Bee breaks her appointment and leaves Emmanuelle

Bee breaks her appointment and leaves Emmanuelle suspended between hope and humiliation. What begins as an ordinary wait becomes a crisis of interpretation: with no explanation from Bee, Emmanuelle invents possible accidents, misunderstandings, moral regrets, jealous lovers, and finally the most painful conclusion—that Bee does not want to see her again. The episode gives physical form to the asymmetry between an encounter that has become emotionally absolute for Emmanuelle and one that Bee may regard as an impulsive departure from her usual life.

The Appointment and the Waiting

Emmanuelle waits at home with an intensity that makes stillness unbearable. Kneeling on an armchair and leaning against the balcony, she rests her chin in her hands while scrutinizing the fragment of street visible through the dense garden. Anxiety trembles through her lips, and every delay becomes a fresh threat: Bee may arrive at any moment, or may already have found an excuse not to come. The balcony turns into a watch post, but it offers no knowledge—only the repeated possibility of a figure appearing beyond the vegetation.

When the hours have passed and waiting becomes too painful, Emmanuelle takes the initiative and telephones the number Bee gave her. A man answers, apparently a servant. The call exposes how little practical knowledge Emmanuelle possesses about the woman she has just loved: she does not know the language well enough to explain herself, and she does not even know Bee’s real name. She risks using a nickname with the domestic worker but cannot tell whether she has been understood, and ultimately gives up. The failure is more than a logistical inconvenience. It leaves Emmanuelle unable to convert desire into action or even to establish, through ordinary social means, where Bee is and why she has not come.

The uncertainty briefly sustains hope. Perhaps Bee did not answer personally because she is already on her way; perhaps she will arrive at any moment. Emmanuelle resumes her guard and imagines that Bee may have had an accident or may be lost in the maze of residential districts. The streets look alike, their names are difficult to pronounce, and they are written in Siamese characters, so being unable to find the house seems possible. Yet another voice within Emmanuelle resists this consoling explanation. Bee has lived in Bangkok for a year and should know its routes; Emmanuelle herself has begun to find her way after only two weeks. More than two hours have passed beyond the time Bee should have arrived, and Bee could have telephoned, asked for directions, or requested that Emmanuelle come to meet her.

From Hope to Abandonment

The practical obstacles multiply because Emmanuelle has neglected to ask for Bee’s address. Marie-Anne has described Bee only vaguely as the sister of the American naval attaché, and Emmanuelle cannot imagine calling the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok without knowing whom to ask for. She remembers the chauffeur who took Bee home the previous day and has him summoned, but he cannot be found; he may have gone to lunch or to play dice. Each attempted solution closes another door, leaving the absent woman increasingly unreachable.

Calling Marie-Anne would be the obvious next step, but pride intervenes. Emmanuelle fears admitting that she is waiting for Bee and exposing herself to further sarcasm. More deeply, she cannot bear to let Marie-Anne see that Bee has failed to keep the appointment, that Emmanuelle’s ardor may not be reciprocated, or that the tender lover of the previous day may already be showing signs of inconstancy. The silence is therefore witnessed not only as absence but as a threat to Emmanuelle’s self-image. She has presented herself as desired and self-possessed; Bee’s failure forces her into the humiliating position of someone pursuing a person who may be withdrawing.

Eventually Emmanuelle becomes certain that Bee will not come—not that afternoon, not the next day, perhaps never again. She reconstructs the previous encounter as a spell that Bee could resist only after leaving her presence. Away from Emmanuelle, Bee may have recovered her senses, decided that she does not love women, judged the game absurd and boring, and considered herself, in her own earlier terms, ridiculous. Emmanuelle also imagines religious conviction or a moral code capable of making Bee repent the pleasures of the flesh. These explanations cannot be verified, but they reveal the scale of Emmanuelle’s need to find a cause for the disappearance.

A contrary hypothesis then takes possession of her: Bee may have another lover and may have lied the previous day. Emmanuelle cannot fully believe this, yet she imagines a jealous lover who has learned of Bee’s “fault,” demanded that she abandon her accomplice, and forced her to break the appointment. The fantasy changes the emotional shape of the event. Bee is no longer merely absent; she is pictured as constrained by another attachment, and Emmanuelle responds by imagining a struggle to win her back. She refuses, for a moment, to surrender, claiming inwardly that the power of love will support her attempt to reconquer Bee.

The Dark Moment of the Affair

That resistance collapses into weakness and pain. Bitterness gradually suffocates whatever confidence remains and extinguishes the hope that had kept Emmanuelle at the balcony. The reason for Bee’s absence finally ceases to matter. Whether Bee has repented, lied, become frightened, or chosen someone else, the immediate truth is the same: Emmanuelle has been abandoned and left alone.

The abandonment is devastating because Emmanuelle has made Bee signify far more than a recent lover. She feels that she came to this country at the farthest corner of the world only to find her. At the first sight of Bee, she believed she recognized the person for whom she had always been waiting. She would have followed Bee wherever Bee wished to lead her and would have given up everything at Bee’s request. The imagined reciprocity is therefore immense, while Bee’s actual response is silence. Emmanuelle is forced to confront a relationship whose emotional meaning for her has outrun its shared reality.

In an effort to protect herself, Emmanuelle vows to erase Bee from her memories. She will forget the glass-like face, the fiery hair, and the hoarse voice that had told her, “I like it very much too.” The remembered line becomes painfully double-edged: it preserves the intimacy of the previous day while also emphasizing that Bee’s words have not produced the promised continuation. A statement of mutual pleasure survives as the last verbal trace of a bond that has already become inaccessible.

The crisis reaches its physical expression in tears. For the first time since childhood, genuine tears run down Emmanuelle’s face, wet her lips and salt her tongue, then fall onto the terrace balustrade, which she still cannot bring herself to leave. She keeps her arms open toward the clearing in the vegetation, still imagining that Bee may appear that night, or the next day, or at some unknown moment, and wave to her. The gesture holds hope and surrender together: Emmanuelle knows Bee will not come, yet her body remains arranged to receive the arrival she has intellectually abandoned.

Jean’s Consolation and the Aftermath

That evening Jean and Christopher take Emmanuelle to the theater. She does not register what is being performed; her face shows only distress. Jean does not question her there, while Christopher, unable to understand what has happened, looks almost as sad as Emmanuelle. The public outing thus fails to distract her, but it is followed by a more intimate scene in bed, where Emmanuelle cries in Jean’s arms until she has no tears left. Exhaustion brings a limited relief, allowing her to recount the story of her unhappy love with less desperation.

Jean judges that Emmanuelle is taking the affair too seriously. He first offers the possibility that Bee’s absence is accidental and that she may return the next day with a perfectly valid excuse. If Bee truly does not want to see Emmanuelle again, however, Jean argues that this would prove Bee unworthy of the distress she has caused. In his view, an immediate end is preferable to a continuation likely to bring greater disappointment and trouble. His reasoning attempts to transform uncertainty into a verdict that Emmanuelle can survive.

Jean also asks Emmanuelle to think of herself as someone who is courted rather than someone who runs after others. He has never seen Bee and had never even heard of her until this episode, but he is certain that she cannot possess a quarter of Emmanuelle’s beauty and qualities. His praise is protective, though it is also competitive: because Bee appears to be bargaining over access to Emmanuelle, Jean frames the answer as a refusal to accept humiliation. He insists that Emmanuelle should not abase herself before an unfaithful woman.

The proposed remedy is revenge in other arms. Jean tells Emmanuelle, in effect, that she can easily find companions more worthy of her and should demonstrate this to Bee without delay. Emmanuelle listens obediently. His argument does not remove her pain, but the idea of consolation or retaliation slightly distracts her from it. By the time sleep approaches, her anguish has become less sharply defined, perhaps because of drowsiness. She cannot know whether her final thought is still for the fleeing lover or for the as-yet faceless women who may one day replace her.

Narrative Significance

The event functions as the relationship’s dark reversal. The previous encounter has given Emmanuelle the sensation of recognition and mutual desire; the broken appointment converts that promise into a prolonged test in which every missing fact must be supplied by imagination. The narrative delays a simple explanation and instead follows the emotional mechanics of waiting: surveillance, practical improvisation, self-questioning, jealousy, moral speculation, certainty, grief, and the fragile return of self-respect.

Bee’s absence also exposes the difference between sexual liberation and emotional security. Emmanuelle is willing to pursue desire across social and linguistic barriers, yet the freedom to initiate intimacy does not protect her from dependence, shame, or the longing for confirmation. Jean’s counsel begins the movement from pursuit to retaliation and from a single unavailable lover toward the plurality of future possibilities. The ending does not promise that Emmanuelle has stopped loving Bee. It shows instead that, after tears, sleep, and Jean’s intervention, the abandoned woman can at least imagine a life in which Bee is no longer the only possible object of desire.