Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

Director Yu walked to the door, opening it with a crash, and, pointing out the door, he said, “Let me repeat it one more time: take your watch and get out of this office.”

She went out, returned to her dorm, and cried her heart out. But a week later, the department director informed her that she was being transferred to the factory’s office to work as a typist.

It was clear to her who had helped her. She was pleasantly surprised and puzzled at the same time, but she could no longer bring herself to go to his office, not even to thank him.

7

Perhaps it’s better for a woman like Fei not to get married, but she still did — she couldn’t take Little Cui’s constant pestering.

Little Cui was a worker in the foundry department. Fei knew in her heart that out of the many men who were interested in her, Little Cui was the one who truly liked her. Little Cui was a man with a sluggish spirit and a stubborn temperament, and his big eyes were always bloodshot for no reason. He didn’t listen to advice, and if anyone tried to give him some, an obstinate expression would come over his face — the look of a man prepared to march down a road to the very end. After Fei got transferred to the factory’s office, there was even more gossip about her. Little Cui got into knife fights with people over it. Later, knife in hand, he went to Fei and said, “I want to marry you.”

Fei said, “This is not something to joke about, Little Cui. You’ve heard the stories about me.”

Little Cui said, “I don’t care what you did before; I just like you as a person.”

“You’d better not lose your head. A man looks for a decent girl to be his wife. Your family would never approve of your marrying me.”

“If I marry you, you’ll be my family.”

Fei felt a lump in her throat on hearing his words. She said, “You can take that back for now. We’ll talk about it in a few days, when you cool down.”

Little Cui cut his index finger with the knife and said, with his finger dripping blood, “I made up my mind long ago. I swear you are the woman I want to marry. Let’s get married. We’ll settle down and live a good life.”

“Live a good life.” Fei remembered that Master Qi had said that to her. Who doesn’t want to live a good life? Who can deny that living a good life is the highest goal for most people? Fei was moved — didn’t she want to live a good life with a man who cared about her?

They were married.

Their marriage made many of the men in the factory unhappy, as if a woman who was originally public property had been taken from them to become Little Cui’s sole possession. Also, his courage in daring to marry a woman no one else would made them feel small. Their annoyance with Little Cui was especially sharp, as if he were a traitor to all men, had betrayed the brotherhood. Several hooligan types among the workers went out of their way to pick fights with him; they publicly insulted him as well as slandering Fei. They’d say brazenly, “Little Cui, guess where I went when you were on night shift? I was in your bed all night long. Your wife wouldn’t let me go until daybreak …”

Little Cui hadn’t expected things to turn out this way; nothing was as simple as he’d thought. But he couldn’t leave Fei. Her body had provided him with countless pleasures. He started to drink, staying drunk twenty days out of a month. When he was sober, he would tie Fei up and beat the hell out of her, sometimes using a leather belt and sometimes a shoe. One day, he interrogated her while beating her: “How did you get to be a typist? Tell me, how did you get to be a typist …?”

Fei dodged his belt and said, “Little Cui, I really don’t know. I didn’t do anything.”

Little Cui said in a hoarse voice, “Everyone knows but me! Everyone knows but me.”

“What? What does everyone know?”

Little Cui said painfully, “You … you and Director Yu … Yu Dasheng.” He said the three words “Director Yu Dasheng” with great difficulty, but he also felt happy to get them out. The long-repressed thought finally saw the light of day, and now he wanted to know all the details of the imagined situation. He got close to Fei’s ear and asked, as he pinched the flesh of her arm, “Tell me, where did he fuck you and how did he fuck you? Tell me.”

The pain brought tears to Fei’s eyes and she said, “He didn’t. Really … he didn’t … I’m telling you the truth.”

Little Cui pinched Fei harder and said, “In his office, right? It must have been in his office …”

Fei almost fainted at the pain. If telling the truth was so painful, then why do it? So she told Little Cui that she had indeed seduced Director Yu and that it had happened right in his office. She let him see the ulcers on her arm as he sat in his chair and he grabbed her arm, forcing her onto his lap …

Little Cui began to untie Fei during her “confession.” The confession stopped his pinching and he suddenly had a strong desire to fuck her. He grabbed one of her arms and pulled her to the bed, anxiously asking as he removed his pants, “What happened next? What happened next?” Her clothes were all stripped off and, naked, she continued to make up her story. She said Director Yu had trapped her in his arms, groping her, and then pushed her down onto the desk … Little Cui had already started to thrust himself into her violently, and meanwhile continued to press Fei for what Director Yu did and when and how. Listening to Fei’s narration so filled him with excitement, it even led him into the novelty of role-play: as if the woman he entered now were not his wife but a dissolute whore that any man could have. And he was not her husband, either; he was Director Yu and could do anything that Director Yu had done. He was doing it, right along with Fei’s detailed account, and experiencing an unparalleled intensity of stimulation and pleasure. Unsure of whether he was in a struggle with Director Yu or merely having an affair with a shameless woman, he discovered he simply needed this, needed it desperately. In his savage and insulting language Fei also found sexual sensations of a strength and variety that he had never before given to her. So good, she was thinking. To die for — she felt. It was under these peculiar circumstances that her first real sexual pleasure was awakened by her husband. To be beaten painfully, and then ravaged, made her feel a pleasure to die for, such as she had never experienced. For this kind of pleasure she would have been willing to be beaten a thousand times over.

From then on, that became the prologue to their lovemaking: Fei had to tell Little Cui of her sexual encounters with other men. She went back to middle school — from Captain Sneakers, then the dancer, until the time she started to work for the factory. Most of the time she just made things up, normally arranging the accounts of what happened from far to near, eventually reaching the bed in their own home. She told Little Cui that she often brought men home when he was blind drunk, and those men would fuck her in their bed, right next to him. She would say, “Little Cui, what do you think? Don’t you think Fei is too tempting?” Little Cui would throw himself on her body with eyes flaring, as if he wanted to compete with those men, as if a drunk weakling of a husband, who was absolutely not Little Cui, were right then sleeping next to this woman, who was about to be fucked to pieces. Little Cui was not Fei’s husband. It was too hard to be Fei’s husband. He felt cornered.

A marriage like this was doomed to be short-lived. The more these two howled their way through sex and entangled themselves in this sort of love of theirs, the more they knew in their hearts that the end was coming. Finally, one day, they stopped the screaming and storming. Instead, unusually bright mild days began to arise between them. Little Cui eventually found someone else, his apprentice, a girl named Er Ling.