Beijing Comrades

by Scott E. Myers

  My wife’s sudden appearance at my company—I had put her on as a human resource manager—radically limited my freedom. I hated it, but what was done was done and I was powerless to change the situation. Now that we were in an office environment together, the very qualities by which I had been so transfixed when we first met now appeared as little more than a veil of artifice. Routine contact regarding tedious work-related matters made her refined bearing and fashionable clothes lose their appeal. To make matters worse, our sex life was a travesty, at least as far as I was concerned.

  One evening, Lin Ping and I were home watching television. “Did you hear that Wei Guo bought a villa in the Northern Suburbs?” she asked nonchalantly. “We should get one, too.”

  “Don’t you like it here?” I asked, though I already knew the answer to the question. It was something we’d fought over repeatedly.

  “What, this place?” she groaned. “Please, Handong! These apartment buildings are so common—public housing for the masses! Outside China, only poor people live in places like this.”

  “Well, the Northern Suburbs are too far from downtown,” I said, trying to reason with her. “Besides, I hear there are always problems with the water and electricity being shut off out there.”

  “I suppose you would know,” Lin Ping said evenly. “You already have a place there, don’t you?” She looked up from the TV, a confrontational yet barely perceptible smile glued to her tightly clenched lips.

  I had to think fast. “That’s not mine,” I said, the words coming out more defensively than I meant them to. I knew full well she was referring to Tivoli. “It’s just a friend’s house I was using for something.” Man! I thought. How did she manage to find this stuff out?

  Lin Ping didn’t pursue her line of questioning, but just stared at me, utterly unable to comprehend why I had lied to her.

  Another long, sweltering hot summer had passed. Each day I took walks outside to let the crisp fall air into my lungs. Autumn had always been my favorite season, and it was also Beijing’s most beautiful time of year.

  Lin Ping and I had only been married a year, but already I was beginning to wonder how long it was going to last. I was deeply conflicted. On the one hand, I couldn’t deny that my wife was extremely good to me. Loving and considerate, she attended to each aspect of my daily life with unswerving devotion, even to the point of asking what I would be wearing each day. On the other hand, the relentless attention she poured on me could be suffocating. About this, however, there was nothing I could do. In addition to spending my money, meddling in my personal affairs was a marital right I couldn’t deny her. Morality and law were on her side.

  There were times I began to feel disgusted by Lin Ping, just as I had always ended up feeling disgusted by other women in the past. Things looked fine on the surface, but I knew we were living in two different worlds. Two people sleeping in the same bed, but cherishing entirely different dreams.

  No matter how bad things got with Lin Ping, though, I couldn’t bring myself to walk out on her. To begin with, her feelings for me hadn’t changed so she was unlikely to agree to a divorce. But equally, if not more, important was the fact that she was very good to my mother.

  My mother didn’t want to live with us the way most parents of grown children did. She said she liked the freedom of living on her own. But nearly every weekend, Lin Ping dragged me to her house for a visit. To me this meant little more than the opportunity to indulge in excessive eating and sleeping for a couple of days. But Lin Ping would sit with my mother day and night, especially in the kitchen, where they would laugh and chat as if they had been mother and daughter by blood. It was moments like these that I understood and appreciated the joys of family life, even if I did little to directly participate. It was in moments like these that my marriage felt right.

  Apart from the weekend visits, I sometimes went to my mother’s house alone during the week just to escape the agonizing tedium of life with Lin Ping. One Thursday afternoon, I was sitting up in bed in my childhood room with a cup of tea. The warm afternoon sunshine filtered into the room as I pored over a thick stack of paperwork in my lap. I had just returned from a meeting at the Skysoar building that hadn’t gone especially well. I thought I had been weak during negotiations. Now, reading the documents, I paused periodically to mentally kick myself in the butt over my performance.

  The open bedroom door gave me an unobstructed view across the hallway straight into the dining room. I lifted my head from my paperwork and watched as my mother’s short gray bob hovered over a thick wooden brush. She had registered for a senior-citizen art class and had fallen in love with traditional Chinese painting. Spread out across the dining-room table was an array of ink plates, brushes, and wide scrolls of paper.

  “You and Lin Ping need to hurry up and have a baby!” she called out, apparently unaware that I was looking right at her. “What are you guys waiting for?”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to!” I hollered from the bedroom. “It’s that she’s not doing it!”

  “That’s not what she told me,” my mother replied, eyes still buried in her artwork. “She told me you’re not trying!”

  “Fine, believe her, then!” I returned to the data sheet in front of me. I didn’t feel like talking about it. Lin Ping and I only had sex a few times a month at that point—and only when she was ovulating at that—but she still hadn’t gotten pregnant.

  “Have you guys been fighting?” I looked up and found her standing at the bedroom door, staring at me with a concerned look on her face. “I notice you’ve been coming over here a lot lately.”

  “We’re fine,” I said curtly.

  “Okay, then!” she said, turning on her heel to return to her painting. A few minutes later she called out again. “By the way, did you hear Li Deshan’s second daughter got a divorce?”

  “I don’t even know who that is, Ma,” I said, getting up from bed, teacup in hand, and walking into the dining room. “But, hey, sounds good to me! You want me to get you a new daughter-in-law this weekend?”

  Ma looked up in stern disapproval, but when she saw I was joking, she smiled. “Very funny,” she said before growing serious again. “Listen, Little Dong. Lin Ping is good to you. She may not come from the best family, but she lets you get away with anything. I mean, when you were—you know, doing that—not only did she not cause a stink about it, she was actually really worried about you! That’s why she came to talk to me about it. If she hadn’t, you probably never would have come around!”

  My heart pounded in my chest. “It was never anything to begin with,” I said. “It was just the two of you making a big deal out of nothing.”

  “Well, we took care of it, didn’t we?” she said, looking up at me with a knowing smile. “That little hooligan won’t be bothering you again.”

  I nearly collapsed. Blood raced through my veins and my fingers clenched tightly around the cup in my hand.

  “You’re talking about the fax,” I said, trying to stay calm.

  “That was Lin Ping’s idea!” my mother said. “If I had my way, we would have gone and talked to that little hooligan face-to-face. I would have told him that if he ever spoke to you again, I was going to report him to the leadership where he worked.”

  I looked down at the cup in my hand and, with all my might, threw it against the wall. Pow! It exploded into pieces that fell to the floor. I grabbed my keys and stormed out the front door, ignoring the anguished sound of my mother’s cries behind me.

  Aimlessly, I drove through the city. It was already early evening when I arrived at One Two Three, where I had a few too many drinks before driving around aimlessly some more. Speeding through the desolate, almost rural outskirts of Beijing, I barely noticed the tall white birch trees as they bled into one another on the sides of the road. I looked at the sky and saw that the sun was setting. I changed the course of my direction and drove in the direction of the Northern Suburbs.

  I hadn’t been to Tivoli on a
single occasion since getting married. Even when I figured out Lan Yu no longer lived there, I didn’t have the guts to go inside. Besides, legally speaking, it wasn’t even my property anymore. But I needed to see it. I needed to see the place where Lan Yu and I had lived in such happiness for so long.

  The remote to the garage door was still in the glove compartment of my car. When Lan Yu and I had first moved into Tivoli, I designated the spot on the left for me, the one on the right for him. I pressed the button on the left and my side slowly rolled up and tucked itself inside the house. Then I pressed the button on the right. When I saw Lan Yu’s white Lexus parked in the garage, a rush of adrenaline surged through me. Was he home? I jumped out of the car and rushed toward the door.

  Entering the house, my nostrils were hit by a mild scent of mildew. It was the smell of a home lacking ventilation.

  “Lan Yu!” I called out to the unsettling silence. The living room was just as neat and tidy as the day I’d left it, but a thin film of dust covered every inch of surface. On the table next to the couch sat the pack of cigarettes I had been smoking the day we broke up. Stepping into the kitchen, I suddenly remembered the can of soda Lan Yu had been drinking for breakfast. But now the kitchen table was empty, and it came as no surprise that he had cleared it before heading out to do whatever he did that day. When we were together, I rarely did any housekeeping and he managed most of the household affairs. He liked things to be very neat and tidy; everything had a proper place. I used to tease him for being so painstakingly clean, but he just laughed it off and said that was how people in his line of work were.

  When I walked into the bedroom and saw the broad bed where we had made love so many times, my eyes filled with tears. I opened Lan Yu’s closet, which was piled high with clothes. He and I were both particular about the clothes we wore—Lin Ping had wanted to pick out my clothes for me but I never let her—but Lan Yu had an additional layer of meticulousness. If he really loved an article of clothing, he would wear it again and again, barely taking it off long enough to wash it. And if he didn’t like something, you couldn’t pay him to wear it, however fancy or high-end it might have been.

  I exited the bedroom and continued through the house, moving from room to room in an attempt to revisit each detail of the time when Lan Yu and I were together. His work studio, an ocean of books, papers, and blueprints, looked empty now. I looked at his cassette player—it doubled as a bookend—and recalled the time I came home one evening and heard those sad songs drifting softly into the living room. I left Lan Yu’s studio and made my way to the study. That, too, looked different somehow, though all the books were still in place. I rarely entered the study, but Lan Yu always spent a good amount of time there reading.

  Nostalgically, I recalled one evening when Lan Yu had to make a phone call to another student in his program. The weightiness of the conversation struck me as comical, so I quietly snuck up behind him and yanked down his trousers. Flustered, he reached down to pull them back up with one hand while holding the phone in the other, all the while talking to his classmate and throwing annoyed looks in my direction. I thought the whole thing was hilarious, so I tried pulling off the rest of his clothes while kissing his neck and groping at his cock. At first, he tried pushing me off of him, but soon realized it was futile and gave in. There he stood in silent surrender as I gave him a blow job while he and his classmate debated the principle features of postmodern architecture.

  After Lan Yu hung up the phone, he fell into a pretend fit of anger. Laughing and yelling, he threw me to the floor and covered me in kisses.

  Tears welled up in my eyes. I couldn’t go on with the memories.

  As I was about to leave the study, I noticed a set of keys on the desk. These were the keys to Lan Yu’s car. They were attached to a gold-plated key chain I had bought us on our trip to Hong Kong. For an additional thirty Hong Kong dollars, the jeweler had engraved two interlocking hearts with the letters L & H below them. I had long since lost mine, but Lan Yu not only kept his—he still used it. Until now.

  The top drawer of the desk was half-open, so I pulled it open all the way and looked inside. All the house papers were there—property rights, insurance forms—as well as another set of keys, a cell phone, and a pager. Nervously, I fumbled through the drawer, certain I was going to find something—a letter, a note, anything from Lan Yu. Even, I thought with terror, a last goodbye to the world. But I found nothing.

  I sat at the desk in despair, then went to the bedroom and lay on the bed. Muddled thoughts swirled in my exhausted mind:

  Don’t do this, Lan Yu . . . Please don’t make me spend the rest of my life with this guilty conscience . . . Maybe I’m not some kind of noble and virtuous gentleman, but neither am I so cruel that the last vestiges of humanity have been wiped away from me . . . Come back, Lan Yu . . . Come back to me.

  I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew I was awakened by the brash sound of the telephone. It was Liu Zheng.

  “Handong! Are you all right? Our Ma and Lin Ping have been looking everywhere for you! We’ve been going out of our minds with worry!”

  I looked up at the ceiling and a wretched groan escaped my lungs. “Just tell them I’m not dead. Not yet, anyway.” I closed my eyes and hung up the phone.

  The following day I went back to my mother and wife as if nothing had happened. Trying to explain to them what Lan Yu meant to me was not an option. Nor could I point the finger at them for what they had done. All I could do was pretend, just as I’d always pretended. I even went so far as to tell my mother I’d thrown the cup, not because of the fax, but because I had been angry with Lin Ping about something.

  I came down with a cold and fever in the weeks that followed. None of the medicine—first Chinese, then Western—that they heaped on me helped, and by the end of the month I was convinced that whatever it was, it was going to be terminal. Lin Ping nursed me with a kind of stoic patience, and we both took great pains to avoid any fights.

  One evening, my mother asked me if I knew a boy named Lan Yu and whether I owned a house in the Northern Suburbs. I told her she may as well stop questioning me because I probably wasn’t going to live much longer anyway. This stunned the poor old woman into silence.

  My cold persisted for two full months before finally going away. When it did, I started proceedings for a divorce.

  Twenty-Two

  “Lin Ping, let’s just end this. This marriage is leaving us with too much suffering. We need to get a divorce.” I was resolved to be as honest and straightforward as I possibly could.

  “Has it really come to this, Handong?” she asked, tears welling up in her eyes. “Did I do something wrong? Have I treated you badly?”

  “I just don’t think we’re happy together.”

  “But that’s not true!” Lin Ping cried in distress. “I know exactly what’s going on. You’re just sick of me! But Handong, we’ve only been married a little over a year!” She looked at me pleadingly.

  “Lin Ping, whatever you might think about it, we have to. We just have to.” My resolve was firm and it showed in my words.

  “You and I are adults, Handong. Getting married is not some kind of game. Don’t you think you’re being a little rash?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” I said flatly. “I just don’t think we can live together anymore.”

  Thus ended the conversation. I knew I hadn’t delivered the most eloquent case for a divorce, but I was just too tired for explanations.

  In the weeks that followed, Lin Ping did everything she could to save our marriage. First, she relieved the maid of her cooking duties and began cooking herself—elaborate, multicourse dinners with soft, romantic music playing in the background. Under the glow of candlelight, she would take my hand across the table and look deep into my eyes. “I love you,” she’d say as I sat on the other side of the table, feeling too weirdly uncomfortable to eat.

  She took me to a concert where she snuggl
ed up to me on the dance floor like she had done when we first met. The show she’d chosen was a cruel irony: a live performance of The Butterfly Lovers. A violin concerto penned in the 1950s, the story it told had much older folk roots. In the original legend, a fourth-century girl defies feudal morality by disguising herself as a boy and pursuing study. She falls in love with another student, a boy, but he remains ignorant of her love, and, besides, the pressures of family and society conspire to keep them apart. When the boy finally learns that his friend is really a girl, he declares his love for her, but circumstance continues to deny them happiness. In the end, the lovers die of heartache and are transformed into butterflies, able at last to join each other in eternal union.

  Holding Lin Ping in my arms as we danced, I remembered something Lan Yu had once told me. He said the true historical basis of the legend was a passionate love affair between two real boys, not between a girl and a boy as depicted in The Butterfly Lovers. It was only that the legend had been distorted over time to have a heterosexual storyline.

  “Ha!” I laughed at the time. “What a crock of shit!”

  Lan Yu looked at me with his big, sorrowful eyes. “I believe it,” he said.

  Listening to the mournful cadence of the melody, I pictured Lan Yu’s face as he told me this story, so sincere, so earnest. I thought about the butterfly lovers. The way they were forced to say goodbye to each other, the way their love was so powerful that they were able to defy death itself. My eyes filled with tears. Maybe I believed they were two boys, too. I raised a hand behind my wife’s back to dry my eyes.