Typhoon

16

Isabella was dreaming about Miles Coolidge. This is the entry in her diary:

Very weird. We were at a beach house, possibly New England? I was standing next to Miles on a curved staircase while Joe went swimming in a pool outside with about four Chinese businessmen, all of them wearing white-collared shirts. It was hot and everyone’s drunk. In full view of the other guests, Miles suddenly leans towards me and kisses me.

Then we walked up the stairs into a room where someone had laid out multi-coloured pills and lines of blue (?!) coke on a huge white sheet. There were lots of people in the room but Miles was kissing my neck and my back all the time. Either the shock of him doing this, the pleasure and surprise of what was happening, or the noise of Joe coming home woke me up.

Isabella was sitting up in bed when Joe walked into the room.

“You’re up,” he said.

“I’ve just had the weirdest dream.”

“What about?”

“Can’t remember.” It was easier to lie.

“You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

Joe picked up a bottle of mineral water from the floor and stumbled as he passed it to her.

“You’re pissed,” she said.

“Very.”

She looked at the clock. “Where have you been?”

“Miles. I’m finished with him. Last time we go out.”

“Did you have an argument?” Isabella stood up and padded past him into the bathroom. She was wearing a blue silk pyjama top and a pair of white cotton knickers. “You really stink, Joe.”

He checked this by inhaling a mouthful of stale tobacco from his shirt and jacket, taking both of them off so that he was standing bare-chested in the centre of the room. “Yeah. A fight. I lost my temper in a club.”

“Which club?” Isabella was sitting on the loo.

“In Wan Chai.”

She knew what that meant. “What kind of place?”

“The kind of place Miles likes. The kind where he can feel up girls from Ulan Bator.” It was a cheap shot. He had never before betrayed Miles’s confidence, but wanted Isabella to think better of him for not being part of his world. The tactic didn’t work.

“God,” he heard her say, running water at the basin. “He’s so lonely. He must be so unhappy if he’s doing stuff like that.”

The remark was like a prophetic indication of Isabella’s desire to change Miles, to save him from himself. Joe couldn’t think how to reply.

“What about you?” she asked.

“What about me?”

“Did you feel up any girls from Ulan Bator?”

“What?” She was drying her hands. The tone of the question had been mischievous rather than disapproving. “Of course not,” he said.

“Really?” Isabella came back into the room and saw that Joe was now standing in his boxer shorts, hanging his suit near the window. Her pyjamas were unbuttoned almost to the waist and she came up behind him, her hands touching his stomach. “Did you want to fuck one of the girls? Were you jealous of Miles? Is that why you had a fight?”

He turned and his eyes went to the dark brown freckles at the crown of her breasts. He kissed them, saying nothing, falling to his knees and pushing her onto the bed. The scent of Isabella’s skin was a paradise which he breathed and tasted, as if it would free him from all of the stress and the madness of Wang and Lenan and Miles. But in the half-light of their bedroom, as he moved inside her, Isabella suddenly became Kitty and Kitty became Isabella and Joe’s head swarmed with guilt. For the first time between them he lost all trace of her as they made love, and he could sense that she knew this. Adrift in the warmth of the woman he adored he went through the motions of a drunken, head-spinning fuck before collapsing in a funk of guilt and booze.

The diary entry continues:

It was as if he wasn’t with me. For the first time it felt ordinary and boring and I just wanted it over. Then I started thinking about what had happened with Miles. I started thinking about the dream.