Beijing Comrades (18 page)

That night Lan Yu and I had sex as always, but he was distant, mechanical. When I looked into his face I saw nothing. His eyes were empty. It was as if he had seen me so many times that he was numb to what he was looking at.

“Turn around,” I said, slapping his butt. “I wanna do it that way.”
That way,
he knew, meant I wanted to fuck him.

He got on his belly and stuck up his ass. “You'll have to pay extra for that, sir,” he said coldly. I can't describe how my heart deflated when I heard this. Not to mention my dick.

I looked at Lan Yu's ass perched up high in the air, his face buried in the pillow. I desperately desired to tell him something:
I want you.
But I was too ashamed to say it. How could I when I had just told him I would be getting married? Yes, I wanted to be with him, but there were also times when I felt a kind of hatred for him. And yet, I knew, this was a completely unreasonable impulse on my part: How could I hate him when he had done nothing wrong?

Still feeling hurt by Lan Yu's comment, I turned off the light and lay down to go to sleep. He lay next to me quietly, but there was something about his breath—tense, uneven—that told me he had something on his mind. Suddenly and without warning, he crawled on top of me, kissing my lips, my cheeks, my eyes, searching in the darkness for whatever part of me he could find.

“Please don't be mad, Handong!” he said. “You can do it that way. You can do it any way that you want. I didn't mean what I said.”

He couldn't see me in the darkness, but he could touch me, so I turned my head away from him so he couldn't feel the tears as they streamed down my cheeks.

Nineteen

In accordance with my mother's wishes, Lin Ping and I set our wedding date for National Day, the holiday commemorating the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The event was to take place on October 1, 1991, a little more than four years after the day I had met Lan Yu.

I was vehemently opposed to the date. It was too soon and I wasn't adequately prepared. It didn't matter that I had done just about everything I could to get ready. First, I bought a huge apartment at Movement Village, a residential complex in central Beijing, and renovated the spacious, five-room unit to be my and Lin Ping's marital home. When the apartment was ready I took Lin Ping to Hong Kong, where I bought her a two-carat diamond ring, dozens of outfits, and a mountainous hoard of cosmetics, accessories, and other assorted junk. And yet, despite all this, I still didn't feel prepared.

Lan Yu and I had essentially moved out of Tivoli, which now sat vacant in the Northern Suburbs and was little more than a place for us to meet up two or three times a week. He had moved into the employee dormitory provided by
City Nine. He said he liked it because it was right next door to work. I went to Tivoli even less than he did and floated between Ephemeros and Country Brothers, usually with Lin Ping in tow. My fiancée didn't move in with me, but she slept in my bed almost every night and always accompanied me to the many social functions I attended with professional contacts. Everybody knew I was engaged to be married. I basked in the attention.

One evening when Lan Yu and I had a dinner date, I made the mistake of asking him to meet me at Ephemeros. When he rang my apartment door, I stepped into the hallway and led him straight back downstairs without even inviting him inside. But just as the elevator doors opened at the ground floor, in walked Lin Ping through the narrow corridor leading from the outside into the building. She had her own key by then, but almost always told me when she'd be coming over. It was an awkward moment for all of us, but especially for Lan Yu, who knew exactly whom he was looking at. What Lin Ping thought, I couldn't be entirely sure. Fortunately, both of my lovers kept their cool, much more, in fact, than I did. Without skipping a beat, each said something like, “All right, Chen Handong, just stopping by to say hi. See you later!” then exited the building before walking off hastily in opposite directions.

Neither of them said anything about the incident afterward, but they were smart people who could figure things out on their own. That's when things started going bad.

It began when Lin Ping told me her boss had given her an opportunity to go to the United States for a three-month-long advanced-interpretation training program. She wanted to go. When I objected on the grounds that she and I were about to get married—on National Day, I added—she told me we would just have to postpone the wedding. Her sudden lack
of enthusiasm made me realize she had probably figured out more from the chance encounter with Lan Yu than she'd let on. Game over. I'd fucked up.

The following morning, things went from bad to worse when Liu Zheng walked into my office and told me my mother had called him the night before. She wanted information about a man named Lan Yu.

“What?” I asked in a panic. “How does she know about him?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “But she seems to know a lot about what's going on.”

“Did you tell her?”

“I didn't tell her, but I didn't make up a bunch of stories, either. I can't look our Ma in the eye and lie, Handong.”

“And you call yourself a friend?” I was pissed.

Liu Zheng threw his hands up in the air. “You can't keep hiding this, Handong. If you don't end things with this guy, if you keep putting things off with Lin Ping, obviously the old woman's going to find out sooner or later!”

“Does Lin Ping know, too?” I asked in sudden alarm.

“I can't say for sure, but I think she does.”

“Fuck!” I slammed my pen on my desk, gripped by helplessness.

Before the clock struck ten the following morning, my mother called to tell me to come home. The moment I entered the house and saw her puffy red eyes and the miserable look on her face, I became riddled with guilt.

“How can you be so disgraceful, Little Dong?” she said, standing up from her chair and looking at me with eyes of fury. “What kind of a man are you?” She cried as she spoke. This was the first time she had ever spoken to me in this way.

“Where on earth did you get this crazy idea, Ma?” I asked. “There is absolutely no truth to this! Someone out there is spreading lies about me.”

“Hiding this for so many years . . .,” she continued, gripping the arm of her chair and sitting down slowly. “Thank heavens your father is dead. If he knew about this, it would be worse than death.” Her gentle tears turned into heavy sobs. She wasn't listening to a word I said.

“From the moment I knew I was pregnant with you,” she continued, “I never wanted anything bad to happen to you. When you were little, I knew the other kids at school bullied you. I used to get so mad I would go to your school and argue with your teachers about it. Then you got older, and every day you were more and more a decent young man. You were so good in school. I was so proud! Do you know how proud I was?”

She was crying so hard at that point she could barely get the words out. I didn't show it, but in my heart I wasn't doing much better than she was. The sorrow I felt was unbearable.

“You always did so well in school,” she resumed with great ardor. “Then you started doing business, and now you've even become an official—director of City Commerce! You've grown up and gained everyone's respect—you know how happy that's made us? But now, Handong, to look at you and know you've done this disgusting thing . . . If people found out, how would you look them in the eye? Huh? How?”

I looked at the floor. I knew she wasn't done yet.

“When you have a pet, you can't bear to see it get hurt. But when a mother sees her own son looked down on by other people, rejected by the world around him, isn't that worse than death? Isn't it, Handong? I'm just so afraid of what's going to happen . . .” She put her head in her hands and cried softly.

It was excruciating for me to see her like this. Whatever
else I might have been, I was still a man and a son, and seeing my own mother so grieved that she desired her own death was more than I could take. When I looked at her red, swollen eyes, nothing else mattered—neither Lan Yu, nor his love for me, nor my own emotional needs. My eyes burned with tears I struggled to fight back. I needed to clean this up. Fast.

“Listen, Ma. You've misunderstood! What you don't know is that this kind of thing is a big trend for rich people,” I chuckled, trying my best to sound calm. “I mean, some people actually compete with one another to see who can have the most fun! But nobody takes it seriously. You just get a guy and go do stuff. Just go hang out at places.” I paused like an idiot, unsure of what to say next. I was determined to convince her.

“Anyway, I'm over it now, so it doesn't even matter,” I continued. “I'm into horse racing now. I mean, it's kind of the same thing. It's just a hobby.”

It took a while, but I eventually managed to convince her. Before long, the tears stopped rolling down her cheeks and she looked at me attentively. I saw my chance to bring it home.

“Actually,” I continued with scholarly authority, “ever since the ancients, China has had what they call the ‘Southern Style.' Haven't you heard of it? I mean, rich people have just always done that, Ma! You remember Cai Ming? Sometimes he gets into this, too. You just have dinner, conversation, stuff like that—and that's it. There's nothing else going on.” Whatever it took to make her feel better.

Eventually, my mother swallowed the story that my relationship with Lan Yu was strictly platonic. I told her Lin Ping and I would be getting married the following month, and at last her tears were replaced with a smile.

I didn't know it at the time, but Lin Ping knew everything about Lan Yu. And she did a good job hiding it.

I began giving serious consideration to how I was going to confront Lan Yu and finally end our relationship once and for all. It had nothing to do with Lin Ping, nor was it entirely for my mother. It was mostly for myself.

I knew I couldn't do with Lan Yu what I had always done with guys in the past: keep them as fuck buddies. Leaving things at the purely physical level would have been impossible, in part because he wouldn't go along with it, but also because each time I saw him I would be drawn anew into the turbulent waters of emotional entanglement. Keeping things as they were but just seeing less of him wasn't the solution either, since the greater the distance between us, the more powerful my longing. My break with Lan Yu had to be permanent, absolute.

The radio weather forecast reported it was going to be windy with low temperatures all night. Sure enough, howling winds beat against the bedroom window, keeping me awake until the early hours of the morning. By the time the sun came up, the wind from the night before had blown away the clouds, leaving clear, bright sunshine in their place. The leaves had been blown off the trees, leaving a kind of desolate beauty in their wake.

It was one of those rare mornings when Lan Yu and I awoke in the same bed. We were at Tivoli. He had told me the previous night that he was looking forward to sleeping in late because he didn't have to be at work until eleven. I woke up before him and got out of bed to look out the window at the beautiful fall scenery. Then I turned back toward the bed to look at Lan Yu, who was still asleep on his stomach. He loved that position. Right cheek pushed up against the bedsheet-covered mattress, a tiny pool of spit quivered in the
lower corner of his mouth. He rolled onto his back, using his foot to push the blanket down to the base of the bed, and I noticed that the underwear he'd put on before going to sleep had somehow disappeared. He was naked now except for the calm serenity that enveloped him after the untamed frenzy of our lovemaking the night before. For a long time I stood there by the window, scrutinizing him and wondering if I was really going to do what I thought I was going to do. Quietly I stepped across the floor back to the side of the bed and gently pulled the blanket up to his chin.

Thoughts raced through my mind as I looked down at him. Did I really want nothing more from him than his body? Was I with him for no other reason than to satisfy my sexual desires? If I ended our relationship, would I be losing anything? I squatted beside the bed and gazed at Lan Yu's angelic face. He woke up.

When he saw me next to him, he gave me a seductive smile. He thought I wanted to have morning sex. How can you be so clueless? I thought. He had no idea what I was about to do.

“Put some clothes on,” I said, striding out of the bedroom. I didn't want to break up with him when he was in the nude.

Lan Yu got up, washed his face, and threw on some clothes, then he came into the kitchen to get something to eat.

By now Tivoli had the appearance of an hourly motel, and a cheap one at that. The refrigerator hadn't been touched for months and was completely empty except for a box of crackers and a few cans of soda. Lan Yu had never been especially picky when it came to food, and I was unfazed when he made breakfast out of a dozen crackers and a can of soda. The only thing on my mind at that moment was where to begin.

“I've done you wrong, Lan Yu. I never should have led you down this path. But I'm not going to hurt you anymore.” The
words sprayed out of my mouth like vomit. I was utterly lacking in shame.

“What are you talking about?” he mumbled, mouth full of crackers.

“I know you've always hated me,” I continued. “It's my own fault for doing this to you.”

“Seriously, what are you talking about?” he repeated. “I've never hated you.” He was usually so sharp. Why was he so slow-witted today?

“Don't lie to me, Lan Yu. It's obvious. You don't listen to me anymore. You don't care about me anymore.” Apparently it wasn't enough just to break up with him. I also had to find some lofty excuse for it.

“How can you say I don't listen to you?” he replied, visibly getting upset. “First you wanted me to go into therapy, so I went into therapy. Then you wanted to see less of me, so we're seeing less of each other. Now you want me to date other guys, so I'm trying that, too.”

I was blown away. I couldn't believe he was reacting this way.

“But this is for your own good!” I protested. “You need to understand that, Lan Yu.” That's when the conversation escalated to a fight.

“Bullshit!” he said, slamming the refrigerator door shut. “You just want to end things because of that whore.”

That pissed me off. I wasn't going to let him disrespect me. “Who's a whore?” I shouted. “You're a whore! A little fucking boy whore!”

Lan Yu stood up from the table and walked toward the front door.

I grabbed his arm as he walked past me. “Where do you think you're going?”

“Don't touch me!” He tried to pry my hand off his arm, but I clenched my fist tighter.

“I'm not done yet!” I said, standing up.

“You want to end this for good, Handong? Fine. There are plenty of other guys out there. I figured that out long ago. Don't worry—I won't bother you again!”

I would never have imagined he would react this way!

I let go of Lan Yu's arm, then walked into the living room and sat on the couch. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been so upset. Reaching for the cigarettes on the table next to me, my hand shook so violently I had to use my other hand to steady it.

Lan Yu sat down on the other end of the couch, as far away from me as possible. We both stared straight ahead.

“I don't live in a vacuum, okay?” I said, still avoiding eye contact. “There are things in my life I can't just ignore. I have a career, I have my mother. I have to face up to these things, Lan Yu. I'm just afraid that if you and I are together—” I faltered, unsure of what I was trying to say. Lan Yu stared at the floor in silence.