by Susan Conley
“I’m not making you go,” he said. “You know I’m not making you.” He smiled at me, and his eyes grew wider. Sometimes his force of will was a thing of beauty and sometimes it was too much.
“If I don’t go, you’ll hold it against me. So it’s sort of like making me.” This wasn’t true, either. It killed Lukas to be ordinary, but he didn’t hold things against people.
He made a certain kind of popular electronic music, and this was the time when his career was changing quickly. He’d built a following that wasn’t exactly smiled on by the government, and he was getting more offers from vaguely illegal middlemen to perform.
“This place is for expats,” he said. “I’ve researched it.” Foreigners here still called themselves expats, as if it was Shanghai in 1937, before the start of the war.
My husband did a great deal of research. On Chinese tea and Chinese opera, on Wagner and the lesser-known composers he sampled in recordings. “I think you need to be gone from the apartment. From the girls and me. We’re loud and take up space.”
He had no basis to believe things would turn out well between us because things had turned out badly for his parents in Denmark, but I didn’t understand yet how determined this made him. He kissed me on the lips and looked at my face, and the light was still on so I could see his brown eyes, which looked watery—the way they got before he cried. He was regularly more nakedly emotional than me. I cried infrequently and mostly over the girls, and I think this thin barrier between Lukas and the rest of the world was one reason we were together. For example, when I’d gone into labor with Myla at the Beijing Hospital, her heartbeat became irregular and they had to cut me open to get to her. There was rushing in the operating room and loud voices, and the Chinese nurses clapped when Myla finally appeared, and Lukas said he loved me three times. I love you. I love you! I love you! Each one louder than the next. I felt it, too, a wave of emotion for him and for everyone in the room, really, but I didn’t know how to name it and was so grateful he’d said it for me.
So I understood in our bed that he wanted me to tell him things would be okay between us, but when you haven’t said what you feel for a long time, you’ll go to lengths to continue not to. I waited, and he turned off the light, and we lay on our backs under the sheet, and I could feel the distance between us and couldn’t close the gap, and this amazed me. It wasn’t like other distances that can sometimes preserve our marriage, and I didn’t know how I’d make my way back to him.
He turned and pressed his face into my neck and kissed me on the collarbone. “The village may be a place,” he said, “that will help with the drinking.”
He kept tucking a piece of my hair behind my ear while he talked. Tucking my hair and kissing my ear, and I could see he thought there were reasons for my drinking he could fix. Practical reasons, and I wished I believed him. Up until then he hadn’t mentioned the drinking. It’s pretty common that people in the throes of other people’s drinking don’t talk about the drinking. You think the drinking is going to get used, but no one dares take the pistol down off the wall and fire it.
He kissed my ear again and held me tight across my rib cage. “This place, Shashan,” he said, “will get you some rest. Then you’ll come back and be better.”
· 5 ·
In the morning Myla came into my bathroom to brush her teeth because she insisted on using our giant bathroom, which was made mostly of the white marble found everywhere in China. I’d pulled a turtleneck sweater over my head, and my hair was still tucked into the neck of the sweater. “You look like a different mommy,” she said. “You don’t look like my mommy at all.” Her face became very worried.
Then Elisabeth lost her first tooth and came running into the bathroom to show us. Lukas kissed her fist that held the tooth and put Elisabeth on his shoulders for a victory lap around the apartment. She held the tooth up in the air, and no one asked about me leaving for Shashan or seemed to have any memory of the Japanese restaurant the night before.
We got the girls set for school, and Lukas came to me by the front door in the hall and put his arms around my waist. I’d already told him that morning how afraid I was to go to the village, and he said he knew this and still thought it was a good idea that I do it. I think we both understood I should do something. But maybe not yoga, which I’d hardly ever tried, and maybe not a week in the mountains where I didn’t talk for whole days.
He walked the girls on the concrete path through the gardens to the school bus, and I took my canvas bag and went down to the parking garage under our building and saw my marriage reflected in our car window. An older Chinese man sat in a wooden booth by the garage exit ramp, keeping track of parking spaces, and I smiled at him, and the man waved in the most optimistic way. I didn’t call Lukas on my cell phone to tell him I’d seen our marriage in the driver’s window, even though he was probably back in the apartment and I should have called, but it felt too early. I hadn’t gotten to Shashan yet, and I thought I was already better. Lukas wouldn’t have taken me seriously if I said I’d seen our marriage then. I still to this day don’t think he would have believed me.
I got in the car and began driving. It’s sweltering here in the summer and bone cold in the winter, but in spring the sky can be blue and high like a circus tent, which it was the day I drove to the mountains. It has been my great luck to live here, and also my reprieve in some ways. I made it to the Fourth Ring Road with the one-speed bicycles and rickshaws and Audi sedans, and it may sound counterintuitive because things were as bad as they’d been in my marriage, but I’d seen my marriage in the window before I unlocked my car, and I thought this was all that mattered, that I’d seen it.
· 6 ·
I drove three hours into the low mountains that form a soft brown ring around the northeastern edge of the capital and parked in a grassy clearing and began climbing. Lukas hadn’t said it was crucial I go, but I felt it was crucial and that things in my marriage were at stake I couldn’t easily identify. After thirty minutes or so of walking I came to a concrete terrace where foreigners sat drinking tea at a round plywood table. I was so happy for having made it that I looked out over the mountain valley and imagined I could see China’s coast, which becomes round south of Shanghai like a well-fed hen. The pine trees were not unlike the pine trees in Maine where I grew up, and this comforted me, too. But then I got the lurching stomach I’ve had the two times I’ve ridden the rickety roller coaster in Beijing, and I thought, “My God what have you done to end up on this terrace and how can you get home?”
The word “terrace” is too fancy, because it was more of a scrabbly concrete yard that extended over the side of the mountain and the astounding view. An awning made from wide sheets of green plastic hung over the concrete and caused the air underneath to get really hot. It was May by then and the chestnut shells hadn’t turned green yet, but summer was coming up off the desert, and I loved the heat in China and walking with the girls outside our apartment building to buy the little candied hawthorns on sticks.
A retired middle-school teacher named Mr. Liu and his wife, Mrs. Liu, owned the terrace and the dilapidated stone house and the rooms where we slept. Mr. Liu’s dark hair had a bird crest in front, and he limped when he brought me to the table where the yoga teacher stood and said he was happy to see me. I didn’t know what to say back. His Western name was Justice, and he had hair down to his waist that smelled of oil the villagers pressed from the apricot trees. His skin was polished like walnuts, and he was truly a beautiful man. He was also owner of the Yoga Station in Beijing and lead singer of a metal thrash band called We Can’t Stop Kissing One Another that played at the Modernista in the Baochao Hutong on Saturday nights, and Lukas and I had seen him there years ago before the children, when we still went out to hear music. But I’d only met Justice when I took one desperate class at his studio to try and prepare for the week, so I didn’t really know him.
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sp; I sat at the table with my bag at my feet, and Justice passed me a plastic thermos of tea. Then I looked at the faces around me and was nervous because I was going to have to talk to these people. A French man named Andre sat closest to me and seemed to use a hair oil that made his hair wavy and wet at the same time, and when he kissed me on both sides of my face I know I blushed from his affection. I didn’t like to be with groups of strangers. Who does? I worried that all of them at the table—Justice, and Andre, and the older-looking New Zealand woman, and a younger Tahitian woman who said her name was Tamar—were probably what they called yogis. People who did a great deal of yoga. This was a terrifying thought, because I hadn’t done yoga for years, except the time in Justice’s studio the week before, which hadn’t gone well.
Mrs. Liu wore pancake makeup and a pink Mickey Mouse T-shirt and hummed while she cooked the pork in an open canteen on the right side of the terrace. When she finished a dish, Mr. Liu jogged it to the table. There was lo mein with pork, and bright green bok choy, and purple cabbage, and local mushrooms with celery slivers. Everything on the terrace—the wooden canteen, the warped plywood table and plastic chairs—had the feeling of imminent decay, but the Lius were so prone to laughter it was hard not to feel a little festive. I didn’t know if it was put-on laughter or real. If I looked up past the Lius’ house, I could see pieces of the Great Wall along the tops of the mountains, and this excited me so much, though I still can’t say why.
Down below, the valleys were different shades of greens, and I could see the groupings of stone rooftops. The mountains behind the houses were stacked on top of one another so the land looked ancient and mystical and otherworldly. I’d left my girls for this village. My sister Margaret had died when she was the age Myla was now, and her death became the dividing line for me, so that my life was in two parts. I can’t recall anyone who’s made me laugh the way Margaret did, and I couldn’t see it then, but I was guarding my girls too much in China. Keeping watch over them for signs of danger.
A Chinese woman appeared at the top of the path, which was surprising because locals don’t often go to the places where the expats go. Justice stood when he saw her and whispered in her ear, and I decided they were lovers, though this turned out not to be true. She wore drapey, expensive-looking silk, and the bones of her face were delicate and close to the surface. After she sat down at the table, we spun the platters on the glass lazy Susan like we do at the banquets in the capital, and I felt silly doing this on the mountainside and wanted to go home and didn’t feel festive anymore.
It seemed like everything I knew before in my life was over. My bed. The gray sectional couch. My husband and girls. The dirt road behind our high-rise. The village looked from another century, quiet and separate, and I didn’t belong and was too far away from my girls and unsteady. I wanted to call them so badly. I couldn’t corner what my marriage had become, and it was so surprising that my life had arrived at this point where I was out of reach, and I almost couldn’t bear it.
· 7 ·
A woman I knew from Beijing made it to the terrace wearing black spandex and carrying a Starbucks cup and seemed about to throw her cell phone over the side of the mountain. “Why won’t you work?” she yelled into the phone.
Tasmin lived near the top of the expat pecking order and was frenetically busy in the city. Both her long black hair and neck were thicker than you might expect from someone so thin. I was nervous on the mountain. I’ve said that already. And I didn’t do well with strangers, but until Tasmin got there I hadn’t realized how attached I was to the idea of not knowing anyone in Shashan. I was trying to become someone else. Or to lose the person I’d become. My heart wasn’t broken yet, but I thought I’d broken Lukas’s heart.
Tasmin wrapped her arms around my neck so she was partly strangling me and seemed to be in the act of taking something from me, but I was almost glad for her affection now that my girls were far away and couldn’t smother me in their kisses.
“You should have told me you were coming, Elsey.” The skin on her face was milk-white and her eyes almost opaque. “I could have had my driver pick you up.”
She and her British husband were the money behind the new penthouse apartments at the luxury mall near the embassy road, and Tasmin had bought several of my early paintings, which plagued me because I was indebted and often didn’t understand how to act around her. Her boys were the same age as Myla and Elisabeth, and they were very physical boys the last time we’d seen them at Tasmin’s garden party, where they’d wrestled in the grass with Elisabeth. But I don’t understand boys. I only know about girls.
Tasmin patted the bun on top of my head, and I smiled a pained smile at her but she didn’t see that it was pained. She didn’t see many things about me. I had a way of appeasing people back then, by appearing to think what they wanted me to think. I did this so they would leave me be. Did I also appease my husband? A marriage, then, based on small acts of omission? It’s frustrating to remember how I was, but I thought it was easier.
“We need to fatten you up. And Christ.” Tasmin touched the pile on top of my head again. “There’s so much hair up here it’s like a Russian novel.”
The terrace shifted under the gushing force of her will, and many things about myself felt inadequate. My long, unruly brown hair. The faded red tank top I used to run in at college. No one runs in Beijing. The sky outside is often low to the ground and soupy. People belong to gyms. An explosion of gyms. And I could tell if I wasn’t disciplined, Tasmin would keep me from doing the work I’d been sent to Shashan to do, which was, I suppose, to develop a method to make me more user-friendly to my family.
My left arm began to feel like someone was stabbing me with a steak knife, and I had a hard time paying attention to Tasmin, because I was focused on the radiating pain that centered around my left elbow. I hadn’t talked about this new pain with Lukas, because it had come out of nowhere, and I didn’t think it was connected to my previous illness. We’d been through enough, and I didn’t want to scare him more than I already had.
· 8 ·
Ulla came up the path next and sat at the table. She was taller than any other woman I knew in Beijing, and I was surprised she had time to be in the mountains. She’d been recently divorced and had no children and was on loan from the University of Stockholm’s biology department to help build a massive organic farming initiative in North Korea. She flew to Nampa months at a time to oversee implementation, and I knew soon she’d be seen striding across the mountain with her spikey hair after some rare bird.
I used to pretend to be more ambitious around Ulla than I really am, because I wanted her to respect me, and I wanted a friend to belong to in China other than my husband. But really I’m someone who likes to paint at night in my underwear and take small pulls of scotch.
The woman from New Zealand was named Tree, and she began arguing with Tasmin over the best foot massage parlor in Beijing. Tree wore a slab of turquoise on a thin chain around her neck and was older like me. Maybe forty. With a pretty, leathery face and wavy hair that were both partly deceiving. I’ve also had discussions about foot massage in China, so I wasn’t above them in any way. Foot massage is a serious thing here. I just felt wrong after I had these discussions, because there were more important things in China to argue about. A few years earlier I’d read the journal of a poet named May Sarton who lived on the Maine coast while I was growing up there. When May Sarton came home from dinner parties, she wrote down each thing she’d said at the party that made her feel badly about herself, and this stayed with me—how freely she must have talked at the dinners and how hard she was on herself when she got home—and I didn’t want to become like her, someone who seemed at times to hate herself.
Tree said China was in her blood, and she wanted more than anything to fall in love with a Chinese man. The papery skin around her eyes crinkled when she smiled. “Justice is a fine spe
cimen.”
We all stared more closely at her after that. Or at least I did, because she didn’t censor herself, which excited me. I don’t think we knew what to do with her honesty, because we’d been on the terrace only a short time and were still learning how we belonged there or didn’t.
“No, I don’t really mean that,” Tree said. “Don’t listen to me. I think out loud too much.”
“Drinks, please!” Tasmin snapped her fingers, which broke Tree’s spell, and everyone at the table laughed.
· 9 ·
“What is this thing called the Talking Circle?” Tasmin read the yoga brochure out loud, and people were sort of half listening to her while they finished their dinner, but this didn’t bother her the way it would have bothered me. I could have never commandeered the table like that.
Before anyone could answer, two boys and a girl made it to the terrace, the boys in black eyeglasses and hair mousse that caused their bangs to stick up, and the girl’s hair dyed white and shaved around her left ear and its piercings. They sat in the plastic seats, and the blonder boy took a fierce drag on his cigarette and asked Justice for the Wi-Fi password. Justice shook his head and told him there wasn’t Wi-Fi in Shashan and the girl shoved the boy with her shoulder.
“We’re in the mountains in China, for fuck’s sake,” she said. “No Wi-Fi.” She had a small metal bar through the cartilage of her nose, which moved up and down when she spoke, and the other, darker-haired boy in the blue hoodie smiled and rolled his eyes.
I knew about the Talking Circle. I’d studied the brochure for stretches of time on the couch in my living room, while my children were at school and I climbed out of a headache.