Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

face.
    They were standing close to each other, by the window. Behind her, the lake water appeared calm and beautiful under the fair moonlight. In the deep blue evening sky, the night clouds grew insubstantial.
    She tilted her face up to him, her eyes glistening. He tightened his grasp of her hand, which was soft, slightly sweaty. She raised her other hand, her long fingers moving to smooth his face, lightly, as a breeze from the lake.
    Several lines came back to him, as if riding on the water: Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!… / Ah, love, let us be true / To one another  …
    Another poet, long ago, far away in another land, looking out the window at night, standing in the company of one so near and dear to him, thinking of the reason why they should love each other:… for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain  …
    It was a melancholy love poem, presenting love as the only momentary escape—from a faithless world, hopeless with “human misery, and the eternal note of sadness.” But at this moment, this world of theirs by the lake was even worse—an utterly polluted one. There was no certitude even in the air, in the water, or in the food. They were here … on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night .
    Still, they could be true to one another.
    He had had some vague anticipation since her arrival, but they had been so busy talking about the murder, conspiracy, and politics around them. Now, in the sudden silence, the significance of the night fell upon them.
    A moment ago, she had looked preoccupied, but now she was intensely present. The moonlight seemed to focus on her face in a stilled glare. He put the folder on the windowsill and touched her lips, and she murmured his name against his hand.
    “Well,” he said.
    “Haven’t we talked enough about other people and things?” She tugged his hand, turning.
    Turning to their right, he saw the door of the bedroom standing open, inviting, the lambent light shedding like water.

SEVENTEEN
    HE AWOKE AT MIDNIGHT.
    She was sleeping beside him, her head nestling against his shoulder, her legs entangled with his. Through the curtain, slightly pulled aside, a shaft of moonlight peeped in. Her naked body presented a porcelain glow, a small pool of sweat beginning to dry in the hollow between her breasts barely covered by a rumpled blanket.
    Through the window, he glimpsed a faint light flickering in the distance, then vanishing across the nocturnal water. The stars appeared high, bright, as if whispering down to him through the lost dream. A ship sailed by in silence. The tick of the electric clock was measuring the invisible seconds.
    So it had happened. He still found it hard to believe. It seemed as though he had been another man earlier, and now he was reviewing in amazement what had happened to somebody else. He looked at her again, her black hair spilled over the white pillow, her pale face peaceful yet passion-worn, after the consummating moment of the cloud coming, and the rain falling.
    In the second century BC, Song Yu, a celebrated poet of the Chu state, composed a rhapsody about the liaison of King Chu Xiang and the Wu Mountain goddess. At parting, the goddess promised she would come again to him in clouds and rain. A breathtaking metaphor, which had become a sort of euphemism for sexual love in classical Chinese literature.
    The memory of the night surged back in the dark, intensely, illuminating Chen in fragmented details. The intensity of their passion had been accentuated by a touch of desperation that affected them both. There was no telling what would happen—to her, to him, to the world. There was nothing for them to grasp except the moment of being, losing, and finding themselves again in each other.
    With her above, she turned into a dazzling white cloud, languid, rolling, soft yet solid, sweeping, almost insubstantial, clinging, pressing, and shuddering when she came, into a sudden rain, incredibly warm yet cool, splashing, her long hair cascading over his face like a torrent, washing up sensations he had never known before. Then she undulated under him like the lake, ever-flowing, rising and falling in the dark, arching up, her hot wetness engulfing him, rippling, pulling him down to the depth of the night,