by Yiyun Li
“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Tang said. “You do all right in bed and she treats you well. Then why do you suspect her of anything? If I were you, I would be celebrating my good fortune to have found such a wife.”
“And why on earth your father?” Mrs. Cheng added. “Just because the baby looks like your father’s grandson?”
“Let’s not interfere with our own opinions,” Mrs. Guan said, trying to save Dao from further embarrassment. Mrs. Guan was finding some of her companions annoying today, their attitude unbusinesslike, but on second thought, these women had always been like this and she had enjoyed them well enough. Perhaps she was the one running out of patience. Mr. and Mrs. Guan were well maintained by their pensions from their civil servants’ jobs and an annual remittance from their son in America. Still, they were witnessing a historic economic boom in the country, and it hurt Mrs. Guan not to be part of it. She had previously sold cosmetics and tonics to neighbors and friends, and perhaps it was time to invent another business now.
“But we need to understand his situation,” Mrs. Cheng said. “I, for one, don’t see a problem unless the young man here is hiding something from us.”
It was how his father had changed, Dao said. A tyrant all his life, the older man had handed over his rule to his daughter-in-law ever since he had moved in with them. And how happy she was, Dao added. There was little reason for her, a widow who had given up her son to be remarried to a shy and quiet man, to be contented. They never behaved improperly in front of him, but he felt there was a secret from which he was excluded. “Like they built a house within my house, and they live in it,” Dao said, shamelessly weeping now. What sadness, Mrs. Mo thought, and wondered if Dao would ever be able to reclaim his life. It had taken her years, but it might be different for him. Men were less resilient than women, and in any case, some sons never escaped their fathers’ shadows.
“Aunties, I saw your program. You’re all experienced with men and women. Could you go meet them and find out for me?”
“But how?” Mrs. Cheng said. “It’s different from locating a mistress. Shall we move into your house and make a nest for ourselves underneath your father’s bed? Would you divorce your wife? Would you give up the baby to your father? Tell me, young man, what would you do if everything is true as you imagine?”
As if Dao had never thought about that possibility, he looked down at his hands in agony and did not reply.
“You want us to find out for you that they’re innocent so you can live in peace, no?” Mrs. Lu said. “Let me tell you, If you suspect a ghost is sitting next to your pillow, the ghost will always be there; if you imagine a god, a god will look after you from above.”
The vehemence of Mrs. Lu’s words shocked not only Dao but also the five women. Mrs. Lu bit the inside of her cheek and told herself to shut up. Peace came from within, she often said to herself, and she had taken up the detective work with her friends in the hope that by saving other people’s marriages she would finally dispel the phantom of a long-dead girl, but such hope had turned out to be in vain. She had done nothing wrong in reporting the girl, Mrs. Lu repeatedly reminded herself over the years—she had found the girl naked in bed with a male classmate and both had been expelled from the university by the end of the week. The girl sneaked into the dorm building a month later, when Mrs. Lu was busy with the mail, and jumped from the top floor. The thud, ten years later, still made Mrs. Lu shiver at night.
“Mrs. Lu here has a point,” Mrs. Fan said. “We could work for you but you have to make up your mind first. What we find out could make you more miserable than you are now, you see?”
Dao looked down at his hands, folding and unfolding them on the table. “I wouldn’t do anything,” he said finally. “There’s nothing for me to do. After all, he’s my father. All I want to know is if they’ve cheated on me.”
Such a spineless man, Mrs. Tang thought. Her husband would have picked up an ax and demanded the truth from the wife and the father instead of crying to some strangers. Her husband had always been the quickest to react, and how unfair that he, the most virile among his friends, was the first to be defeated by age.
The only truth for Dao to know, Mrs. Fan thought, was that he would be locked in his unhappiness forever, as she herself would be. It did not matter anymore if he was cuckolded, as it did not matter to her that her husband had been deserted by his second wife. For some people punishment came as a consequence of their mistakes; for others, punishment came before anything wrong had been done. Welcome to the land of the unfortunate and the deserted, Mrs. Fan thought, almost relishing the unfairness of her fate, and Dao’s.
Mrs. Guan looked at her friends. Already she could tell that they would not be able to take the case as a group, as they showed little of the sympathy toward Dao that they had shown to the wronged women. She would find an excuse to speak to him after this meeting, she decided, about the possibility of working on the case by herself. A similar plan took shape in Mrs. Cheng’s mind, too, though it was not money she was after but the satisfaction of her own curiosity—Dao’s description of his wife and father intrigued Mrs. Cheng: What kind of love had they fallen into that caused the father to scheme against his own son, and the wife to entertain her lover’s son out of necessity? Even at her age, Mrs. Cheng still worried that she would miss something interesting before she left this world.
Mrs. Mo observed her companions. She knew that it was her responsibility now to reject Dao gently, and despite her curiosity, she would not let his case break the friendship she had created for the lonely days she would otherwise have to pass by herself. Even as she was thinking up excuses to dismiss him, her mind wandered to the biweekly session of the dancing club that afternoon. She had discovered dancing late in her life, and had been addicted to it ever since, whirling in her partner’s arm, their bodies touching each other in the most innocently erotic way. It was not a simple task to maintain intimacy with another human being by the mere touch of bodies, and to accomplish it she needed total concentration to keep her soul beyond the reach of the large and small flames of all the passions in this treacherous world.
Number Three, Garden Road
THEY HAD MOVED into number three, Garden Road forty-five years earlier, he with his new wife, she with her parents and three younger siblings. Garden Road had been a narrow dirt lane then, a patch of radish field on one side, wheat on the other. Number three, a four-storied, redbrick building, was the first to be built along Garden Road. The first to be numbered also, though no reason was ever given about not starting from the very beginning. To this day Garden Road, a four-lane thoroughfare with many shops and buildings on both sides, was missing the first two numbers, a fact known to few people, and number three, its red facade darkened by dust and soot and cracked by a major earthquake twenty years ago, stood irrelevantly between two high-rise buildings with consecutive numbers, an old relative that no one could identify in a family picture.
Of all the residents in the building, Mr. Chang and Meilan were the only ones remembering the hot July day forty-five years earlier, when government-issue furniture—tables, chairs, desks, and beds, painted brownish yellow with numbers written underneath in red—had been unloaded from flatbeds and assigned to the new tenants. Mr. Chang was in his mid-twenties then, a young recruit for the newly established research institute to build the first missile for the country. As he was waiting for his share of furniture, a toddler from a neighbor’s family wobbled over and placed a sticky palm on his knee. Uncle Fatty, she called him, looking up with a smile innocent and mysterious at once. He was a stout young man but far from being fat; still, when the crowd laughed, out of their approval for the child’s wit, he knew that the nickname would stay.
Apart from Mr. Chang’s new wife, Meilan was perhaps the only other one who had noticed his embarrassment. Meilan was ten then, and it was the first time she had seen a man blushing. It was her youngest sister who had given Mr. Chang the nickname, so there was no other choice for Meilan b
ut to use the name, too. Calling someone “Uncle” who was not much older than her was enough of a torture; the name itself, Uncle Fatty, troubled her long after it had stopped bothering him.
Uncle Fatty and his wife lived in a unit directly above Meilan’s family. A natural musician, he played different string instruments: violin, erhu, pipa, and an exotic one Meilan had never seen. Music from that instrument, unlike the graceful serenades from the violin or the weeping folk songs from the erhu and the pipa, was loud with happy beats, but it was those songs that broke Meilan’s heart to pieces before she knew it.
FORTY-FIVE YEARS was a long time, enough to broaden the muddy, nameless creek next to Garden Road into a man-made river, named Moon River after an American love song and adding value to the already rocket-high price of properties on Garden Road. “Ten thousand yuan per square meter now. Last year it was only eight thousand,” Meilan said whenever there was a newcomer to the dancing party at the riverside park. Units at number three had been up for sale twelve years ago when private-owned housing had been made legal. Meilan’s parents had asked their children for help so that they would not lose their home, and Meilan was the only one to withdraw all her savings to assist in the purchase. Naturally her siblings thought it her duty then, as she had just moved back in with her parents after her second divorce. It turned out to be a wise investment, and for that her siblings wrote her off as an opportunist.
“Thirty thousand yuan in ’95. With that amount of money I could buy half a bathroom in this neighborhood nowadays,” Meilan said often, shaking her head in happy disbelief. Like many of the street-dancing parties in Beijing, the gathering by Moon River—the Twilight Club, it was called—was attended mostly by old people, and repetitions were tolerated as they would not be elsewhere with children and grandchildren. A lucky bird she was, one of those men who liked to nod at everything Meilan said in approval would compliment her every time she mentioned her real estate success. Lucky she was, she would reply, with no children to break her back, no husband to break her heart.
Meilan was the youngest and slimmest woman at the Twilight Club, indulged by men ten or twenty years her senior. “Little Goldfish,” they called her, even though she was past the age for such a girlish nickname. Indeed when she plunged into the music she felt like a playful fish, one of her regular partners holding her tight while his wife, no longer able to match his energy and enthusiasm, looked on among a group of women her age, not without alarm. Once in a while a wife would comment that Meilan did not belong at the Twilight Club. “Go to a nightclub, or a karaoke bar,” the wife would urge. “Show the young people what is called aging gracefully.”
Meilan smiled good-naturedly, but the next time she danced with a man whose wife had tried to offend her, she embraced him tightly and whispered so that he had to put his ear, already hard of hearing, close to her lips.
The only man Meilan had not danced with at the Twilight Club was Mr. Chang, though between the two of them they had missed no more than a handful of parties in the past twelve years. In fact, it was Mr. Chang who had introduced Meilan to the Twilight Club. She had recently returned to live with her parents then, middle-aged and twice divorced, without a child from either husband to soften people’s criticism. To kill the time after work and to escape her parents’ nagging, Meilan took to strolling along Moon River, and on one of those first evenings since her return, she discovered Mr. Chang, sitting on a bench with a woman. He did not recognize Meilan when her gaze caught his eyes, and the woman, in her red blouse and golden skirt, was not the beautiful wife who had, many years ago, made Meilan conscious of her own, less attractive features.
Uncle Fatty, Meilan’s parents reported when she queried about him, had stayed in number three. His wife had been ill with some sort of cancer for the last year or so. Is she still alive? Meilan asked with great interest, and her parents, shocked by her inappropriate curiosity, replied that they were too old to discuss other people’s health problems with the unfeeling young generation.
Now that she knew he had a wife somewhere—dying in a hospital, or at the mercy of a brusque caretaker in their unit—Meilan started to follow Mr. Chang in the evenings. He left home at half past six and went to the nearest bus stop to meet his lady friend. They strolled along Moon River, now and then resting on an available bench and talking in low voices. Twice a week they went to the Twilight Club and danced all night till the last song, “Long Live Friendship,” with archaic Chinese lyrics set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” The first time Meilan watched a hundred old people slow-dance to the song, she was overwhelmed by a bleakness that she had never known existed. In her adulthood Meilan was considered by many as a woman without much depth; “brainless,” she had been called behind her back by her siblings, the kind of wife made for a cheating husband.
Meilan was caught off guard by her tears, and she had to hide behind a bush when the partygoers bid farewell to one another. Later, when she followed Mr. Chang and his lady friend to the bus stop, Meilan was pleased that “Auld Lang Syne” had not moved him to hail a cab for the woman he was perhaps thinking of replacing his wife with.
The woman soon was replaced by a younger, prettier-looking woman, who did not last long. A couple of women later, his wife died, but the news was a few weeks old when it reached Meilan. She did not remember having detected any sadness in Mr. Chang; at least there had not been any change in his evening routine. By then she had created a few opportunities to encounter him in the building, but he only nodded at her in the same unrecognizing manner as if she were one of those less fortunate who had to rent in number three. She studied herself in the mirror. Even if his deteriorated eyesight and memory prevented him from recognizing her from her girlhood, she did not see why she could not compete with the women he was dancing with twice a week. Perhaps she needed a different setting to meet him instead of their dusty, stale-smelling hallway. Meilan spent half a month’s pay to take a dancing class, and after that she showed up at the Twilight Club like a princess. The hem of her long skirt brushed the sandaled feet of her partners in the summer, and in winter the men competed to hold her hands nestled in a pair of white suede gloves. Little Goldfish, soon the men renamed her; there was no excuse for Mr. Chang not to see her and perhaps desire her in ways she did not care to imagine.
The Twilight Club had become a center of Meilan’s life since she was forced into early retirement at the age of fifty. She accepted small harmless presents and dinner invitations from men with wives, but once a widower made a move to differentiate himself from her other admirers, she discouraged him with subtle yet resolute gestures. In time, death came for some of the old men, but one had only to avert her eyes to forget such inconvenient disruptions. With a flat, a small pension, and many admirers, Meilan had little more to ask from life. If there was one imperfection, it would be Mr. Chang—what right did he have to ignore her for twelve years, all while he was busy dancing with those not-so-young women who had to take buses to the Twilight Club?
MR. CHANG CIRCLED the flat: the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom their twin boys used to share. He slept in one of the single beds now. The other bedroom, where he had spent the thirty-three years of his married life with his wife, was entered every spring and autumn when he brought her clothes to the balcony for airing. Once upon a time the lingering scent of sunshine on the clothes, mixed with that of camphor, had filled the flat with the peculiar presence of another warm body and left Mr. Chang drowsy for days afterward; now that number three was dwarfed on both sides by high-rises and Garden Road was often congested with long queues of honking cars, the clothes came home with a cold strangeness to the touch. The liveliness that took longer to leave the clothes than for a body to be cremated, a slower death for which Mr. Chang had not been prepared, made him wonder how much he had not known about the life that he had once thought of coming to completion at the deathbed of his wife.
Mr. Chang poured tea for himself. Each time he finished a round in the flat he swallowed a
nother pill with half a cup of tea. At least an hour of his morning would be covered by the handful of pills. Another two hours by the three morning newspapers he subscribed to. Cooking, an hour, and eating, with the new, ill-fitted denture, another half hour. The afternoons were less intimidating, for he allowed himself to nap as long as he could. The evening papers arrived before four o’clock, and by half past six, with some leftovers from lunch in his stomach and clean clothes on, he was ready to meet his friend at the bus stop.
They were always his friends—not girlfriends, as many of them might have mistakenly thought—coming into his life and then leaving, one at a time. Some of them were easier to break up with than others; one of them, about five years ago, had gone to the extreme of threatening to kill herself for him, but he had known, as she had too, the flimsiness of the threat. Passion of that sort could be taken seriously only when one was in his twenties, a novice of love and of life in general. And not to his surprise, even the most persistent of the women eventually left him alone. After all, there had been no intimate touches to be accounted for; he had only strolled along Moon River and danced at the Twilight Club with them. It was they who had nurtured their own hope, even if they could blame him for misleading them in the first place.