Opening the bathroom door, she finds the hallway empty. A few doors down, outside the room where she is sleeping alone, a bottle of water stands on the floor. She picks it up and takes it into the room. The water tastes like spit, but she drinks as much as she can. On the bed, she tries closing her eyes again and finds that it is possible now.
Feeling a little bit better, at last she slides into sleep.
The room is darker when she awakens. She has to use the bathroom, but the thought of that toilet, the wet tile, the trash can—no. She shakes her head, and instantly her skull is filled with a bright, vibrating pain. It arranges itself into waves, and the waves move through her brain. And still her bladder is full.
Outside, swooping bats chatter in the night. A breeze from the window meets the side of her cheek. Outside. That is where she’d like to be.
She goes into the hall. At one end is a glass door that leads onto a veranda; ghostly white sheets have been hung there to dry. At the other end are the stairs going down to the first floor. She heads toward them and then descends like a ghost herself, slow and silent, uncertain of the ground.
A clock on the wall reads eleven fifteen. She finds the front door unlocked, which means that the others have gone out somewhere, to keep drinking or to play cards, to do whatever it is that men do when they are gathered in a small town in the mountains and their wives and girlfriends and children are not there.
Juanlan sets off down the street. It’s darker out than she’d expected, but the mist has its own kind of incandescence, the small amount of light from people’s houses dispersing among the water molecules in the air, and anyway it’s not so thick that she can’t see several meters in front of her. The turnoff is close by—she remembers that from earlier in the day. A baihuodian on the corner, with a red sign over the door. Turn left, and one block down is the river.
Immediately she can sense the open stretch ahead, though she can’t hear the river’s sound.
It’s even darker down this street, which has only a few shops, all of them closed. Just before she reaches the wall separating the end of the street from the river, she encounters a pile of iron rods on the gravel. She squats behind them and urinates on the ground. When she’s finished, she pulls up her pants and goes to the wall, lays her palms flat on the top, leans out and looks down.
All fog. The river is somewhere below; she remembers how high the water appeared earlier in the day, fewer than two meters from where her toes now touch the concrete. She closes her eyes, opens them again. Black versus gray, nothing else to be seen, but suddenly she is certain that the buildings she passed coming down this street only a moment ago are gone. Disappeared into the mist, they are no longer there. And the hotel, the post office, the two-story block buildings that have shops on the bottom floor and flats on the top—they are gone, too. The motorbikes and the white vans, the single small bus that makes the journey down to Heng’an once a day—none of them exists any longer. All that remains is the place with its elementals: the flat sedimentary lines turned up at sharp angles on the mountain slopes; the water in the air, the water in the river.
A hundred years ago, there would have been a small collection of houses and the office for the tea company. Not much more. Up the mountain, the house held a person from some far-off place, in the kitchen, crouching. Hand shaking as it carved a message in the post.
She pulls her head back from over the wall. It’s time to go back.
At the baihuodian with the red sign over the door, she hears voices approaching. Men’s voices. She doesn’t have time to decide whether she wants to be seen before she hears a shout—“Xiaojie!”—and then the forms condense out of the fog, and they are her brother, Director Wei, and Baozi, all walking in a jagged line, laughing. Zhuo Ge’s arm is around Director Wei’s shoulders. “Xiaojie!” one of them shouts again.
She stops and waits for them to stumble up. Seeing them, she is suddenly aware that her vision is no longer wavering; her head is clear enough, only aching.
“What in the world are you doing out here?” It’s Zhuo Ge’s voice, but somehow the question seems to come from Director Wei. The men are a three-headed figure, a creature that has stepped out of the mist and recognized her.
“I wanted to go see the river.”
“The river?”
“We found a river, too,” Baozi sings in a high-pitched voice. “A river of baijiu!”
The three-headed creature is beside Juanlan now, and the part that is her brother puts his free arm around her. Baozi splits off, and she takes his place in a line. With Zhuo Ge in the middle, anyone coming upon them would think that he was the drunkest one, and Juanlan and Director Wei were holding him up. But it is clear that Baozi is much drunker than any of them. He’s singing the national anthem, the words slurred by a heavy tongue. We millions have one heart! Arise, arise, arise!
They reach the hotel and file in through the door. Baozi is still singing, and Zhuo Ge good-naturedly tells him to shut his mouth. The hotel owner comes out, smiling and squeezing his hands, and asks if they all had a good evening. “I put fresh thermoses of water in your rooms,” he says.
Director Wei glances around idly. “I might have a cup of tea before bed,” he says. His eye catches Juanlan’s for a moment before moving on. “It’s good for settling the stomach.”
“You can do what you want in your room, old man,” Zhuo Ge says, “but I’m planning on getting some sleep, if this joker lets me.” He thrusts a thumb at Baozi, and they all climb the stairs.
Back in her room, Juanlan turns on the lamp and considers her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes are wide and bright, her hair frizzy from the mist. She sweeps it back in a ponytail with her fingers, holds it there at the top of her head. Du Xian always liked the way this looked, but he isn’t here now. She tilts her chin, purses her lips. The sight of her bare neck makes her proud, makes her want someone to see it, admire it, kiss it.
Two short knocks, so soft they can hardly be heard. Juanlan doesn’t breathe.
A lock clicks, and the door swings open. Director Wei tilts his head, an unreadable expression on his face. A half hour has passed. He’s still wearing Ru Dan’s clothes, but his feet are bare. He seems surprised to see her, and for a moment she worries that she has misunderstood, that he had no intention of inviting her here. But then he takes a step back, sweeps his arm inward.
Once inside the room, Juanlan isn’t sure what to do: where to sit, what to do with her hands.
“Have a seat, please,” he says, and gestures to the still-made bed. He pulls out the lone chair and sets it at an angle, indicating that he will sit there. They will not rush things. He turns to the table by the wall and begins to fix tea.
She perches on the edge of the mattress, but this is too awkward. Scooting back until her spine is against the wall, she puts her legs straight out in front of her. She tries to admire them, but they are shaped like a stalk of wosun, the calves and thighs all in a line. When Director Wei turns back, he nods slightly—something like approval in the gesture—but his face looks almost stern. “Be careful,” he says as he hands her the cup. “It’s hot.”
She remarks on the tea. It’s not what she has in her room.
No, he says. He brought his own from Heng’an. He nods at the little foil bag on the table and she sees that, yes, it’s the same kind she’s had in his home.
He sits back in his chair and gives her a wobbly smile, but that smile is enough to let her know that he is still somewhat drunk, too. The thought is reassuring. She extends her foot and nudges his knee with her toe. “Why did you ask me here?”
Director Wei stares at her foot as if he’s never seen anything like it before. It is a wonder, a mystery, the first foot ever discovered. “Because I’m not tired,” he replies without looking up.
“No”—she pulls back her foot, crosses one leg over the other—“why did you ask me here, to Tao Xu?”
Now he does look at her, and his voice is light. “Because I’d like to kn
ow you better.”
“Why?”
“Why,” he repeats. And then: “Why not?”
She frowns, and this seems to amuse him. He puts a hand on her ankle and strokes the top of her foot with one finger. The sensation makes her leg a live thing, separate from the rest of her; every nerve in her body quivering and turning toward his touch. The awareness of sex embeds itself between her thighs and she is reluctant to acknowledge it, but she feels it and yes, it’s what she has come here for. She tilts her head to the empty space beside her on the bed.
But Director Wei just smiles and continues stroking her foot.
Now they are no longer two people but a single accumulation of parts, and one by one, each part draws attention it never has before. His ear, for example, she is considering his ear. It lies close to his head and is lightly pink, perhaps from the alcohol he’s drunk. And there is his hair: still mostly black, only a few strands of white. He is not so old, after all. His status used to make him seem older to her, but that same status is what makes him attractive now. The leader of a danwei, he is accustomed to taking charge. His finger is working around to the inside of her ankle now, circling the bone and trailing up the inside of her calf. He has to lean forward to reach her knee, so he tucks her foot under his arm, and this is a relief for the skin that has been stroked for what feels like forever. But now all the nerves are waking up in her knee and the feeling is too much. She puts a hand on Director Wei’s to stop him. She should have worked it out ahead of time, decided what she would say, what she would ask for. This is the revelation that has been working itself out in her mind all day, while they were driving up through the mountains and while they were in the crumbling house, during dinner as she was tasting wild mushrooms and greens and tossing back burning baijiu, after dinner as she walked back through the streets with the others—all this time, she was working out an idea that has only now become clear: she can make demands. She is a woman and she is young, and Director Wei wants something from her. She should get something in return.
“What would you like?” Director Wei asks, and at first she thinks he’s read her mind. But he goes on, “I want to please you,” and reaches his other hand, the one that is free, up between her legs so he is touching her through her shorts and underwear. His touch is not as light as he perhaps intended; the action is awkward, like a dog shoving its nose up there.
“Wait,” Juanlan says.
He pulls back but maintains contact: his thumb resting lightly on the crotch of her shorts.
“I want to talk.”
“Oh,” he says. “That’s not what I was thinking.” He twitches one finger, brushing the fabric of her shorts. “That’s not what you were thinking, either.”
“No, I want to discuss this. We should know what we’re doing. I should know what I’m getting into.”
He sighs and sits back in his chair. “Negotiations.” He looks tired, and his eyes are red. His face is red, too: the alcohol is working itself through his system. Not a handsome man, but handsome doesn’t matter when it comes to attraction. Someone told her that recently. Lulu.
Juanlan moves her neck, not quite a shrug.
“All right,” Director Wei says, and now he is pressing down on his thighs with his palms, impatient to get through all this as soon as possible. “Tell me what you’d like to know.”
“What happens when we get back to Heng’an?”
“That depends on what happens tonight.”
She swallows her embarrassment. Wills it away. “We go to bed,” she says simply, using the usual euphemism.
A smile plays at the corners of his mouth. “We’ve already gone there.” He thumps the mattress. “See?”
“You’re still sitting in a chair.”
“Only because you won’t let me sit next to you.”
They are being coy with each other, flirting the way actors flirt in romantic films, but the script is not right, or else they haven’t learned it correctly. Instead of hot tension, there is a cool slackness. She shouldn’t have stopped him. The moment for talk is not before, but after, because there will be too much time then and they will need to fill it somehow. Tilting her head down, she purses her lips, makes a pout. “Come sit next to me,” she says. Even as she’s speaking, she twists her body so she can lie down against the wall. The ceiling sweeps up into her vision, and then she feels rather than sees Director Wei rise from his chair. She twists her neck to look at him. His back is to the bed; he is taking off his shirt.
When he turns around again, she laughs because his pants are tented comically over his erection. He frowns. It is an effort, she can see, for him to refrain from covering himself.
“I’m sorry,” she says, stifling the laugh, biting it back. “I’m nervous.”
“You’re not a virgin.”
It’s not a question, but she answers, anyway. “No.”
“That’s all right. It’s better, really. You have some experience.”
He’s still standing beside the bed, looking down at her, not moving to join her on the mattress. It’s punishment for her laughter. She has to make it up to him, reassure him that the laugh had nothing to do with him. “I’m not a virgin,” she says, and feels the blood rush to her cheeks, “but I don’t have much experience. I’ve only been with—the one.”
Director Wei nods, satisfied. “Well, you know enough to understand—” He stops, brushes a hand over his face, pushing his hair up at odd angles so that, for a moment, he resembles a much younger man. Then he sits down abruptly in the chair again. Reaching a hand toward her on the bed, he tells her to stand.
She rises before him, and his hands move to her waist. Then he is pulling her shirt up over her head, kissing her stomach, and she thinks, Yes, all right, this. A half hour earlier she stood before the mirror in her room wanting admiration, wanting a man’s eyes to fall on her and not be able to look away. So she lets her weight fall against him, waiting for him to pull her the rest of the way down onto his lap. Instead, he pushes her lightly away and tugs on the waistband of her shorts. He is pulling her down so she is on her knees before him. Then she understands.
She unbuttons his pants, pulls the zipper down. With Du Xian, it was always dark when they met in this way. They had to keep quiet, too, and so she often felt when they had sex that they were not who they normally were with each other. But with the lights turned on and Director Wei’s hand on the back of her head, she feels exactly the opposite: the thrill of recognition. The assurance that whatever goes on between them will come back to this.
Hazel
23
One spring day, a year after she and George began renting my land, Lydie called me up and asked if I was busy. She had something she wanted to discuss, she said, and she wanted to do it in person. It was afternoon, and I’d gotten home from work a half hour before. Now I was standing in the kitchen, staring at the calendar on the wall, a free gift from the Bank of Edwardsville that featured pictures of various buildings downtown—shop fronts, two or three churches, a historic house on St. Louis Street. The picture for March was of the high school, taken at a steep angle from down the hill. I was staring at it and thinking that my worlds were crossing over—a photograph of my workplace hanging right here in my kitchen—as Lydie repeated that she wanted to talk to me, alone.
She’d found out about George and me, I thought. I imagined her standing at her kitchen phone, just as I was; I could see the phone line stretched out between us, leaping from pole to pole.
I told her to come on over.
As soon as I hung up the phone, I began busying myself in the kitchen. I brewed a pot of coffee and got out two mugs and saucers, the sugar bowl, a little pitcher for milk. The sugar bowl was half empty, and I thought I’d fill it. But then there was a crust around the rim, so I dumped it all back into the bag and washed and dried the bowl before filling it again. I got two spoons and set them beside the mugs on their saucers, and I got out a fresh package of saltines and arranged them on a plate beside
some sliced cheddar cheese, and I poured some potato chips into a bowl, and I put some brownies on a glass platter. I stood looking at it, thinking that it wasn’t enough. But I knew, too, that whatever Lydie had to say to me would be better said over an empty table. So I removed everything but the brownies and the things for coffee. Then I heard the crunch of tires on gravel and knew she’d arrived.
The storm door was unlocked, and she pulled it open and came up the steps to the door that led into the kitchen. I saw her shape through the thin crepe curtain over the glass. She knocked once and came in.
Glancing around the kitchen, her eyes lit on the table. Her face was tired and drawn.
“How about some coffee?” I asked.
“Just a half cup. I had plenty at breakfast.” She gave me a distracted smile and sat. Right then I understood that although there was something heavy in the room with us, it wasn’t the thing I’d feared. It was unrelated to me; she had come as a friend, to see if I could unburden her of it.
There was a summersweet bush outside the north-facing window and the birds liked to land on it and peer in with curious, cocked heads before flying off again. A redbird was perched there now, and Lydie and I both watched it watching us. Its eyes were shining black, full of some kind of intelligence it wasn’t sharing.
“Have a brownie,” I said when the redbird flew off. I pushed the plate toward her.
She took one and set it on her saucer without tasting it. “Do you know what I did the other day?” she said suddenly. “I was downtown and bought myself a copy of Life magazine, and then I went into Bennie’s and ordered a piece of cherry pie. I sat at the counter reading this long article about Paris. It was all about how the city has come back from the war.”
I nodded, not sure where this was going.
“The article said that Paris is like it was back before,” she went on, “only better. They were describing a street, rue de la something or other, that leads right down to the Eiffel Tower, and there were pictures, one of them of an outdoor café. A lady in a dress, so pretty and elegant, you wouldn’t believe, she was sitting alone at a table with her ankles crossed. She had a glass of wine and you could tell by the light that it couldn’t be much later than one or two o’clock, bright light everywhere. Her handbag was sitting on the other chair at the table, and the tables were pushed close together, but they were all empty; she was the only one sitting there, and she was staring off somewhere.” Lydie was in a sort of reverie, speaking the way you do when you’re telling someone your dream. She’d get to the point eventually, I figured, and I was willing to be patient. “Go on,” I said.
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