“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” he said, pulling me out of my reverie. I turned to look at him and noted with surprise that I could finally see him clearly. His big, round eyes settled on my face, and he looked at me earnestly, as if trying to convince me that what he had just said was true. Clumsily, I reached out an arm to wrap it around him and pull him closer. He laughed nervously and threw a glance at the rearview mirror, where we could see the taxi driver looking back at us with a wide-open stare.
“Who cares about him?” I whispered drunkenly into Lan Yu’s ear. “None of his fuckin’ business!” I pulled him closer, then collapsed onto his shoulder.
Don’t overthink it, I told myself just before passing out. He came looking for you. He still wants you, and that’s what counts.
Back in his apartment, Lan Yu made some hot tea to wake me up and shake me out of my languor. The shoddy little heater in his bedroom was hardly enough to keep us warm, so we shivered under the blankets. When I had more or less sobered up, I pulled him into my arms, hoping to trap our collective body heat between us.
“What the hell kind of way to live is this?” I complained. “Here it is, practically November, and they still haven’t turned the heat on?”
“They don’t turn it on till the fifteenth.”
“That’s bullshit,” I replied grumpily. My temples throbbed in anticipation of the hangover that was coming.
“Aw . . .,” Lan Yu goaded me playfully. “Is the young master troubled by a draft?”
I laughed. No doubt about it: he had definitely become more skilled in the art of playful banter in the two years we’d been apart.
“Hey, you know I can’t take the cold like you,” I said, pressing my cheek against his lips in search of a kiss. “I still remember when you used to wear that thin white jacket in the wintertime. You must have been out of your mind!” I was recalling the day we had stood outside Country Brothers as light, fluffy snowflakes fell around us like feathers and I put my scarf around his neck. It was only the third time we had gotten together. A lifetime ago.
“What? When did I ever do that?” Lan Yu protested, as he pulled my arms tighter across his chest. “Oh, right! I remember that jacket. I used to wear it every time I saw you. It was the nicest thing I owned at the time.” He laughed. “I used to go crazy before seeing you. I was like a girl meeting her suitor for the first time before the arranged marriage. Then you had that ex of yours bring me that other jacket from Hong Kong! I still can’t believe you did that.”
“So, what about now?” I asked. “Do you still feel like you’re seeing your suitor for the first time?” I looked at his profile, wondering whether he still wore the bluish-gray jacket I’d asked Min to buy for him.
He stopped laughing. “No,” he said. “I don’t. It’s not like that anymore.”
“What’s it like, then?”
Lan Yu stared ahead in silence, eyes fixed on the other side of the room. Then he turned to me with a teasing smile.
“Just messing around, right?” He freed himself from my gripping embrace and climbed on top of me. “Hey, Comrade Chen,” he continued. “How about a little physical education? I want to see you work up a sweat!”
When Lan Yu and I kissed, nothing else mattered. The world disappeared and there was nothing but the mingling of our bodies. Right and wrong, truth and falsehood, the present moment and time without end—all these categories became meaningless. I needed him, needed his beautiful body. I could sculpt him like clay. I could bite him, even violate him. There was only us. He was mine.
But when we weren’t together—that was when things became more complicated.
After making love we lay in bed quietly, just holding each another and basking in the postcoital glow. His breathing became steady, and before long he was fast asleep.
When we awoke the following morning, I asked him what he had on his agenda that day.
“Oh man,” he said. “I have a ton of stuff to do today.” And that was it.
I didn’t ask for details. I was as busy as he was, and besides, I knew independence—cruel, secretive independence—was the basis of our relationship now.
I left Lan Yu’s apartment and went back to my room at Country Brothers. That’s where I was sleeping most nights at that point.
Lan Yu wasn’t the only one with a lot to do that day. I needed to get started on the crisis management I would need to weather the storm I knew was coming in the wake of Yang Youfu’s arrest. And yet, instead of doing this, I spent the day on the couch, watching TV and wondering where my life was going.
Twenty-Seven
Liu Zheng ended up staying at the company. I was glad, but not especially surprised. Monumental as our fight had been, quitting wasn’t something Liu Zheng would do lightly. Nor was I about to fire him, because I didn’t want to lose him as a friend. As for the argument itself, he only had one thing to say when he walked into the office a few days later: “Too much honesty is a form of stupidity.”
Although I had patched things up with Liu Zheng, I was failing miserably at extricating myself from my relationship with Lan Yu. Each time he called, a rejection would form in the back of my mouth, but it always vanished before materializing on my lips. Then I would go see him.
One afternoon, I was on my cell phone at the little blue table in Lan Yu’s living room. I needed to jot down a number, so Lan Yu told me to go to the bedroom and dig around in the desk for a pen. Fumbling through the top drawer, I came across a stack of photographs: It was the same guy I had seen squeezing Lan Yu’s hand outside the building a few weeks earlier. He was more pretty than handsome, and his wire-rimmed glasses gave him a scholarly air. There was only one picture of the two of them together: two happy and handsome young men, sitting outdoors on two big rocks next to each other, broad smiles on their faces. I had come to hate the flippant, emotionally distant smirk Lan Yu always seemed to have on his face lately, but in all the years I’d known him this was the first time his true smile made me uneasy. More than uneasy. It was like my heart was being gutted with a knife.
One evening when we were at Gala, there was a knock at the front door. A utility worker had come to read the electricity meter and collect a payment. He and Lan Yu began to do bill calculations, so I stepped onto the balcony and lit a cigarette. The building facing us was barely a stone’s throw away—so close that on the summer day when I had visited Lan Yu for the first time, I could hear the thumping sound of children racing around and shouting inside the other homes. But now it was silent. Just faint lights turning on and off and the mundane activities of tenants who’d forgotten to close their window curtains.
I was so absorbed in observing other people’s lives that I didn’t hear Lan Yu open the door and step out after the worker had left. He grabbed me from behind and I jumped, startled by his interruption of my trancelike musings. I struggled to turn around and face him so I could give him a playful slap on the cheek, but he held me tight, hooking his chin over my shoulder and pinning me to the spot. I felt his hot breath against the nape of my neck, then against my ear. Rapid, excited. Nearly all the curtains in the building opposite were shut by this time, but I still had a vague worry that someone would see us.
“You . . . here . . . just like this . . . it’s so . . .,” he whispered, kissing the patch of skin he had exposed by pulling down the back of my shirt collar. “So damn . . .” His tongue darted around at the back of my ear.
“So damn what?” I asked with a laugh, throwing off his arms and turning to face him. Our lips touched, but before it could turn into a kiss he pulled away from me, apparently remembering he hadn’t finished his sentence.
“So damn sexy,” he said, stressing the final word in English. He smiled sheepishly. Perhaps he was afraid I would think he was showing off.
“Quit making fun of me!” I laughed. “You know my English is shit.” I combed my fingers through his hair and looked at him intently. I had something important to say.
“Lan Yu,” I starte
d. “I want things to be like they were before. I’m not seeing anyone else. I don’t want to see anyone else. I just want it to be you and me.” I was determined to give this thing the final push it needed to work.
“Give me a chance, Lan Yu,” I persisted. “Give us a chance. My feelings for you are stronger than ever before. I’m serious,” I said, and I meant it.
“Serious?” he scoffed, incredulous. “Since when is anything serious to you?” The excitement that had been in his eyes just moments earlier was gone, replaced by a cold and hostile indifference. Averting his eyes, he grabbed me by the hand and led me back inside. That was his way of ending the conversation.
“But I am serious!” I insisted, trailing behind him back into the apartment. “I’m not interested in women anymore, Lan Yu. I’m never going back to that life.”
“You say that now,” he said, “but things could change in the future. Besides, you don’t live in a vacuum, remember? You have your mother to think of, your career . . .”
Your mother? I thought sadly. He no longer said “our Ma.”
We entered the bedroom and Lan Yu jumped between the sheets. I stood at the foot of the bed with crossed arms, gazing down at him with an intentionally pouty look on my face.
“What?” he asked, scrunching his face up into a scowl and lifting his fists as if challenging me to a fight. Fine then! I thought. If he wanted to drop the subject and keep things simple and easy, I’d let him. For now, anyway.
“Don’t be scared,” I said, as I slowly walked around the bed like a tiger sizing up its prey. “I’m just going to give you a little kiss. Just a little hug and a kiss!” I jumped onto the bed and we both laughed. There was tension between us, but we were doing what we could to avoid an argument.
“Listen, Handong,” Lan Yu said with sudden concentration. “Even if you are being real, I have someone now. He’s good to me. We’re happy together.” He paused for a moment, then tugged at a button on my shirt as if he were thinking. “It’s bad enough that I’m here with you. I don’t want to do anything else to hurt him.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here was Lan Yu lying in my arms, telling me about his devotion to another man—a man who had probably been in this very bed with him a dozen, two dozen, a hundred times. I hated it! I hated it with every fiber of my being. But it was no longer my place to question Lan Yu. Or his relationships with others.
“Is he the only guy you’ve been with these last two years?”
“God no,” he replied. “There’s been a bunch. Most were just a quick fuck, then see ya later! Pricks.” He laughed.
“How did you meet him? I mean, your boyfriend.”
“When you and I broke up, I started going back to Huada more often, even though I’d already graduated. I don’t know why—I was probably lonely and missed the place. Anyway, one day I was sitting alone in this little gazebo they have—the Island, they call it. He came in and sat on the bench opposite me. I could tell he was watching me—he just stared at me for the longest time. Then he sat down next to me, gave me a cigarette, and told me I looked brokenhearted.”
“Was he also a Huada graduate?”
“No, he had gone to a different school. But we had a lot in common. He gave me a lot of—” Lan Yu broke off his own sentence and looked up at the ceiling.
“You know,” he continued, “when you and I were together, no matter how bad things got or how scary things were, as soon as I thought of you, I wasn’t afraid anymore. It was only after we broke up that I realized that for people like us—I mean, it’s just so fucking hard, you know?” He moved his eyes away from the ceiling and looked at me.
“At the time, I hated you for getting married. But I understand now. You’ve got a pretty good deal, Handong. You can be with men or women.”
“You can get married too if you wanted!”
“No,” he said firmly. “I can’t.”
I took Lan Yu’s hand in mine. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about my marriage, and I certainly didn’t want to talk about how great his boyfriend was. All I wanted was him. In that moment. The beautiful young man I was with.
So fuck it! I thought. If I can’t have all of him, let me at least have this moment. I kissed him roughly on the lips. “Let’s fuck,” I said with a devilish grin. He smiled.
I got on top of him, then reached over to the desk next to the bed and grabbed my tie. Lan Yu gave me a puzzled look, but smiled when I lifted his arms and tied them to the steel bed frame. It was something I’d seen in a porn video.
Being tied up excited him. His lips parted in tortured expectation and he looked up at me in silent submission. There it was—that unconditional surrender I hadn’t seen for so long. Instant hard-on.
“You’d better behave, little boy, or I’m going to have to discipline you,” I said, trying to sound butch and authoritative.
I stripped the pillowcase off the pillow, then folded it in half and covered his eyes. With its floral design, it wasn’t exactly the black leather blindfold I’d seen in the video, but it would do. After Lan Yu’s eyes were covered, I kissed him roughly, then bit him from head to toe like a beast devouring its kill, leaving faint bite marks where my teeth had been. And finally, I dove into his cock like it was my last meal. I sucked greedily, hungrily. It was pleasure, but a strange kind of pleasure, a pleasure tainted by the sadness of knowing he wasn’t really mine and never would be. For a moment I thought I was going to cry right there with his thick, pulsing dick lodged in the back of my throat.
I crawled back up to him and kissed him again, wondering if he could taste himself on my lips. I pulled the pillowcase away from his eyes and he looked at me with rapturous excitement. Soon enough, however, he saw there were in tears in my eyes. He looked surprised, but the next thing I knew there were tears in his, too.
“Turn around!” I barked like a military officer. I wasn’t going to let a few tears get in the way of the hot scene we had going. I untied his wrists and turned him onto his side as he looked back at me with a wild expression: burning, desperate. His hands were free now, but he kept groping at the tie and bed frame, unwilling to be released from the bondage in which I’d placed him. I lay on my side next to him and slowly pushed inside, but things weren’t going as planned because the only sensation I felt was a deep grief forming at the pit of my stomach. It was the agony of not being able to possess him entirely. When it was more than I could bear, I pulled out, turning Lan Yu to face me as I broke into uncontrollable sobs.
“Lan Yu, I can’t take this anymore!” I heaved, tears streaming down my cheeks. I pulled him into my arms. “Marry me, Lan Yu! Why can’t we . . . why? If I can marry a woman, why can’t I marry you? I’ll do anything . . . just tell me what you want me to do!” Frantically, I held him against my chest, then pulled away again to look him in the eye. “Men, women, I don’t care anymore! I love you, Lan Yu! It’s you that I love! I don’t care if they say I’m sick, I don’t care if people call me a hooligan. I love you!”
He trembled in my arms. I held him so close, so tight, his voice was barely audible.
“I don’t want anything else,” he said, choking with sobs. “I’ve never wanted anything else. I just want to be with you.”
Forty-five minutes later, Lan Yu and I stepped out the front door of his apartment building and into the street, looking like nothing more than two ordinary friends. Even less than friends, I thought bitterly. Everything that had just transpired in his bedroom—none of it mattered now. We had nothing. No recognition from the outside world. None of the pressures keeping couples together, but all the ones keeping them apart. Walking down the street together, it was as if nothing had happened.
Twenty-Eight
When spring came the following year, I had a strange premonition that something bad was coming. Time revealed it wasn’t my imagination. Everywhere I turned, spring flowers were blooming. But not for me.
The crisis began to take shape when my mother asked m
e to come home for one of her late-night talks, which were becoming more and more frequent. She wanted me to marry again, and without delay. With somber earnestness she told me about her life and my father’s life, about their marriage, and about the hardship of life in general. Throughout her story, she paused periodically to stress the dangers of life without a woman.
“Handong,” she said. “You can’t go on with this lifestyle! It’s reckless. You need to start taking responsibility for your life.”
On and on she went while I stared at the floor in grumpy silence, cynically asking myself how a woman with a Republican Era high school education had suddenly become a philosopher. What she didn’t openly state, of course, was her fear that I’d returned to my old “hobby,” a hobby we both knew had not, in fact, been replaced by horse racing.
Before long, I learned that the censure wasn’t coming from my mother alone. One weekend in March, I took the family to Beijing World Park to go for a stroll and enjoy the replicas of the Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, and other world marvels. My youngest sister, Jingdong, was married by then and had just become a mom like our other sister, so we were a big group. She spent most of the day keeping an eye on the baby, but I noticed her periodically looking at me in disgust. Later that night when I mentioned it to my mother, she said that Lin Ping had told Jingdong everything. It broke my heart to hear this. No longer was I the perfect big brother.
If my relationship with my family was in crisis, my professional life wasn’t doing much better. The list of individuals tied to Yang Youfu’s case grew in the wake of his arrest, culminating with the police striding into the office of an associate of mine, a bank director, and placing him under arrest. This bank director had been a miracle worker for me, a personal God of Wealth who’d given me major financial backing on more than one occasion. The threat of being dragged into the case was becoming real, so I decided to lie low for a while. I wanted to wait and see how things were going to unfold.
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