Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“But what will you do about your job?”

She could say she had arranged a leave to make him feel better, but the truth was she never lied to him. It wasn’t much, she knew: one can withhold many things and build a wall around oneself; one can have a graveyard of dead memories without speaking a word. But at least she was adamant about giving him the kind of love she had not given others: it is rare that one meets a person to whom one chooses never to lie. “I’m giving it up,” she said. “Don’t, please, Josef, don’t try to convince me otherwise. It’s only a job.”

“And what are you going to do here?”

“That can be decided later,” Moran said. “Unless you oppose this move with all your heart.”

Josef sighed. “This is a free country,” he said.

“Would it leave you in a difficult situation with your children? Would they oppose it?”

“You can’t change your life at this moment just for me.”

“Why can’t it be for me, too?” she said, though her voice was low, and she was not sure if he heard her. What he’d called her life was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.

The café was filling up, the warmth of people and their everyday contentment pressing in. It was a Wednesday. This must be the day of the week for the four gray-haired ladies two tables away to meet up and laugh, and for the two young mothers by the window to compare notes on motherhood, their infants sleeping in carriers next to them. A few couples had come in, all of them Josef’s age, and Moran had dreaded recognizing them as his friends, though he had only smiled and nodded at them in the friendly way one smiled and nodded at strangers. Other than two college-aged girls, who were doing some intense work over their coffee, the café seemed to be a place for people who were either at the beginning of their stories or, more befittingly, at the end. Even the college girls, in a way, were only starting out. What one did not find at this place was someone in the middle of a story — but perhaps those people, like Moran herself a week earlier, did not have the luxury of idleness on such a morning. They would be sitting in a cubicle somewhere, secured and entrapped; sometimes they look up at the ceiling, a forgotten memory from their childhood or a glimpse into their old age passing through their minds like the fleeting shadow of a bird flying by, before their thoughts are reined in to the immediate present. No, to be in the middle requires one to be practical: one does not walk away from a stable job; one does not take a sojourn from life. Yet was it her true position to be in the middle — without a future to look forward to, was she, despite her age, already at the end?

“Are you going to look for a job here?” Josef asked.

“Only if it’s flexible enough,” Moran said. “Though maybe not for a while.”

“Then how are you going to spend your time?”

“I’m coming back to be near you. Unless—” she paused, a sudden fear hitting her. “Unless you have a lady friend now. I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”

“I would’ve told you,” he said. They had circled the topic in the past, but had always managed, at the end of each meeting, to inform each other of their love lives, or of the lack of love in their lives. He had gone out with a woman for a while, but by the time Moran came for his next birthday, the relationship had fizzled. There had been other interests, though nothing fruitful had come of them, disappointments for him perhaps, but she had felt relieved each time, and guilty about her relief.

“Then what prevents you from saying yes to my proposal?”

“Wouldn’t you say no, too, if you were in my shoes?”

“No.”

“But you would, Moran,” Josef said gently. “You know you would.”

“There’s this old tale in China. An ironsmith boasted that he had built the sharpest spearhead — one that could pierce all armor; then he boasted that he had built the sturdiest armor that no spearhead would be able to pierce.”

“So he was asked to test his own products on each other?” Josef said.

“Very good thinking, my dear Josef,” Moran said. “But the lesson is, I think, that each and every one of us has flaws in our reasoning, and we should not take advantage of that in another person. What I would do if I were in your shoes doesn’t matter. What matters is what I would decide in my own shoes.”

“Of course it would be … wonderful to see you more.”

“Then why don’t we settle on this?”

“But I won’t be here forever.”

Of course it was like Josef to remind her of a fact that she never forgot. “Shouldn’t that be more of a reason for me to come back?” she said, and abruptly asked the waitress walking past to bring them the check.

“We still have some time,” Josef said.

“Can’t you see that I don’t want to be a fool and cry in here?” she snapped, and leaned her face into her hands, warning herself not to fail her first test. He did not need a weepy woman; facing death, he was more defenseless than she was.

The waitress came with their check. Moran did not change her posture and let Josef take care of it. When he asked if she was ready to go, she took a deep breath and looked up. The effort to ensure that her eyes stayed dry had exhausted her, but she was glad that the dam inside her had not broken. “Now, don’t look so worried,” she said. “I’m not here to bring a scandal to your name.”

“Man in seventies bullies visiting ex-wife into tears in public,” Josef said. “No, no, we don’t want to see that in the paper.”

“But that ex-wife is not visiting anymore,” Moran said. “The big news is, she’s moving back to haunt him.”

Josef made a gesture of being caught in a spotlight, his hands raised halfway in an effort to shelter his face, which was flushed by the sudden movement. Momentarily they were back in a better time, when he had made her smile with a few unexpected improvisations. Were these moments, she wondered, enough to be called happiness this late into their story?

Later, when she dropped Josef off at his place, he asked if she would like to go up and sit for a while. She hesitated, and then said she would let him rest. She wanted to make a few appointments to look at some rentals before everyone headed out of town for Thanksgiving.

“Moran, enough fooling around. Let’s drop the subject.”

“Why?” she asked. In his voice she’d detected the weariness that belonged to people who were too tired to feel responsible for how they spoke.

“You and I both know that you should not leave your job.”

She wondered if the visit to the hospital had made him change his mind. He had introduced her to the nurse as a friend, and the nurse had asked about Rachel and her family before they left. Could it be that there was a settled rhythm to his life that he did not want her return to disturb? Or that his time, already limited, had little extra to spare for her?

“Will it be too much for you? Will I be taking you away from your family and friends?” she asked, tightening her grip around the steering wheel, even though she had parked the car, perfectly centered between the two lines, just as he had taught her.

“You know that’s not the reason.”

“Then what is?”

“You still have half a life to live.”

“Why can’t moving back here be part of that half?” she said. His face looked ashen, much sicker than it had earlier; he must be exhausted from spending the morning with her. What if she, despite good intentions, was only toxic for him?

“You know it means the world to me that you came,” Josef said. “It’s too flattering by half that you’re talking of moving back. But we ought not to indulge ourselves.”