Lost in Translation Page 0,57

almost like you’re off the board somehow. Like you’re not playing on the same field. You know?"

"No. I don’t."

"I remember the first time I saw you—at five in the morning, you were coming back to the hotel on a bicycle. Wearing some little black dress. So I figured you probably had a boyfriend in Beijing—what, a Chinese guy?" He stopped, saw the click in her eyes, and understood. "So that’s it, then. You only like Chinese guys. That’s it, isn’t it?"

"Full marks, Dr. Spencer." She smiled, drained off her cup and held it out for a refill.

He poured for both of them. "So, I was right."

"Hardly a state secret. I love Chinese men."

"Really? What is it about them?"

She thought. "They incite a certain race memory in me."

"Very funny."

"Not a joke."

"Seriously. What is it? It has something to do with your father, right?"

"No!" she answered, a few notches higher.

"Okay!" He put his hands up. "Okay. Sorry. I said I wouldn’t mention him, I know. So why, then?"

"Well. They’re beautiful, for one thing. Chinese men and women both—haven’t you noticed? Edgar Snow once wrote that the Chinese were arguably the most intelligent yet certainly,without a doubt, the best-looking people on earth. It’s true."

"So they’re beautiful, that’s one thing." He licked his index finger and tagged the air.

"Yes. And another thing. Their skin is different. Smooth. Almost hairless. Not like barbarians."

"Number two, smooth skin." He marked the air again. "Wait a minute. Aren’t you a barbarian?"

"Not really. Inside I’m half Chinese. Okay: another thing. You have sex with one of them, you have sex with China. Know what I mean? You’re not on the outside anymore."

"Does it last?"

"Only for a minute. Now the most important thing. Chinese men are reserved. Much more reserved than Western men."

"Reserved?"

"That’s right."

He knit his yellow brows at her.

Like Jian, she thought. Jian, who had been able to communicate to her with a single hard look in some public place—on the street, or in a roomful of his friends—what he planned to do to her the minute they were alone. Jian, who had been with her for weeks before finally reaching out and touching her neck, her hair; who had taken over her body with agonizing slowness, over a period of many more weeks, showing her finally when he went to bed with her that physical sex was only one more link in the chain that bound them.

"Reserved?" Spencer asked. "Okay, reserved." He licked his finger and made a final mark in the air. "Interesting. So your boyfriend in Beijing—the man you saw the night before we met—he’s like that? Reserved?"

"Well ..." Alice hesitated. Lu Ming, of course, had only been reserved on the surface. He had woven his net around her with words, looks, the touch of his foot under the table. But when he had gotten her alone, he—like most of the men she picked up—had driven right into her. No reserve. Not like Jian. Jian had understood sex the way that she, all her life, had understood music, and then later, language. He was aware of it: the thousand ways of touching, breathing, smelling, the rhythmic exchange of physical innuendoes. The theme and variations. She sometimes realized—faintly, as if from a distance—that she was going from one to another in search of a man like him. A man with all his subtlety, his intelligence, but a man—unlike Jian—who was willing to accept and love her true self. Though what was her true self? The vodka was like a bubble now, pushing against the top of her brain. She laughed. "I suppose I’m holding out for the true Chinese man—the type who waits until he has a woman’s heart. When a man like that delivers, watch out."

"But it’s just love that does that, isn’t it?" Spencer asked, syllables starting to get mushed. "You can be English or Eskimo or anything. It’s when you truly love someone that happens."

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back over the top of the chair.

"Don’t you want love?" he pressed on. He carried his cup to the spot where his mouth was supposed to be, slopped a few drops over the side. "Don’t you want to get married, settle down? What about kids? Don’t you want to have kids?"

"Yes," she said. "Absolutely."

"I bet your dad wants you to have kids."

"You mean Horace. Of course he wants grandchildren, but only if they’re Anglo-Saxon. That’s Horace."

"You never call him Dad?"

"Horace. Look—he’s my father. But I don’t call him Dad, or Daddy. Dads