Can Xue - The Last Lover

Vincent and Lisa vanished without a trace, all the way up to the end of the workday. Joe figured they must have gone someplace in the city, the two of them calling out unceasingly but extremely distant from each other. If they were to meet, they would have to cross a river. But the sky was already dark; the water was very deep; there were no boats on its banks. Joe walked to the bar on the corner. He looked inside and saw Reagan drinking alone at a table. Hadn’t he gone back home earlier? Joe stood riveted in place, staring. Reagan chased one glass with another, as if he were drinking water. There were some papers spread out on the table that might be the contract they had signed in the morning. He remembered what Reagan had said at the time, “The reenactment of tragedy is sometimes necessary.” Afterward, he’d affixed his signature to the agreement. Now he had spread the contract out on the table in the bar to look it over, but what was he after? Was he still thinking of those two workers drowned at the farm? His jacket had a dark stain on it. Probably he’d vomited. Even then the barkeeper didn’t make him leave. Maybe he needed customers; the place was really desolate. He stood behind the counter, obviously watching every movement of this drunkard, so as to intervene at any moment. Joe didn’t want to go in because in their relationship Reagan always took the role of the leader. When Joe thought of that scorching, glittering farmland, he grew dizzy, feeling himself inferior. Reagan lived there year in and year out, but he still ran to the gloomy city every so often. On the surface he came to do business and sign contracts, but who knew what he really came for? Every time he proclaimed that he was going back that same day. Could it be that every time was like today, when he didn’t go back but came instead to this low kind of place to soak himself in liquor? Reagan raised his blood-red eyes and stared in Joe’s direction. Joe knew Reagan hadn’t discovered him standing outside the window; he was terribly drunk.

“Do you remember Reagan, the farmer from the rubber tree plantation in the south?” he asked Maria.

“Yes, he’s a real man.”

Maria was putting a finished piece of tapestry into her chest. Joe realized that she had been selling fewer pieces. She seemed to be storing up tapestries. And she couldn’t afford to spend money as freely as before. Joe couldn’t help feeling sorry for her because she was giving up a few of her favorite extravagances.

“The sun must have fried that man’s brains,” Joe said.

“Nonsense. He’s a born thief, I can tell. He doesn’t have any brains.”

Maria locked the small trunk and drew out the key. Joe saw electric sparks, this time breaking out from the key. Maria made a sign to Joe, then turned and went out to the garden. He followed her closely.

A small table was set among the rosebushes, and a large pot of tea was set on the table.

Maria drank a sip of tea and said, “Did you know that from here Daniel and I can see everything in your study clearly?”

Joe was surprised and craned his neck in that direction, but he couldn’t see anything except a dark red brick wall and the creamy white balcony.

“Spectators have the clearest view of what goes on.” Maria smiled.

The Maria who lived in that house with its own garden wasn’t content with her middle-class existence, so she had developed a fascination with mystical experiments. Joe realized that she was conducting these experiments almost every minute of the day, and he also realized that they intimidated him. This was probably why he had hidden himself in his stories in the first place. There was another thing that bothered Joe, which was that after she started the experiments — with the tapestries, the roses, the cats all becoming her props — Maria grew extremely independent. Now even if Joe were to leave her and live elsewhere, she probably wouldn’t care much. Her relationship with Daniel was comparatively close. Joe believed that information often passed between them even though they were rarely together. Take the roses: to those two they acted as a magnetic field, but they had no such effect on Joe. The day when Maria sat there with Daniel and Joe had stuck his head out from the study, listening to their voices floating in midair, he was simply amazed. But today, as Joe listened to Maria, there was something masking her voice. Her body wrapped in a blue checkered skirt looked fake. He listened to himself speaking, and his voice was rebuffed, blocked by a metal plate that left behind a ca ca screeching. Maria extended a hand and held Joe tight when she saw he was trembling.

“Joe, how many years has this been going on?” She squinted her slightly narrow eyes, with an expression of one doing her utmost to remember something.

Joe mused that the answer she was seeking lay in his unfinished story. Maria held some event deep in her heart, such that every few years, no matter what decade it was, she would ask this same question. Perhaps that event hadn’t even taken place at a given time. All the periods of time she referred to were only periods that she differentiated for herself.

“I don’t know. I want my voice to carry, but it just makes a din around my ears.” Joe forced a smile. He was still trembling. He couldn’t remember his story.

Not long after they ate dinner, Maria disappeared into her room. Joe noticed that she’d even turned out the lamps. Joe knew she wasn’t asleep: she had a habit of mulling over her secrets in the dark. He had once compared her way of thinking to a tuberose coming into full bloom. Joe sat in his study and continued reading the third page of his book, gently fiddling with the mantis in his hand. The sentences snuck past his eyes until he felt he was being separated from the story. Joe too shut off the lights and sat in the lonesome dark thinking of Reagan’s rubber tree plantation. He had a sudden intuition that Reagan still hadn’t left. The bar was already closed, so where would the drunk have gone?

Joe emerged onto the street. He didn’t find Reagan, but he did run into the black woman he saw every morning.

“Sir, are you looking for someone?” the woman stopped walking to ask, furrowing her eyebrows as she spoke.

“Yes. He’s not from around here, and he’s drunk.”

“Go look in the underground crosswalk. He’s there crying.”

The woman walked away.

But the underpass was empty. It looked like Reagan had already left. The underground crosswalk was very gloomy at night; it brought out thoughts of homicide. It must have been an extreme compulsion from his heart that drove Reagan to pass from the magnificent sky of the south to this kind of place. When Maria said he was “a real man,” this was what she meant. Joe recalled Reagan’s appearance when he’d come to the office in years past, when Joe had thought of him as an optimist.

Coming out of the walkway, Joe took a few deep breaths in the damp night air. He felt he could go back to the story he’d just abandoned.

On the plantation of rubber trees in the south, under the scorching summer sun, Reagan realized that little by little he was losing his mind. Reagan was an orphan. In his youth he’d gone into the tobacco business with his uncle, earned a bit of money, and bought this farm. He hadn’t been able to finish school, so his knowledge was earned through tenacious self-study. Still, without formal teaching this auto-didact had become an educated man, a stern but commonsensical farm owner. He enjoyed physical labor and at times went out himself to tap rubber, gather lotuses, and the like. Although women tended to indulge him, he was already fifty and still alone in the world. Reagan felt that his body was encased in a hard kind of shell, and that his motions toward socializing could not break through because the shell had grown along with his body. He suspected that his heart, too, had grown a hard shell.