Zugzwang, Book II, Chapter 039
Chapter 039 – Gaining a tempo
Later that day in Hong Kong, Alys was seated before the dressing table in her hotel room in the Excelsior, pinning up her long cable of hair into a chignon at the nape of her neck. The day had been long and tedious. It had been the final day of the Ancient World Philosophy Conference where she spent the most of her time being distant and insouciant to anyone who spoke to her, thereby giving credence to the lie that she was not feeling well and was unable to attend the conference dinner that night held in one of the ballrooms in the fashionable part of the city. She had also spent much of the day keeping herself close to Henry Goldman and a few of her philosopher friends from Taiwan and the European continent so as to keep Francis Eyre at bay. Having worked hard to be where she was in the philosophical and academic world, she was not going to risk her standing in it by attaching her name to the Francis Eyre and Rose de Winter scandal once more. Fortunately, Dr Eyre had gotten the message and exchanged nothing more than commonplace pleasantries and philosophical points on Xenophon with her. “Well, that’s over,” she sighed to herself, giving her head a shake to ascertain that the chignon was secure.
Indeed, the conference was over as was the shadow of Francis Eyre. She had much to look forward to in the coming months – possible tenure with the University of Tokyo, a conference on Renaissance political philosophy in Britain in early May, and right now, within the short space of an hour, dinner with her annoying freeloading brat of a beau. Unlike most women, Alys never fussed over what she should wear or over her makeup. She had already decided that the dress she brought for the formal conference dinner would suffice for a night out with her partner, and her makeup would be subtle as she preferred it. No, Alys was more concerned with who would be paying for dinner and how much they would have to spend that night. If it would be possible for her to take him with her to her conference dinner, and she would have, for it would have meant absolutely zero expenditure. However, she did not wish to thrust him into the politics of the philosophical and academic world anymore than he wanted her to be the subject of gossip in entertainment rags. Thus, through a tactic agreement, they kept their professional lives and their attendant duties away from their relationship.
Putting down her lipstick brush, Alys gave the corner of her terracotta red painted lips a wipe before an idea on Machiavelli’s Socratic irony dawned upon her. Suddenly seizing upon a pen and paper, she quickly scrawled across the page as the idea flowed from her head. It would be a key concept in a new paper she was trying to write, and it would serve as a bridge between the warring notions of Machiavelli as practical thinker and Machiavelli as a perceived devil’s advocate.
While she was wrapped up in this agreeable activity, her equally mordant partner was in Sho’s hotel room. Unusually for him, he was having second thoughts on the Ni no Arashi prank. His irresoluteness on the matter revolted against the devil-may-care attitude he had always had, and Sho’s failure to either assuage his fears or consign him to the devil grated on his nerves. However, the fault did not lie with Sho for the older man was on his laptop, having a video-conference call with Chiaki and unable to entertain Nino’s irascibility.
“What would happen if you did what I am about to do to Alys-chan to Chiaki?” was the hypothetical question Nino posed to Sho.
“I wouldn’t do it,” Sho said, watching Nino knot a slim Prussian blue necktie loosely to his shirt.
“I’d set my fire ants on you and leave you for dead,” Chiaki’s voice came over the laptop speakers. “Alys would not be so kind. She gave Sora some very graphic ideas for the torture scene in Burning like Ice.”
Sho shuddered and cringed. “Wifey has a point; she’s not really a woman sometimes.”
“Oi! You’re besmirching the character of my evil little witch,” snapped Nino defensively.
“Renée-Caroline suggested that Alys is an unnatural woman,” Chiaki replied matter-of-factly. “Not really fair to her seeing how she is exceptionally kind sometimes.”
“Heh, she’s bitter poison and I wouldn’t trade any of her,” chuckled Nino, doffing his hat on his head and wrapping a scarf around his neck and chin.
“Then don’t go ahead with it,” Chiaki cautioned over the speakers.
But it was too late, Nino had already gone, and when Sho told Chiaki so, they both hoped that the prank wouldn’t go too far.
Technically speaking, it was not too late for Nino to call off his latest Ni no Arashi stunt, and he was toying with that notion as he and Haruyo sat down in a dark corner of the Dragon Pearl restaurant in the Excelsior. It was already 8.15pm and there was no sign of the elusive academic. Although he was perturbed by his lady’s uncustomary tardiness, Nino managed to present a nonchalant face to Haruyo as he sipped the excellent grade of warm pu-er tea.
“You should go if you don’t want to wait,” Nino intoned coldly, fishing out his DS and starting it up. He believed that if he was indifferent enough, the honeysuckle beauty of the Japanese entertainment industry would get the idea that he wasn’t interested and leave him alone. His original Ni no Arashi plan be damned, he thought. Right now, all he wanted was to spend a quiet evening with Alys talking about what he did on set and what she did at her conference.
Haruyo could not be so easily put off, mainly because she was painfully oblivious to Nino’s disinterest in her, just as she was painfully unconscious of his patent boredom with the fact that her sunshine yellow alter-necked wrap dress was cut shockingly low.
“Is this normal for you? Waiting for your companion, I mean?” Haruyo enquired, smoothening the creases from her dress while her imagination conjured the picture of a dowdy middle-aged female professor keeping Nino as a toy boy. That her imagination could not be further from the truth did not occur to her, and she continued to ply Nino and the staring garcons with her brilliant smile and ample bosom.
“She usually waits for me,” he replied in his most bored voice, tilting his DS to move his character out of harm’s way. “Ever thought you could make yourself scarce, Ichinose-san?”
“I told you to call me Haru-chan, everyone does,” she tittered in the time-honoured manner of young ladies affecting false modesty.
“Well yeah, I’m not everybody,” he retorted, still half-watching his game and half-watching for any human figure that resembled his lady’s.
“You’re really funny,” she giggled again, and Nino successfully fought the urge to make a disdainful face at her.
“And you’re not,” he snapped, and upon pushing a few more buttons on his game, he dropped his voice suddenly, “You know what you can do to be useful?”
She slid closer to him and flashed a sweet, dimpled smile. “What?”
“Get lost,” he intoned so lowly that it was almost a cross between a hiss and a snarl.
“But what about the plan to make your companion jealous?” she remonstrated, clearly confused by this sudden change in Nino. Reaching over from her seat opposite his so as to touch the fingers that he had wound around his cup, she continued with a smile, “You want to get rid of her, deshou? I understand, I can help.”
“You can help by getting lost!” hissed Nino, lowering the DS from his face and glaring at her. As he did so, he uncurled his fingers from the cup to flick away her hand. However, the ever opportunistic Haruyo seized the chance to cover his hand with hers.
This last gesture was observed by the newly arrived Alys who had finally managed to tear herself away from jotting down her thoughts on Machiavelli. She had never in all her years in academia regretted the claims of work and study on her, and welcomed the burdens those worthy occupations placed upon her. Like most academics, Alys would neglect to heed the time when lulled into the pleasant distraction of reading and writing on subjects she loved. But that evening, she mentally cursed herself for her besetting sin of placing intellectual pursuits over and above social intercourse. It would be a gross understatement to say that she was seething over the sight of Haruyo touching Nino’s hand with a come-hither expression. Despite her displeasure, Alys managed to school her features into the habitual mask of insouciance she always wore when forced into social events. Then she dismissed the hovering waiter and made her way to the table.
“Hello, darling,” she greeted him in English with such chilly casualness that Nino raised his mocking eyes to hers as if to say ‘at last, you damnable witch’.
Her arrival had the desired effect of Haruyo withdrawing her hand with a flash of surprise in her wide kohl rimmed eyes. Patting the hand Alys had rested on his shoulder, he cocked a smug half-smirk at her as he drank in the vision of his professor in her sleeveless sapphire calf-length blue dress that ended in a trumpet hem. Going by the gaping O that was Haruyo’s mouth, he knew his young co-star did not believe that this petite and bespectacled creature was both a professor and his ‘long time companion’. But it was just the reaction he wished her to have. Perhaps she would finally get it in her thick skull that Ninomiya Kazunari could not be won by a few smiles and a few flashes of inflated bosom. But since Haruyo was there, he might as well go ahead with the plan and leave his Alys to deal with the woman in her own inimitable cruelty.
“Alys-chan, this is a co-star from the Resurrected Butterflies drama, Ichinose Haruyo. Ichinose-san, my companion, Professor Teng Alys. We had a free evening today and I invited her to join us,” he informed her, handing her the menu.
“How generous,” she conceded with a polite nod at Haruyo and a smile at Nino. Her behaviour underneath the table however was a far cry from her placid and courteous tone of voice, for she made it a point to step as hard as possible on his foot. “Will she pay for dinner tonight, or are we going to survive on tea?”
“You are funny, Teng sensei; it will be my honour to treat you both tonight,” said Haruyo with an expression of sweetness which Alys knew instinctively was feigned, as such expressions always were in her experience.
“Alys-chan has a wicked wit.” Nino smirked to mask the pain that was shooting up his leg from his professor’s assault. “Her honours and graduate students call her the philosopher’s philosopher in Todai.”
“You really are a Todai professor?” gasped Haruyo in disbelief, while making eyes at Nino.
Alys’s eyes flashed briefly in contempt and rummaged through her handbag for a name card. “I’m one of the lesser professors,” she deadpanned with a self-deprecatory curl of her lips after placing their orders in Cantonese.
“In what way lesser?” Nino asked, pushing her cup towards her, ignoring the looks Haruyo threw at him because he was more in favour of getting Alys to throw off her mask of cool indifference to his shameless co-star. He could tell that there was certain awkwardness in her behaviour. Nino knew better than to judge by faces, and with Alys that evening, he did not try. He levelled his gaze at Alys’s hardened eyes as she stared keenly and penetratingly at him. But the more he looked at her, the more he was convinced that there was more melancholy than suspicion in her gaze. It was as though Alys’s eyes were saying she understood that trust and affection were folly, but still regretted that it was so.
She grasped his hand tightly and dug her freshly clipped nails into his palm. “You tell me, freeloader.” Then leaning in his earshot, she hissed in English, “Why is this tart here?”
“You call him freeloader?” Haruyo’s eyes flew up from Alys’s name card, putting on a show of innocence at the public display of affection between the professor and Nino.
Pushing up her glasses and allowing vitriol to drip from her tongue, she replied, “Among other things unsuited to your chaste ears.”
“Hontou desu ka?” Haruyo put on an exaggerated gasp as her hand flew to her mouth.
That gross hyperbolic act had Nino in near stitches for he was doing his best not to laugh. While Haruyo’s bad acting was amusing in its own way, Nino was concerned with Alys’s tightly controlled behaviour. Had his plan backfired? He could not fathom why Alys did not blow up even though she had given every indication that she was upset with Haruyo’s presence and the sheep’s eyes the younger woman was making at him.
“She’s very adept at torture,” Nino said blandly to his co-star. Then on the pretext of pouring out more tea for Alys, he bent to her ear and whispered, “Jealous yet, witch?”
“Good Lord! Don’t tell everyone!” she laughed hollowly, smacking his arm with more force than she usually did. When she did so, she cast him a furtive glare and hissed in English under her breath, “Jealous? Me? Not a whit.”
Haruyo made a mouth and made a comically exaggerated show of cringing at Alys’s thwacks. “Doesn’t it hurt?” she rubbed her arms and shuddered with the well-practiced skill of someone to whom a pinprick would constitute excruciating pain.
“Sometimes,” Nino said, shooting Haruyo a warning look as she fluttered her eyelashes coquettishly at him. But her acting was such that he soon had to feign a cough to hide the laugh that was inadvertently threatening to engulf him.
“Only when I want to hurt him.” Alys’s lips curled scornfully as she stepped on his foot again, this time she made sure to twist the heel of her shoe to maximise his pain.
To which claim, Nino corroborated by kicking her shin. While he was inwardly relieved that Alys was galled enough to respond to him, he could not understand why she refused to lash out at Haruyo. How could she hit him, kick him, step on him and more but not level an insult at Haruyo? How could she sit there and make polite small talk with Haruyo about her lessons at Hitotsubashi University when the younger woman was making eyes at him? How could she act like nothing was wrong? Alys’s actions or non-action rather puzzled him. Nino had always prided himself on his ability to read people and their moods like books, but now when faced with Alys’s perplexing mask of calm against Haruyo’s patent flirtatiousness, he wondered whether he was losing his touch or whether he had misread her, her behaviour, and her thoughts. More importantly, he was suddenly afraid that in misreading his Alys he was gradually losing her.
NOTES
In chess, a tempo refers to a "turn" or single move. When a player achieves a desired result in one fewer moves, he "gains a tempo" and conversely when he takes one more move than necessary he "loses a tempo." Similarly, when one forces his opponent to expend moves (often in defense) that he would not otherwise have expended, one "gains tempo" because the opponent wastes moves.
‘Hontou desu ka’ may be translated loosely as ‘Really? You don’t say.”
