A Map for the Missing(90)

He put his hand around Mali’s shoulders and took the hem of her sleeve between his fingertips, rubbing the outlines of the embroidered eyelets. “Let’s go outside for a moment,” he whispered in her ear. She turned to him and laughed without registering what he’d said, her breath, hot with alcohol, blowing upon his cheek.

“Ma, thank you!” she said, raising a toast to Yitian’s mother.

Just then, Xie Han, Mali’s cousin, shoved a camcorder in front of Yitian’s face. He’d leased it with his own money and had been recording videos all day—his wedding gift to the couple, he said.

“What would you like to say on this momentous occasion?” Xie Han bellowed. The butt end of the bulky plastic device bumped Mali on her shoulder. Xie Han, who had already toasted the couple three times, was too drunk to notice. Yitian worried whether the expensive piece of equipment would make it through the night.

“Hello,” he said, turning to the camera. “Thank you to everyone who has come to celebrate with us today.”

“No, no, you have to say something more than that!” Xie Han said. “Don’t be so formal.”

“What would you like me to say?”

“Say something in ENGLISH! Since you’re going to AMERICA!” Xie Han slurred, but Yitian demurred. The English words sounded misshapen in his mouth and he was embarrassed to have them recorded.

He tapped his foot to the beat of music that played over the speakers and counted the number of songs that were left until their reservation would expire.

Mali’s father, a short and plump balding man, approached him for his second toast that day. He hadn’t liked Yitian the first time Mali had brought him home, refusing to even acknowledge him across the dinner table piled with food that Mali’s mother had prepared. When Yitian left that evening, he heard, through an opened window, her father refer to him as a peasant. But after Yitian announced he was going to America, her father’s entire demeanor changed. Yitian was not sure if he would ever be able to see Mali’s father as anyone other than the man who’d diminished him to a single word. He dutifully clinked his glass low against his father-in-law’s and called him Ba. He assured her father he would take care of his daughter, because he knew that was what was expected of him as a husband. Money, stability, and safety were all his domain. But whenever he looked at Mali, he felt sure that she was the one more likely to offer him the protection.



* * *



—

As their wedding gift to the couple, Mali’s parents paid for them to have a room in the hotel attached to the restaurant. Long after Yitian first wished they would, their friends rose from the tables and carried them to their hotel room. He was tossed haphazardly onto the bed, while Mali was placed gently onto the comforter, so that her styled and shiny hair would stay in perfect place. Their friends milled about in the hotel room for a few minutes, making jokes about how the guests would creep outside their door for the entire night to keep watch. In his village, the tradition was for the children to crouch under a windowsill to confirm the marriage was consummated, but in the city there was a hope for privacy. Their friends eventually filed out and left them in a silence that felt sudden after all the day’s noise.

The hotel had scattered rose petals over the bedspread. Wondering where they’d come from, he picked one up and rubbed it between his fingers. It was only made of fabric and plastic, after all.

“I thought my cousin would never leave!” She laughed and kissed him firmly on the mouth. Her face still had the glow of excitement and alcohol. She washed her makeup off in the bathroom and returned to the bed, pressing her body to his. It was the first time they were able to lie next to one another without fear of a roommate walking in.

Like most other students, the only times they’d been able to be together intimately were late at night by the lake, where they went and moved their bodies with hurry and frenzy. Every time they pushed themselves against each other, Yitian was surprised at how much he could feel her want. It was an experience unlike any he’d ever known, to be desired by someone like this, allowing himself the rare moment of being taken out of the shadows of the past and of occupying his body wholly as it existed in the present. He’d felt desire like this on evenings with Hanwen—always at night, after the dark had set in and made her skin bright and almost see-through—but he could not have said if she reciprocated.

The first time he and Mali slept together, when they’d fumbled in the dirt while they took off their clothes, a warmth had spread through his face and limbs. Everything he wore had strange tightness and elastic that he’d never noticed before. He felt awkward lying outside there, and worried that he would not know where to go on her body. But then she’d covered his body with hers, and all the embarrassment of a moment earlier had disappeared. When the time came, the heat of her told him like a route on a map.

He did not grow hard now as she hugged him.

“I’m a little tired tonight,” he said.

“All right.”

He could hear the disappointment in her voice, but she loosened her arms. He turned his back to her and gently moved her arms to drape them across his shoulders. In this way, her body acted like a larger parentheses to his. He fell asleep quickly and dreamed he was in an earlier time, when he could feel the body of his grandfather’s next to his, as small as Mali’s. He placed his palm against the sheets and could swear that he felt the cotton poking out. How many times his mother had kept patching over those holes, how each stitch always required another by the next season.