When Red is Black

will,” he said.
     
    “Her cholesterol level is still too high. The expensive delicacies on the nightstand may not be good for her.”
     
    “I understand,” he said. “Some of my friends are incorrigible.”
     
    “She must be proud of a successful son like you with all those important buddies.”
     
    “Well, you’d really need to ask her that.”
     
    As he walked toward his mother’s room, he was surprised at the sight of White Cloud making a call at the pay phone. Her back was toward him, but she was wearing the same white, large-collared wool sweater as on the first day she had reported to his apartment. She must have come to visit his mother again.
     
    She had a cell phone, he remembered, but it was not surprising that she should use a pay phone, considering what her cell phone bill at the end of the month might amount to. He, too, had used the pay phone in the lobby.
     
    Was it possible that Gu had given her a cell phone only for her assignment? And now that the job was finished, he had taken it back? In any case, it was none of his business.
     
    She seemed to be engrossed in a long conversation. He was about to step away when he heard his title mentioned. He snapped to attention, and took a few steps to the side until he was out of sight behind a white pillar.
     
    “Oh, that chief inspector. . . . What a prig . . . impossible ... so self-important.”
     
    There was no justifying his decision to go on eavesdropping. But he remained fixed by the pillar, hardly able to convince himself that he was lurking there for the purpose of finding out more about Gu.
     
    “Those Big Bucks at least know what to do with a woman. . . .Not so goddamned bookish, so busy keeping his official neck untouched. He will never take a risk for something he wants.”
     
    From the position in which he stood, he could not quite make out every word she spoke. He could tell himself that she was probably talking about somebody else, but he knew it was not so.
     
    “He loves only himself. ...”
     
    Was she so aggravated by his “political correctness” or “Confucian morals?”
     
    Perhaps he was too bookish to figure this out. Perhaps she was so modern or postmodern that in her company, he was hopelessly old-fashioned. Hence the inevitable conflict. Perhaps he did not understand her at all.
     
    In a Zen episode he had read long ago, a good lesson came with a blow. When you are knocked out of your usual self, things may be seen from a totally different perspective.
     
    Or perhaps it was nothing but business. In business, every gesture was possible, for a possible reason. Hers would have been made for his approval, and more importantly, for Gu’s approval. It was not every day that she could have landed such a job. Now that their business was finished, she was making her objective comments.
     
    Yet these objective comments hurt.
     
    I am a cloud in the sky, casting a reflection, / by chance, in the heart of your wave. Don’t be too amazed, / or too thrilled, / in an instant I’ll be gone without a trace.
     
    Those were lines from another poem by Xu Zhimo, also with a central image of a cloud. The poem would read far more naturally in her voice. She was not meant for him. Still, he should be grateful to her, whether their relationship had been all-business or not. In those hectic days, her help really had made a difference. He wished the best for her now that everything was over.
     
    He decided not to go back to his mother’s room. White Cloud would be there too. It was time for him to return to the routine bureau work which he had become accustomed to, the way a snail becomes used to its shell.
     
    No more little secretary, nothing. He was truly like the blank page he had thought of in his mother’s company a short while earlier.
     
    * * * *
     
    Afterward, on the way to the Shanghai Police Bureau, he dropped in at a travel agency, where he booked his mother a trip to Suzhou and Hangzhou with a tour group. She had not had a vacation for years—not since the early sixties, when she had taken him to Suzhou on a one-day trip. He had been a Young Pioneer, in his pre-school days, and his mother, wearing a red silk cheongsam, had been very young as they stood together in the Xuanmiao Temple. A trip might help her to recover, he thought. A pity that he would not be able to accompany her. There was no possibility of his taking another vacation, not after he received a phone call from the Central Party