Shanghai Vixen

Tuesday night was a whirl of art openings, and D and I bounced one to another to another, ending up at one curator friend’s final show at that venue.

She had invited me to a grand finale dinner afterwards, apologizing that it was a small intimate crowd so D couldn’t come along, and she was cool about that.

I was wearing a lively-patterned turquoise dress, which previously I associated with that first night I saw Ah Ren a year and a half ago, paired with the gorgeous four-inch-heeled blue and green suede Mary Janes I bought in Jakarta. The dress has a plunging neckline that shows off my boobs to great advantage: they are the one upside of being overweight, I call it my Cleavage Dress; and the heels perk up my lower assets not unflatteringly. I was looking good that night.

It was a sumptuous spread in a sumptuous old villa. “Everyone must have fun and get drunk!” my normally cautious friend declared. Apart from a few other white foreigners, including La Turqa and her man, it was mostly an East Asian affair, heavily Francophone Japanese, a smattering of Koreans. I had met several of them, including a hunky Japanese filmmaker, who I recall crushing on when I first and last met him last year, and a rather quiet, pinched-face Japanese journalist who is my friend’s constant sidekick; I never can remember her name.

I ended up sitting accross from La Turqa and a Chinese artist, and between a Taiwanese businesswoman, who I know fairly well, and an elegantly-dressed, handsome if slightly feminine Japanese entrepreneur I hadn’t met before. He looks younger than his 35 years, and has a sensuous suppleness to his face; similar to me, his expressions stretch all over his round baby face.

He has been in Shanghai for nine years, and we quickly bond over our shared time here and compare memories like scars. Seguing smoothly from English to Mandarin and back, I am more fluent in both but he can keep up, even as both languages waxed drunkenly, dangerously fast as the night boozed on.

We chat, joke, discuss, flirt throughout the dinner. He is very attentive, very interested. I learn about his businesses, in design and entertainment, and his charm and confidence both vouch for him and make me suspicious: how is it that this handsome, charming, successful, wealthy man could be single?

The Japanese journalist, seated to the other side of him, glares at us in disapproval. Quite the unmistable stink-eye she gives me. At first I wonder whether she is his wife, but I quickly abandon that theory. Either she likes him, unreciprocatedly, or was but no longer is involved with him, or is friends with his girlfriend/wife. I wonder. He wears many rings, but they are all more decorative than “wedding”, and I can never remember which finger wedding/engagement rings go on, that is a culture foreign to China. But here and later was he hitting on me quite blatantly, in front of his close friends; it seems unlikely that a married man would do that. More likely, he is a player.

Dinner finishes, and most guests retreat, leaving just the Japanese core and myself, in no hurry, lolling on the sofa and drinking even more exquisite wine. My new friend is accross the table from me now, and I am sitting next to the hunky filmmaker. And, wait, is he now flirting with me too? Ah, Cleavage Dress, the trouble you get me into! The sensual enterprenuer meanwhile makes eyes at me accross the coffee table; he keeps catching my eye and smiling or winking, I waggle my eyebrows back at him, and he laughs. The other journalist frowns at us.

I don’t know what to call this fellow. For now “Tan”, as there is that Chinese character in his name, I guess. Calling him “The Japanese guy” would be in poor taste, I know.

So, we all traipse out. I can outdrink a room of Japanese any night, and was less drunk than most there, but my heels and gravity and uneven lane ground betrayed me, and I took a stumble and skinned up my knees. Tan offers to drive me home, he has a fancy schmancy car and I was on his way out to Hongqiao. I tease him about living in the Japanese expat ghetto.

His car is half-way down the block, and as we walk I link my arm through his, for balance as much as gesture. Tan immediately responds by wrapping his arm around my waist, quite tight, and nuzzling my head; I rest my hand loosely on his shoulder. We reach his mini-van, he opens the door for me and takes me hand to help me in. Driving, we play with each others’ hands at the stoplights.

We reach my lane, and after a brief hestitation we lean in for the kiss. We are both drunk, and it is sloppy but earnest. But I have little chance to process: Tan IMMEDIATE grabs for my breasts. Okay, I realize “the girls” were rather front and center that night, but oh come ON. I remove his hands, “I don’t know you well enough yet for that!” I try not to sound annoyed.

He complies, and we resume kissing. This time, his hands lunge immediately for my ass. Man, this is hilarious, I think. At least the man knows what he wants - which is somewhat a nice change after Worm. Yet it signals just another for of WEIRD! Geez, men! I bid him goodnight, with a rather less slurpy final kiss, and climb out of his car.

It seems he took my “no boobs yet” policy fairly well, better than my last over-eager turned sulky paramour last fall: emails have been exchanged, and he’s invited me to a party with our mutual friends at one of his restaurants this coming Monday. Promising. I still long for Worm, but I have to move on. Maybe Tan is just what I need - even if I continue to look over my shoulder, hoping Worm will step up, will come claim me. I don’t suppose he will, though.

Zip, zip, zip!

Life has gotten good and busy again, good-bye boring, although it remains far from pre-crises spring madness. The weekend before, Manila Moxie visited; then this past week another friend, a Chinese woman who emigrated to the US fifteen years ago, was in town, and also staying with me. Good company, albeit a bit exhausting. Tonight is my first evening alone, and it’s rather nice.

Last weekend was the big Weihai Lu open house, an annual thing now in its third year. Zipping previously to openings at IFA and M97, and managing to lose a pair of vintage Dior gloves in the process, I collected my visiting friend and then zipped along to Weihai. My gal Kazza has a gallery there, and I had volunteered to make martinis for her show’s opening.

She’d hired two waiters, “your bitches!”, to mix and serve, and I joined Kazza in playing hostess, we got a lot of people in, and some press and some sales. It was fun, and even without my Dior gloves I was in full swishy mode, dahling.

About 45 minutes in, I escaped to the bathroom, and coming back in I heard a still if by now barely familiar voice come at me, “Oh! Hey there…” It was Worm.

It had been exactly a month since I’d last seen him. I barely recognized him, his hair is out of control shaggy now, and he had shed the WASPy peacoat he huddled in all winter.

I got pulled back into other social whorls, he chatted briefly with our mutual friend Happy Fish - who is privvy to the whole secret drama - and then he retreated with his friends to sit at the back. I brought them martinis, and Worm “cheers”ed me, before I had to rush back to make more drinks.

He skulked there for a good half hour, even after the friends he came with left. Watching me, it seemed; whenever I glanced his way, he quickly averted his eyes, then looked tentatively back at me, then away again. Finally I went back over - not to force any discussion of what if any remnants there are in the wreckage of “us”, just to catch up, see how he is.

“How’ve you been?” I ask lightly.
“I gotta go now.” Worm puts down his drink and flees. Pushing through the crowd, out the door.

I pause for a few minutes then follow him outside. I see Worm’s figure retreating down the lane, only a few meters away; obviously he had stood just outside the gallery for several minutes more before really leaving.

“What was *that*?!” I puzzle to myself. Not the first time I have asked that with regard to our introspective old Worm.

“What *was* that?!” Happy Fish asked me a few days later, at another opening. I shrugged. “He’s SOO weird. You need to, like, get in his face and be all, “Why are you so weird?!”

But I know why. He’s wounded, fearful, prefers fleeing to dealing. I know him. That’s the problem.

I didn’t cry.

Not until today. Perhaps yesterday’s blip of hope, before the holding pattern resumed.

This has been over for a long time, and I have known it, but I only today realized it. Necessary, release.

Goodbye, Worm. For whatever it is worth, I loved you, and always will love you.

That night.

So, I hopped into a taxi and headed back to the Worm’s bar in residence, texting him that I was coming, that I was craving to see him again. “I’ve already left,” he replied. He said he’d gone home, felt like staying in, I asked to come over, he equivocated.

By then I was standing, shivering, on his corner. I have never been to his flat, but had walked him this far before. Awkward texing ensued; then deteriorated. “Fine, whatever, see you around then,” I pissily sent. “Ok” Worm responded. “What the hell?” I sent back.

Finally I called him, hearing the buzz of a bar in the background. Home, my ass. The glare from the women staffing the Family Mart I am standing am sends me out on the street, but the noise sends me ducking into some cheap hotel’s entry corridor, lined with grimy fish tanks.

“What the hell, [Worm]?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what’s going on here?”

“I can’t deal with being around you tonight. There’s too much to process.” He proceeded, over the following fifteen minutes, to delineate why he is freaked out, why he felt our situation was so complicated: his reluctance to get seriously involved right now, his fraught emotions towards me, that he’s already seeing someone else casually, that he needs to figure out his life, etc etc. But that that Saturday had been wonderful and intense and that he does really care for me, which is why this is difficult for him and I need to give him some space for him to sort everything out.

All this filtered through the bar noise on his end; on my end standing feeling bludgeoned in this greenish-lit dingy hallway with tank upon grimy tank of fish staring beadily at me, mouths moving in seeming mockery.

I didn’t cry then, and I haven’t since. I have felt confused and annoyed and estranged than sad.

The next day I emailed him, apologizing if I fucked things up by pressing to see him, promising to give him some space, saying that it was too early for him to be worrying about where this could be going, adding that my body already misses his.

That was two weeks ago.

Radio silence since, apart from some neutral online chats, and his leaving town without telling me. I finally called two days ago, to see if he still wanted to come along on a trip I’m planning soon. He was enthusiastic, has obstacles but will join if he at all can. I extended a lunch invitation, he deferred as his parents are incoming and he has to know their plans before scheduling anything. I had to pry him off the phone, as I was waxing late to an appointment.

It has been an irritating two weeks.

With anyone else, with a “normal” guy, I would know from this that I was dumped. But the Worm is not a normal boy. Whenever I second guess him, I am wrong, it is an impossible paradox. It has been three months now of limbo, not just since we hooked up. I know the ambiguity results from his ambivalence, and from his larger issues - he is a man-boy very much lost in the angsty pool of his own navel.

Some of it I should take personally, but not all of it. The problem is knowing when it’s him, and when it’s about me. And, regardless, it’s a shitty situation. I can deal with a lot, but I have to know WHAT I’m dealing with. I’m tolerant and understanding of his bullshit and issues, but not when it’s directed at me. It’s not like I’ve done anything to him to deserve such maltreatment.

I won’t say I deserve better. What we deserve is what we demand, and I need to demand better. I don’t want perfection, I don’t want commitment - I’m not even offering commitment, I don’t know whether I can do this either. What I do require, though, is a baseline of communication, companionship and courtesy. It is not a lot to ask. If he cannot do even that, then I need to walk away - sadly and reluctantly, but at least I will not end up hating him, or myself.