Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“Yes, to look and to ask.”

Ruyu sighed. “You could’ve asked me without going to all that trouble.”

“You could’ve told me without my going to the trouble,” Celia said. “I didn’t want you to feel that I was intruding. On the other hand, I wanted to know what happened, and I thought it’d be best to have Edwin ask.”

“Why?”

“Because he’d be okay if you didn’t tell him anything,” Celia said. “And since you know he doesn’t care much, you might have chosen to tell him the truth — and I’m saying this not only about you but about everyone. Those who are lied to are the ones to whom truth matters, don’t you think?”

Celia, by simply being herself, was sheltered from doubt, and Ruyu admired Celia for that: anything concealed from her was done so because she cared too much. In life we have all met those like Celia, and sometimes we have befriended one or two, but never too many: if they are not the sole reason for the events around them, they at least have a part in everything that happens or does not happen. Their commitment to life is to be indispensable, a link between one thing and another; what they cannot connect to themselves — inevitably someone, something, will fail them by falling out of their range — will stop existing in their world. But was this a bad arrangement for Celia, or for those around her? Without Celia, Edwin, who had no tentacles of his own, would perhaps have had a less solid grasp on many things, though what did Ruyu know about Edwin’s marriage? What did she know about him while he had, at least for a few days, kept their conversation a secret?

The thought that at some moment she had been on his mind was alarming in itself. Ruyu’s ease with the couple relied on Edwin’s keeping an incurious distance and Celia’s having enough drama in her life for Ruyu to watch; as much as Celia enjoyed the attention, Ruyu enjoyed watching, and at moments did not stop herself from imagining, as all audiences do at one time or another, being on stage. Without difficulty, Ruyu could see herself in Celia’s position: at the hub of things, adding, expanding, until the bubble becomes the entire universe for its maker — a world as infinite as one’s ego will allow.

Ruyu did not regret not choosing that position. If she had ever felt anything close to passion, it was a passion of the obliterating kind: any connection made by another human being, by accident or by intention, had to be erased; the void she maintained around herself was her only meaningful possession.

Ruyu had thought Celia, oblivious, would be safe from that erasing. Unlike Shaoai, who had deemed it both her right and her responsibility to teach Ruyu how to feel; unlike Moran, to whom Ruyu’s happiness and unhappiness had taken on a burdensome weight; unlike Boyang and the men after him, who saw things in her that she did not care about — Celia did not mind Ruyu’s being an anomaly. Or she had not minded before today. Impatiently, waiting for an explanation, today’s Celia had dragged Ruyu off the spectator’s seat. “I didn’t think the dead woman was relevant to anything,” Ruyu said.

“But you’ve been unsettled.”

“Any death can do that,” Ruyu said. She unwound her scarf and asked if they could sit down. She could use a cup of coffee, Ruyu said, sending Celia into the kitchen ahead of her.

Was Celia right that Ruyu had not bothered to lie to Edwin because he did not matter to her? On the walk up, she had run into him at the bottom of the hill. He had stopped his car and rolled down the window. Would she like a ride to the house, he asked, and she said no, she would walk. He looked at the sky, as though disappointed by Ruyu’s decision to remain inconvenienced by the weather, so she added that she’d always liked to walk in the fog and rain. Why had she said that, Ruyu asked herself now: one does not talk about oneself without a motive. She liked the couple enough to have allowed some sort of permanency into her relationship with them, though Edwin — or Ruyu herself — had disturbed that balance, and in doing so had deprived her of what little luxury she had allowed herself in the Moorlands’ house: exemption from participating in life.

Ruyu watched Celia operate the shiny coffeemaker, which hissed professionally. “I’ve been thinking — I know this is sudden,” Ruyu said. “But what do you think of my going back to China?”

“Back to China? When? For how long?”

The thought of returning to Beijing — for what, Ruyu wondered, though that question could wait until later — had been on her mind since she had woken up this morning. “It’s only a preliminary idea,” Ruyu said.

“But why do you want to go to China now? Whom are you going to see there?”

A better question, Ruyu thought, was what she wanted to see. Over the years, she had given Celia some information about her history. With a vagueness that must have been taken as an unwillingness to stroll down memory lane, Ruyu had made Celia understand that she no longer had living parents in China; if she had friends or relatives, they were distant enough not to bind her to the place. “Not really anyone important,” Ruyu said.

“Is this trip prompted by this mysterious death that you’re not telling me about?”

One could never avoid having a history. Ruyu thought about how much truth she could give away without actually giving away anything. Such calculations had become second nature to her because she did not like to lie. Lying, like living, needs motives, however obtuse they may be. With Paul, she had had to make up stories, both about her parents’ deaths and about a childhood she’d never had: her parents had died in a traffic accident in Anhui Province, when a bus had missed a turn on a cliffside road and plunged into a river — a tragedy Ruyu had stolen from a newspaper article she’d read in college; her experience of being an only daughter she had borrowed from Moran, and a couple of childhood friends were modeled on Moran and Boyang — though naturally, Ruyu had told Paul, she had lost contact with them after so many years. What she could not produce as evidence — family pictures, snapshots of herself at different ages — she had explained as a natural and necessary loss resulting from emigration and a difficult divorce.

If Celia was right, the lies she had told Paul must have meant, somehow, that he had had meaning to Ruyu, at least more than the other men in her past. With her first husband, she had not needed to make up anything: he had known she was an orphan, which he had welcomed as a bonus because he would be free from in-laws; he had met her grandaunts — that is, he had met with their disapproval, though long before that, they had, without withdrawing their financial support of Ruyu in high school and college, made it clear to her that she had let them down. They had not questioned Ruyu about Shaoai’s case. What they had heard, they said, had been enough, though for them the unforgivable was not that Ruyu had stolen, but that the crime was motivated by the sinful thought of suicide; it was the latter that had made them shake their heads and say that she was, after all, not related to them by blood, and they had no way to understand her. That Ruyu had decided to marry at nineteen — no doubt another violation of their vision for her — they had accepted with resignation; to marry at all constituted a betrayal of them, though betrayal caused less damage than sin. What would be less redeemable: to take one’s own life, or to take another’s life? It occurred to Ruyu that she had never really known the answer. She turned to Celia. “What is more sinful in Catholicism — suicide or murder?”

“Where did that question come from?” Celia said. “Is it inspired by this woman’s death?”