"Well…" Alice hesitated. Lu Ming, of course, had only been reserved on the surface. He had woven his net around her with words, looks, the touch of his foot under the table. But when he had gotten her alone, he-like most of the men she picked up-had driven right into her. No reserve. Not like Jian. Jian had understood sex the way that she, all her life, had understood music, and then later, language. He was aware of it: the thousand ways of touching, breathing, smelling, the rhythmic exchange of physical innuendoes. The theme and variations. She sometimes realized-faintly, as if from a distance-that she was going from one to another in search of a man like him. A man with all his subtlety, his intelligence, but a man-unlike Jian-who was willing to accept and love her true self. Though what was her true self? The vodka was like a bubble now, pushing against the top of her brain. She laughed. "I suppose I’m holding out for the true Chinese man-the type who waits until he has a woman’s heart. When a man like that delivers, watch out."
"But it’s just love that does that, isn’t it?" Spencer asked, syllables starting to get mushed. "You can be English or Eskimo or anything. It’s when you truly love someone that happens."
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back over the top of the chair.
"Don’t you want love?" he pressed on. He carried his cup to the spot where his mouth was supposed to be, slopped a few drops over the side. "Don’t you want to get married, settle down? What about kids? Don’t you want to have kids?"
"Yes," she said. "Absolutely."
"I bet your dad wants you to have kids."
"You mean Horace. Of course he wants grandchildren, but only if they’re Anglo-Saxon. That’s Horace."
"You never call him Dad?"
"Horace. Look-he’s my father. But I don’t call him Dad, or Daddy. Dads take care of their kids, and help them, and let them be whatever they want to be. They let them grow up. We’re not a family that way, Horace and I. We’re-" She stopped, stuck, not sure how to say what in fact they were. A diagram. A pattern formed by a famous politician and his daughter. Locked together. The man loving the daughter deeply, but too overpowering to know how to let her live. And the daughter needing his love, but unable to bear it.
Was this the price of Alice’s life? And why did her price seem to be so much higher than everyone else’s? She thought of what Teilhard had written about evolution: Every synthesiscosts something… Something is finally burned in the course ofevery synthesis in order to pay for that synthesis. Well, she had paid, certainly. Paid and burned. Why didn’t things change? "I really do want love," she said nakedly to Adam now. "I do. I’m just waiting for it."
"You and Lucile," he said, meaning it as a joke, not meaning to hurt her, but cutting through her with the words nonetheless. Because Lucile had succumbed to self-deception. Lucile had told herself Pierre would leave his order for her, and had ended up waiting all her life in vain. As she wrote in her diary: I suppose a lot of the things I have been living on were built by myown imagination-that is not his fault…
Lucile, alone in the bitter sea, with only a priest at her side.
But Alice’s life was going to be different.
"To love," she said resolutely to Spencer, and they drank.
That night, small and shiny with sweat, the vodka worn off, she lay in bed thinking about it. She was thirty-six. Old. But there was still time to change, wasn’t there? And now Mother Meng was dead. Alice sighed and twisted to one side in the sheets, staring through the window.
The street outside was empty now, it was past midnight. Quiet had settled like snow, and the only sound she heard was the far-off approach of the cricket vendor. This was a sound she loved, a sound of old China: the surging waves of cricket song, and under it the sad creak of the vendor’s bicycle wheels. The man approached and then seemed to pause under her window.
The chorus of crickets. It always carried her back to Houston, Texas, to running along the top of Buffalo Bayou in the dusk, the trees, the path, the bayou banks blurring to something else. Black stick or cottonmouth snake? Jump over it. Do the others hate you? Show them. You want to change yourself? Leap. Just leap.
She concentrated on the sound of crickets, and the smell of the cigarette the cricket man was smoking. She slid out of bed and to the window: yes, there it was, the leaning bicycle, the hundreds of tiny woven cages. The man was staring, shave headed, white capped, off down the deserted street. No, this was not Houston, it was bleach-dry Ningxia. And outside there was only the oasis night, the dim boxy shapes of concrete buildings, the spires of the mosque.
She gave up finally, dressed in the dark, and slipped out of Building Three. The hotel courtyard was silent except for the small slapping of fish in the pond. She padded down the covered walkway and found a spot on the little bridge that curved over the dark water. To one side was a decrepit gazebo; to the other beds of hollyhocks, bunched between intersecting stone paths. Everything had been laid out in the spirit of formal Chinese gardens, the kind that were popular back East, in towns like Suzhou and Hangzhou and Shanghai, where the affluent men of the Ming and Qing had had the time and money to create them. Here in the Number One the gardeners had made do with a pond, some aging carp, and an arched bridge cast from concrete. They had managed to raise big deciduous trees, not often seen here in Ningxia, but most of these were clumped against the two-story hotel buildings. It was a pleasant spot, if out of place. Sitting here, it didn’t feel like Yinchuan, an oasis at the intersection of two deserts. A flowering patch of farmland at the foot of the Helan Shan range.
Teilhard had loved the Helan Shan, had written rapturous letters about the ways in which their purple peaks rose up to God. In the shadow of those mountains he had found his proof, Paleolithic proof. But it didn’t help. Man was doomed in the Garden, they told him.
A waste, she thought, staring at the trees waving and whispering by the wall of Building Two.
There was a movement in the trees, near the door to the building: a person, perhaps, or an animal, or just a rippling bush. The motion detached and wove through the plots of hollyhock. Something white glimmered about its upper half-a shirt, maybe, pale and detached in the darkness.
A man. She squinted.
He came toward her. Only when he was almost upon her could she see it was Dr. Lin.
"Shuibu-zhao?" he whispered, Can’t sleep? and squatted beside her. A carp broke the water and slid under again. Dr. Lin folded his arms over his knees.
"How did you know I was here?"
"Meiyou zhidao. " I didn’t.
Then there was quiet for a stretch, in the temporarily unreal night world of the Number One courtyard. They sat so close, their legs were almost touching. She knew he spoke no English at all, so her thoughts, her mind, her senses, slid entirely into Chinese. "Dr. Lin. Do you ever wish you were somebody else?"
"Trouble you to repeat?"
"Do you wish your life had been different?"
He made a chuckle, but it was a hollow sound. "Of course, but I don’t think of it that way. We Chinese can’t think that way. It’s different here. I don’t know if you can understand."
"I think I can," she countered. "I have worked here a long time. I have listened to many people’s tales."
"So you have," he said, looking briefly into her face. Privately he thought: She knows a lot. But whether or not she knew about the insides of a man after the Chaos, the barren soul, the fields sown with salt-he could not tell.
"I know it was bad," she said in a softer voice, respectful, knowing something terrible must have happened with his wife.
He nodded.
She sighed, aware that he saw her as an outsider. They all did, at first. If he got to know her, he would see that she was more Chinese than American. Wasn’t she? Sometimes, when she looked back on the thick, damp air of Houston, she wondered if she had ever really lived there at all, if it had been anything other than a strange dream of before. Not that Dr. Lin would have understood this. Not that she felt ready to say it.