Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Wickedly Ruyu wondered if she should have told Celia about the death: no other stranger would feel the waste of Shaoai’s ambitions and desires or imagine her imprisonment in her body for twenty-one years as unreservedly as Celia would. Why not be lenient and let the loss of Shaoai be acknowledged? Who else would do that for Shaoai if not Celia? Certainly Shaoai’s mother must be suffering. Boyang had not mentioned Aunt in his email, but Ruyu knew she was alive: when Uncle had passed away a few years earlier, Boyang had emailed with the news. All mothers, though, mourn the deaths of their children, and a mother’s grief, like a mother’s love, offers little redemption. The world would be a kinder place if mothers, and mothers alone, were the judges of their children. Everyone would be absolved of her sins before her heart repents, everyone but you , Ruyu thought with a sudden rage: you — lonely, vicious, remorseless orphan.

Shaoai’s death had not taken Ruyu by surprise. Had she not been, by keeping an email address available to Boyang and by checking it regularly, waiting for Shaoai to die all along? Had he been waiting too, she wondered; had Moran? Little had bound them together but the waiting, which, all over now, would finally release them into a void, where even the keenest ears could not discern that they, like three unconnected music phrases, had once been in the same piece. Ruyu wondered what ripples the death had left in the other two hearts, but perhaps they had become immovable over the years, which she hoped, for the sake of their happiness, was the case.

Ruyu had not seen Moran or Boyang since she had left the country, but instinctively she knew that they had not forgotten her. Would it be a solace to them that they had not been forgotten by her, either? Other people in her past — her grandaunts, her two ex-husbands, Eric — she did not think about often. When she did, she thought of them incuriously, their lives, and in the case of her grandaunts, their deaths, affecting her little. But at least she had enough mercy for Moran and Boyang: sometimes she allowed herself to wonder about their current lives. It was their bad luck to have met her, their bad luck to have stumbled onto a battleground where they had had no reason to be. But to whom had the battleground belonged? Once upon a time Ruyu had thought that the battle was between herself and Shaoai, but the latter had not deserved to be her equal; it could have been between Ruyu and God, but she had been unwilling — was still unwilling — to grant him that position.

Suppose one could head into a battle without a definite enemy, and one could, with a blind resolution, leave a trail of corpses behind. If that were her lot Ruyu saw no point questioning it now. Moran and Boyang had been her casualties, yet in some way their lives must have been enhanced by her, too. This view, no doubt heartless to the world, comforted Ruyu: they had not been extraordinary people to start with. Years of living — quarreling with the surroundings, making do with small triumphs — would have worn out their innocence in the most banal way. Though it wasn’t innocence betrayed that made them interesting — innocence is always betrayed — but that neither Boyang nor Moran understood how to carry a burden as enduring as Shaoai, or why it was theirs.

God should have had mercy for Moran and Boyang, Ruyu thought; God should have let Shaoai die a long time ago. Willfully, wishfully, he changes his mind and adjusts a few minor details, but revision of the script — of any script whose creator is cursed with all-seeing eyes — must amount to little gratification. Does that make him feel lonely, abandoned even? Or bored, and enraged by his boredom?

You , Ruyu said in her heart to the god she had long stopped believing in, you have my sympathy .

Only once in her life had Ruyu been surprised — by Shaoai’s fingers and tongue, probing where they had no right to; and by her own paralytic silence, which must have been interpreted by Shaoai as acquiescence. Had that been in God’s script, too? If he’d intended other schemes for Ruyu, she had not let herself be caught again. He had beaten her that one time because he was God, and she had been young.

The bells on top of the door jingled. Ruyu tried to suppress her vexation — a customer was coming into the store, wanting something, or worse, not knowing what he or she wanted, demanding recommendations and later approval from Ruyu. Yet when she looked up it was only Edwin, who, both hands occupied with take-out bags from a nearby deli, walked sideways into the shop. Jamming his foot between the door and its frame, he let the door close gently so that the bells would rattle less.

She should have stood up to greet him, but for a moment Ruyu did not move, watching the door close behind Edwin in slow motion and wishing that someone would rush in, instantly bursting the bubble of stealthy quietness that was now enclosing the two of them.

“Hello,” Edwin said.

“Oh, it’s you,” Ruyu said. Why would anyone mute a bell that was supposed to ring?

“Are you closed?”

“No,” Ruyu said, trying to recover from her momentary frustration. “Did Celia send you not only to buy dinner but also to get treats?” she said. It must be one of those days when Celia couldn’t find enough inspiration to cook a dinner both aesthetically and nutritionally satisfying.

They were celebrating a coworker’s fiftieth birthday the following day, Edwin said, and he thought he would bring some sweets. Ruyu nodded at the display and told him to take his time. She should have been more accommodating, making recommendations, chatting about the children and their schoolwork, but the silenced bell had come back to her — not from this cozy boutique in the suburban town center that looked like a quaint Old West main street, but from the Beijing quadrangle half a lifetime ago. More often than not, the bell above the door to Shaoai’s house did not have a chance to jingle before Aunt hurried to cover it with an anxious hand. What was the point of having a bell if one had to constantly prevent it from ringing, Ruyu had thought then. Had she asked Uncle, he would have said that it was Aunt’s nature to want to save the bell from unnecessary wear, or that she did not want to disturb the bedridden Grandpa, but Ruyu knew Uncle only wanted to believe his answers. To have or not have a bell in the house: neither seems wrong, but to mute one that has been given a place is an act of inconsistency, to want comings and goings to be known and yet remain unknown at the same time. The furtive eagerness with which Aunt raced to reach the bell when she heard someone’s steps approach the door — Ruyu remembered it now, and shuddered with a violent resentment — was it not a kind of greediness, to be there, always there, to be the first person to greet those who came and the last person to say farewell to those departing?

“What do you think, Italian or French?” Edwin asked, studying the truffles. “Or you recommend neither?”

“Belgian,” Ruyu said, knowing that anything Edwin chose would, in the end, bear signs of poor judgment in Celia’s eyes. “How’s Celia?” she asked.

Concerned, as always, that their Thanksgiving dinner would not be a smooth success for her visiting parents, Edwin said. Ruyu nodded with sympathy. Last year Celia had been hurt when her parents decided to spend the holiday with her sister’s family. Two years in a row, Celia had said; not that she wanted the hassle of hosting them, but shouldn’t they give an explanation?

Edwin placed two boxes on the counter and watched Ruyu ring them up. “How are you feeling these days?” he said, his tone too casual to sound natural.

Ruyu looked up. Really, she thought, spending unnecessarily on two beautiful boxes of truffles just to ask a question like that? She placed the golden stickers with the shop’s logo on top of the boxes and smoothed them with her fingertips. That Edwin had refrained from relating their conversation to Celia could have been an oversight on his part; at least that was what Ruyu preferred to believe. “Why do you ask?” she said.