‘No, he’s into futures,’ someone else said.
‘No, no. You’re all wrong. He works in a subsidiary of the China Poly group.’
They all started arguing. They were all playing detectives, snooping into other people’s wealth. He was certainly rich, they could agree that much, but nobody really knew how — a fact which only made him seem all the richer. He had mysteriously become rich the way I mysteriously kept losing my job.
I didn’t know anything about it myself. I hadn’t seen her for ages.
‘So the bitch finally dropped you,’ one said. ‘She never even talked to you about marriage?’
I never imagined she would. She wasn’t my girl.
She was the class beauty.
They all started wondering if he’d given her one back then, which got everyone reminiscing about taking girls to the cinema, getting to first base, swearing eternal love … they’d all had girlfriends. I was gutted. There really was nothing between her and me except for borrowing rubbers. But the way they were talking made me think there had been something momentous, some grand passion between us, and that she’d dumped me. I wanted to go find her, give her a slap and ask if she’d dumped me because I wasn’t as smart as her fiancé. Because I didn’t have a Lexus. But the more I wanted to ask her, the less I wanted to go to the dinner.
And when I found out Lexus would be there, there was no way I was going.
‘Hey, stop being such an idiot,’ they said. ‘We’ll stick up for you. We’ll make a fool of that Lexus.’
Bikers jealous of a man on four wheels? I still wasn’t going.
‘Surely you’re not afraid of him,’ they said.
‘Afraid? Me? You must be kidding!’ I protested. Shit. What the hell was there to be afraid of anyway? There was never anything going on, not even a hint of a love affair, so why the hell would I be worried about being run down by a Lexus?
‘OK, I’ll go.’
2
She had become beautiful. And I mean truly lovely. As lovely as a brightly-painted lantern. And that lantern was hanging right in front of my eyes, dazzling me. Lexus was standing behind her. He was powerfully built, but unfortunately he was almost a midget. No amount of money would change that. This stocky little man jingled the car keys in his hand, damn it, like they were marbles.
‘Is he really tall enough to drive a car?’ someone asked.
‘Can he reach the clutch?’
‘Of course he can! He can put a pad under his feet, just like the boy hero Lei Feng!’ There was a shout of laughter.
But he didn’t seem to hear any of that. She was raising her arm — the same long, white arm I remembered — beckoning for everyone to come over for a photo, like some damn class monitor. None of us wanted to be in the picture. In fact, everyone insisted it should be just the two of them, pushing them together so they were shoulder to shoulder, putting their arms around each other’s waists, making them stand cheek to cheek — ‘To make it more intimate.’
But, guess what? To our surprise, Lexus objected.
‘You don’t need to get close in public if you’re sleeping together,’ he said. ‘You only do it in public if you’re not doing it in private.’
That shut everybody up. We all stood there, blinking in surprise. He went upstairs. She stamped her foot and ran after him. We didn’t dare stare. So that’s what it was like to be rich — you could do whatever the fuck you wanted. In the end we all got up to get him a drink. But no one wanted to go upstairs after them. They all said I should go first. I said no, so they started trying to push me up the stairs. I pushed back with all my might. Then who should turn up but Lexus, glass in hand.
‘Hey, stop bullying the poor man,’ he said.
‘Poor man?’ Everyone roared with laughter.
I glared round at them, but they took no notice and carried on laughing. He must have known. I definitely shouldn’t have come. It was all very well for the rest of them, but I’d fallen right into a trap. Then he burst out laughing too. He laughed just like a frog, clasping fat arms to his chest. I started to relax.
The rest of them were still joking: ‘Trust an honest man to get one over on you.’
‘You mean him?’ he asked, poking me with his finger, as if he was that paragon of official virtue, Judge Bao. More laughter. He stopped laughing and topped up my drink. ‘I have ways of telling if you’re a thief,’ he said, raising his glass towards me and emptying it.
The others all chanted: ‘Drink! Drink! Down it in one!’ So I did. I had to.
‘Good,’ said Lexus. ‘People who drink and thieve are generally thieves, people who are honest and drink are generally honest. So he’s not a thief.’
Everyone burst out laughing again. But Lexus wasn’t laughing. He just opened another bottle and sat down beside me, ignoring the racket going on around us.
‘Come on, let’s drink,’ he said and poured some more for both of us.
She nibbled seeds and looked bored, her face somehow pinched. He was deliberately ignoring her. Suddenly she stood up and tried to grab the glass out of his hand.
‘If you get drunk, how are you going to get home?’ she said.
‘What are you worried about? Hitting a telegraph pole and dying is no big deal.’
There was a cheer at that. A real cheer. But she went red, then white, and looked like she was going to cry.
‘I don’t care about you dying, I care about the car.’
‘The car?’ he said. ‘It cost less than a hundred thousand. Peanuts.’
‘Wow!’ everyone said. ‘That’s money talking.’
‘Where the hell did you get so much money from?’ someone asked.
‘I robbed a bank,’ he said.
That stunned everybody. Then they started grinning.
‘Have you ever seen someone with a wallet walking down the street? Reach out and it’s yours,’ he said. ‘Have you ever seen jewels on display in a shop window? Get a knife and a bag and grab them, and they’re all yours. Aren’t they?’
A roar of laughter.
3
If he’d talked seriously about business, he’d have got himself throttled. As it was, everyone thought he was great. Even me. At the end of the evening, I got him to drive me home. Three days later, he turned up at my house in the Lexus. He stood there jingling his keys as the neighbours gawped, then came in and plonked himself down. My house was so ramshackle it practically needed propping up, and the floor was uneven, but he just sat right down on it and said: ‘Let’s have a drink.’
I couldn’t imagine why. He pulled out a bottle of baijiu and some nibbles — duck legs, duck wings, shredded squid and a packet of dipping sauce. I couldn’t believe he had all this stuff in his pockets when he was driving here in the Lexus. I laughed and drank up.
‘I had to sneak out,’ he said, taking a gulp. ‘I nearly didn’t make it.’ He sneaked a glance through one of the cracks — my door was full of cracks. It dawned on me that she wasn’t here and that, without her, something was missing. Still, she gave us something in common. Maybe I could tell him how I felt.
‘She’s on my case day in day out,’ he said, ‘going on about this and that, telling me drinking’s not good for you, that alcohol poisons the system and hardens the liver.’ She sounded like a model citizen. I’d never seen that in her at middle school. Maybe women are always women, and automatically turn into model citizens like they can automatically breastfeed when they have babies.
‘That’s just how she is,’ I said.
‘It’s so annoying,’ he said.
Why couldn’t she lecture me instead? I stood up.
‘You’re all right,’ I snapped. ‘She loves you.’