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Chapter 16 The Night Drive
Chapter 16 The Night Drive
The rainy season did not end because they had spoken. On Wednesday of the next week Linjiang rained the whole day. Beiwan's contract had entered legal's slow tempo, and the project team had a little room to breathe. Zhou Heng told everyone to leave early. The sentence was rare in sounding like something a person would say.
At the revolving door Zhang Xue held an umbrella. Wu Ziyi stood outside the umbrella. Li Gan's car was in the old place. The order in which the three of them got in did not turn into a ceremony again. Zhang Xue got in the back. Wu Ziyi got in the passenger seat. The doors shut, and the rain went far. It was the same as the first night, and it was not. The same things were the wipers, the red lights, the citrus, and the sound of Zhang Xue typing. What was different was that inside the silence there had already been one another's bodies, and the right to tell one another no.
At the first red light Wu Ziyi looked at him. "When you reported today, the end of the sentence didn't fall."
He smiled. "You still listen for that."
"I listened when I sat off to the side and behind," she said. "Sitting beside you now, I hear it more clearly. This isn't a meeting. Zhang Xue, if our talking annoys you, say so."
"It doesn't annoy me," Zhang Xue said. The keyboard was still going. "Go on. I'm answering a letter that doesn't matter. When I've answered it I have a sentence too."
Green. The car went forward. The rain was lighter than the first night, light enough to read the plate of the car ahead. Li Gan's hands were steady. Wu Ziyi did not put her whole hand on his leg. She only touched the back of his hand with a knuckle, and took it back when she had touched it. This taking-back was no longer a brake after a fright. It was that she knew she could touch him again.
Zhang Xue finished the letter and shut the laptop. "My sentence is this. Friday night I want to open the door first. Not the hotel kind. I want Li Gan to come to my room, and Ziyi, you come too if you want to. My bed is small. It may be a squeeze. If anyone thinks it's a squeeze, say so and we'll move to the master. I don't want it to be that I'm only allowed on the largest bed."
Wu Ziyi turned and looked at her. "Yes. I'll come. If it's a squeeze I'll say so. I won't lie awake on a small bed until dawn in order to look generous. Li Gan, you?"
"I'll come," he said. "If halfway through you want to sleep, send me back to my own room. I can hear being sent away now. I used to be afraid of it. Now being sent away only means that night has reached its end."
Zhang Xue laughed once in the back seat. "Listen to him. The man talks like an adult now. Ziyi, you have to take part of the responsibility. And part of the responsibility for pulling me in. I won't thank you. I'll only admit it."
"Admitting is enough," Wu Ziyi said. There was a laugh in her voice, and under the laugh a little unsteadiness, the way any feeling that is still alive is unsteady. "Li Gan, in the garage you don't have to sit an extra minute to prove anything. If you want to sit longer, say so. We sit if you say it. If you don't, we go upstairs. I'll boil the noodles. This time they are not allowed to go soft."
"That night you were the one who said Zhang Xue boiled them to mush," he reminded her.
"I heard that," Zhang Xue said. "I've written the debt down. Tonight the noodles are hers to boil. If they go soft I have the right to laugh at her. That's a housework clause. Easier to enforce than the ones in bed."
The car went into the garage. Concrete cut the rain off. Nobody hurried to pull a door. Li Gan shut the engine off. His hands were still on the wheel. He looked at the concrete pillar ahead and said suddenly, "The first night, you asked me what it was because of. I couldn't answer then. I can answer now. Because I want you. Later I could answer the other half too. Because I want Zhang Xue. Both sentences are here. Neither of them is because I can't refuse. If someday you find I've started being unable to refuse, push me. At work you can't push me. That hasn't changed. What has changed is that I'm willing to be shaken awake by the two of you in the rest of life."
Wu Ziyi looked at him. Her thirty-eight-year-old eyes were clear under the garage light. "I heard you. I won't ask again whether it's because you're embarrassed. I'll change the question. Do you want to sit an extra minute tonight?"
"I do," he said. "Just one minute. Then we go up and eat noodles."
Zhang Xue leaned back in the rear seat and did not rush them. "Then sit. I'm here. I won't get out and be the one who leaves first, and I won't read this minute as me being shut out. When the minute's up, the three of us walk together. Whoever drags it out does the dishes."
In that minute nobody kissed. Wu Ziyi's hand covered his hand. Zhang Xue's hand came from behind and rested on his shoulder. The three hands were not the same temperature. Rain drifted in from the garage entrance and wet a few meters of ground outside. Li Gan looked at the rain and felt that the silence which had been called out that first night finally had a shape. It was not a secret. It was this small piece of time they had chosen to sit through together.
The minute was up. Zhang Xue spoke first. "Let's go. Sit any longer and the ending goes soft. I'm hungry."
In the elevator mirror all three of them were a little travel-worn. There was rain in Wu Ziyi's hair. Zhang Xue's umbrella dripped. Li Gan's ears, this time, did not go red for anyone to see. He only pressed the floor. When the doors shut, his eyes met theirs in the mirror. Nobody looked away.
That night the noodles were not boiled soft. Zhang Xue still laughed at Wu Ziyi once, laughed at the hesitant hand that put the salt in. Wu Ziyi picked up that too-bland mouthful and gave it to Li Gan and called it compensation. Li Gan ate it. He was the one who washed. When the water started, the two women were talking low in the living room about how exactly Friday's bed would be squeezed. The sound of the talk was ordinary. Inside the ordinary was a future he had once not dared to think of: not a future that never hurt, but one in which, after the hurt, there was still the next bowl of noodles, and the next car, and a person willing, when the red light came on, to take her hand back, and who knew that after the green light she could ask again.
He shut the tap off and stood in the kitchen listening to them laugh. The rain was still falling. The lights in this flat were warm. He no longer covered a sentence he wanted to say with the sound of water. He walked to the living-room doorway and looked at them.
"Friday I'll buy a thin mattress," he said. "So nobody falls off. That's all the preparation I can do ahead of time. The rest we ask when the day comes."
Wu Ziyi looked at him and nodded. Zhang Xue lifted her chin at him, like permission to sit down between them. He sat. The glasses on the coffee table touched other glasses. Rain outside the window washed the city blurred. Nobody needed a silence anymore to pretend nothing had started.
The night was still long. The car keys lay in the dish in the entry, touching the two door keys, and made one small sound. After the sound, the flat went quiet again. In the quiet were three people's breaths. This time, each of them could hear the others.
