handsome and bright boy, as if his parents were awarded doubly for what had been taken away the first time—but who would’ve thought that such a success, instead of making their marriage a happier one, would turn his wife away from him? How arrogant he was to make the same mistake a second time, thinking he could outsmart life. What had survived the birth of Beibei did not survive Jian’s birth, as if his wife, against all common wisdom, could share misfortune with him but not happiness. For twenty years, they have avoided arguments carefully; they have been loving parents, dutiful spouses, but something that had made them crazy for each other as young cousins has abandoned them, leaving them in unshareable pain.
A finger taps Mr. Su’s shoulder. He opens his eyes and realizes that he has fallen asleep. “I’m sorry,” he says to the woman.
“You were snoring,” she says with a reproachful smile.
Mr. Su apologizes again. The woman nods and returns to the conversation with her companions. Mr. Su looks at the clock on the screen, too early for lunch still, but he brings out a bag of instant noodles and a mug from his bag anyway, soaking the noodles with boiling water from the drinking stand. The noodles soften and swell. Mr. Su takes a sip of soup and shakes his head. He thinks of going home and talking to his wife, asking her a few questions he has never gathered enough courage to ask, but then decides that things unsaid had better remain so. Life is not much different from the stock market—you invest in a stock and you stick, and are stuck, to the choice, despite all the possibilities of other mistakes.
At noon, the restaurant commissioned by the stockbrokerage delivers the lunch boxes to the VIP lounges, and the traders on the floor heat lunches in the microwave or make instant noodles. Mr. Su, who is always cheered up by the mixed smells of leftovers from other dinner tables, goes into a terminal booth in a hopeful mood. Someday, he thinks, when his wife is freed from taking care of Beibei, he’ll ask her to accompany him to the stockbrokerage. He wants her to see other people’s lives, full of meaningless but happy trivialities.
Mr. Su leaves the brokerage promptly at five o’clock. Outside the building, he sees Mr. Fong, sitting on the curb and looking up at him like a sad, deserted child.
“Mr. Fong,” Mr. Su says. “Are you all right? Why didn’t you come in and find me?”
Mr. Fong suggests they go for a drink, and then holds out a hand and lets Mr. Su pull him to his feet. They find a small roadside diner, and Mr. Fong orders a few cold plates and a bottle of strong yam wine. “Don’t you sometimes wish a marriage doesn’t go as long as our lives last?” Mr. Fong says over the drink.
“Is there anything wrong?” Mr. Su asks.
“Nothing’s right with the wife after she’s released,” Mr. Fong says.
“Are you going to divorce her?”
Mr. Fong downs a cup of wine. “I wish I could,” he says and starts to sob. “I wish I didn’t love her at all so I could just pack up and leave.”
BY LATE AFTERNOON Mrs. Su is convinced that Beibei is having problems. Her eyes, usually clear and empty, glisten with a strange light, as if she is conscious of her pain. Mrs. Su tries in vain to calm her down, and when all the other ways have failed, she takes out a bottle of sleeping pills. She puts two pills into a small porcelain mortar, and then, after a moment of hesitation, adds two more. Over the years she has fed the syrup with the pill powder to Beibei so that the family can have nights for undisturbed sleep.
Calmed by the syrup, Beibei stops screaming for a short moment, and then starts again. Mrs. Su strokes Beibei’s forehead and waits for the medicine to take over her limited consciousness. When the telephone rings, Mrs. Su does not move. Later, when it rings for the fifth time, she checks Beibei’s eyes, half closed in drowsiness, and then closes the bedroom door before picking up the receiver.
“Why didn’t you answer the phone? Are you tired of me, too?” Mrs. Fong says.
Mrs. Su tries to find excuses, but Mrs. Fong, uninterested in any of them, cuts her off. “I know who the woman is now.”
“How much did it cost you to find out?”
“Zero. Listen, the husband—shameless old man—he confessed himself.”
Mrs. Su feels relieved. “So the worst is over, Mrs. Fong.”
“Over? Not at all. Guess what he said to me this afternoon? He asked me if we could all three of us live together in peace. He said it as if he was thinking on my behalf. ‘We have plenty of rooms. It doesn’t hurt to give her a room and a bed. She is a good woman, she’ll take good care of us both.’ Taking care of his thing, for sure.”
Mrs. Su blushes. “Does she want to live with you?”
“Guess what? She’s been laid off. Ha ha, not a surprise, right? I’m sure she wants to move in. Free meals. Free bed. Free man. What comes better? Maybe she’s even set her eyes on our inheritance. Imagine what the husband suggested? He said I should think of her as a daughter. He said she lost her father at five and did not have a man good to her until she met him. So I said, Is she looking for a husband, or a stepfather? She’s honey-mouthing him, you see? But the blind man! He even begged me to feel for her pain. Why didn’t he ask her to feel for me?”
Something hits the door with a heavy thump, and then the door swings open. Mrs. Su turns and sees an old man leaning on the door, supported by her husband. “Mr. Fong’s drunk,” her husband whispers to her.
“Are you there?” Mrs. Fong says.
“Ah, yes, Mrs. Fong, something’s come up and I have to go.”
“Not yet. I haven’t finished the story.”
Mrs. Su watches the two men stumble into the bathroom. After a moment, she hears the sounds of vomiting and the running of tap water, her husband’s low comforting words, Mr. Fong’s weeping.
“So I said, Over my dead body, and he cried and begged and said all these ridiculous things about opening one’s mind. Many households have two women and one man living in peace now, he said. It’s the marriage revolution, he said. Revolution? I said. It’s retrogression. You think yourself a good Marxist, I said, but Marx didn’t teach you bigamy. Chairman Mao didn’t tell you to have a concubine.”
Mr. Su helps Mr. Fong lie down on the couch and he closes his eyes. Mrs. Su watches the old man’s tear-smeared face twitch in pain. Soon Mrs. Fong’s angry words blend with Mr. Fong’s snoring.
With Mr. Fong fast asleep, Mr. Su stands up and walks into Beibei’s room. One moment later, he comes out and looks at Mrs. Su with a sad and calm expression that makes her heart tremble. She lets go of the receiver with Mrs. Fong’s blabbering and walks to Beibei’s bedroom. There she finds Beibei resting undisturbed, the signs of pain gone from her face, porcelain white, with a bluish hue. Mrs. Su kneels by the bed and holds Beibei’s hand, still plump and soft, in her own. Her husband comes close and strokes her hair, gray and thin now, but his touch, gentle and timid, is the same one from a lifetime ago, when they were children playing in their grandparents’ garden, where the pomegranate blossoms, fire-hued and in the shape of bells, kept the bees busy and happy.
HIS STORY, AS THE STORY OF EVERY ONE OF us, started long before we were
