Beijing Comrades

by Scott E. Myers

  I didn’t have any contact with Lan Yu for a month after that. Again and again I thought about calling him, but each time I persuaded myself to hold out. Nor did I ask Liu Zheng to contact him for me. For some reason, I no longer felt that he or anyone else should be involved in what we had. Finally, it was Lan Yu who called me first.

  “How are you?” I was determined not to lose my chance to get him back.

  “Okay,” he replied in perfect Beijing Mandarin.

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Okay.”

  “How are your classes?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ve been worried sick about you, Lan Yu!” This was true, but I only said it because I wanted him to hear it; I needed verbal ammunition if I was going to win him over.

  Silence.

  “Your summer vacation is coming soon.”

  “Yeah.”

  I needed the conversation to move forward. “Hold on,” I said. I put the phone receiver down on my desk and got up to shut my office door. I returned to the phone and lowered my voice.

  “I’ve missed you so much, Lan Yu,” I said in a desperate whisper. “I’ve never been like this before. Remember how I said that with this kind of thing, if we want to be together—I mean, maybe you hate me, but—” I took a deep breath and continued. “Listen, if you only want to be friends, that’s fine. But you don’t have family here in Beijing and I took you home to meet mine and—I mean, I really regard you as my little brother.” At this point I was beginning to sound a little dramatic. But it was real.

  Lan Yu remained silent, but at least he hadn’t hung up.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ve been staying at Ephemeros. Just me, no one else.” That was a lie, since Huang Jian was sleeping there almost every night at that point. But if Lan Yu was going to be coming over, I’d make sure Huang Jian was gone, purple eye shadow and all.

  I told Lan Yu I’d wait for him at Ephemeros at six. He didn’t say whether he would be coming, but before I had the chance to ask him, I heard one of his dorm mates in the background saying he needed to use the phone. Lan Yu hung up, and at five thirty I left the office to go home and wait for him.

  A little before seven, Lan Yu showed up at my sixth-floor apartment looking just as vexed as the day we had met. When I opened the front door, he walked inside without so much as a greeting and sat down on the couch. A period of awkward silence ensued, until I realized I had to do something to make him feel at ease. I sat next to him and tried to think of something to say.

  “I didn’t think you would come.”

  In lieu of a reply he stared at the floor.

  “Why did you run off like that the other day?”

  I was stalling. I needed time to figure out what I would do in the event that he started throwing accusations at me. Far from condemning me, however, what Lan Yu did next caught me so completely off guard that it took me a moment to realize what was happening. Without removing his eyes from the floor, he reached across the empty space between us and took my hand in his. He moved closer to me and embraced me, kissing my lips, my cheeks, my forehead. I was so stunned by what he was doing that I had almost no reaction.

  Wordlessly, he began peeling away my clothes. Wherever his hands went, his lips followed closely behind, planting kisses on my skin where the clothes had been. He got on his knees and was about to pull off my shoes when he stopped and looked up at me, eyes full of expectation. It was like he was waiting for me to answer a question he couldn’t articulate, no matter how urgent. Unable to bear the tension any longer, I lifted him back up to the couch, wrapped my arms around him tightly, and began frantically kissing his mouth, his cheeks, his eyelids. Never had a kiss infused me with so much passion. We kissed endlessly, stopping only when we were both exhausted, out of breath even. I felt as though the world around me had gone black; there was nothing else, only us.

  He had the clean, soapy smell typical of young men. Taking my hand, he stood up from the couch, pulling me with him, and it occurred to me that he was exhibiting dominant behavior for the first time since we’d met. I wanted to run my hands along his body, but my fingers shook uncontrollably, leaving me no choice but to anchor them forcefully to his shoulders. Lowering myself, I unbuttoned his pants, pulling at his underwear and kissing his abdomen. Reaching up, I tried grasping at his chin with my thumb and forefinger. I fumbled; he was too far away. Lan Yu looked down at me with yearning in his eyes. My body burned. “Handong!” he called out in a heavy, trembling voice.

  Sex with Huang Jian and with Lan Yu was equally intense, but they were intensities of very different kinds. With Huang Jian, it was raw physical intensity. With Lan Yu it was this as well, but my body wasn’t the only thing that was engaged. My psyche was, too.

  After making love, Lan Yu said he was exhausted and wanted to sleep. He rested his head in my lap and I tousled his hair.

  “Your hair is so stiff,” I said.

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” he mumbled, eyes closed.

  “It’s terrible,” I said with a smile he couldn’t see. “It’s so hard to tame that way!”

  He laughed faintly. “Well, so what? I’m not your horse.”

  I looked down at him. Only then did I notice how worn-out he looked. His features were drenched with a kind of fatigue that nobody his age should have. Slowly he drifted into sleep, mumbling something about feeling like a zombie, neither dead nor alive, as I studied his cherubic features. I remember wishing he didn’t feel that way.

  The following day I stayed home from work and Lan Yu skipped class. That’s when we had our first fight.

  “How many times do I have to tell you, Lan Yu? Messing around with this kind of thing isn’t that serious! It isn’t serious and it can’t be!” I slammed the newspaper I was reading on the living room tea table and sat on the couch, arms folded in a defiant posture.

  “What is serious to you, then?” He entered the living room and scowled at me. He hadn’t raised his voice, but his words were razor sharp.

  “Listen,” I said, raising my hands in exasperation. “I feel exactly the same as the day we met. If we’re having a good time we stay together. Otherwise, forget it!” I was trying to shift the focus away from me, and I also knew that this would sound like a threat. These words, I knew, would tap into his insecurities.

  “What do you think I am, Handong? Some kind of . . .” He faltered, unable to find the right word.

  “I think of you as my friend, my little brother. Stop acting like a woman. Every little thing makes you so damn suspicious.”

  After our argument, Lan Yu went to campus and I was in a bad mood for the rest of the day. What right did he have to place demands on me? Who did he think he was, anyway? He was just some kid! A kid who had apparently forgotten that I was the one supporting him.

  I didn’t feel like going to the office after that so I called up a friend and asked him to meet me at a karaoke bar for a drink. We even found a couple of girls to hang out with us while we sang shitty pop songs and pounded back beers. Then I won ¥4,000 playing cards. I didn’t get home until three in the morning and, for a while at least, was able to completely forget about the fight with Lan Yu.

  Lan Yu and I continued seeing each other after the fight, sometimes often, and always at Ephemeros. He never mentioned the argument again and we kept sleeping together as usual. We didn’t have anal sex every time, but once in a while I would ask and he never refused me.

  And that, I think, is the difference between men and women. When a woman has sex with you, it’s because of something you have—genius, money, or whatever—or because they want to find someone who will let them be a parasite forever. After they get what they want, they use sex as a way of rewarding men. But when men have sex there’s no rhyme or reason. They’re just satisfying a primitive need.

  Seven

  Another sweltering Beijing summer had arrived, and no matter where you turned the city was alive with action. Young lovebirds strolled side by side
. Middle-aged ladies ambled through the Wangfujing shopping district in search of fabric and housewares. For three solid months there wasn’t a bicycle lot in sight that wasn’t jam packed. Each day before dawn, the parks teemed with retirees in various postures of tai chi. By afternoon they were full of opera singers, chess enthusiasts, and old men carrying little birds in bamboo cages. When evening came, throngs of middle-aged dancers with portable cassette players squeezed into public squares to twirl beneath the stars. And sometimes when darkness fell, hidden deeper in the tall clusters of trees, solitary men with furtive looks on their faces moved silently through the park, searching for sex, love, or some combination of the two.

  In my world, however, it was just another long and tedious summer. At least it started out that way. Business was at a standstill, and I spent my days inventing petty tasks for my employees to execute. Just as I was about to give up even making an effort to do business until the arrival of fall, a contact advised me that the apparel industry was nearly always unaffected by the summertime blues. China’s textile trade was closely linked to Southeast Asia, and there were plenty of opportunities to make money. I dove in enthusiastically, calling associates from Bangkok to Singapore until finally I drummed up enough of a buzz to warrant a trip.

  Originally, I had the wild yet feasible idea of making love and money at the same time by taking Lan Yu with me. I even contacted a border-control official who, after two conversations and one bottle of Chivas Regal, told me not only that he could get Lan Yu a passport within three days but also that it could be done without going through Lan Yu’s university administration. This impressed me, since getting permission from one’s school or work unit was always required to go abroad. That’s why, after all the hard work and pulling of strings, I was angry when Lan Yu told me he couldn’t make the trip because he had landed a summer job at a construction site.

  To me, the idea of working at a construction site sounded like a living hell, especially in the summer heat. During the first weeks of summer, nearly all my days were spent indoors listening to the radio announce temperatures reaching thirty-eight degrees Celsius, though it felt more like forty. Lan Yu finished his finals and started his job, where he stayed each day from ten in the morning until ten at night. He said it was a time-sensitive project with two work crews on rotating twelve-hour shifts. His was the day shift. Lan Yu wasn’t particularly light skinned to begin with, and by the end of his first week his skin turned so dark you would have mistaken him for a black man. The whole thing was getting to be more than I could bear. We had another fight—a significant one this time.

  “What exactly is the point of you taking this job?” I asked him, turning off the TV and standing up from the couch. “You want to be a construction worker for the rest of your life?”

  “I just want to get a little hands-on experience,” he replied evenly. He seemed taken aback by the question. “I think it’s good for me to spend time at a construction site so I can learn more.”

  “How much are they paying you?”

  “Five hundred yuan a month.”

  “Five hundred yuan a month!” I repeated with a derisive laugh. “A motel hooker’s asking price is four times that!” I crossed the room and stood in front of the window, where I folded my arms and looked outside in defiance. “Besides,” I continued, turning to face him again. “What the hell kind of job is that? Standing outside in the blistering heat for twelve hours a day?” Lan Yu had no response to this, so I kept pushing. “What about the ¥20,000 I gave you? Isn’t that enough?”

  “You know I’m paying you back for that,” he retorted angrily, tapping the remote control against the palm of his hand in agitation. “Or maybe you just thought you were buying me for a few months!” He was so goddamn sensitive.

  The way Lan Yu was acting left me with an uncontrollable urge to sock him in the face. He just didn’t get it!

  “You want to get hit?” I asked impulsively, though I knew I wouldn’t do it and didn’t have to in order to get my point across. “If ¥20,000 is all it takes to buy you, you’ve got low self-esteem. Pretty good price if you ask me.”

  Lan Yu was silent for a while, then got up from the couch and walked toward me. “You would know about motel hookers. You have a lot of them at Country Brothers, don’t you?” With that, he turned on his heel and walked to the kitchen.

  “That’s none of your fucking business!” I yelled after him, so full of rage that specks of spit flew out of my mouth. The truth was I hadn’t seen Huang Jian in over a month.

  “Then don’t mind my business, either!” he yelled from the kitchen.

  There was no reconciliation after that. No fiery makeup sex, nothing. A few hours later he announced that he wanted to go stay at the workers’ dormitory at the construction site.

  “Fine with me,” I said. “But if you leave, don’t bother coming back.” This was all it took to make him change his mind. Lan Yu remained with me at Ephemeros, coming home close to eleven each night looking like a wreck. I derived a kind of sick pleasure from this, so great was my resentment.

  Still, each night after he came home and took a shower and got into bed, I would cuddle up next to him to kiss his neck and rub his shoulders, doing my best to excite him and, I hoped, fool around. He always resisted at first, explaining how tired he was. But he was a young man, after all, and exhaustion eventually submitted to libido. Even then, though, he often just went through the motions, trying to get it over with as quickly as possible. When he finally came—if he came at all—it was only a matter of seconds before he fell asleep, leaving me alone in the world of the wakeful to watch him and wonder which emotion was stronger, my affection or my resentment.

  One evening I had just returned from a business trip to Shenzhen, where a friend of mine invited me to tour a Hong Kong–invested factory as part of my new interest in the apparel industry. Returning home, images of workers hunched over piles of clothing—black sweaters, gray trousers, and, in one case, an odd-looking fuchsia garment with a frilly neckline controlled by a blue drawstring—swirled about my mind. When I entered the apartment, I noticed the bankbook I’d given Lan Yu wedged among the stack of course books he’d read the previous semester. I pulled it out and opened it up only to discover there was no record of him having made a single withdrawal.

  Fine! I thought, slamming the bankbook down on the table. If Lan Yu wanted to believe I’d think more highly of him if he didn’t take my money, fine. I wasn’t some noble and virtuous gentleman. He could take my money or not, but he was still mine to play with. If he rejected it I would just be playing for free. Never had I been so furious at one of my lovers—or, I thought bitterly, should I just call them my playthings?

  That same night Lan Yu came home past ten looking like shit. Dirt smudges streaked his haggard face, and one of his fingers was wrapped in a thick mass of gauze and medical tape. He said he had cut it on a piece of glass. I couldn’t bear to look at him, let alone talk to him, until he came out of the bathroom and got into bed. That’s when I put my arms around him and kissed him. Then I put my hand between his legs and started to rub his crotch.

  “Handong,” he said imploringly. “I’m exhausted. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

  “But I’ve been thinking about you all day!” I whined, ignoring his plea and continuing to kiss him. Despite my provocations, he remained prostrate with his eyes closed until I heard his breathing get heavier. He was falling asleep.

  “Wake up. Hey, wake up!” I said, pushing him. “You’re no fun.”

  Wordlessly, I crawled on top of him and kissed him. He reciprocated, reluctantly at first, but soon became aroused, and when he did he jumped up from the bed, laid me down on my back, and started to give me a blow job with a surprising degree of enthusiasm. I looked down at him, mesmerized by what he was doing, while stroking his cheeks, tugging at his hair, and gently slapping him across the face. When he looked up at me hungrily, almost desperately, I grabbed the back of his head and pushed him down rough
ly until I hit the back of his throat. He gripped my thighs frantically; it was hard to tell if he was trying to push me away or pull me in deeper. My balls tightened with pressure. I knew I was about to climax, so I pulled him off of me. When I came, it was to the sound of him gasping for air. He was playing with himself and came almost at the same time.

  It took Lan Yu a few minutes to catch his breath and come down from the high. He stayed between my legs for a long time, looking up at me now and again through the kisses he planted on my inner thighs. I reached for a towel to wipe his face, then pulled him up to me so he could collapse in my arms while I stroked his hair. We lay like that for some time until finally he fell asleep in my arms. I pulled the blanket over us and turned off the light.

  At some point in the middle of the night I got up to use the toilet. Pulling myself out of bed, I glanced at the alarm clock: just past two. I pissed, then splashed water on my face and went back to bed. Lan Yu was fast asleep, lying on his side facing the wall. I put my hand on his shoulder and rolled him onto his back. Then I laid my entire body directly on top of him. He woke up.

  “What are you doing?” he mumbled, sounding annoyed.

  “I can’t sleep. Come on, stay up with me for a while.”

  “Go back to sleep! I have to work in the morning.”

  “It’s almost seven,” I lied. “You have to get up soon anyway.”

  “It can’t be seven. It’s still dark out!” He pulled a pillow over his head, then pushed me off of him and rolled onto his stomach to go back to sleep.

  I turned on the small TV I kept in the bedroom and put a tape in the VCR. It was a bisexual porn video Min had picked up in Hong Kong when buying Lan Yu the bluish-gray jacket and other clothing. I glued my eyes to the image on the screen: a girl and a guy, both on their knees, taking turns sucking a second guy’s dick. I turned the volume all the way up and lit a Chunghwa cigarette. Even I thought I was acting weird.