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Chapter 3 The Bar
Chapter 3 The Bar
At nine in the evening a short rain fell on Linpu. The ground was wet only enough to throw light back. Jiang Ruoxue should have gone home. The apartment was empty. There was soup in the refrigerator that her assistant had left. Heat it and the night could be got through. Instead she drove to Nanpu, to the stretch near the old warehouses. Not to look at the land. To look at a street she had seen that day in a tenant's address.
At the corner there was a bar. The name was Old Cable. The door was small. The windows had fogged. She went in because she did not want to return at once to the pages, and because she knew she was touching a muddier possibility: that he might be nearby. The possibility made her think poorly of herself for a moment. A negotiator went to a site. That did not mean he sat in a bar at night waiting for someone. She was not here to wait. She told herself that, and pushed the door.
Old Cable was warmer than the street. A wooden bar. A few lamps set low. Retired cable hung on the wall, and a yellowed map of the wharf. Not many customers. By the window Lu Chen was already sitting, a drink in front of him barely touched, his coat on the back of the chair. He saw her. He was plainly surprised. After the surprise he did not dress himself up as the host of a coincidence.
"Director Jiang." He stood. "If you've come to look at the parcel at night, you can't see the boundary from here. The fog is too thick."
"I didn't come to look at a boundary," she said. "May I sit. Or are you waiting for someone."
"No one. Please. I can also leave, if you want the place to yourself."
"Sit," she said. "Walking in and out looks like a transaction."
She ordered a whisky with a little water. Before the drink came they listened for a while to other people's talk and the light touch of glasses. The opening was harder than a meeting room. A meeting room had page numbers. Here there was only a wooden table stained by water.
"Director Han told me this afternoon to find you tonight," Lu Chen said first. "He said you are too hard in a formal room, and that a private meal would loosen the terms. I refused. I am not here to carry out his instruction. I am here because if he finds someone else to do it, you should know beforehand. Not everyone inside Yanbei accepts that wanting and pricing have to be kept apart."
Her drink was set down. She did not drink at once.
"Telling me this could also be a tactic."
"It could," he said. "Whether you believe it, you can only tell by whether tomorrow's clauses are still where they were. If someone trades a worse structure for the air of tonight, then take tonight as evidence that I am not to be trusted. I accept that test."
She drank. The whisky was an ordinary good, not the kind of expensive that required comment. After the heat had passed her throat, her shoulders came down a little.
"Cai Shufen's tree," she said. "Will your shareholders care?"
"Director Han doesn't. He cares whether the tree becomes news. I care that if the roots tear the drain, dealing with it during clearance will cost more and look worse. If you want the tree in the contract, I'll support writing it as keep or transplant, one of the two. Who pays can be fought. I won't support writing it as lyric."
"I rarely write lyric."
"I noticed."
She smiled. The smile was short, so short she almost failed to catch it herself. Lu Chen watched the smile. His eyes stopped at the corner of her mouth, then returned to her eyes. He did not use the smile to come closer.
"Your husband," he said. "The archaeologist. Director Han used him as talk. I don't intend to ask for details again. But if you want to say it, I want to hear. Not to find a gap."
Jiang Ruoxue turned the glass. Ice touched the side. The sound was light.
"Lin Hao. We've been married six years. He's with a joint team in Hexi, digging a Bronze Age settlement. He was supposed to be back at the end of last year. The dig expanded. He stayed. He is a good man. The goodness includes believing I can handle Jiangcheng, so he rarely asks. I used to think that was luck. Now I think we are like two very polite letters, each of us on the road, the contents still stopped a few years back."
Only after she finished did she realize she had said too much. A bar made it easy to mistake too much for an invitation. She lifted her eyes to him, ready to nail the boundary back down.
Lu Chen did not take the too-much and spend it. He nodded, as if he had heard a piece of background that mattered, not a seam where a hand could go in.
"Does he know you're negotiating this land today?"
"He knows Jiangcheng is negotiating a parcel along the river. He doesn't know who the other side is. He had no signal today, or he had signal and was in a trench, and the phone wasn't on him. That doesn't matter. What matters is that I will not use his not knowing to do a thing I don't dare own."
"Then what is it, that you came here."
"I wanted to see you," Jiang Ruoxue said. After the sentence was out, the roots of her ears were hot, but she did not take it back. "In a room with page numbers I can pretend I am only judging an opponent. There are no page numbers here. I want to know whether what I am judging is only an opponent left."
Lu Chen's fingers stopped on the glass. He looked at her a long time, long enough that the bartender came over and had the sense to go away.
"Not only," he said. "It started when you pulled the flood channel out of the price. I want you, including the way you don't let a wrong red line pass. Including the more direct part. Your mouth. Your waist. The way you walk into a room with no intention of being comforted by anyone. I didn't touch you today. I can still not touch you. You said you wanted to see me. I'm glad. Glad is not permission."
She felt her breath drop an inch. After the direct part was said, it did not become cheap. It became specific. Specific meant she could not escape on a sentence like "it's only the air of a negotiation." She lowered her eyes and lifted them again.
"Then touch me once," she said. "Only once. I need to know whether I hate it, or whether I don't want to hate it."
Lu Chen moved his chair nearer by half a palm. His hand covered the hand she had set on the edge of the table. The palm was still dry. The temperature was higher than a handshake. His thumb rested on her knuckle. He did not rub. He did not go in under the sleeve. Only covered. Jiang Ruoxue looked at the two hands. Her wedding ring, beside his thumb, caught a small light. She did not pull away. The heat she had carried since noon suddenly found a direction out, and went toward the top of her thighs. She pressed her legs together, hoped he had not seen, and knew the hope was childish.
"Do you hate it?" he asked.
"No," she said. "That's the problem."
His thumb finally moved, a light pass over the knuckle, and stopped. He did not kiss her. The lamps in Old Cable were low, and there was fog on the window, but this was still a public room, and her company still had to sit at a table with Yanbei tomorrow. Jiang Ruoxue turned his hand over. She looked at the lines of the palm, at the old callus, the kind left by a pen and a steering wheel, not a decoration made in a gym. She put her mouth to his palm. Very light. Light as a test. The result of the test was bad and clear: she wanted to lengthen the kiss, wanted to open her mouth to a degree that did not belong in a bar.
She drew back.
"We stop here," she said. Her voice was a little rough. "Not regret. A stop. I haven't decided whether I'm going to sleep with you. What I have decided is that tonight, here, I will not make the shape of that thing."
"All right." Lu Chen took his hand back. He did not cling. The place the palm left cooled. His ears had reddened too, slightly, but she saw it, and something hard in her loosened. More dangerous than the kiss.
They sat another twenty minutes. The talk was forced back to clearance. He told her the steel-shed tenant was named Zhou. The son was away. The father could not let go of the client list. She told him that if Jiangcheng took the land, the first phase along the river was meant to be converted warehouses and a walk open to the public, not a wall that hid the river. He said the walk would pain Han Yu in saleable area. She said let it pain him. Otherwise she would not win the meeting on the planning-bureau side. They argued a few sentences. During the argument their knees touched once under the table. Neither turned the touch into a second time. Once was enough for her to know that the skin under her stockings had become sensitive to a ridiculous degree.
When they left, the rain had stopped. The street threw light back, like a contract that had not dried. Lu Chen walked her to the car, hands in his coat pockets, using the pockets to keep himself in order.
"Ten tomorrow," he said. "I'll write both the sixty-day and the ninety-day versions as clean sentences. I'll only say the price range out loud, and only when your structure can stand. It will not go onto paper they can photograph."
"Lu Chen." She used his name for the first time, without the surname. His eyes darkened. "If I am hard on you in the room tomorrow, it is not a performance for Han Yu. It is that I still have to be able to be hard. You have to be able to take it."
"I can take it," he said. "You look better when you're hard. That sentence is extra. You can treat it as unheard."
She opened the car door. She did not treat it as unheard. Before the engine came up she looked at him through the lowered window. The night wind put a little disorder in his hair. A man of thirty-six stood at the curb near the old warehouses. Not like a plunderer. Like a person the wind could also reach.
"I heard it," she said. "Go back."
She was a long way off before, at a red light, she touched her lower lip with a knuckle. In the bar she had kissed his palm, not his mouth. The lip still seemed to hold another memory. Her body sat heavy in the seat. Her underwear was already a little wet. That made her ashamed and angry. Angry that she was this easy. Ashamed that inside the ease no one was steering her. The light changed. She did not drive back to Old Cable. She took the river bridge. The city's lights broke up in the water.
The apartment was indeed empty. The soup was in the refrigerator. She did not heat it. She showered. The water was hot. When it ran over her breasts and between her legs she put her hand on her belly, held it there a long time, and in the end only turned the water off. The mirror was all fog. She wiped a small patch clear and saw her own eyes, too bright for a person who had to talk penalties at ten the next morning.
The phone lit. Not Lu Chen. A very short message from Lin Hao, by some miracle through the signal: Wind smaller today. A rim came up. Miss you. Sleep early.
Jiang Ruoxue sat on the edge of the bed. Her hair was still dripping. She looked at the two words. Miss you. She answered: Good that the wind is down. I miss you too. Sleep early yourself.
After she sent it she set the phone face down on the nightstand. Neither sentence was false. Missing could point, at the same time, at a person very far away and at the temperature of a palm just now. This was not a grammar she had allowed herself before. She lay down. The ring touched the nightstand, a small sound. She closed her eyes and did not touch herself. She left the wet and the heat outside tomorrow's meeting, to see whether they would go out on their own.
They did not. In the dark she knew it clearly. Clearance, the camphor, fifty percent, ninety days: the words lined up in her head, and at the end of the line stood Lu Chen's voice. Your mouth. Your waist. She turned over, pressed her face into the pillow, and swore once, low. After the swearing she still smiled. After the smile she set tomorrow's structure in order again in her mind, until the figures were louder than the body, and only then did she sleep.
