One day she throws on a tight satin Dolce & Gabbana - high heels and a pashmina wrap, and grabs her Baschmakoff purse, and walks out.
Her Rolls Royce shushes its way to locate her afterawhile, and leans in acquiescently as it approaches the spot where she is standing on the pavement.
Angrily, she pulls off the million-dollar ring and casts it down to the gutter or to the pavement somewhere, and is too exorcised to even notice as the new innovation of a blue illumined, glowing frosty Makrolon Spirit of Ecstasy, lights up its warm 'welcome in' to her very brand new and gleaming Rolls Royce Wraith -, all plush inside with its doublecream-thick carpets and lambswool rugs, and soft luxury black-piped leather seats, and its excessive starlit ceiling.
Ah, see! The elevated in society too have their problems denying to them proper use of a faculty which can truly appreciate the splendours of a lofty station. For that faculty needs time, and ease, objectivity, and insight.
Anyone can easily become highly disillusioned by staying in this place too long, if they are a fundamentally decent person - in the face of big money when it shows its banal public profile as a tool of power in the hands of those who would merely overlord. Power corrupts and boredom does too.
In certain circumstances one can be uplifted by big money's intensely private side; that is to say, if one ever discovers the mysterious face of that private power, called discreet money. It is mysterious because it is in every way like the mist-breath of a magical mythical beast, conjured by a yet-more-mysterious beast-sorcerer. For no one, or at least certainly very few, can even say if such things exist at all! And those who know are not supposed to tell.
The light thrown there glimly in the midst of the thick obfuscation of the mundane and the material life of Man, is in fact from that passionate life we all wish to know more about and perhaps experience intimately ourselves most keenly above all other things in the carnal world.
*
"Can you come soon?"
"Yes."
"And bring some food for me – I wish to have shark fin soup. And abalone char mein. Not chow mei fun, eh – char mein. Can you do that? I'll meet you outside your place when you call back."
"Okay."
Rich men have their second wives – 'er' (2nd) 'nai' (wives). Why shouldn't I have such a paid companion too, she would tell herself, each time she arranged a meeting with this young girl. Of course it wasn't quite the same thing as a typical ernai.
*
Sarah – that was what she said her name was – stood outside the apartment block near the Marina Mandarin Hotel. She had said her age was twenty three, but she had a decorum and composure that was unusual for someone of that age. She was wearing a ridiculously short white coloured satin brocade cheong sam with a dark burgundy edging around the hemline which if anything, simply accentuated the very particular obsceneness of the skirt segment itself. The little, owlish glasses motif on the left breast announced to those who knew that it was a bespoke design from the ultra-exclusive and expensive atelier of Sophie Hong Fashion.
She had dark and long eyelashes and mascara-ed upturned eyelid corners that gave a strikingly exotic otherworldly look to her already pretty face.
In both hands she held the metal loops atop two of those Chinese takeaway-style containers, the ones that were square-ish and taller than a square box and usually made from oil-proofed cardboard – only these ones, the ones she held, were made from pure gold. And the chopsticks and little spoons were made from rosewood with gold inlays.
On her feet she wore Paris-handmade Corthay trompas – elevated platform Chinese slippers; albeit entirely handmade by French craftsmen... And on her hands she wore English Dent gloves, white chamois with discreet mulberry-coloured embroidered designs of tiny birds and wings and feathers and fleur-de-lis.
Her mistress opened the car door to her on the passenger side, and the girl got in delicately, sitting in the rear left-hand side seat, next to her patron who also sat in the rear, on the right, directly behind the liveried male driver who always seemed to just look straight ahead.
"Good morning. How are you this morning, Madame Li.'
The Greeks have a word for a type of formal language and diction – they call it Katharevousa. In Sanskrit and in modern Hindi the word Devanagari applies to the same concept and although in all those cultures and languages that have such a spoken literary form, though the words used are ordinary and from the particular language of the culture in question, the implication is that the purity and strictness of the meanings and syntax that is employed has to do with the way divine beings are said to speak.
In Chinese classical literature too it is said fairy beings of heaven speak in a perfect form of words as well as sentence composition, but by tradition they are said to have very little interest in the affairs of the human being and often their words will seem utterly meaningless to people.
The girl Sarah spoke with just such crisp clarity, simplicity, and yet perfection, and Li presumed it was a Beijing affectation now fashionable among the rising class of new ernai elite.
The style or form of language encouraged Li to reciprocate. "Quite poorly, Sarah."
She looked into the girl's face to see if there was a response of any kind.
"And that is why I have called to see you on such short notice."
Instead of a facial expression of any kind at all, the girl simply remarked: "I am constantly at my mistress's service." And with a small incline of her head and a level tone she gave away nothing but a sense of complete demure innocence.
"You do not ask whether I am ill at all and what is the cause?"
"You do not appear unwell and so I assume that the matter must be of an emotional cause..."
Li had often wondered about the perspicacity shown continually by this young thing, and here again was just another of those many such occasions where the question arose in her mind.
Li raised her own eyebrows. "Well you have surmised correctly. I have left this arrogant spoiled miser, and I am thoroughly sick of all the people like him, using their power and position and wealth to take whatever they want, and do, whatever they want, with no regard for the feelings of anyone else, whatsoever."
"I understand." Sarah said, nodding very slightly.
Madame Li shifted a little uneasily in her soft, alpine bull-hide leather seat. "And I have something important that I wish to discuss with you which is not made easier either, by these bad experiences that I have had recently."
"But Madame, if I may suggest, that you eat something first – before it gets cold."
"Good idea." Li dropped the formality of speech, relieved by the easy distraction of the abalone noodles and the shark fin soup, from the real subject that was taxing her thoughts heavily and about which she actually wished to talk to this girl. She loved the way the girl always seemed to know in every right moment what was most comfortable and pleasant to her. How did she do that? She was particularly good-looking too, though in a slightly boyish way. Although maybe that was just a matter of personal opinion... She had to admit to herself there was a strong element of personal erotic bias – which was the real undercurrent to the meeting, afterall.
Sarah had been in the Rolls Royce before and knew how to operate the little trays and crevices and spaces, and knew where the glasses for the champagne were. And where the champagne was.
And where the fluffy white cotton hand-towels were and how to prepare them in the enclosed-behind-the-walnut-veneer-panel, on-board warmer.
Was it solicitous the way the girl had tested the hotness of the shark fin soup before she turned the same spoon she had placed a second earlier into her own earnest mouth and offered the spoon and the soup to her patron? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was just insouciance.
It had taken a long long while for the more mature woman Li, to realize that although she thought of herself as straight, that she was in fact very capable of thinking about another female as a sex partner too. Somewhere, she did not even recall where, in the process of angrily and dismissively seeking out a typical ernai both from a spirit of curiosity and retaliation, she had actually begun to think of Sarah as highly highly sexually exciting. But then there was this almost, nobility about her. She had proven to be a reliable friend, an available companion, an honest broker in judgements about emotional things, highly intelligent, resourceful, and generous in her words of approval and compliment. She was uplifting to be around.
And now it was all too late to go back.
Back on the thoughts, back on the feelings that welled up, back on those ideas of - 'what if...?'
At last she put down the golden box and looked directly and hard, at the girl, and said: "Sarah, there is something I wish to suggest to you that makes me very nervous about what you might say when you hear it..."
"Yes, Madame Li." Utterly unwavering equanimity.
"I believe you are such a nice person in every way that the absolute last thing of all that I would want to do is cause an insult to you or cause you any trouble." She paused only very briefly, and continued.
"This thing I started with you began as something very stupid on my part and probably I was wrong to use money and position to arrange it, because it makes out there is an implication of assuming that anything is on offer for money. Which is ordinarily a way of thinking I myself hate when I see it in other people. Originally I told you that all I wanted you to be was a professional friend."
Li realized at that moment that she was able to some extent to rely on her own maturity, her greater years of experience of the world and of relationships - at least with men because she had never had any of that kind with women. The gap in physical years gave her a degree of self-assurance to deal with the subject matter she was raising with this younger girl.
"Sarah. When a person gets to a certain age – and I am speaking from personal experience of course – the subject of sex poses less fears than when you are younger and less experienced. And although I cannot say I understand how you yourself have approached this matter in your own mind, that is, when you have chosen your lifestyle – if that has been a real choice, of course – I must assume you are not completely negative towards sex.
"The fact is, that I find myself sexually attracted to you and yet I do not want to behave badly toward you either."
