A Map for the Missing(27)
“So you know where my mother and father live, right?” Yitian said. “How could I try to trick you?”
“Yes, and I suppose . . . if I was questioned, if anything went wrong, I’d be able to tell them to go to your house and find you, isn’t that right?”
“Exactly. You know where I live if anything happens. Just tell Tian Hanwen that Tang Yitian is here to see her and needs her help. We’re old friends. She’ll recognize my name.”
The guard took his keys out and locked the gate, telling Yitian he’d be back soon. After a few steps he turned back. “Nothing inappropriate between you and Mrs. Tian, right? Nothing that would get me in trouble with her husband, right?”
“No, no, of course not.”
Yitian picked the leaves off a bush until he heard the sound of footsteps and conversation from the other side of the gate. There were two voices now: the guard’s, and a woman’s answering him.
He inhaled deeply.
“Sir? Tang Yitian, sir? I’ve brought her,” the guard announced from the other side of the door. It unlocked with a click, and slowly fell open on its hinges.
Yitian’s head snapped up, but the person who came through the gate looked like nothing more than a young village girl. She must be hardly eighteen, he thought.
“I think there’s been some mistake,” he said.
The girl looked nervously at the guard, then back at Yitian. “He told me you were waiting out here. Have I done something wrong? Mrs. Wang told me to come get you.”
Ten
You must try this tea if you ever go to Yunnan,” she said, popping the lid off a small tin and passing it to him.
Yitian, who’d been examining her appearance while she was occupied preparing tea, was startled by the sweet scent of chrysanthemum.
“Sure. I’ll keep that in mind,” he said lamely. He didn’t know how to tell her that he couldn’t imagine himself ever traveling to Yunnan, that he wasn’t whatever kind of person she’d become, who took vacations to exotic destinations with her family and had a mind for such activities of leisure.
When she’d greeted him at the door, he’d been so struck by the difference in her appearance that he found it difficult to speak. As a teenager, her beauty was the kind that crept up after months of knowing her, a new feature of her face revealing itself each time they met. Now, it had become striking and purposeful, features chiseled and focusing themselves into a face that demanded admiration. Her hair had been cut short and permed into an elegant pouf that curled in around her long neck. Powder blurred her skin and her eyes were lined to make them appear deeper set than before. A wide pink skirt flounced and billowed around her calves, so glamorous that he wondered if she’d quickly changed while the ayi had gone to get him, or if she always dressed so elegantly, even in her own home. Mali had a penchant for soft, practical clothes, which she sleepily pulled out of her closet in the mornings without much consideration.
She’d led him to a table, sturdy and shined, in an alcove off the living room. The duplex was gigantic by Chinese standards. When he was young, he’d thought to have money meant to be a city person in a block apartment, a home crammed with objects the measure of one’s wealth. Then, in America, he’d found that rich people liked to live in stand-alone homes far out of town. That sounds so beautiful and idyllic, colleagues said, when he told them about where he’d grown up. He was sure they were making fun of him somehow.
Her home now defied what he knew of both countries. In the living room they’d walked through, huge heads of jade lettuces and bok choy ornamented the side tables, chandeliers dangled, the ceiling was crimped with molding imitating the Europeans. He felt as alien as he had when the dean of his department had invited him to a party at his hillside home, an uncomfortable evening that Yitian had spent feeling acutely aware of his body—how his fingers sweated on the stem of a wineglass, which hand to hold the knife in and which the fork—while Mali chattered freely, unencumbered by her accent, which made him wince every time she spoke. She’d left the evening with promises to attend an aerobics class with the dean’s wife.
Just as Mali had melted into that space at whim, so Hanwen appeared utterly at ease here.
“It’s hard to believe you live in a place like this,” he said.
“But you’re American. You must see things like this all the time,” she said. Her long fingers moved deftly with tongs to pick up teacups, just warmed with hot water. He felt himself sized up by her words.
“That’s not what my life in America is like,” he said. “Everyone thinks that I live some fancy existence over there. I’ve been a graduate student all these years, close to broke.” Even had he wanted to pretend with her, he couldn’t. She knew too much of him and would have easily been able to see through the lie.
She put down the teacups and, for the first time since he’d arrived, looked at him, really looked at him. He could see a blaze of her old determination to make herself understood as she said, “I wonder if you’ve been away too long. You can’t see how we would see you. Our amazement at you.”
“Maybe that’s true. I’m too selfish in all my judgments.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said, and her eyes were adrift again. She handed him a cup of tea. “Never mind. It’s a surprise that you’re here. I wondered if you would look me up on your trips back, but I always thought you’d be too busy, what with all your obligations to your family.”