Kinder Than Solitude (24 page)

“Someday you’ll be grateful to me,” Shaoai said. “I know you may not believe me now. If you’re angry, you can stay angry for as long as you’re able, but this is what I think you should know: you have a brain, which you are responsible for filling with meaningful thoughts; you have a life ahead of you, which you should live for yourself. You have not been taught to think or to question by your grandaunts. For heaven’s sake, you have not even been taught to have human feelings. Since they haven’t done that for you, someone else must.”

Do murderers expect gratitude from the murdered souls for setting them free from their earthly burdens? If Ruyu went to Grandpa’s room now, could she put her hands gently on his brittle neck and liberate him from the humiliation of being half-dead?

“You are the most unbending girl I’ve ever met,” Shaoai said, all
of a sudden possessed by an anger that Ruyu did not understand. “Why do you think you have the right to be like that?”

“I don’t understand what you are asking,” Ruyu said. “I don’t see how the kind of person I am has anything to do with what happened.”

“Of course it doesn’t in your mind, but that’s what I’m talking about. Live like a real human being. Bring yourself down from the clouds. Open your eyes.”

Yet there was nothing to see, Ruyu thought, but could she be wrong? Suppose ugliness is worth seeing, too?

“Just so you know: I don’t want you to think too much of what happened. As a matter of fact, nothing much has happened between you and me. Someday, you may even shrug it off and laugh at it,” Shaoai said, and after a moment she added bitterly, “If you don’t believe me, go ask Yening. She may have wisdom to share with you.”

Ruyu wondered if Shaoai had said that out of the hope of being contradicted. Perhaps Shaoai wanted to know how permanently she had marked Ruyu’s life because she had failed to make Yening her possession. Ruyu shifted her body and felt the mosquito netting brush her face. Aunt had said earlier that day that the netting would be kept up until the end of the week. All the mosquitoes would be gone by the second week of October, she had said with cheerful assurance. One nuisance out of one’s life, Ruyu thought, feeling a dull ache behind her eyes. Was this how people felt when they wanted to cry? Ruyu could not remember the last time she had cried.

“Why don’t you say something?” Shaoai asked.

“Do you do that to Moran, too? Do you want to do that to her, too?”

Shaoai seemed taken aback. “Of course not.”

“Why of course? Why not?” Ruyu asked. Though she knew the answer already. Shaoai’s desire would never bring her to Moran, because Moran, with her idolization of the older girl, held no meaning for Shaoai, just as Ruyu herself, and her grandaunts also, meant nothing to God. Bad things happen—wars, plagues, parents abandoning
their children, the heartless preying on those with hearts—and no one, not a human nor a god, will ever intervene.

Shaoai seemed baffled. “Moran, she’s only a child,” she said after a moment.

Moran did not sleep well that night, perhaps because of the day’s excitement. When she woke up at daybreak, she could no longer stay still. She got out of bed and washed quietly at the washstand, and through the window she could see Shaoai, who’d risen early also, lingering under the grape trellis. Had Shaoai stayed outside overnight? Moran wondered; but having few words of comfort for her, Moran found herself unwilling to go into the yard, as she would have done on any other morning.

13

On their second date—five days after their dinner on Sunday—Sizhuo asked Boyang his age, and whether Boyang was his real name. Why, he said with amusement, and placed his citizen’s ID on the table. They were in a teahouse near his parents’ place, which he’d planned to stop by afterward, hoping it would seem to his parents as though they were on his mind often enough to warrant an unplanned visit. But the thought of seeking their approval, however unconsciously, made him decide at once to skip seeing them after all. On the most fundamental level, they were the best parents he could ask for: they caused him no conflict, either internal or external, while with each day’s passing he was made more aware, by his guilty glances at the calendar, that he had not visited Aunt since the day of Shaoai’s cremation. It was more Aunt’s fault than his own, he insisted to himself, turning defiant as people do when their limits are shown in unsparing light: unlike his parents, she reminded him of all the complications he was incapable of dealing with in life. Who had granted her the right to do that to him?

He had told his secretary that he was taking the afternoon off—Sizhuo worked five and a half days a week, Friday afternoon and Saturday being her time off. Other things he had gathered on their first date: she’d grown up in a village in the northeast, near the border of Russia; her father was the only teacher in the village school, teaching
six grades in one room; her mother ran a seamstress’ stall; she had a younger brother at a provincial university with two more years of study; his major was marketing, and Sizhuo hoped she could help her brother come to Beijing after graduation.

“You’re older than I thought,” Sizhuo said after studying the ID.

“What does that even mean?”

Sizhuo pushed the ID back across the table. “My friend said if you were over thirty-five I should not see you again.”

“Wait a minute, who’s this friend, and how old is she?” Boyang said, feigning indignity. From Sizhuo’s background—and she had not shied away from giving details when he had asked the previous time—he had calculated that she was twenty-two or twenty-three, more or less Coco’s age.

Sizhuo shook her head, as if to say the questions were not important.

“And what makes her so prejudiced against men my age?”

“She said men
that
old”—Sizhuo stopped, but there was neither apology nor coyness in her pause—“men at your age want different things than I do.”

The friend might not be wrong, Boyang thought, but what did he want from this girl whom he knew he should have left alone altogether? There were plenty of people in his life to cater to his sentiments, and his sentiments had a reliable pattern—reliable enough—so that he did not worry about unpleasant surprises, nor did he wait for joyful ones. For mindless pleasures, he could go to Coco, with whom there was a cleaner contract, less befuddlement. For intellectual intrigue, he could talk with his parents—his mother more than his father, who had started to show early signs of dementia; or even with his sister, to whom over the years he had grown closer than when they’d been children, but perhaps it was more accurate to say that in adulthood they found each other, as she had been launched into the world not as a child but as a mind of genius that had to dwell in a child’s body for some time. If ever he wanted to develop affection
for the young there were his two nieces for him to dote on from afar. If he wanted to play games with people—did he ever want that? no, not really—there were plenty of opportunities, challenging rivals, and profitable gains if he wanted to make scheming more a part of his life. In thus looking at his life, Boyang could not find a place to fit the girl. She’s miscellaneous, he thought; others belonged to that category, too, the unsettled and the unsettling: Moran, Ruyu, Shaoai—she had been the center of that category for so long that it was impossible to think of her as absent now—perhaps even Aunt; and of course he himself, too, at listless moments, when people in his life failed to entertain or distract him. But to put Sizhuo into that space that he rarely allowed himself to visit—was it an alarming sign?

“What does a girl your age want?” Boyang asked. Easily he could list all the things Coco wanted, none of them too expensive. He could list a few things Sizhuo desired: to hold on to her job at a time when many young people were jobless after graduation; to find a way to move up in life—by what means? he wondered, and decided that marriage was the only possible way—and purchase a small apartment, outside the Fifth or the Sixth Ring Road; to know a few of the right people so that her younger brother could get a foothold, however unsteady, when it was time for him to enter the job market; to work with her sibling to establish some sort of settlement in Beijing, so that eventually their parents could come and live with them. Marriage and children would ensue, and by the next generation the family’s migration from the countryside to the metropolis would be complete. A familiar story, and Boyang could see that he could come in handy in that narrative. Was that why the girl had agreed to a second date? At their previous dinner, he had only vaguely spoken of his profession; he had made certain that for both dates he had dressed with impeccable but not extravagant taste, though he wondered if she could recognize the subtle difference. On so many levels, she was not like Coco, which was part of the reason that he felt unequipped to come to any conclusions yet. When one has enough protocols set
up for life, anything that does not fall readily into an available protocol makes one suspect that he has been underplayed. Treacherous was not what he would call Sizhuo, yet he was treading less familiar waters, which, thrilling as it was, could also be perilous.

Sizhuo looked pensive. “I suppose I want …” She paused and looked up again. “Do you have a child?”

“I’m not married,” Boyang said. “Listen, many men my age might be monsters in your eyes, but if I had a wife, I would give her enough honor not to chase young girls around.”

“But that doesn’t mean you didn’t have a wife before, right? So it
is
possible you have a child?” Sizhuo said. He wished that she were being coy or even flirtatious, but her unsmiling expression made the conversation seem like a logic debate.

“Yes, it’s possible. But no, I don’t have a child. If I had one, I wouldn’t hide the fact from you.”

“But how do I know if you’re lying or not?” Sizhuo asked. “I don’t know you, so the only way is to go by your words.”

Boyang laughed. “What are you, miss? A private detective?”

“No, certainly not,” she said, leaning back so the waitress who had brought them their tea could place the set between them. When the waitress finished pouring, she lowered her eyes and said she hoped they’d enjoy the tea. Sizhuo thanked her, her eyes never leaving the girl’s face. Boyang wondered if Sizhuo was aware that his eyes had not moved from her face. When they were left alone again, Sizhuo said that people lied sometimes, and she would like to know when and why they did.

“Do you not lie?” Boyang said.

The girl thought and said she did not lie so much as she would avoid situations in which dishonesty would be required of her.

“I’d call you a lucky girl if you’ve been achieving that,” Boyang said. “For instance, here’s a question for you: you like me enough to see me a second time, is that right?”

Sizhuo blushed. Her inexperience—no, her innocence was what
made him lose his head and become less tactical, yet innocence also brought her into this dilemma. It was one lesson, Boyang wanted to say, that she had yet to learn: innocence can be one’s weapon only when it’s not seen by the world.

“I don’t have an answer to your question,” Sizhuo said.

“That’s the most conventional answer people use to dodge a question,” Boyang said. “And that’s even worse than lying.”

“But if it works? Why can’t I use it if others use it successfully?”

Because he hated to see her as one of the others, but Boyang did not say that. “One thing that makes my age more advantageous,” he said, “is that it’s easier for me to catch someone lying than when I was twenty. But in any case, I’m going to tell you this and it’s not a lie: I was married once. Not anymore.” Under forty, divorced, no children, with an excellent income and spacious housing in the city, Boyang was one of the most desired men on the marriage market, a
diamond bachelor
. “Now, not only am I too old, but now you know that I’m divorced. Does that add to my disqualification as a suitor?”

Sizhuo looked uneasy at the term
suitor
but quickly regained her countenance. “No, I think it’s expected for someone your age.”

“What is expected?”

“A divorce. My friend says the only thing worse than a man over thirty-five is a man over thirty-five who has never married.”

Boyang laughed, but Sizhuo only watched him with unaverted eyes. He felt his heart sink a little. What was she doing with him—making him a specimen for her girlish study of men and their characters, so she could afterward discuss him with her friend? “Now, who is this friend of yours?”

“Someone you don’t know.”

“But she’s someone I must know!” Boyang said. “I’ll offer her a position screening job candidates for me.”

Sizhuo’s face froze for a split second, and he wondered if girls always felt jealous when another girl was being praised. “But she’s employed already,” she said.

“I can give her a better offer.”

Sizhuo shook her head and pretended to study the tea set. She had insisted on meeting elsewhere, away from the area around the Front Sea and Back Sea; why, he had asked, and she had said there were too many tourists, and they had made the place impossible to breathe.

“What are other things on your friend’s list that you’re to find out about me?”

“I’m the friend,” Sizhuo said.

For a moment Boyang did not grasp the words. Sizhuo smiled and said there was not another person she consulted with. She herself was the friend she was speaking of.

“I see,” Boyang said, but he could not see where the conversation was going. What he noticed was that the girl looked sadder and older when she smiled, a pity in a young, good-looking woman; a smile—unless it was the kind Coco and her girlfriends perfected in front of a mirror with a fashion magazine for a textbook—should be a woman’s best adornment.

“Had I been my own best friend, I’d have wanted to know the answers to those questions,” Sizhuo explained again, and he recognized a hint of placation in her voice. “Does that make sense? I wasn’t really lying.”

The girl had too much patience with the world, Boyang thought; she must never have been in a situation where impatience was an option for her, or she had never considered it her due. “So, what’s this best friend inside you whispering to you now? That I’m a bad choice for you?”