Читать книгу My Crescent Moon (A Collection of Short Stories) - Joseph Dylan - Страница 3

The day I went looking for the ring, large, tumescent clouds of rose above Beijing. They rolled into town the day before, and although most referred to them as sandstorms, in truth they were dust storms, comprised of loess dust that carpeted the vast interior of China. This afternoon the slanting sun turned the loess clouds into pale shades of yellow, orange, red, and grey. It was March, but it had been a dry winter in northern China, the lack of winter’s precipitation breeding a handful of dust storms, this being the first of many that spring. As I drove in the taxi to Wangfujing, where I was going to buy the ring, the wind tore at the Chinese flags that rippled on their masts at the foot of the federal buildings. People scurried the sidewalks holding their umbrellas to the side to deflect the northwesterly wind. Only a fool would be out in these conditions; but, I had an impulse that demanded my urgent attention – I needed an engagement ring, and I needed it quickly. It was Wednesday afternoon, and I knew that I couldn’t take any time off before the clock trickled down to five in the afternoon on Friday when I’d be off work at the American Embassy. Then, at dinner, I’d propose to Wen Wen.

For three years I’d been working in Beijing at the American Embassy. There I applied my knowledge of the Middle Kingdom in the commerce department greasing the wheels of American companies to work with their Chinese counterparts. Taking care of all the arcane and exigent laws of international commerce with China was truly exacting and frequently left me exhausted at the end of the day. But it was in the chambers of the commerce department that providence allowed me to meet Wen Wen. Working as one of the commercial department’s assistants, I was immediately drawn to her. Though not originally from Beijing, she had lived there most of her life. Wen Wen was originally from Fujian, and that was where her hukao, or citizenship card, listed as her hometown. That might cause problems when we were married. There, I had seen her for over year, but it was only over the last six months that we became serious.

The road to the American Embassy in Beijing was neither a short nor a straight one. As an undergraduate, I matriculated through the Chinese Studies Department at Yale. Upon graduation, anxious to see the world, while at the same time hoping to leave it a better place, I joined the Peace Corps. They sent me to an impoverished rural town in southern Taiwan. There I fell in love with the Far East. I spent two years in the Peace Corps, then I stayed on in Taiwan, enrolling in a Taiwanese law school. Successfully having sat for the bar in Taiwan, I took a post in the Diplomatic Corps, who sent me for a year to Guangzhou and then to Beijing.

Though I discovered Beijing delightfully different than Guangzhou, I found the Chinese friendly, but wary. Though it had not been that long since the nineteenth century held a grip on Beijing and the rest of China, it just now was coming out of its cocoon. When people seemed skittish, when they seemed to keep me at arms length, and were reluctant to invite me out to eat or come over to their apartment, I remembered that it had only been a little more than a generation since the Cultural Revolution.

I remember the first day that Wen Wen came to our department. Her English was excellent, even if it wasn’t the King’s English. Her fiery eyes, dark as anthracite, set off her beautiful raven hair. No less did they set off her precious teeth and fair complexation. In profile, I could imagine that face composing one side of an old Grecian urn. I was a good ten years older than she was, with the beginnings of a small paunch and sandy hair that was starting to recede like the hoarfrost on a windowpane in the middle of winter as the sun comes up. In her eyes, she must have seen me as a tall, gangly lao wei (foreigner) that I was: something to hold one’s interest for a moment, like a child picking up an object and, deciding that it wasn’t likely to hold his or her interest, setting it back down. But to my surprise – almost to my dismay – she seemed to take an interest in me. Though I possess an extremely dry sense of humor that I often share with my coworkers, she was genuinely amused by most of my offhand remarks. Soon she was putting her hand on my shoulder and letting it linger there when she brought me documents to peruse and sign. For months we spent more and more time in each other’s presence, becoming more and more familiar with each other, and, at least on my part, lusting for her unlike I hadn’t felt for any woman I’d met since I’d been in mainland China. And I found the women of China, in their offhand elegance, the most beautiful I’d ever encountered. When I finally got my courage up, I took Wen Wen to The Metro, an upscale Italian Restaurant that specialized not only in pastas, but also in finely grilled steaks. Besides, the Metro was an out-of-the-way place to go in order not to be seen by colleagues. I didn’t know how my superiors would look upon any romantic entanglement with a Chinese national, but I didn’t think it would be good. While I held up the conversation most of the night, she didn’t seem bashful about telling me about her family and her life outside the embassy. Every few minutes she would smile and laugh like a little girl, something I found very charming. When the taxi dropped her off at her apartment, she told me she was free the next weekend. I didn’t sleep with her until we had been out together for six or seven times. In bed she seemed to be both bashful and eager to please.

We began taking trips together on the weekend, such as Hong Kong or Shanghai. At these destinations, we took long walks, we savored long meals, we made everlasting love. Then after about half a year of this, I told her I loved her.

“Sometimes I think I love you, Robert. Sometimes I don’t.”

I never knew how to respond to this, though we seemed to grow closer and closer.

Then one night, she said to me: “You know in China it is the man’s job to make the money and it is the woman’s job to spend it.”

“If I gave you that idea, then I gave you the wrong one,” I said. I chided her as if she was someone a years younger than she was. For the rest of the night she seemed to pout. I think it was that night that I became more aware of her propensity to withdraw into a late adolescence. When Apple built a store in Sanlitun, I bought her an iPhone. For weeks, she hinted that she wanted one. Finally, when I bought her one, she spent so much time talking to her friends she had to carry her recharger with her. Money matters often sparked small arguments between us. When I told her I couldn’t afford something she’d become petulant, just like some of my college girlfriends. But that phase appeared to have passed after the first five or six months of our relationship. She’d tell me how she missed me the nights I wasn’t in her bed; she’d tell me how she looked forward to having my children. This gave me some pause, but I was thirty-two: I was not opposed to settling down; I was not opposed to having a family. After I’d been seeing her for a year, she was hinting too that she wanted to settle down.

So it was not quite an unexpected act on my part to by her a ring and become officially engaged. The ring would signify my true love of Wen Wen. Thus, it was with love that I departed the taxi in the raging dust storm in front of Oriental Plaza in Wangfujing. The jewelry store that I had in mind was located on the first floor of Oriental Plaza next to the Hyatt Regency. In Xiao Wu’s store, there were two jewelry display cases forming two squares within each other. Giving Wu’s assistant a rough idea of how much I wanted to spend, she took me to the very back counter. Showing me platinum, silver, and gold bands, encrusted with diamonds, sapphires, rubies or other semiprecious stones, I settled on a platinum band with a ruby. Setting me back about one paycheck, the dark red would appear quite elegant with her black hair. This one was precious enough to set me back several hundred dollars. “You sure you don’t want to see any others?” I shook my head. I paid her with my credit card and had her wrap the ring as a gift.

Friday couldn’t come soon enough for me. So far, I had never mentioned marriage to Wen Wen, so I knew that tonight’s solicitation would come as quite a surprise. But I did tell her that there was something I had to tell her. Again, I took her to the Metro. Inside, most of the tables were vacant. Marvin, who was the manager and a friend of mine, found us an especially private table. I ordered a steak while she ordered penne with clam sauce. The wine I ordered wasn’t the finest that the Metro carried, but it was still quite dear. From the moment we sat down, until the food arrived, Wen Wen was on her iPhone conversing with friends. While I slowly cut and ate my steak, and vigorously drank the wine, she barely recognized that I was there. She giggled at jokes I couldn’t hear; she hushed as I assumed one of her friends told her a secret. I started to say something to her, but she held her hand up as if to wave me off. I looked across the restaurant. Sitting at another table was a Chinese couple. The woman was on her smartphone too as her husband continued to put his meal away. He looked so bored with it all. I fingered the wrapped gift box sitting in my suit coat pocket. Then she dialed another friend. All the while I finished my steak and the rest of the wine. Finally, while I had taken the last sip of the wine, she hung up with her last friend and turned to me. “So what was it that you wanted to tell me?”

“I don’t know how to put it, Wen Wen, so I’ll just say it. I think we should start seeing other people.”