Chapter 2

Chen Liping has counted the screws, the nights, and the light burning across the hall. Now the numbers stop adding up — and his wife starts keeping accounts of her own.

Four — How Water Seeps

First method: the convenient hand. When Lifen’s shop was buried, loads of wet laundry needed hauling up to the roof line. If Jianjun was home, he helped. Armfuls of soaked sheets up the stairs, trip after trip, never much talk, gone when it was done. His wrists were strong; he wrung a sheet drier than I could. Lifen told me, “That neighbor’s a solid man.” I said, “Solid.” She said, “Don’t go getting ideas. His wife’s right there.” I said, “What ideas? I owe him thanks.”

Second method: never off-shift. When Jianjun wanted something fixed, he always picked a time when Chunmei was home. A pipe, a lock, the range hood — his wife there pouring tea and handing towels, three people laughing together, everything above board in broad daylight. When he picked up laundry from Lifen’s shop he came at the noon rush and called out sister-in-law in front of a roomful of customers — “That red dress of my wife’s, take care washing it, cost real money.” You couldn’t catch him at a thing. Whatever was wrong was wrong inside your own head, and if you blew up about it, you’d be the dirty one.

Third method: hit the short rib. My back is bad. Hauling fridges in the shop, I often need Lifen’s hands, and while she never said it aloud, she minded that I wasn’t the man I used to be. Jianjun could carry a full bucket of water up to the roof one-handed, shoulder under the drying pole, while Lifen steadied the line and looked up at him. “Brother Jianjun,” she said, “with strength like that, trucking’s almost a waste of you.” He laughed. “Sister, your Liping’s a craftsman — eats by his hands. I eat by my back. Can’t swap trades.” Said so smooth it took the temper out of me too. He set me up on a shelf so high I couldn’t climb down off it.

Fourth method: go through the women. The one who truly pushed this thing forward was Chunmei. She and Lifen became sisters — night market, nails, carrying each other home drunk. Chunmei gave Lifen a pair of red panties. Real silk, little flowers embroidered on the edge. “A woman our age should wear something decent,” she said. “Even if no man sees it, it feels good against your own skin.” Lifen took them. She held them up in front of me at home — “Chunmei gave me these. Pretty?” I said, “Pretty.” She said, “Pretty my foot, your eyes are about to fall out.” Her ears didn’t even go red. She smiled like it was nothing at all.

I got to the fourth method and couldn’t take it apart any further. I went up to the roof to smoke. Four households’ washing hung on the line, and the wind kept pressing Chunmei’s nightdress against Lifen’s shirt, tight as skin. I reached out and separated them. A minute later the wind pressed them together again.

Standing up there I thought: when I courted Lifen, I used the same weapon. Her shop had just opened. I delivered repaired irons to her door day after day — two months of deliveries before she bought me a bowl of noodles. The convenient hand. It doesn’t show. It doesn’t knock. It seeps in under the door a fraction at a time, like water out of a bad pipe, and by the time you smell the damp, the wall’s soaked through to the plaster.

The question I couldn’t put down was which side of the wall Lifen was standing on when the water came through.

I tried to dam it, in my own way, and the way failed instructively. One week I took to walking her home from the shop at closing like a young husband — six o’clock sharp, there at her shutter, carrying her bag. Jianjun, passing with a crate of beer for his own door, just grinned and said, “Brother knows how to treat a wife,” and held the stairwell light for us till we were up. Another night I fixed a broken stool at Chunmei’s parlor without being asked, and she paid me in dumplings and told the whole mahjong room I was the best neighbor on the street, and Jianjun came home and ate those dumplings and praised my work on the stool to my face. Every wall I put up, the man walked around it smiling, or worse — he held it up for me. I lay awake those nights doing the newest arithmetic: if he wanted my wife in the dark, he’d have gone around me. Instead he kept coming through me, over my own doorstep, in daylight, carrying sheets. Whatever this was, my one-man dam wasn’t built for it, and some part of me — the part that had started the whole sickness — had stopped wanting a dam at all. It wanted a window. It got one. It just had to wait for me to call the window by its name: a peephole.