Homesick for Another World(6)

“Wei?” answered the woman.

She had answered on her cell phone.

He nearly jumped for joy. He had her, he felt, in arm’s reach.

“Wei?” he heard again. She was behind the counter, scribbling on a pad, phone to her ear, undisturbed. He waited a few more seconds, then hung up. He quickly e-mailed his brother, who was a military man in Suizhou. He wrote that he’d met the most amazing woman in the world, and that he’d probably make her his wife within a year. Then he wrote, “She is old, and not very pretty.” He wrote that because he knew that it was bad luck to boast.

He left the arcade and made his way down the back alley, past the ravine, toward the restaurant where he would have a special lunch that day. Everything looked so beautiful. The sun, the sky, the dry brown brittle roads. A red banner announcing the opening of a new grocery store lit his heart on fire as he crossed the little footbridge. He bought a pack of the most expensive cigarettes. He bought a can of orange soda and a small bottle of baijiu. At the old temple flophouse he dropped to his knees and said a prayer of thanks for the woman’s cell-phone number.

Now that he had the woman’s cell-phone number, he would send her a text. But he didn’t know how to start off the exchange. “Who’s this?” he considered texting. “I just found your number saved in my phone. But I don’t know who you are.”

But that was no way to begin the romance of his life. He racked his brain for a good opener.

“I’ve seen you at the arcade.”

“I see you around and think you’re beautiful.”

“I think you’re beautiful and would like to get to know you better.”

“I find you attractive.”

“I like watching you count money.”

“You have nice hair and nice hands,” he thought of texting.

None of these were good openers. He decided to wait until the perfect line struck him, rather than to rush into a sloppy exchange that might trip him up. More than anything in the world, perhaps more than winning her heart, he did not want to appear awkward.

“I will go to the brothel,” said Wu to himself and went out and walked to the bus and waited.

? ? ?

Now, he knew full well that any normal man in his position would simply ask her out to dinner. But that seemed to him to be the worst possible tactic to employ. If he gave her an opportunity to reject him, he was sure she’d take it. “You have seen my face,” he considered texting.

His downstairs neighbor was also waiting for the bus.

“Brother Wu,” he called to him. “What’s your direction?”

“I am going into town to speak with some higher-ups,” lied Wu. “We are working on hiring a cleaning crew for Hu Long Road. It will take some real convincing to allocate more funds for this project. It is not my job, but someone has to speak up.”

“You’re an asset to our community,” said the neighbor. He looked despondent. His wife’s prawn claw must be getting him down, Wu thought, at once sympathetic and cruel.

“How is the wife, the baby?” he asked.

“The baby is sick. My wife cannot nurse, and the baby food we give it makes it shit water. I’ve done something to anger the gods,” said the neighbor. He held up his hands, palms up to the sky. Wu hadn’t been around this sort of superstitious type for a while. He’d forgotten they existed. His own prayer earlier that morning had not really been one of gratitude, but like a child’s birthday wish. He’d wished to one day hold the woman naked in his arms and lay her across a moonlit bed.

“Where are you headed?” Wu asked his neighbor.

“To the doctor,” he said. “To buy more medicine.”

Wu had run out of things to say. He looked at his phone, as though already expecting a reply from the woman at the arcade. He still hadn’t thought of what to text her. He thought, Maybe the neighbor knows.

“Tell me, neighbor,” he began. “How did you get your wife to marry you?”

“We sat beside each other in grade school,” the neighbor said simply. “We lived nearby, and our mothers played mah-jongg at night, so we played together, we were friends. We were friends first. And then the rest,” he said. “She has a sick hand, you know.” He looked at Wu out of the corners of his eyes.

“I hadn’t noticed,” lied Wu.

“It made her desperate, I think, to settle for any man.”

This gave Wu an idea.

He turned to the neighbor. “I wish you both the best, and your little boy,” he said.

“The child is a girl,” said the neighbor.

But Wu was not listening. He was thinking of the woman at the arcade.

He thought hard on the bus and performed distractedly with the little prostitute. To stave off his shame, afterward he took himself to a Western restaurant for dinner, ordered steak, a fresh cabbage salad, a glass of red wine.

He took a taxi home.

He knew what to text the woman at the arcade. He would text, “How does it feel to be a middle-aged divorce?e living with your retarded nephew and working in a computer cafe?? Is it everything you ever dreamed?”

He took a long time to type all the letters in pinyin and to select the right characters in the phone. He read it over and over again until the taxi stopped in front of his door. He pressed Send and paid the driver.