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Chapter 5 The Rearview Mirror
Chapter 5 The Rearview Mirror
Zhang Xue had not only seen it that night. The soup was an excuse. The buttons were an excuse. What she really began to rewind was Wu Ziyi looking at the side of Li Gan's face in the red light. That look was not a colleague's. A colleague would not remember the falling end of a person's sentence so clearly, and would not, after saying "no meeting," still leave her gaze on the hand that held the wheel.
She sat in the back. The laptop was lit, and not one character on the screen went into her head. In the rearview mirror Wu Ziyi's hand rested on her own knee, one gear-change away from Li Gan's hand. The car was an automatic. There was no gear lever to stand between them and that distance. Zhang Xue deleted an email she had not finished typing, then typed it again. She was thirty-six. She had done client success for eight years. What she was best at was hearing, in another person's pause, the demand that had not yet been spoken. Using that craft in her own home now was like holding a knife backward.
That night she had said the flat wasn't large, and the moment she finished she regretted her tone. Too much like grabbing. Too much like a person who had not been invited and had already gone to stand in the doorway. After she went into her room she did not turn on the big light. She only sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the kitchen tap run for a while. Li Gan did not come out after her to explain. Neither did Wu Ziyi. That made it look even more like what it was.
She and Li Gan had lived together for eleven months. At the beginning she had taken him for a younger brother who needed reminding to eat. Later she found he was not that. When she was rushing a draft he would set cut fruit at the corner of her desk and say nothing. He remembered that she did not eat cilantro. After she had finished arguing with a client he would change the music in the car to something without lyrics. These things were small, small enough to be explained as manners. But Zhang Xue knew the night she had stopped explaining them as manners. That night she had a fever. He knocked twice, set a thermometer and fever medicine outside the door, and said, "I won't come over. If you want to open the door, open it." She opened it. He only looked at her face, made sure she could still stand, put his coat over her, and stepped back to the doorway. She thought then: this person was twenty-six, and he already understood what kind of closeness would not shame a person.
She kept that liking pressed very low. The reason for pressing it low was practical. The same flat. The same company. She was ten years older than he was. She had seen too many women pay care out first inside an age gap, then get called older sister, and in the end have to apologize for their desire on account of that name. She would not. So she went on sitting in the back seat, went on transferring the gas money to the cent, went on saying the garage wasn't hot when his ears were red, and then stopping the sentence there.
Wu Ziyi had reached out before she did. Once that was seen clearly, jealousy was not a fog. It was a specific stone.
The next morning the three of them still left together. Everyone in the car was normal. Normal enough that Zhang Xue wanted to laugh. Wu Ziyi talked through Beiwan's wording. Li Gan answered. Zhang Xue herself added a line about the mood on the client side. At the office they split in the elevator and went to their own desks. At noon Zhang Xue saw them miss each other by half a step in the pantry. That half step had more in it than an embrace. She stood outside the glass with her own cup and suddenly wanted to set the cup down, walk in, and ask: how long do you plan to hide this, until I voluntarily clear the master bedroom for you?
She did not ask. She went back to her desk and wrote an email that could have been soft so that it came out hard. In the afternoon Wu Ziyi came to her to align the client's phrasing. Zhang Xue revised it sentence by sentence until there was no crack in it. Wu Ziyi looked at her. "You're angry today."
"So is the client," Zhang Xue said. "Ziyi, if some things need saying, don't say them at the desks. And don't make me guess from buttons and condoms. I guess accurately. When I guess right, it's more humiliating."
Wu Ziyi's face went white for a moment, then recovered. She nodded. "We'll talk at home tonight. Or you set the time. I don't want to act it out with you here."
"Li Gan has to go through data with Zhou Heng tonight. You know that." Zhang Xue closed the file. "Saturday. Before Saturday, don't do anything in the kitchen that I'd walk in on. That's the only demand I want to make right now. The rest I have to sort out myself first. When I've sorted it, I'll ask you. I won't ask and then cry and tell you to get out. And I'm not here to grant permission."
Wu Ziyi looked at her. There was an apology in her eyes, and a hardness that came after being seen through. "All right. Saturday. Thank you for still being willing to choose home, and not the office."
"Don't thank me," Zhang Xue said. "I just still want to live there."
That evening she got home before they did. She showered, changed into an old T-shirt, and sat in her room without turning on the television. When headlights swept through the gap in the curtains she knew it was Li Gan's car. She did not go out. She heard the two of them come in, heard Wu Ziyi say "sleep early," heard Li Gan getting water in the kitchen. The water stopped. Nobody knocked on her door. That let her breathe out, and it made her hate them more.
After she lay down, the hatred slowly changed its shape. It was no longer only "you hid it from me." It became "where will his mouth go." She could imagine too well. She imagined Wu Ziyi in the passenger seat, skirt up, Li Gan's head going down. She imagined the hand she had seen countless times pressed to Wu Ziyi's waist. She imagined the sound of him saying Ziyi, rougher than the sound of him saying Zhang Xue at home. Her body was more honest than her pride. Her underwear gradually went wet. When she put her hand inside she swore at herself once, and still did not take it away.
The moment her fingers pressed her clit she bit the pillow. She was thinking of Li Gan's tongue, and she was not thinking only of herself. She also saw Wu Ziyi's open legs, saw the woman who had gotten him earlier shaking. Jealousy and desire stacked together and burned until her eyes were hot. She pushed two fingers into herself, rubbed that point with her thumb, fast and hating. She would not make a sound. The wall was not thick. When she came the tops of her thighs went tight, her hips lifted, and then they dropped hard, and the wetness covered her palm. In the aftershock she buried her face in the pillow. Her breathing was disordered and angry.
She did not only want to be fucked. She wanted to be chosen. She wanted to push that door open not as the person catching them, but as a person desire had also named. But she was clear about this too: wanting it was not the same as being able to accept herself becoming the one who joined later. What a person of thirty-six feared most was not the absence of sex. It was being assigned, inside a story other people had already started, the place of the one who understood.
She pulled a tissue, dried her hand, and poured herself half a glass of water that had already gone cold. The glass sat at the head of the bed. The surface of the water was steady. She looked at that little water and lined up, in her mind, the things she would say on Saturday. At the end of the lining-up, only three sentences were left.
I saw it.
I'm jealous.
I want him too, and I will not accept being treated as the landlord who needs soothing.
She pressed the three sentences under her tongue and finally slept. Before she slept she thought of one more thing she resented having to admit: she had thought about Wu Ziyi's body too. Not only today. Once Wu Ziyi had come out of the shower with water on her collarbone, and Zhang Xue's gaze had stayed too long, and Zhang Xue herself had been the one to move it. If Saturday's talk was only about Li Gan and not about this, she would still be lying. She hated lying. She especially hated lying to herself.
On the two nights before Saturday the three of them kept up a fragile politeness. In the car Zhang Xue still sat in the back. At red lights she looked at the rearview mirror on purpose. Wu Ziyi no longer looked at Li Gan for too long. Li Gan's hands stayed honestly on the wheel. Honesty itself was a kind of admission. Zhang Xue saw her own eyes in the mirror and suddenly felt the car was ridiculously small. All three of their breaths were on the same small piece of glass. Whoever wanted to leave whoever inside the silence, the silence would not agree.
