Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

A tenderness stirred in him: he had already known her more than perhaps he was willing to. Every question to which one seeks an answer will inevitably come back, a boomerang to cut into one’s flesh. She was not armored against that danger as she might have thought; no, she was not protected at all: only those who do not seek answers are safe from being touched.

“I’m asking,” Sizhuo started to answer, then paused to reconsider. “I suppose I’m asking about what you, yourself, think.”

Boyang felt a surge of satisfaction, as though he had won a hard battle against a battalion of men, their indistinctive faces retreating fast. “I think of myself as a conventional man in this aspect, and so of course I take it that I’ve asked you out on a date,” he said, keeping his expression thoughtful. “However, you’re asking for more honesty, so I’ll give you more: only very tentatively do I consider this a date.”

“Why tentatively?”

“Because such a conversation should not be happening on a date, don’t you think? When people are wholehearted about any kind of business, they don’t analyze and question why they are there in the first place.”

“I see,” Sizhuo said, and Boyang thought she looked a little defeated. During their first meeting, she had seemed to enjoy herself more, though their conversation had been less demanding then: she had talked about her work and her childhood in the northern village; he had asked her questions, and in turn gave a few harmless details about his own life.

Neither spoke. The conversation seemed to be going off in an unexpected direction, though Boyang could not decide if he was disappointed. There was no reason for him to be in this girl’s life, and he should be glad that she had the good sense to question his presence. All the same, he wanted to hold on to her a little longer; he even wanted to confide in her — but confide what? he thought, alarmed. The girl seemed to have a center, perhaps unknown to her, like a mysterious vacuum, which effortlessly drew him toward her. Could it be youth, or innocence, that was doing the trick? No, that must not be it. He thought of the other girl from years ago, the orphan who had made a fool of him. There was nothing youthful or innocent in Ruyu even back then; still, the same vacuum, dangerous in that case, had been there to draw him in. Boyang raised the teacup to calm himself. People don’t vanish from one’s life; they come back in disguise.

“Suppose we aren’t really on a date,” Sizhuo said. “Then what do we do now? We shake hands and say good-bye, right?”

Boyang pointed at his watch. “We’ve only been sitting here for twenty minutes,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit rushed to say farewell now?”

“But is it?” She gazed at him.

“Did you come today just to find out if we’re on a date?”

“Perhaps.”

“And now that you know the answer, you’re ready to take off,” he said. “Not even inclined to stay for a friendly chat?”

“What’s the point of a friendly chat when we’re not even friends?”

Indeed, they were no more than strangers who had caught each other’s eye by happenstance — a smile, a nod, eyebrows raised in surprise or marvel or bafflement, but what one should not ask for, and thus should not be granted, is the right to linger. To breach the contract of transience — whether to indulge oneself in the belief that much more could happen, or to have merely an undisturbed moment to ponder the impossibility of making something out of this, or any kind of, encounter — is to overreach, to demand clarity from life’s muddiness. Certainly Boyang’s ache for permanency, his ache to make sense out of the nonsensical, should have been cured by now. Why couldn’t he simply agree with the girl, wish her a happy life without him, and part ways amicably? Yet he was not ready to let her go. She seemed to be living in a universe of her own making, but how could she — how could anyone — live so seriously and so blindly? Where did her fallibility hide itself? Her lack of corruption reminded him of the folktale in which a child could turn a rock into a piece of gold, yet remained oblivious to the fact that this capacity — more than it would make him rich — would launch him into an unredeemable life: my child, the world is a much worse place than you can ever imagine.

Boyang did not know whether he was jealous of Sizhuo or angry at her on behalf of the world that had already gone bad. It was not exactly an urge to protect that made him linger, nor a desire to destroy, but if she was destined to lose that universe of her own making, he wanted to be the one responsible — he, the corruptor who beat all other corruptors. “It takes time and effort to find a friend in this city, no?” he said. “Why not give us some time?”

“Friendship happens,” Sizhuo said.

“But not love?”

“Love happens, too.”

“So neither is something we can strive for? Or should I say, I’m given no hope in either category?”

Sizhuo looked at Boyang quizzically. He wondered if he had been unwittingly aggressive, but he had little — or too much — to lose: in either case, one was allowed a deviation from the protocol. “How about this?” he said, pointing to the window; across the street, on the side of a building, was a billboard for a fitness center. “I have a membership to the gym there. There are six badminton courts on the second floor, and we can go there once a week to play badminton. We don’t even have to talk if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t know how to play badminton,” Sizhuo said.

Boyang wanted to kick himself for his oversight. Certainly she, growing up in the village, would think of badminton as a luxury sport, but could he explain to her that he and Moran used to play in the alleyway, dodging people on foot or on bicycles, often having to climb up to the rooftop to retrieve a stray birdie? Could he tell her that in the summers, he and other boys would hunt for the fat, green larvae of cabbage butterflies, put them into birdies, and launch them straight into the sky with their racquets? The poor worms always plunged back to the earth with nothing to meet them but a solid death, yet there had been nothing ominous to him, or even to Moran, about those random executions. Would Sizhuo protest if he told her the story? Coco would have screamed and called the action sick, but Sizhuo had grown up in the countryside where lives were probably butchered or maimed every day. “How about Ping-Pong?” he said.

She smiled, which again made her look resigned. Did the village school where her father taught have a crude concrete block that served as a Ping-Pong table in the yard, as his elementary school had? His childhood, even though it had been a city childhood, had come almost a generation earlier, and could not have been too different from Sizhuo’s.

“I don’t know how to play Ping-Pong.”

“How about racquetball?” he said. “Now, hold it — give me the pleasure to say I don’t know how to play it, either. I’ve watched people play, and the ball sure goes fast. We’ll be too occupied with learning the game to feel awkward about not talking.”

“Why do you want to play racquetball with me if you don’t mind not talking?” she said.

Any activity would be an excuse for him to continue seeing her — this she had no reason not to understand. “I suppose I’m interested in getting to know you better,” he said. “So I’m scrambling to find anything you’ll agree to do with me so I have an opportunity.”

“Is this how a man of your status courts a woman?”

He looked into her eyes but could find neither malice nor irony in them. “What kind of status are you referring to?”

“You have a car and an apartment, so you must also have a good career?” she said, asking more than stating, and he nodded to confirm her guess. “Does that mean when you court a woman, you can always find something to do with her?”