Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

Tiao stepped out of the car in one stride, slammed the door, and walked into the dark. She walked quickly, whether it was because she was determined or simply desperate, it would have been hard to say — people in either situation might walk as she did. Desperate people might show a more hurried manner. So, then, she was desperate. She walked desperately, ignoring Chen Zai’s following after her and calling out. He said, “Can you stop your aimless walking? Come back to the car.” She walked even faster and shouted back, “You’re the one who’s walking aimlessly. Leave me alone.”

She kept walking ahead this way, and he trailed at a slow speed. She thought about the late night on Sixth Street in Austin, and finally understood that when she and Mike held hands and looked at the dark Colorado River flowing under the bridge, she wanted to have a night like that with Chen Zai. Now here they were late at night, but what an unfortunate muddle of a night it was. She walked desperately and her heart was entirely gloomy. She was angry at herself because she had ruined everything. What had passed seemed to have passed forever, and Chen Zai had long ago become another woman’s husband. The other woman, what was her name? Oh, Wan Meicheng. Wan Meicheng, Wan Meicheng, what a beautiful name, much nicer than Tiao’s. What right did Tiao have to demand that Chen Zai give an opinion about her relationship with Mike? What obligation did Chen Zai have to give it? Wan Meicheng, Wan Meicheng, Wan Meicheng … he was Wan Meicheng’s husband, and they had been husband and wife for ten years. He was nobody to Tiao — not before, and wouldn’t be in the future. If she tried to force him to be someone to her, then she was fooling herself. But that was exactly what she’d been doing, and, ashamed of it, she felt she had to escape from Chen Zai, from his car, immediately. She rushed from the pavement into the middle of the road, intending to stop a taxi.

She waved at an approaching taxi just as Chen Zai got out of his car and grabbed her arm. The taxi stopped in front of them, and they were almost wrestling as Tiao tried to free her arm from Chen Zai’s grasp, screaming, “Let me go! Let me go!” But Chen Zai held her even more tightly. When she pulled open the taxi door to get in, Chen Zai swept her up in one motion and strode over to his own car. He hurled the door open, threw Tiao into the backseat, and then drove the car off as fast as possible.

The car sped off, leaving Tiao’s taxi far behind. When they passed a cinema, Chen Zai turned into the small parking lot in front of it, stopped the car, and turned off the engine. He got out of the car and then got in through the back door, sitting on the seat with Tiao. He breathed heavily in the dark, and his breath struck Tiao’s face as if it were a solid shape. His face was right beside hers, so close that he gave her the feeling that he was going to bite her. She moved away from him a little and said, “Why are you bullying me like this?”

He embraced her tightly and, breathing heavily, said, “Yes, I just want to bully you. I should have bullied you long ago.” Then he kissed her on her lips, firmly and tenderly.

The situation was one that neither had predicted but both seemed to have anticipated. They had known each other for over twenty years, but had never been so intimate. They had kept missing the chance to connect with each other, as if it were a test of their long affection and friendship. Now neither could take it anymore. As they finally kissed, the damage to their long-standing feelings began. But they didn’t care too much about the damage. It wasn’t enough just to have affection and friendship. They needed the marvellous damage. At this moment, as their kisses turned deep and mellow, they even sighed at how long the damage had taken to happen.

Frantically, they inhaled each other, as if they could inhale each other into their hearts.

4

They didn’t realize how much time had passed until they started to feel out of breath. Such a narrow space couldn’t contain their expansive kisses. It occurred to them now to drive back home to Tiao’s place.

Once there, she managed only to get out her key and open the door and lock it behind them before he had to take her in his arms again. He held her and pushed her back, step by step, all the way to that grey-blue three-seater sofa in the living room. He finally made her stretch out on the sofa, hungry to lay his body on hers, to press into her. Leaning over her, he whispered, “Tiao, let me lie on you. Let me lie on you.”

His whispers made her heart race, but she didn’t really want him to lie on her on that sofa. She never even sat on it, and when Chen Zai pressed down on her to the point of suffocation, she seemed to hear fits of screaming from underneath them. It must be Quan’s voice. Quan had always been sitting here. Now Tiao and Chen Zai had disturbed her and pressed down on her — yes, she screamed because Tiao and Chen Zai combined to bear down on her, for their pleasure and out of their desire. She screamed to interrupt Tiao and to warn her, forcing Tiao to push insistently on Chen Zai’s shoulder, saying, “Let’s go to bed. Let’s go to bed.”

Let’s go to bed.

He heard her invitation, so quick and straightforward, which actually minimized its erotic element. Let’s go to bed — as if they were playing house. They got up from the sofa, and she led him by the hand to the bedroom and onto her bed.

On the bed they sat talking, face-to-face and cross-legged. Holding hands and knee to knee, they stared into each other’s eyes, understanding that everything had just begun. So there was no desire in their eyes, and their bodies were freed from the night’s agitation.

Chen Zai kissed Tiao’s hands and said, “Ten years ago, when I was planning to get married, I asked you the same thing I’m asking you now. Why didn’t you tell me that you loved me?”

Tiao kissed Chen Zai’s hands and said, “Because you never said you loved me.”

Chen Zai said, “But you knew I loved you. I’ve loved you since you were twelve years old. I was only seventeen at the time and didn’t really know what love was. Still, I just loved you. When you jumped the rubber-band rope in front of the building one afternoon, I even spied on you. Later, you fell and loosened your little plaits, and you got up embarrassed and ran off. I loved your embarrassment, all your indignities, your tears and disappointments. No other woman ever revealed so much of herself to me; no other woman ever gave me so much trust. I have known you so long, and I often swore to myself that even had you travelled to the ends of the earth, you would still be a treasure in my heart, embedded in me, blood and bone. You’re my family, and you have to be my family. I didn’t know how to tell you all of this, and it seems I’ve never been given a chance like this. I always believed that the right to ‘tell’ wasn’t up to me. It was you who controlled how close we could be from the very beginning. Everything that happened tonight surprised me very much. I was surprised at myself and at you. I hope this isn’t something you’re doing on impulse. When the sun rises, things that happen at night often seem ridiculous.”

Tiao shook her head at Chen Zai and then nodded. The words of love he’d held on to for so long stirred a lot of different feelings in her. She said, “I can tell you, Chen Zai, I’m not acting on impulse. I love you now, not when I was twelve or twenty-two, those years I treated you as my older brother. Hundreds of times I tried to figure out when I fell in love with you, and I suppose it started the day Fang Jing left me in the waiting room of the train station. He threw me down from the heights of a dream and you caught me before I hit the ground and held me up, with all my tears and hurts, my humiliation and bitterness. If you were not the dearest person in the world to me, how could I have cried in front of you that way without any self-consciousness? But I didn’t know at the time; I had no ability to analyze myself. My soul fell in love with you, but this soul of mine didn’t inform me. Later on, I finally worked all of this out, but by then I felt I had no right to your love. I didn’t deserve it. Behind my apparent pride, I hid a deep sense of unworthiness. You had seen all my misery and embarrassment and I couldn’t offer that shameful confused mess of myself to you. I couldn’t. How could I grab on to your love while still grieving the loss of Fang Jing’s? How could I be so shallow and careless? Maybe I was too concerned with your impression of me. Maybe I was desperate to have you think I wasn’t so silly. When I loved you the most, I also resisted you the most. When you told me that you were going to get married, I tried my best to keep myself composed. Looking back now, I thoroughly hate myself — for putting on an act, exaggerating my happiness for you, and pretending to be calm. I said you should have married long ago. Wan Meicheng, such a beautiful name … my heart felt like it was being cut by a knife, but in my mind I kept thinking about how sensible I was! How moral! And how wise I was! Let me hide at a corner and love secretly. Let me treat your happiness as my own—”