Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (20 page)

IN LATE APRIL
the regulars at the Twilight Club decided to change the party schedule and meet four times a week instead of two. Spring in Beijing was as brief as a young girl’s grief over a bad haircut and they might as well not waste the good days before the sauna weather set in, though no doubt by then they would have more reasons to keep the schedule despite the heat. Amid the excitement, the absence of Mr. Chang went unnoticed except by Meilan, and when he didn’t show up for the next two parties, she decided that it was her responsibility as a neighbor to check on him.

A little before five she knocked on his door. It was a decent time for a single woman to drop in at a widower’s, with dinner as an available excuse if the meeting was unpleasant. She had put on her favorite silk blouse of sapphire blue and a matching skirt, secretly hoping that, if she were not to find Mr. Chang with a grave illness, they would perhaps show up at the Twilight Club together that night.

Mr. Chang looked alarmed when he opened the door, his round-necked undershirt and threadbare pants reminding her of her own father in his old age. “Little Goldfish?” he said. Though the question was inappropriate for a greeting she was glad that he recognized her. She told him her name, and he showed little recollection. “I’m the first daughter of the Lus, downstairs,” Meilan said. “Remember, Uncle Fatty? My little sister gave you the name.”

He had to excuse himself to change into more formal clothes so that he could calm himself. His wife had always called him by that name; “Aunt Fatty,” he would reply, with forced cheerfulness till the very end of her life, when her body was wasted by the cancer. One would hope for certain things to be buried, but no, a woman he did not want to dance with had come and knocked on his door, claiming her partial ownership of a name she had no right to use. Mr. Chang’s hands shook as he buttoned his shirt. If he lay down on the single bed, would the woman take the cue from the closed bedroom door and leave him alone? But she would knock and break into the bedroom, she would call an ambulance if he insisted on ignoring her questions, and no doubt she would, later at the Twilight Club, brag about how she had saved his life by being a considerate neighbor.

Windows in his unit opened to the same view as hers did, and Meilan was surprised that she had overlooked this fact despite the time she had spent imagining his life. The last time she had visited the unit she had been twelve, and in the living room there had been a few articles of furniture identical to theirs. She wondered now if he had sold the ugly-colored furniture with red painted numbers underneath. Her own parents had saved every piece, but after their deaths she had hired two laborers to dispose of the furniture as they wished. She regretted now that she hadn’t saved a few pieces; had there ever been an opportunity for him to pay her back a visit, the furniture might provide a topic of shared memories.

Mr. Chang entered the living room, and Meilan did not turn from where she stood in front of the window. “Remember the pigpens?” she said, lifting her chin at a man washing his brand-new Lexus in the narrow lane between number three and the next building. The pigpens had been there in 1977 when she had come home to her parents with the news of her first divorce. The man at his Lexus worked on diligently, unaware that he was being watched just as full pens of pigs had once been watched from the windows of number three.

Mr. Chang sat down on the couch before the guest did. An ill-mannered host, she must be thinking of him, but he had not invited her, and he would let her draw any conclusion she wanted to. Of the women at the Twilight Club he had avoided her more than others. A rabbit should not be chewing on the grass around his nest, Mr. Chang had told a few old men when they had hinted that, as neighbors, he and Little Goldfish could develop some convenient romance. They laughed at his cunning reply, but they, unwise old souls who could be deceived by a flirtatious gesture from a no longer young woman, could not see that certain women, Little Goldfish being one of them, were to be shunned for their shrewdness.

“We used to name the pigs after people in number three,” Meilan said, and turned around with a smile. “Of course you were one of the grown-ups then, so you wouldn’t know our tricks.”

“I didn’t know you moved back,” Mr. Chang said.

“I bought the unit downstairs for my parents,” she said. “They didn’t want to live elsewhere.”

The same with his wife and him, Mr. Chang replied, though it was only half the truth. They had helped both sons with their purchases of bigger, more modern flats so they could marry their dream lovers, and in the end, number three, with its rumbling pipes and cracking walls and the garbage chute that still attracted flies years after it had been sealed, was what Mr. Chang and his wife could afford.

Meilan nodded and sauntered to the couch. He stood up quickly and watched her take a seat close to where he had been sitting. Tea? he asked, and when she said yes, he was both horrified at her insistence on extending the visit and relieved that he had an excuse to leave the room. When he returned from the kitchen he sat down in an armchair across the room.

He had his shirt on now, buttoned to the top, and Meilan had to restrain herself from telling him that his shirttail was escaping from under his belt. The glass top of the coffee table had tea stains; a bowl of leftover noodle soup was sitting on a pile of newspaper. The flat was not one where a man could entertain a lady friend; she felt an urge to absolve him of all the women he had danced with.

“I heard about your wife’s passing,” Meilan said, eyeing the framed pictures of his wife on the wall, mostly enlarged black-and-white snapshots taken, judging from the clothes and the young look of the wife, before anyone in number three had been able to afford color film. It was strange to study his wife through an older woman’s eyes; years ago her beauty had been stifling to Meilan, but now she detected melancholy in the young face. Such a woman would let herself be defeated by an illness. “A good wife you had,” Meilan said. “I’m sorry about your loss.”

It had been eleven years, but the way she said it made the pain fresh again. He said that he had been sad to hear about her parents’ passing, too, as if by reminding her of her own loss he would be spared. It was different with one’s parents, she argued, and he had little to defend himself. The teakettle whistled, a prompt excuse for him to withdraw from her gaze.

“Have you thought of remarrying?” Meilan asked when he returned with the tea.

She must have seen his friends at the Twilight Club, so it was natural for her to regard him as an old donkey fond of fresh grass. It was better that she, or anyone else in the world, think that way. He shook his head without giving more explanation. Instead, he asked her about her marriage and her children, as if it were a game of Ping-Pong that one had to win with a tactful performance.

“No husband, no child.”

“You own a flat on Garden Road,” he said. There was little else to compliment in her situation.

“Funny thing is, we moved here when I was ten,” Meilan said, “so there must have been another home before this, but I have little recollection. Am I not a lucky one to die in the only home I’ve known?” It was meant to be a joke, but she was surprised to see that he looked pale and shaken. She had always liked to talk about her own death as if it was an event to look forward to, her secret superstition being that death, like a man, would make itself conveniently unavailable once it knew it was desired.

The only home for him, too, he thought. His sons had tried to persuade him to sell the unit in number three after his wife’s death and he had refused. It was not his responsibility to make them understand him; time would come and teach them about love, which they thought they knew about already.

Meilan studied the old man shrinking into the depth of the armchair, his eyes looking past her and dwelling on some distant past she had no place in. How many times in his life had he let himself truly see her? She remembered years ago—when gas pipes had not been installed in number three and when propane tanks had been rationed—she had often hidden behind a pile of coal bricks on the third floor landing and waited for Uncle Fatty to come back from work. How old was she then? Twelve, or perhaps thirteen, too old to pretend to be playing in the sooty hallway, but she persisted. Once, a rat came out from nowhere and jumped onto the coal, not more than five feet from where she squatted. Neither the rat nor Meilan moved for a long moment, until Uncle Fatty and his wife walked upstairs. The rat scurried away, frightening his wife with its swift movement, and Meilan remembered him looking past her to search for the offender. She had been born ten years too late to bear any meaning for him, she remembered weeping to her journal.

“I’ve always thought that one of your lady friends would be good enough to marry into number three,” Meilan said, laughing lightly. “Have you realized you’re the only one to bring your own partner to the Twilight Club?”

He would no longer, but such information he did not have to share with a stranger. After the relapse of her cancer his wife had told him to start searching for a replacement; she said she would like to see him taken care of so she could leave in peace. He obliged her as one would oblige any fantasy of a dying loved one, but he could not stop himself from strolling and dancing with strangers after her death. He would do anything to keep her alive from day to day, even if it meant being called an old donkey and using other women’s hope as an anesthesia. A week ago, when he had had to break up with his latest friend and call the matchmaking agencies, none of them had provided any new names who had shown interest in his file. A clerk at one of the agencies had even suggested that he no longer pay the fee to keep his file active; her words were subtle but there was no way to make the message less humiliating.

“Of course everything gets harder at our age,” Meilan said. Ten years could be an abyss when one was twelve, and what a relief one did not have to stay twelve all her life. She adjusted her necklace of cultured pearls and sipped the tea. “So if you ask me, I’d say you’re the smartest. It’s better just to have a few dances together. Beyond that things get complicated.”

“So you’ve always been single?” Mr. Chang asked with some curiosity. The woman, uninvited and at ease in his home, was different from his friends. Was it because she owned the patch of roof above her?

“Married twice, lost twice to mistresses,” she said. “No, you don’t have to feel sorry for me. The way I look at it—a bad marriage is like a bad tooth and it’s better to remove it than to suffer from it.”

Mr. Chang leaned forward. He had some vague recollection of her from years ago, but hard as he tried, he could not connect the woman to the young girl, whom his wife had once commented on as being intense and sad for her age. He had never doubted his wife, for whom the world seemed to be more transparent, many of its secrets laid out for her to see, but could she have made a mistake about the girl, or had time alone been able to transform a sad and serious girl into a loud and graceless woman?

“Come to think about it, at least I don’t have to grieve over the death of a spouse,” Meilan said. She was insensitive, she knew, but why should she pretend to be someone other than herself, even for him?

“That’s to be congratulated,” he said with sincerity, but perhaps she took it as a sarcastic comment, as she shrugged without replying.

The light dimmed in the flat. Evenings in Mr. Chang’s unit, as they were in Meilan’s, came earlier in all seasons, their windows shadowed by the high-rise next door. In the soft light Meilan fixed her eyes on his face, unscrupulously. “What would your wife have said about your lady friends?”

She had told him that he needed another woman in his life so she could rest in peace; would she have less peace had she known that not one but many had been in his life, coming and going? Mr. Chang shook his head.
“The dead is gone, the live lives on,”
he said. The same saying must have been quoted by all the widows and the widowers in this city when they accepted a substitution.

“The live lives on only to ignore a longtime neighbor,” Meilan said. She wondered if she sounded like a hurt woman. What she meant, she explained, was that they were both good dancers, and wasn’t it a surprise that they had never danced? Unless it was more than a dancing partner he had been searching for, she added with laughter; she herself had no interest in anything other than dancing, she said, dancing being all that mattered to her.

The woman, with her cunning smile as if she had seen through him, looked familiar. Mr. Chang felt a moment of disgust mixed with fascination. Then it came to him, not the woman in front of him but another one, with her hand between his legs, not moving it much but nevertheless applying pressure from each of her fingers. He had been thirteen then, taking a train ride for the first time in his life, to the provincial capital for middle school; the other passengers, his uncle included, had been dozing off in the dimming light of the northern plain. He could have gripped the fleshy wrist and removed the hand from his lap, he could have yelled for her to stop, or at least stood up and moved to another seat, but in the end, he had done nothing, because when he looked up she was smiling at him, her teasing eyes saying that she knew all about his secret, and that he was as sinful in this little game of theirs as she was.

Mr. Chang shifted in the chair. The phantom limb of a youthful swelling from half a century ago and the wetness afterward made him unable to breathe in the twilight. He had never told his wife about the incident; she had not been the kind of woman who would make a man relive a humiliating memory like that.

She did not mean to embarrass him in any way, Meilan said; only she was curious why he had not thought of dancing with her. Mr. Chang shook his head. Some people were destined to be friends, he said, and others strangers.

A man could break a woman’s heart with that reply, and Meilan had to tell herself she was lucky that she had not had a heart for all of her adult life.