Cries in the Drizzle (12 page)

But the morning I summoned up courage to call Su Yu over to the pond and was able to maintain this bold stance long enough to tell him everything, Su Yu showed not the slightest sign of alarm, instead saying earnestly, “What you're talking about is masturbation.”

His attitude astonished me. There was a smile of embarrassment on his face as he told me evenly, “I do it too.”

Tears seemed to spill from my eyes and I heard myself saying with vexation, “Why didn't you tell me that before?”

I will never forget that morning beside the pond with Su Yu. In the wake of his admission, daytime recovered its beauty. The grass and trees nearby gleamed in the sun and when some boys burst out laughing over some joke or other, Su Yu pointed at them and said, “At night they do it too.”

One evening not long afterward, at the tail end of winter, Su Yu and Zheng Liang and I were walking along a quiet street—the first time I was with Su Yu after dark. I remember I had both hands in my pockets, through habit ingrained by the winter cold, and it was only when I realized that my palms were breaking into a warm sweat that I asked Su Yu in surprise, “Is it spring already?”

I was fifteen that year, and to be going around with two friends considerably older than me was a memorable experience. Su Yu was on my right, his hand on my shoulder. Zheng Liang— my companion for the first time—was on his right. When Su Yu introduced me, Zheng Liang did not think any the worse of me for my shortness and even seemed pleased, saying to Su Yu, “Did you think I don't know who he is?”

Zheng Liang made a deep impression on me that evening. He had a way of swinging his arms as he walked, and in the moonlight his tall figure conveyed an air of complete self-assurance. It was on that occasion that the three of us quietly addressed the topic of masturbation. Su Yu, normally so laconic, was the one who started things off, and I was quite taken aback when he calmly broached the subject. It is only now, when I recall this scene after an interval of so many years, that I understand Su Yu's intentions. At the time I had yet to shake off all the baggage I had accumulated, and Su Yu brought the issue out in the open to help me put it in perspective. And it is true that only after this did I become truly relaxed about it. Now, as then, I feel there was something touching about the conspiratorial tone of the confidences we shared.

Zheng Liangs attitude was matter-of-fact. “If you can't sleep at night, it really does the trick,” he said.

Recalling how cruelly I had been punishing myself just a few days earlier, I shot him an admiring glance.

Although on that particular evening he put me entirely at ease, a casual remark of his somewhat later on created a new matter for concern. Zheng Liang, quite unaware that he was revealing his own ignorance, said to me, “That stuff is like water in a thermos—there's only so much of it in you. People who use it up quickly exhaust their supply by the time they're in their thirties,
whereas people who save it up still have some when they're eighty.”

This comment sent me into a tizzy. Given my overindulgence during the preceding weeks, I thought it very likely that my stocks had been drained dry, and I was worried sick at night when I contemplated my future. As fear gnawed away, my romantic yearnings failed to reignite those fantasies that once kept me in their thrall and instead I became increasingly resigned to a life of loneliness. One evening I imagined myself as a doddery old man plodding alone through the winter snow, and I felt heartsick over my wretched lot.

For many nights after this I continued my nocturnal activities—not to satisfy physical urges but to determine the status of my bodily functions. Successful experiments gained me only momentary reassurance, for panic followed hard on their heels. I was well aware of the risks I was taking with each effort at verification and that the very last drops of fluid had just been discharged. Then I would bitterly regret the proof I had just completed. But within days anxiety about the prospect of internal depletion would stir me to renewed testing. My physical growth took place against the backdrop of a wan complexion, and often I would stand next to the pond in Southgate, looking at my reflection. I saw my emaciated chin and lackluster eyes drifting helplessly in the water, and faint ripples made me see a face covered in wrinkles. Especially when the sky was overcast I could clearly make out the gloomy features of a man grown senile before his time.

It was not until I was twenty years old that I learned the truth of the matter. I was at the university in Beijing at the time and happened to make the acquaintance of a poet who then enjoyed a considerable reputation. He was the first celebrity I had
known and his offhand, distracted manner inspired me regularly to take a two-hour bus trip to reach the other side of town, just to enjoy a few minutes of conversation with him. After three such visits he was still vague about what my name was, but his friendliness and his scathing mockery of fellow poets more than compensated for this indignity. Though prone to holding forth at great length, he was also capable of listening attentively to my own scattered opinions while regularly correcting what he saw as erroneous views.

At the home of this forty-year-old bachelor I would encounter women of various stripes and hues, a reflection of the poet's catholic tastes. After our relationship developed, I once rather gingerly suggested that perhaps it was time for him to get married. This intrusion into his privacy did not seem to irritate him, for he answered casually, “What's the point of getting married?”

This put me on the spot. Out of concern for him as a man I much admired, I blundered on, “You don't want to use all that stuff up prematurely.”

This bashful remark left him incredulous. “How on earth could you think like that?” he asked.

So then I repeated what Zheng Liang had said that evening years earlier. His reaction to this account was a roar of laughter, and I still remember vividly the sight of him doubled up on the sofa, splitting his sides with mirth. Later he invited me for the first time to stay for dinner, a meal that took the form of two packets of instant noodles purchased from the convenience store downstairs.

The poet did get married when he was forty-five, to a woman in her thirties whose striking good looks were paired with a remarkably fierce temper. The poet, formerly such a free spirit,
now found himself the cat's-paw of fate. Like a child in the hands of a stepmother, when he left his apartment the only money he had in his pocket was his round-trip bus fare. Control of the purse strings was just one of her areas of expertise. He often came over to my place, bruises all over his face, seeking temporary refuge, the reason being simply that a certain female had called him up. A few days later he would insist that I accompany him back home as he prepared to make an official apology. I said to him, “Don't look so dejected. You've got nothing to be ashamed of. You didn't do anything wrong.”

But he smirked and said, “Better to confess my errors.”

I remember how his pretty wife, from her perch on the sofa, said to her husband as he came in the door, “Take the garbage out!”

Our poet lifted the bulging basket of trash, a beam of pleasure on his face. He was wrong to assume that performance of this chore would secure him a clean bill of health, for on his return she gave me my marching orders, and after the door had closed behind me, I heard her launch forth like a parent lecturing a child. As his wife, she was of course fully aware that the object of her reprimands was a gifted poet. So it was that I heard a tirade that left me quite dumbfounded, so wide was its lexical range, incorporating references to classical poetry and contemporary political jargon, pop lyrics, and goodness knew what else. At intervals in between I heard her husband's pious utterances: “That's well put” or “You've set me straight on that.”

As the wife's voice grew ever more passionate, she was no longer censuring her husband as much as she was carried away by a pure love of invective. I hated to imagine what it would be like to be under her thumb on a daily basis: even if one could endure the
black eyes and bloody noses, it would be hard to put up with her verbal incontinence.

Her most extreme measure was to decorate their apartment with her husband's letters of repentance, pledges to reform, and statements of self-criticism, as though they were some kind of design element that would impress her husband's friends when they visited. When she first stuck them up, his face was ashen, but with time he was able to pretend it was no big deal. “A dead pig's not afraid of being scalded with hot water” was his comment.

“Forget about the physical abuse,” he once told me. “She's making an emotional wreck out of me too.”

“Why did you marry her in the first place?” I asked.

“How was I to know she was a shrew?”

Along with other friends I urged him to get a divorce, but he ended up reporting our advice to his wife, holding nothing back. His betrayal resulted in an identical outcome for each of us, a threat-filled phone call from his wife. The curse placed on me was that I would die on the street on my twenty-fifth birthday.

In the spring ofthat year when I turned fifteen, I was dressing after a shower one lunchtime and discovered that my body had undergone a peculiar change. I noticed that some long hairs had appeared in my groin, which added a new layer of agitation to the inner turmoil generated by my nocturnal activities. Uninvited guests, these slender intruders had all of a sudden sprouted on my smooth skin. I stared at them stupefied, uncertain just how I should view their arrival, though I had the fearful sensation that my body had lost its carefree simplicity.

As I headed off for school through the sunlight, everything around me was just as it had always been—my body alone had changed. Something ugly was hiding in my underpants, making
me feel that my feet were unbearably heavy. Although I hated those hairs I had to keep their existence a secret, because I could not deny that they were a part of me.

Soon after, hairs started springing up on my legs, too. I noticed this in the summer, when I no longer wore long trousers, and when I walked to school in my shorts the hairs’ obvious and inescapable presence made me feel hideously exposed. All it took to make me squirm was for a girl to glance in their direction. Even if I had uprooted the most flagrant offenders by the following morning, I was always worried that Cao Li would already have seen them.

The tallest boy in my class had legs densely covered with dark hairs but walked around casually all the same, flaunting them to the whole world. I went through a phase when I often felt anxious on his account, and if I noticed girls’ eyes fixed on his legs my concern for him only accentuated my own sense of unease.

Shortly before the start of the summer vacation, I came back to school early after lunch, but was deterred from entering by the sound of girls talking and laughing loudly inside. (Even now, if it is all women or all strangers in a room, I find it an intimidating experience to go in on my own. With so many eyes resting on me all at once, I am nervous and flustered.) I meant to walk away immediately, but I heard Cao Li's voice and her laughter kept me rooted to the spot. Next thing, I heard the others ask her which boy she liked most, a question that startled me with its boldness. What surprised me even more was that Cao Li was not the least embarrassed. There was a clear note of relish in her voice when she told them to guess the answer.

So tense was I that my breathing became labored. The girls came out with a whole string of potential candidates, including Su
Hang and Lin Wen, but my name was conspicuously absent and I was mortified at having been overlooked. At the same time, Cao Li's total rejection of these possibilities gave me some fleeting hope. But soon a voice named the classmate with the hairy legs and Cao Li immediately responded in the affirmative. The girls greeted her admission with simultaneous peals of laughter, and amid the hilarity one voice chipped in, “I know what it is you like about him.”

“What's that?”

“The hair on his legs.”

For a long time I would puzzle in vain over the explanation Cao Li herself gave. She said that of all the boys in the school he looked the most grown-up.

I quietly edged away from the classroom door and Cao Li's wanton laughter pursued me all the way down the corridor. What I had just heard did not sadden me as much as shock me. In that moment, as never before, life had revealed to me a state of affairs that seemed utterly counterintuitive. The lanky schoolboy who couldn't care less about the hair on his legs would hand in essays littered with miswritten characters and there wasn't one teacher who didn't single him out for ridicule, but this very same student had gotten the thumbs-up from Cao Li. Precisely what I regarded as ugly was alluring to her. I walked all the way to the pond next to the school and stood there for a long time watching the sunlight and the foliage that floated on the water's surface, and my deep disappointment with Cao Li slowly evolved into self-pity. For the first time in my life a beautiful dream had been shattered.

A second disillusionment was brought home to me by Su Yu, and involved the secrets of the female body. By now I had a longstanding desire for the opposite sex, but I was still in the dark
about women's anatomy. I had specially earmarked my purest notions, using them to construct in a vacuum my image of Woman. This specter had appeared at night in the shape of Cao Li but never emerged as a genuinely sexual being, and in the evenings I would content myself with glimpsing female figures of matchless beauty who were dancing in the dark.

It all started with that hardback volume on Su Yu's father's shelves. Su Yu was quite familiar with his father's library, but it was through Su Hang that he became aware of this particular title. Ever since leaving Southgate the Su family had lived in one of the apartment blocks for hospital staff, with Su Yu and Su Hang on the first floor and their parents on the second; the one chore the brothers were assigned was to mop the floors each day. In the first few years Su Hang took responsibility for mopping downstairs, for he was unwilling to carry the mop up to the second floor, with all the extra work that would entail. But later on Su Hang abruptly told Su Yu that he would take charge of cleaning upstairs. He did not provide any explanation, for he was already accustomed to ordering his older brother about. Su Yu accepted Su Hang's suggestion without comment, this minor change striking him as of no consequence. After Su Hang took charge of the second floor, two or three classmates would drop in every day and help Su Hang with the mopping. So it was that Su Yu downstairs would often hear a flurry of furtive comments from upstairs, as well as a puzzling assortment of whistles and sighs. Su Yu burst in on them one time and thereby learned their secret.