Yiyun Li - Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

MR. CHANG CIRCLED the flat: the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom their twin boys used to share. He slept in one of the single beds now. The other bedroom, where he had spent the thirty-three years of his married life with his wife, was entered every spring and autumn when he brought her clothes to the balcony for airing. Once upon a time the lingering scent of sunshine on the clothes, mixed with that of camphor, had filled the flat with the peculiar presence of another warm body and left Mr. Chang drowsy for days afterward; now that number three was dwarfed on both sides by high-rises and Garden Road was often congested with long queues of honking cars, the clothes came home with a cold strangeness to the touch. The liveliness that took longer to leave the clothes than for a body to be cremated, a slower death for which Mr. Chang had not been prepared, made him wonder how much he had not known about the life that he had once thought of coming to completion at the deathbed of his wife.

Mr. Chang poured tea for himself. Each time he finished a round in the flat he swallowed another pill with half a cup of tea. At least an hour of his morning would be covered by the handful of pills. Another two hours by the three morning newspapers he subscribed to. Cooking, an hour, and eating, with the new, ill-fitted denture, another half hour. The afternoons were less intimidating, for he allowed himself to nap as long as he could. The evening papers arrived before four o’clock, and by half past six, with some leftovers from lunch in his stomach and clean clothes on, he was ready to meet his friend at the bus stop.

They were always his friends — not girlfriends, as many of them might have mistakenly thought — coming into his life and then leaving, one at a time. Some of them were easier to break up with than others; one of them, about five years ago, had gone to the extreme of threatening to kill herself for him, but he had known, as she had too, the flimsiness of the threat. Passion of that sort could be taken seriously only when one was in his twenties, a novice of love and of life in general. And not to his surprise, even the most persistent of the women eventually left him alone. After all, there had been no intimate touches to be accounted for; he had only strolled along Moon River and danced at the Twilight Club with them. It was they who had nurtured their own hope, even if they could blame him for misleading them in the first place.

When an old friendship came to an end, a new one began without a problem. For the records Mr. Chang kept at a dozen matchmaking agencies, the few key details he provided — a retired scientist with a sizable pension and a flat on Garden Road — were enough to attract certain women in their midlife dilemmas. He did not go through the big binders to choose someone but let his name remain to be chosen by desperate women, for whom he had not many specific requirements except for two rules: He was not to go out with a mother — a child could become a complication in time, and by all means he had brought up two sons of his own and had no intention to help raise another child, grandchildren included; and he was not to befriend a woman who had never married. Divorced women in middle age, with no housing of their own nor a great job for long-term stability — enough of them were plagued by their futures in this city and there was no reason to put his peace at stake by wading into the more treacherous water.

Mr. Chang had never thought of remarrying, though for a while his fellow dancers at the Twilight Club thought one or another of his friends would become his new wife. They complimented him on his ability to attract women fifteen or twenty years younger than he was, and perhaps secretly they also envied him for the many opportunities they themselves did not have. In time some of them joined him in his widowhood, and a few of them remarried, joking with him of their taking the lead now. Mr. Chang smiled and promised to hasten, but eventually, as he had expected, people started to treat him more as a joke. An old donkey who loved to chew on the fresh grass, they must have been saying behind his back. He’d better watch out for his stomach, some of them would perhaps say, but they forgot it was the heart that would kill a man; a man never died from indigestion.

IN LATE APRIL the regulars at the Twilight Club decided to change the party schedule and meet four times a week instead of two. Spring in Beijing was as brief as a young girl’s grief over a bad haircut and they might as well not waste the good days before the sauna weather set in, though no doubt by then they would have more reasons to keep the schedule despite the heat. Amid the excitement, the absence of Mr. Chang went unnoticed except by Meilan, and when he didn’t show up for the next two parties, she decided that it was her responsibility as a neighbor to check on him.

A little before five she knocked on his door. It was a decent time for a single woman to drop in at a widower’s, with dinner as an available excuse if the meeting was unpleasant. She had put on her favorite silk blouse of sapphire blue and a matching skirt, secretly hoping that, if she were not to find Mr. Chang with a grave illness, they would perhaps show up at the Twilight Club together that night.

Mr. Chang looked alarmed when he opened the door, his round-necked undershirt and threadbare pants reminding her of her own father in his old age. “Little Goldfish?” he said. Though the question was inappropriate for a greeting she was glad that he recognized her. She told him her name, and he showed little recollection. “I’m the first daughter of the Lus, downstairs,” Meilan said. “Remember, Uncle Fatty? My little sister gave you the name.”

He had to excuse himself to change into more formal clothes so that he could calm himself. His wife had always called him by that name; “Aunt Fatty,” he would reply, with forced cheerfulness till the very end of her life, when her body was wasted by the cancer. One would hope for certain things to be buried, but no, a woman he did not want to dance with had come and knocked on his door, claiming her partial ownership of a name she had no right to use. Mr. Chang’s hands shook as he buttoned his shirt. If he lay down on the single bed, would the woman take the cue from the closed bedroom door and leave him alone? But she would knock and break into the bedroom, she would call an ambulance if he insisted on ignoring her questions, and no doubt she would, later at the Twilight Club, brag about how she had saved his life by being a considerate neighbor.

Windows in his unit opened to the same view as hers did, and Meilan was surprised that she had overlooked this fact despite the time she had spent imagining his life. The last time she had visited the unit she had been twelve, and in the living room there had been a few articles of furniture identical to theirs. She wondered now if he had sold the ugly-colored furniture with red painted numbers underneath. Her own parents had saved every piece, but after their deaths she had hired two laborers to dispose of the furniture as they wished. She regretted now that she hadn’t saved a few pieces; had there ever been an opportunity for him to pay her back a visit, the furniture might provide a topic of shared memories.

Mr. Chang entered the living room, and Meilan did not turn from where she stood in front of the window. “Remember the pigpens?” she said, lifting her chin at a man washing his brand-new Lexus in the narrow lane between number three and the next building. The pigpens had been there in 1977 when she had come home to her parents with the news of her first divorce. The man at his Lexus worked on diligently, unaware that he was being watched just as full pens of pigs had once been watched from the windows of number three.