Kinder Than Solitude: A Novel

by Yiyun Li

  “Only because I find your unfeeling attitude toward the world most extraordinary. Do you know a person like you cannot be trusted?”

  Ruyu opened her eyes and did not avert them when Shaoai continued studying her face. “I didn’t ask you to trust me,” Ruyu said. “So why don’t you leave me alone?”

  “I didn’t ask you to come and live here. I didn’t agree for my parents to take you in,” Shaoai said, her voice all of a sudden hoarse. “Leave you alone? Why don’t you spare all of us that judgmental attitude? Why don’t you leave me alone?”

  At such a close distance, Shaoai’s face looked as though distorted by pain. “If you tell me how to leave you alone, I’ll do it just as you would like,” Ruyu said. “I didn’t know I was in your way. Your parents told my grandaunts that you would be living in the university dorm during the school year.”

  “So the fault is mine?”

  “I don’t have another place to be.”

  “You’ve left me no place to be.”

  For a split second Ruyu had the impression that Shaoai, enraged implacably, would strangle her. She willed her body to stay still and said in a calm voice that she was sorry if that was how Shaoai felt. And it was late, she said, and she had a weekly exam tomorrow morning. Before Shaoai could reply, Ruyu switched the light off. She had not yet had a moment of free time to pray, but she was too tired to worry about that now.

  For a while Ruyu stayed awake, and she knew that Shaoai was awake, too. Ruyu was vaguely aware of a power she held over the older girl, but what it meant she did not want to understand; to some extent she preferred to believe that it was the same power she held over Boyang and Moran, though the latter two were transparent, while Shaoai was, despite being a nuisance, a mystery. Yet the mere thought of understanding that mystery struck Ruyu as sordid. Besides, she would never allow herself to be outwitted in what she excelled at: the habit of being opaque allowed her to be a mystery in people’s eyes. To want to know any person better requires one to give up that position and to become less inscrutable.

  11

  Three days passed, but the conversation Ruyu had begun to dread, in which Celia would request an explanation as to why Ruyu had told Edwin but not Celia about the death of a friend, had not occurred. The person who’d died wasn’t close, Ruyu would have said, but that would not have sufficed. For Celia, any death, be it that of a stranger she’d read about in the newspapers, a passing acquaintance’s distant relative, or an aged neighborhood pet, was relevant, the grief she felt on other people’s behalf leaving her constantly bruised yet acutely alive. To deprive Celia of an opportunity to mourn was to deny her the right to feel.

  Wickedly Ruyu wondered if she should have told Celia about the death: no other stranger would feel the waste of Shaoai’s ambitions and desires or imagine her imprisonment in her body for twenty-one years as unreservedly as Celia would. Why not be lenient and let the loss of Shaoai be acknowledged? Who else would do that for Shaoai if not Celia? Certainly Shaoai’s mother must be suffering. Boyang had not mentioned Aunt in his email, but Ruyu knew she was alive: when Uncle had passed away a few years earlier, Boyang had emailed with the news. All mothers, though, mourn the deaths of their children, and a mother’s grief, like a mother’s love, offers little redemption. The world would be a kinder place if mothers, and mothers alone, were the judges of their children. Everyone would be absolved of her sins before her heart repents, everyone but you, Ruyu thought with a sudden rage: you—lonely, vicious, remorseless orphan.

  Shaoai’s death had not taken Ruyu by surprise. Had she not been, by keeping an email address available to Boyang and by checking it regularly, waiting for Shaoai to die all along? Had he been waiting too, she wondered; had Moran? Little had bound them together but the waiting, which, all over now, would finally release them into a void, where even the keenest ears could not discern that they, like three unconnected music phrases, had once been in the same piece. Ruyu wondered what ripples the death had left in the other two hearts, but perhaps they had become immovable over the years, which she hoped, for the sake of their happiness, was the case.

  Ruyu had not seen Moran or Boyang since she had left the country, but instinctively she knew that they had not forgotten her. Would it be a solace to them that they had not been forgotten by her, either? Other people in her past—her grandaunts, her two ex-husbands, Eric—she did not think about often. When she did, she thought of them incuriously, their lives, and in the case of her grandaunts, their deaths, affecting her little. But at least she had enough mercy for Moran and Boyang: sometimes she allowed herself to wonder about their current lives. It was their bad luck to have met her, their bad luck to have stumbled onto a battleground where they had had no reason to be. But to whom had the battleground belonged? Once upon a time Ruyu had thought that the battle was between herself and Shaoai, but the latter had not deserved to be her equal; it could have been between Ruyu and God, but she had been unwilling—was still unwilling—to grant him that position.

  Suppose one could head into a battle without a definite enemy, and one could, with a blind resolution, leave a trail of corpses behind. If that were her lot Ruyu saw no point questioning it now. Moran and Boyang had been her casualties, yet in some way their lives must have been enhanced by her, too. This view, no doubt heartless to the world, comforted Ruyu: they had not been extraordinary people to start with. Years of living—quarreling with the surroundings, making do with small triumphs—would have worn out their innocence in the most banal way. Though it wasn’t innocence betrayed that made them interesting—innocence is always betrayed—but that neither Boyang nor Moran understood how to carry a burden as enduring as Shaoai, or why it was theirs.

  God should have had mercy for Moran and Boyang, Ruyu thought; God should have let Shaoai die a long time ago. Willfully, wishfully, he changes his mind and adjusts a few minor details, but revision of the script—of any script whose creator is cursed with all-seeing eyes—must amount to little gratification. Does that make him feel lonely, abandoned even? Or bored, and enraged by his boredom?

  You, Ruyu said in her heart to the god she had long stopped believing in, you have my sympathy.

  Only once in her life had Ruyu been surprised—by Shaoai’s fingers and tongue, probing where they had no right to; and by her own paralytic silence, which must have been interpreted by Shaoai as acquiescence. Had that been in God’s script, too? If he’d intended other schemes for Ruyu, she had not let herself be caught again. He had beaten her that one time because he was God, and she had been young.

  The bells on top of the door jingled. Ruyu tried to suppress her vexation—a customer was coming into the store, wanting something, or worse, not knowing what he or she wanted, demanding recommendations and later approval from Ruyu. Yet when she looked up it was only Edwin, who, both hands occupied with take-out bags from a nearby deli, walked sideways into the shop. Jamming his foot between the door and its frame, he let the door close gently so that the bells would rattle less.

  She should have stood up to greet him, but for a moment Ruyu did not move, watching the door close behind Edwin in slow motion and wishing that someone would rush in, instantly bursting the bubble of stealthy quietness that was now enclosing the two of them.

  “Hello,” Edwin said.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Ruyu said. Why would anyone mute a bell that was supposed to ring?

  “Are you closed?”

  “No,” Ruyu said, trying to recover from her momentary frustration. “Did Celia send you not only to buy dinner but also to get treats?” she said. It must be one of those days when Celia couldn’t find enough inspiration to cook a dinner both aesthetically and nutritionally satisfying.

  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 silence
d 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 b
y 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.