Dead Stones [manxman] [boyxboy]

Part II

Hao Chen-Li’s day had begun at five am and darted through the mercury: wrestling at a 1000 bucks an hour with the Irvine startup brats, the oily wreck of the veal scaloppini, the intern with a very unattractive Confucius beard and his illiterate memos, muttering through an hour and a half of choked traffic. And here he was pacing outside the entrance of the Cheese and Mints café.

In the January damp cold, he felt queasily hot in his tailored suit. He condescended to remove his silk tie and fold it into his pocket. His watch—a Swiss monstrosity but a sweet present from Ricardo—glittered 8:30. There was just one plan for the evening: Say hello for five minutes and drop out.

But did he really have go in there? There was still time to turn around and enjoy another lovely lonely evening of nothing. He shuffled back to the burgundy bean pod of his car but stopped short of opening the door. Drunk with hesitation, he called Yuu’s mother.

“Oh, it’s you,” Nianxi’s hoarse mezzo jabbed from the receiver.

“Don’t act as if you weren’t expecting a call on your birthday.”

“Lately it seems best not to look forward to these things.” Hao rolled his eyes. Nianxi droned, “Call Yuu and remind him, will you?”

“If I have to remind him, a call can’t mean much.”

“No more meaningless than the Facebook app that reminded you of my birthday.”

“Ai-ya, don’t give me grief. Go nag your husband.”

“In another hour or so, he will have completely forgotten my birthday. Don’t worry, I’ve got my slipper ready for him in the morning.”

Hao grimaced. Before he could be ecstatic that he had dodged lifelong monogamy with Nianxi, the ambient silence roared in his ears. Nianxi would never bring up Ricardo, a fact that had brined him bitterly over the years. Now it felt such a great relief. Still this silence was just too much.

“Spare Jerry your slipper--I have to go.” Hao dropped the line manfully and texted Yuu, “Why am I reminding you of your mother’s birthday!!!!”

He put the phone away, groaning helplessly to that wine-tinged moon. <Just do this. I’m fine.>

He braved the door. A cinnamon mélange invaded his senses, and he quivered a smile to Monica cutting a dripping piece of bread pudding at the counter. She lifted her bread knife in high greeting. But before her orange-painted lips could to utter a word, he ducked away to the adjoining room.

He made a careful way through the bramble of tables and chairs and to the wall of curtains dusty and floral. Churning in his mind were the possible lies for his long absence. Busy … Contracts don’t write themselves … Went to China for a bit … The go hobby is making Ricardo jealous. He paused to wilt in the brazen fecklessness of the last lie, loosened his collar, and marched on.

A scream shook him solidly from lies. A seal-like woman swooped past him from behind and swathed open the curtain, zoomed onto a little blonde batting her little hand irately at the table.

The woman shrieked, “Zoë baby, what’s wrong?”

A moment later the mother emerged from the curtains, grabbing a candlestick wrist of Zoë, who was adamantly protesting, “They won’t let me play Sensei.” She wrested her hand away from the silly arms of her mother. “MOM?”

Not quite understanding the commotion himself, Sensei looked paralyzed before a horizontal front of equally frozen go players. But Hao was shivering at the strange rudeness of evening and wondering how in his three-month absence had incivility grown wild.

“I’ll give her a teaching game,” Hao said quickly.

Zoë’s cheeks rounded into hard stones. “You are not Sensei.”

“Hao’s a Sensei.” Brett blundered forth from the game tables, seizing the chance to save the evening.

“Better than the other Sensei?” Zoë said.

Posturing had always been unwelcome in the club, more so from a child. Although Hao was a god of the game, Sensei was god squared. Brett looked pleadingly to Hao flicking aggressively at the metallic straps of his watch.

Hao snorted at her affront. He was not even supposed to stay long, he fumed, but irritation spun out of gas as Brett sidled to him and palmed his ebony hand over his shoulder.

“You’ll need a handicap of nine stones from him,” Brett said to Zoë.

“So he’s better than you?” she asked.

Brett’s hand was clawing into Hao’s clavicle now. “Yes, very. I have to take seven stones from him.”

“Oh, then I’ll beat him at five stones then.”

Nine stone handicap, five stone handicap, an even game, all were the same to Hao as long as the little girl could make the stones sing again. Excited, he furrowed at the blue pebbles of Zoë’s eyes and queried for something astonishingly brilliant.

“Honey, over here.” Already Zoë’s mother, with diffident motions and happy hums, was setting a board and go bowls at a table far away from the hallowed Sensei.

Brett patted Hao’s shoulder and said in a hushed tone. “Thank you so much. She’s a little …”

Hao did not oblige to pair Brett’s yellow-toothed grin. Brett hustled away too quickly to fawn at Sensei playing sensationally ten simultaneous games. Hao was left decaying to thorny need. He seated himself across from Zoë arranging five black handicap stones in a wide quincunx pattern over the board. Her movements jumbled giddily. And his eyes slid across the aisle to a young man counting silently the score of his game against Kenji, who was standing tall over him. Hao did not recognize the young man. Yet, the burgundy tint of his moving lips was familiar as was the peninsula of razor rash stretching along his side burns. Still handsome despite the hormonal pox, fresh, lively, smiling now probably because the man perceived a win. Hao shifted, played his fingers in the bowl of white stones, a showering sound of the stones washing his thoughts. Go was whispering lovingly to the young man. And also to Kenji collecting his lips into a fish pout. And to Cindy focusing her poppy-red nose less than six inches onto her game. And to Brett nodding assuredly to himself. Perhaps not to Claus haggling with Monica over grapefruit. Everyone was so busy that no one noticed his cinnamon-hot heart.

A blue feeling niggled Hao. Go did not seem to have missed him in these last few months, neither had the club.