The Peninsula

We have arranged to meet at 11:30 for lunch, but I delay a bit, watching from behind a pillar. I like to observe her. Natalie sits on one of the plush chairs in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel, where women fresh from shopping sip coffee together and beside their LV and Prada bags, where businessmen from many countries meet to discuss money. She is wearing a pale pink silk dress, which looks like it could come from one of the fashion boutiques attached to the hotel, but it really came from a rack of a hundred dresses at the market on Nathan Road last night. Ten dollars. She will throw it out, possibly before we leave Hong Kong. The dress has a relatively modest cut, showing a few inches of leg above her knee as she sits, showing her bare arms, the candy pink of her fingernails resting on one thigh. Her legs are angled and bent at the knee, ankles crossed. One of her heels is lifted away from the sole of the bright pink sandal, the arch of her foot duplicating the arch of her shoe; her toes are painted the same candy pink as her fingernails. She looks like she belongs, sipping her tea languidly, her mind lost in the middle distance, privately enjoying being the object of the perusal of those who enjoy a woman’s lines: the slope of neck and shoulders, the concave and convex of waist and hips, pretty legs and feet.