A Certain Smile

by Judith Michael

  But he could not hold onto thought. Everything scattered, borne away by the gale of his desire. He moved against her, pulling her to him, breathing her in. She smelled of coolness: plants and open meadows, hillsides lush with falling water and green-carpeted woods, an American coolness of savvy and ownership, and then, as she spread her legs and he settled between them, everything became heat: noon

  and shimmering air and molten sun. Their bodies nestled, parted, came together again; they breathed in quick bursts and long sighs. Then he was inside her, and a triumphant joy flared within him, so great he thought he would explode, that nothing could contain such exultation, and Miranda's eyes met his, wide with wonder, and their mouths met. Their bodies found a rhythm furious and exhilarating, and the fragmentary thought. As if we 've always known . . ., broke to the surface of Li's consciousness before being swept into the vortex of desire and need and gratitude, and he moved inside her, pulled deeper and deeper, until he felt he had become Miranda, and she him, and there was no way, in their flaring passion, that mind or feeling could tell them apart.

  When they lay still, clasping each other, his cheek against damp tendrils of her hair, her skin cooling beneath his chest, Miranda let out a long, slow breath. "As if we've always known each other."

  He raised his head. "You thought that?"

  "I felt it." She gazed at him. "So did you."

  He nodded.

  "Nice," she said. Her voice was languorous, as slow as his, her eyelids heavy. But then, watching him, she began to smile. "You don't like it that someone knows what you're thinking."

  "You're not 'someone.' "

  "And so .. . ?"

  "It's surprisingly pleasant. I think I could get used to it. I could even come to rely on it."

  She laughed. "Different indeed," she murmured mischievously, mimicking his words in the bar.

  He laid his hand along her face. "How lovely you are. Beautiful and open and free."

  "No, not—"

  "Yes, you are. Do you know, when we first lay together, it seemed to me you smelled of meadows and mountains and coolness, of everything fresh, like the earth, open to spring, and to all that is new."

  "I like that. I'd like to be like that."

  "And so you are, with me."

  "But we can't be sure of anything, can we? Everything is different, because ..." Her gaze slid to the draperies. "Whatever is out there is waiting for us, and we don't really forget it, ever, and maybe that's why we're so close. Danger out there and the two of us, besieged in here."

  He kissed her, denying what he himself had thought earlier. "I do not need danger to feel joyful with you."

  "But it's there. It's part of everything we do."

  "It is part of the other world we inhabit, and we will face it when we return there. But we all live in more than one world, and you and I are creating a world of our own. No one else is part of it. No one can alter it."

  She shook her head. "You know better than I how others can smash what people try to create."

  "Yes, but they cannot alter how we feel, or what we give to each other and gain from each other. That comes from within us. What is outside is background, no more."

  "You really believe that," she said wonderingly.

  "And so will you. Because two people who have found each other are more powerful than governments and armies and all the dangers that fortune can hurl at them."

  To end a conversation he was not sure he really believed, he kissed Miranda again, a lingering kiss, and in a moment her arms embraced him and brought him to her. They made love slowly this time, holding back, discovering their bodies' smallest curves and hollows and angles, the taste and feel of each other, what pleased the most. Li moved his lips and tongue over Miranda's body, holding her, turning her, tasting her, lying back so that she could move over him, taking him in her mouth and pulling him deeply into her throat, licking, drinking, offering herself, joining with him, and he with her, first one way and then another until they became one long sinuous form, finding a cadence, in that muffled room without clocks or seasons, as primitive as the earth, as old as time.

  When they lay stiU again, Li's thoughts slowly stirred. Miranda. A name of promise and magic. And then, Journeys end in lovers meeting.

  Startled, he raised his head,

  "What is it?" Miranda asked.

  "I thought of something. A line from a poem, I think. It surprised me. And I thought of your name. Something about magic." He held her hand, running his fingers over hers; their voices drifted lazily in the hushed room. "Does Miranda mean magic? Where did it come from?"

  "Shakespeare. The Tempest."

  "I had forgotten that. Miranda is the heroine of The Tempest?"

  "Yes."

  "And why did your parents choose it?"

  "My mother did. In the play, Miranda lives on an enchanted island, and my mother hoped that someday I'd find my own enchanted place and live there forever. You were right about the magic; Miranda's father, Prospero, is a magician, and magic is behind most of the story. My father scoffs at magic; he only believes in things he can weigh and

  measure, so he wanted to give me a down-to-earth name like Susan or Joan. But my mother was feeling romantic and hopeful when I was bom, so she insisted."

  Li laced her fingers through his. "Is she no longer romantic and hopeful?"

  "Oh, I think romance disappeared a long time ago. She's still hopeful, but mainly that no disaster will befall any of us. Jeff's death was awful for her. It was more than being fond of him; she was comfortable knowing that I had someone to take care of me. Now she keeps imagining all the terrible things that can happen to a woman alone, and she asks who will watch over me when she and my father die. I say I'll watch over myself, but that doesn't make her feel better."

  "She has so little confidence in you?"

  "Apparently."

  "But surely that reflects on the way she raised you?"

  Miranda laughed. "Yes, but I can't imagine myself telling her that."

  "Why not?"

  "Because it would only hurt her."

  "But it is the truth."

  "What good would it do? I'm all grown up, Li, there's nothing she can do with me anymore. Why tell her now about mistakes she's made over the last forty years?"

  "It might make her stop telling you how worried she is."

  "You think she can change her ways after a lifetime? It would be like expecting her to shed an arm. Anyway ..." She frowned, the small frown that Li loved and always wanted to kiss away, but not until he found out what it was that had caught her imagination. "Maybe I don't want her to stop. Maybe it's nice, knowing someone cares enough to be worried."

  He was silent. "You're right," he said at last. "I sometimes make a god of the truth. And gods are not always our best guides."

  She gave a small smile. "Wasn't your mother very much like mine?"

  "You mean, did romance disappear for her? Oh, yes, when she finally admitted that my father was truly gone. And was she hopeful? About him in a dreamlike way, but about other things more concretely. She held onto more hopes than most Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. She was stubborn, my mother, but she was also a dreamer and the Communist Party really ... oh, what is it the Americans say about this? Convincing her of something even when there is no reason, and that damages her—"

  "They did a number on her."

  del

  "Yes, yes, isn't that wonderful? What a crazy way to say it! It makes no sense but it makes you sit up and take notice. I love English when it has these crazinesses."

  "But what about your mother?"

  "Oh, she truly believed we would come out of that destructive time and find a communist paradise. She was easy to convince, because in spite of everything she still believed that destruction can be reversed, that unhappiness is not permanent, that we always recover and live lives that are better than before."

  "I like your mother. I'm sorry I never met her."

  "You would have been
friends, both believing in love even in its absence. She would have asked you a million questions about America, to picture some places my father might be living." He kissed Miranda's fingertips. "Did Shakespeare's Miranda find love on her enchanted island?"

  "Yes, with Ferdinand, the son of a king who had been her father's enemy. It takes a while, but eventually everyone reconciles and her father and the king bless their marriage."

  "And they live happily ever after?"

  "Shakespeare doesn't say. I'd like to believe it."

  "It is a fine thing to believe." He kissed her and ran his palm slowly from her shoulder to her hip and down her thigh. He loved the feel of her, silken and fragile ... no, not fragile; he knew by now how much strength there was in her slender form. Miranda Graham, about five feet four inches, and perhaps one hundred and ten pounds, with strong bones and well-defined muscles that moved with supple grace beneath a clear, unblemished skin. It was a body that had had time and atten-fion, an exercised body, well fed, well kept, well rested. An American body.

  And she was, to him, America, with all its beckoning light and promise and wealth.

  No. Never.

  Roughly, he brought her to him, pushing away his thoughts as their bodies flowed together until they were perfectly meshed halves with no gap to define them separately, and no sound but their breathing and the whisper of flesh on flesh. They clung, lips and arms and legs, sinking into one small point of pure feeling, and from those depths, Li's thoughts broke free.

  Not a country, not a system, not a prize. A wonderful, wondrous woman.

  Whom I love.

  But when they lay back, hands clasped, Miranda's head on his shoulder, he did not say that aloud. It was not time. It was not appropriate. And if anyone might find it peculiar to speak of appropriateness almost in the same breath as love, he could not help it: he knew what was right for him. And so they lay together, wrapped in the stillness of the room.

  "I like the feel of you inside me," Miranda said, her eyes closed, and Li had to clutch at the vows he had just made, almost choking on the words he would not let himself say. "And I like to talk to you, and walk through cities with you and eat dumplings and sit in crowded bars, even smoky ones ..."

  He stirred, his resolve weakened by her openness. And then Miranda sat up, leaning back against the carved headboard, the silk spread pulled around her like a strapless gown. "What was the line from a poem you thought of earlier?"

  "It wasn't a poem," he lied casually, sitting beside her. "I was mistaken. It was from a Chinese play about a man who makes love to a young girl and says he feels like the old world taking advantage of the new, the corrupt taking advantage of the innocent. I felt like that with you."

  Smiling, she shook her head. "You made that up."

  "That play is in Beijing right now; I can take you to—"

  "Oh, I believe you about the play; it sounds very Chinese, pushing that tired old idea of gullible and unsophisticated Americans just because our country is so much younger than yours. I just don't believe for one minute that that's what came to you while we were making love."

  Li chuckled ruefully. "It seems I'm not very good at lying. Well, I can't remember where I read it, but what I thought was. Journeys end in lovers meeting."

  "Oh. Shakespeare again. It's from Twelfth Night."

  "Have you seen it?"

  "Many times; it's one of my favorites."

  "How does it go, the rest of the line?"

  "It's a song; I don't know the melody, but I think I remember the words." She closed her eyes and thought for a moment.

  "O, mistress mine, where are you roaming? O, stay and hear; your true love's coming. That can sing both high and low: Trip no further, pretty sweeting;

  Journeys end in lovers meeting, Every wise man's son doth know."

  Li was thoughtful. " 'Every wise man,'" he repeated. "Unless they are Chinese. We have poems like that, but most of them end unhappily."

  "There are no happy journeys in Chinese poetry?"

  "Some, but mostly they end in melancholy, gazing at a solitary reflection in a lake or greeting a peony. There may be some about true lovers coming and singing both high and low, but I have not found them. I wish I could see Twelfth Night. I have all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets; they were in my father's collection. But I have never seen any of them. Are they performed often, in America?"

  "Yes. And in Europe."

  So they skated smoothly away from talk of lovers. The languor was gone from their voices; they talked of theater and American musicals, and Li described Chinese opera, even mimicking the traditional high-pitched singing that sounded to foreigners like the wailing of deranged hyenas, until Miranda's laughter stopped him.

  "Of course I'm not a professional," he said modestly, "but that gives you the idea."

  "I've seen Chinese opera on television," Miranda said. "It sounds very different when it's sung by a naked man in bed with me."

  "And looks even more different, since the costumes are magnificent."

  They laughed, and Li reflected on the wonder of laughter. The best of all the joy and magic of what we are discovering, is laughter. Talk and laughter. He kissed Miranda's palm, her wrist, her arm, her lips. There are no differences that talk and laughter cannot bridge.

  Later, Miranda said, "Somehow we missed dinner. Do you think it's too late for room service?"

  "No, it's open all night. What a good idea. Do they have robes here?" He went to the closet. "Two robes. Excellent. And a menu?" He went to the table in the window. "Of course. Everything we need. What shall we order?"

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, they launched into one of their serious discussions of food. In the middle of it, as they pondered chicken curry and duck with fried noodles, Miranda suddenly said, "But when they deliver it, you can't let them see you."

  His eyebrows rose. "You're ashamed to have me here?"

  "No; you know that's not what I meant. We're already being watched; it would make it worse if they knew you were in my room ... in a bathrobe ..."

  "What do you think they are assuming already?"

  "But they don't know for sure."

  "We have been seen in restaurants. And flying here together."

  "It's not the same. That could be business."

  "So you are saying my government is concerned with what I do in private?"

  "Of course. Aren't they?"

  "Sometimes. If you and I were organizing a demonstration or starting our own newspaper, or planning a new political party, they would be. Or they would be if I had state secrets that I might blurt out in a moment of passion. But since we are not organizing anything, and I have no state secrets, they would not pay any attention to something as uninteresting as sex."

  "Uninteresting."

  "In this context. To government bureaucrats."

  "But they're interested in m5."

  "Only because someone thinks you will meet with dissidents, and that you will do it more carelessly because I am with you, as guide and translator, perhaps as lover. When it does not happen, they will lose interest and turn their attention to more promising targets."

  "But they might think we fooled them."

  "They would never think that. They would rather believe that we are in fact doing business. Your company could be looking for office space for a branch in China. Perhaps Talia wants to build her own building here, or invest in a Chinese construction company. Perhaps she wishes to start a joint venture company with one of our garment companies wishing to expand. Any of these are possible, and since our State Security Bureau cannot afford to believe it makes mistakes, someone will find a reason for everything, and that will be the end of it."

  His thoughts moved beyond Miranda to Beijing, to tomorrow, when he would plunge back into a cauldron where thousands of small, vicious whirlpools of greed and competitiveness, of backbiting and suspicion and gossip, could threaten the stability and success it had taken him years to build. He had not thought he was taking a chan
ce when he first approached Miranda; who would have thought that a timid American woman on a business trip could be a political liability? But in the bizarre nexus of people and places in a shrinking world, one could not rely on what seemed to be obvious. Miranda had met Sima Ting in Boulder Colorado—would anyone have imagined a Chinese dissident in Boulder Colorado? —and so, on the other side of the world. Yuan Li was once again under surveillance.

  Preposterous. But this was a preposterous world. And in the

  midst of it, he had found Miranda Graham, and never would he regret that.

  "Are you thinking about going back to Beijing?" Miranda asked.

  No longer surprised by how clearly she understood him, he nodded. "There are things I have to deal with there."

  "Are you afraid the Security Bureau will call you in again?"

  "No. I think they will wait, to see what we do."

  "Then you're thinking of Sheng?"

  "That's a big part of it. I have to learn how to talk to him. After all these years, I still am looking for a way to connect with him. It hangs over me .. . you know, something above me, about to crush me... what is the word?"

  "Looms."

  "Yes, that's it. Loooooms. So descriptive, as if the word itself is falling over. It looms over me, like a weak structure that needs to be shored up. He and his generation, all of them, as foreign as if they lived in a different part of the galaxy. Oh, I would like to leave it all behind, shed everything and begin again somewhere where everything is completely new. But that would be running away," he said quickly. "And I have never done that." He picked up the menu. "We were talking about food. I know ... we will have mooncakes. Shall we?"

  "I don't know anything about them."

  "They celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival, something like your Thanksgiving, which is a time of fruitfulness and hope for the future, and they symbolize the full moon, which is the symbol of unity and immortality. So we will celebrate harmony and hope and long life with mooncakes, filled with..." He scanned the menu, murmuring, "Orange peel, date paste, melon seeds, cassia bloom.... Date paste," he said firmly, "since you enjoyed the date filling in the steamed buns our first day in Beijing, and also cassia bloom, because you should have something new to try." He looked up and saw her watching him with a smile of such openness and tenderness that he was undone. His hand shook slightly and he dropped the menu. "I love you," he said, and it did not matter that he had sworn he would not say it, on this night, or perhaps on any night.