"Yes," he said finally.
"Do I need to explain more?" she asked softly.
He shook his head, and felt his heart burst into bloom. So she did want him! Couldn’t he be sure now? She did. Sometimes it had seemed so clear-the way she was looking at him, talking to him. Zai shuo, he’d told himself so many times, she was a foreign woman. An outside woman. What did he know about such creatures? And what if he moved to couple with her and he was wrong and he grievously offended her-what bitterness might rain down on him then?
"What about Dr. Spencer?" he asked with difficulty. "The way I’ve seen you touch him, I thought perhaps-"
"No!" she cried. "There is nothing between us. That’s just being American. We are more suibian in America. It’s a friendly thing. Please. Believe me."
He smiled in relief. "Then what do you say I shall do?"
She thought. "Go with me now? Let’s walk around the city."
He stood and held out his hand. They stepped over a warm, messy pile of undershirts, socks, and trousers on their way out.
They followed Sun Yat-sen to Shanxi Avenue, which cut across the center of the city. She watched him. Would he tell her about himself now? It was odd that she didn’t know. Most Chinese, once they got comfortable with her, immediately and at considerable length spun out their life stories. Especially they detailed all that they had suffered during the Chaos.
Not that it had always been that way. In the seventies, she’d heard, everyone was furtive and afraid. Eyes down. But by the time she first came to China in the early eighties Mao had died and it had all erupted, everyone talking at her, talking, telling her their terrible stories. At the time it had seemed to her like a strange, sudden, ad-hoc form of Chinese opera, this verborrhea, so extravagantly histrionic. So like the squealingly choreographed dramas, played to audiences who knew the story already, knew it intimately, could then appreciate it as they laughed, applauded, gossiped, ate, and spat. The Luanshi,the Chaos.
"Did you have a bad time in the Chaos?" she asked softly. They had come to a park, and walked now under the trees.
"You can’t imagine it," he said tightly.
"I believe you’re wrong about that," she answered, which made him look at her. Inside, she thought: You should tell me, because I know all about holding and hiding. I could help you.
"Eh, Xiao Mo, I’m sorry." He stared at their scuffling feet. "If it was I who suffered, I could talk about it. I know, most people have told it all, they told it years ago and now it’s a boiling river that has finally run out of them and left them in peace. But it was not I who was hurt. My wife would express only the truth-and she was the one who was taken. Not me. Do you understand me or not?"
"You mean you feel guilty. Because you survived. And it was Meiyan, and you don’t like to talk about Meiyan."
"Yes. Especially-" he stopped.
Especially to me, she thought willfully, because you have feelings for me. Say it.
"Especially to you," he said, looking at her.
A group of rough-cotton-clad men brushed by them, talking boisterously in Mongolian. After several solid blocks of cement low-rises they were passing a temple, with its ornate red pillars and curving golden roofs. Rustling acacias stretched out in front of them along the sidewalk.
"Will you talk about her now?" she whispered.
"If it is what you want."
Ask him. Just ask him.
"Do you still love her?"
He stopped and looked down at her. "Yes. I’ve never stopped."
She looked frozen back up into his face.
"Eh, Xiao Mo." He sighed. "It’s true that she has been gone for more than twenty years. But I never got any definite answer… so in my heart, and according to the law, I am still married. I was never willing to denounce her. Do you understand me or not?"
"Of course I do," she said. "But Dr. Lin, that was years ago. You have heard nothing for so long, isn’t it so? Don’t you think-"
"I think she is my airen," he said simply, stubbornly, with an edge in his voice.
She felt stung. Airen, Loved one, the word that meant a wife, or a husband-for life. Caution, she thought.
"And it’s a strange thing," he continued. "In some way my feeling for her is even greater now than when we were together in life."
Alice felt numb. Teilhard had written about that to Lucile: Sometimes I think that this very privation I must impose youmakes me ten times more devoted to you. "It’s a… level of commitment," Alice said, not sure how to respond.
"Yes," he said, looking at her strangely, "very Chinese- commitment."
"Not just Chinese," she corrected him. "All people feel this way." She knew he probably thought Western women were loose, casual, suibian. As she’d been up until recently-up until now, as a matter of fact. But she was through with that. She was going to start a new life.
"I don’t know if all people are the same," he said. "I am Chinese. I made the commitment to my wife and I have held to it. Though lately"-he looked at her-"I begin to wonder."
Oh, this man could change, Alice thought with a streak of hope. He could. She laid her hand briefly, sympathetically, on his arm. It was the same American gesture that had made him jump like a frightened animal in the middle of the night, in the garden at the Number One. This time-though they were in public, in daylight, in a crowd-he responded by touching her hand lightly with one finger.
"My life has also been hard," Alice ventured.
He looked down, his face open.
"I mean my father. He’s an elected official, very famous, I think I told you, but I am so ashamed of his beliefs. He is a racist. He thinks whites are superior to all the other races in the world."
"You mean blacks."
"I mean everyone."
"Including Chinese?"
"Yes."
Lin snorted in disbelief.
"Of course I don’t agree with such things."
"No."
"But I am his daughter. It follows me everywhere."
"Terrible."
She saw the sympathy in his face and felt that she did not have to explain the Alice Speech, the thirty-year march of civil rights, the terrible immorality of racism in America. Because the immoralities in China had been equal-maybe greater- though different. And there were certainly leaders in China whose children struggled under shame the same way she did.
"So that is the thing in you I can feel," Lin said softly. "Some bitterness. Is it your father?"
"Horace," she corrected him. "Yes. And perhaps my mother too-I never had one. She died when I was a baby."
"Zhen bu rongyi, "he said, with genuine sympathy. She felt him wanting to touch her.
"Let’s sit a moment," he said. They had come to a grassy area of stone benches flanked by beds of hollyhocks. In front of them rose the ancient, pagoda-style drum tower.
A northern-type opera was being performed at the foot of the tower on a makeshift wooden stage. A few old men carrying wooden birdcages had gathered to watch the actors shriek and strike their poses through the story. She rather liked the sound of opera. She liked it the way she liked the sound of a baseball game on the radio-which in fact, she hated, just as much as she actually hated Chinese opera if she had to sit down and watch it. But both Chinese opera and baseball, as background noise, gave her a secure and filled-up feeling. She had a childhood memory of Horace listening to baseball on the radio.
Now she and Lin sat on the stone bench while the female impersonators in their brilliant face paint flourished their fake gilt-crusted fingernails, and the old men swung their birdcages and cracked sunflower-seed shells between their teeth and laughed their bubbly phlegm laughs, and a boy in mended clothes beside the stage beat on the big brass gong.
Suddenly Lin reached over, took her hand in his, and squeezed it. Then he let go of her hand, and returned his hand to his lap. She looked. He was immobile, but his whole frame blazed with alertness. She loved this quality in Chinese men, this physical hyperawareness, this restraint. It was like a guide wire, anchored in her softest heart.