Can Xue - The Last Lover

Joe couldn’t get used to Maria saying strange things, although she’d always had this habit. Her strangeness had been passed on to the two African cats. Not long before, the brown-striped female had even bitten their son.

“A man goes to work as usual, returns home on time, and has no vices, but is still seen every day at his mistress’s house. Isn’t this odd? Is it possible there’s another man? Yet he’s admitted to it. Lisa’s desperate. She’s up against something sinister.”

Maria returned to her loom as she spoke, alternating her sentences with the weaving of a few strands. As Joe fixed his gaze on the enormous scorpion, he felt a gust of cold air at his back. The whole room was filled with dense, cold air. Maria began to rock back and forth in front of him as though she were floating in a thin mist, and at Joe’s feet that treacherous cat was crouching. He staggered, trying to fight free of it so he could go upstairs to his study. Maria was mumbling to herself, but when Joe turned back to look, the seat next to the loom was empty. Where was her voice coming from?

It was only when he was seated at his writing desk opening a book by a Japanese author that Joe’s head finally cleared. He read the story aloud at the top of his voice, with a profound feeling that his life of late had been reversed, and everyday life transformed into a dreamland, one that was like a chain of interlocking rings. Even though the story Joe was reading was set in the East, the young woman wearing geta sandals walked leisurely into a square that he had already constructed in his mind two months ago, a place surrounded by parasol trees. She hid behind the thick trunk of one of the trees, and only a triangle from the lower hem of her kimono was revealed by the blowing wind. Joe read until his eyes grew dim and he had to stop.

As Joe and Maria sat together in the kitchen eating dinner, the cat ran over to them unexpectedly and wound itself around Joe’s legs, rubbing back and forth against his trousers and purring, wu wu . Maria’s gray eyes were calm and shone with light as she gazed directly at Joe. He was bending over to pat the cat on the back when his hand burst out in pricks of heat. Was it possible for the cat’s body to be electrified? Did Maria have such mystical power? Joe looked at his wife, puzzled. Her expression was rapt. Was she waiting for something to happen? What did she actually do at home all day, aside from household tasks? It seemed that his energetic wife had already made this house into a small personal kingdom.

Joe’s son Daniel was seventeen years old. He was at boarding school out west and came home only twice a year. It wasn’t clear exactly why, but the relationship between father and son was one of indifference, in part at least because each was inclined to be absorbed in his own little world. Joe didn’t know what his son’s interests were, but in Daniel’s vacant gray eyes he recognized the yellowed photographs of his own early youth. In general, Daniel was more at ease with his mother, and this was apparent also from his relationship with the two cats. It was as if the ghostly animals played the leading roles in a conspiracy planned by Maria and her son — Joe couldn’t help harboring this suspicion. He once encountered mother and son squatting under the flower trellis behind the house, discussing the two cats in voices alternately raised and lowered. Meanwhile, the cats crouched proudly on top of a stone table, holding their bodies very straight, as if they wouldn’t deign to pay the slightest attention to the talk of the humans. When Joe appeared, the conversation broke off short.

“My uncle’s family is taking this tapestry. Tomorrow they’ll be here to pick it up. Now I feel an emptiness in my heart.”

Maria cleared away the plates as she spoke.

“Why don’t you weave a story? One that contains all possible designs, where there’s nothing that can’t be worked in?” Joe said the first thing that came into his head, and regretted it immediately. He worried that his wife might question him more closely.

“I don’t have any such story in my mind, so how could I weave it? Watch out. You’re stepping on the cat’s tail.”

The cat shrieked in pain and ducked away. Joe stood awkwardly, then returned to his study upstairs. He carried the book by the Japanese author to the bathroom and continued to read on the toilet. There was a sumo match in the book. The huge body of a wrestler from the north, Xiao Jing, was pushed off the stage and his young son was crushed to death. The wrestler’s mournful silhouette disappeared into the dense mass of spectators. The loudspeakers started to broadcast an amazing sort of dirge. The music wasn’t sorrowful — it sounded like joyousness that was being firmly repressed by something. When he’d read this far, Joe’s eyes grew dim. Returning to the study, he became aware of how the story he’d been reading, set in the East, and the West, where he was in person, were converging on each other to form a separate, alternative space. He closed the book and turned his exhausted face to look behind him and up. This time a different story flourished in that different place, and a triangle of azure kimono hovered in midair. He heard the cat scratching at the door of the study, and it occurred to him: let the cat go ahead into this square, too. . where a rank of black dogs crouched in stillness off to the side.

Joe’s room was a typical bachelor’s bedroom. There were no pictures on the walls, no decorations, and only a few unconnected yellowed photographs set in copper frames. Of the photos, one was of a hat, another of a walking stick, another a tobacco pipe, and still others were enlargements of objects like false teeth or screws. There were some photographs where you simply couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be, such as a rectangular picture that looked like a brown path with something a little bit like porridge and a little bit like pigment flowing out of it. It left you feeling ignorant. The furnishings in Joe’s bedroom were conservative and compact, and no one could have discovered from them that their owner was a man of complex thoughts. Joe didn’t smoke, but there was an ashtray on the bedstand, and inside the ashtray a few small bones from when he’d had an operation on his knee. About five or six years earlier Maria had developed insomnia, and the couple now kept separate rooms. With Maria gone, Joe had quietly remade the bedroom into a bachelor pad. No cats or dogs were allowed inside. He realized that he was growing more eccentric as time passed. Maria’s bedroom was on the far side of his study. Before it had been bright and spacious, but Maria had taken dark curtains and shaded the two windows, and even during the day she kept a small purple lamp lit. One day Joe found himself thinking of her, and he walked over to her room. It was filled with a perfume that was familiar to him. Maria was just getting up and dressing. Without turning around she said to Joe: “You’ve come too late, Joe. How can you keep these things in your mind constantly? Look at this lamp: it burns day and night in my heart, making the pitch-black places shine brightly.”

They still went to bed together, and Joe was astonished by his wife’s fervor. There were even some things she desired that were unfamiliar to him, and at the height of her excitement her body stiffened upward and Joe saw two small purple lights shining in her deep, indistinct gray eyes. From that time on, Joe had not entered his wife’s bedroom. He was frightened of the abyss of her desire, and even thinking of it made his spine turn cold. “How can Maria be like this? She doesn’t love me at all.” Occasionally Joe would be sick at heart, thinking, “And then, she’s so lonely, although there’s Daniel. But he doesn’t call or write from school.”