The Crazed

20

I often wondered how much Banping Fang knew about Mr. Yang’s private life. Had he heard about his unrequited love for Lifen? Was he aware of his marital trouble? Our teacher’s mind now resembled a broken safe — all the valuables stored in it were scattered around helter-skelter. The thought bothering me most was that Banping might have known as much as I did. I was afraid he’d tell others.

The next afternoon Mr. Yang talked to a woman in his sleep again, but for a while his words were too fragmentary to be intelligible. He snickered and groaned alternately as I was leafing through the English-language magazine China Reconstructs. At about 4:30 he started singing. He sang in a sugary voice, impersonating a young woman:

Oh my ring, I lost the gold ring

My groom gave me last spring.

How can I get it back? Oh how?

If an old man picked it up

I’d treat him to dinner at my house

And can accept him as my grandpa.

If a young man has it now

He can do anything with me

Except share my bridal bed. .

Done with singing, he grinned lasciviously and said, “I can tell you’re not a virgin. I don’t like virgins, I want a real woman.” He chuckled, his voice tapering off.

I held my breath and was all ears, but he only grinned. He seemed to be with a young woman or a girl. What was he doing? Flirting with her?

Then his voice grew audible again. “You’re mine, every part of you belongs to me. No, he-he-he, I was just kidding, can’t help being silly whenever I’m with you. Oh, I’m so lucky.” His face was glowing.

Who was he speaking to? When did this happen? Some years ago? Time was crucial here. If this had taken place before his marriage, the young woman could be his wife-to-be. But he sounded as if he was having a good time with a different person. Who was she? Lifen?

“Ah, look at these legs,” he said, sighing. “Look at these breasts, gorgeous. Aren’t they fresh peaches? My goodness, how you’re dazzling me! Oh, I’ll have a heart attack tonight. I can’t breathe.” He smiled lewdly. “Oh, how come I’m so lucky! Am I dreaming or awake?”

So they definitely went to bed together. Since she had peachy breasts, she must be the same woman whose nipples tasted “like coffee candy,” which I had heard him mention twice. When did this take place? Long ago? Or recently? If only he had revealed some clue to the time, then I might be able to figure out what was going on. Could this—

He cut my guessing short. “Don’t think I’m a bad man. It’s true I’m not a good man, but I’m not a bad man either. To be honest, you’re the second woman I’ve ever touched in my whole life. So don’t take me for a shameless, dirty old goat. I’m just an ordinary man who’s fond of pretty women. But most women don’t like me. I never thought that someone like you, charming and full of life, would be interested in me. If only I were twenty years younger. .”

After a sigh, he subsided into silence.

He had made love to only two women in his life? That meant that besides Mrs. Yang, this was the only woman he had gotten intimate with, so she might have been Lifen, of whom he still dreamed from time to time. By now I was certain that Lifen didn’t live in Shanning City and that they couldn’t have met regularly. If he didn’t love his wife, he must have gone through a good part of his life without the company of a woman he really loved. In other words, though married, he must have lived an emotionally barren life. His confession reminded me of a handsome, strapping graduate student in the History Department, a Casanova who often boasted that he would not consider marriage until he had “tried it out” with one hundred women. He was so bold that he’d accost a stranger girl, saying, “May I invite you to coffee or tea?” If she replied, “I already have a boyfriend,” he’d tell her, “It won’t hurt to do some comparison.” In this way he often succeeded in securing a date. A friend of his told me that he was reaching his target of bedding a hundred women and would look for a wife soon. I often wondered why he had never encountered a woman outraged enough to harm him.

Then it crossed my mind that Mr. Yang’s last sentence, “If only I were twenty years younger,” might suggest that he had been with a young woman in recent years. What did he mean exactly? If he were that much younger, he would have known better how to love a woman? Or more capable in bed? Or able to spend more time with her? Or he would have left his wife? He was fifty-nine now. Assuming their intimate meeting had taken place recently, which was very plausible, then the woman should be under forty, roughly twenty years younger than he. That’s to say she couldn’t be Lifen, whose age should be close to his. Then who was she?

Mr. Yang coughed dryly and went on to say in a clear voice, “Weiya, don’t you think I’m silly? Sometimes I feel I’d like to grow potatoes at the foot of a mountain rather than teach literature. I could live a happy life if I were a farmer. With knowledge comes misery and grief. Why are you smiling? You think I’m too mawkish? Or too quixotic?”

Heavens, Weiya was his mistress! My scalp tightened and I closed my eyes. A feeling of being betrayed surged up in me while my nose turned stuffy. I shook my head as if a hard object had hit it. Who betrayed you? I asked myself. Probably both Mr. Yang and Weiya had.

On the other hand, I was quite ridiculous — how could they have included me in their liaison? Weiya had never wanted a triangle, so I couldn’t possibly fill an emotional corner in her heart. I remembered Banping had told me that Weiya often came to see Mr. Yang in the mornings and that she was “very emotional.” Why wouldn’t she visit him in the afternoons when I was here? Did she deliberately avoid me?

“If I were a farmer in another life,” Mr. Yang went on, smiling mischievously, “say a cabbage or soybean grower, would you live with me as my wife?” He paused, his face radiating childlike innocence. “Don’t smile, Weiya,” he said. “I’m serious. We can’t be together in this life, but we may in the next life when I won’t be a bibliophile feeding on paper every day. I will be a man capable of honest work and worthy of a woman like you. .”

They even discussed marriage! Did she really love him that much? He seemed absolutely serious about this relationship. Did his wife get a whiff of it? She might have. That must be why she had left for Tibet.

“Don’t say love,” Mr. Yang said fretfully. “I hate the word ‘love.’ People say they love each other, but they’ll change their hearts later on. Love is a chameleon. No, worse than any reptile, it can be sold and bought with power, money, Party membership, and even food coupons. So just say you want to be with me, or you are attached to me. That makes more sense.” He stopped as if waiting for Weiya to say something.

“So am I to you,” he said in reply. “But heaven always contradicts human wishes. I’m too old to deserve a woman as young and as good-hearted as you. I’m so sorry, if only I could marry you.”

She actually loved him? She was willing to marry him? Why wouldn’t she mind the twenty-eight-year age difference between them? He could have been older than her deceased father. Maybe she just wanted to have a fatherly man. Somehow I often had difficulty with women who were only fond of older men. Four years ago at Jilin University where I got my B.A., I’d had a crush on a girl and even proposed to her, with full expectation that she would accept me, but she declared to me that she’d never marry a man younger than herself and that she could trust but not love me. She wanted to continue our friendship, which I refused, because it hurt me to see her date an older fellow, who was a mere half-wit, a braggart, though he headed a student poetry group called Open Road.

Mr. Yang was wordless now. He seemed to be dozing away, still whining faintly.

How could Weiya fall for such an old man? What made him so attractive to her? Could it be his acute mind? Not likely. There were other men who had perceptive minds too, even younger and quicker than his, if not deeper. Then what could draw her to him? His erudition? His limited power as the director of graduate studies? His reputation? His eloquence? None of these was thinkable to me.

To my mind, his only quality that might have attracted Weiya was his disposition. I had noticed a kind of hidden melancholy in him. Although he seldom expressed his emotions in front of his students, his voice occasionally betrayed some kind of misery that seemed peculiar to him, as though he had been born with it. Weiya didn’t live a happy life either. Her maternal grandfather used to be an accomplished epigraphist in Tianjin City, owning a Japanese bungalow, which later was confiscated by the Communist government. She told me that her father, an architect in a construction company, unable to endure the torture inflicted by the revolutionary masses in the summer of 1967, had killed himself by jumping out of an office building. Some years later she was sent to the remote Yunnan Province to be reeducated on a rubber plantation. She might have lost her virginity there if Mr. Yang’s remark about it was true. A woman of her experience and background could hardly view life with cheerful eyes anymore and must have been very sensitive to the melancholy that arose from Mr. Yang’s disposition. Actually some people might enjoy sadness and suffering, because their lives have been nourished only by miserable feelings. They can endure anything but happiness, which is alien to their systems. Mr. Yang seemed to be one of those people; so did Weiya. This must be the grounds for their mutual sympathy, attraction, and affection.

Whether there had been genuine love between them, I wasn’t sure. Didn’t Weiya tell me that she had outgrown love? Was she really serious about their affair? She might have been at first, but now she seemed quite eager to hit it off with Yuman Tan. She couldn’t be a novice when it came to a romance, could she? Mr. Yang must have been too naive about her.

To some extent, I felt mortified as I realized why Weiya had treated me, a man only five years her junior, as a nonfactor in her love life, as if I belonged to the younger generation. Perhaps her relationship with Mr. Yang psychologically prevented her from counting me as a man. Yes, this might be a hidden meaning in her statement that she wouldn’t do Meimei “a nasty turn”: if one day Mr. Yang recovered, divorced his wife and married her, she would become Meimei’s stepmother and my stepmother-in-law. She’d be a generation older indeed.

Then I remembered the virginal heart she had claimed for herself. What did she mean? Did she anticipate that I might find out about her affair with our teacher? Very possible. Then why wouldn’t she wait until Mr. Yang recovered or died and then see what she should do? Why had she left him for Yuman Tan in such a hurry? This wasn’t very becoming for a woman with a virginal heart, was it? Maybe her liaison with our teacher was just a fling for her, but why did he take it as earnestly as though she were his only soul mate?

These questions puzzled me. Yet one thing seemed true: Weiya might be less serious about their affair than Mr. Yang.

On the other hand, I shouldn’t be too critical of her. She understood their relationship would lead nowhere, as he had made it clear to her that he couldn’t marry her. She had no choice but to look for another man.

Somebody knocked on the door. Before I could get to my feet, Nurse Chen breezed in, carrying a round aluminum tray that held Mr. Yang’s dinner — a bowl of custard, a cup of soybean milk, and seven or eight slices of vegetarian sausage in a dish.

“Din-din,” she announced pleasantly. This also meant that my shift was over and that from now on she would look after him.

“I don’t want to eat dinner,” Mr. Yang replied, still in delirium. “I want to eat you. You’re my best meat, palatable.” He grinned suggestively without opening his eyes.

I was embarrassed, fearful that Mali Chen would take offense, but she didn’t seem to mind his nonsense at all. Instead, she turned to me, smiling knowingly and batting her eyes. It flashed through my mind that she must have heard similar words from his mouth so many times that she was used to them. Her smile suggested that she knew no less than I about my teacher’s private life, as if it meant to say, “Boy, you have no idea what it’s like at night. This is nothing by comparison.” It was as though both of us had been grave robbers, but she had outsmarted me by digging deeper and at richer spots and had found much more treasure. She was a superior thief!

Never had I imagined that she too had been prying into Mr. Yang’s mind. She might already have drilled, mined, and excavated the whole terrain of his blasted brain. How I hated her! But all I could bring out was “I wish he were dead!”

“How could you say such an awful thing?” Wide-eyed she froze, still holding the tray.

I felt giddy and nauseated. Without another word I snatched up my bag and rushed out the door.