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Chapter 12 Checkout
Chapter 12 Checkout
The morning light was the kind that comes after rain, white and without mercy. Xu Siyi woke first. Chen Hao's arm was still across her waist. His palm was hot. His fingers were loose. She did not move it away at once. She looked at a strip of sea in the gap of the curtain. The sea was flat, as if nothing had happened. Her body knew it had. There was a heaviness at the tops of her thighs. The red on her chest was still there. Someone else's tooth mark was on her husband. She set these things side by side and did not pick one of them, first, to be the conclusion.
When Chen Hao woke he saw her looking at him. He did not smile, and he did not hide. "Morning."
"Morning. Seven forty. We said the morning didn't have to be sex. I don't want it now either. I want to eat, and then give the cards back."
"All right."
They showered, dressed, and pulled the chargers out of the sockets. Xu Siyi folded the rules and put them in a slot of her wallet, not as a souvenir, because she had not yet decided when to destroy them. Chen Hao saw it and did not object. He did up his buttons in front of the mirror. Xu Siyi stood behind him and turned his collar right. The tooth mark showed a little above the collar. She pressed it with her fingertip.
"Still there," she said.
"Yours on your chest is still there too. I saw it. I'm not comparing sizes."
"Thank you for remembering that one."
When the knock came, both of them startled. It was two knocks, not three. Xu Siyi opened the door. Gu Wanning stood outside, wearing very light makeup. Her suitcase was upright beside her. Lin Zheng was a little behind her, holding two cups of coffee, like a man who did not know whether coffee ought to be carried into someone else's marriage.
"The restaurant downstairs is crowded," Gu Wanning said. "We bought coffee. We can drink it in your room and go down together, or we can pretend we never knocked. You choose."
Xu Siyi stepped aside. "Come in. The door's open. On checkout day we don't lock it from the inside."
The four of them stood in a room that was already half packed, and suddenly none of them knew where to put their hands and feet. Lin Zheng set the coffee on the table. There were four cups. He even remembered whether Xu Siyi drank sweet things. Hers was an Americano. Xu Siyi saw the writing on the sleeve, and the bit of liking in her moved again. She did not hide the liking, and she did not stretch it.
"You remembered," she said.
"Remembering doesn't cost anything," Lin Zheng said. "What costs is whether, after we go back, I still remember that Wanning doesn't drink sweet things. I already remembered that. I just didn't say it when I remembered."
Gu Wanning took her own cup and blew on it. "Then say it when you go back. Saying it to her is enough. You don't have to say it to all of Hangzhou."
The coffee was half gone before the talk really began. Chen Hao said first that after he came back at twelve he had smelled the scent, had been jealous for a moment, and had not had sex. Xu Siyi said she had put the rules in her wallet. Gu Wanning said that in the morning she had thought of sending Chen Hao a message on the hotel line, to tell him that if the tooth mark seeped blood he could use hot water, and then she had thought better of it and knocked herself, because an internal line would also become the start of contact. Lin Zheng said he had stood in the bathroom a long time, not out of regret, but to ask Xu Siyi's crying out of his ears and into a place where it would not disturb him when he went home.
When Xu Siyi had heard all of it she set her cup down. "We say the thirty days to death one more time. Once we leave this door today, we don't exchange WeChat, we don't leave phone numbers, we don't search each other's companies on any app. If we find them, we still don't add them. During the thirty days, thinking is allowed. What you think, you tell your own spouse. You don't tell the other person. After thirty days, if both couples still want to send word that they're all right, Xu Siyi and Gu Wanning make the contact. The husbands don't move first. If one of the women is unwilling, it ends. Is that fair?"
"Not fair to me," Chen Hao said. "But I agree. I know my hands are fast. A person with fast hands ought to be tied a little."
Lin Zheng nodded. "I agree too. My hands aren't fast, but I think slowly, and when I think slowly I write very long messages at night. Once they're written they're easy to send. If Wanning keeps that right, I'm at ease."
Gu Wanning looked at Xu Siyi. "After thirty days I'll wait for you one hour in a fixed place. Only one hour. If you don't come, I'll take the answer as no. We fix the place now, so later we don't use discussing the place as an excuse to chat. I won't go to Shanghai from Hangzhou. You don't have to come to Hangzhou from Shanghai. Qingdao isn't suitable. Coming all the way would be too much like doing it again. Jiaxing. Jiaxing is in the middle, so neither of us looks more hurried. The old teahouse by South Lake. I'll write it on paper. Three o'clock on the Saturday afternoon thirty days from now. If you come, we drink a cup of tea, say we're all right, and each go our way. If you don't come, I finish the tea myself."
Xu Siyi copied the address into her wallet. After she copied it she felt her handwriting was too steady, too steady for a person whose heart was beating. "I'll decide with Chen Hao whether to come. I won't run to Jiaxing alone and play the hero. If he doesn't want it, I don't come. The same for you. If Lin Zheng doesn't want it, you don't show up. Absence doesn't need an explanation."
"All right," Gu Wanning said.
The checkout line was not long. The woman at the desk was not the one who had taken the wrong envelopes that day. She smiled and asked for the key cards, asked about the minibar, asked whether they wanted to delay until afternoon. The four of them handed the cards over. The plastic cards stacked together, were swept into a drawer, and the room numbers left the system. Chen Hao watched the drawer shut and suddenly understood that this was more like an ending than exchanging cards in the corridor. The ending had no music. The ending was only a drawer.
Wind at the hotel entrance blew Xu Siyi's hair into her face. Taxis stood in a line. Lin Zheng's car came first, because they had to catch an earlier train at Qingdao North and change once on the way back to Hangzhou. When the suitcases went into the trunk, Gu Wanning walked up to Xu Siyi.
"I'll hug you once. Only once. No kiss."
"All right."
The two women held each other for a short second and a little more. Shoulder met shoulder. Perfume mixed. Neither buried her face in the other's neck. When they let go Xu Siyi's eyes were dry, but the corner of her mouth was shaking. Gu Wanning nodded once at Chen Hao and did not hug him. She said, "Don't pick at the tooth mark. If you pick it, it stays longer." Then she got into the car.
Lin Zheng shook Chen Hao's hand. Both hands used force, and after the force both of them felt the gesture was too much like the end of a project. Lin Zheng let go and said to Xu Siyi, "You didn't do anything wrong when you cried. After you go back, if he still doesn't know how to stop, you stop yourself. Stop where you can see it."
Xu Siyi said, "Your wife wants directness. Give it to her. Don't only give it in Qingdao."
Lin Zheng smiled, a short smile. The door shut. The car joined the traffic along the coast and soon was only an ordinary pair of taillights. Chen Hao and Xu Siyi were still on the steps. The next guests dragged suitcases past them. Someone complained that the sea wind was strong. Someone said they absolutely had to eat barbecue at night. The world went on receiving new key cards.
"We go too," Xu Siyi said.
"We go."
Their car passed Golden Beach. The sea flashed on the right. Yesterday's rain had washed the sand very flat. Chen Hao looked out the window and reached into the middle of the seat. Xu Siyi put her hand in. Both their palms were sweating.
"Do you regret it?" she asked.
"I regretted a few moments. The whole of it, no. And you?"
"The same. What I'm most afraid of now isn't that you like her. It's that after we get home, in order to prove we weren't affected, we'll deliberately live colder than before. Cold turns into another kind of lying."
Chen Hao held her hand tighter. "Then at home we argue, we say it, we do it. I don't agree to going cold and pretending nothing's wrong. If someday you want to go to Jiaxing, you tell me. Whether I want you to go or I don't, I tell you. I won't treat silence as permission."
The taxi went up onto the elevated road. In the rearview mirror Tingchao Hotel became a pale sign, then disappeared. Xu Siyi did not look back. She watched the road ahead and kept her wallet pressed to her knee. Inside it there was an address, and the rules, and her own identity card. The address on the card was still Shanghai. She rubbed that address with her thumb, the way you rub a promise that has not yet expired.
