Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“Do you know all the places you bring me to?”

“More or less,” Boyang said. “Generally speaking, I want to know what I’m doing.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Enjoying an outing with you.”

“But why do you agree to come, when it’s cold and boring like this? It can’t be hard for you to find a more exciting way to spend your afternoons.”

“If you mean to kill time — yes, I have other ways, but I wouldn’t call this misspent time,” Boyang said, and opened the car door for Sizhuo.

She ungloved her hands and put them in front of the heater when he started the car. “Don’t do that,” he said. “You could get chilblains.”

She looked at him oddly and put her gloves back on without saying a word.

“What? Did I say something wrong?”

“Nobody gets chilblains these days.”

Boyang wondered if that was true. He remembered the winters in grade school, when the boys all had swollen red fingers, and sometimes the girls, too, though Moran had never had them. She had been the one who had reminded Boyang, every time they entered a room, not to go right away to the heater but to rub his hands first. Always the one to offer a solution to any problem, Boyang thought; always there, always, counting a hundred before letting him go to the heater. What kind of comfort does a good person like that offer? Less than she has imagined, alas.

“You look annoyed,” Sizhuo said.

“Why don’t kids have chilblains now?” he asked.

“Why should they? The world is enough of a bad place without chilblains.”

Boyang looked at Sizhuo, who only looked down at the fingertips of her gloves. He wondered what had brought on her mood today. “The world would be a good place if all we had to worry about were chilblains,” he said.

“That must make you feel good, then?”

“What?”

“That your only concern about me today is that I don’t get chilblains.”

“How do you know that’s my only concern?”

“Why do I want to know?” Sizhuo said.

“It’s natural for a person to want to know another person’s thoughts,” Boyang said. “That is, if they’re next to each other.”

“Natural?” Sizhuo pointed to a giant crow spreading its wings and hopping to the other side of the road, to make way rather than fly away. “That,” she said, “is a perfect example that nothing is natural in this city.”

“Where did that criticism come from?”

“Shouldn’t a bird take flight when a car comes?” Sizhuo asked. Somewhere she had read, she said, that the only emotion birds felt was fear.

“Maybe the crows are used to the cars.”

“Does that mean they can’t feel fear anymore? That they have been robbed of their only emotion?”

Boyang turned down a narrow lane. He had a sense that something had gone awry. He thought back to the afternoon — she had looked calmly engaged when she had photographed the kite; she had not shown any sign of listlessness when he had picked her up that afternoon. His comment on chilblains ought to have been taken as both considerate and innocuous. “I don’t know if you’re only talking about the birds or about something else,” he said.

“There’s always something else, no?”

What he thought of her, which he hated even to sort out in his mind, and what she thought of him, which he had no way of knowing — these questions were their companions on their outings, though they had never stopped and faced their silent followers. “And what’s that something in this case?” Boyang asked.

Sizhuo stared ahead — the car was coming to the end of the lane, which was blocked by metal chains. On the other side of the chains was an open lot. Boyang honked, and someone looked out a window of a bungalow, and then unlocked a door. It was an older man, whose face showed no expression when he walked across the lot and told them that the place was not open. “Not open?” Boyang said. “It’s almost five o’clock.”

“Not open,” repeated the old man, turning around the cardboard sign hanging on the chain so they could see it. Sold, it said.

Boyang leaned over and apologized to Sizhuo, who sat straighter to make room for him as he felt around in the glove compartment. Finally he located the right pack of cigarettes, half-full — he kept three packs of different brands, which, depending on whom he was speaking with, he would choose from accordingly. “Sold to whom, Uncle?” he said, handing over a cigarette.

The old man sniffed the cigarette — the least expensive brand Boyang carried in the car — and nodded to himself. “City Ocean,” he said.

City Ocean, Boyang thought to himself. “Not by any chance Metropolitan Ocean?” he asked.

The old man said yes, indeed it was Metropolitan Ocean. Boyang asked a few other questions, which the old man waved off. “Ask my son,” the old man said and turned away. Boyang wondered if the old man was playing dumb, but there was little else he could do, so he backed the car out of the lane.

They stopped at another eatery a few kilometers down the road. When the waitress came with their menus, Sizhuo said she only wanted a pot of hot tea. “Did you get a chill?” Boyang asked. He would have made an effort to cheer her up if he hadn’t just discovered the sale of the land around the old pub to Metropolitan Ocean. Distracted more than distressed, he ordered a pot of tea for Sizhuo and some dumplings to go.

“Why don’t you eat?” Sizhuo said. “You said earlier you were hungry.”

“If you’re not feeling well, I’d prefer to get back to the city as soon as we can,” Boyang said.

“Or you need to get back for a business reason, and my not feeling well provides a perfect excuse.”

“I don’t work on Saturdays.”

The waitress brought the tea, and Sizhuo asked if she could order the peasant stew on the menu. “That’ll take some time,” the waitress, a middle-aged woman who no doubt recognized Boyang’s role, replied with her face turned to him. He said they had plenty of time.

“I see someone is moody today,” Boyang said when the waitress left.

“Is that part of your being a good man, catering to every mood of mine?”

“You’re the least moody woman I’ve met.”

“So you’ve had your share of women with bad moods?” Sizhuo said. “How many of them have you known?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Do I not have a right to be curious?”

In her eyes he saw defiance mixed with resignation; it was a look he hadn’t seen before. Could it be that she, being the less experienced of the two, had finally cracked, as he had feared would happen to himself? He felt a surge of satisfaction — until that moment, he had not caught any sign that he existed in her world as more than a chauffeur and a walking companion, and had been both amused and puzzled by her patience. “Of course you have every right to be curious,” he said, pouring the tea for her. “But what I don’t understand is this: my comment about the chilblains seemed to upset you.”

“What does it matter to you if I get chilblains or not?”

“Now, that is childish.”

“I don’t understand why, week after week, we meet for a walk, sit down and talk about trivial matters, and then disappear from each other’s worlds for the rest of the week as though nothing happened. You don’t like my photography. You have better ways to entertain yourself. Why do you humor me?”

“I’ve never had a chance to see the final prints. How do you know I don’t like them?”

“You’d have asked if you were interested.”

“Is it too late to ask now?”

Sizhuo looked at Boyang, and he could see the confusion in her eyes. “Listen,” he said and glanced at her hands on the table. He calculated the effect of covering her hands with his, but decided against it. “You must know I like you. A lot. So however we spend time together makes me happy.” Or was it a misstep to say “happy,” when he did not really believe in happiness? “I never got the sense that you hated these outings, but if that’s the case, I will certainly leave you alone.”