Number Three, Garden Road
THEY HAD MOVED into number three, Garden Road forty-five years earlier, he with his new wife, she with her parents and three younger siblings. Garden Road had been a narrow dirt lane then, a patch of radish field on one side, wheat on the other. Number three, a four-storied, redbrick building, was the first to be built along Garden Road. The first to be numbered also, though no reason was ever given about not starting from the very beginning. To this day Garden Road, a four-lane thoroughfare with many shops and buildings on both sides, was missing the first two numbers, a fact known to few people, and number three, its red facade darkened by dust and soot and cracked by a major earthquake twenty years ago, stood irrelevantly between two high-rise buildings with consecutive numbers, an old relative that no one could identify in a family picture.
Of all the residents in the building, Mr. Chang and Meilan were the only ones remembering the hot July day forty-five years earlier, when government-issue furniture—tables, chairs, desks, and beds, painted brownish yellow with numbers written underneath in red—had been unloaded from flatbeds and assigned to the new tenants. Mr. Chang was in his mid-twenties then, a young recruit for the newly established research institute to build the first missile for the country. As he was waiting for his share of furniture, a toddler from a neighbor’s family wobbled over and placed a sticky palm on his knee. Uncle Fatty, she called him, looking up with a smile innocent and mysterious at once. He was a stout young man but far from being fat; still, when the crowd laughed, out of their approval for the child’s wit, he knew that the nickname would stay.
Apart from Mr. Chang’s new wife, Meilan was perhaps the only other one who had noticed his embarrassment. Meilan was ten then, and it was the first time she had seen a man blushing. It was her youngest sister who had given Mr. Chang the nickname, so there was no other choice for Meilan but to use the name, too. Calling someone “Uncle” who was not much older than her was enough of a torture; the name itself, Uncle Fatty, troubled her long after it had stopped bothering him.
Uncle Fatty and his wife lived in a unit directly above Meilan’s family. A natural musician, he played different string instruments: violin, erhu, pipa, and an exotic one Meilan had never seen. Music from that instrument, unlike the graceful serenades from the violin or the weeping folk songs from the erhu and the pipa, was loud with happy beats, but it was those songs that broke Meilan’s heart to pieces before she knew it.
“Thirty thousand yuan in ’95. With that amount of money I could buy half a bathroom in this neighborhood nowadays,” Meilan said often, shaking her head in happy disbelief. Like many of the street-dancing parties in Beijing, the gathering by Moon River—the Twilight Club, it was called—was attended mostly by old people, and repetitions were tolerated as they would not be elsewhere with children and grandchildren. A lucky bird she was, one of those men who liked to nod at everything Meilan said in approval would compliment her every time she mentioned her real estate success. Lucky she was, she would reply, with no children to break her back, no husband to break her heart.
Meilan was the youngest and slimmest woman at the Twilight Club, indulged by men ten or twenty years her senior. “Little Goldfish,” they called her, even though she was past the age for such a girlish nickname. Indeed when she plunged into the music she felt like a playful fish, one of her regular partners holding her tight while his wife, no longer able to match his energy and enthusiasm, looked on among a group of women her age, not without alarm. Once in a while a wife would comment that Meilan did not belong at the Twilight Club. “Go to a nightclub, or a karaoke bar,” the wife would urge. “Show the young people what is called aging gracefully.”
Meilan smiled good-naturedly, but the next time she danced with a man whose wife had tried to offend her, she embraced him tightly and whispered so that he had to put his ear, already hard of hearing, close to her lips.
The only man Meilan had not danced with at the Twilight Club was Mr. Chang, though between the two of them they had missed no more than a handful of parties in the past twelve years. In fact, it was Mr. Chang who had introduced Meilan to the Twilight Club. She had recently returned to live with her parents then, middle-aged and twice divorced, without a child from either husband to soften people’s criticism. To kill the time after work and to escape her parents’ nagging, Meilan took to strolling along Moon River, and on one of those first evenings since her return, she discovered Mr. Chang, sitting on a bench with a woman. He did not recognize Meilan when her gaze caught his eyes, and the woman, in her red blouse and golden skirt, was not the beautiful wife who had, many years ago, made Meilan conscious of her own, less attractive features.
Uncle Fatty, Meilan’s parents reported when she queried about him, had stayed in number three. His wife had been ill with some sort of cancer for the last year or so. Is she still alive? Meilan asked with great interest, and her parents, shocked by her inappropriate curiosity, replied that they were too old to discuss other people’s health problems with the unfeeling young generation.
Now that she knew he had a wife somewhere—dying in a hospital, or at the mercy of a brusque caretaker in their unit—Meilan started to follow Mr. Chang in the evenings. He left home at half past six and went to the nearest bus stop to meet his lady friend. They strolled along Moon River, now and then resting on an available bench and talking in low voices. Twice a week they went to the Twilight Club and danced all night till the last song, “Long Live Friendship,” with archaic Chinese lyrics set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” The first time Meilan watched a hundred old people slow-dance to the song, she was overwhelmed by a bleakness that she had never known existed. In her adulthood Meilan was considered by many as a woman without much depth; “brainless,” she had been called behind her back by her siblings, the kind of wife made for a cheating husband.
Meilan was caught off guard by her tears, and she had to hide behind a bush when the partygoers bid farewell to one another. Later, when she followed Mr. Chang and his lady friend to the bus stop, Meilan was pleased that “Auld Lang Syne” had not moved him to hail a cab for the woman he was perhaps thinking of replacing his wife with.
The woman soon was replaced by a younger, prettier-looking woman, who did not last long. A couple of women later, his wife died, but the news was a few weeks old when it reached Meilan. She did not remember having detected any sadness in Mr. Chang; at least there had not been any change in his evening routine. By then she had created a few opportunities to encounter him in the building, but he only nodded at her in the same unrecognizing manner as if she were one of those less fortunate who had to rent in number three. She studied herself in the mirror. Even if his deteriorated eyesight and memory prevented him from recognizing her from her girlhood, she did not see why she could not compete with the women he was dancing with twice a week. Perhaps she needed a different setting to meet him instead of their dusty, stale-smelling hallway. Meilan spent half a month’s pay to take a dancing class, and after that she showed up at the Twilight Club like a princess. The hem of her long skirt brushed the sandaled feet of her partners in the summer, and in winter the men competed to hold her hands nestled in a pair of white suede gloves. Little Goldfish, soon the men renamed her; there was no excuse for Mr. Chang not to see her and perhaps desire her in ways she did not care to imagine.
The Twilight Club had become a center of Meilan’s life since she was forced into early retirement at the age of fifty. She accepted small harmless presents and dinner invitations from men with wives, but once a widower made a move to differentiate himself from her other admirers, she discouraged him with subtle yet resolute gestures. In time, death came for some of the old men, but one had only to avert her eyes to forget such inconvenient disruptions. With a flat, a small pension, and many admirers, Meilan had little more to ask from life. If there was one imperfection, it would be Mr. Chang—what right did he have to ignore her for twelve years, all while he was busy dancing with those not-so-young women who had to take buses to the Twilight Club?
Mr. Chang poured tea for himself. Each time he finished a round in the flat he swallowed another pill with half a cup of tea. At least an hour of his morning would be covered by the handful of pills. Another two hours by the three morning newspapers he subscribed to. Cooking, an hour, and eating, with the new, ill-fitted denture, another half hour. The afternoons were less intimidating, for he allowed himself to nap as long as he could. The evening papers arrived before four o’clock, and by half past six, with some leftovers from lunch in his stomach and clean clothes on, he was ready to meet his friend at the bus stop.
They were always his friends—not girlfriends, as many of them might have mistakenly thought—coming into his life and then leaving, one at a time. Some of them were easier to break up with than others; one of them, about five years ago, had gone to the extreme of threatening to kill herself for him, but he had known, as she had too, the flimsiness of the threat. Passion of that sort could be taken seriously only when one was in his twenties, a novice of love and of life in general. And not to his surprise, even the most persistent of the women eventually left him alone. After all, there had been no intimate touches to be accounted for; he had only strolled along Moon River and danced at the Twilight Club with them. It was they who had nurtured their own hope, even if they could blame him for misleading them in the first place.
When an old friendship came to an end, a new one began without a problem. For the records Mr. Chang kept at a dozen matchmaking agencies, the few key details he provided—a retired scientist with a sizable pension and a flat on Garden Road—were enough to attract certain women in their midlife dilemmas. He did not go through the big binders to choose someone but let his name remain to be chosen by desperate women, for whom he had not many specific requirements except for two rules: He was not to go out with a mother—a child could become a complication in time, and by all means he had brought up two sons of his own and had no intention to help raise another child, grandchildren included; and he was not to befriend a woman who had never married. Divorced women in middle age, with no housing of their own nor a great job for long-term stability—enough of them were plagued by their futures in this city and there was no reason to put his peace at stake by wading into the more treacherous water.
Mr. Chang had never thought of remarrying, though for a while his fellow dancers at the Twilight Club thought one or another of his friends would become his new wife. They complimented him on his ability to attract women fifteen or twenty years younger than he was, and perhaps secretly they also envied him for the many opportunities they themselves did not have. In time some of them joined him in his widowhood, and a few of them remarried, joking with him of their taking the lead now. Mr. Chang smiled and promised to hasten, but eventually, as he had expected, people started to treat him more as a joke. An old donkey who loved to chew on the fresh grass, they must have been saying behind his back. He’d better watch out for his stomach, some of them would perhaps say, but they forgot it was the heart that would kill a man; a man never died from indigestion.
A little before five she knocked on his door. It was a decent time for a single woman to drop in at a widower’s, with dinner as an available excuse if the meeting was unpleasant. She had put on her favorite silk blouse of sapphire blue and a matching skirt, secretly hoping that, if she were not to find Mr. Chang with a grave illness, they would perhaps show up at the Twilight Club together that night.
Mr. Chang looked alarmed when he opened the door, his round-necked undershirt and threadbare pants reminding her of her own father in his old age. “Little Goldfish?” he said. Though the question was inappropriate for a greeting she was glad that he recognized her. She told him her name, and he showed little recollection. “I’m the first daughter of the Lus, downstairs,” Meilan said. “Remember, Uncle Fatty? My little sister gave you the name.”
He had to excuse himself to change into more formal clothes so that he could calm himself. His wife had always called him by that name; “Aunt Fatty,” he would reply, with forced cheerfulness till the very end of her life, when her body was wasted by the cancer. One would hope for certain things to be buried, but no, a woman he did not want to dance with had come and knocked on his door, claiming her partial ownership of a name she had no right to use. Mr. Chang’s hands shook as he buttoned his shirt. If he lay down on the single bed, would the woman take the cue from the closed bedroom door and leave him alone? But she would knock and break into the bedroom, she would call an ambulance if he insisted on ignoring her questions, and no doubt she would, later at the Twilight Club, brag about how she had saved his life by being a considerate neighbor.
Windows in his unit opened to the same view as hers did, and Meilan was surprised that she had overlooked this fact despite the time she had spent imagining his life. The last time she had visited the unit she had been twelve, and in the living room there had been a few articles of furniture identical to theirs. She wondered now if he had sold the ugly-colored furniture with red painted numbers underneath. Her own parents had saved every piece, but after their deaths she had hired two laborers to dispose of the furniture as they wished. She regretted now that she hadn’t saved a few pieces; had there ever been an opportunity for him to pay her back a visit, the furniture might provide a topic of shared memories.
Mr. Chang entered the living room, and Meilan did not turn from where she stood in front of the window. “Remember the pigpens?” she said, lifting her chin at a man washing his brand-new Lexus in the narrow lane between number three and the next building. The pigpens had been there in 1977 when she had come home to her parents with the news of her first divorce. The man at his Lexus worked on diligently, unaware that he was being watched just as full pens of pigs had once been watched from the windows of number three.
Mr. Chang sat down on the couch before the guest did. An ill-mannered host, she must be thinking of him, but he had not invited her, and he would let her draw any conclusion she wanted to. Of the women at the Twilight Club he had avoided her more than others. A rabbit should not be chewing on the grass around his nest, Mr. Chang had told a few old men when they had hinted that, as neighbors, he and Little Goldfish could develop some convenient romance. They laughed at his cunning reply, but they, unwise old souls who could be deceived by a flirtatious gesture from a no longer young woman, could not see that certain women, Little Goldfish being one of them, were to be shunned for their shrewdness.
“We used to name the pigs after people in number three,” Meilan said, and turned around with a smile. “Of course you were one of the grown-ups then, so you wouldn’t know our tricks.”
“I didn’t know you moved back,” Mr. Chang said.
“I bought the unit downstairs for my parents,” she said. “They didn’t want to live elsewhere.”
The same with his wife and him, Mr. Chang replied, though it was only half the truth. They had helped both sons with their purchases of bigger, more modern flats so they could marry their dream lovers, and in the end, number three, with its rumbling pipes and cracking walls and the garbage chute that still attracted flies years after it had been sealed, was what Mr. Chang and his wife could afford.
Meilan nodded and sauntered to the couch. He stood up quickly and watched her take a seat close to where he had been sitting. Tea? he asked, and when she said yes, he was both horrified at her insistence on extending the visit and relieved that he had an excuse to leave the room. When he returned from the kitchen he sat down in an armchair across the room.
He had his shirt on now, buttoned to the top, and Meilan had to restrain herself from telling him that his shirttail was escaping from under his belt. The glass top of the coffee table had tea stains; a bowl of leftover noodle soup was sitting on a pile of newspaper. The flat was not one where a man could entertain a lady friend; she felt an urge to absolve him of all the women he had danced with.
“I heard about your wife’s passing,” Meilan said, eyeing the framed pictures of his wife on the wall, mostly enlarged black-and-white snapshots taken, judging from the clothes and the young look of the wife, before anyone in number three had been able to afford color film. It was strange to study his wife through an older woman’s eyes; years ago her beauty had been stifling to Meilan, but now she detected melancholy in the young face. Such a woman would let herself be defeated by an illness. “A good wife you had,” Meilan said. “I’m sorry about your loss.”
It had been eleven years, but the way she said it made the pain fresh again. He said that he had been sad to hear about her parents’ passing, too, as if by reminding her of her own loss he would be spared. It was different with one’s parents, she argued, and he had little to defend himself. The teakettle whistled, a prompt excuse for him to withdraw from her gaze.
“Have you thought of remarrying?” Meilan asked when he returned with the tea.
She must have seen his friends at the Twilight Club, so it was natural for her to regard him as an old donkey fond of fresh grass. It was better that she, or anyone else in the world, think that way. He shook his head without giving more explanation. Instead, he asked her about her marriage and her children, as if it were a game of Ping-Pong that one had to win with a tactful performance.
“No husband, no child.”
“You own a flat on Garden Road,” he said. There was little else to compliment in her situation.
“Funny thing is, we moved here when I was ten,” Meilan said, “so there must have been another home before this, but I have little recollection. Am I not a lucky one to die in the only home I’ve known?” It was meant to be a joke, but she was surprised to see that he looked pale and shaken. She had always liked to talk about her own death as if it was an event to look forward to, her secret superstition being that death, like a man, would make itself conveniently unavailable once it knew it was desired.
The only home for him, too, he thought. His sons had tried to persuade him to sell the unit in number three after his wife’s death and he had refused. It was not his responsibility to make them understand him; time would come and teach them about love, which they thought they knew about already.
Meilan studied the old man shrinking into the depth of the armchair, his eyes looking past her and dwelling on some distant past she had no place in. How many times in his life had he let himself truly see her? She remembered years ago—when gas pipes had not been installed in number three and when propane tanks had been rationed—she had often hidden behind a pile of coal bricks on the third floor landing and waited for Uncle Fatty to come back from work. How old was she then? Twelve, or perhaps thirteen, too old to pretend to be playing in the sooty hallway, but she persisted. Once, a rat came out from nowhere and jumped onto the coal, not more than five feet from where she squatted. Neither the rat nor Meilan moved for a long moment, until Uncle Fatty and his wife walked upstairs. The rat scurried away, frightening his wife with its swift movement, and Meilan remembered him looking past her to search for the offender. She had been born ten years too late to bear any meaning for him, she remembered weeping to her journal.
“I’ve always thought that one of your lady friends would be good enough to marry into number three,” Meilan said, laughing lightly. “Have you realized you’re the only one to bring your own partner to the Twilight Club?”
He would no longer, but such information he did not have to share with a stranger. After the relapse of her cancer his wife had told him to start searching for a replacement; she said she would like to see him taken care of so she could leave in peace. He obliged her as one would oblige any fantasy of a dying loved one, but he could not stop himself from strolling and dancing with strangers after her death. He would do anything to keep her alive from day to day, even if it meant being called an old donkey and using other women’s hope as an anesthesia. A week ago, when he had had to break up with his latest friend and call the matchmaking agencies, none of them had provided any new names who had shown interest in his file. A clerk at one of the agencies had even suggested that he no longer pay the fee to keep his file active; her words were subtle but there was no way to make the message less humiliating.
“Of course everything gets harder at our age,” Meilan said. Ten years could be an abyss when one was twelve, and what a relief one did not have to stay twelve all her life. She adjusted her necklace of cultured pearls and sipped the tea. “So if you ask me, I’d say you’re the smartest. It’s better just to have a few dances together. Beyond that things get complicated.”
“So you’ve always been single?” Mr. Chang asked with some curiosity. The woman, uninvited and at ease in his home, was different from his friends. Was it because she owned the patch of roof above her?
“Married twice, lost twice to mistresses,” she said. “No, you don’t have to feel sorry for me. The way I look at it—a bad marriage is like a bad tooth and it’s better to remove it than to suffer from it.”
Mr. Chang leaned forward. He had some vague recollection of her from years ago, but hard as he tried, he could not connect the woman to the young girl, whom his wife had once commented on as being intense and sad for her age. He had never doubted his wife, for whom the world seemed to be more transparent, many of its secrets laid out for her to see, but could she have made a mistake about the girl, or had time alone been able to transform a sad and serious girl into a loud and graceless woman?
“Come to think about it, at least I don’t have to grieve over the death of a spouse,” Meilan said. She was insensitive, she knew, but why should she pretend to be someone other than herself, even for him?
“That’s to be congratulated,” he said with sincerity, but perhaps she took it as a sarcastic comment, as she shrugged without replying.
The light dimmed in the flat. Evenings in Mr. Chang’s unit, as they were in Meilan’s, came earlier in all seasons, their windows shadowed by the high-rise next door. In the soft light Meilan fixed her eyes on his face, unscrupulously. “What would your wife have said about your lady friends?”
She had told him that he needed another woman in his life so she could rest in peace; would she have less peace had she known that not one but many had been in his life, coming and going? Mr. Chang shook his head. “The dead is gone, the live lives on,” he said. The same saying must have been quoted by all the widows and the widowers in this city when they accepted a substitution.
“The live lives on only to ignore a longtime neighbor,” Meilan said. She wondered if she sounded like a hurt woman. What she meant, she explained, was that they were both good dancers, and wasn’t it a surprise that they had never danced? Unless it was more than a dancing partner he had been searching for, she added with laughter; she herself had no interest in anything other than dancing, she said, dancing being all that mattered to her.
The woman, with her cunning smile as if she had seen through him, looked familiar. Mr. Chang felt a moment of disgust mixed with fascination. Then it came to him, not the woman in front of him but another one, with her hand between his legs, not moving it much but nevertheless applying pressure from each of her fingers. He had been thirteen then, taking a train ride for the first time in his life, to the provincial capital for middle school; the other passengers, his uncle included, had been dozing off in the dimming light of the northern plain. He could have gripped the fleshy wrist and removed the hand from his lap, he could have yelled for her to stop, or at least stood up and moved to another seat, but in the end, he had done nothing, because when he looked up she was smiling at him, her teasing eyes saying that she knew all about his secret, and that he was as sinful in this little game of theirs as she was.
Mr. Chang shifted in the chair. The phantom limb of a youthful swelling from half a century ago and the wetness afterward made him unable to breathe in the twilight. He had never told his wife about the incident; she had not been the kind of woman who would make a man relive a humiliating memory like that.
She did not mean to embarrass him in any way, Meilan said; only she was curious why he had not thought of dancing with her. Mr. Chang shook his head. Some people were destined to be friends, he said, and others strangers.
A man could break a woman’s heart with that reply, and Meilan had to tell herself she was lucky that she had not had a heart for all of her adult life.
Neither spoke for a moment, and when Mr. Chang asked if Meilan needed another cup of tea, she knew that her time was running out. “Do you still play music?” she asked, eagerly grabbing the first topic that occurred to her.
“The one who understands the music has ridden the wings of the crane to heaven,” he said.
She thought of telling him how she had listened to the music coming from his unit years ago, through open windows in the summer evenings, behind piled coal outside his unit on winter nights. But a love story told forty years too late could only be a joke. Instead, she asked him about the strange instrument she had never seen. She might as well solve one mystery if this turned out to be her only chance to talk with him.
He looked at her as if surprised by her memory, and without a word withdrew from the living room. A moment later, he came back with a round-bellied instrument. He plucked the strings and shook his head at its off-key tuning. “My father-in-law brought it from America but neither he nor my wife knew how to play it,” he said. “It’s a banjo.”
“Where did you learn to play it, then?”
“I figured it out myself. It was not that hard. My wife used to boast to her friends that I was the only banjo player in Beijing.”
“Was that true?” Meilan asked, watching him smile dreamily, remembering an old joke, perhaps, between husband and wife.
“I’ve not met another one in my life.”
“Am I not a lucky one to meet the only banjo player in this city, Uncle Fatty?”
Mr. Chang nodded, trying to recover some old tunes. Meilan stood up and swung slowly to the music. In the soft twilight her face looked beautiful in a strange way that reminded him of his wife, but the woman, with her blind cheerfulness and loud voice, would not feel in his music what his wife had once felt. Perhaps this was what his wife had wanted for him, a woman who understood little, an antidote to death and loneliness.
“I have a great idea,” Meilan said when the music stopped. It had taken forty years for him to play the banjo for her once, and neither of them had forty more years to waste. “We should move into one unit and sell the other.”
Why? he asked, aware that he had not appeared as shocked or offended as he should have. If he told the story of the train ride to the woman in front of him, would she laugh at him? Or perhaps she would tell an equally unseemly story, a joke that would crack them up like a pair of shameless oldsters at the Twilight Club.
“Garden Road is hot now, and we’ll make good money.”
“What should we say we are if the police come to check our household register cards?”
“Neighbors, roommates, coinhabitants,” Meilan said. “How much space does one need at our age?”
Indeed, he thought. In the semidarkness he plucked the strings again. Sooner or later one of them would have to stand up and turn on the lamp, but for now he would like to think of himself as happily occupied, playing an old song on an older banjo.