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Chapter 8 The Dig
Chapter 8 The Dig
When she got home she answered that she was back. No emoji. No warmth beyond the period. She wiped the mud off her boots at the door with old newspaper. The paper had another city's housing prices printed on it. After the wiping it was dirty all the same. She turned the shower very hot. As the mud ran down her legs her hand stopped on the inside of her thigh. No mark there. He had kept his word. The body remembered anyway: the iron sheet, the rain, the arc of a bent finger. She did not do it again under the spray. She dried her hair, changed into old clothes for the house, a dark blue shirt Lin Hao had brought back from a site one year, the cuffs worn white. Wearing it to take his video felt like an order she was still willing to keep.
The video came without warning. Just after nine the screen was first a shake of yellow earth, then Lin Hao's face. He had thinned. His lips were dry. The old scar in the eyebrow had been faded further by the sun. Behind him was tent cloth and a solar lamp. The wind had dropped, which was why he could get through.
"You really are home." He smiled. The narrowing of the eyes was still the look from six years ago. "I was afraid you were sleeping on the office sofa again. Let me see you."
She propped the phone so he could see the living room, and the pothos he had watered before he left, still alive now because the housekeeper kept it. "Home. And you. Weren't you only going into the center of the foundation on Thursday."
"The wind warning came forward a stretch. The director wouldn't let us stay in the trenches at night. So I escaped to show you something." He brought a sealed bag close to the lens. Inside was a piece of rim. Pale yellow body. A cord mark pressed into the edge. Nothing spectacular. The way his fingers held it was careful. "Look at this curve. It matches the piece from last week. Not as simple as one jar smashed. The same people, in the same season, making a jar's lip like this. You may find it dull, me telling you."
"Not dull," Jiang Ruoxue said. Her throat was tight. She looked at his fingers. Cleaner than they had been. Soil still in the nails. Those hands had touched her these years, and had touched countless fragments. She suddenly could not put the orgasm under the iron sheet and the pottery in this hand into the same night. They were already in it.
"And you today," he asked. "Your voice is a little hoarse. If you've caught cold, don't force it."
"Rain. I went to the land at Nanpu. No cold. There was an old woman. Twenty-nine years. A camphor behind the house. I promised her the tree would not be written as rubbish."
Lin Hao's eyes lit. What lit was the thing he truly loved. "And under the warehouses. You said last time the investigation showed anomalous reflections. Ruoxue, don't let them send an excavator straight in to open a road for the engineers. An old wharf, a foundation, even a late grave. Once the bucket goes down, it's gone. Write the stoppage into the clause. Write that a qualified person has to be on site. You understand these things. I'm not interfering with your price. I'm asking you. Some things, once broken, money cannot put back."
He rarely used the word ask like that. Jiang Ruoxue dug her nails into her palm and nodded. "It's written. The trigger looks to the authority and to a qualified opinion. No claim of breach during a stoppage. I'm still fighting them on the number of days. You can rest easy on that part. The price I fight myself."
"Of course I rest easy with you," he said. The smile thinned. "I rest easy with you on everything. Sometimes I feel I rest too easy, as if I've left you alone in a city to be the steward of it. If you're tired, curse me. Don't only say you've eaten."
That sentence was harder to meet than a blame. She looked at him in the lens and wanted to say: today, in the rain, I let another man bring me off with his fingers. In her mouth the sentence became something else. "I'm a little tired. It isn't your fault. Put the rim away safe. Don't drop it showing it to me. If the wind comes up again, don't stand outside to call."
He was silent two seconds, as if he had heard a layer under the word tired, and had decided not to open it on a bad signal. "All right. Then one more sentence and I'll let you sleep. I miss you. I miss you, the person, and I miss your body. If you want, I can stay with you like this. We don't have to look. I'll turn the lamp off. You tell me where your hand is."
This was an intimacy they had sometimes had since they were apart. Awkward. Sincere. Sometimes it really did soften her. Tonight her body felt as if it had been tuned to another frequency. She could not listen to the touch Lu Chen had left and, at the same time, direct Lin Hao's voice into the same place. That would turn both men into tools.
"Not tonight," she said, and kept it gentle. "Not because I don't miss you. My head is heavy, the rain was heavy, and I'm afraid what I give you would be false. You deserve the true thing. When you're back, face to face. All right?"
Lin Hao blinked, then nodded. No pressing. No cold face. That was exactly his goodness, and the goodness made the guilt sink. "All right. Then sleep. The green bottle is in the corner of the tent. It won't be stepped on. Ruoxue, you did right about the tree."
The video ended. The living room was suddenly too large. She took off the shirt with the whitened cuffs, folded it, and did not throw it away. She sat on the floor, her back to the sofa, and cried a short while. She kept the sound below what a neighbor could hear. Afterward she washed her face. The washing was as clean as putting lipstick on before a negotiation. She did not mean to use tears to wash herself innocent. She only needed the eyes clear, so she could go on revising clauses.
The laptop opened on the dining table. On the relics page she added a sentence: mechanical excavation may begin only after a qualified person has confirmed it on site. Before that confirmation, only the surface may be cleared by hand. The sentence was Lin Hao's. It was also the land's. She wrote it not to cancel what had happened on the loading slope. Canceling could not be done. She wrote it because it ought to be written.
At eleven she still put her hand inside her sleep trousers. The light was off. Her fingers were not as long as his. The angle was wrong. But her clit was still swollen, and a touch brought the rain back. What she imagined was Lu Chen's breath, not pottery. Halfway through the imagining she saw Lin Hao's photograph at the head of the bed, and her fingers stopped. The stop did not hold long. She said to herself that in this one thing, at least, she would not perform the wife without desire. She rubbed again. Two fingers went into herself. The heel of her hand pressed her clit. The rhythm was fast and hard, like punishment, and like owning it. When she came she bit the corner of the pillow. Her vagina tightened. The tops of her thighs were wet. The last thing clear in her head was Lu Chen saying I've got you, and Lin Hao saying I rest easy with you on everything. The two sentences stacked. The pleasure was so sharp it was almost not pleasure.
She pulled a tissue. She did not sleep at once. A car's light swept the ceiling. She decided she would not go looking for Lu Chen tomorrow. Let the clauses walk a day on their own. If she could not wait even a day, then the face to face she had promised Lin Hao was only the rhetoric of delay.
