Kinder Than Solitude (21 page)

They were celebrating a coworker’s fiftieth birthday the following day, Edwin said, and he thought he would bring some sweets. Ruyu nodded at the display and told him to take his time. She should have been more accommodating, making recommendations, chatting about the children and their schoolwork, but the silenced bell had come back to her—not from this cozy boutique in the suburban town center that looked like a quaint Old West main street, but from the Beijing quadrangle half a lifetime ago. More often than not, the bell above the door to Shaoai’s house did not have a chance to jingle before Aunt hurried to cover it with an anxious hand. What was the point of having a bell if one had to constantly prevent it from ringing, Ruyu had thought then. Had she asked Uncle, he would have said that it was Aunt’s nature to want to save the bell from unnecessary wear, or that she did not want to disturb the bedridden Grandpa, but Ruyu knew Uncle only wanted to believe his answers. To have or not have a bell in the house: neither seems wrong, but to mute one that has been given a place is an act of inconsistency, to want comings and goings to be known and yet remain unknown at the same time. The furtive eagerness with which Aunt raced to reach the bell when she heard someone’s steps approach the door—Ruyu remembered it now, and shuddered with a violent resentment—was it not a kind of
greediness, to be there, always there, to be the first person to greet those who came and the last person to say farewell to those departing?

“What do you think, Italian or French?” Edwin asked, studying the truffles. “Or you recommend neither?”

“Belgian,” Ruyu said, knowing that anything Edwin chose would, in the end, bear signs of poor judgment in Celia’s eyes. “How’s Celia?” she asked.

Concerned, as always, that their Thanksgiving dinner would not be a smooth success for her visiting parents, Edwin said. Ruyu nodded with sympathy. Last year Celia had been hurt when her parents decided to spend the holiday with her sister’s family. Two years in a row, Celia had said; not that she wanted the hassle of hosting them, but shouldn’t they give an explanation?

Edwin placed two boxes on the counter and watched Ruyu ring them up. “How are you feeling these days?” he said, his tone too casual to sound natural.

Ruyu looked up. Really, she thought, spending unnecessarily on two beautiful boxes of truffles just to ask a question like that? She placed the golden stickers with the shop’s logo on top of the boxes and smoothed them with her fingertips. That Edwin had refrained from relating their conversation to Celia could have been an oversight on his part; at least that was what Ruyu preferred to believe. “Why do you ask?” she said.

“I remember you said your friend died,” Edwin said. “I hope you’re feeling better.”

Why on earth had she slipped and told him something so irrelevant? Worse, why had Edwin, who seemed a sensible person, chosen not to forget a conversation that should not have happened in the first place? To turn something into a secret—the way Edwin had with Shaoai’s death—is like inflicting a wound on one’s own body. To let the harm be known—to walk into the shop and ask about the death again—is to thrust the wound into someone else’s sight. A secret that
never heals makes a person, however close, a stranger, or worse, an intimate, an enemy.

“I’m doing just fine,” Ruyu said. “Thank you for asking.”

Edwin mumbled something, and his face turned beet-colored. Ruyu sighed. As a shop assistant, she was neither impatient nor untalented when it came to small talk. People came into the store out of idleness, and idly they studied the pretty objects on the shelves: imported toffees and chocolates in exquisite wrappings and packages, handmade mugs bearing witty or cloying or nonsensical images and words, flimsy china teacups arranged around a teapot like well-behaved orphans perpetually begging to be filled with love, tin windup toys that were neither sturdy nor attractive to children today but nevertheless gave the store an old-world feeling. None of the objects for sale was essential to anyone, but because of their non-essentialness they continued to be, and continued to be cherished: much of life’s comfort comes not from the absoluteness of happiness and goodness but from the hope that something would be good enough, and one would find oneself happy enough. Perhaps it was for that reason people would walk in—La Dolce Vita was one of those stores one entered without knowing what one wanted, thinking that it would provide a clue, a solution, or at least a moment of distraction. It was Ruyu’s job to convince a customer that someone—be it a friend or a family member or even the customer herself—deserved decadence. That she spent part of her time in a store that mattered little to anyone did not bother Ruyu; these places—the shop, Celia’s kitchen, the soccer field where once in a while she drove Ginny’s son to practice and waited among a group of women who watched their children with tireless love—allowed Ruyu both to be among people and to treat them as though they were the pair of kissing Dutch dolls next to the cash register. Given enough distance, she could even let herself feel a fondness toward these men and women and children; yet out of that obliterating mist had come Edwin, who, for whatever
reason, insisted on his right to be regarded as real and indispensable. “I didn’t mean to sound harsh,” Ruyu said. “I just don’t want to make a fuss about something trivial.”

“A friend’s death is not trivial.”

Ruyu looked at Edwin, uncertain as to whether she despised or pitied him, a man foolishly falling victim to his own kindness. The concern in his voice was that of a needy soul; acting as though he was agonized by her loss, he was asking her to acknowledge his right to feel her pain. “She was not a close friend,” Ruyu said, trying hard to maintain the evenness in her voice. It was his bad luck to have stepped onto that old battleground, but today she saw no need for another casualty.

“I thought you looked sad the other day.”

“Then I’m afraid you made a mistake,” Ruyu said. “She was one of those people I would not want to see or hear about ever again, and I feel no pain whatsoever about her death. No, let me take that back. The only pain I feel is that she didn’t die soon enough. Now, are you reassured that I’m going to survive just fine?”

Edwin flinched, trying to find words, and Ruyu, her mercy for him gone, stared at him, not offering any assistance in his struggle. Time, be it old or new, lived or yet to be lived, was merely a body she carried inside her heart, its weight growing less conspicuous by the day, its coldness more acclimated to, and its possessiveness easily taken, or mistaken, for composure. And then there was Celia—all the Celias of the world—who made it easy for Ruyu to be who she was: their eyes looked neither at nor through her, but looked instead for themselves in her face. Hadn’t Edwin learned anything from his marriage? Why would he come here trying to resurrect what was beyond revival? “Are you religious?” Ruyu asked.

Edwin shook his head. Baffled, he explained that his grandparents and parents had been, and they had raised him according to their faith—but no, he was not religious now.

“Then don’t try to be good to strangers,” Ruyu said. “It’s pointless.”

“I don’t understand.”

“An easy example: at this moment, shouldn’t you be worrying more about your family’s dinner getting cold than about a dead person you’ve never met?”

Edwin’s face turned red again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have intruded.”

Something softened in Ruyu’s heart. The urge to embarrass and the urge to humiliate were as treacherous as the urge to be kind, as any sentiment granted another person the status of being less hypothetical. “Let’s forget this altogether. The person has no place here, and let us not complicate life with death,” Ruyu said, gesturing to the door, where the bells were dutifully waiting to bid farewell to Edwin. “Do send my love to Celia and the kids.”

Later Ruyu walked home in the moonlight. The fog from the bay had drifted inland, and across the canyon, orange lights lit up people’s windows, just smudged enough to appear dreamy. Three nights a week Ruyu stayed at the shop until closing. The walk uphill, if she’d shared it with another person, would have been beautiful in people’s eyes; but companionless on these walks, she must cut a lonesome figure to those who knew her by sight. But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others—a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.

All her life Ruyu believed she was able to fend off love and loneliness, her secret being that the present would be let live only its allowed duration. The person who dusted the shelves at the shop was as solid and real as the person who nannied two Pomeranians when their owners went to southern France or Italy for the holidays, or the person tutoring an unmotivated teenager in Mandarin. A born murderess,
she had mastered the skill of snuffing out each moment before releasing it to join the other passed moments. Nothing connects one self to another; time effaced does not become memory.

Crickets chirped in the bushes, pausing with the approach of Ruyu’s steps, so that, at any given moment, she could hear only those in the distance. These autumn lamenters, even in chorus, were slyer than nightingales, bleaker than owls. It was nearly Thanksgiving, but the season was a particularly mild one, even for northern California. In Beijing, the last of the autumn crickets would be frozen now by the first cold front from Siberia.

Certain things come unannounced, like crickets, like the darkness of the season: by the time one notices them, one has already fallen victim to their wicked charm. Ruyu watched as her shadow was turned by a nearby bush into something too strange to belong to her. Instinctively she stepped back and hid from the sole street lamp behind a tree. Something slid into the bushes behind her, a squirrel or a raccoon. Nature makes one look for one’s own species, but what would one’s species do but make one lonelier?

Half a block before she reached her cottage, her cell phone rang. It was Celia, and Ruyu picked up the call: one should not neglect the mortal.

“Where are you?” Celia said.

“About to open my door.”

“Edwin said you looked unwell. What’s wrong?”

Was belated honesty a form of deception? “Nothing is wrong,” Ruyu said.

“Did you catch a cold?” Celia said. “Your voice sounds funny.”

“Maybe it’s the signal.”

“Or maybe not,” Celia said. “Listen, you don’t have to tell me, but if talking it out helps, I’m all ears.”

“All ears for what?”

“Edwin seems to think that someone important died,” Celia said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I would’ve told you if it
had
been someone important,” Ruyu said. “The fact that I only randomly mentioned it to Edwin but forgot to tell you—shouldn’t that be enough to prove that nothing is the matter?”

“Was it a woman? Edwin thought it might be one of your exes’ lovers?”

Perhaps there was nothing but true compassion in Edwin’s curiosity, but Ruyu could not help feeling resentful: passive-aggressively, he had enlisted his unsuspicious wife to ambush Ruyu. She sighed. “Let’s talk about this later, Celia.”

“Can you come for coffee tomorrow? Before you go to the shop?”

Ruyu looked at her watch. She had fewer than twelve hours to come up with something reasonably good to stop Celia from pursuing the topic. Yes, Ruyu agreed. She would come after Celia dropped the kids off at school.

But by the time Ruyu had settled in for the night, she could no longer follow through with her resolution to prepare a tale for Celia. Any planning required her to imagine the future—a day or a month to come—but the moment she set such a task for herself, her mind stubbornly vacated itself. People went to yoga studios and meditation retreats to achieve the same effect; too bad she could not share her secret with the world, Ruyu thought, feeling already lethargic. She had noticed that since the news of Shaoai’s death arrived, she had become more prone to feeling tired. All that arguing with a god from the past must have affected her more than she had expected.

Ruyu had long ago realized that her grandaunts, religious and pious as they had believed themselves to be, had only held on to a faith that had been more of their own creation, and the god they had given her, too, had not been the god in other people’s prayers. But what did it matter if they had given her the wrong faith, now that she had gone astray from that faith? All the same, Ruyu knew that she had to credit her grandaunts: by giving her a god they had given her a position of superiority, when an orphan like her could easily be devoured
by the world; by leaving them and their god behind, she had gone beyond destructibility.

Ruyu filled the bathtub and then turned on the CD player, which contained the piano concerto she had been listening to earlier, by whom at the moment she did not care to remember.

In the warm steam, she drifted off a little; here and there a phrase from the concerto caught in her head, and she seemed able to see it printed clearly on a music sheet before the notes swam away like tadpoles. One easily lost tadpoles, as one could lose anything. Once, at eight, Moran and Boyang had gone to a nearby pond to catch tadpoles, which they had carried in wax paper tubes filled with pond water and secured on both ends by vines; they thought of running back to the quadrangle and depositing the tadpoles in the giant barrel in which Teacher Pang kept two koi fish, but for one reason or another, they took a detour to visit a classmate, and for a while the three of them bounced up and down in the classmate’s bed, the tadpoles completely forgotten by their captors.

They never dared to ask the classmate about his bed, Moran had said when she told Ruyu the story. The poor tadpoles, Boyang had said guiltily; and the poor friend, Moran had added, the voice so clear and close to Ruyu’s ears that she opened her eyes abruptly. The steam had not dispersed. She must have dozed off for only a moment, yet she felt confused; she thought she had seen and heard Moran and Boyang, not only as the teenagers retelling the story, but also as eight-year-olds, carefree children who should have been strangers to her, yet they had looked familiar in her dream, if, in fact, it was in her dream she had seen them.