Chapter 19
In the evening, along New York's East River, the sound of guitars intermittently echoed from the street. The cobblestones under the Manhattan Bridge glowed in the afterglow.
After dinner, Meng Zixian walked Sylvia back to her apartment. As they reached the bottom of the building, he looked up. The concrete building had a west entrance, its gate inlaid with the brass letters "VE." The third floor was lined with a row of glass facades, reflecting the sunlight from the East River. The entire building seemed to be lit from the bottom up. A bright white halo flickered in the corners of his eyes, and Meng Zixian squinted uncomfortably.
Sylvia followed his gaze and exclaimed that it was indeed a beautiful building.
Meng Zixuan hadn't been back in three years and didn't remember this building reflecting such a bright light in the evening. He looked away and closed his eyes, a bright spot remaining in his sight.
The apartment was sold to him by an old man from Goldman Sachs. At fifty-six, Brent Walter suffered a heart attack on a private plane. Upon his release from the hospital, he vowed to quit investment banking and moved his family to Florida. Walter was in a hurry to leave, and Meng Zixian had just moved to New York, so the two of them negotiated and closed the deal. After moving in, Meng Zixian had time to look around the surrounding real estate and realized the old man had probably ripped him off. Later, when the old man returned to New York, Meng Zixian won back his money at the poker table.
At the time, he had just retired from MacDill Air Force Base, and although he and Shen Huan were still legally married, they hadn't seen each other for a year. During his final year of service, Meng Zixian was transferred to Tampa, Florida, while Shen Huan stayed in North Carolina for graduate school.
Chen Huan called him and said that she was going to New York for a few days for her graduate school trip and asked if she could stay at his place. He refused. Chen Huan said that this is also my apartment and half of the property belongs to me. Meng Zixuan said that you reminded me that I had to fly to Raleigh first so that we can complete the divorce procedures. This was his petty revenge because she had left him when they were in the most difficult time. There was silence on the phone for a few seconds. Meng Zixuan thought she had hung up, but when he glanced at the phone screen, it was still connected. After a while, Chen Huan finally said, let's get a divorce.
He flew to Raleigh that afternoon and spent two days in a hotel, purposely missing her graduation. He later learned that Chen Huan had returned to Hancheng a week earlier and would have to fly across the Pacific to divorce him. In his twenties, recalling this entanglement, he'd laughed at himself for being naive, but now, thinking about it, he couldn't be any more respectable.
Meng Zixuan thought Shen Huan would argue with him in divorce court about real estate, funds, and future income. He wasn't rich, but he had more than she, an unsuccessful illegitimate daughter. Shen Honglang had never appeared in Shen Huan's life, and the rumors at university had fueled the debate, leading Meng Zixuan to mistakenly believe she was an illegitimate daughter. But Shen Huan signed the divorce agreement drafted by his lawyer without objection.
Leaving the courtroom and standing on the stone steps, Meng Zixuan felt so much regret that even his breath was taut. Meeting again a year later had made him vulnerable, so vulnerable that he easily broke the rules he'd repeatedly emphasized for himself. He made another wrong move. He asked if she was still going to New York, that she could still live with him. Chen Huan was a spineless person, having flown back to his New York home with him after the divorce.
She stayed with him for a week, spending most of the day and night doing it. On the first day, after landing at the airport, he went back to work while she went to antique shops, bookstores, and music stores, picking up all sorts of worthless items. When he got home from work, he found her, dressed in a pullover and gray cotton shorts, bare-legged, sprawled on the wooden floor amidst a pile of cotton bags, old newspapers, film cans, and printed packaging, filling out a Sudoku puzzle stroke by stroke with a pencil. His throat tightened, his gaze burning as if he were touching something forbidden yet too real to deny.
Chen Huan was stripped naked by him, lying on the floor beside his knees, looking up at him with wet eyes. He was still wearing a suit, shirt and tie. Chen Huan was as obedient as a lamb, with her arms on both sides of her body, not reaching out to touch his clothes, not even looking directly at him. When he leaned over to kiss her, she turned her face to the side, her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted, and her breathing was shallow. When his hand touched her shoulder, she trembled uncontrollably. He asked her if she was cold, and she shook her head. She said, Meng Zixian, I like it this way. So he turned off his phone and didn't go to the company, and she no longer went on any trips.
He had restrained himself for the first few days, and the things that happened in the bedroom were as sweet as when they first met. He even wondered if he had been struggling in vain for the past year. Perhaps their previous conflict was just a flu, intense but short-lived, and after he left the army and she left Fort Benny, everything could be repaired.
Gradually, he stopped suppressing himself. That day, he made her lie face down on the bed with her back to him, and he was behind her. After they were done, his palms still carried the warmth of her back skin, as soft as melted butter. Chen Huan leaned on his chest and asked, "Did you want to hit me just now?" Meng Zixuan opened his eyes, was stunned for a moment, and said no. His voice was so low that he was not sure if he was lying. Chen Huan also opened her eyes, and she whispered, "You can hit me, you can do anything you want to me."
A cold hand gripped his stomach. You can do whatever you want to me, she said. You can hit me.
Her words were like a new moss growing deep in the cellar, moist and green, spreading and growing across his chest and abdomen with a vitality that frightened him, weaving itself into the cracks between the bricks and the corners of the wall. He had never before felt such a desire for Shen Huan. His love for her might have had an element of possessiveness, but it had never been this cold, mold-covered, as if it were lying on the ground gasping for revenge.
He realized that Henry Schumer's death was like the eyes of the half-broken statue of Jesus deep in the church, silently watching him. Henry was going to drag him into hell. He thought that Chen Huan had left him a year ago, perhaps out of selfishness or indifference, but that after returning from Dawashi Province, he knew that their relationship could no longer continue. It turned out that Meng Zixian, who could have loved her well, had died in the Helmand Desert.
Meng Zixuan stood on the balcony until late at night. Chen Huan opened the glass door and came to find him. She asked if I said anything wrong. Don't worry about it. What you said in bed can also be ignored.
At five in the morning, Meng Zixian woke Chen Huan up. He said, "I have to go back to the company in the morning. You pack your luggage and I'll take you to the airport." Chen Huan clung to his arm in confusion. She asked where I was going, and she said she wouldn't leave. Her body leaned against him, small and soft. Through her cotton vest, his hand could still feel the warmth of melted butter. At noon, Meng Zixian saw her off to the plane back to Hancheng.
Chen Huan always thought that this was his revenge for her breaking up with him. She cried and said, "Haven't we always been waiting for this day? We won't be separated again."
Later, Chen Huan would fly to see him, squatting under the ash tree outside his apartment building in the fall and sitting at his doorstep in the winter. Two months later, Chen Huan finally stopped coming. I heard she had found a boyfriend who was quite old and had even bought her a one-bedroom apartment in the east of Hancheng.
Li Ting was no saint. He'd used despicable means to secure Chen Huan's favor, and after divorcing Chang Yueqing, he'd remained silent about Chen Huan's existence for a long time. Meng Zixian hadn't expected Chen Huan to fall for such a man. He'd assumed she'd fall for a high school math teacher, a museum artifact researcher, a veterinarian with a dozen jars of reptiles at home, and then live a secluded life with that man. But Chen Huan chose Li Ting, who relished stirring the storm, and Meng Zixian still couldn't understand why. Was she so desperate for money?
Li Ting offered Meng Zixian a sincere invitation to join Xuan Tao, promising him a fertile, uncultivated land with no walls behind and no borders in front. But Meng Zixian pondered for a whole month. He wasn't sure how much longer his willpower would last. If he saw her every day, would he make another shameful mistake one day?
Only when he saw her later at the company's annual meeting did Meng Zixuan realize how ridiculous he had been. Chen Huan's eyes were filled with Li Ting. She had been gone for a long time, walked very far, and would never turn back to look at him again. At first, her indifference was even a relief for him. He could watch her for a long time in silence from a distance, like a drunkard stumbling outside a bar, his nose pressed against the crack of the door, and the tip of his tongue could already taste the aftertaste.
But greed would not let him go. Year after year, his satisfaction was eroded by jealousy, and hatred accumulated in his heart. He wondered why you could live better than me. You don’t even know what I have done for you.
Chen Huan, with the keen senses of a small mammal, could smell Meng Zixian's malice. She began to avoid him, to circumvent him. She felt that Li Ting was the one who could protect her, so she stood firmly by his side, pushing Meng Zixian behind the iron bars soaked in sweat and rust. She had always been selfish. In the past, her cowardly instincts had fed and nourished his greedy ego, but now she was taking that beautiful dish of flesh and blood from him and offering it to another, increasingly ugly and greedy person.
When Shen Huan came to see him in the hospital room on medical parole, it was the closest he had been to the edge in six years. On the one hand, his injuries had left him unable to maintain his former self-control, and on the other, it had been so long since he'd seen her. He wanted to lean into her face, beg her to come back to him, and then unleash all his old hatreds on her. This was what Shen Huan deserved. She shouldn't have accepted his proposal downstairs in the apartment building. She shouldn't have left him in his most desperate moment. She had to pay the price for her actions. But Shen Huan refused. She always made wise decisions when she had someone to support her.
After being discharged from the hospital, the warden of Qiguanzhou sent him for psychological treatment, citing feedback from the prison doctor and the prison guards that Meng Zixian had suicidal tendencies. Meng Zixian found this ridiculous, and he couldn't go down before sending everyone to hell to see Henry Schumer.
But psychotherapy did improve his condition. He was also assigned to clean and clear the protective forest behind Qiguan Mountain. Because his penetrating wound hadn't healed, he couldn't do heavy labor, effectively wasting his six hours of outdoor activity each day. The abundant sunshine and cool air rekindled his confidence, and the whispers and curses that lingered in his ears late at night no longer defined him as a broken and shameful person.
He plans to let go of the past and live a good life.
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