Beijing Comrades (19 page)

“Look,” I continued. “I'm not going to let you destroy me, okay? I'm not a homosexual. I need to have a normal life.”

Lan Yu's reaction to this surprised me. Without even turning to look at me, he reached across the space between us and took my hand. After a few moments we turned to face each other, and for a split second I even saw gentleness in his eyes.

“I knew it would end like this eventually,” he said, squeezing my hand. “I've been waiting for this day to come for a long time. I still remember what you told me when we met: ‘No strings,' you said; it would be ‘embarrassing' for two men to stay together. And now, just as predicted, you're getting married. Who knows? Maybe I'll get married too.”

The anguish on Lan Yu's face then was so deep he may as well have had the word itself carved on his forehead. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, but it was I who broke down first. I turned my head in the other direction and started crying—just like a woman, right in front of him.

“Handong, don't . . .,” he said, choking with sobs. “It's not a big deal, really.”

What was wrong with me? Here I was dumping him, and he was the one consoling me! I disgusted even myself.

In the end, I suppose we both needed to retain an ounce of male dignity because we ended up parting with a smile. Just before saying goodbye, Lan Yu lay in my arms and listened to me as I spoke, just as he always had.

“Now that you've graduated, you have to learn to take care of yourself. If you get sick, go to the doctor, especially if you have a fever.”

He squeezed my forearm, which was draped around his chest. I took it to mean
okay.

“If you meet someone new, you have to be careful. I don't want to hear through the grapevine that you've caught some kind of disease!”

He clutched my forearm tighter.

“Even though we've agreed that we're not staying in touch, if you ever have a true emergency, come find me. Is that clear?”

He nodded.

Lan Yu asked me to leave first. It was better for me that way, too. Easier, somehow. I got up and started moving toward the front door, but slowed down as I got closer to it. Just as I was about to turn the doorknob, I turned to look at Lan Yu one last time. There he sat on the arm of the couch. He looked back at me, his face strange and unfamiliar, a tiny smile on his
lips, but one that was forlorn, gutted. This is the last time I'll cross the threshold of this villa, I thought to myself, the last time I'll stand inside the house that Lan Yu and I had called home. Twisting the doorknob, I wanted to turn around and look at him one more time, but couldn't. I opened the door and stepped out, the image of Lan Yu's strange smile etched in my mind.

And that was how we broke up, as Lan Yu put it, for good.

Twenty

The heartache of losing Lan Yu was unlike anything I had ever known. However great the sorrow, though, reason told me that going back was not an option. I had played with fire long enough.

Were it not for my impending marriage to Lin Ping, I probably would have wallowed in self-pity forever. Fortunately, the wedding itself helped assuage the pain of breaking up. It took place in the imposing and stately ballroom of the Grand Capital Hotel. Festive, dignified, and extravagant, it was everything a wedding should be. Seeing my mother's face brim over with happy, wrinkly smiles gave me a kind of satisfaction I had never experienced before.

Everybody knows that the best part of a wedding is the after-party. When the formal banquet was over and all the other guests had gone home, Lin Ping and I stuck around with our closest pals to laugh, drink, and have fun late into the night. Dutifully we performed all the traditional amusements a new husband and wife were expected to, including an array of mild humiliations imposed on us by our friends. First, we
had to go from table to table, begging our guests to accept a toast even though we knew full well they would refuse until we answered an embarrassing question or performed some wild stunt. Next, we had to hold our hands behind our backs and try to gobble pieces of fruit and candy they dangled from strings in the air. Then, we were goaded into telling the whole story of how we met, went on our first date, and fell in love. And finally, they made us sing a traditional wedding song—“The New Couple Goes Home”—which, by the end of the night, had been turned by drunken party revelers into “The New Bed Gets Rode.” I was in great spirits all night, not—or not only—because I had Lin Ping, but more importantly because I had finally gained something I had desperately longed for: the unconditional blessings of friends and family.

Legally speaking, the nuptial arrangement with Lin Ping was my first, but the truth is I was no stranger to married life. Lan Yu and I had no legal ties, but we had lived together just like any husband and wife. The life we shared was routine, even dull at times, but always fulfilling.

The day after the wedding, Lin Ping announced she wanted to quit her job as an interpreter. Work was irregular and didn't pay well, she complained. This didn't come as a surprise, since she had ended up rejecting her employer's offer for the three-month training in the United States. More vexing was her brilliant new idea of coming to work at my company. I was totally against the idea—hated it, in fact—but eventually caved in to her endless imploring and asked Liu Zheng to make the arrangements.

Lin Ping's decision to quit her job wasn't the only surprise that popped up after the wedding. Soon after moving into the apartment at Movement Village, I began to feel I was getting to know a completely different person. Everything, from the
food we ate to the household appliances, was a target for her fussiness. She insisted on nothing but designer products, and even the toilet paper she wiped her ass with had to be the most expensive on the shelf. In her assessment, “so-called Chinese designer brands” were garbage, and products from Hong Kong weren't much better. Only Japanese imports and things you would find in the department stores of New York's Fifth Avenue would satisfy her. Only things like that were truly “high end.”

Nearly every day she went to the beauty salons of major hotels to get facials, manicures, and other treatments. Less than two weeks after the wedding, she hired a live-in maid because she didn't want her long, slender fingers and perfect nails to be marred by housework. I just stood on the sidelines, watching in amazement as she returned each day from her shopping trips. I wasn't bothered by her reckless spending habits per se. It's just that I couldn't comprehend how a typical girl from a poor family, someone who had once been a student and an ordinary worker, could burn through that much cash in such a short amount of time.

Nothing satisfied her. She wasn't happy with the Honda I'd bought her because she wanted a Mercedes-Benz. She didn't like the apartment we lived in and spoke incessantly of buying a house in the Northern Suburbs, an idea I vetoed again and again because, I said, I wanted to be closer to the city center. That was true, but an equally important reason was that I didn't want my marital home to be anywhere near Tivoli.

Despite Lin Ping's many shortcomings, however, the good always outweighed the bad. Every time she saddled me with a new demand, she would always turn around and do something so sweet, so loving, that it was impossible not to wrap
my arms around her and forgive her for being such a pain in the ass.

One night after we'd had sex, she crawled into my arms, where I held her against my chest just like I had held Lan Yu a thousand times before. I looked into her dancing, whirling eyes and smiled.

“You know what you are?” I asked playfully. “You're a shrewd little she-wolf!”

Lin Ping laughed. “What does that make you, then?”

I closed my eyes and raised a single finger in the air as if about to say something important and philosophical. “I am the big, dumb sheep whose flesh the she-wolf has bitten!”

“Ha! Is that right?” she said, pinching my nose between her fingers. “Well, I'll tell you what you
really
are. What you really are is a
bad, bad
boy! A smart, romantic, and loving man—but also a sneaky and cunning
plaaaaaaayboy
!”

Oh dear, I thought. Where was this going?

“But that's fine with me,” she continued, “because you're all mine now!”

Lin Ping squealed in my arms, looking wildly pleased with herself. Was she delighted by her own witty banter or by the fact that she had managed to snag me? Either way, we both knew her perception of me as a “playboy” wasn't entirely wrong.

Married life passed by quickly, and before long it had been six months since Lan Yu and I had broken up. Just as we had agreed, we had no contact with each another. But every time my cell phone rang, I wondered—with hope or fear, I wasn't sure—whether it was him. When we broke up, I was more than a little surprised by the calm, rational indifference he displayed.
He was much more resolute than I had expected. At the same time, however, it was precisely his cold and tempered rationality that dissipated some of my worry over the breakup. It made me have faith that he was going to be all right.

I did everything I could to stop thinking about him and the private, intensely emotional world we once shared. And yet, every time I had sex with my wife, I thought only of him. My hands caressed her soft white skin, her thick, heavy thighs and breasts. She was so gorgeous, so loving, but none of her beauty provoked my desire, and when I closed my eyes, it was Lan Yu I saw. There were times when I almost managed to trick myself into believing it was him I was touching: dark and firm, a radiant sheath covering a strong back and two broad shoulders. Only then would I slowly start to get hard.

There were some things I wouldn't let myself think about: the touch of my tongue against his neck, the euphoric excitement he showed when I kissed him. These thoughts were off limits, outside the scope of the fantasy world I allowed myself to create during sex with my wife. I couldn't do those things with Lin Ping, and trying them would have caused nothing but disappointment and grief. She wasn't Lan Yu. She would never be Lan Yu.

I forced myself to have sex with her, but it was nearly impossible for me to come. Each time, I had to close my eyes and think about having sex with Lan Yu or, sometimes, with other men I had seen on the street that day, usually with Lin Ping on my arm. Only then was I able to climax. Pretty soon I started asking Lin Ping to let me fuck her on her hands and knees like I used to fuck Hao Mei. It worked at first, but in time even that wasn't enough. More and more, I found myself jerking off when she wasn't around, fantasizing about the men I wanted to be with. Finally, nine months after my wedding day,
I submitted to my relentless desire and hooked up with a guy.

I had only met him a few times before we slept together. He was in his midtwenties and had been introduced to me by a friend in common. My memory of him is vague because we only had sex a handful of times, but I still remember his eyes, which radiated with intelligence. Sex with him was mind-blowingly good, in part, no doubt, because it had been so long since I'd been with a man.

The first time we had sex, I kept repeating something under my breath as I writhed on top of him, fucking him harder and harder while running my hands along his back. Lying in bed after we both came, he laughed and asked me if I had an ex-boyfriend named Lan Yu.

I knew it was only a matter of time before I broke down and contacted him. I had no real agenda, or so I told myself at the time. I just wanted to know how he was doing. I agonized for hours in my office before finally picking up the phone. I tried his cell first, but it was disconnected. Then I called Tivoli, but the phone just rang and rang. I had no choice but to call him at work. A woman answered the phone.

“City Nine!”

“May I speak with Lan Yu?”

“Who's calling?”

“A friend from college.” I wasn't in the mood for an interrogation.

“He doesn't work here anymore,” she said, as disinterested in the conversation as I was annoyed.

“What? Has he been transferred somewhere?” I asked, startled.

“He got fired.”

“Why?”

“How the heck should I know!” she barked before slamming down the receiver.

When I got home that night I kept calling Tivoli, but no one answered. I called every five minutes until one in the morning, and still nothing.

The next day I asked Liu Zheng to go to China Telecom to see whether there had been any activity on either Lan Yu's cell phone or the landline at Tivoli. He could do that because both lines were paid for by the company. When he came back to the office he reported that neither number had been in use for over six months.

For the rest of the day I sat in my office agonizing over what to do. I recalled the strange smile Lan Yu had given me the day we said goodbye. Horrible scenarios flashed through my mind. Could he have done something stupid?

The following day I confessed to Liu Zheng that I was worried.

“Why don't I go over to City Nine and see if I can find out what happened?” he asked. Liu Zheng was a good friend, always eager to help.

“I'll go with you,” I said, preparing for the worst.

Armed with a bogus letter of introduction requesting information for employment purposes, Liu Zheng and I showed up at the administrative offices of City Construction Number Nine. There we talked to two guys—a chubby, baby-faced security guard and a middle-aged cadre from human resources.

“So, here's the deal,” began the cadre. He was in his midforties, short and muscular with an angular flattop and bulky military clothes. “Around five months ago, the company received a fax that brought to light certain . . . um . . . inappropriate
activities. Bottom line: he was engaging in hooliganism.”

I braced myself for whatever he was going to say next. But before he could continue, the younger, fat-faced security guard jumped in.

“Oh man!” he exclaimed, practically jumping up and down in his seat with excitement. “He seemed like a real good kid when he got here. A Huada graduate—real distinguished. Who would've guessed he was doing that!”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Doing that kind of stuff!” the guard replied. He was a little slow.

“Male prostitution,” the cadre said matter-of-factly. “He was a male prostitute.”

Liu Zheng must have sensed I was about to fly off the handle when I heard this because he wisely intervened. “Can we take a look at the fax?” he asked calmly.

“Why, I believe I have it right here,” the guard said as he reached into the drawer of the tiny wooden desk where he was seated. He pulled out a beige envelope, very nearly knocking over a glass jar full of tea leaves and hot water in the process. He was enjoying the excitement a little more than I cared for, but at least he was cooperating.

The message on the fax was computer generated, not handwritten as I had expected. It was almost completely faded, and all I could see were clusters of words punctuated with little black smudges:
Mr. Lan Yu . . . City Nine . . . public indecency . . . loitering in hotel lobbies . . . money . . . sexual services for men.
My head swam with words and I became vaguely aware of a lump in my throat. It grew bigger and bigger until I thought I was going to puke.

Finally, the beefy cadre with the flattop broke the silence.
“This stuff may not be true, you know. The kid never admitted to it, and frankly, it's hard to know what's what when you only have a fax.”

“But when you look at the way he dressed and stuff,” the security guard jumped in, “you gotta wonder where a guy like that—I mean, straight out of university and all—gets that kind of cash. You should have seen his watch! I heard it was real expensive.”

I knew exactly the watch he was talking about. It was the Rolex I'd bought him when I was in London.

“So you guys fired him,” Liu Zheng said flatly.

“We didn't fire him,” said the cadre. “We let him resign. He wanted to. Fuck!” He gave an incredulous laugh. “Just think—a kid like that? A college kid, early twenties, going down that road? He was good at his job, too, hardworking and conscientious. He got along with everyone here. I'll tell you one thing: he may have been doing that kind of stuff off duty, but he never did it here.” The cadre crossed his arms and looked at Liu Zheng and me righteously.

“If you guys want to hire him,” he continued, “I guess I'd say give it a shot. After all, he is a graduate of a good university. But watch out for AIDS!”

“He has AIDS?” Liu Zheng and I exclaimed in unison.

“Everyone like him has AIDS,” the cadre said cooly. “Our company doctor said so.”