"How are you called?" He leaned close to shut out the wall of music.
She answered "Yulian," the Chinese name she currently used for these situations. Yulian was an old-fashioned name; it meant Fragrant Lotus. It was a name that rang on many levels. The bound feet had been called lotuses, and there was also that famous heroine of Chinese erotic fiction, the Golden Lotus.
These allusions were not lost on him. He pressed his mouth together in amusement. "I’m Lu Ming."
A hollow-chested young waiter with a sharp, acne-cratered face materialized. "Bai jiu," Lu Ming told him, slang for the steamroller 120-proof rice spirits popular in China. Then he turned to Alice: "Unless you’d rather have a"-he interrupted his Chinese to try to pronounce it the English way-"Coca-Cola?"
"Bai jiu ye xing," she answered. Good, she thought, rice spirits, one shot, maybe two. It was better to be high. "Good. Bai jiu."
The spirits arrived, clear liquid in two tiny glasses. Lu Ming toasted their friendship with a standard phrase, and then added, "Gan-bei," dry glass, and they both drained it and laughed. The fire burned through her stomach and rose instantly to her head. How long since she’d eaten?
"What are you doing in Beijing?" Lu Ming asked, circling his empty glass on the wet tabletop.
She paused. Sometimes she invented professions; tonight, on a whim, she decided to tell the truth. "I’m an interpreter."
"Trade?"
"Freelance. I’m about to start a job with an archaeologist. Something to do with Homo erectus."
"Eh?" he squinted.
"You know, Homo erectus, our ancestors, the missing link? Like Peking Man."
"You mean the ape-man?" he chortled, using the street word, yuanren. "I doubt very much if the Chinese people could be descended from the ape-man!"
"Well"-she tensed slightly at this prejudice-"I don’t know anything about it, really. I’m just a translator."
Still Lu Ming did not let it go. "But such an expedition must cost huge money!" He raised his hand in a two-fingered signal to the passing waiter. "And for what? For history? Eh, it’s a waste!" Two new, full glasses appeared in front of them. The music blasted away. "History is but a hobby. It’s for old men with no yang left."
"I like history," she said defensively. "I think old things are beautiful."
"What counts now and for the future is modernization. Commerce." He leaned into her. "Money."
"To money." She forced a smile. It was no use arguing with Chinese men. Especially if you were a woman. And a foreigner. Their probing interest in her-the free American mind, the direct laughter, the pale, willing body-always held the potential for an edge of contempt. If she could stay back from that edge, though, the excitement was unmatched. The two of them drank. "And you, Lu Ming? What do you do?"
"I’m in business," he said simply, as if no further explanation were needed of this most glorious word. Gracefully he withdrew a white card from his black jacket.
She glanced at the characters. "Lu Investment Consulting Group?"
He touched his forelock in mock salute.
"Well, Chairman Lu, to your profits." She smiled, pleased to see that there was now yet another tiny, full glass in front of her. "Gan-bei." They drank and gasped together. The booming room shuddered. "These must be good times for you," she said, rolling the empty glass between her palms. "The current leaders."
"Eh, it’s so. It’s because of old Deng Xiao-ping we have all this." He paused and with a rapid sweep of his eyes managed to include the frenzied crowd, the recorded tidal wave of guitar and saxophones, the rolling static of laughter, and, last and most pointedly, his square white business card half splashed now with rice brandy on the table. "Ta-de kai fang zheng che, liufang bai shi; danshi Liu-Si ye jiang yichou wannian, " The open door will hand down a good reputation for a hundred generations, but the Six-Four will leave a stink for ten thousand years.
"True," she said, recognizing the colloquial term Six-Four -shorthand for the Tiananmen incident, which had occurred on June fourth. Chinese liked to remember things by their numbers. "Do you think new leaders might change the situation?"
He lowered his voice, conjuring a bond between them. "It’s a mistake to think it matters who’s in charge. Of course the old leaders die. But then not much changes. The wolf just becomes a dog. Though as for the open door"-by this he meant China’s new liberalism-"I am sure it will remain as it is. They’ll never be able to close it." Under the table he placed his foot alongside hers, a gentle but insistent message. "You see," he said, and spread his hands disarmingly, "I care only for my personal success now. Completely selfish! But I’m educated. And-everyone agrees on this, Yulian-my heart is good. Therefore"-he leaned in and locked on her eyes- "will Yulian now go with me to some more peaceful place where friends can speak with their hearts at ease?"
Cigarette smoke, laughter, the throbbing bass swirled around her. Suddenly the Brilliant Coffee was a box of thunder, of unbearable noise. He really wants me, she thought with the familiar thrill. And then she hesitated.
He rubbed her foot with his. It was soft, he wore only a sock, when had he taken off his shoe? "Yi bu zuo, er bu xiu, " he whispered, Once a thing is begun, no one can stop it until it is finished.
He moved his foot away, not touching her now, only leaning close-but his entire body flamed with attention. Hers did too. She closed her eyes. Pretend, tonight. She felt a pull to the center of him, where surely lay entry to all China. "Weishenmo bu," she whispered finally, Why not.
He didn’t speak as they pedaled side by side through the mud-rutted lanes that coiled away from the Brilliant Coffee- she remembered this the next morning as she rode her bicycle back in the misty, unfurling dawn to the Minzu Hotel. He had smiled at her once, radiantly, but said nothing. It was like a Chinese man not to speak, not now, not when it was about to happen. They all had this magnificent reserve. She knew how this wall of reserve would come to an end, too, and she had been right: even now, pedaling hard through the early half-light of Wangfujing Boulevard, her thighs cramped with desire when she remembered the way the door had closed behind them in his apartment and he had turned to her, reached for her, and all in one motion carried her down with him to the floor where in an instant the verbal, astute, urbane man he had been at the Brilliant Coffee vanished and in his place was a purely physical being, urgently male, frantic to enter her.
Later, when they were lying naked under sheets by the open window, he asked her whether, since she was based in Beijing, they could be friends. She didn’t answer right away. This was the hard part for her. She loved it when they first touched her, and she would always cringe a little, pull back, savor the waves of shame and shyness and then, finally, surrender. That was the pleasure. But it always ended. The sex always ended and the talking came back, and with it the lines she could never seem to cross.
"Of course I couldn’t visit you at your hotel." He lit a cigarette and exhaled a blue cloud toward the ceiling. "It would cause too much talk. You’re waiguoren, an outside-country person. Not Chinese. But you could come here, at night."
Did he have to say all this? Though of course a lot of men talked too much, and unwisely, in the temporary state of total spread-legged candor which followed sex.
"Well?" he asked softly, fingers moving through her hair.
She guarded herself. "I know all about what you are saying."