Yiyun Li - Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

“Come to think about it, at least I don’t have to grieve over the death of a spouse,” Meilan said. She was insensitive, she knew, but why should she pretend to be someone other than herself, even for him?

“That’s to be congratulated,” he said with sincerity, but perhaps she took it as a sarcastic comment, as she shrugged without replying.

The light dimmed in the flat. Evenings in Mr. Chang’s unit, as they were in Meilan’s, came earlier in all seasons, their windows shadowed by the high-rise next door. In the soft light Meilan fixed her eyes on his face, unscrupulously. “What would your wife have said about your lady friends?”

She had told him that he needed another woman in his life so she could rest in peace; would she have less peace had she known that not one but many had been in his life, coming and going? Mr. Chang shook his head. “The dead is gone, the live lives on,” he said. The same saying must have been quoted by all the widows and the widowers in this city when they accepted a substitution.

“The live lives on only to ignore a longtime neighbor,” Meilan said. She wondered if she sounded like a hurt woman. What she meant, she explained, was that they were both good dancers, and wasn’t it a surprise that they had never danced? Unless it was more than a dancing partner he had been searching for, she added with laughter; she herself had no interest in anything other than dancing, she said, dancing being all that mattered to her.

The woman, with her cunning smile as if she had seen through him, looked familiar. Mr. Chang felt a moment of disgust mixed with fascination. Then it came to him, not the woman in front of him but another one, with her hand between his legs, not moving it much but nevertheless applying pressure from each of her fingers. He had been thirteen then, taking a train ride for the first time in his life, to the provincial capital for middle school; the other passengers, his uncle included, had been dozing off in the dimming light of the northern plain. He could have gripped the fleshy wrist and removed the hand from his lap, he could have yelled for her to stop, or at least stood up and moved to another seat, but in the end, he had done nothing, because when he looked up she was smiling at him, her teasing eyes saying that she knew all about his secret, and that he was as sinful in this little game of theirs as she was.

Mr. Chang shifted in the chair. The phantom limb of a youthful swelling from half a century ago and the wetness afterward made him unable to breathe in the twilight. He had never told his wife about the incident; she had not been the kind of woman who would make a man relive a humiliating memory like that.

She did not mean to embarrass him in any way, Meilan said; only she was curious why he had not thought of dancing with her. Mr. Chang shook his head. Some people were destined to be friends, he said, and others strangers.

A man could break a woman’s heart with that reply, and Meilan had to tell herself she was lucky that she had not had a heart for all of her adult life.

Neither spoke for a moment, and when Mr. Chang asked if Meilan needed another cup of tea, she knew that her time was running out. “Do you still play music?” she asked, eagerly grabbing the first topic that occurred to her.

“ The one who understands the music has ridden the wings of the crane to heaven,” he said.

She thought of telling him how she had listened to the music coming from his unit years ago, through open windows in the summer evenings, behind piled coal outside his unit on winter nights. But a love story told forty years too late could only be a joke. Instead, she asked him about the strange instrument she had never seen. She might as well solve one mystery if this turned out to be her only chance to talk with him.

He looked at her as if surprised by her memory, and without a word withdrew from the living room. A moment later, he came back with a round-bellied instrument. He plucked the strings and shook his head at its off-key tuning. “My father-in-law brought it from America but neither he nor my wife knew how to play it,” he said. “It’s a banjo.”

“Where did you learn to play it, then?”

“I figured it out myself. It was not that hard. My wife used to boast to her friends that I was the only banjo player in Beijing.”

“Was that true?” Meilan asked, watching him smile dreamily, remembering an old joke, perhaps, between husband and wife.

“I’ve not met another one in my life.”

“Am I not a lucky one to meet the only banjo player in this city, Uncle Fatty?”

Mr. Chang nodded, trying to recover some old tunes. Meilan stood up and swung slowly to the music. In the soft twilight her face looked beautiful in a strange way that reminded him of his wife, but the woman, with her blind cheerfulness and loud voice, would not feel in his music what his wife had once felt. Perhaps this was what his wife had wanted for him, a woman who understood little, an antidote to death and loneliness.

“I have a great idea,” Meilan said when the music stopped. It had taken forty years for him to play the banjo for her once, and neither of them had forty more years to waste. “We should move into one unit and sell the other.”

Why? he asked, aware that he had not appeared as shocked or offended as he should have. If he told the story of the train ride to the woman in front of him, would she laugh at him? Or perhaps she would tell an equally unseemly story, a joke that would crack them up like a pair of shameless oldsters at the Twilight Club.

“Garden Road is hot now, and we’ll make good money.”

“What should we say we are if the police come to check our household register cards?”

“Neighbors, roommates, coinhabitants,” Meilan said. “How much space does one need at our age?”

Indeed, he thought. In the semidarkness he plucked the strings again. Sooner or later one of them would have to stand up and turn on the lamp, but for now he would like to think of himself as happily occupied, playing an old song on an older banjo.

THEY HAD BECOME sworn sisters in Ailin’s backyard fifty years earlier, Ailin being the oldest of the three and the one to come up with the idea. They were twelve going on thirteen, their bodies just beginning to fill the gray Mao jackets handed down from their mothers. By then sworn sisterhood, like many other traditions, had been labeled as a noxious feudal legacy, and they had to bribe a neighbor’s daughter to take Ailin’s younger siblings to the marketplace for sugar canes so that the three girls could be free of prying eyes — it would take the little ones a sweet long time to chew from one end of the sugar canes to the other. Mei had stolen some yam liquor from her father’s cabinet, and they each took a sip of the strong liquid before pouring it on the ground. “Let the heaven and the earth be the witnesses of the beginning of the rest of our lives,” Ailin read a pledge she had adapted from old novels in which men and women chose their sworn brotherhood and sisterhood beyond the bond of blood, and Mei and Lan repeated after her that they, sworn sisters from now on, would stick through thick and thin till the day they were to leave the earthly world together.

Later they went to the only photographer in town to have a picture taken. They were in their best outfits: moon white blouses with bows of the same color tied on the ends of their braids, pants with soft-colored floral prints. The photographer, a bachelor in his late thirties, watched the three girls giggle with excitement as he adjusted the lamps, and was moved by something in the girls’ faces that was beyond their understanding. In the final prints, he wrote, with a fine-brush pen, a line from an ancient poem: As innocent as new blossoms, unaware of the time sweeping past like a river . Embarrassed yet unable to bring themselves to confront the photographer, the girls pretended that they did not notice the annotation to their sworn sisterhood.