faults and flirts

“Sunset, hey, it’s Anya. You doing anything tonight?”
“Hey. Uh, A-he, you remember A-he? He’s having a party. They just published a new book. But you have to wear perfume.”
“Okay, but I don’t have any perfume.”
“Come over to our place beforehand and we’ll go over together. You, uh, you know what kind of books he publishes?”
“Pornographic comic books, right? And the occasional Proust?”
“Okay. So we’ll see you tonight. You outside right now?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, be careful.”

That last bit is a reference to our current freak meteorological event, a wintertime typhoon which, to me, is distinguishable from a summertime typhoon only by the fact that it is occurring in December. Was that sentence clear or what? What that meant was, the weather was finally starting to cool down a little, almost enough to resemble early autumn, and then this typhoon hit and now it is once more hot and muggy. The perfume I did not understand until we got to the party, having, of coure, forgotten to use either of the bottles that the girls had so painstakingly rummaged to find. Sunset lives with two of the other girls who were dancing around at Jennifer’s place last week, in some sort of not completely clear arrangement between the seventh-floor apartment in which resides one of the girls’ mothers and the windowfull eighth floor roof-box that the family built on top of it. The roof-box is among the nicest I’ve seen(which means it’s nicer than most of the apartments I’ve seen) with a kitchen, two bathrooms, a bright work space with two big computers where Superior Purity and Big Sister do their graphic design, and a huge room divided into super-cozy hanging-out space and ultra-cozy bedroom space. There are windows on three sides, and the view from the hanging-out room is, to my mind, incredibly Taipei, even though the roof-box is taller than most of the other things around it, which means that what you see from the window is something other than the wall of the next building, or, as in my case, the next-door neighbor smoking and talking loudly on the phone on his closed-in verandah.[1] In this sense it is not, actually, very Taipei at all; very Taipei would definitely involve windows facing walls.

What you see from the windows there are the layered roofs and corrugated coverings of various original and added-on structures, descending in a kind of irregular roof-tile overlap all the way down to the alley. You can trace the alley with your gaze up to its fifty-degree angle with the next alley up, and then you start to lose it in the maze of other non-right-angled alleys that everyone claims only exist in the older, western, sections of Taipei but in fact cover the entire city except for the aberrant Xinyi Plan Area, which is just north of this particular domicile. Following the brown and grey patchwork rooftops and grey and black alleys up, up, up, your gaze suddenly hits the scintillating monster that is Taipei 101, all silver shine and sleek reflective windows punctuated by airport-sized blinking red and blue lights, a steel and glass larger than life King Kong staring straight into the window, a shocking discrepancy to everything around it that gives the entire roof-and-alley ensemble a movie-set feel, as though someone had decided to film Der Golem next to the World Trade Center.[2]

The party was in a little whimsically painted bar slash coffee shop with lampshades made out of long white feathers. They knew a few people, including a girl who’d studied in France with Superpure (I think her personality is better expressed by this version of her name—maybe I’ll eventually go as far as to say Supapure). I spent a lot of time near the door chatting to Big Sister and observing the goings-on. Sunset met a girl who turned out to have graduated from the same MFA program as her and in no time at all the were calling one another Sister (as is, of course, appropriate: the girl was Sunset’s xuemei, school-younger-sister, and Sunset was her xuejie, school-older-sister), before embarking on some long passionate hugging and dancing around. The girl was there by invitation of a boy who works at the publishing company (which is called Big Spicy and has a most interesting business card). They made a big deal about this fact when introducing one another, causing a continual minor raising of eyebrows: a girl and guy as roommates? “It’s a rainbow apartment,” Sunset reported back later, pointing out the girl’s girlfriend in the crowd.

Supapure spent most of the evening inciting the interest of various men at the party with her performance of Superior Purity, which involves a lot of eyelash-batting, an elegant scrunching together of the upper body in response to the victim’s attention, an easy laugh made all the more valuable by a modest hand covering the mouth as if to silence its unstoppable outpouring of joy, and a lot of pouty run-on sentences spun like melodies on a baseline of wide-eyed glances on an upward diagonal (a technique which she succinctly summarized as “I’m so weak, you’re so great! I’m so small, you’re so tall!”). Returning from her first dip into the crowd, she announced the results by doing a tiny little hip-thrust in the general direction of an autograph she’d gotten from a famous illustrator and then turning to Big Sister and saying with highly inferior purity, “I think I just caught a job, they need a poster design, goddammit I didn’t bring my business cards, gimme a pen.” And then she waded back in. Big Sister watched it all with some amusement. “I like to see her have a good time. She hasn’t really gone out and played in a long time. Usually it’s me going out to play. She doesn’t get jealous or anything; but still I like to see her have a good time.” They’ve been together for about seven years now.

The perfume that we all forgot to wear turned out to be for raffle purposes: you could write down the relevant information and enter it into a drawing, prizes being the company’s new publications. Supapure got a hold of some raffle entry slips and used her best adorable salesgirl voice to ask each of us in turn: Excuse me miss but what kind of perfume are you wearing? Where did you dab it? What is its defining characteristic? Whose perfume do you like the best? We called out our most expensive answers, and each other, and she dropped the slips into the big glass, and between the four of us we won two copies of the new pornographic action-adventure comic book, reminiscent of Tom of Finland but with women, and less well drawn, and one thick, bound collection of gold-and-red hued prints, in the highly decorated martial arts style, of Chinese warriors and maidens in obscene positions among many large swords emanating from and pointing to particular places. With unbelievable injustice, not a one of these books was won by me.

Supapure, who had preemtively claimed any winnings as her own because she’d been the one to fill out all our raffle tickets, took the chance to jump around and hug a variety of people before coming back to where Big Sister, Sunset, the girl who'd been in France, and I were chatting. Supapure pointed an accusing finger at her old classmate: “She has no faults.” Turning to me with the exaggerated, supacute head tilt and almost lip-synchy speech she had been using on the men in the audience, she said, “I always know people’s faults. I know them right away. You too: the night we met you I already knew what your fault is, I told Big Sister about it right that very night.” “Oh yeah? What’s my fault?” I asked. “You,” she said, the heartbeat pause before each word an aural jabbing finger, “are too polite.”[3]

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[1] His Taiwanese is so clear that even I can catch some of it sometimes; it must be the only time in my life I’ve actually enjoyed being subjected to other people’s very loud telephone conversations.

[2] Is that in bad taste? What’s another shiny silver skyscraper everyone would recognize? (Don’t say the Sears Tower—Taipei 101 is no Darth Vader.)

[3] Of course she meant distant, uninvolved—what is normally translated as polite, 客氣 keqi, means having the attitude of a guest, i.e. an outsider. But I figured I could take this chance to give my mother a momentary, if somewhat deceptive, sense of relief at the thought that someone somewhere finds me too polite.