His emotions were like a prisoner desperate to break out of jail. His sexual urges grew stronger and at dead of night he masturbated constantly. It sapped his energy and made him depressed. Only a girl could save him from himself. That girl could have been Di, but he liked his women curvaceous and wild. Di was too flat-chested to interest him. If truth be told, Tianyi was the one he really fancied. She was a lovely young woman, married but with the quiet simplicity of a girl and, best of all, she had curves. However, she also had an air of dignity that awed him and put her far out of his reach.
Now a girl had finally appeared to rescue him. She was in her final year studying piano at the Conservatoire and had heard him gabbling away at a meeting. Somehow that touched her sympathies. On their first date, in the park, they got down to some serious petting. He gave Tianyi a blow-by-blow account, making her blush with his frankness: ‘She undid her bra so I could feel her breasts,’ he stammered. ‘Then she pushed my hand down there …’
‘Is she pretty?’
‘No, but she’s curvy, and she’s really hot.’
‘So she fits the bill?’ Tianyi asked with a touch of sarcasm.
‘Yes, yes she does,’ Jin went pink. ‘So I need your help, I’ve been wanting to do an experiment, to watch a girl’s reaction to having sex …’
‘That’s not fair, if she really loves you …’
‘But I might fall in love with her during the experiment. So there’s nothing unfair about it …’
‘It’s crazy.’
As with everything else, Tianyi told Lian all about it. To her astonishment, Lian not only did not condemn Jin, he evinced great enthusiasm for the plan and, of his own accord, went looking for a room. This gave Tianyi a whole new level of respect for him.
The one he found was next-door to their own apartment, and belonged to a friend of Lian’s on the Planning Commission. He had gone abroad for six months and left Lian with a set of keys so he could keep an eye on the place.
Jin was hugely grateful, but Tianyi had a few more chores now, as she had to take them a thermos of boiling water, and sometimes breakfast too. Naturally enough she got to meet the luckless girl who was to become the object of the sexual experiment. It was true she was not pretty, but she was very fair-skinned and her full, high breasts strained against her T-shirt. To Tianyi, the older woman, she was shy and deferential. With Jin, according to him, she was sexually voracious. She liked it dozen times a day and Jin began to flag.
‘She twists her head on the pillow when we’re having sex. What does that mean, is it from pleasure …?’ Tianyi was amused and entertained at the things he told her, until she realized he was staring at her own breasts, which she did not like at all.
‘Anything else? Off you go then!’ she would interrupt him brusquely.
‘We … we need more condoms … the last lot got used up …’ he stammered.
Tianyi felt as if she was trapped in a world of make-believe, forced to play the clowning assistant.
One day, Jin brought a big stack of photographs to show her, all nude pictures of the girl, in all kinds of poses, some of them very revealing. ‘These are a bit over the top,’ Tianyi remonstrated. ‘Did you force her into this?’ ‘No … it was her, she wanted to do it. Are all girls a bit masochistic?’
His question struck home and Tianyi shivered. Was she masochistic? It seemed like it. Her sex life had never given her any pleasure. Was it because Lian was just too nice to her? Too gentle? Did she need someone a bit rougher? Not too rough, she wasn’t looking for violence, just a masculine sexuality, a masculine strength. If the man wasn’t strong then the woman wouldn’t be gentle. A man had to be a man before a woman could be a woman. Some men could penetrate, caress, embrace a woman just by looking at her. Did such men still exist?
In time, Tianyi really did meet a man like this. It was two years later. Jin had gone to America, and the girl had graduated and been allocated a job back in her native Liaoning province. Tianyi was invited by a social science journal to a symposium in Zhangjiajie, Hunan. Zhangjiajie, an area of mountains and forests, had only just opened to tourism and its gorgeous scenery was still pristine. The journal had invited a group of top scholars to attend. Tianyi was the only woman present, and so enjoyed privileged treatment. And there she met Xiao’ou, spotted him straightaway. A guide took the whole group out for an evening stroll along Golden Creek. Tianyi hummed as she walked, infected with an almost irrepressible excitement, her footsteps dancing in time to the song in her head. She was still young, after all.
It was this renewed vitality that restored her to health, not the mini-confinement after the miscarriage, which had only added to her ailments. For instance, her fingers swelled up and she could not grip properly, and her periods became irregular and very heavy. The practitioner of Chinese medicine she consulted just said she ‘had deficiencies in her blood and her qi’ and prescribed endless herbal tonics. None of them did any good at all and she decided she might as well stop them. Her complexion was dull and sallow and there were dark rings around her eyes, although they were still bright.
Xiao’ou was a research student, with a job as a newspaper reporter and a talent for writing. He was tall and very handsome, with a husky, deep voice, and was a wonderful conversationalist. It was hard to find fault with him, in fact. It was an eight-hour bus ride from Changsha, the capital of Hunan, to Zhangjiajie and they sat next to each other and chatted all the way. There seemed to be so much to say. She did most of the talking and he listened attentively. She liked listeners who paid attention. She felt small and delicate next to a man of his stature, and she liked that feeling too.
As they got nearer to Zhangjiajie, the temperature began to drop. She was cold and huddled up in the seat. He noticed immediately and took off his down jacket and draped it around her shoulders. The jacket carried the smell of his body, and made her feel cosy and warm. In the course of eight hours, they became intimate, almost like lovers. Their fellow passengers even began to make jokes: ‘Hey, has the TV soap finished yet?’
He recommended Last Tango in Paris to her, and she did manage to get hold of it when she returned to Beijing. She watched it, flushing, her heart pounding. She did not understand why he would like a film like that. Of course, Marlon Brando was brilliant, but she did not like him in his old age, nor did she like this nightmarish sex.
After she got back to Beijing, they carried on meeting. He told her he wanted to go abroad, to set up some kind of ‘cultural enterprise’. She helped him by finding the right people and pulling strings. She brimmed with enthusiasm, unstinting in her efforts, especially happy to help someone that she liked.
Xiao’ou was always unhurried and unflustered. He often phoned her at unexpected moments and, when she heard his deep tones, it would give her a frisson of excitement. Once he said: ‘Why don’t you come over? I’m in the Erligou Hotel, room 203, we’re going to do a TV drama. The screenwriter and the actors are all here, come and meet them, talk through some ideas, they’re really keen to hear your ideas.’ ‘You’re so funny,’ she said. ‘How come you’re always doing something different, even TV dramas?’ He laughed: ‘Right, do you find that a bit of a let-down? This is the second TV play I’ve directed, the first was two years ago but it’s never been broadcast.’
So she went. There was a noisy scrum of people in the room. The screenwriter was the author of a best-selling book, The Complaint, a man called Dong. He wore his hair long and clearly thought he was the boss of the show. There was a lame man who walked with a stick, an attractive figure who had played a Christian priest in a previous role but this time was the male lead. The female lead was a stunner. She was dressed in a black leather coat and long, black boots that made her look like a Nazi Stormtrooper. Xiao’ou introduced her as Wenshu. Tianyi found her spirits dampened by how casual and relaxed Wenshu and Xiao’ou were together. She made an effort to act cheerful and laugh and joke but secretly wanted to make her excuses to leave at the first opportunity.