Across a Green Ocean

by Wendy Lee

  “The best thing would have been for me to see your father,” Liao says in parting. “But seeing you is next best. You remind me very much of him.”

  Michael ducks his head, not knowing how to respond to the old man’s graciousness.

  He thanks Liao’s wife and Mary for dinner and declines Ben’s offer to drive him back to his hotel. Ben insists on walking him to the front gate of the campus, where white tents are set up by the sides of the streets. Inside these tents, Muslim men in white hats roast skewers of mutton over braziers while customers sit on small stools nearby. The smell of cooking meat is intoxicating, and, despite the lavish meal earlier, Michael’s stomach rumbles.

  “Would you like to try it?” Ben asks.

  Michael holds up a hand. “I’m still full, thanks.” But even as he says that, he realizes dinner was several hours—and what feels like several lifetimes—ago.

  “Come.” Ben gestures toward a stool. “You can’t visit Xining without trying this.”

  They sit down, and a man serves each of them several skewers of meat along with round flat white pieces of bread to soak up the juices. The seasoned chunks of meat are succulent and tender, not at all gamey. It’s unlike any mutton Michael has ever tasted before.

  “Good, yes?” Ben asks.

  “Very good,” Michael confirms, and they spend the next few minutes in silence, chewing. He looks around the tent at the other customers, all of whom are men, and blinks when he notices that one of them appears to be digging into a piece of mutton with the fluffy tail still attached. A few of the men sit in pairs, as if they could be couples, although Michael knows they can’t be. He remembers how Liao described tongxinglian as meaning “the same hearts together.” It’s an awfully poetic phrase for something that he guesses is still very much forbidden in China.

  “This tongxinglian.” He hopes he’s pronouncing it correctly. “How is it viewed here?”

  Ben does not blink an eye. “It is still, how do you call it, a taboo. It is thought to be more of a Western idea. It is different in larger cities like Beijing and Shanghai. I have heard of nightclubs there where these people go and nobody bothers them. What are these people called in English?”

  “Homosexual. Or gay. And there are other words too. Slang words.” Michael decides not to elaborate.

  “There are slang words for it here, too. These men, they call one another tongzhi. Comrade.”

  “As in what the Communists called one another?”

  “Yes, people here used to call one another comrade too. It is, how do you say—”

  “Ironic,” Michael supplies.

  “Yes,” Ben says, smiling.

  Looking at the other man in the flickering light from the braziers, Michael wonders how Ben felt earlier, hearing his father tell such personal, incriminating things about himself. He feels prompted to make a confession in return. “The reason I’m asking, why I’m curious, is because I’m that way too. Tongxinglian.” The phrase is beginning to sound more natural on his tongue, almost musical. “Do you know what my father said when he found out? He said, ‘You are my punishment. You are what I deserve.’ ”

  Michael swallows and sits back, waiting for Ben’s reaction. He’s never repeated these exact words to anyone, not to Amy the night his father said them, to his sister or mother, or to David. It’s as though if he refused to repeat them, they’d lose their power and eventually fade away, like a bruise that turns different shades before vanishing. But it’s easy saying them to Ben, who’s a virtual stranger to him and whom he’ll probably never see again after this night.

  Contrary to what he expected, Ben doesn’t appear shocked or even surprised. Instead, he says, “Your father meant more than you thought when he said that.”

  “Only, I didn’t know that then.” Michael considers that this is probably more than Ben wants to hear, but he continues. “I was sixteen years old, no one else in my life knew this about me. The way my father found out”—okay, Ben doesn’t need to know the exact details—“was humiliating and shameful, and on top of that, this is what my father says.”

  “It is not so bad,” Ben says at last.

  Michael starts to laugh. “You’re right. I could have been put in prison for fifteen years, like your father. That puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it? But I’ve spent the past ten years thinking that I was my father’s punishment in life, just because of who I am.”

  “But he is dead—”

  “That doesn’t make any difference. He’ll always be here, in my head, in some way. But I guess I understand more about him now.”

  That, Michael supposes, is what matters. He may never know exactly what his father was thinking, what emotions he was feeling, that night when he was sixteen. But this explanation is the closest he may ever come to the truth, and, as Ben says, maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it isn’t, after all, his fault.

  After they finish their midnight snack, Michael and Ben walk out to the road, where Ben flags down a taxi. Ben offers his hand and Michael shakes it, and as the taxi pulls away, he looks back to see Ben waving. He feels a certain affinity for the young man, as if they aren’t people who met that morning, or even friends, but somehow related.

  As the taxi takes him across town, Michael looks out the window at a city he feels like he knows much better after the past three days. At night it looks more modern, transformed by the lit-up buildings and the bright tents by the side of the road. If he watches the reflection of the red and yellow lights streaming down the inside of the windowpane, he can almost imagine that he’s home.

  Michael thinks about Liao and his father as teenagers, such close friends they were like brothers, until they were sixteen, and then his father sent his friend to prison. He thinks about how different his own life had been at that age.

  A few months after his father had discovered Michael’s secret, things appeared to have gone back to normal, at least on the surface. Aside from lecturing him on the importance of applying to the right colleges, his father didn’t have much to say to him. He also had a new job that required a longer commute, so Michael was easily able to time it so that they didn’t see each other much at all.

  Having decided where he wanted to go to college, Michael began to push his boundaries. He stayed out late, smoked pot with Amy, got a fake ID—things he should have done years ago had it not been out of deference to his parents. The one thing he couldn’t do with Amy—or in this town, even—was to find someone who would alleviate the frustration that had been building up in him ever since that night his parents had gone out. It was pathetic that the only person he had kissed was his next-door neighbor, and she was a girl.

  Then an opportunity presented itself when Emily called to see if Michael was planning to do anything for their parents’ anniversary (Do they even know when it is? he’d replied) and inadvertently revealed that she and Julian were going to be out of town that weekend. Michael tried to convince her to let him stay in their apartment in the West Village.

  “I don’t understand why you’re offering to house-sit,” Emily said. “We’re only going to be gone overnight.”

  “Fine, can I please just crash at your place?” Michael pleaded. “There’s a party in the city that everyone’s going to, and the trains don’t run that late.”

  “What did you tell Mom and Dad?”

  “That I needed to go to a friend’s house to work on a school project.”

  “And they’re okay with it?”

  “Sure.” Lying to his sister was as easy as lying to a stranger.

  “All right,” Emily said. “Just get here by noon on Saturday.”

  Michael ended up missing his train, so that he was barely able to get the keys from Emily before she and Julian got into their rental car. They appeared to have a lot of luggage for just one night away at a bed-and-breakfast upstate. His sister had always been boring, Michael thought, but this seemed like something a couple who had been married for years would do. Maybe couple’s years were like dog’s y
ears and aged you before you knew it.

  He realized, upon entering their dark, claustrophobic studio apartment, why Emily had sounded so skeptical when he had mentioned house-sitting. There wasn’t much to house-sit, not even a plant. The walls where the paint was peeling looked like they had leprosy, and there was a stain vaguely in the shape of Africa above the center of the room. Emily’s clothes, in various shades of black and gray, were strewn everywhere, along with Julian’s video equipment. They had just moved in earlier that year, but it looked like they had thoroughly entrenched themselves.

  Michael found some calcified takeout in the refrigerator and ate it for dinner while standing up, looking through Emily’s and Julian’s things. The bookshelves contained various law textbooks and massive tomes on film theory, as well as a secondhand copy of The Kama Sutra. He flipped through it briefly, trying to get himself worked up, but the couples in the diagrams were maddeningly straight; plus, the poses looked like some form of torture.

  When he replaced the book, he knocked it against something in the back, like a loose tooth. It was, he discovered, a jewelry box that contained a diamond so enormous that it seemed like it sucked in the little light that was in the room and refracted it like a giant mirror ball. So Julian was planning to propose to Emily—although obviously not this weekend, unless he’d forgotten the ring. They were what, only twenty-three? Who in their right minds got married that young? His sister’s life was truly foreign to him. At the rate he was going, Michael would be lucky if he had a boyfriend by that age.

  He was planning to achieve a kind of milestone for himself that night, though. He showered, put on Emily’s deodorant, slicked back his hair, and dressed in what he thought of as his smartest outfit: a dark, close-fitting shirt and jeans, which Amy said made him look like an Asian greaser from the fifties, if that wasn’t an oxymoron. He made sure he had his fake ID and hit the streets.

  Michael knew of the famous pick-up spots, the Ramble in Central Park, certain movie theaters in Chelsea, but he had spent years listening to his mother’s warnings about getting, mugged and he didn’t want to go somewhere that was too dark. Bars and clubs were a better alternative, but he wasn’t comfortable going in there alone. So instead he went to a video store in the Village and loitered in the back section, where you had to be eighteen to enter. Occasionally, the ponytailed man up front would look his way, but then other customers came in and he got distracted.

  Michael didn’t have to wait long. After about fifteen minutes, a man whose beard hid his age sidled up to him and asked, “Excuse me, have you seen this?” He was holding a video entitled Anchors Assway, accompanied by the picture of three sailors in white caps and nothing else, holding anchors over their privates.

  “Oh, yeah,” Michael replied. “That one’s really funny.”

  “I was thinking,” the man said, “maybe you’d want to come home with me and watch it?”

  “Sure.”

  The man said his name was Alex, and that he was a computer programmer. Michael said he was an NYU student in bioengineering. Alex’s apartment was only a few blocks away from Emily and Julian’s, which Michael considered a good sign. If things went bad, he could just leave and walk home.

  Alex’s apartment was in a high-rise and did not seem like the residence of a serial killer. Michael had snuck a peek at the stack of mail on the dining room table when they came in, and Alex seemed to be telling the truth about his name. Michael had given his name as Carl Cheung, which was the name of a kid from church.

  Alex told Michael to make himself comfortable on the couch and put in the video, and for a second, Michael thought that Alex really meant for them to just watch it. Before the opening credits finished, he turned to Alex, eager to get started.

  “Doesn’t take much to get you hard, does it?” Alex said, looking at the crotch of Michael’s pants and grinning.

  Michael wasn’t even sure if he found Alex attractive; he was just anxious to get it over with. Alex’s beard was scratchy against his mouth, and when Alex removed his shirt, the hair covering his body proved to be equally scratchy. Michael would bet that he’d be covered by a rash by the time they were done. He tried to think about that rather than the fact that Alex must be twice as old as he was, which was more evident when he was unclothed, by the graying hairs on his chest and the sag in his belly.

  Michael came almost immediately when Alex took him into his mouth, and he was afraid Alex would guess that he had never done this before, but Alex just wiped his lips, grinned again, and said, “My turn now.”

  Alex pushed his head down, and Michael realized, at the same time that it was happening, that he was actually doing it—he had a man’s penis in his mouth, and it tasted salty and sour, like regurgitated salt water. Alex grasped him by the sides of the head, tightly but not unkindly, and pushed his face closer. Michael kept his eyes shut and pretended he was sucking on a metal spigot. He couldn’t help gagging toward the end.

  “You okay, kid?” Alex asked after he was done.

  Michael nodded, although he supposed he must have looked rather dazed. Alex handed him a towel to wipe himself off with.

  Then Michael said faintly, “I guess I should go.”

  “Okay,” Alex said. “Glad you came over.”

  He didn’t bother to walk Michael to the door, and when Michael looked back, Alex had resumed playing the video.

  On the way back to Emily and Julian’s apartment, Michael felt oddly light. As sordid as the episode was when he replayed it in his head later, as he was swigging Emily’s mouthwash, trying to rid the taste from his mouth, the truth was that he was no longer a complete virgin when it came to sex. He wasn’t sure if he would tell anyone about it, not even Amy, but for now, it made him feel pretty damn good.

  When he went to college, this became a funny story he would tell, usually while half drunk or half stoned: the story of the hairy man who gave him his first blow job. The girls would feel sorry for him while the boys would be grossed out. Occasionally, with the right boy, it would get him laid.

  When he told David a few weeks into their relationship, David said, “So I wasn’t the first person who tried to pick you up.”

  “No,” Michael said. “And you probably won’t be the last.”

  In his hotel room, Michael sits on the bed with the ugly orange coverlet, trying to process recent events. It seems like it’s been days since he went downstairs to meet Liao and Ben. In the time that Michael has been away, someone has come in and made his bed, and straightened out his few belongings on the luggage rack.

  This is his last night in Xining. The next day he’ll catch a train and take another seemingly interminable twenty-four-hour ride in a hard sleeper to Beijing. When he arrives, he’ll need to stay a night there before taking the plane back to New York. Fortunately, his flight leaves late in the day, giving him enough time to check out one last place, whose directions he’d gotten from Liao Weishu before he left. His entire trip in China will have taken a week, and most of it will have been spent on a train.

  Michael wonders if anyone back home will have noticed that he’s been gone for so long. Since he isn’t working, there’s no employer to keep tabs on him. His mother calls sometimes, but she’s used to Michael taking a few days to respond to her messages. His sister rarely checks up on him. David, of course, will be concerned since Michael didn’t return any of his messages. He’s probably used his key to enter Michael’s apartment and discovered his note by now. But even David is accustomed to Michael taking time off from their relationship. Maybe this time he’s pushed David so close to the brink that David has given up on him. Michael doesn’t want to think of that possibility yet. The fact that it’s quite likely no one will have cared that he’s been away makes him feel a little uncomfortable, even forlorn. He wouldn’t be surprised if things were exactly the same when he returned, with no one being the wiser about where he’d gone or what he’d learned.

  Michael isn’t sure if he’s going to tell Liao’s sto
ry to his mother and sister, at least not yet. He’s not sure if it’s even something they need to hear. His mother and sister undoubtedly have questions about his father too, but they’ll be different questions, ones that will have to be answered some other way. He knows he will have to eventually tell them, but there are so many much more important things that he hasn’t told them. Such as the fact that he’s gay.

  David had found it unbelievable that Michael’s family didn’t know. This had come up a couple of months after they had known each other, when David had wanted to introduce Michael to his parents. The Wheelers were in town to see some art exhibit, and Michael couldn’t stomach the thought of walking from one white, well-lit room to another in the company of two strangers who already knew so much about him, including that his father had recently passed away. There would be nowhere to hide from their good intentions.

  Besides, Michael knew that he could never reciprocate by asking David to meet his mother and sister. After putting him off with some unconvincing excuses, he’d finally admitted to David that his family knew very little about his personal life.

  “Are you serious?” David had said. “What about high school? Didn’t they wonder why you weren’t dating anyone?”

  Michael had explained that Emily hadn’t been allowed to date when she was in high school, and neither had the kids of his mother’s church friends, so that issue had never come up. There had also been his friendship with Amy, which his mother regarded with suspicion. However, he was sure his mother had never figured out the reason why he never took Amy to the prom or brought home more girls from college.

  “I’m sure she never knew. If she did, she’d be telling everyone in church. She can’t keep a secret to save her life.”