Kowloon Tong by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page B

being punctual and did not mind seeming predictable, but this was confining and dull. You are forty-three and your mother is nearing seventy and she is telling you that she can't eat because you're not also at the table, and she is repeatedly demanding Where were you?
    "Doing the accounts," he said.
    He did not look her in the eye. Meeting her gaze would have undone him, yet how could he tell her the truth?
    "All this Chuck business put me behind. I've been flat-out all day."
    His lie immediately helped, as he suspected it would. His mother stepped aside, letting him pass, and she patted his cheek in a sympathetic way. As she lost her anger Bunt felt a jolt of energy, the physical thrill of having kept his secret from her. It was necessary. He knew he was weak, and so any secret made him stronger. Had his mother known how he spent his days, his life would have been unbearable. And his stratagem went deeper than merely concealing it from her. Keeping her in the dark was also a way of not having to face the secret himself.
    They ate in the lounge, Wang waiting on them.
    "I saw Wang jogging today."
    Betty's habit of speaking about Wang as if he were not in the room was her way of making him insecure. She could sense him stiffening now, his chin rising, the almost perceptible contraction of his bum cheeks.
    His usual jogging route was down the Peak footpath to Wellington, then up again. When people asked Bunt whether he exercised, he usually said, "No, my houseboy does it for me."
    Betty said, "He looked very impressive in his combinations."
    "Leave off, Mum," Bunt said. He wanted a bit of peace, his mind was in turmoil.
    Just after Mei-ping had left his office, he had felt pleasantly drowsy, with a sharpened appetite. Sex in the late afternoon made him anxious but left him in such a stupor of fatigue that he could do nothing about it. The act of sex was for him first a stunning relief, sudden as a sneeze, and an instant later it was the opposite, a sense of helpless suffocation. Once, at thé Rainbow Theatre in Tsim Sha Tsui, he had seen a Chinese acrobat balancing his partner on his head—her headstand on his skull—and on each of her upright ankles clusters of gyrating hoops. That had been a thrill for him, because it seemed so dangerous. But when, as he dreaded, the woman faltered and fell, dropping the hoops, Bunt felt it was the same thing with sex. Sex was a balancing act that always ended in failure, a fall, a sense of having slipped and been inattentive, of not knowing how to explain it. You refused to remember it, and when you tried again the failure was repeated.
    And there was the partner to consider: now, that woman knew a secret. It was not as though he had done something wrong alone. It was a conspiracy, but it was unequal. With the
onset of desire he found himself pleading and promising. Afterward he was empty, with no memory of his lust but only an odd fishy smell on his fingers and a fleeting image of the ridiculous posture he had contrived, the amateur acrobatics, the thrashing legs, even the hoops—no wonder it never worked. He felt tricked and resentful. It was all her fault. And it seemed motiveless as well, because most of them hated it and only did it because he was a big, needy
gweilo.
    Bunt had seen them gag and make faces too many times for him to imagine he was giving a woman pleasure. Before they parted, while the woman was still rumpled, her hair askew, her face rubbed and pink, her eyes glazed, he would think,
She looks stuffed,
and wonder whether he looked the same. Sex was their favor to him, who did them many favors. Usually they said, "You done?" And always, after sex, he hated himself for wanting to say "Sorry."
    It was wrong to keep an appointment afterward, like that one with Monty. He would have preferred a quiet pint of beer and a plate of chips in a darkened club, a little time to resume a calmer identity, an interval, like deliciously smoking a crafty fag between the acts.