"Oh yeah, right. Just a sec!"
He saw her get up, leave the room, turn one way out the door of her bedroom, stop and turn the other way toward the bathroom.
She found it on top of the toilet and came rushing back in. She sat in the chair, leaned back, pressed it against her lips and the bit of moisture that was growing inside her helped to ease it in. He wondered if she would act differently if she knew he could see her and figured she'd just play it up a bit. This was much better.
"Master, master, master your inside of me now," she typed. Her girlish enthusiasm made him grin.
"It's you're, not your.'"
"Whatever!"
"Good, I give you permission to come this evening. Now remember: be a good girl to everyone you meet, and especially to Karla. And not a word that I've given you my permission."
"Right. When do I get to see you again?"
"Be patient!" was all he wrote and the now dreaded blue flash appeared and he was gone.
Her heart sunk like iron in a bathtub.
'What the hell's going on? Maybe he has a fetish.' Watching women have sex, or just the idea, turned him on? Maybe he was letting her get all this out before they settled in together. Then she had an insight. 'Maybe this isn't about sex at all.'
She reviewed a bit. The things he had done for her: the gym membership, the clothes and pearls, but most of all, the love he found inside her which kept her on a mad carousel of emotions as disorienting as a gallon of cheap wine. In a week she'd been through it all: humiliation, self-loathing, physical pain and mental anguish. She'd cried six years worth of tears, reassessed her life and found that it sucked. She'd fallen in love so quickly, so profoundly that it flattened the breath out of her. She reached new heights of sexual ecstasy with a man, felt the attraction for a woman - no, two women - and thoroughly enjoyed the novel sensations of lesbian sex. She finally discovered that love was more than it promised.
For a few moments, as the vibrator mindlessly stroked her g-spot, she meditated on her man, her master. She didn't fantasize about sex, but thought instead of what he meant to her and how he made her feel. It was all those things guys had been trying to tell her all along. From that first guy, Billy somebody, and the teacher she seduced and, well, frankly, blackmailed. All the guys in and after college, they had all been trying to tell her, but she didn't have ears to hear. It was what she'd wanted her father to tell her: how thinking of her made him live in joy. How life without her was unthinkable. But he never said those things. He just left, without a kiss or so much as a wave of his hand. That's when she realized where the source of her handicap lay.
It was like an unexpected midnight knock at the door and was so obvious as to be clichรฉ. It made her feel so stupid not to have figured it out before, but her mind must have long ago created some mental block to protect her. It shunted his memory in a locker where lost and dead things go, only infrequently and indistinctly recalled.
She turned off the vibrator and removed it, remarking how wet she'd gotten thinking of Philip this way. She put it next to the keyboard and crawled into bed wishing she had her comforting leather collar to keep her warm and not the cold pearls.
She returned to thoughts of her father. As much as she had tried in the past to hate him, she could not. She just didn't have enough information. Her mother never spoke of him and photos were scarce. There was one, folded and faded, of them both at a park somewhere in San Francisco. She was on a swing and he was behind her, smoking a cigarette, looking off camera. She was looking at her mother, who held the camera, and smiling wide, full of joy. It was probably the last photo of them together.
'Where was he? Where had he been when she was young?' She thought back and felt his missing presence at the critical moments in her life. She couldn't think of any in particular then realized that they were all critical moments. Each argument with her mother, each night at the dinner table, each bath before bed, there was only one voice, one cheek to kiss. One set of arms to enfold her and tell her there were no monsters living in the park.
'How,' she wondered, 'how does a man leave his child? How does his own life become so important to him that he knowingly destroys the life of his daughter and wife?'
She reached for her phone and called her mother.
"Mama?"
"Jenny, honey. How are you?"
"I'm ok, mama. Are you well?" It had been a couple of weeks since their last conversation.
"I'm ok. You sound upset."
"There's been a lot going on. Listen mama, why did daddy leave us?"
"Oh Jenny, darling. We've been through this before."
"Mama, call me Mei Chun please. I want to go back to my real name and let's speak in Chinese, ok?"
Her mother replied in Chinese, "Ok, but I want to know what's gotten into you!"
"Ok, we'll have dinner soon and talk about it, but please tell me. Now that I'm a woman you can tell me the truth. Tell me like a woman, not like your little girl."
She heard something in her daughter that had never been present before. Something indeed had happened to her. Perhaps something tragic that caused her to step over the line from girl to woman. "Ok, Mei honey. It feels so strange to call you that again, but I always loved your name. I miss you."
"I miss you too, mama."
"What can I say? Your father was a big man in town, the son of an important official in Zeng Jia Wan, the county seat for Shayang county. Anyway, you don't want to get a lesson on central China, but for a small town, one of the tens of thousands of small towns in China, he was a big man. When he started to woo me, I was young. I thought he loved me and I thought I loved him. We were married in a big ceremony and there were so many people. Then we went to Shanghai for our honeymoon and stayed in a nice hotel. It was like a dream and you were conceived there, I'm sure. And we had all the love a new couple has. We were really happy and spoke about moving there and living the life of rich town folks, but honeymoons have to end. We had to return and our dreams came to nothing as dreams do. I've told you this before, honey."
"Not to a woman. You told me when I was too young to understand the truth."
"Well... then things started to get worse, almost right away. He began to resent that his freedom was gone, that he couldn't be the cock in the farmyard. As the son of an important man, he was used to chatting up girls and I wasn't his first, so having to stay at home and care for me when I was pregnant was difficult for him. He tried," she sighed into the phone, "I think he tried, but some nights he made some excuse and came home drunk and I could smell the women on him. He didn't really have a job, just ran errands for his father, but his father's influence was declining because of age and probably politics. I think the wedding was the last opportunity he had to gather the respect he once had - like it was his retirement party or something. Well then, he had to find work, your father, and he didn't do well in school and that's when we moved to Wuhan, so he could find work.
"You had just been born and he was disappointed. I know you understand enough about China that a boy child is much more valued than a girl child. I am sorry about that, Mei, but it's just the truth, even though I never felt that way. Anyway, he was disappointed that you weren't his son and in China then, and I think now still, having more than one child was just not possible. Except for those who were rich or well connected, it was just not done.
"He got a job in a factory as a manager with his father's help but he hated working. We did ok for a few years. We struggled and we were poor, but I thought he had changed and was coming around to his responsibilities. But then he found some friends and they lured him out at nights and he came home later and later. I found out that he'd been keeping a woman, or at least paying something for her, and I lost control. I hit him and he hit me back and when you came crying out of the bedroom in pajamas he just left. He didn't return for days and I didn't know what to do. I was working then too. I had some basic English in college and they made me a teacher but it didn't pay much. I couldn't lose him because I wouldn't be able to make ends meet and give you what you needed.
"So I started thinking and began to suggest that we visit America and maybe try to emigrate. He had some relatives who lived over here and I began to press him to contact them. I tried to paint a picture of a new life for us. That he would be free to have his son in America. Eventually, he did contact them and they encouraged him. His father was still alive and he arranged everything through some close friends. So when you were nine we moved to San Francisco."
That sounded to Mei like the end of the story, but she pressed her mother for more.
"Well it didn't help. At first America was new for him, exciting. We'd seen Shanghai and San Francisco seemed even more of a dream. People were so wealthy, everyone had a car and he fell in love with it but soon our problems returned. He couldn't keep a job because he hated working. He fell into gambling with his cousins and the women returned. One day he said he was going back to China and asked if I wanted to come. I said no, that life for you would be better here, and that was it. He left and I haven't heard from him since."
"But mama, what about me? How could he leave me like that?" It was the little girl again and her mother didn't know what to say.
"My Mei Chun, I don't know, honey. He didn't leave you, baby; he left me. I got so tired of him, so sick of his excuses and his lies and laziness; I just made his life worse. It was a thousand things, honey, not you. It was the looks I would give him when he came home and the cold shoulder when he wanted love. He just didn't deserve to be honored like the big man he thought he was. He tried to get everything without earning it. Trust me, Mei Chun, you had very little to do with it."
That sounded right. She had very little to do with her father, she was insignificant, the child that wasn't his boy. Her citizenship was the result of his desire to replace her with a son, to fix the mistake of her birth.
