February Flowers

by Fan Wu

  The air-conditioning started to blow cool air. Du Sheng asked me if I wanted to dance. I said I only liked to watch others dance. We said no more. Then he downed his glass of wine and ordered a whole bottle. Just as the waiter was about to head toward the bar to fill the order, I stopped him and asked him to bring me a glass.

  When the wine arrived, Du Sheng lifted the bottle gingerly and was about to pour me some. Then he changed his mind. He turned my glass upside down and said that as I was not yet eighteen years old, I should not drink alcohol. I said I had never drunk alcohol and wanted to taste it. I said I thought the wine would taste like strawberry juice. I turned my glass right side up, took the bottle from his hand, and poured. I filled half the glass and kept pouring. He took the bottle away. We looked at each other silently. I lifted my glass and gulped the wine. The red liquid flew down my throat into my stomach, leaving a sweet and spicy taste on my tongue. I put down the glass arrogantly, my eyes fixed on Du Sheng’s face. I was about to say that the wine tasted just like strawberry juice when I felt heat in my stomach, as if a bonfire had been lit.

  Du Sheng kept drinking. Within two songs, he had drunk all the wine in his glass and the rest in the bottle. I joked about how fast he was drinking, saying there wasn’t a drought. He said my face was as red as the national flag and he was afraid I would get drunk.

  My brain was getting warm, then numb, then swelling as if it would expand into a big balloon and fly from my body, free from the gravity of Earth. The flying sensation made me happy and excited. I stopped a waitress and ordered a glass of wine for myself. After I took a sip Du Sheng took the glass away from me and drank it in one gulp. Then he stood and said he was going to send me back to my dorm for the night.

  On our way out he walked on my right, suggesting that I rest my hand on top of his left arm. He smiled and said if he ever had any bad intentions I could use my more powerful right hand to defend myself. I smiled back at him. Miao Yan must have told him about this habit of mine. Whenever I walked with her, I would walk on her left side. She once asked me why but I could think of no explanation other than it being a habit. The next day she showed me a newspaper clipping that said people who liked to walk on the left tended to be more cautious and skeptical. The reason cited was that the right hand was typically stronger and more agile and could react to sudden attacks more quickly.

  Though my face and chest were burning I could still walk. But I put my hand on his arm, afraid that my high heels couldn’t support my weight. My toes hurt with every step. How I missed my flat shoes! They were so comfortable, so springy. Why must women torture themselves to look sexy? I thought.

  We walked through the dance hall. “Happy birthday!” he whispered in my ear.

  In the lobby, an attendant brought my coat and began to help me put it on. Du Sheng took over and waved her away. He also fastened all the buttons and moved a few strands of hair from my cheeks to behind my ears. “I have hands,” I protested. He smiled.

  I told him that I didn’t want to go back to the university. I said it was my eighteenth birthday and I wanted something special. He said he would do whatever I wanted. I lifted my hand and pointed to the luxuriously decorated White Swan Hotel across the street. “I want to sleep there. I’ve never slept in a hotel room,” I said. It was the truth. As far back as I could remember, I had never slept anywhere but at home or in student dormitories.

  He was thinking hard but finally nodded. I said that if that hotel was too expensive, I wouldn’t mind staying somewhere cheaper. He laughed the way that an older brother, if I’d had one, would have laughed. He said I was really just a little girl who knew nothing.

  I was irritated. “I know everything and nobody can treat me like a kid,” I asserted. I also said I would refuse to speak to him if he dared to treat me like a kid.

  He didn’t argue. He stood in front of me, smiling, then combed my hair with his fingers. “I wish you were a few years older,” he said.

  We entered the hotel. While he spoke with the receptionist I sat on a leather armchair in the middle of the lobby. I kicked off my shoes—they were killing me. But when I saw a uniformed bellboy walking by I quickly put them on again. He smiled at me and I smiled back. I crossed my legs, put my arms on the armrests, tilted my head backward—I wanted to look older. When Du Sheng returned, I glimpsed the clock on the marble wall opposite. It was seven minutes to three.

  It was just the two of us in the elevator. When it reached the eighteenth floor, it stopped with an alarming ding and the sliding door opened. I wanted to ask Du Sheng if he had deliberately booked the rooms on this floor, but I said nothing—my head was heavy, my throat itchy.

  I followed him into a room with two queen-size beds. He settled me on one and turned on the lamp above the headboard. He walked to the liquor counter, removed a jug from the cabinet, and filled it with water. He poured the water into a tea kettle, plugged in the power cord, and opened a tea bag. He said, his back to me, that he had booked two rooms and that his room was next door. For a while the only sound I could hear was the sizzling of the kettle as it warmed up.

  He asked me if I was feeling better. I said I was a little dizzy but other than that I was feeling great. “Why are you standing so far away?” I asked. He didn’t answer. Instead he asked me if I hated him because he had broken up with Miao Yan and hadn’t made her stay in Guangdong.

  I shook my head and laughed. “Of course not,” I said. “Her leaving has nothing to do with you. She left because she didn’t like me anymore. I was too naive, a silly girl. I couldn’t help her, not even give her any advice.”

  I felt warm so I took off my coat and slipped under the coverlet with my head on the pillow. Du Sheng sat on the edge of my bed. “Want some tea?” he asked.

  As soon as I lay down the effects of the alcohol increased. I had a severe headache. I had never thought I would react so strongly to alcohol. I closed my eyes, hoping to fall asleep, but a string of stacked rooftops appeared in my mind—red, white, gray, blue, and some unspeakable colors—flying in the sky like magic carpets.

  Du Sheng touched my cheeks lightly, as if he somehow thought my face was made of paper. I could hear his breathing as he leaned over me and felt the heat of his breath on my cheeks and lips.

  I opened my eyes. He was still sitting on my bed, where he had been earlier. I asked why he had left Miao Yan after he had made love with her and why he didn’t marry her. I don’t know whether I was only thinking about asking the questions rather than saying them out loud, or he hadn’t heard what I said, but he didn’t respond. He just stared into my eyes. Then I asked him—or, again, I thought I was asking him—if Miao Yan would come back to see me. He still didn’t reply.

  I sat up, startling him. He jumped up, looking ashamed, embarrassed, and frustrated. He walked to the window, pulled open the thick velvet curtains, and put both hands on the sill, breathing heavily. “What are you thinking about?” I asked. He looked at the window, reflecting my image, and said he was going to send me back to the university. After a pause he added that he might not be able to control himself if we stayed together in the room for another five minutes. His voice trembling, his head bowed, he looked exhausted.

  “Make love to me,” I demanded. “I want to make love to a man. I want to grow up.”

  At the window, Du Sheng buried his face in the curtains.

  I continued, “I want to become a woman, a real woman like Miao Yan. Make love to me now and make me a woman.”

  He said something about going to call a taxi to send me home. He said more, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “Can you make love with yourself, here, in front of me?” I asked.

  He turned around and murmured that I was torturing him.

  I repeated my question, louder, as though I was asking a class of schoolchildren what water is made from. I was in the mood for talking. I talked about how I always spent time alone in the dark attic when I was a kid. I talked about the night Miao Yan and I first met on the r
oof. I talked about the porn magazine I had read in the dorm and the class I was asked to leave. I said I had never watched porn videos or movies, had never masturbated because I felt too ashamed to touch my own body and thought it dirty. I said my roommate Donghua would touch herself when she thought we were asleep. I said I was scared the first time I heard her soft panting and her long, satisfied sigh at the end.

  I said that I didn’t know what making love was about until a few months ago. My parents and teachers never told me anything about it and even Miao Yan wouldn’t talk about it with me since she considered me a child. I said Miao Yan had promised to tell me everything when I turned eighteen but had left without telling me anything. I talked and talked. I talked as if I would become mute after the evening, as if talking was the only remedy for all my problems.

  Du Sheng slowly turned to face me. He nodded periodically while I was talking.

  I was thirsty when I finished talking. Without being asked, he walked to the liquor cabinet, poured water into a glass, and handed it to me. I drank it greedily, gave him the empty glass, and slipped back underneath the coverlet with my head against the headboard.

  Footsteps echoed in the hallway outside, mixed with broken dialogue in a foreign language. Water bubbled in the kettle—it had been boiling for a while. I asked Du Sheng to open the window. I looked out and saw the lights of the distant skyscrapers.

  He sat down next to me on the bed. “Do you really want to see me masturbate?” he asked, his voice calm and tender. I said yes. He then asked if I would mind if he turned off the light. I said I wouldn’t mind. He said I could still see him by the light from outside. He said he had never done anything like this in front of a girl, not even with Miao Yan, and it sounded ridiculous to him at first. “But it didn’t sound so ridiculous after hearing your confession,” he said.

  Du Sheng turned off all the lights. I sat on the bed, the coverlet over my legs. When he passed, he bent and kissed me lightly on the cheeks. He was about to kiss my lips but stopped halfway. He stood so close that I could see his pupils glint and hear his heartbeat. He gazed at me, unblinking, then walked to the other bed, placing a box of tissues on the night-stand.

  With his back to me, Du Sheng started to remove his sweater and pants, then his shirt and underwear. He did everything with both hands, slowly and elegantly. He didn’t turn even once to look at me.

  By the light from outside I could see his smooth skin and bulging biceps. His lean, masculine hips had a nice curve to them. I studied his naked body without embarrassment or nervousness. It was quiet in the room except for the rustling of his clothes.

  He lay down. He seemed tired. He spread his legs apart and put his hands on his thighs. He didn’t move for a few minutes. As I was wondering whether I should get up and cover him with a blanket, he started to stroke his penis, caressing it with one hand. At first his movement was slow, as if his hand was carrying a lot of weight. But as his penis became erect he quickened his motion. He began to groan, a groan that sounded to me like a mix of happiness and pain, suggesting something meditative and religious…

  I closed my eyes, slipped under the coverlet quietly, and covered myself from head to toe. I felt I was sleeping on the bare cement of the rooftop of West Five. It must have been past four o’clock. At this hour the rooftop would be empty and lonely as a graveyard. No one, not even I, would visit it at this early hour. There was no moon tonight. I couldn’t imagine what the rooftop would look like without moonlight and people.

  It was time to make my birthday wish. I wished that when the clock reached exactly five forty-three, my birth time, there would be bright sunshine and my dorm room would be lit up as if newly painted. But I knew it was just a wish. It would still be dark then, as dark as it was right now, since it was winter and the sun wouldn’t rise until after six thirty.

  I could hold back my tears no longer. I heard myself whimpering. The groaning from Du Sheng stopped.

  My whimpering became sobbing, then full-lunged weeping. I cried because I knew I would never want to see Du Sheng again. Because I didn’t know why things were happening the way they were. Because I didn’t know how to face my parents when I went home. Because there were still so many questions that would remain unanswered when I finally turned eighteen…

  All this happened ten years ago and I have not seen Miao Yan since. When I turned nineteen I received a birthday card from her. Her handwriting was the same—coarse and childish. “Happy birthday, my little poet,” she wrote. There was no return address, nor a phone number. The postmark was too smudged to decipher its origin. I wondered if she was still living in her tiny hometown with her family, if she was married, what her life was like. I wanted to know all these things yet I was afraid to bring back the memories. Even if she had enclosed her contact information, I doubt I would have called or written back.

  At nineteen, I was tormented by the idea that she had abandoned me, like an irresponsible and selfish parent abandoning her child. I was obsessed with the notion that she might have deliberately arranged for me to be with Du Sheng that evening, so she could leave me without guilt. Didn’t she say something like “I want somebody to take care of you when I’m away”? That must have been so, or she wouldn’t have invited him to see her when she knew she would already be gone. She wanted me to have sex with Du Sheng. Perhaps she thought that was how I could become a woman—having sex with a man. She might have worried that I would end up having sex with a bad guy, as she had, so she picked Du Sheng—a man she had loved and trusted—to help me realize my womanhood and discover my sexuality. But if that was true I couldn’t appreciate her thoughtfulness. I saw something else. I saw myself as having been enslaved by my devotion to her, which was why I had always obeyed her and had done what she told me. I saw her fear of my growing up—that she didn’t need another woman in her life. My being her white daisy was what she had wanted and cherished. As soon as I grew up, she left me and no longer wanted to see me. She had manipulated me and my devotion to her. As I had become like her, I had lost her and myself.

  Or she might have sensed a danger in my attachment to her so she decided to leave me. Didn’t she say, “Don’t like me too much, it’s dangerous”? To have an excuse to leave, she let Du Sheng fall in love with me and arranged for us to spend the evening together so she could claim later that she had to leave me because I was involved with her ex-lover.

  I often came up with different theories and speculations, different reasons. Since I couldn’t get any confirmation I tormented myself with endless guessing. Out of frustration, I resented her for leaving me and resented my devotion to her.

  The week I graduated I received another card from her. The postmark was Beijing. “Congratulations!” she wrote. At the bottom of the card, in small letters, she wrote: “My father passed away a few months ago.” Again, there was no return address or phone number.

  By now my resentment had faded and I started to think that she hadn’t come to see me because she wanted to forget her past, or thought I would do better in my life without her. If I could, I would have contacted her. But as she had said, she was a wild goose with no sense of home. She might have sent me more postcards—or even letters—after I graduated. If so, they were probably destroyed by the post office because I moved around a lot and with no return address the post office couldn’t return the mail to her.

  Sang Wei became my first boyfriend. After the winter break when I turned eighteen, he returned to the university and the first thing he did was come and see me in West Five. After that we saw each other often and sometimes strolled around the campus in the evening, as Miao Yan and I had done. The day I confided in him how I spent my eighteenth birthday, we became boyfriend and girlfriend. By then he was teaching at a local college. We never talked about Miao Yan or Du Sheng—they were taboo—but I could sense the uneasiness and awkwardness this careful avoidance had brought to the relationship. Sometimes, in the middle of a casual conversation, he would stop and stare at me with a puzzled e
xpression. Or when we were kissing I would turn away from him suddenly.

  He disliked my smoking, a habit I had picked up, though not heavily, during my second year, but I suspected that what he really disliked was how much it reminded him of Miao Yan. One day, at the beginning of my final year, I told him that I couldn’t continue our relationship.

  “Did you meet another man?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “So it’s about Miao Yan?”

  “I guess so. I think about her when I make love to you. I feel like I live in her shadow. I feel like I’m sharing you with her. I feel like I’m actually her.”

  “Don’t be silly. I knew her before I met you. It was so brief that I wouldn’t even call it a relationship. You said you’d forgive me.”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about me.”

  “Tell me, then.” He sat beside me and touched my face, his hand warm and trembling.

  “I can’t. I don’t know where to start.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because I haven’t figured it out myself. What if I can never stop thinking about her for the rest of my life?”

  “Why can’t you forget the past? She’s the past, everything about me and her is the past, everything about you and her is the past. We don’t even know where she is. We’re together now. Isn’t that what matters? Why do you attach yourself to the past and refuse to move on? Did you ever ask me how I felt about the night you saw her boyfriend masturbating? You said he didn’t touch you. Why should I believe you? For God’s sake, what kind of girl would watch her best friend’s boyfriend masturbate? When I met you, I thought you were innocent and pure but now I don’t know what to think.”

  He swiped a glass vase from the table with his arm. It smashed to pieces on the floor. That was the last time I saw him.