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Chapter 1 The Room Keys
Chapter 1 The Room Keys
September in Qingdao had not quite given summer up. The sea was bright. The wind already found the open collar and came in with a damp chill. When Chen Hao lifted the suitcase out of the taxi trunk, Xu Siyi was standing under the revolving door of Tingchao Hotel, looking at her phone. A corner of her black coat lifted in the wind. She was thirty-one, a corporate account manager at a bank. In a new place she confirmed the checkout time and the breakfast cutoff before she would look at the sea.
"Twelfth floor. 1208." She put the phone away. "Did you read the reviews when you booked? Someone said the soundproofing is only average."
"I read them." Chen Hao handed the suitcase to the bellman and carried her laptop bag himself. He was thirty-four, a sales manager at a medical-device company in Shanghai. Most of his talking had been trained into him by the job. Silence was something he had only just, in the last two years, managed to learn. They had been married six years. Annual leave was cut into short pieces. This piece had been Xu Siyi's idea. She had said that if they did not open a room with a view of the sea, the only conversation left between them would be reimbursements, parcels, and who showered first.
The lobby was pale stone. There was a faint smell of citrus in the air-conditioning. The woman at the desk took their two identity cards, tapped the keyboard, then stopped and looked to their left.
A man had his elbows on the counter. The cuffs of his dark gray shirt were rolled to the middle of his forearms. He looked about thirty-six, broad through the shoulders, with the color of someone who had been outdoors. Beside him stood a woman in a beige knit dress, her hair loosely pinned, her earrings very small. She smiled first, as if the little confusion were not worth anyone getting nervous over.
"Lin Zheng." The man nodded at Chen Hao. His voice was not loud. "Ours is 1210. The envelopes probably got swapped."
The clerk apologized more than once, rewrote the room numbers, and pushed two black cards into paper sleeves. Xu Siyi saw her own room number pause for a second beside Lin Zheng's hand, then get drawn back. The hand was steady. There was a little old callus on the knuckles. It was not a hand that only held a mouse all day.
"If nobody had noticed," the woman said suddenly, her voice clear, "we'd have slept in the wrong rooms tonight."
She looked at Xu Siyi. It was not a provocation. She had set a joke down on the counter to see whether anyone would take it up. Xu Siyi's eyebrows moved.
"We'd have to see first whether the minibar has water I can drink," she said.
All four of them laughed. When the laugh ended, a thin thread stayed in the air.
The woman added, "Gu Wanning. From Hangzhou. He's my husband."
Going up in the elevator, no one hunted for more talk. The corridor on the twelfth floor was deep blue carpet. Footsteps were eaten. 1208 and 1210 faced each other. Between them there was only a fire hose cabinet and a painting of a sailboat. Chen Hao opened their door and stepped aside to let his wife in. At the edge of his sight, Gu Wanning had already opened the door opposite. Before she went in she turned and said to Xu Siyi, "There's no one in the bar downstairs until after seven. If you come down, we can finish that joke. Or we can talk about something else."
"We'll see," Xu Siyi said.
The two doors closed, one after the other.
The sea in the room was closer than the lobby had promised. Beyond the glass was the last stretch of Golden Beach. In the middle of September there were not many people. Someone was walking a dog on the wet sand. Xu Siyi hung up her coat and went into the bathroom first to wash off the dust of the road. When she came out, Chen Hao had changed his shirt and was standing at the window.
"You looked at her," she said.
"You looked at him too."
"I looked at his hands." Xu Siyi sat on the edge of the bed and took her earrings off into a small dish. "A very dull observation. And you?"
Chen Hao did not answer at once. There were only the two of them in the room. Wrapping the truth would have looked false.
"She talks straight," he said. "Straight enough that you want the next sentence."
Xu Siyi made a sound. It was not anger. It was confirmation that she had heard. "Sixth year of marriage, and you finally admit in front of me that you looked at someone else. Call it progress."
"And you?"
She took off her boat shoes. The socks were thin. Her toes curled once against the carpet. "When he looked at me he didn't look away. That doesn't happen often. Most men either don't dare look, or they look and then pretend they were looking at the sea. I'm not saying I'm going to do anything. I'm telling you I noticed."
They stood at the window for a while. In the evening the sea turned a heavy blue. The lighthouse was not lit yet. Chen Hao put his arms around her waist from behind and set his chin against her hair. He had done this countless times. Today it felt like checking a size. This was still his wife. Her shoulders were a little thinner than he remembered. The perfume was the same bottle. Under his palm her heartbeat was steady.
"Go down?" he asked.
"Shower first. Then go down. If they're not there, we treat it as our own holiday."
"And if they are?"
Xu Siyi turned her face and kissed his wrist. "Then we drink. A joke can stay a joke."
After she went into the bathroom he was still at the window. The balcony door opposite was open a crack. A white sheer was pulled out by the wind and snapped back. He saw a short length of Lin Zheng's arm setting a bottle of water on the railing. Drops ran down the glass. Chen Hao took his eyes back and felt ridiculous. A man of thirty-four should not have his heart jump over a stranger's hand and a curtain.
But the jump was real. He noted it, to tell Xu Siyi in a little while. Over the years they had not been without other heartbeats. They had only grown used to pressing a heartbeat back down, pressing it into weekdays, pressing it until neither of them would say it first.
Water started in the bathroom. He took off his shoes, plugged in both chargers, and folded her scarf onto the chair. The actions were small. Small enough to be saying to himself: you still have a wife, you still have an evening to get through together, do not turn the day into a fantasy in the first hour.
