Must I Go

by Yiyun Li

  * * *

  I’M ONLY MARKING THIS as a sample for you. Like one of those tiny bites of cheese they put out in a store to tempt you. The next two hundred pages, all are bits and pieces of cheese like this. In case you decide to skip, let me tell you what you’ll be missing.

  Roland and Hetty bought and moved into a house, across the bay from Halifax so Roland could feel “liberated” from his childhood shadow. (Imagine moving from San Francisco to Oakland to become a completely new person. Unlikely, but that is Roland all over, thinking unlikely thoughts.) Hetty died in the house (and I suppose Roland did, too, though Peter Wilson neglects to tell us). But I’m getting ahead of myself. They still had many years to live. Roland had a shop on Garden Road, and occasionally a young woman would be hired as a helper, but these employees came and went like seasonal allergies. (No surprise there.) Weddings and funerals. Family reunions. Many charity dinners, because Hetty was a charitable lady. Holidays, mostly in Europe, but also to Asia a few times. You get the sense Hetty would rather have stayed in her garden, but she took the trouble of traveling with Roland so he could stay put as her POW for the rest of the time.

  POW isn’t my word, but Sidelle’s. She used it once in a letter, and Roland recorded it alongside a long passage of analysis of the situation, as you can imagine. She must have been in what Roland called “that mood of Sidelle’s.” What kind of mood was that? She never meant to break up his marriage. She seemed fine with him living so far away. But somehow Roland made it sound like he had wounded Sidelle by marrying Hetty, and because of that wound, there had to be a flare-up once in a while. Can we trust him?

  Ah yes, I remember now. Sidelle said something about him losing his own war of independence and becoming a POW. I would say that he would be on the losing side of that war in any case. Either he was Hetty’s POW or Sidelle’s. The question is: Which one would be a better jailor?

  Sidelle, if you ask me—but we don’t know what her life was really like in those years. It still kills me that we can only imagine it and that we may be so off the mark in our imaginings.

  Roland claimed that he and Sidelle remained intimately connected even though they lived across the ocean from each other. That I believed. Sidelle said she was a loyal woman. And I believe her. She and I are alike in that way: We only say what we mean. And Roland, what else could he have to make him feel special but Sidelle’s letters? They met up when Roland and Hetty holidayed in Europe, but it was different then. Roland was traveling with a wife. And Sidelle was an older woman.

  Roland might have written another thousand pages, but his life would be nothing more than the earth rotating to make day and night, and the earth going around the sun to make summer and winter. Roland was that earth and Roland was that sun.

  And then there were the South Pole and North Pole of his world: Hetty and Sidelle. Between the two poles there were other women. I was between those two poles, too, the little girl from California that he would never marry. But I’ve made a good use of my life. I won’t say I don’t have regrets. I do, but regrets are like weeds. You kill them before they grow and spread. Willpower is the strongest weed killer. And I have willpower.

  19 NOVEMBER 1969.

  London. The young men and young women in the street, hair too long, garments too loose, faces too vacant, make the city a foreigner to me. Had I been younger I would have strived to look like one of them—was it not how I felt forty years ago when I first arrived in New York City? Forty years move one a few steps on, to another place on the chessboard. When the girls walk by without sparing a moment of their attention on one, one belongs to the past. When the boys see no threat in one’s existence, one becomes history.

  But call me old-fashioned, or reactionary. The young people, blossoming in their delusions, made oblivious by cannabis, are only marching blindly onto a field of tomorrows. Whereas I am able to make use of the days last past. In that I am a millionaire and they, paupers.

  For sure this same generation is sprouting around us at home, too. But Hetty is good at maintaining the moat between us and the army of nieces and nephews and their friends.

  I arrived in the late evening. It was the soonest possible after I received the telegram from one of Mr. Ogden’s daughters.

  To London, I told Hetty as I was phoning the travel agency, Mrs. Ogden is dying. Right away Hetty went up to pack my suitcase, black suit and black tie ironed, socks rolled up like newborn black bunnies, handkerchiefs for tears, mufflers for the throat, pills for the heart, backup reading glasses, and an extra fountain pen.

  Hetty’s efficiency awed me. Perhaps what keeps me in this marriage is that I live in a state of perpetual awe. That the book entitled Sidelle Ogden is to end is a mere fact to Hetty. What kind of character I am in Sidelle’s book is of no interest to Hetty. Perhaps when the book called Roland Bouley ends, she will accept it just as easily, allowing her eyes to pause at the word “Finis,” but no more. If I were to die tomorrow she would pack up as efficiently as this, too. Perhaps she would even send me off to the morgue with a second pair of reading glasses, an extra pen, and a few coins. Blessed the man whose wife knows so well his habit of misplacing the trivial contents of his life.

  Though, am I to die soon? If Hetty asked I would reassure her: No, darling, it’s not time yet to let death do us part. I have no doubt that she would have all of the strength and courage to go on, but what would be the point of her outliving me? Hetty as a widow would be no different to Hetty as a wife. Nothing under the sun is new to her, so nothing gets old. I have not been a widower. That remains an unswum river, an untasted wine, an unmapped terrain, an unmet lover. I would not mind knowing what the experience is like. Oh dear lord, do all loving husbands and wives in long-lasting marriages harbour these secret, near-murderous, thoughts?

  It seems I shall outlive Sidelle. No surprise there, unless I drop dead this moment, or am hit by a car. But someone—who? I don’t think it was Sidelle—once told me that I was not the kind of person to be run down by a car. Why? Does that kind of tragedy only happen to people who are of the indispensable kind?

  * * *

  ROLAND DIDN’T REMEMBER THAT it was me who told him that. But at least he remembered my words.

  After Lucy died, Gilbert once said that he didn’t understand how such a sad thing could have happened to us. What do you mean? That we are too nice? I asked. He said, No, we’re ordinary people, and we should be allowed to live an ordinary life, without this suffering. I thought to myself, who could grant us this? Someone with cancer might think, I don’t deserve this. Someone who lost a family member in a traffic accident would think, The world is unfair. Someone who marries a woman like Lilia Liska should ask himself, Why me? Someone who marries a woman like Hetty Bouley should ask himself, Why on earth?

  20 NOVEMBER 1969.

  I rang the University College Hospital. It did not sound as though Sidelle would be able to speak on the phone, but the nurse said she would let her know of my arrival. I also exchanged a call with Tessa Hutchinson, Mr. Ogden’s elder daughter. Likely it will be within a day or two, she said, and I said I would keep my return plans open. Her unperturbed tone, with so little curiosity in it, reminded me of Hetty. What is the world going to do with itself without women like them?

  After lunch I visited Sidelle and sat with her for as long as I could endure. The afternoon was empty of intruders. Had she informed people that she wanted to spend this time alone with me?

  She looked insubstantial, but not as fatally near death as I imagined. The way she raised a hand slowly to me—and I duly held it and kissed it—reminded me of a moment years ago, when she was lounging on the sofa in her drawing room, a hand extended as a gesture of truce. I must have been in a frantic mood that day. Was it before the death of Harry Ogden, or after? It no longer matters. It happened so many times, and it always happened the same way: I wanted something from her, and she made it clear t
hat I was making a fool of myself by wanting it. Perhaps if I still have the time to write that epic novel about my life, it should be titled The Wrong Moods.

  Or, The Wronged Moods.

  The only difference between Sidelle and life: She has always made the effort to appease me. Life, that bugger, never does.

  Sidelle has lost her voice completely. Do other visitors, encouraged by her quiet reception, talk her ears off, or do they, unsettled by her wordless scrutiny, scuttle off after a decent quarter hour?

  Even whispering seems to give her pain, but she has not lost her wit. The words she has difficulties saying aloud I can easily understand. The arrangement of our duet has changed, the essence not.

  Hetty? she whispered.

  No, she’s not in London, I said. I came by myself.

  She shook her head slightly, pitying me. No one is waiting at the hotel, then, was what her look said. In the past twenty years Sidelle and I have met, mostly in London, but also elsewhere in Europe, but I have always arrived as a tourist, accompanied by my dutiful wife. They do not meet. I do not even tell Hetty when I visit Sidelle. I do not have to. In the world of endless confrontations between countries, between ideologies, between religions—in a world where anything can cause a war, I have established an armistice between two remarkable women.

  Peacemaking between a loyal wife and a mistress to whom one has dedicated lifelong loyalty—this is a higher art, and should be required for all future world leaders, policy makers, and diplomats. Perhaps my epitaph should be: Here rests an ambassador of human hearts.

  You can’t expect me to bring her this time, I said to Sidelle.

  Still, pity in her eyes, but more good-humoured now. Then you will have to travel back alone after I die—that was what she would be saying to me. Or, too bad you didn’t think that the return trip would be a little different. Who will accompany you home after the funeral?

  I don’t mind travelling alone, I said.

  Brave, she whispered.

  Am I? I would prefer to always travel alone, I said, had I had a choice.

  She shook her head, seeing through my lie as easily as I had told it. Her greyish blue eyes looked nearer to youth than to death. A life with some tremendous losses, people will say so at her funeral, but what they don’t know is this secret. All of us are fools in Sidelle’s eyes, and she has lived a good life entertained by fools.

  Besides, who can avoid journeying alone? I said, still protesting, still arguing. She is always able to turn me back into my twenty-year-old self. And what is my aloneness even to myself? I said, pressing on as though she would answer me.

  She shook her head, dismissing my digression. Ready for business? she whispered.

  For a moment I thought of her as one of those characters in a Russian novel, producing on her deathbed a secret will, naming me her heir. Would that give me what I need to secure a freedom from all that binds me to my current life? I would feel no qualm to accept everything from her. Though someone might come to challenge my bequest after her death. Relatives from Mr. Ogden’s side, perhaps. Had we been ten times more socially prominent, we would have made a splash of a scandal. But here we are, a mostly forgotten poet and a provincial book dealer. No one would know that we two have lived at the apex of human existence.

  She pointed to a writing pad on the bedside table. On the pad, written not in her penmanship, was an instruction. “I have destroyed all the letters from you. Please destroy my letters. Thank you.”

  It was that impersonal “thank you” that made me realise that this was an instruction to all her friends. Still, I could not for a moment recover from the cruelty of the message. She was not leaving me anything. Giving she does not, taking she does. Yes, I kept a carbon copy of my letters to her, so one could argue that there was no real loss. But that cold gesture from the deathbed?

  Can I not keep them? I said.

  What’s the point? her smile said.

  The point is that the living need to live on, I said. And the living need to hold on to things. You can’t just take them away with you.

  What if I didn’t obey her wish? She would never know. I cannot be the first man in history to defy a woman’s dying wish. A few weeks ago, I read in the news that a young couple, distraught lovers who could see no future, decided to jump from the balcony of a skyscraper together. They had both had plenty to drink, but when she stepped into the empty air he, all of a sudden, realised that there was not a trace of desire to die in him anymore. What if I were that man, looking down from a dazzling height, feeling no remorse or grief but instead an extreme relief that I hadn’t taken that final step? I cannot stop Sidelle from dying, but I can stay safe on that solid ground built by her and myself, secured by all the letters we have written each other.

  One rather likes a neat ending, she whispered.

  You can’t expect that I cut a limb off myself so that you can have your neat ending, I said.

  She smiled. How I hate that mocking look in her eyes. Even dying doesn’t soften her.

  You’re saying I exaggerate everything. And I’m being messy, vulgar, and sentimental, I said. She looked like she was ready to drift away from me. I put a hand on her lifeless hair. Sidelle, I said. You can’t order me to destroy anything. What would I have to remember you by?

  You yourself, she whispered. Enough, no?

  You mean, I shall exist to the end of my days as a memento of your brilliance? I said. What an honour, what fortune. Let’s all give a round of applause to Roland Bouley, created by the one and the only Sidelle Ogden.

  She opened her eyes a little wider. Sympathy, mock sympathy.

  Maybe I should congratulate myself, I said. Had I been a neurotic young man I might have died a long time ago for you. And then what? You would’ve gone on to find another young man, who’d have suited you just as well. Fortunately, I’ve played whatever role you’ve assigned me. I’ve put my heart into it. Perhaps even surpassed your expectations. And now you say to me: Go back to your wife. I’m done with you.

  Oh, Roland, Sidelle whispered.

  I did not know what she meant by that, but I did not have time to figure it out. A woman, late middle-aged, plumpish, came in, presumably one of those female friends Sidelle has accumulated in the past twenty years. I greeted her and saw that her eyelids were puffy and red, the worst type of visitor at a hospital. She seemed surprised to find me there, and showed no recognition when I said my name. Her name was Mrs. Morse, and before Sidelle said anything she bent over to peck Sidelle on her cheek. Not a word, darling, she said. I’ll come back later.

  A sacrifice she had to make for me and for Sidelle, that the woman did not conceal. How can Sidelle have a woman like that as a friend, how can she permit a woman like that to contaminate the last days of her life? Perhaps even Sidelle had to allow herself some deterioration in her old age, letting miscellaneous people take hold of her attention. Stupid, stupid world.

  Her son killed himself years ago, and she still writes one letter to him every day, Sidelle whispered.

  It is interesting now to remember that all afternoon the longest sentence she spoke was about someone who is beyond intolerable.

  Why doesn’t she just die, then, if she’s so eager to be with him? I said.

  Your solution for everyone, she whispered. Here you are, her smile continued to speak. You’re no less melodramatic than Mrs. Morse and I put up with you just fine.

  There is never an only orphan, an only widow, an only widower, or an only sufferer, I said. Does she come to you because she thinks you can understand her loss? Or does she go to everyone because she’s certain nobody can understand her loss and she must make this her one-woman crusade, to have her pains seen and heard and known? God bless her son’s soul.

  Sidelle closed her eyes. Exhausted by my tantrum, perhaps. When she opened th
em again I had the vague feeling that she would live on forever. Some people are not born to die.

  Still not taking me seriously, are you? I said.

  She smiled. Whatever you mean, that smile said, you’re making a fool of yourself.

  One wants to be taken seriously, I said emphatically.

  Hetty? she whispered.

  Sure, Hetty, I thought. She is the one woman who has never not taken me seriously. And then there are clients and acquaintances who in a way take this Roland seriously.

  Has it occurred to you, I said, that perhaps one wants to be taken seriously only by one specific person?

  Me?

  Yes, why not.

  The problem is, Sidelle’s smile said, have you seen me take anyone or anything seriously?

  I don’t care about how you treat others, I said. What I don’t understand is why on earth you cannot take me seriously. You said Hetty takes me seriously. Maybe she does. Maybe she doesn’t. It’s extraordinary, you can say, that I don’t know if anything in my marriage truly matters to me, but it’s also extraordinary that I don’t care to know. What I do mind, however, is not knowing why you’ve never given me the one thing that I wanted. Had Hugh lived, would you have treated him this way, too? Perhaps you would have been one of those mothers who destroy the lives of their sons without any remorse. Perhaps he would have long fled from you. A son can do that. But I’m not your son. I’ve remained loyal to you.

  A nurse entered, alerted by my raised voice. Sidelle indicated that all was well. She did not look like a person on the edge of death. What if they had made a mistake when they summoned me? What if my presence was somehow keeping her alive?

  I just read what I wrote. Too much whiskey, too little clarity. My memory of the afternoon was longer than recorded here. What else was said? I don’t seem to have grown a day older since I met Sidelle.