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Chapter 7 Badaguan
Chapter 7 Badaguan
The taxi ran along the sea. September light fell on the plane trees. The leaves were still green. The edges were already a little dry. The houses of Badaguan stood back behind the trees, one after another: yellow walls, red roofs, stone steps. There were not many tourists. Someone held a selfie stick. Someone pushed an old person along slowly. The four of them got out and walked abreast at first, then naturally became two pairs. Chen Hao and Xu Siyi went in front. Lin Zheng and Gu Wanning were a few steps behind.
At the corner of Zhengyang Pass there was a very small coffee shop. A handwritten list of the day's beans was stuck to the glass. Gu Wanning stopped to look. Xu Siyi stopped too. The two women stood together, shoulder to shoulder, and looked, oddly, like friends who had come out together. Chen Hao watched from behind. The jealousy in him eased in a strange way. Easing was not vanishing. He still remembered the weight of Gu Wanning sitting on him last night. But in daylight she would frown over where a bag of beans came from, and the frown made her a person again, not a picture from his night.
"Shall we go in and sit?" Xu Siyi asked.
"Yes," Gu Wanning said. "Ten minutes. If I sit too long I'll want to buy clothes, and if I buy them I won't be able to walk."
There were only four tables. They ordered two Americanos and two lattes. Lin Zheng did not drink sweet things. Xu Siyi stirred the foam on her latte apart with a spoon. Chen Hao watched her stir and said, suddenly, "You do this at home too. Something sweet, you have to spoil it a little before you'll drink it."
Xu Siyi looked up. "Saying that now, who are you trying to remind?"
"Myself," Chen Hao said. "I still remember you. I'm afraid that when this trip is over I'll only remember someone else's body, and not remember you stirring coffee."
The table was quiet for a second. Lin Zheng pushed the sugar packets aside and spoke slowly. "Then I'll say one too. When Wanning drinks an Americano she has to smell it first. She isn't putting it on. She smells it and then she knows whether she can drink it today. I used to think it wasted time. Later she was ill once and drank without smelling, and I found out that what I was actually afraid of was her not being particular about anything."
Gu Wanning looked at her husband. Her eyes softened, then she pulled the softness back. "In the daytime you aren't allowed to be this moving. Does being moving count as a foul?"
"No," Xu Siyi said. "It counts as the outdoor version of the debrief. As long as nobody undoes anyone else's buttons at the table."
They all laughed. After the laugh they walked on. The lawn in front of Huashi Villa was bleached by the sun. Wind came straight off the sea. Xu Siyi's scarf blew open a second time. Lin Zheng reached without thinking, stopped his hand in the air, and took it back. Chen Hao saw the stop. He went forward himself, wound his wife's scarf again, and let his fingertips rest a second at the side of her neck. Xu Siyi's ears heated. She did not dodge.
"Thanks," she said.
"Yours," Chen Hao said.
Gu Wanning watched from the side. She was not sour enough to need to speak. She only pinned her hair up. Her elbow touched Lin Zheng. Lin Zheng bent his head and asked if she was cold. She said she was not, and then said his hand had stopped well just now. Lin Zheng said stopping had not been easy. Their talk was very light. The wind nearly took the second half of it. Chen Hao still heard. He found he did not hate Lin Zheng. Hatred needed the other person to be grabbing. Lin Zheng was not grabbing. That left the jealousy without a target, so it had to go back into his own body and become a harder kind of swell.
At noon they ate seafood noodles near Minjiang Road. The broth was fresh. Chili oil floated on it. Halfway through, Xu Siyi's phone rang. A call from a bank client on a day off felt especially rude. She looked at the name, frowned, and went outside the shop to take it.
Chen Hao watched her profile through the glass. When she spoke her back was straight. One hand moved in the air. That was her habit when she was holding anger down. The call was not long. When she came back her face had already sunk.
"A client insists the guarantee clause has to be changed today." She sat and put the phone face-down on the table. "I said I was out of town. He said, don't you have a computer. I said we'd talk in office hours tomorrow. He laughed. That kind of laugh."
"The kind that treats you as someone on call," Gu Wanning said.
"Yes."
Lin Zheng pushed a little dish of vinegar to her hand and did not give a lecture. "The noodles are going cold. The clause will still be there tomorrow. You can swear at him once today. We'll listen."
Xu Siyi did swear, short and dirty. After she swore she startled herself, then laughed. Chen Hao had not heard her use that voice in a long time. It was not the bank's voice, and it was not a wife's voice. It was the voice of a person who had been annoyed. Under the table he took her hand. She held back, hard.
In the afternoon they did not go into more houses. Badaguan, walked too long, tired you. Pretty windows, seen too often, became windows. The four of them followed the road out to the rocks at Taiping Cape and found a clean place to sit. The sea was louder than it was in the hotel window. It hit the stone and broke into white.
Gu Wanning took her shoes off and set her feet on the cold rock. "I want to say something that can be said in daylight too. After last night I didn't want to run. I thought I would. I didn't. But today, when I saw Chen Hao put Xu Siyi's scarf on, I was still sour. After I was sour I told Lin Zheng. Now I'm telling you. The sourness isn't asking you not to do it. The sourness is that I'm still alive."
Xu Siyi looked at the sea. "I'm sour too. Sour that your perfume is still on his sleeve. I washed him once. It's still there. I'm not asking you to change perfume. I'm asking that none of us pretend to be so generous we don't have noses."
Chen Hao said, "I'm sour about the time Lin Zheng spends looking at you. The time he looks at you is steady. Sometimes I look at you once and go back to a message. The comparison is rotten. I'm still saying it. After I've said it I mean to change. Not to beat him. Because I should have been looking at you anyway."
Lin Zheng was silent a long time, long enough for a wave to come in and go out. He said, "I'm sour that Chen Hao can make Wanning laugh in that voice. That voice is scarce at home. I have no right to demand she laugh that way at home too. All I can do, when we go back, is make her carry fewer relatives who talk like clients. Relatives aren't clients. The tone is very similar."
Gu Wanning leaned on his shoulder, only for a few seconds, then sat up straight. "Enough. The daytime allowance is used up. If I lean any longer I'll kiss you. Kissing you isn't a foul, but kissing and kissing will get out of hand. We go back where there are people."
In the car back to the hotel, Xu Siyi's head was against the window. Suddenly she hooked Chen Hao's sleeve with her fingers. The force was not great. Chen Hao looked down at her. She shook her head, meaning this was not stop, only a hook. He covered her hand with his other one. In the back seat Lin Zheng and Gu Wanning said nothing. The radio was playing an old song. The words were blurred. Outside the window the sea was cut, stretch by stretch, by trees.
They reached the hotel at five. The lobby lights were on. The citrus smell was still there. The four of them stood at the elevator and no one pressed the button first.
Xu Siyi spoke first. "I want twenty more minutes in the room with my husband. If after that it's still yes, I'll come and knock on 1210 myself. Two knocks means we go on. No knock means tonight stops. Stopping one night is not canceling the whole thing."
"The same," Lin Zheng said.
The elevator opened. They went in and stood face to face. On the metal door their four shadows showed, blurred, very close. No one smiled. When the door opened, the carpet swallowed their steps again. Two doors shut in the same second, like last night run backward.
