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Little toy you held so tight you break it

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“I’ve never told anyone about us,” he continued.

“Why not?”

Lan Yu turned to look me in the eye. “It’s ours, Handong. It doesn’t belong to anybody else.”

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“Handong,” she said. “You can’t go on with this lifestyle! It’s reckless. You need to start taking responsibility for your life.” On and on she went while I stared at the floor in grumpy silence, cynically asking myself how a woman with a Republican Era high school education had suddenly become a philosopher. What she didn’t openly state, of course, was her fear that I’d returned to my old “hobby,” a hobby we both knew had not, in fact, been replaced by horse racing.

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It was pleasure, but a strange kind of pleasure, a pleasure tainted by the sadness of knowing he wasn’t really mine and never would be.

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Monumental as our fight had been, quitting wasn’t something Liu Zheng would do lightly. Nor was I about to fire him, because I didn’t want to lose him as a friend. As for the argument itself, he only had one thing to say when he walked into the office a few days later: “Too much honesty is a form of stupidity.”

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But Lan Yu was like a drug to me. When I couldn’t get a fix, I craved him. When I got him, it was bliss. But when he was gone, the agony of the crash was unbearable.

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There was a time when I would look into his eyes and understand what he was feeling: melancholy, a sense of infatuation, admiration. But now he withheld everything. The esteem in which he had held me was gone, replaced by cynicism, distrust. He was no longer mine.

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There were times I began to feel disgusted by Lin Ping, just as I had always ended up feeling disgusted by other women in the past. Things looked fine on the surface, but I knew we were living in two different worlds. Two people sleeping in the same bed, but cherishing entirely different dreams.

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I watched him standing there at the bus stop, an ordinary kid who’d come to Beijing like all the others. And yet, nothing about him was ordinary.

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I still remember his eyes, which radiated with intelligence.

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Leaving things at the purely physical level would have been impossible, in part because he wouldn’t go along with it, but also because each time I saw him I would be drawn anew into the turbulent waters of emotional entanglement. Keeping things as they were but just seeing less of him wasn’t the solution either, since the greater the distance between us, the more powerful my longing. My break with Lan Yu had to be permanent, absolute.

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Yes, I wanted to be with him, but there were also times when I felt a kind of hatred for him. And yet, I knew, this was a completely unreasonable impulse on my part: How could I hate him when he had done nothing wrong?

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I knew that if I were to take Lin Ping home, the “dear old lady” would leap with joy. Lin Ping was a paragon of womanly virtue. As a son, this would be the greatest happiness I could give my mother.

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With women, even the tiniest trace of tenderness could be expressed as if it were the greatest love in the world. But with men—with Lan Yu—it was the exact opposite. No matter how much love I felt for him, I couldn’t show even the slightest trace in public.

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Lan Yu sighed. “I just worry that it’s you who doesn’t want me anymore,” he said, looking wistfully at the ceiling. I studied his face. His smile was gone, and his eyes were full of that kind of anxiety I knew so well, that deep distress that made me want him so badly when we first met and that still ignited my passion even now. At that moment, however, the distress he displayed provoked not desire—or not only desire—but a combination of sadness and guilt. Under the soft glow of the headboard light, my heart was flooded with so much passion for him, so much devotion to what we had, that my eyes filled with tears. “Are you crazy?” I asked, burying my face in his neck. “How could I not want you?”

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We stepped into the lush, well-lit dining area, my right arm hooked around her waist. Testosterone surged through my veins as we made our way through the maze of tables, lighting up a runway of grandeur as each man we passed, whether Chinese or foreign, turned to drink her in with his eyes. I beamed with a kind of pride I never thought possible. Lan Yu would never be able to give me that.

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At eight o’clock on the dot, Lin Ping strode into the lobby where I waited, the automatic glass doors unfolding before her like parting seas. My eyes lit up. One hundred seventy centimeters of breathtaking beauty.