Kinder Than Solitude

13

On their second date — five days after their dinner on Sunday — Sizhuo asked Boyang his age, and whether Boyang was his real name. Why, he said with amusement, and placed his citizen’s ID on the table. They were in a teahouse near his parents’ place, which he’d planned to stop by afterward, hoping it would seem to his parents as though they were on his mind often enough to warrant an unplanned visit. But the thought of seeking their approval, however unconsciously, made him decide at once to skip seeing them after all. On the most fundamental level, they were the best parents he could ask for: they caused him no conflict, either internal or external, while with each day’s passing he was made more aware, by his guilty glances at the calendar, that he had not visited Aunt since the day of Shaoai’s cremation. It was more Aunt’s fault than his own, he insisted to himself, turning defiant as people do when their limits are shown in unsparing light: unlike his parents, she reminded him of all the complications he was incapable of dealing with in life. Who had granted her the right to do that to him?

He had told his secretary that he was taking the afternoon off — Sizhuo worked five and a half days a week, Friday afternoon and Saturday being her time off. Other things he had gathered on their first date: she’d grown up in a village in the northeast, near the border of Russia; her father was the only teacher in the village school, teaching six grades in one room; her mother ran a seamstress’ stall; she had a younger brother at a provincial university with two more years of study; his major was marketing, and Sizhuo hoped she could help her brother come to Beijing after graduation.

“You’re older than I thought,” Sizhuo said after studying the ID.

“What does that even mean?”

Sizhuo pushed the ID back across the table. “My friend said if you were over thirty-five I should not see you again.”

“Wait a minute, who’s this friend, and how old is she?” Boyang said, feigning indignity. From Sizhuo’s background — and she had not shied away from giving details when he had asked the previous time — he had calculated that she was twenty-two or twenty-three, more or less Coco’s age.

Sizhuo shook her head, as if to say the questions were not important.

“And what makes her so prejudiced against men my age?”

“She said men that old”—Sizhuo stopped, but there was neither apology nor coyness in her pause—“men at your age want different things than I do.”

The friend might not be wrong, Boyang thought, but what did he want from this girl whom he knew he should have left alone altogether? There were plenty of people in his life to cater to his sentiments, and his sentiments had a reliable pattern — reliable enough — so that he did not worry about unpleasant surprises, nor did he wait for joyful ones. For mindless pleasures, he could go to Coco, with whom there was a cleaner contract, less befuddlement. For intellectual intrigue, he could talk with his parents — his mother more than his father, who had started to show early signs of dementia; or even with his sister, to whom over the years he had grown closer than when they’d been children, but perhaps it was more accurate to say that in adulthood they found each other, as she had been launched into the world not as a child but as a mind of genius that had to dwell in a child’s body for some time. If ever he wanted to develop affection for the young there were his two nieces for him to dote on from afar. If he wanted to play games with people — did he ever want that? no, not really — there were plenty of opportunities, challenging rivals, and profitable gains if he wanted to make scheming more a part of his life. In thus looking at his life, Boyang could not find a place to fit the girl. She’s miscellaneous, he thought; others belonged to that category, too, the unsettled and the unsettling: Moran, Ruyu, Shaoai — she had been the center of that category for so long that it was impossible to think of her as absent now — perhaps even Aunt; and of course he himself, too, at listless moments, when people in his life failed to entertain or distract him. But to put Sizhuo into that space that he rarely allowed himself to visit — was it an alarming sign?

“What does a girl your age want?” Boyang asked. Easily he could list all the things Coco wanted, none of them too expensive. He could list a few things Sizhuo desired: to hold on to her job at a time when many young people were jobless after graduation; to find a way to move up in life — by what means? he wondered, and decided that marriage was the only possible way — and purchase a small apartment, outside the Fifth or the Sixth Ring Road; to know a few of the right people so that her younger brother could get a foothold, however unsteady, when it was time for him to enter the job market; to work with her sibling to establish some sort of settlement in Beijing, so that eventually their parents could come and live with them. Marriage and children would ensue, and by the next generation the family’s migration from the countryside to the metropolis would be complete. A familiar story, and Boyang could see that he could come in handy in that narrative. Was that why the girl had agreed to a second date? At their previous dinner, he had only vaguely spoken of his profession; he had made certain that for both dates he had dressed with impeccable but not extravagant taste, though he wondered if she could recognize the subtle difference. On so many levels, she was not like Coco, which was part of the reason that he felt unequipped to come to any conclusions yet. When one has enough protocols set up for life, anything that does not fall readily into an available protocol makes one suspect that he has been underplayed. Treacherous was not what he would call Sizhuo, yet he was treading less familiar waters, which, thrilling as it was, could also be perilous.

Sizhuo looked pensive. “I suppose I want …” She paused and looked up again. “Do you have a child?”

“I’m not married,” Boyang said. “Listen, many men my age might be monsters in your eyes, but if I had a wife, I would give her enough honor not to chase young girls around.”

“But that doesn’t mean you didn’t have a wife before, right? So it is possible you have a child?” Sizhuo said. He wished that she were being coy or even flirtatious, but her unsmiling expression made the conversation seem like a logic debate.

“Yes, it’s possible. But no, I don’t have a child. If I had one, I wouldn’t hide the fact from you.”

“But how do I know if you’re lying or not?” Sizhuo asked. “I don’t know you, so the only way is to go by your words.”

Boyang laughed. “What are you, miss? A private detective?”

“No, certainly not,” she said, leaning back so the waitress who had brought them their tea could place the set between them. When the waitress finished pouring, she lowered her eyes and said she hoped they’d enjoy the tea. Sizhuo thanked her, her eyes never leaving the girl’s face. Boyang wondered if Sizhuo was aware that his eyes had not moved from her face. When they were left alone again, Sizhuo said that people lied sometimes, and she would like to know when and why they did.

“Do you not lie?” Boyang said.

The girl thought and said she did not lie so much as she would avoid situations in which dishonesty would be required of her.

“I’d call you a lucky girl if you’ve been achieving that,” Boyang said. “For instance, here’s a question for you: you like me enough to see me a second time, is that right?”

Sizhuo blushed. Her inexperience — no, her innocence was what made him lose his head and become less tactical, yet innocence also brought her into this dilemma. It was one lesson, Boyang wanted to say, that she had yet to learn: innocence can be one’s weapon only when it’s not seen by the world.

“I don’t have an answer to your question,” Sizhuo said.

“That’s the most conventional answer people use to dodge a question,” Boyang said. “And that’s even worse than lying.”

“But if it works? Why can’t I use it if others use it successfully?”

Because he hated to see her as one of the others, but Boyang did not say that. “One thing that makes my age more advantageous,” he said, “is that it’s easier for me to catch someone lying than when I was twenty. But in any case, I’m going to tell you this and it’s not a lie: I was married once. Not anymore.” Under forty, divorced, no children, with an excellent income and spacious housing in the city, Boyang was one of the most desired men on the marriage market, a diamond bachelor. “Now, not only am I too old, but now you know that I’m divorced. Does that add to my disqualification as a suitor?”

Sizhuo looked uneasy at the term suitor but quickly regained her countenance. “No, I think it’s expected for someone your age.”

“What is expected?”

“A divorce. My friend says the only thing worse than a man over thirty-five is a man over thirty-five who has never married.”

Boyang laughed, but Sizhuo only watched him with unaverted eyes. He felt his heart sink a little. What was she doing with him — making him a specimen for her girlish study of men and their characters, so she could afterward discuss him with her friend? “Now, who is this friend of yours?”

“Someone you don’t know.”

“But she’s someone I must know!” Boyang said. “I’ll offer her a position screening job candidates for me.”

Sizhuo’s face froze for a split second, and he wondered if girls always felt jealous when another girl was being praised. “But she’s employed already,” she said.

“I can give her a better offer.”

Sizhuo shook her head and pretended to study the tea set. She had insisted on meeting elsewhere, away from the area around the Front Sea and Back Sea; why, he had asked, and she had said there were too many tourists, and they had made the place impossible to breathe.

“What are other things on your friend’s list that you’re to find out about me?”

“I’m the friend,” Sizhuo said.

For a moment Boyang did not grasp the words. Sizhuo smiled and said there was not another person she consulted with. She herself was the friend she was speaking of.

“I see,” Boyang said, but he could not see where the conversation was going. What he noticed was that the girl looked sadder and older when she smiled, a pity in a young, good-looking woman; a smile — unless it was the kind Coco and her girlfriends perfected in front of a mirror with a fashion magazine for a textbook — should be a woman’s best adornment.

“Had I been my own best friend, I’d have wanted to know the answers to those questions,” Sizhuo explained again, and he recognized a hint of placation in her voice. “Does that make sense? I wasn’t really lying.”

The girl had too much patience with the world, Boyang thought; she must never have been in a situation where impatience was an option for her, or she had never considered it her due. “So, what’s this best friend inside you whispering to you now? That I’m a bad choice for you?”

“Can I ask you a question — are we on a date?”

The easiest response would be to make a joke to defuse the girl’s uncanny persistence, but would that suffice? Would that make him a lesser person to her? Sizhuo’s eyes, when Boyang looked at them, seemed to indicate a resolve to never let a single detail pass without being seen. He wondered if that tenacity came to her naturally. “Traditionally speaking, this should be considered a date.”

“But what if we’re not traditionally speaking?” Sizhuo asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I want to know how you think about these things.”

“Me, or men in general?”

She seemed torn; each option put her in a situation with which she had to reconcile: in wanting his personal opinion she risked putting him in a weighty position in her life; in casting him back into an ocean of men, she would question her own unfairness.

A tenderness stirred in him: he had already known her more than perhaps he was willing to. Every question to which one seeks an answer will inevitably come back, a boomerang to cut into one’s flesh. She was not armored against that danger as she might have thought; no, she was not protected at all: only those who do not seek answers are safe from being touched.

“I’m asking,” Sizhuo started to answer, then paused to reconsider. “I suppose I’m asking about what you, yourself, think.”

Boyang felt a surge of satisfaction, as though he had won a hard battle against a battalion of men, their indistinctive faces retreating fast. “I think of myself as a conventional man in this aspect, and so of course I take it that I’ve asked you out on a date,” he said, keeping his expression thoughtful. “However, you’re asking for more honesty, so I’ll give you more: only very tentatively do I consider this a date.”

“Why tentatively?”

“Because such a conversation should not be happening on a date, don’t you think? When people are wholehearted about any kind of business, they don’t analyze and question why they are there in the first place.”

“I see,” Sizhuo said, and Boyang thought she looked a little defeated. During their first meeting, she had seemed to enjoy herself more, though their conversation had been less demanding then: she had talked about her work and her childhood in the northern village; he had asked her questions, and in turn gave a few harmless details about his own life.

Neither spoke. The conversation seemed to be going off in an unexpected direction, though Boyang could not decide if he was disappointed. There was no reason for him to be in this girl’s life, and he should be glad that she had the good sense to question his presence. All the same, he wanted to hold on to her a little longer; he even wanted to confide in her — but confide what? he thought, alarmed. The girl seemed to have a center, perhaps unknown to her, like a mysterious vacuum, which effortlessly drew him toward her. Could it be youth, or innocence, that was doing the trick? No, that must not be it. He thought of the other girl from years ago, the orphan who had made a fool of him. There was nothing youthful or innocent in Ruyu even back then; still, the same vacuum, dangerous in that case, had been there to draw him in. Boyang raised the teacup to calm himself. People don’t vanish from one’s life; they come back in disguise.

“Suppose we aren’t really on a date,” Sizhuo said. “Then what do we do now? We shake hands and say good-bye, right?”

Boyang pointed at his watch. “We’ve only been sitting here for twenty minutes,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit rushed to say farewell now?”

“But is it?” She gazed at him.

“Did you come today just to find out if we’re on a date?”

“Perhaps.”

“And now that you know the answer, you’re ready to take off,” he said. “Not even inclined to stay for a friendly chat?”

“What’s the point of a friendly chat when we’re not even friends?”

Indeed, they were no more than strangers who had caught each other’s eye by happenstance — a smile, a nod, eyebrows raised in surprise or marvel or bafflement, but what one should not ask for, and thus should not be granted, is the right to linger. To breach the contract of transience — whether to indulge oneself in the belief that much more could happen, or to have merely an undisturbed moment to ponder the impossibility of making something out of this, or any kind of, encounter — is to overreach, to demand clarity from life’s muddiness. Certainly Boyang’s ache for permanency, his ache to make sense out of the nonsensical, should have been cured by now. Why couldn’t he simply agree with the girl, wish her a happy life without him, and part ways amicably? Yet he was not ready to let her go. She seemed to be living in a universe of her own making, but how could she — how could anyone — live so seriously and so blindly? Where did her fallibility hide itself? Her lack of corruption reminded him of the folktale in which a child could turn a rock into a piece of gold, yet remained oblivious to the fact that this capacity — more than it would make him rich — would launch him into an unredeemable life: my child, the world is a much worse place than you can ever imagine.

Boyang did not know whether he was jealous of Sizhuo or angry at her on behalf of the world that had already gone bad. It was not exactly an urge to protect that made him linger, nor a desire to destroy, but if she was destined to lose that universe of her own making, he wanted to be the one responsible — he, the corruptor who beat all other corruptors. “It takes time and effort to find a friend in this city, no?” he said. “Why not give us some time?”

“Friendship happens,” Sizhuo said.

“But not love?”

“Love happens, too.”

“So neither is something we can strive for? Or should I say, I’m given no hope in either category?”

Sizhuo looked at Boyang quizzically. He wondered if he had been unwittingly aggressive, but he had little — or too much — to lose: in either case, one was allowed a deviation from the protocol. “How about this?” he said, pointing to the window; across the street, on the side of a building, was a billboard for a fitness center. “I have a membership to the gym there. There are six badminton courts on the second floor, and we can go there once a week to play badminton. We don’t even have to talk if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t know how to play badminton,” Sizhuo said.

Boyang wanted to kick himself for his oversight. Certainly she, growing up in the village, would think of badminton as a luxury sport, but could he explain to her that he and Moran used to play in the alleyway, dodging people on foot or on bicycles, often having to climb up to the rooftop to retrieve a stray birdie? Could he tell her that in the summers, he and other boys would hunt for the fat, green larvae of cabbage butterflies, put them into birdies, and launch them straight into the sky with their racquets? The poor worms always plunged back to the earth with nothing to meet them but a solid death, yet there had been nothing ominous to him, or even to Moran, about those random executions. Would Sizhuo protest if he told her the story? Coco would have screamed and called the action sick, but Sizhuo had grown up in the countryside where lives were probably butchered or maimed every day. “How about Ping-Pong?” he said.

She smiled, which again made her look resigned. Did the village school where her father taught have a crude concrete block that served as a Ping-Pong table in the yard, as his elementary school had? His childhood, even though it had been a city childhood, had come almost a generation earlier, and could not have been too different from Sizhuo’s.

“I don’t know how to play Ping-Pong.”

“How about racquetball?” he said. “Now, hold it — give me the pleasure to say I don’t know how to play it, either. I’ve watched people play, and the ball sure goes fast. We’ll be too occupied with learning the game to feel awkward about not talking.”

“Why do you want to play racquetball with me if you don’t mind not talking?” she said.

Any activity would be an excuse for him to continue seeing her — this she had no reason not to understand. “I suppose I’m interested in getting to know you better,” he said. “So I’m scrambling to find anything you’ll agree to do with me so I have an opportunity.”

“Is this how a man of your status courts a woman?”

He looked into her eyes but could find neither malice nor irony in them. “What kind of status are you referring to?”

“You have a car and an apartment, so you must also have a good career?” she said, asking more than stating, and he nodded to confirm her guess. “Does that mean when you court a woman, you can always find something to do with her?”

“To do?”

“What if you lived in a basement with three other provincial boys, and you did not have any savings? You worked six and a half days a week, and yet you knew you would never be able to afford the cheapest apartment in this city. What if all you possessed was your being, and there was nothing you could do but be yourself? Would you still be courting a girl?”

No, he thought; this was not a welcoming world for young men without any means. A few weeks ago, a woman in her early twenties had said in a TV interview that she would prefer an unhappy marriage with a BMW to being in love with a young man who could afford only to carry her on his bicycle. Boyang mentioned the name of the young woman — already her bold practicality had made her a national celebrity — and asked what Sizhuo thought of the woman’s preference.

Sizhuo looked agonized. She crossed and uncrossed her fingers, the first time he had seen her lose her equanimity. “I wish she were completely wrong about everything. I don’t think she was, though,” she said. “This is not the kind of world I thought I’d grow up to live in, you know?”

She was not the first to have realized that, he wanted to point out. What made her different from other disillusioned souls? All young people start with untainted dreams, but how many would retain their capacities to dream? How many could refrain from transforming themselves into corruptors of other untainted dreams? We are all wardens and executors biding our time; what’s taken from us, what’s killed in us, we wait for our turn to avenge. Such wisdom, had Coco ever been interested, Boyang would not have hesitated to share: he would have sneered, laughed, enjoyed his position the way a cat gently plays with its prey. But what made Sizhuo different — what made him pensive now — was that he wanted a better answer for her; he wanted a better world to offer her. Was this how a father would feel toward a child? He made a face, the question conjuring the most farcical: paternal, he thought, a paternal sugar daddy.

Sizhuo did not take her eyes from his face. “You must find my ranting laughable,” she said, though her face showed no sign of unease due to self-consciousness. “Sometimes I think so, too, but the moment I think that way, I know I’m wrong.”

“I’m not laughing at you,” he said. “More at myself because, you know, I’m one of those people who have made the world a bad place for you, and in turn I’m asking you to like me, even to fall in love with me.”

“What do you do that for?”

“To ask you to like me?”

“To help make the world a bad place, if what you said was true.”

“What else can I do?”

Sizhuo looked baffled, as though he were asking her for an answer.

“Nobody can refrain from doing things,” he said. “You see, a child can get by with just being, but we aren’t children forever. We must live by doing things. And either we do harm, or, if we are extremely lucky, we do some good. The problem, as you know, is that the world is an unbalanced place, and it requires more bad than good to maintain that unbalance. If you want to do one good thing — say, if you give money to a beggar child — no big deal, right? But no, it’s not that simple. To be able to do that, you have to deceive yourself into believing that a bill dropped in her basket is going to help her, to give her one more morsel of food, to spare her one beating from her parents. While in reality, you and I both know that she might have been stolen or rented or sold to the begging ring; by giving her money, instead of doing anyone any good, what you’re really doing is contributing to criminals, helping them profit from doing damage, and encouraging more criminals to steal and sell babies into that trade. So what do I do? I either give her the money, or I don’t, all depending on my mood that day. But either way, I have no illusions about doing anything good for her, or for anyone. I’m sorry, is this too bleak for you?”

Sizhuo shook her head. “Why is the world unbalanced?” she said. “Why does it require more bad than good?”

He could give her his hypothesis about the connection between human hearts and entropy that he sometimes played in his head, but he would have to be drunk to go on with such nonsense. Already he regretted that their conversation was going off on a tangent. He was here to woo a woman. He was not here to be baffled and defeated by the world alongside her. “Why that is,” he said, “I truly don’t know.”

“Do you want to know?”

No, he did not, he thought, though he knew that was only wishful thinking. The real question was, can anyone afford to know? “Do you?” he asked.

“I do,” she said. “That makes me a fool in people’s eyes, I know, but I don’t mind being a fool.”

“What do you mind?”

“Not knowing, and making do with not knowing.”