Kinder Than Solitude (29 page)

“This is the only time I go while you’re here,” Josef said. “So don’t worry about next time. By the way, Rachel said to thank you for your help today.”

That, Moran thought, was his cue for her to ask about Rachel, her children, and her siblings and their children. In the past, Moran and Josef had been talkative at his birthday lunches, each picking up a new subject before quietness set in: he would speak of the local orchestra concerts he’d attended, various construction projects in the city, his children and grandchildren; she would speak of new products at work, the colors she’d painted her bedroom, the pots of herbs she was cultivating on her windowsill. What she had failed to do in their marriage she seemed to have managed since, at least once a year: to assign interest to small matters. It takes courage to find solace in trivialities, willfulness not to let trivialities usurp one’s life. Trivialities, though, could wait now, or could be done away with forever. “There,” she said, “will be next time. I’m moving back.”

“Back, Moran, to where?”

Did she detect suspicion or even panic, however fleeting, in his eyes? The house she had known to be theirs—and before that, his and Alena’s—had been remodeled and sold two years earlier. Josef’s move to the condo, she had known at the time, would be only the beginning of a series of moves, each confining his world more. Indeed, back to where? But a more apt question would be, back to
when? Over the years she had failed to offer Josef evidence of settlement: a new marriage, a love interest, an affair, anything to end their birthday ritual. It was kind of her to come, he said every year, his happiness and gratitude genuine because she was the one to rearrange her life once a year for him. But Moran wondered if he was only acting for her sake—his life would have been the same otherwise, children and grandchildren providing a solid reality for his memories of Alena, polished into perfection by time. Had Josef not preserved a place for her to alight, Moran would be a hapless bird lost in migration from one year to the next. Indeed, back to when: the moment she had asked for a divorce, or earlier, when she had convinced herself that a man with a loving heart would offer her a place in life, or even earlier, when they had first found affectionate companionship in each other?

“Don’t worry. I won’t install myself in your living room like an uninvited guest. I won’t be in your way when your children come to see you. Oh, no, don’t you worry, Josef,” Moran said, feeling her stomach tighten. She had meant to find the best time to tell him her plan, but five minutes into the breakfast, she was already losing her strategy. She could not bring herself to say that there must be times when he needed a driver, a hand to hold on to when he walked on the icy sidewalk, someone to listen to him reminisce while sleep eluded him, a lover of his good heart.

Josef was quiet, then said that it was comforting to know that, with a bit of food in her, Moran was her old self again.

He meant that impatience and irritation came easily to her when she was with him, part of herself that no one else was allowed to see. To the world, she was not unlike Josef: poised in an old-fashioned way. She liked to imagine that she carried with her something good from him, though at times she suspected she was one of those people who would latch on to what was not in their nature and set about making it their own: once upon a time, it had been Shaoai’s romantic vehemence about injustice and Boyang’s lack of concern for all
things troublesome. (How had those two traits mixed in her? she wondered, but it seemed too long ago for her to understand.) There had been Ruyu’s imperviousness, a most alien quality, yet for years Moran had striven for it, as though by aligning herself with Ruyu, she could claim at least a small part of Ruyu’s impunity. But how does one tell where one’s true self stops and makes way for all the borrowed selves? To this day, Moran still sometimes woke from dreams in which she had laughed jovially. Often Boyang was in those dreams, and sometimes Ruyu, too, and the backdrop, however vague, was unmistakably one of her favorite corners of Beijing; in the first moment of wakefulness, the unconstrained happiness, like the lingering aftertaste of the locust blossoms they ate as children, was intensely real, until she remembered that she was no longer a person who had things to laugh about, or people to laugh with. Extreme disappointment seems a lesson one can never master: no matter how many times it had happened, the realization would still hit her like a fierce bout of physical illness, and for a moment she would be dazed, asking herself how it could be that her life had not turned out to be a place for that happiness.

“Did I offend you?” Josef said.

Always quick to admit wrongdoing, always ready to apologize—it was the same for both of them. How could two people like that make a marriage, which required a certain degree of irrationality, work? “I mean it, Josef,” Moran said. “I’m moving back to town.”

“Why?”

“That”—she stared at Josef—“is a stupid question.”

“But what will you do about your job?”

She could say she had arranged a leave to make him feel better, but the truth was she never lied to him. It wasn’t much, she knew: one can withhold many things and build a wall around oneself; one can have a graveyard of dead memories without speaking a word. But at least she was adamant about giving him the kind of love she had not given others: it is rare that one meets a person to whom one
chooses never to lie. “I’m giving it up,” she said. “Don’t, please, Josef, don’t try to convince me otherwise. It’s only a job.”

“And what are you going to do here?”

“That can be decided later,” Moran said. “Unless you oppose this move with all your heart.”

Josef sighed. “This is a free country,” he said.

“Would it leave you in a difficult situation with your children? Would they oppose it?”

“You can’t change your life at this moment just for me.”

“Why can’t it be for me, too?” she said, though her voice was low, and she was not sure if he heard her. What he’d called her life was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.

The café was filling up, the warmth of people and their everyday contentment pressing in. It was a Wednesday. This must be the day of the week for the four gray-haired ladies two tables away to meet up and laugh, and for the two young mothers by the window to compare notes on motherhood, their infants sleeping in carriers next to them. A few couples had come in, all of them Josef’s age, and Moran had dreaded recognizing them as his friends, though he had only smiled and nodded at them in the friendly way one smiled and nodded at strangers. Other than two college-aged girls, who were doing some intense work over their coffee, the café seemed to be a place for people who were either at the beginning of their stories or, more befittingly, at the end. Even the college girls, in a way, were only starting out. What one did not find at this place was someone in the middle of a story—but perhaps those people, like Moran herself a week earlier, did not have the luxury of idleness on such a morning. They would be sitting in a cubicle somewhere, secured and entrapped; sometimes they look up at the ceiling, a forgotten memory from their childhood or a glimpse into their old age passing through their minds like the fleeting shadow of a bird flying by, before their thoughts are
reined in to the immediate present. No, to be in the middle requires one to be practical: one does not walk away from a stable job; one does not take a sojourn from life. Yet was it her true position to be in the middle—without a future to look forward to, was she, despite her age, already at the end?

“Are you going to look for a job here?” Josef asked.

“Only if it’s flexible enough,” Moran said. “Though maybe not for a while.”

“Then how are you going to spend your time?”

“I’m coming back to be near you. Unless—” she paused, a sudden fear hitting her. “Unless you have a lady friend now. I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”

“I would’ve told you,” he said. They had circled the topic in the past, but had always managed, at the end of each meeting, to inform each other of their love lives, or of the lack of love in their lives. He had gone out with a woman for a while, but by the time Moran came for his next birthday, the relationship had fizzled. There had been other interests, though nothing fruitful had come of them, disappointments for him perhaps, but she had felt relieved each time, and guilty about her relief.

“Then what prevents you from saying yes to my proposal?”

“Wouldn’t you say no, too, if you were in my shoes?”

“No.”

“But you would, Moran,” Josef said gently. “You know you would.”

“There’s this old tale in China. An ironsmith boasted that he had built the sharpest spearhead—one that could pierce all armor; then he boasted that he had built the sturdiest armor that no spearhead would be able to pierce.”

“So he was asked to test his own products on each other?” Josef said.

“Very good thinking, my dear Josef,” Moran said. “But the lesson is, I think, that each and every one of us has flaws in our reasoning, and we should not take advantage of that in another person. What I
would do if I were in your shoes doesn’t matter. What matters is what I would decide in my own shoes.”

“Of course it would be … wonderful to see you more.”

“Then why don’t we settle on this?”

“But I won’t be here forever.”

Of course it was like Josef to remind her of a fact that she never forgot. “Shouldn’t that be more of a reason for me to come back?” she said, and abruptly asked the waitress walking past to bring them the check.

“We still have some time,” Josef said.

“Can’t you see that I don’t want to be a fool and cry in here?” she snapped, and leaned her face into her hands, warning herself not to fail her first test. He did not need a weepy woman; facing death, he was more defenseless than she was.

The waitress came with their check. Moran did not change her posture and let Josef take care of it. When he asked if she was ready to go, she took a deep breath and looked up. The effort to ensure that her eyes stayed dry had exhausted her, but she was glad that the dam inside her had not broken. “Now, don’t look so worried,” she said. “I’m not here to bring a scandal to your name.”

“Man in seventies bullies visiting ex-wife into tears in public,” Josef said. “No, no, we don’t want to see that in the paper.”

“But that ex-wife is not visiting anymore,” Moran said. “The big news is, she’s moving back to haunt him.”

Josef made a gesture of being caught in a spotlight, his hands raised halfway in an effort to shelter his face, which was flushed by the sudden movement. Momentarily they were back in a better time, when he had made her smile with a few unexpected improvisations. Were these moments, she wondered, enough to be called happiness this late into their story?

Later, when she dropped Josef off at his place, he asked if she would like to go up and sit for a while. She hesitated, and then said she would let him rest. She wanted to make a few appointments to
look at some rentals before everyone headed out of town for Thanksgiving.

“Moran, enough fooling around. Let’s drop the subject.”

“Why?” she asked. In his voice she’d detected the weariness that belonged to people who were too tired to feel responsible for how they spoke.

“You and I both know that you should not leave your job.”

She wondered if the visit to the hospital had made him change his mind. He had introduced her to the nurse as a friend, and the nurse had asked about Rachel and her family before they left. Could it be that there was a settled rhythm to his life that he did not want her return to disturb? Or that his time, already limited, had little extra to spare for her?

“Will it be too much for you? Will I be taking you away from your family and friends?” she asked, tightening her grip around the steering wheel, even though she had parked the car, perfectly centered between the two lines, just as he had taught her.

“You know that’s not the reason.”

“Then what is?”

“You still have half a life to live.”

“Why can’t moving back here be part of that half?” she said. His face looked ashen, much sicker than it had earlier; he must be exhausted from spending the morning with her. What if she, despite good intentions, was only toxic for him?

“You know it means the world to me that you came,” Josef said. “It’s too flattering by half that you’re talking of moving back. But we ought not to indulge ourselves.”

“You may need someone,” Moran said, though she knew that the role of caretaker could easily be filled by another person: Rachel, for instance, or his other children; down the line, it would probably be a hired nurse, or else he would be moved from the condo to a facility. Many stories of his generation would end that way, and he would argue that there was no point in being different.

“You’re being stubborn,” Josef said.

She exited the car and opened the passenger door. “Come,” she said, bending down and reaching for his hand. “I’ll walk you up after all.”

Moran had not been in Josef’s condo before, but a place, like the person who inhabits it, can become close to one at the first encounter. Of course there were the things from the old house: the framed pictures of the children and Alena; the oil painting of a lone, whitewashed farmhouse dwarfed by the rolling green hills behind it, which used to hang in the family room; the sofa and the coffee table, both of which, Moran had once calculated, must be about her age, if not older. But more than these objects, it was the unclutteredness that reminded her of her own house. One could easily trace a life lived in solitude. The footprints, though invisible, were not hard for her to see: the steps to the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, all taken out of necessity.

Moran asked Josef if he would like to lie down, and he said it would be better that he sit on the sofa. On the coffee table, five pills of three different colors lined up on a coaster, next to a glass of water. She asked if he needed to take the medicine now, and he said yes, and thanked her when she handed the water and the pills to him.