The Bathing Women (30 page)

She was so ashamed that she couldn’t say a word. She hadn’t felt shame for a long time—Director Yu forced her to be reacquainted with it, but deep down she refused to admit defeat. However, the courage to continue to sit there left her.

A strong sense of failure settled in her after she returned to her dorm. “You are still a child”—these words of Director Yu’s went round and round in her mind. He was probably forty-something, old enough to be her father. Of course he could say, “You are still a child.” It was more like subtle urging than a reprimand or a shaming. But at the time Fei was unable to understand the implication. She believed she was no longer a child; she had long ago stopped being a child. She was an adult, the head of her own family; she was mother to herself and father to herself, her own master. “You are still a child.” Such words were not offensive to her; they were just too light, too easily said, and could no longer move Fei. Director Yu could embarrass her but he couldn’t repress her desire to leave the foundry. He didn’t fall for her ploy, but she was determined not to lose this one-in-a-million chance.

She remembered that Shanghai Coral Jewel watch, the keepsake that the dancer had left, which she had been keeping as property she might use as a last resort. She thought it over and over and asked herself numerous times: Is this my last resort? Yes, she answered herself every time. Only leaving the foundry as soon as possible would enable her to keep her looks, her beauty, and her youth, to which she was so attached. Because she loved her looks so much, she must offer the watch. She was indeed still a child, believing that just because she thought the watch was valuable property, everyone else thought so too. She took out the watch, carefully cleaned it with a handkerchief, and wound it. Then she walked into Director Yu’s office again with the quietly ticking watch, intending to give him the precious watch in exchange for the favour of getting her transferred.

When she first pushed open the door, there were a few people talking to Director Yu in loud voices, so she closed the door and wandered around outside for a while. When she returned, he was alone. She entered the office, walked directly to his desk, took out the watch, and put it down. Director Yu said, “Whose watch is this?”

Fei said, “Oh, it’s mine … no, it’s yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s yours—I’m giving it to you. Can’t you see this is a man’s watch? I’m a woman. It doesn’t suit me.”

Director Yu asked, “Who put you up to this?”

“No one.”

“What do you mean by ‘no one’?”

“I mean no one. Nobody.”

Director Yu took the watch, looked at it, and then put it back on the desk. He stood up and turned his back to Fei and said, “Now please take this watch and leave my office.”

So he didn’t go for this, either.

It made her angry and suspicious. She was thinking that he couldn’t possibly be a man who didn’t go for anything. He’d probably rejected her because he’d heard a lot of gossip about her, things she had done in high school, which had long ago circulated around the whole factory. She even heard two workers betting on her. One said, “If you can fuck that girl Fei from the foundry, I’ll buy you a pack of cigarettes.” The other said, “Oh, her. I’ve fucked her plenty. All I have to do is wave and she comes running …” Anytime they felt like it, they would make those bets; she became a plaything for them, a verbal outlet for the relief of their sexual tensions. She was sure that Director Yu had heard the gossip and was afraid to be associated with her. It would be his loss. Still, after all, he was the vice director of the factory, not Master Qi. Her dream of leaving the foundry had been thwarted, and in such an embarrassing way, being humiliated by a decent man at the same time. Her face turned cold. If her opponent was so decent, she had to show some indecency, meeting decency with indecency, as if they could at least reach a standoff and she could avoid such a thorough defeat. She raised her voice at the back of Director Yu and said, “You think I admire you for refusing the watch, right? Hmm, actually I think you’re a chicken. Your guts couldn’t fill a thimble. It’s not like you don’t want … a good-looking girl like me … you’re afraid I’ll get you dirty and spoil your reputation. You actually misjudge me. If you slept with me, I’d absolutely not tell a soul. I—”

Director Yu walked to the door, opening it with a crash, and, pointing out the door, he said, “Let me repeat it one more time: take your watch and get out of this office.”

She went out, returned to her dorm, and cried her heart out. But a week later, the department director informed her that she was being transferred to the factory’s office to work as a typist.

It was clear to her who had helped her. She was pleasantly surprised and puzzled at the same time, but she could no longer bring herself to go to his office, not even to thank him.

7

Perhaps it’s better for a woman like Fei not to get married, but she still did—she couldn’t take Little Cui’s constant pestering.

Little Cui was a worker in the foundry department. Fei knew in her heart that out of the many men who were interested in her, Little Cui was the one who truly liked her. Little Cui was a man with a sluggish spirit and a stubborn temperament, and his big eyes were always bloodshot for no reason. He didn’t listen to advice, and if anyone tried to give him some, an obstinate expression would come over his face—the look of a man prepared to march down a road to the very end. After Fei got transferred to the factory’s office, there was even more gossip about her. Little Cui got into knife fights with people over it. Later, knife in hand, he went to Fei and said, “I want to marry you.”

Fei said, “This is not something to joke about, Little Cui. You’ve heard the stories about me.”

Little Cui said, “I don’t care what you did before; I just like you as a person.”

“You’d better not lose your head. A man looks for a decent girl to be his wife. Your family would never approve of your marrying me.”

“If I marry you, you’ll be my family.”

Fei felt a lump in her throat on hearing his words. She said, “You can take that back for now. We’ll talk about it in a few days, when you cool down.”

Little Cui cut his index finger with the knife and said, with his finger dripping blood, “I made up my mind long ago. I swear you are the woman I want to marry. Let’s get married. We’ll settle down and live a good life.”

“Live a good life.” Fei remembered that Master Qi had said that to her. Who doesn’t want to live a good life? Who can deny that living a good life is the highest goal for most people? Fei was moved—didn’t she want to live a good life with a man who cared about her?

They were married.

Their marriage made many of the men in the factory unhappy, as if a woman who was originally public property had been taken from them to become Little Cui’s sole possession. Also, his courage in daring to marry a woman no one else would made them feel small. Their annoyance with Little Cui was especially sharp, as if he were a traitor to all men, had betrayed the brotherhood. Several hooligan types among the workers went out of their way to pick fights with him; they publicly insulted him as well as slandering Fei. They’d say brazenly, “Little Cui, guess where I went when you were on night shift? I was in your bed all night long. Your wife wouldn’t let me go until daybreak …”

Little Cui hadn’t expected things to turn out this way; nothing was as simple as he’d thought. But he couldn’t leave Fei. Her body had provided him with countless pleasures. He started to drink, staying drunk twenty days out of a month. When he was sober, he would tie Fei up and beat the hell out of her, sometimes using a leather belt and sometimes a shoe. One day, he interrogated her while beating her: “How did you get to be a typist? Tell me, how did you get to be a typist …?”

Fei dodged his belt and said, “Little Cui, I really don’t know. I didn’t do anything.”

Little Cui said in a hoarse voice, “Everyone knows but me! Everyone knows but me.”

“What? What does everyone know?”

Little Cui said painfully, “You … you and Director Yu … Yu Dasheng.” He said the three words “Director Yu Dasheng” with great difficulty, but he also felt happy to get them out. The long-repressed thought finally saw the light of day, and now he wanted to know all the details of the imagined situation. He got close to Fei’s ear and asked, as he pinched the flesh of her arm, “Tell me, where did he fuck you and how did he fuck you? Tell me.”

The pain brought tears to Fei’s eyes and she said, “He didn’t. Really … he didn’t … I’m telling you the truth.”

Little Cui pinched Fei harder and said, “In his office, right? It must have been in his office …”

Fei almost fainted at the pain. If telling the truth was so painful, then why do it? So she told Little Cui that she had indeed seduced Director Yu and that it had happened right in his office. She let him see the ulcers on her arm as he sat in his chair and he grabbed her arm, forcing her onto his lap …

Little Cui began to untie Fei during her “confession.” The confession stopped his pinching and he suddenly had a strong desire to fuck her. He grabbed one of her arms and pulled her to the bed, anxiously asking as he removed his pants, “What happened next? What happened next?” Her clothes were all stripped off and, naked, she continued to make up her story. She said Director Yu had trapped her in his arms, groping her, and then pushed her down onto the desk … Little Cui had already started to thrust himself into her violently, and meanwhile continued to press Fei for what Director Yu did and when and how. Listening to Fei’s narration so filled him with excitement, it even led him into the novelty of role-play: as if the woman he entered now were not his wife but a dissolute whore that any man could have. And he was not her husband, either; he was Director Yu and could do anything that Director Yu had done. He was doing it, right along with Fei’s detailed account, and experiencing an unparalleled intensity of stimulation and pleasure. Unsure of whether he was in a struggle with Director Yu or merely having an affair with a shameless woman, he discovered he simply needed this, needed it desperately. In his savage and insulting language Fei also found sexual sensations of a strength and variety that he had never before given to her. So good, she was thinking. To die for—she felt. It was under these peculiar circumstances that her first real sexual pleasure was awakened by her husband. To be beaten painfully, and then ravaged, made her feel a pleasure to die for, such as she had never experienced. For this kind of pleasure she would have been willing to be beaten a thousand times over.

From then on, that became the prologue to their lovemaking: Fei had to tell Little Cui of her sexual encounters with other men. She went back to middle school—from Captain Sneakers, then the dancer, until the time she started to work for the factory. Most of the time she just made things up, normally arranging the accounts of what happened from far to near, eventually reaching the bed in their own home. She told Little Cui that she often brought men home when he was blind drunk, and those men would fuck her in their bed, right next to him. She would say, “Little Cui, what do you think? Don’t you think Fei is too tempting?” Little Cui would throw himself on her body with eyes flaring, as if he wanted to compete with those men, as if a drunk weakling of a husband, who was absolutely not Little Cui, were right then sleeping next to this woman, who was about to be fucked to pieces. Little Cui was not Fei’s husband. It was too hard to be Fei’s husband. He felt cornered.

A marriage like this was doomed to be short-lived. The more these two howled their way through sex and entangled themselves in this sort of love of theirs, the more they knew in their hearts that the end was coming. Finally, one day, they stopped the screaming and storming. Instead, unusually bright mild days began to arise between them. Little Cui eventually found someone else, his apprentice, a girl named Er Ling.

After having Er Ling, Little Cui stopped forcing Fei to tell him stories—he had become like those characters in Fei’s stories, seeing another woman outside of his marriage, which brought some peaceful life back to his long-withered heart. He didn’t feel sorry for Fei; he merely felt that he could begin to forgive her.

It was Fei who asked for a divorce first. That day, she bought him a bottle of One-Acre Spring, two rabbit ears, and a small piece of donkey sausage, and they sat drinking together, face-to-face. She came straight to the point: “Er Ling is an innocent girl from a decent family. Little Cui, you shouldn’t fool around with her.”

Seeing that Fei knew everything, Little Cui blushed and said, “What do you want? What right do you have to criticize me?”

“Don’t worry. It’s true that I don’t have the right to criticize you, but I have the right to tell you one thing.”

“What is it?”

“We should get a divorce. Er Ling is the girl you should marry.”

Little Cui hadn’t expected Fei to say this, which was exactly what he wanted to say but found it was too hard. She allowed him to preserve his dignity, to keep intact that old image of himself as the man who had cut his index finger and, dripping blood, sworn to marry her. Embarrassed, he gulped a mouthful of alcohol as if to wash out the hidden underside of his heart. He said, “Fei, I actually wasn’t thinking about this, but—”

Fei raised her glass and interrupted him. “There are a lot of ‘actuallys’ in our life, but let’s not talk about it. Let’s drink.” She drained her glass, licked her lower lip, and then clasped her hands. “Let’s go and take care of that tomorrow.” She said this very calmly, and, while Little Cui heard every word, he was much more focused on Fei’s habit of reaching out with her tongue to lick her lower lip. He would have been unable to describe the feeling that this small gesture gave him, but it moved him greatly—how she extended the pink tip of her tongue, just a little, and then quickly, almost more quickly than the eye could follow, licked her slightly trembling lip, like a cat, like a small wounded animal licking its wound out of sight. In the background was their empty home, which had nothing in it except for a bed and a quilt. All the money had disappeared into Little Cui’s bottles of alcohol. Even Fei’s salary had been readily taken by Little Cui as convenient for his use. Fei had never argued with Little Cui about money; she just let him spend it any way he wanted. She herself preferred to wear old clothes, or just uniforms all year long. He looked at Fei in her old uniform, at the sudden flicking of her pink tongue. For a moment his resolution to get a divorce almost wavered. He recalled how her attraction for him began with her mouth, how words were unable to describe the beauty of the corner of her mouth; her mouth made him dizzy. Years of drinking had damaged his memory and he had forgotten many things, but now some of them came back. He remembered Fei had never let him touch her mouth, even after she became his wife. So now he wanted to kiss her. When they’d decided to get a divorce, the beautiful, mysterious Fei from before their marriage started to return to him little by little. He wanted to kiss her, but she pushed his face away with her hand. “Don’t,” she said.