The Leavers(65)

THREE WEEKS BEFORE YOU came back, six weeks after Yi Ba died, I went to a party at Quan’s apartment. The men played cards while the women talked and watched TV.

I saw a man in the corner tip a bottle of beer to his mouth. Built like a block, he leaned back, mouth curled up at the ends, like he was daring me to come to him. He noticed me looking and unpeeled a large, open smile. There was a gap between his two front teeth, wide enough to slip a watermelon seed inside.

“You don’t play cards?” He shuffled the deck in his wide hands. His Fuzhounese had retained the rural tones I’d been trying hard to sand down.

“No money for cards,” I said. A commercial blared on the TV, a deep voice narrating as a sports car looped the sharp curves of a mountain.

“You don’t have to play for money.” He cracked a peanut shell in his mouth. “We can play for peanuts.”

“I don’t like losing.”

“Then you won’t lose,” he said. “Then you’ll always win.”

I picked up a peanut and snapped it in half. “So when did you come over?”

“Nine years now.” He cut the deck. “You?”

“Six.”

He said the name of his village, which wasn’t far from Minjiang. “Better to be the one who leaves than the one who’s left behind.”

“You think?” I saw the man’s secret smile, his weighty brow, the eyes that tugged down at the corners, and wanted to unlock him. He was familiar to me, but nothing like Haifeng; he looked like if you got to know him, there might be something there. “Working our asses off in America? Maybe it’s better to be home, fat and happy in a brand-new house.”

“And daydream of being here? You wouldn’t stay there,” he said.

I smiled. He was right.

His name was Leon, and he worked nights at a slaughterhouse in the Bronx. It was demanding work, slicing and cutting cows and pigs, evidenced by his thick arms and shoulders, which I snuck a feel of when we kissed on the corner after leaving Quan’s. When I opened my lips it was like being unraveled.

Sometimes, when I saw good-looking men on the street, I wanted to ask if they would take me home. Once I trailed a man for five blocks, admiring how he walked with his crotch pointed forward like a dare, moving with purpose while keeping his hips loose. Stopped when he stopped, stayed steps behind him, checked out his butt while he waited for the light. What if he didn’t speak Fuzhounese, only Cantonese or another dialect I didn’t know? He could be an American-born Chinese, or worse, he might laugh, shout that this crazy woman was propositioning him. I watched him walk off, my breath rushing out of me.

My third year in America, I slept with a guy from Anhui province a few times. He drove a produce truck and had a wife in his village, and I was relieved when he said she was coming to New York. Until Leon, abstinence was another sacrifice I could pride myself on: Look at all I’ve done. Look at all I’ve given up. But when Leon traced the star-shaped mole on my neck as we stood on the frosty little street outside Quan’s apartment, beneath the fire escapes and perilous icicles, when he called me Little Star, there was a tug inside me in a place I had overlooked, like remembering a long forgotten memory. Oh, that. How could I have forgotten that? Leon’s mouth tasted like beer and peanuts. Leon’s tongue nudged up against mine. There was a hard twist inside me, a knot of years loosened. This wasn’t the village. A woman could kiss a man she just met, kiss him on the street in front of strangers, and nobody would care.

In three weeks, you were coming home to me. Because I had lived in the apartment for so long, my roommates said it would be fine if you stayed there, as long as I agreed to pay extra rent, though not as much as a new roommate would pay, since you’d be sharing my bed.

“We’ll move out soon, to a bigger place,” I told them, though I didn’t know how.

I mapped out the best route to the school on Henry Street and rearranged my hours at the factory. I was scared of being Mama again, having to care for a walking, talking, six-year-old boy that I didn’t even know. I remembered how hard it was to be responsible for another person, how some days were like choking. What if I had forgotten how to be with you, or screwed you up by sending you away?

The day after I met Leon, he called to see when I was free. I told him my son was coming to New York next month. I didn’t have to tell him, but I did.

“What’s his name? How old is he?”

I told him you had turned six last month, that I hadn’t seen you for five years.

Leon said, “I can’t wait to meet him.”

A COUSIN I’D NEVER met before delivered you to me on a January evening. I patted your shoulders, but your arms remained at your sides. Your face was longer, your body meatier. “Big boy,” I said, and you jutted your lower lip out at me. Fat clung to your face. You wore a green sweatshirt with an iron-on decal of a soccer ball, passed down from a neighbor or one of the other children on 3 Alley. Your hair stuck up in stubborn quills, like you had forced them out of your skin. Who had cut this hair?

Last Saturday, Leon’s hands had pressed down on my hips. His sister, whom he lived with, had taken her own son to visit a friend, so we were alone and could make all the noise as we wanted. He pushed into me with his eyes closed, and as I moved against him they opened. He said my name, I said his, and then everything was spinning and sliding. “Say my name again,” I demanded, and he did and I laughed. This novelty, my hand on a new man’s back. Such a nice, muscled back. Over five years in New York and this was the first time I hadn’t been surrounded by people, just me and one other person in an apartment by ourselves, and afterwards I leaned against the sink in Leon’s bathroom and cried, not only because of the sex and the beautiful man, but because of how good it felt to not hear sewing machines or honking cars or my roommates sniping at one another. Savor this moment, I told myself, you may never get it again.