Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

cry don’t cry don’t cry . . .” It did no good — she cried with abandon, louder and louder. I thought about opening the door again, but quickly realized that was a bad idea. So I sat down beside her and grabbed her ice-cold hand with my sweaty one and put my other arm around her; I patted her shoulder. “Don’t cry,” I said, “please don’t cry Tell me what’s wrong. I want to know who had the nerve to make our little Chunmiao so sad. Tell me who it was, and I’ll go twist his head till he’s looking behind him. . . .” But she kept crying, eyes shut, mouth open, like a little girl, pearl-like teardrops streaming down her cheeks. I jumped to my feet, but sat back down. A young woman crying in the office of a deputy county chief on a Sunday afternoon was nothing to joke about. If only, I thought, I could be like one of those kidnappers you read about, I’d have wadded up a sock and stuffed it in her mouth to keep her quiet. What I actually did might be seen by some as the epitome of foolishness and by others as the height of intelligence. I held one of her hands, pulled her close by the shoulders, and covered her mouth with mine.
    She had a very small mouth; I had a very big one. Mine covered hers completely. Her cries rattled around inside my mouth and produced a loud hum in my inner ears. Soon the cries turned to sobs, and then the crying stopped. At that moment I was overcome by a strange, powerful, unprecedented emotion.
    Now I was a married man with a child of his own, and you might think I’m lying when I tell you that in fourteen years of marriage we’d had sex (that’s the only way to describe contact in which love played no role) a total of nineteen times. Kiss? Once, and that wasn’t a real one. It was after we’d seen a foreign movie, and I was affected by the passionate love scenes. I wrapped my arms around her and puckered up. She turned her face this way and that to avoid contact, but eventually our mouths touched, barely, and all I felt was teeth; not only that, her breath smelled like spoiled meat. It made my head swim. I let her go and never again entertained a similar thought. On each of those rare sexual encounters I put as much distance between me and her mouth as possible. I tried to get her to have her teeth looked at, but she gave me an icy stare and said, “Why should I? My teeth are fine.” When I told her I thought she might have halitosis, she replied angrily, “Your mouth is full of shit.”
    Later on I told Mo Yan that that afternoon’s kiss was a first for me, and it rocked my soul. All I wanted to do was suck on her full lips, almost as if I wanted to swallow her whole. Now I knew why Mo Yan was forever using that particular phrase when he had his male characters falling head-over-heels in love in his novels. The moment my mouth was on hers, she stiffened and her skin turned cold. But just for a moment; when she relaxed, her body seemed to grow and to soften; then came the heat, like an oven. At first my eyes were open, but not for long. Her lips swelled, and the smell of fresh scallops filled my mouth. I began to explore with my tongue, something I’d never done before, and as soon as our tongues met, they frolicked together. I could feel her heart beating against my chest as she wrapped her arms around my neck. My mind was wiped clean of everything but her lips, her tongue, her smell, her warmth, and her soft moans. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, until a ringing telephone intruded into our world. We separated as I went to answer the phone, but I immediately fell to my knees. I felt light as a feather, all because of a single kiss. I didn’t answer the phone, after all. I pulled the plug and stopped the ringing. She was lying on the sofa, faceup, so pale and her lips so red and swollen a person might have thought she’d died there. Naturally, I knew she hadn’t, and not just because tears were rolling down her cheeks. I dried them with a tissue. She opened her eyes and wrapped her arms around my neck. “I feel dizzy,” she murmured. I stood up and brought her up with me. She rested her head on my shoulder, tickling my ear with her hair, as the voice of the office clerk suddenly filled the corridor, and I quickly came to my senses. I gently pushed her away, opened the door a crack, and, rather hypocritically, I think, said, “Forgive me, Chunmiao, I don’t know what came over me.” Still teary-eyed, she said, “Does that mean you don’t