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.
21
Weiya Su came to see Mr. Yang the next afternoon. He was sleeping when she knocked on the door. I was surprised to see her because she seemed to me a different person now, difficult for me to understand. Her right arm was hooked around something heavy in a white cloth sack, pressed against her flank. She gave me a smile, which was so familiar and so good-natured that it induced me to say, “Come in. Why stand there?” The previous afternoon I had shaved Mr. Yang, washed his hair, and applied some lotion to his hands and cracked lips, so he looked presentable now, though his face was still puffy, like a loaf of stale bread.
“How is he today?” Weiya asked rather timidly.
“He’s okay, very quiet.”
“We shouldn’t wake him up.”
“All right, we won’t.”
To my amazement, she took a watermelon out of the sack, not a large one, but a seven- or eight-pounder. Where on earth did she get this? I asked myself. It was springtime, not the season for watermelons. At this time of the year, most fruit stores in town had only dried and canned fruits for sale except for fresh apricots and overripe plantains. The latter came from the tropical Hainan Island, very expensive.
Weiya noticed the surprise on my face and said of the watermelon, “I bought it at Swans.”
I nodded without speaking. Swans was a supermarket owned by a Hong Kong man who had invested millions of dollars in Shanning City, mainly in restaurants and retail businesses. The supermarket was the first one on the Western model opened here. I had never been there, but heard that it offered many kinds of fresh produce, all at a tripled or quadrupled price. It wasn’t a place where people living on regular wages would go shopping. I was amazed Weiya could be so openhanded; she had only a meager stipend like mine.
She stepped closer to Mr. Yang and bent forward a little to inspect his swollen face, which had lost its energetic features. She went on biting the tip of her tongue and opened her mouth from time to time, as if trying to say something but unable to get it out. Her eyes darkened, their lids flickering. She kept her hands on her sides the whole time, and her fingers twisted in her green sweater. Then her egg-shaped face softened, a smile emerging like a child’s, as if she intended to invoke some response from Mr. Yang, who remained expressionless, still asleep. Noiselessly I slipped out and closed the door behind me. I meant to leave them alone out of respect for their privacy. I had done this without a second thought.