A Certain Smile

by Judith Michael

  "What I remember most is the pain she caused, the ugliness of her betrayal of our friends, my own discovery of the kind of person I had married—how blind I had been, so anxious to marry and have a home, to be a father, as if to replace my own. And that was when I gave up the idea of passion. It was not something I did deliberately, but I realized, over time, that I had rejected it; what I wanted was to pick my way through the minefields that China had become, and survive in my own way, without mrmoil. And that is what I have done."

  The waitress returned. When she left, Li chuckled softly. "This is not the kind of dinner one chooses for uninterrupted conversations."

  "But most of the time it's very private," Miranda said, wanfing to reassure him that he had chosen well. "This wonderful room, and wonderful food."

  "Thank you. And thank you for listening so well. It is very comfortable, talking to you."

  He served the dumplings—"Lotus seed; another sweet"—and poured the last of the wine. With the door shut, silence wrapped them again. Miranda looked for something to say. "When we met your son yesterday, he seemed angry. Was it because of me?"

  "No. Of course not."

  She smiled faintly. "You said that too quickly. But perhaps he thought you should not be seen with an American woman."

  "It had nothing to do with you. Sheng is often unhappy; his life is filled with problems. I told you, he has so many ways of making money. I have done a little investigating, and I think one of them may be involved with pirates, which is a dangerous business."

  Miranda smiled uncertainly, thinking she should get the joke. "Pirates? You mean unscrupulous businessmen?"

  "No, I mean real pirates. Bands of them roam the South China Sea, ambushing cargo ships. They take them to Beihai, a small town on the coast, and unload them."

  "But they'd be seen. I mean, even at night..."

  "They do it in daylight, and indeed they are seen, but it does not matter because the police and city government work with them."

  'The police? The government? But... why?"

  "Because they are paid to do it. It is always the same story, is it not?"

  "Who pays them?"

  "Sheng, if he is indeed in this business, and his partners, and all those who deal in this. They pay the pirates, as well. It is a large payroll."

  "They hire pirates? And pay them salaries? That is so bizarre. But if they're ambushing ships, other companies, other governments must be involved. At some point they'll be stopped, won't they?"

  "Most likely, and that is probably Sheng's biggest worry, whether it is this pirate business or some other. But he is not a child; he will fend for himself. Do you like the lotus-seed dumpling?"

  Miranda wondered how much of his nonchalance about Sheng was an act. But she could not ask that, and in any event, he had changed the subject.

  "Yes," she said, "very much." She ate slowly, aware that she was handling chopsticks and dumplings quite expertly, but mostly thinking of Li's story. She could not imagine a life of such turmoil.

  "What are you thinking?" he asked.

  "That I've never known such pain as you've known."

  "Your husband died."

  "I'm not saying that wasn't hard. It was a shock, suddenly not being a wife; it was as if I didn't know who I was. I felt unmoored—"

  She saw his puzzled look, and said, "When a boat isn't tied to a dock, when anything is cut loose and is drifting, it's unmoored. It was almost as if I had no purpose in life. Of course Lisa and Adam were there, but then I worried about bringing them up alone ..."

  "So you did have pain."

  "Not like yours. You lost years of your life, and love and trust and hope. When Jeff died, my life barely changed." She looked up sharply, stunned by her words. They were astonishingly revealing. How could she have said them to this man, whom she barely knew?

  But I do know him. I already know more about him than I do about a lot of people I've known for years.

  So what? All my life I've known you can't trust foreigners; you have

  to be on your guard against people who are really different, because you can't believe anything they —

  "That's totally ridiculous," she burst out.

  Li's eyebrows rose. "That your life barely changed?"

  "No. I'm sorry, I was thinking about something else."

  "And it was ridiculous?"

  "Yes."

  Because I do know him. And I trust him.

  "Do you want to tell me what it was?" he asked.

  "No. I'm sorry, but—"

  "Of course, your thoughts are your own. You were telling me about your life after your husband died."

  "Yes. It hardly changed, and that was almost sadder than his death. I lived in the same house and slept in the same bed and my days were the same. I made the same food and moved around the kitchen in the same ways, and stood in the same place in front of the stove where I'd stood for years.... And when Lisa and Adam went to school, I worked in the sunroom, just as I always had. And my parents or friends would come to dinner, or we'd go there, so I was cooking just about as much as I always had. And at night I read in the living room or in bed, just as I always had."

  "But you had lost a husband."

  "I'd lost a friend, and I missed him, but I had other friends, and my parents, and I didn't have to be alone or go anywhere alone if I didn't want to."

  "A friend," Li said.

  "Yes." Her gaze turned inward and after a moment, she said, "We used to go for long walks after dinner. Our street makes a gradual descent into town; there are wonderful old trees on each side and on a parkway that runs down the center, and moonlight flickers through the leaves when the summer breeze comes down from the mountains, and the air is soft and it smells of cut grass and roses, and there's a kind of murmur coming from front porches where people are sitting and talking—you can hear the clink of ice in their glasses and sometimes the squeak of a swing or rocking chair—and we would walk for hours, not talking, just being part of our town."

  "Not talking," Li echoed again.

  "Not much. The last few years, we didn't have a lot to talk about, except for the children and the house. Jeff was so sweet, he was such a good person, but he wasn't happy, and he couldn't seem to get interested in things, not even his work. Nothing seemed to satisfy him."

  "What did he look like?"

  del

  "Tall, handsome, blue eyes, sandy hair getting thin on top which drove him crazy, a little overweight—he kept trying new diets, and he jogged every day and lifted weights, but he always stayed about the same—and he liked action movies with lots of blood, which I didn't, and he read mysteries and science fiction."

  "Which you didn't?"

  "No, I like novels and poetry and history. And travel books and magazines—" She saw Li's eyebrows shoot up and she gave a small laugh. "Well, I do read about other places even if I don't go there; I always have."

  "So you've wanted to travel, but didn't?"

  She looked away, briefly embarrassed. "I told you: it seemed so daunting. But I like travel books, and when I read them, late at night, when everything is quiet, I can almost see myself in another country; it really is something like being there. I know it's not the same, but it's what I've—" Settled for, she thought, but did not say it. "It's what I've chosen."

  After a pause, Li asked, "Did your husband read travel books, too?"

  "No, he said they were dull. Like politics and history; he said they didn't have any plot."

  "So you are interested in more things than he was."

  She gave a small laugh. "I hope so. It wasn't that he didn't care about things; he cared about doing a good job and being a good father and a good husband. But everything was so hard for him. He'd wake up each morning dreading the effort of getting through the day, coping with the demands of work, acquaintances, family, parents ... all of us who expected things of him. He tried, though: he worked hard at doing the things he was supposed to do, and he did most of them well, but he never
..."

  "Caught fire," Li said when her voice trailed away.

  "Yes."

  "Not even about you."

  She shook her head. "What Jeff wanted most was security and quiet. He was terrified of uncertainty or ambiguity or conflict. He wanted a family of friends who would keep him safe. If he'd ever felt passion, he would have run from it, because it's messy and unpredictable and it might have made his heart beat faster."

  At her sarcasm, Li looked at her sharply, but she was absorbed in her memories.

  "After a while, I felt I was smothering. Whenever I was happy or excited, or wanted to try something new, I couldn't talk about it,

  because he'd change the subject or leave the house, actually run away, and that would spoil everything. So I kept it all to myself." She paused. "Those long walks into town ... I loved them. I felt Boulder wrap itself around me, and I was part of it, and part of the mountains and the prairie, and all the lighted windows were guiding us, and on the way home the moon would light our way, and the air was fragrant and silent, even the birds had gone to sleep, and I felt so full of joy and love ... and there was nothing I could do with it." She laughed lightly. "I gave it to my children, so most of the time I only felt partly smothered."

  "And then he died."

  She nodded. "We'd been married ten years."

  "And it was harder for you, knowing that you had not loved him."

  "I loved him once. I think. I may have been looking for security just as much as he was."

  There was a silence. Miranda looked up to find Li contemplating her. "But since then, you have loved, have you not?" he asked. "In all the years since he died, someone must have come into your heart."

  She hesitated. A lie might deflect further questions, might protect her defenses, but at that moment she could not imagine lying to him. "Not that way."

  "But by then you knew what you longed for, what you had missed. You must have searched for it."

  She shook her head. "There are so many woman searching. I was afraid of being one of them, single women with hungry eyes, looking for a man. I wasn't unhappy, I had my children, my work, a good life ..." She shook her head. "I didn't search."

  "Or want?"

  "Oh, want ... Of course I wanted. I wanted a lover and a companion; a voice late at night in my silent house; conversations full of ideas and curiosities and new ways to make sense of the world. I wanted to reach out and find a hand to hold, steps to match mine, someone protecting me while I was protecting him. I wanted to share all the things that are pleasant when we're alone but wonderful when they're shared. I never pretended I didn't want all that; I just couldn't go out looking for it. I couldn't imagine dating, like a teenager, starting from scratch—"

  "Scratch?"

  "The beginning. Getting to know someone from the beginning, over and over again, probing, revealing ..."

  "Like traveling to a foreign country," Li said. "All the effort, all the

  unknowns. All the fears. But did no one appear, without all those things from scratch? Did no one come on his own, to stand at your side, and give you a chance to love?"

  She met his eyes, warm, questioning, accepting, and knew her own were filled with the surprise of discovery, that she felt safe enough to talk of these things to this man, without fear or defensiveness. "I met a lot of men. My parents wanted so badly to see me settled, and my friends had a fine time being matchmakers, so there were dinner parties and theater parties, Christmas caroling, hiking, skiing ... and I was always paired up with someone."

  She was looking inward again, remembering. "It was a little like a drug, you know; I didn't know how to stop it, even when I wasn't having a good time. Usually it was better to have a partner than to be the single person tagging along with couples, so I kept doing it, saying yes to meeting someone new, saying yes to seeing him again, saying yes to—" She stopped.

  "But did none of them come into your heart?" Li asked, pressing her, and she knew he was not interested in whether she had slept with men, but in whether one of them had consumed her.

  "No," she said, then smiled faintly. "I might not have recognized it, though; I didn't know what it felt like."

  Li reached for her. It happened so quickly that his hand was on hers, curving around it as if to shield it from harm, before either of them realized that he had moved. And then it was over: he pulled away and tried to cover the moment by reaching for the second bottle of wine and opening it, fumbling shghtly in his confusion. "Please forgive me. I had no right."

  "You felt sorry for me," Miranda said.

  "I felt sad for you." He filled her glass. "Did you not even pretend?"

  Her eyes widened. "Yes; how would you know that? I did try. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I couldn't fall in love even when everyone was telling me how fine these men were, how good for me.... Once I did think I'd found someone, a man I'd known a long time, who'd moved away but came back to Boulder after his wife died. I liked him, and for a while it was so comfortable letting him take charge of everything, but that wasn't what I wanted, you know: to have my Ufe organized by someone else. I'd always dreamed—"

  "Yes?" he asked when she fell silent. He sat back, as if to give her more space. "What did you dream?"

  "That I might love and be loved without defining the boundaries or compartments of our love. That there would be a flow of giving and

  receiving, of understanding, of laughing and crying together, of being awed by the wonders of the world and held close against its dangers. I know it's a fairy tale, the kind of thing people look for in novels because they don't expect to find it in life, but when Jeff died and I realized how lonely I'd been, even in marriage, I knew it was what I wanted, and I've clung to it ever since." She smiled at Li. "Like your clinging to the dream of your father coming back. Maybe there are some things we just can't outgrow."

  Li's eyes were brooding, fixed on her face.

  "You're feeling sorry for me again," she said.

  He shook his head. "I am admiring you. Because you dream of an encompassing love, and you hold your dream close. Too often our dreams are knocked away from us."

  His gaze moved past her, to some memory she could not imagine. "Sometimes we are afraid to try," he murmured, "because the pain of loss is so great. So many of us, in so many ways, snagged by fear."

  Miranda was about to ask him what he feared, whom he had lost, when he shook his head a little, as if shaking something off, and turned to their dinner. Briskly, he opened the new steamer basket on the table. "Vegetable," he said. "And two dipping sauces; this one is hot. You know, when I was a boy, we had mostly vegetables to eat. No one could afford meat."

  He described the farm where he had grown up, and his grandparents, to whom he had been so close in the years when his mother was deeply depressed. "Eventually she recovered, but she never got over my father; she was betrayed and lonely, but she could not lose that destructive hope that keeps real life at bay." He talked about his friends and their clubhouse, his school, the hours in his room when he dreamed of a father and of America. The waitress came and went, steamer baskets appeared and were taken away, the wine level fell in its bottle, all in a dreamlike rhythm.

  And then the waitress brought in a large tureen and placed it on the table. Miranda, startled, looked at Li. "I thought there would just be baskets, one after another, forever and ever ..."

  He laughed. "This is our soup."

  "Then dinner is over." She felt a deep sadness.

  "Not until we eat our soup."

  She shook her head. "I can't. All those dumplings ... I really don't have room for any more."

  "Try a little. It is very good. And it helps create—"

  "Balance and harmony." They exchanged a smile. Once again, to her amazement, Miranda finished hers. She sat back with a sigh as Li

  poured the last of the wine. "What an extraordinary dinner. I'm having such a good time."

  "I hoped you would. There is another very fine dumpling res
taurant, Defachang, in Xi'an. If you like, we could fly there tomorrow evening and try it out. That would also give you a chance to see the terra-cotta warriors."

  Miranda set down her wine glass. The dreamlike rhythm had shattered. "I want you to explain all this to me."

  After a moment, he nodded. "I will—"

  The waitress brought in a blue and gold teapot, filled two small han-dleless cups, set their lids upon them, and looked at Li. He said a few words and then she was gone.

  "What did you tell her?" Miranda asked.

  "That we have everything we need. Now we will be completely private." He leaned back, stretching out his legs, and contemplated her. "Would it satisfy you if I told you I was attracted to you the moment I saw you, and I want to be with you, and that is all there is to it?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I'm not beaudful, I'm not witty or brilliant or mesmerizing. There has to be another reason for you to—"

  "What?" he prompted.

  "Pursue me."

  He smiled. "One of the reasons I have pursued you is what you just said."

  ''Because I'm not beautiful—?"

  "Because you insist you are not. This is nonsense. What does it say about me? That I am stupid? Or blind? That I have no high standards or aspirations?"

  "It has nothing to do with you."

  "I know that. I know you do not think me stupid or blind; this is about how you see yourself. So. I will tell you how it comes about that I pursue you. When I was sent to Mianning to make bricks, I had not had a real marriage for almost a year; my wife and I were living separate lives. I was criticizing her activities in the Party and finally she had me sent away; I found out much later that that was her doing. So I was already lonely before I was expelled from Beijing, and of course it was far worse in Mianning, where I knew no one and found no one who shared my interests. They were poor people, you understand, with no education and no time or energy to wonder what was beyond their village: they lived in dirt-floored hovels; they were diseased and starving, freezing in winter, faint with heat in the summer; without hope.

  They had no idea why I was there and I could not make them understand; they thought it was a big joke. And then I met someone."