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Chapter 1 The Night Drive
Chapter 1 The Night Drive
The rain came down hard the moment the meeting broke. Fog filmed the conference-room glass, and then the whole window went white under the wash. Zhou Heng shut his notebook and said that was enough for today; Beiwan's numbers could be checked again tomorrow. Chairs scraped in a rush. Li Gan was still staring at the last page of his notes. The tail of his sentence dropped in his throat, and nobody asked him to pick it up.
Wu Ziyi sat off to the side and a little behind him. She capped her pen and looked at him once. There was no praise in the look, and no picking of faults. She had simply seen him clearly. She was thirty-eight. When anything came up in solutions, people found her first and Zhou Heng only after. Li Gan did not report to her. He was twenty-six, carried on the delivery roster, and the person he reported to was Zhou Heng. She would say that more than once later. But on that rainy night, before the car had even started, he felt the silence change because she had looked at him.
Zhang Xue poured what was left of two Americanos into the sink, crushed the paper cups, and dropped them in the bin. She was thirty-six, client success, quicker with words than anyone, and quiet today all the same. Passing Li Gan, she pushed across the car keys he had forgotten on the table. "There's standing water by the garage exit. Drive slow."
"All right," he said.
The three of them going down together was not an arrangement. It was a habit of eleven months. The company had pulled them out to Linjiang for the Beiwan Bank project. The housing allowance sat at an awkward figure: too little to rent alone, just enough to share. Zhang Xue would not take a two-bedroom. Three people squeezed into two rooms, she said, and given time something would go wrong. In the end they rented an old three-bedroom on the east side of the city. Wu Ziyi took the master. Zhang Xue took the south-facing second bedroom. Li Gan took the smallest room, the one against the kitchen. The car was his, a gray old sedan with dull wipers. He did the driving. The other two transferred him their share of the gas each month. At first it was only to save trouble. Later it became a default: the end of the day, the revolving door, his car, their places in it.
Outside the revolving door the rain had stitched itself into lines. Zhang Xue opened an umbrella and a rib bent at once. Wu Ziyi carried none. Her trench-coat collar was up, and one wet strand of hair stuck to her cheek. Li Gan pulled the car in under the eaves, hazards blinking. Wu Ziyi opened the passenger door, set her bag by her feet, then sat down. The smell of rain came in with her, and a faint citrus on her skin. Zhang Xue climbed into the back. Water flicked onto Li Gan's wrist as she closed the umbrella. She said she was sorry. He said it was nothing.
The doors shut. The rain went far away.
They were often quiet. Zhang Xue answered messages. Wu Ziyi watched the road. Li Gan drove. That kind of quiet had no weight. Today was different. A red light held the car. The wipers cut two fans across the glass, and the rain covered them again at once. Wu Ziyi's hand rested on her knee. Her fingers were long. There was no ring. Li Gan knew she had been divorced for three years. On the project that was not a secret. The secret was the day he had begun, in gaps like this, to look at her hand.
She spoke, not loud. "When you reported today, the moment you got to collections, the end of the sentence fell. You used to lift the numbers a little without noticing."
His hands stayed on the wheel. "You hear even that."
"I sit off to the side and behind," she said. "Zhou Heng asked you a second time. You didn't get annoyed. I saw it."
From the back seat came Zhang Xue's voice, a little amused and a little warning. "Ziyi, don't hold a meeting in the car. I've already had eight hours of Beiwan today."
"No meeting," Wu Ziyi said.
The light turned green. The car slid into the rain. Water thrown by the car ahead hit the windshield in a white sheet. Li Gan looked straight ahead. The corner of his eye was all her. A dark wet patch marked the hem of her coat. Her calves were together. The skirt stopped at the knee. He called himself dull and still could not pull his eyes all the way back. Twenty-six was too old to behave like a man who had never seen a woman. He had. There had been a short relationship, and the reason it ended was ordinary past bearing: different cities, both of them busy, nothing especially cruel said by either. Wu Ziyi sitting beside him was not something those memories could explain. She was twelve years older than he was. He had done the sum, felt ridiculous when he finished it, and today he was doing it again.
Zhang Xue asked from the back whether they should buy food. Wu Ziyi said there were noodles at home. Li Gan said he could pull over. In the end none of them ate anything from the roadside. The car went down into the compound garage. Concrete cut the rain off. The world went suddenly dry, except for the drip of water off the tires. Zhang Xue got out first and said she would put the water on. Her steps sounded a few times between the pillars, and then she was in the elevator.
Wu Ziyi did not pull the handle at once.
The engine was still turning. The heater lifted the ends of her hair. She looked at the concrete pillar ahead as if she were making sure of something. "The quiet in this car tonight isn't quite right."
"The rain's heavy," Li Gan said.
"It isn't only the rain." She turned. The garage light was white, and her eyes were steady. "I felt it. If that makes you uneasy, pretend I didn't say it."
His throat moved. "I'm not uneasy."
The sentence was false. She could hear that, and she did not take it apart. She nodded. Her fingers rested on the door handle and stopped. "Li Gan, I'll leave one sentence here. I am not your superior. I lead the Beiwan proposal. Your review sits with Zhou Heng. Any day you don't want to drive me, you can say so straight out. I won't trip you at work because of it. If you're sitting an extra minute in this car because we share a place, because I'm older, because it's awkward to refuse, then that minute ends here."
He looked at her. When she said these things her ears were not red and her voice did not shake. His did. "It isn't because I can't refuse."
"Then what is it because of?"
He could not answer. Not because there was no answer. Because the answer was too hot to say for the first time in a garage. All he could manage was, "I don't know how to say it. But it isn't because I was forced."
Wu Ziyi looked at him for a few seconds, as if she were putting that insufficient sentence away in some drawer. "All right. Then tonight ends here." She pushed the door and got out. The hem of her coat swept the edge of the seat. Two steps on she bent again and spoke through the half-open window. "Don't boil the noodles too soft. Zhang Xue always turns them to mush."
He smiled, and the smile was short. "I know."
After she went upstairs he was still sitting in the car. There was a little damp on the wheel. Maybe it was only his imagination. He put his forehead against it and swore at himself, quietly. The elevator numbers climbed. The lights in the three-bedroom would come on one by one. He did not search the night for those windows. He locked the car.
In the kitchen Zhang Xue had already boiled the water. She was in a gray long-sleeved house shirt, hair loosely pinned, and when she saw him she pushed the noodle cakes over. "Where's Ziyi?"
"She's up. She said she'd shower first."
"Oh." Zhang Xue broke the noodles and glanced at him. "Your ears are red."
"The garage is hot."
"The garage isn't hot." She dropped the noodles into the pot, and her tone loosened. "Forget it. Rain makes people strange. Go and change. Don't flick a wet sleeve into my pot."
When the noodles were ready Wu Ziyi came out, hair half dry, the collar of a black cotton house set loose, a small patch of pink at the collarbone where the hot water had steamed her. The three of them sat at the small table and ate. Nobody mentioned what had been said in the car. The tap dripped once. Zhang Xue's phone rang. She took a client's voice message out on the balcony, and at once her voice went polite, clear, impossible to fault.
In the living room there was only the light click of chopsticks against the rims of bowls. Wu Ziyi picked up a small bite of noodles and set it in Li Gan's bowl. "Eat more. At lunch you only had half a rice ball."
"How do you know."
"Zhang Xue said." Her lashes lowered. "And I saw it."
The balcony door was still open a crack. The smell of rain came in. Li Gan bent his head to that mouthful and understood something with a sudden clarity: once a silence had been named by her like this, it could not be forced back into its old shape. The person across from him had not touched him. She had only passed him the noodles, finished saying where the line of power was, and then sat here the way people sat on any ordinary night of sharing a flat.
But his knee was tight under the table. Hers was less than a palm away. Neither of them came any closer.
When Zhang Xue came back she looked at the table and at the two bowls and asked nothing. She only said the client had changed the wording again and she would have to be up early. Wu Ziyi answered her. Li Gan drank the last of the broth and got up to wash. The water ran loud. He used the loud water to cover the sentence in him that still had not been said.
At night he lay in the smallest bedroom and listened to the kitchen pipe knock now and then. Beyond the wall was Wu Ziyi's master room. Past that was Zhang Xue. All three doors were shut. He almost typed a line to Wu Ziyi: I really did want to sit that extra minute. Halfway through the characters he deleted them. Not because he did not want to send them. Because he still did not know what wanting would have to carry.
The rain did not ease until after midnight. Before he slept, the last thing he thought of was not her body. It was the sentence she had left in the garage: if it's because you can't refuse, that minute ends here.
In the dark he answered, very softly, and nobody heard him. "I can refuse. I just don't want to refuse you."
