The Bathing Women (40 page)

Chen Zai said, “Yes, I heard you. Mike said he loved you. Do you love him?”

Tiao said, “I want to love him. I really want to love him. I really want to tell him that I love him. I … I … I simply love him and I must love him. The problem is … the problem is, I’ve said so much to you and I want to know what you think of it all. Before … I told you everything about me before, so I want to hear what you think of it.”

Tiao rambled on, but this speech of hers wasn’t sincere. It was not the “most important thing” that she wanted to tell Chen Zai, but she couldn’t lead the conversation to the most important thing no matter how hard she tried. She didn’t know why she would babble about Austin or why the more she loved Chen Zai, the more she praised Mike. It was probably also a kind of timidity, hypocrisy and timidity. Again she repeated what she’d just said—timidly and hypocritically—”I want to tell him I love him. I must love him …” Her heart felt such pain that she was at the point of tears.

Chen Zai slowed down and parked his car on the side of the road. He rolled down the window as if to get some fresh air. He said, “Tiao, if you really love him, other things, like age, are all secondary.”

Tiao said, “Is that your opinion? Is that what you want to say to me?”

Chen Zai was quiet for a while and then said, “Yes, that’s what I think.” Tiao’s face suddenly changed toward him—Chen Zai knew it even in the dark. Her expression was grim, resenting herself as well as Chen Zai. “Tell me again what it is you think.” Chen Zai turned his face to the darkness outside the window. “If you really love him, other things aren’t important.”

Tiao questioned him sharply, “Do you really think like that?”

“Yes, I really do.”

Tiao said, “You’re talking nonsense. You always talk nonsense. Deep down, that’s not really what you think. You said it because you think that is what you should say. You’re hypocritical through and through. You’ve always been hypocritical through and through. Why do I bother to talk to you? Why am I talking crap to you? I hate you. I’ve never hated you as much as I do now … You … you! Now I should go. Goodbye!”

Tiao stepped out of the car in one stride, slammed the door, and walked into the dark. She walked quickly, whether it was because she was determined or simply desperate, it would have been hard to say—people in either situation might walk as she did. Desperate people might show a more hurried manner. So, then, she was desperate. She walked desperately, ignoring Chen Zai’s following after her and calling out. He said, “Can you stop your aimless walking? Come back to the car.” She walked even faster and shouted back, “You’re the one who’s walking aimlessly. Leave me alone.”

She kept walking ahead this way, and he trailed at a slow speed. She thought about the late night on Sixth Street in Austin, and finally understood that when she and Mike held hands and looked at the dark Colorado River flowing under the bridge, she wanted to have a night like that with Chen Zai. Now here they were late at night, but what an unfortunate muddle of a night it was. She walked desperately and her heart was entirely gloomy. She was angry at herself because she had ruined everything. What had passed seemed to have passed forever, and Chen Zai had long ago become another woman’s husband. The other woman, what was her name? Oh, Wan Meicheng. Wan Meicheng, Wan Meicheng, what a beautiful name, much nicer than Tiao’s. What right did Tiao have to demand that Chen Zai give an opinion about her relationship with Mike? What obligation did Chen Zai have to give it? Wan Meicheng, Wan Meicheng, Wan Meicheng … he was Wan Meicheng’s husband, and they had been husband and wife for ten years. He was nobody to Tiao—not before, and wouldn’t be in the future. If she tried to force him to be someone to her, then she was fooling herself. But that was exactly what she’d been doing, and, ashamed of it, she felt she had to escape from Chen Zai, from his car, immediately. She rushed from the pavement into the middle of the road, intending to stop a taxi.

She waved at an approaching taxi just as Chen Zai got out of his car and grabbed her arm. The taxi stopped in front of them, and they were almost wrestling as Tiao tried to free her arm from Chen Zai’s grasp, screaming, “Let me go! Let me go!” But Chen Zai held her even more tightly. When she pulled open the taxi door to get in, Chen Zai swept her up in one motion and strode over to his own car. He hurled the door open, threw Tiao into the backseat, and then drove the car off as fast as possible.

The car sped off, leaving Tiao’s taxi far behind. When they passed a cinema, Chen Zai turned into the small parking lot in front of it, stopped the car, and turned off the engine. He got out of the car and then got in through the back door, sitting on the seat with Tiao. He breathed heavily in the dark, and his breath struck Tiao’s face as if it were a solid shape. His face was right beside hers, so close that he gave her the feeling that he was going to bite her. She moved away from him a little and said, “Why are you bullying me like this?”

He embraced her tightly and, breathing heavily, said, “Yes, I just want to bully you. I should have bullied you long ago.” Then he kissed her on her lips, firmly and tenderly.

The situation was one that neither had predicted but both seemed to have anticipated. They had known each other for over twenty years, but had never been so intimate. They had kept missing the chance to connect with each other, as if it were a test of their long affection and friendship. Now neither could take it anymore. As they finally kissed, the damage to their long-standing feelings began. But they didn’t care too much about the damage. It wasn’t enough just to have affection and friendship. They needed the marvellous damage. At this moment, as their kisses turned deep and mellow, they even sighed at how long the damage had taken to happen.

Frantically, they inhaled each other, as if they could inhale each other into their hearts.

4

They didn’t realize how much time had passed until they started to feel out of breath. Such a narrow space couldn’t contain their expansive kisses. It occurred to them now to drive back home to Tiao’s place.

Once there, she managed only to get out her key and open the door and lock it behind them before he had to take her in his arms again. He held her and pushed her back, step by step, all the way to that grey-blue three-seater sofa in the living room. He finally made her stretch out on the sofa, hungry to lay his body on hers, to press into her. Leaning over her, he whispered, “Tiao, let me lie on you. Let me lie on you.”

His whispers made her heart race, but she didn’t really want him to lie on her on that sofa. She never even sat on it, and when Chen Zai pressed down on her to the point of suffocation, she seemed to hear fits of screaming from underneath them. It must be Quan’s voice. Quan had always been sitting here. Now Tiao and Chen Zai had disturbed her and pressed down on her—yes, she screamed because Tiao and Chen Zai combined to bear down on her, for their pleasure and out of their desire. She screamed to interrupt Tiao and to warn her, forcing Tiao to push insistently on Chen Zai’s shoulder, saying, “Let’s go to bed. Let’s go to bed.”

Let’s go to bed.

He heard her invitation, so quick and straightforward, which actually minimized its erotic element. Let’s go to bed—as if they were playing house. They got up from the sofa, and she led him by the hand to the bedroom and onto her bed.

On the bed they sat talking, face-to-face and cross-legged. Holding hands and knee to knee, they stared into each other’s eyes, understanding that everything had just begun. So there was no desire in their eyes, and their bodies were freed from the night’s agitation.

Chen Zai kissed Tiao’s hands and said, “Ten years ago, when I was planning to get married, I asked you the same thing I’m asking you now. Why didn’t you tell me that you loved me?”

Tiao kissed Chen Zai’s hands and said, “Because you never said you loved me.”

Chen Zai said, “But you knew I loved you. I’ve loved you since you were twelve years old. I was only seventeen at the time and didn’t really know what love was. Still, I just loved you. When you jumped the rubber-band rope in front of the building one afternoon, I even spied on you. Later, you fell and loosened your little plaits, and you got up embarrassed and ran off. I loved your embarrassment, all your indignities, your tears and disappointments. No other woman ever revealed so much of herself to me; no other woman ever gave me so much trust. I have known you so long, and I often swore to myself that even had you travelled to the ends of the earth, you would still be a treasure in my heart, embedded in me, blood and bone. You’re my family, and you have to be my family. I didn’t know how to tell you all of this, and it seems I’ve never been given a chance like this. I always believed that the right to ‘tell’ wasn’t up to me. It was you who controlled how close we could be from the very beginning. Everything that happened tonight surprised me very much. I was surprised at myself and at you. I hope this isn’t something you’re doing on impulse. When the sun rises, things that happen at night often seem ridiculous.”

Tiao shook her head at Chen Zai and then nodded. The words of love he’d held on to for so long stirred a lot of different feelings in her. She said, “I can tell you, Chen Zai, I’m not acting on impulse. I love you now, not when I was twelve or twenty-two, those years I treated you as my older brother. Hundreds of times I tried to figure out when I fell in love with you, and I suppose it started the day Fang Jing left me in the waiting room of the train station. He threw me down from the heights of a dream and you caught me before I hit the ground and held me up, with all my tears and hurts, my humiliation and bitterness. If you were not the dearest person in the world to me, how could I have cried in front of you that way without any self-consciousness? But I didn’t know at the time; I had no ability to analyze myself. My soul fell in love with you, but this soul of mine didn’t inform me. Later on, I finally worked all of this out, but by then I felt I had no right to your love. I didn’t deserve it. Behind my apparent pride, I hid a deep sense of unworthiness. You had seen all my misery and embarrassment and I couldn’t offer that shameful confused mess of myself to you. I couldn’t. How could I grab on to your love while still grieving the loss of Fang Jing’s? How could I be so shallow and careless? Maybe I was too concerned with your impression of me. Maybe I was desperate to have you think I wasn’t so silly. When I loved you the most, I also resisted you the most. When you told me that you were going to get married, I tried my best to keep myself composed. Looking back now, I thoroughly hate myself—for putting on an act, exaggerating my happiness for you, and pretending to be calm. I said you should have married long ago. Wan Meicheng, such a beautiful name … my heart felt like it was being cut by a knife, but in my mind I kept thinking about how sensible I was! How moral! And how wise I was! Let me hide at a corner and love secretly. Let me treat your happiness as my own—”

Chen Zai reached out and covered Tiao’s mouth with his hand. He said, “But you know I’m not happy.”

Tiao removed his hand and said, “But Wan Meicheng is happy. She has what she wants.”

Chen Zai said, “I haven’t given her what she most wants, though.”

“What is that?”

“A child.”

“So … you can’t?”

“No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to because I always had a vague hope for a different future. I didn’t want to reconcile myself with the life I had, although it wasn’t fair to her. She is about to go crazy because she wants a child so much. But I won’t do it. We had an arrangement before we got married. She agreed not to have a child as long as she could marry me.”

The day was breaking and they couldn’t remain sitting this way and continue talking. Chen Zai would never have been able to leave if they kept talking like that. He got off the bed, splashed cold water on his face, and then left Tiao’s place without saying anything more.

Tiao also needed to go to work. She took a hot shower, washing her breasts carefully, letting the clear water and her hand massage them. She held the showerhead and swept her whole body with it, letting the strong flow spout onto her vagina, which had been so long unstirred.

She set off for the Publishing House energetically. As soon as she entered her office, she got Chen Zai’s phone call. He said, “Tiao, are you listening?”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“I can’t live without you in my life. I want to marry you.”

5

“Are you ready?” she softly asked from a distance as he lay naked in the dark. She came out of the bathroom, pushing open the door, letting the light stream into the bedroom. Following the path of the light, she moved to the bed. “Are you ready?” she asked softly again when she was next to him, boldly and joyously gazing at his unfamiliar naked body.

He got up suddenly and lifted her trembling body and laid her down on the bed, and in the dim light cradled her face in his hands. He started to kiss her, kissing her hair, kissing her ears, kissing her eyebrows and eyes, kissing her burning cheeks. He kissed her chin, kissed her collarbone, kissed her small, firm breasts. What else did he kiss? He kissed the beautiful curve where her lower back met her pelvis, he kissed her knee—the knee that she had hurt when she fell down jumping rope when she was twelve—kissed her leg, kissed her foot, and bit each one of her toes; he licked the small cold soles of her feet. His kisses stopped her trembling. His kisses made her relax her body and stretch out passionately, and at the same time he slid his head between her legs and put the tip of his tongue for a moment in that most tender and smooth of places. Unable to hold back, she let out a brief, sharp moan, a very particular sort, not human, but the moan of an animal always utterly candid in expressing its pleasure. At that instant, her face had the fierce grimace of someone with ecstasy in reach. It was beauty, beauty of a kind people are unwilling to acknowledge. As she continued moaning, he bore down and forcefully entered her.

She made him ecstatic; he couldn’t have imagined that they would be so much in harmony, that it could be so good. The more he felt in love with her, the deeper he wanted to be inside her; the more he felt the pain of love, the more he attacked her; the crazier he was for her, the more he tormented her; the more he treasured her, the more he wanted to ravage her, to break her apart.