about, asking them to keep it a secret. If she got any more messages from the secret talker, suspicion would fall on this group.

  Next, she printed out every email she’d ever received from the secret talker and read them one more time. “Disppointment” or its variants appeared eighteen times, and four more in Nini’s messages. Twenty-two in total, missing the same letter each time.

  She had several days of peace, during which her inbox remained empty. On day five, she got a message from Jianjun, just a few lines, saying his wife had had a baby.

  After Hongmei had left Jianjun, her hysterical love and desire for him had subsided, and with his marriage, promotion, and renovation of the three-bedroom apartment he’d been newly allocated, it had evaporated altogether, like the new liaisons she kept seeking out. Just some encounters based on tacit understandings, ambiguous smiles, hugs and kisses disguised as politeness. These were mostly shared with Glen’s colleagues or friends, those possessing their own homes and dishonest hearts. Their enchantment with her was based on a misreading, and she tried to maintain these beautiful misunderstandings as long as possible.

  Back to her regular life with Glen. The scary part was over, and they could treat the stillness and monotony as peace and try to enjoy it that way.

  * * *

  Nini showed up uninvited, speaking loudly in Chinese as soon as she came in. Nini was taking a break from love, and her current boyfriend was just someone to go sightseeing with. So she had a lot of free time to dedicate herself to the mystery of the secret talker. She’d found a girl in her twenties in San Francisco, she said, who looked exactly like the one in the photo. Hongmei asked, “What photo?” and Nini switched to English: “The father killer!” Glen, forking a piece of grilled fish just then, heard this explosive word and let the fish fall back onto the plate. He stared at the two Chinese women, trying to understand.

  Nini said, “I’m describing a horror film.” She knew Glen wouldn’t believe her, but he also didn’t know how to deal with her.

  She told H
ongmei that in the photos the twenty-something woman had emailed Hongmei, one was a close-up, with a backdrop of an archway wreathed in vermilion bougainvillea, the top of a fire tower visible on the left. Going by the angle of the photo, she’d located the archway. She had the address if Hongmei wanted to see for herself. Hongmei declined for now. She wasn’t ready to confront the secret talker. Not yet. Nini and her boyfriend had sat at the coffee shop opposite and waited. Around six in the evening, the woman finally showed up. She was driving an old, white Toyota, wearing DKNY sunglasses, Calvin Klein jeans, and Nine West leather sandals. Her toenails were unpolished, and a dozen silver bracelets jangled round her wrist as she walked. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her at all—she certainly didn’t look parricidal. She had said this last word in English.

  “A hundred-dollar word!” Glen exclaimed.

  Nini said, “Haven’t you noticed I love using big words?”

  Hongmei said calmly, in Chinese, “You use Chinese to talk nonsense, then switch to English for the important words—place names, coffee shops. Careful.” She then asked, “Did you talk to her?”

  “Around seven o’clock I rang her bell. She opened the door, barefoot, still chewing. I asked if she recognized me. She stared at me for a while and shook her head with a confused smile. I could tell right away she wasn’t bluffing—she really didn’t know who I was. Which meant she hadn’t seen all those photographs I’d emailed.”

  As she spoke, Nini got herself a glass and poured herself a little white wine. “She asked how I knew her. I couldn’t answer, so she said it must be online; a lot of magazines have published articles about her. I didn’t even know her name, but now I couldn’t ask—that would give the game away. I said yes, I’d learned about her story online. She said she was sorry she couldn’t ask me in. I knew she was trying to get rid of me, so I quickly left.”

  Hongmei couldn’t work out what kind of spell this had been.

  Nini was enthusiastic enough to offer up her boyfriend as a sacrifice. She dismissed guys like him as pretty but useless, definitely not marriage material. She was willing to send her pretty, useless boyfriend to go seduce this girl. Again, she switched to English on the word “seduce.”

  Dinner was over by this point. Glen smiled. “Want me to go?”

  “Didn’t you understand?” Nini retorted.

  “I heard enough. Seduction and parricide.” Glen cleared away the plates, giving them the sinister smile of a private detective.

  Hongmei said she wasn’t interested, and she’d changed her email address anyway. Nini said animatedly that the truth was going to come out soon.

  “Stop messing around,” said Hongmei. “This person found a picture of a girl online and pretended to be her, and you fell for it.”

  Nini said at the very least they ought to find out the name of the girl who killed her father, then Google articles about her.

  Hongmei said, “That’s enough. Stop being crazy. If you really have nothing better to do, go join in the antiwar protest.”

  On the tenth day after she cut the secret talker from her life, Hongmei was in a terrible mood from writing her thesis and had given up—she was slumped in her swivel chair, playing solitaire. It was late at night. Her feet scrabbled beneath the desk for her slippers. She was chewing a half-eaten apple, thinking it was time for bed. A minute later, she realized she was staring at her inbox.

  A message from a name she didn’t recognize.

  Her heart seemed to stop beating; her lungs felt stuffed full. She didn’t know if she was more afraid of the secret talker or of the self that these prying eyes would see through. Her listlessness these last few days had been because she was missing this person’s secret words.

  Don’t ask how I got your new email address. I’ve known for a while how to break into your artificial sanctuary, but I didn’t. I wanted to see whether, if I didn’t have you, I could still drink coffee, read the papers, watch TV, listen to music, breathe, eat . . . live. I also wanted to see, if you didn’t have me, how you’d behave, speak, look around. Who would you make eyes at? It’s been ten days, and the conclusion is that you and I can’t do without each other, especially you. In these ten days, you’ve done everything as usual, but your soul is gone.

  Hongmei wanted to snap back, How could you be so shameless and full of yourself? But she didn’t. This was not the time to be quibbling about who was chasing whom.

  I knew you wouldn’t give up so easily. Let’s do this properly and set up a meeting. Then we can talk to our hearts’ content and know exactly where we stand. We’ll take it from there. I could never love a woman, just as I could never be friends with a man.

  Are you so sure you couldn’t accept a woman?

  One hundred percent.

  So let’s say I’m a man, the way I first appeared—wealthy, idle, eclectically well informed, enough for some gentlemanly embellishments in my conversation. Could you accept a man like that?

  I don’t know what you’re babbling about.

  You must. Actually, you’ve never fully believed that I was a woman. This evening at eight I’ll wait for you at the Blue Danube. If you want to tell me to go to hell, you might as well come say it to my face.

  10

  The Blue Danube coffee shop was where the students hung out. The restaurants on either side closed at nine each night, after which they could come here for a $1.80 soup or a mini pizza for two bucks. Almost every night there’d be students here performing jazz or chamber music. She accepted the secret talker’s invitation. What could anyone do in the Blue Danube? Eight o’clock was the busiest time, and every table would be packed.

  She got home early from the library and, seeing Glen’s leather shoes at the front door, called out, “Hello.” Alarmingly, she sounded like a madwoman. Glen called back from his study, “Hello,” as if he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. She changed and put on an apron, yelling that she’d be in charge of dinner.

  She got some vegetables and a half carton of frozen shrimp from the fridge. There wasn’t enough time for it to thaw, so she tossed the frozen brick into the sink, intending to fill the carton with hot water. An ominous thud. When she looked, there were numerous tiny cracks in the sink’s white porcelain surface.

  Bad things were starting to happen.

  She turned on the faucet, and water spurted out, splashing her full in the face. She twisted her head left and right, wiping her face dry on her shoulders, and found she was laughing crazily.

  Time to set out the plates, cutlery, and napkins. She dashed back and forth, into the dining room, opening the kitchen door, then forgetting what she’d come to get, climbing the pantry ladder, then forgetting what she’d wanted. Yet she found a lightness and agility she seldom possessed, chopping vegetables with balletic grace. Turning around, she saw Glen at the kitchen door, smiling silently at her. He looked like he’d been watching her for quite a while. She quickly sobered up. There was still time to cancel her appointment with the secret talker, but she knew she wasn’t going to do that. She simpered at Glen, despairing at her own shallowness.

  Every girlish smile has its consequences. Glen came over and hugged her. She said, “The stove . . . the fire . . .”

  A clap of thunder. A long, long time ago storms had loved this place, then there’d been a six-year drought. Now, bit by bit, the rain was coming back.

  As if he knew about her secret assignation and was trying to prevent it, Glen hugged her more tightly. She gently stroked his fingers, her mouth full of soothing words. There was no choice—she had to make this appointment, and neither Glen nor the weather would stop her.

  Hongmei spent all of dinner silently watching the clock as it ticked closer and closer to eight. Glen seem so innocent, so unperturbed, and chatted aimlessly about classes. He had no idea what she was thinking or plotting. When Glen got up from his seat, leaving his dirty plate and utensils behind, Hongmei saw her chance. Not even bothering to make up an excuse or finish her dinner, she da
shed out into the storm, calling out to Glen as he made himself comfortable in front of the TV, “Back soon!”

  * * *

  There was no one she knew in the Blue Danube. All twenty-odd tables were full, and an experimental play was taking place on the little stage: a dozen theater majors wearing the white face makeup of mimes, imitating the movements of various animals. The lead actor was reciting lines that sounded like they were from Waiting for Godot.

  Hongmei waited and waited for the secret talker to show up. The scent of rain and hot coffee mingled, making this first encounter feel warmer and more homely. She felt strangely safe.

  Her eyes swept across the faces at every table. This person was late. There were no seats she liked the look of, so she went around the walls studying the oil paintings—the handiwork of art majors. The person had said he’d be holding an art journal with a bust by Julio González on the cover. This person had toyed with her enough, playing with both their identity and their gender. She looked at her watch—only one minute had passed. She’d give it ten minutes and then she’d leave. The oil paintings had been hung recently; the paint still smelled fresh. Why not open by saying something about them? People needed safe topics of conversation when they met for the first time. She’d say, Look at these lifeless brushstrokes, these screaming colors that have nothing to say. Just as so much sumptuous-looking food has no taste, or so much sex has no emotion, or so much conversation has no meaning.

  She pretended to be absorbed in the paintings and gradually turned a corner. This led her to a passageway that ended at the back door. She guarded the way out, listening to everyone’s entrances and exits, movements and silences. Her face was tilted up, her back and neck very relaxed, hands folded lazily before her chest. From the back, she didn’t look expectant at all. Now and then a drop of water trickled down from her wet hair, rolling lazily down her temple, leaving a ticklish, icy trail.