The Bathing Women (37 page)
Authors: Tie Ning
Even if everything I did before was wrong, it doesn’t mean what you did was right.
Fan must surely have heard, and taken it in—there are words that can force a person to remember.
Tiao left Fan’s home ahead of schedule. She called a taxi and went to the airport seven hours before her flight. It was a day of rain and snow, and Fan drove to the airport after her. She wanted very much to run to her sister and to hug her, as she had done when she’d picked her up two days earlier, and then to tell her, I was wrong. But she didn’t have the courage. A man named Mike went in and out of her mind. Yes, Mike. Didn’t Tiao have too much? She was going to fly to Mike’s city. She was abandoning Fan again. A sharp sadness struck her, and Fan felt a moment of dizziness. She was a victim; she had always been a victim, lonely, with no one on whom to depend. The deepest suffering in her heart was not the loneliness, but the fact that all her life she had no one to turn to, no one to tell.
1
Tiao was preoccupied on the aeroplane to Austin; Fan’s bitter face was flashing in front of her eyes all the way. She knew she had upset Fan, and this time she’d used Mike. Why would she mention Mike when Fan was talking about the several brief affairs she’d had? Using Mike as counterpart to Fan’s short-term lovers made it seem like Mike had become Tiao’s lover, or at least implied that Mike was going to. This wasn’t Tiao’s style; it sounded a little like bragging, it was immodest, and seemed like a conscious provocation of Fan. But maybe that was what she had intended; gradually realizing Fan’s weaknesses, she’d provoked her on purpose, although she was reluctant to admit it to herself. Perhaps, though, she hadn’t said it to provoke her but, instead, only wanted to indulge herself. Breathing foreign air seemed particularly conducive to self-indulgent thoughts, even if they merely remained thoughts. In another country no one pays attention to you or bothers to talk to you, unlike those above or below her in the Publishing House, pleasant or unpleasant, and those incompetent little plots they liked to spin and believed to be clever. There were also one or two men in particular who were corrupt. If you went along with them, you would win their cheap approval; if you looked down on their contemptible behaviour, they would get back at you with ten times the contemptible behaviour. You don’t have to notice, but it’s hard to ignore because it’s such a part of the reality of your life. In another country no one pays attention to you or bothers to talk to you, so you pay attention to yourself, which means indulging yourself, caring for yourself and not caring too much about what others think. Yes, not caring too much. In her own country she cared too much, every word she said and every action she took, every time she made a move, her job in the Publishing House, the chance to advance her position, the chasing after national book awards every year, and the profit the Publishing House made … every slipup might result in a huge loss. Caring too much should be the opposite of being cruel, right? She needed compensation, and she had the right to it, any compensation, good or bad. She needed to escape from her own demons and carve out a space for herself, her own space in which she could care for herself. Where was it? Was it here, in other people’s country? Wasn’t the conclusion a little absurd? She could find her own space only in someone else’s country.
She cast a glance from the corner of her eye at the neighbour on her right, an American man with blond hair and conservative dress, who had the look of a senior corporate executive. He let down the tray table soon after the aeroplane took off and started to write something on a stack of paper. He was left-handed, as many Americans seemed to be. That was how Tiao noticed the fancy oval cuff link on his expensive-looking shirt. It must have been silver, with a kind of black luster like titanium’s. Even senior executives wouldn’t wear cuff links every day, so the appearance of the left-handed man beside her suggested that an important occasion awaited him as soon as he got off the aeroplane. Of all the accessories for men, Tiao was fondest of cuff links, and found them elegant. The impression might have come from a pair of cuff links that Wu had, which were eighteen-carat gold and diamond and had belonged to Wu’s father, Tiao’s grandfather. The story went that the grandfather’s lover had sent the cuff links to him as a gift when he returned from studying in England. The gift from the lover eventually came into the hands of his daughter, Wu, which must have made her feel uncomfortable. She had saved them probably because her love for the cuff links surpassed her disgust for her mother’s rival. It was the pair of old diamond-studded cuff links that wakened Tiao’s initial secret yearning for men. She asked Wu hundreds of times about the lover, with appreciation, sympathy, and envy that crossed generations. Only at a distance of generations could someone respond to a family’s complicated suffering with those emotions. Unfortunately, Tiao had never seen pictures of her grandfather’s lover, which, according to Wu, had all been burned by Tiao’s grandmother. Later, when Tiao’s relationship with Fang Jing was at its unsteadiest, she’d even thought about stealing her grandfather’s cuff links and giving them to him. She was really crazy, so crazy that she got the roles thoroughly confused. Obsessed with becoming Fang Jing’s wife, she decided to follow the example of her grandfather’s distant lover, who was so tenacious with her love. Did she understand this as the dream of all women—to be the best wife for a man and at the same time to be his best mistress? No, Tiao wasn’t aware of it; she was far from reaching this kind of self-realization.
She had become acquainted with Mike at a conference in Beijing, sponsored by an American research institute for women and children. Tiao was invited to attend the conference and to present her paper, “A Lecture to Mothers.” The paper explored the mother-child relationship, and Mike was the interpreter the sponsor had hired. He was studying Chinese at Beijing University then, and dreamed of becoming a translator and helping cultural communication between China and America. His fluent and accent-free Chinese made him something of a star at the conference. It was hard to believe he was an American if you listened to him with eyes closed. He was six feet tall, had curly auburn hair, a pair of clear green eyes, and his voice was soft and gentle. During the break Tiao was waiting behind him to get water from the water dispenser. Mike got himself a cup of water, and filled another for Tiao. He turned around and handed it to her.
Holding their cups, they moved aside and chatted. Mike said attentively, “I know you don’t like to drink cold water. What you prefer is colder than hot water, but hotter than lukewarm, am I right?”
Tiao savoured the temperature of the water in her cup and said, “You managed the temperature perfectly. How did you know what I wanted?”
Mike put on an air of mystery. “If I want to get to know someone, I can find out everything about her.” Tiao smiled without saying anything. Mike asked, “Why are you smiling?”
Tiao said, “I smiled because you used the word ‘lukewarm.’ I thought you wouldn’t know the Chinese for that.”
Mike said, “I can also recite some Chinese nursery rhymes. I’m sure you learned them when you were young.”
“Really? Say them for me.”
“Do you really want to hear?”
“Yes, I really do.”
Mike drained the water in his cup, stepped forward to throw it into the nearby trash can, and then returned to Tiao and started to chant solemnly, “‘Eat the milk. Drink the bread. Beneath your arm, carry the train. Ride on a briefcase, instead. Afterwards, get off the case. Eastward, then, turn your face. There you’ll see a man bite a dog. Pick up the dog. Give a stone a whack, but then the stone will bite the dog back …’”
Tiao couldn’t help bursting into laughter. Mike said, “Listen to this one: ‘Riding on a bike, arriving at the bank. Meeting the head banker and giving a salute. The banker said, that’s all right, that’s okay, we all work in the bank anyway.’”
Tiao asked, “What else?”
Mike said, “‘A little car is honking, beep, beep, beep. Chairman Mao sits in the backseat.’”
“What about the one that goes, ‘The car is coming but I don’t care. I’ll give the car a phone call over there. The car turned around and ran my little feet down’?” Those old wordplays and nursery rhymes gave Tiao a familiar, warm feeling, especially “The car is coming but I don’t care. I’ll give the car a phone call over there.” It was a nursery rhyme that came out of her childhood, a period when both the car and the telephone were rarities. For children, the proof that they were not afraid of a car was that they were bold enough to call it on the phone. Ah, the car is coming but I don’t care. I’ll give the car a phone call over there.
Over the next few days, Mike and Tiao were pretty much together all the time during the breaks. He would pour her a cup of water at the right temperature, she’d take the water with a thank-you, and then they would start to talk about things related to their studying and work. One day Tiao took half a day off from the conference because her publishing house needed her to preside over a book release in the Great Hall of the People. During the break the next day, before Tiao walked up to the water dispenser, Mike, who could hardly contain himself, ran to her and said, “Finally I see you. You weren’t here yesterday and I thought you wouldn’t show up again. I was terrified.”
“Why would my disappearance frighten you so much?”
“I don’t know, but I meant what I said. How are you?”
“I’m fine. You sounded like we hadn’t seen each other in years.” Tiao was just joking, but Mike got serious and said, “I did have the feeling that we hadn’t seen each other in years.”
All of a sudden Tiao felt a bit awkward about Mike’s serious turn, or maybe she didn’t want anything else to come out of it, so she said to him calmly, “Mike, can you satisfy a small wish of mine?”
“Of course, what is it?”
Tiao pretended to be nervous and lowered her voice. “Please, get me a cup of water, cooler than hot water but hotter than warm water.”
Mike tapped himself on the forehead and said, “Of course! I forgot about the water.” He quickly disappeared from Tiao’s view and then cheerfully returned with a cup of water. He handed Tiao the water with two hands and said, “Please, cooler than hot water but hotter than warm.” He watched Tiao finish the water, and then the bell rang to resume the conference. When Tiao was going to throw away the paper cup, he took it from her and said, “Allow me. Let me throw it away for you.” Tiao never noticed that the cup remained in Mike’s hand all the way back to their seats.
On the night the conference ended, Mike invited Tiao to a readers’ salon, a discussion group, at a bookstore called Distance near Xidan, saying he was very friendly with the couple who owned it, and they often recommended good Chinese books to him. Mike said, “I’ve noticed that the Distance Bookstore almost never sells children’s books, which is unfortunate because China has so many children and they get so much more attention and love than those of any other countries because of the birth control policy. Why don’t you recommend some good books published by your publishing house? Your publishing house will be better known, and the Distance Bookstore will also gain customers.” Tiao listened politely to Mike’s suggestion, although she didn’t take it too seriously. Mike didn’t know much about publishing. Tiao was much more familiar with the business, the distribution networks and connections than he was, but she didn’t want to spoil Mike’s generous gesture; his consideration for her work touched her. Together they went to the Distance Bookstore, and the owners were very friendly, asking Mike and Tiao to stay after the salon to chat and have an evening snack. They prepared poached eggs in rice wine for Tiao and Mike, saying that Mike was especially fond of their poached eggs. Tiao also liked poached eggs, but her great concern at that moment was to find a toilet. She’d planned to head for the bathroom right after the salon, and hadn’t expected the couple to invite them so enthusiastically to stay. She held her bladder and pretended to eat the poached eggs calmly. After a bowl, her need only grew stronger. She looked around and saw no bathroom. She was reluctant to ask the woman, because she didn’t know her well, nor was Mike an old acquaintance. It would have been a little embarrassing for her to ask people she had just met where the bathroom was, and what was more irritating was that Mike still sat there talking to them endlessly. Tiao had held herself for too long and her face apparently showed concentration. If Mike continued to talk she would simply stand up and run out. Fortunately, Mike stopped. When the woman asked him another question, he glanced at his watch and said, “I’m sorry, but we have to go. It’s getting very late.”
They took their leave. As soon as they walked out of the bookstore Tiao blurted out, “Mike, I’m sorry, but I’m desperate to get to a bathroom.” She didn’t expect Mike also to grimace and say, “I’m sorry, Tiao. I have to go right away myself.” Single-file, they ran to look for a restroom on the street. Tiao complained, “Why did you talk non-stop if you also had to go to the bathroom?”