Beijing Comrades (23 page)

We sat in the living room in silence. His movements were stilted and he repeatedly averted his eyes.

“Would you like something to drink?” He finally broke the silence.

“I'm okay, thanks.”

He went into the kitchen and returned with two bottles of beer. “This is all I have right now,” he said, giving me a real smile for the first time since seeing me downstairs. He opened one of the bottles, then hesitated. “Oh, right,” he said. “You're probably driving. I guess you can't drink.” He put the bottles on the table and walked into the bedroom. When he came back, he had an open pack of cigarettes in his hand.

“You smoke now?” I asked in disbelief as he handed me the pack. I had never seen him take so much as a puff.

Lan Yu gave me a sarcastic smile. “You know I'm not prone to addiction,” he said. My heart sank. What was that supposed to mean?

The cigarettes were apparently someone else's. I put them
on the couch next to me. Lan Yu sat quietly in a chair a few feet away.

“So . . . you seem to be doing well,” I said.

“I'm surviving,” he replied. “What's new? How's business?” His tone was somewhat mechanical, like a bureaucrat asking questions from a list.

“Pretty good, thanks.”

He sighed and looked out the window. “How's your—I mean, how's our Ma's health?” He turned from the window to look at me.

“She's great!” I answered, trying to sound chipper.

This kind of small talk continued until I told him I had to go. “Do you think—I mean, could I have your phone number?” I took a deep breath, not knowing what to expect.

Lan Yu went into the bedroom and produced a business card from one of the desk drawers. “Page me if you need anything.” He placed the card in my hand.

We went downstairs, then stopped just inside the front door of the building. He looked like he wanted to say something. “Do you have a kid?” he asked.

“No.” For some reason, I didn't want to tell him I had gotten a divorce. Awkwardly, I mumbled a goodbye and stepped into the night.

Twenty-Four

Lan Yu was alive! He was alive and had built a life for himself!

The last two years of endless fear and anxiety had been a waste of time. I didn't have to dread the prospect of spending the rest of my days plagued by a guilty conscience any longer. The rediscovery of Lan Yu was my release. I could go back to the life I had before that nagging feeling of culpability had brought me to the brink of annihilation. Back to carefree decadence!

Lan Yu, on the other hand, had changed. The man I saw at the expo dwelled in the same physical body, but the boy I had once known was gone. There was a time when I would look into his eyes and understand what he was feeling: melancholy, a sense of infatuation, admiration. But now he withheld everything. The esteem in which he had held me was gone, replaced by cynicism, distrust. He was no longer mine.

I looked at the business card he had given me:
Yamato Building Materials Company, Lan Yu, Business Representative.
So it was a Japanese company, and the middle-aged man I
had seen him with was probably Japanese after all. I no longer cared either way. I gazed out my office window, twirling the card in my hand and wondering what to do next. Now that I knew he was alive, did I even need to call him? What did I expect to come of it? Questions like these swirled around in my mind, but before I could answer them I made up my mind to page him. Less than a minute passed and the phone on my desk rang.

“
Wei
?” Lan Yu hollered into the phone. “Did somebody page 2345566?” My eyes filled with tears. Lan Yu had dialed my office number nearly every day for four years, and here he was asking who had paged him! I felt betrayed.

“It's me, Chen Handong,” I said, deliberately using my full name to create emotional distance. I guess I wanted to punish him for not recognizing my number.

“Oh . . . What's up?” he asked curtly.

“Nothing, I just—”

“I'm at work.” He interrupted me. “If you want to talk, we can set up a time.”

A long silence followed. I still wasn't sure why I had called him, or whether it was a good idea for us to see each other at all. Finally he spoke.

“Look, why don't you come over tonight?” An invitation, but not one that was extended with an especially warm voice.

“Okay, great,” I said, pretending to be oblivious to the cold indifference he was showing me. I hung up the phone, telling myself that tonight would be the only time I'd see him.

The sun hadn't quite disappeared into the west when I knocked on Lan Yu's door. I stepped into the living room, where he treated me with the clinical politeness of a first-time visitor.

“Have you had dinner?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks.” A small plate with a few cucumber slices was on the table, and I wondered if this had been his entire dinner. “Do you live here alone? I mean, apart from the roommate you told me about.”

I was no longer nervous about talking with him, and consequently had no fear of how he might answer the question. I had one item on my agenda and one item only: to work up to saying my piece so I could do what I needed to do and leave. But if I was honest with myself, I had to admit I was also curious to know whether the guy I'd seen him with was his boyfriend.

Lan Yu hesitated. “Well . . . yes and no . . . There's someone who—he doesn't officially live here, but he's here a lot.” It didn't escape me that he was just as honest and direct as ever.

“Well, I won't bother you again,” I said. “I just wanted to see you so I'd know that you're okay. I've looked everywhere for you, Lan Yu. I was beginning to worry something might have happened.” He sat at the table with the chipped paint in the corner of the living room, as far as possible from the couch where I was seated. He had no response to what I had said, so I continued.

“Lan Yu, I know that what I did was wrong. I owe you more than one man could ever give. I could spend the rest of my life trying and it would never be enough. So let's just say I owe you a lifetime. I'm divorced now, so if you need anything—I mean, apart from money—just contact me. Anytime.”

He remained seated, quiet, eyes blank.

“Anyway . . . take care,” I said, standing up from the couch.

I reached for the doorknob, but before I could touch it I felt a hand gripping my arm tightly. Turning around I found myself face-to-face with Lan Yu, who stood so close to me that I could
hear his breathing and smell the familiar scent of his breath. This was the moment I had waited for, the fateful reunion I had mentally rehearsed each day for nearly two years. In my daydreams, our eyes would lock in a sublime union that no words could describe and felt as though we were peering into each other's souls. But what was actually happening was very different from that. Instead of looking into my eyes, Lan Yu fixed his stare to my shoulder and shoved his free hand into his pocket as if he didn't know what to do with it. I pulled him toward me and held him there in the dimly lit entrance hall. Wordlessly he began to cry, and pushed himself deeper into my chest, shoulders, even my armpits, until my upper body was wet with tears. He tried to stifle it, but his sobbing became heavier and heavier until he was biting my shoulder in grief-stricken agony. I had never seen him like this, not even when we broke up. So why was he like this now?!

I don't know how long the two of us stood there together in the doorway. There came a point when I tried wiping away his tears and slowly ungluing him from my body. But he wouldn't let go. A great deal of time passed before he finally peeled himself away and looked up at me with eyes that were as red as a rabbit's. I pressed my lips against his eyelids one by one to kiss the tears away. His eyelashes were wet and I could taste his brackish tears, but his lips were dry. I moved my lips to his cheek, my tongue periodically darting out of my mouth to touch his skin. He pulled away slightly to look at me intently, but I couldn't say what emotion I was seeing—was it pain or joy? I closed my eyes and kissed him again.

I pulled off his T-shirt and, for the first time in two long years, drank in his beautiful dark skin with my yearning eyes. I dove into his neck and chest and then slowly descended until I was on my knees and at eye level with his belt, which I
unbuckled while gazing up at him submissively. We were still in the doorway of his apartment.

Lan Yu looked down at me in a way I had never seen before: controlling, dominant. It was the cold stare of contempt, the look of someone who intended to dominate. And for the first time in my life, I wanted to be the object of that domination. It was damaging to my self-respect, but it was precisely this humiliation that propelled me to further extremes of wanting to be degraded and even abused by him.

Yes, I thought. I'll be the bitch tonight. I was going to give him what I owed him.

Lan Yu entered my mouth and I sucked him with a sense of purpose. Submission, I believed, would repay him what I owed. I sucked longer than I had ever sucked before. I sucked until my knees hurt and my lips were numb, until my mind turned off and my motions were mechanical. It wasn't long before Lan Yu's breathing got heavier. I held on to his waist and looked up at him in surrender as he grabbed a fistful of hair. He pulled his cock out of my mouth and a warm shower of cum splattered against my lips.

As Lan Yu was coming down from the high of his orgasm, I went to the bathroom to clean up. When I came back I gathered my belongings and told him I was leaving. I wanted his last memory of me to be one of conquest, of him possessing me. But instead of applauding my exit as I had expected, he threw on his pants and looked at me in bewilderment.

“Why are you leaving?”

I leaned against the front door, trying to look detached. “Remember, I'm indebted to you forever. Anytime you need something, just come to me.” I had completely avoided his question about why I was leaving.

Lan Yu's eyes filled with tears again. He threw himself into
my arms, peeling off my clothes and kissing me with such intensity that I almost lost my balance and fell to the floor. He took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom, where he pushed me onto the bed. My head spun. He was on his knees now. I didn't want him to blow me, didn't need him to, but that's what he was doing. All I wanted was to say something. Something that needed to come out. Something I'd waited a lifetime to say. At the very moment I reached climax, I looked down at Lan Yu and cried out, “Don't leave me!” Tears streamed down my cheeks. “Don't ever leave me! I'm begging you!”

Listlessly we lay on the bed. I closed my eyes and felt we were in an ocean, rising and falling as wave after wave pushed us to the crest and carried us forward. Then it was calm, and the ocean became quiet. I heard the heavy sound of Lan Yu falling asleep. Then I fell with him.

The next day I sat in my office thinking again and again about what had happened the night before. My intention had been to offer recompense then disappear from his life forever. And yet, visions of him burned in my mind with a fiery intensity.

No longer afraid of seeming too direct, I picked up the phone and dialed his cell. He picked up and I asked him, more haltingly than I had expected, if he wanted to get together that night. He said he had plans.

“What plans?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Someone's coming over.” The words were barely out of his mouth when I hung up.

Twenty-Five

For several weeks we had no contact. In the beginning I sat by the phone hoping he would call, but by the seventh day it finally sank in that he wasn't going to. By the end of the third week I broke down and called him to ask him to dinner. He accepted the invitation, but insisted it was
he
who was taking
me
to dinner. This, I figured, was his way of asserting his autonomy and financial independence. I insisted, however, and we argued briefly over who was taking whom to dinner until finally he laughed and said, “Fine, forget it! If you're not afraid of my cooking, why don't you just come over here?” I said yes.

When I stepped into his apartment and saw the crude collection of dishes spread out across the little blue table, I smiled. One thing was certain: he hadn't improved much in the cooking department.

After we greeted each other, Lan Yu returned to the kitchen and I went into his bedroom, more out of curiosity than anything else. One of the desks was piled high with books, mostly TOEFL and GRE study guides. On the other desk sat a
tiny television and, next to that, a portable cassette player. I pressed the eject button and pulled out the tape, then slowly read the English words:
Classic Romantic Love Songs.
Lan Yu had never cottoned to English-language music, so I figured it must belong to the “someone” he had been talking about. Was the other desk that someone's, too?

When dinner was ready we sat down to eat. Lan Yu watched closely as I sampled the stir-fried green pepper he had made. “How is it?” he asked.

“Awful!” I joked with him.

“Don't eat it, then! Spit it out!” We both laughed, then fell silent for a while.

As usual, Lan Yu was the first to break the silence. “You must have thought I was a mess the last time you saw me,” he laughed. “I have no idea what came over me. I must have looked pathetic breaking down and crying like that!”

“You're not the only one,” I replied. “I was just as pathetic as you were!”

After dinner, our bodies came together and we made love. Really made love, not just me wanting to be his “whore” like the last time. Lan Yu climbed on top of me and straddled my waist, thighs open wide. With one hand on my chest, he used his other hand to reach back and guide me into him. The instant he put his hands on my thick chest muscles and began riding me in pleasure, I knew he was mine again.

Lan Yu and I had been together for four years before breaking up, so when it came to sex, we mixed as easily as milk and water. We knew everything about each other: what the other liked, how he liked it, where to touch and how. Nearly two years apart and sex with him was just as hot as before. Hotter, even.

The summer was as oppressively muggy as any other Beijing
summer, and Lan Yu's tiny apartment could get excruciatingly hot. After we climaxed, Lan Yu went to the kitchen and grabbed a couple of cold beers. Plopping back down on the bed, he handed me one of the bottles and turned on the television: it was some American movie with cops and criminals beating the crap out of each other. Lan Yu had always liked war movies and action flicks—anything with blood, chaos, and pandemonium. I used to tease him by calling him lowbrow, but he would just laugh it off, insisting that I was just jealous of his refined taste. He was absorbed in the spectacle, but I wanted to talk.

“So how long have you been working at your new place, the Japanese company?” I asked.

“About a year,” he replied, eyes glued to the TV set.

“How come you left City Nine?” I knew perfectly well the answer to this question.

“Isn't it better to work at a foreign company?” he replied. Mild Chinese curses—
shoot, darn it!
—flowed from the dubbed movie on the TV, out of synch with the lip movements of the English-speaking actors. It was evident that Lan Yu had no interest in discussing the past.

“It was because of the fax, wasn't it?” I asked.

Lan Yu turned his eyes from the TV set and looked at me in shock. “How did you know about that?”

“I looked everywhere for you, Lan Yu!” I exclaimed. “Including your old workplace! I was scared. I really thought something happened to you.”

He scoffed and continued watching the stupid movie. “Why even bother?”

“Why didn't you come to me for help?” I persisted.

“And what good would that have done?” he snapped. “Look, Handong, it doesn't matter, okay? I was planning on
leaving City Nine anyway.” He wanted to end the conversation.

“But if nothing else, I could have helped you find a new job.”

He returned his attention to the movie, but the distressed look on his face told me he wasn't really watching. I needed to know more. I needed to know how he had survived after getting fired from his job.

“What did you do after you left?” I asked.

“Well, I got by, didn't I?” he retorted. “I didn't starve to death. Anyway, I don't want to talk about it, okay?” He was losing patience with the subject.

Lan Yu squinted in fixed concentration at the television. I didn't like seeing him upset and never had. I took the remote from his hand and clicked off the TV.

“My ex-wife did it,” I said. “The fax. She did it.”

Lan Yu looked at me in horror. “Are you fucking kidding me? What an evil bitch! How could you marry someone like that?”

There was nothing I could say. I certainly couldn't refute him.

After a few more minutes of angry cursing, Lan Yu calmed down. “Well, it's in the past now,” he said. “As long as it wasn't you.”

“How could it even cross your mind that it could have been me, Lan Yu? I was going crazy worrying about you! I looked in every corner of the city for you. I really thought—”

“Well, you were wrong,” he interrupted me. “Sometimes things are horrible when they're happening, but you just have to clench your teeth and get through it.” He turned the TV back on and looked at me. “Anyway, the fax wasn't nearly as hard for me as when we broke up.”

I looked into Lan Yu's eyes. I knew them so well. They
were the eyes I had fallen in love with, those deeply troubled eyes that had ignited my desire innumerable times past.

Now, sitting there in the blue flicker of the TV set, his eyes penetrated me like a knife. Damp tufts of hair clung to his forehead, a sweaty reminder that we had had sex only a short while ago. The stiffness of his body told me he was still agitated from the conversation we had just had. He clenched his lips and squeezed the remote control so tightly I thought it might break. And yet he continued to stare at me. I kissed him until the tension in his body melted away and he at last locked his arms around my neck. We didn't have sex again, but stayed like that, kissing each other gently in front of the TV.

Lan Yu woke up early the following morning, grumbling about how strict his Japanese company was about punctuality. I wanted to offer him a ride to work, but didn't have the courage to say the words. Our relationship was different now—ambiguous, lacking in definition. Involvement in each other's daily lives belonged to the past, to the relationship we once had. Lan Yu seemed to want it this way.

After getting dressed we stepped out of his building and into the morning sunlight. When we reached the main gate of Gala, he rushed off to catch a bus, saying he'd be in touch. This, I knew, meant “don't call me, I'll call you.” And I had no right to ask him for anything more. I had promised him my life.

When Lan Yu and I were together, especially during those precious moments when we made love, I felt so close to him that he sometimes seemed an extension of my own body. It was times like these I knew for sure that the person I was with was Lan Yu, that he was the same person I had known all this time. But most of the time there was only distance between us.
It was a strange and surprising feeling: for the first time in my life, I felt the pangs of unrequited love, the agony of wanting someone who was out of my reach.

I did everything I could to get over him. I slept with other men and even with other women. But Lan Yu was like a drug to me. When I couldn't get a fix, I craved him. When I got him, it was bliss. But when he was gone, the agony of the crash was unbearable.

In a sense I had Lan Yu back, but it was a narrow sense because our relationship was purely sexual. We rarely asked about each other's lives, and never uttered a word about the past. We spoke freely of sex, but emotions were off limits. I never did manage to find out what he had done between jobs at City Nine and Yamato. Lan Yu's reluctance to discuss it that night in front of the TV set made me drop the subject.

Each time I saw him, a long interval would pass before he'd pick up the phone and call me again. Gradually, however, he started contacting me more often. I, meanwhile, was growing accustomed to his lack of commitment. And yet, I sometimes couldn't help but wonder: Why did he keep coming back? Was there something about me that made him want me more than he wanted other men?

One Tuesday afternoon, I went to Skytalk to pick up Lan Yu after work. Exiting the parking lot, I suggested we go to Tivoli. The truth was, I didn't care much for being at Lan Yu's place. He made decent money at his job, but not enough to get out of the tiny, simple apartment he lived in.

“I don't want to go there,” he replied bluntly.

“But it's your house.”

“I don't want it.”

“But I gave it to you.”

“I don't want it!”

“There, you see? You do hate me.”

“I do not hate you.”

“Then why don't you want to go there?”

Lan Yu folded his arms in front of his chest and looked out the window. Then he laughed. “I guess it wasn't enough to buy my virginity with a thousand yuan,” he said frostily. “Now you want to buy my love with a house, too.”

I was so angry my hands shook. I slammed on the brakes. “Get out.”

Lan Yu didn't waste any time mulling it over. He opened the door, jumped out of the car, and began walking down the street in the direction from which we'd just come.

It only took a few days for us to make up, but the incident made me begin to wonder if Lan Yu was right. Perhaps we were better off leaving things strictly at the level of sex. Words were dangerous. Anytime we used them, they only threatened the fragile simplicity of the casual relationship we had.