I would like to be closer to you. I know you want the same thing. I know the real reason you insist on bringing me with you every time you open a new branch in a new city. I know the real reason you always invite me when you go out to dine with new school administrators and government officials and investors.
But I am a creature that falls to pieces terribly often, and you can’t hold on to a thing like that. Every instance of physical touch invites potential damage to my artificial skin and the risk of being discovered.
It is difficult to maintain a safe distance in an overcrowded country where schoolboys sit on each other’s laps without embarrassment and ayis press their shopping baskets into your legs when you queue up at a market.
When you or anyone else stands too near or puts an arm around my shoulders, I step back and say, “Westerners like to keep other people at arm’s length.”
You have your own reasons not to get too close. You have familial obligations, filial piety. You must make your parents happy. They paid for your education, your clothes, your food, your new apartment. They gave you your job. You owe them a marriage and a child. You have no reason to be a bachelor at the age of twenty-eight.
Your mother and father choose a woman for you. She’s pretty and kind. You can think of no adequate excuses to chase her away. You can tolerate a life with her, you decide. You’re a businessman. You will travel a lot. She doesn’t mind.
You announce your impending marriage less than a year later. The two of you look perfect in your engagement photos, and at your wedding you beam so handsomely that even I am fooled. I’m not jealous. I’m relieved that she has taken your focus from me, and I do love to see you smile.
A few months later, we travel to Beijing. New Teach is opening a training center there, so we have another series of banquets and gan bei and KTV with our new business partners.
By the end of the night, you’re staggering drunk, too drunk to walk straight, so I stoop low to let you put your arm across Thomas Majors’s shoulders in order to save you from tipping onto the pavement. I hope that you’re too drunk to notice there’s something not quite right with Thomas’s limbs, or at least too drunk to remember it afterward.
I help you into a cab. The driver asks me the standard waiguoren questions (Where are you from? How long have you lived in China? Do you like it here? What is your job? Do you eat hamburgers?) but I ignore him. I only want to listen to you.
You rub your stomach as the taxi speeds madly back to our hotel. “Are you going to vomit?” I ask.
You’re quiet for a moment. I try to roll down the window nearest you, but it’s broken. Finally, you mutter, “I’m getting fat. Too much beer.”
“You look fine,” I say.
“I’m gaining weight,” you insist.
“You sound like a woman,” I tease you.
“Why don’t you get fat?” you say. “You’re a Westerner. How are you so slim?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” I say.
I pay the cab fare and drag you out, back up to your hotel suite. I give you water to drink and an ibuprofen to swallow so you won’t get a hangover. You take your medicine like a good boy, but you refuse to go to sleep.
I sit at the edge of your bed. You lean forward and grab my scarf. “You always wear this,” you say.
“Always,” I agree.
“What would happen if you took it off?” you ask.
“I can’t tell you,” I reply.
“Come on,” you say, adding a line from a song: “Come on, baby, don’t be shy.” Then you laugh until tears flow down your red cheeks, until you fall backward onto the bed, and when you fall you drag me by the scarf down with you.
“Be careful!” I tell you. “Ah, xiao xin!”
But instead you pull on the scarf as though reeling in a fish.
“You never take it off,” you say, holding one end of the scarf before your eyes. “I have never seen your neck.”
I know I’m supposed to say something witty but I can’t think of it, so I smile bashfully instead. It’s a gesture I stole from Hugh Grant films.
“What would happen if I take it off?” you ask. You try to unwrap it, but fortunately you’re too clumsy with drink.
“My head would fall off,” I say.
Then you laugh, and I laugh. Looming over you is awkward, so I lie beside you and prop my head up on Thomas Majors’s shoulder. You turn onto your left side to face me.
“Da Huang,” you say, still playing with the scarf. “That’s your Chinese name.”
“What’s your Chinese name?” I ask. “Your real name, I mean? You never told me.”
“Chengwei,” you say.
“Chengwei,” I repeat, imperfectly.
“No,” you say. “Not Chéngwéi.” You raise your hand, then make a dipping motion to indicate the second and third tones. “Chéngwěi.”
“Chéngwěi,” I say, drawing the tones in the air with Thomas’s graceful fingers.
“Hen hao,” you say. Very good.
“Nali,” I say, a modest denial.
You smile. I notice for the first time that one of your front teeth is slightly crooked. It’s endearing, though, one of those little flaws which, through some sort of alchemy I have yet to learn to replicate, only serves to flatter the rest of the picture rather than mar it.
“Da Huang is not a good name,” you say.
“What should I be called?” I ask.
You study Thomas Majors’s face carefully, yet somehow fail to find its glaring faults.
“Shuai,” you say. You don’t translate the word, but I know what it means. Handsome.
You touch Thomas’s cheek. I can feel your warmth through the false skin.
Again, I don’t know what to say. This hasn’t come up in the etiquette books I studied.
I realize that you’re waiting for me to be the brash Westerner who shoves his way forward and does what he wants. This hunger of yours presses on Thomas Majors, pinches and pulls at him to resculpt his personality.
I want to be the man who can give you these things. But I’m terrified. When you run your fingers through Thomas’s hair, I worry that the scalp might come loose, or that your hand will skate across a bump that should not be there.
You grab me by the scarf again and pull me closer to you. I shut my eyes. I don’t want you to see them at this distance; you might find something wrong in them. But that’s not what you’re looking for.
Then you kiss me, a clumsy, drunk kiss. You cling to me like one of Harlow’s monkeys to a cloth mother.
I can’t remember the last time I was kissed.
I vaguely remember engaging in the act of coitus in some previous incarnation. It did not go well.
The mechanics of sexuality, of blood redistributing itself and tissue contracting and flesh reddening and appendages hardening and fluids secreting, are marvelously difficult to imitate with any verisimilitude.
This is the climax of every story. In romance novels, the lovers kiss in the rain, and it’s all over. In fairy tales, the kiss breaks the spelclass="underline" the princess awakens, the frog becomes a man. But that doesn’t happen, not now, not the last time I was kissed, and not the next time I will be kissed.
But I enjoy it all the same. Your body is warm and right and reaclass="underline" self-heating skin, hair that grows in on its own, a mouth that lubricates itself.
I study your body and memorize it for future reference. At the moment there is little I can learn and so much that I want to know. I wish I could taste you.
You remove yourself from my lips and drunkenly smear your mouth against my cheek, my jaw, what little of my neck is not covered by the scarf. You press your nose against me and try vainly to smell Thomas Majors under the cologne I have chosen for him. You rest your head on my arm for a moment. I stroke your hair—not because it seems appropriate, but because I want to.