Kinder Than Solitude. Yiyun Li
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a marriage ought to work like the hand of a masterful craftsman, slowly softening one’s edges and changing one’s hues until one becomes perfectly invisible. Josef, disappointed then, had nevertheless articulated that his conception of their marriage had never involved her adapting herself to his world.
But to mention his world, Moran knew, was to gain an unfair advantage. Having come into the marriage by herself—she had cited visa difficulties for her parents’ absence at the wedding—she had only herself to account for, while Josef had his family, which in the end had been used as part of her excuse to exit the marriage.
Of course, Josef said now, he understood her concern. She wished he would not say that; she wished he would be less accommodating. She would get in touch once she had the flights booked, she said. He said okay, though his voice sounded defeated. Why couldn’t she be kinder to him?
After a moment of hesitation, Josef said there was one more thing she needed to know before she came: these days Rachel drove him around.
During her previous visits, Moran had not seen Rachel, and she’d wondered if Josef concealed their annual lunches from his children and friends. In their minds, she had been the calculating one: marrying Josef for security when it was needed for a new immigrant, divorcing him the moment she got her citizenship and a job offer. She imagined his having to plead with Rachel to drive him to meet Moran, guilty as a man caught cheating yet stubborn in his helplessness. “I’ll rent a car,” she said. “That way I can drive you anytime, if you need.”
Josef thanked her. “Till then, Moran?” he said.
A dread of the immediate silence made Moran breathe in sharply. “Josef,” she said, feeling, against all reason, widowed.
“Yes?”
She wanted to say that someone she knew from a long time ago had died, but it was selfish to unburden the news onto a dying man. She wanted to beg him not to let go of his hope, even though, had she been in his position, she would have easily chosen resignation. She wanted to apologize for things she had not done for him, and things she had done wrongly to him. But now, as he waited patiently on the phone, she knew that these words, true to her heart, would sound melodramatic once said. “Are you all right?” Josef asked gently.
“Of course I’m all right,” she said, and added that if she had any talent worth boasting about, it was to always be all right.
Josef ignored the meanness—to herself more than to him—in her words. He had never been a fan of sarcasm. “Is there something upsetting you, Moran?”
Was he asking if her heart had been broken by another man? He would, of course, offer solace, as he had once consoled Rachel when she had broken up with her college boyfriend—but how could Moran explain to him that what was broken was not her heart but her faith in solitude? When she had asked for the divorce, she had told him that only a small part of his life would go to waste. There were his children and grandchildren, his friends and his house, all of which had crossed paths with her minimally, all of which would remain his, as they had never been hers. Considering how excruciatingly long a life was, she had said, the five years they had spent together were no more than a detour. What she had not told him was that, giving up the marriage, she had decided to live in a more limited way: all she wanted was to have her mind and her heart uncluttered, and with discipline she had since maintained a savage routine that cleansed her life to sterility. But today, two calls had come, announcing one death and another impending, and what filled the uncluttered space but pain that the most stringent cleansing would not alleviate? She missed Josef; she missed people.
“What’s the matter, Moran?”
Nothing was the matter, she reassured him. It had perhaps dawned on him over the years that she was no longer looking for a companion, though she could tell that he continued to hope otherwise, counting on the day she could no longer travel for his birthday because she had someone else’s feelings to consider. “I’m sorry I am nasty to you,” she said.
“You surely aren’t,” Josef said.
“Let’s not argue over this,” she said, though who else would she argue with? She told him to take care of himself, and she would see him soon. When the call was disconnected, she felt pressed in, as though his voice had left a crack through which loneliness flooded into her room. She remembered a story she had read when young, about a Dutch boy finding a hole in a dam, and putting his finger into the hole to stop the ocean. In the story, the sea, which had once been a frolicking friend for the boy, murmured sinister seduction into his ear as the numbness from his finger expanded to his arm and then to his whole body. Why not, Moran said to the boy and to herself, let go of your heroic resistance and see what happens next?
But nothing happened. The silence, unlike the murmuring sea, did not engulf and drown her, and the woman in Modigliani’s painting watched on, merciful in her insouciance.
Moran put on her coat and then wound a scarf around her neck, and a minute later emerged into the street. Dusk was falling, the wind picking up, sweeping leaves along the sidewalk. Lamps lit up people’s windows, and here and there could be heard the opening and closing of a mailbox, the sound of a car engine coming to a full rest after the rumbling of a garage door, the buzzing of an erratic street lamp. The sound track of a suburban evening could be as deceivingly idyllic as that of a mountain village in Switzerland: the cars driven home were as eager to reach the end of their journey as were the sheep and cows trekking homeward; the barks here and there of dogs that had spent the day alone and now heard their owners’ approaching steps were as exuberant as those of the sheepdogs who, after a day of working, smelled warm fried food upon nearing the cottages. Behind each door, beyond the gazes of strangers curious or insensitive, another day’s happiness and unhappiness converged, adding or subtracting, modifying or concealing, leading or misleading those susceptible hearts to a place different, however imperceptibly, from yesterday’s.
Once upon a time, cooking in the kitchen where for years Alena had made meals for her husband and their four children, listening for Josef’s car but not really waiting for him, Moran had made up a life for herself apart from Josef, as she later would make up lives for Grazia and the cobbler and the heartbroken shepherd. It was not disappointment in her marriage, as Josef had thought, that had led her to do that, but her belief in the imperativeness of not living fully in any given moment. Time is the flimsiest surface; to believe in the solidity of one moment till one’s foot touches the next moment, equally trustworthy, is like dream-walking while expecting the world to rearrange itself into a fairy tale path. Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope.
The life imagined in the kitchen of Josef’s house was not far from what Moran conducted now: loneliness and solitude had been rehearsed while she chopped vegetables. It had been her only defense against having her heart moved to a strange place, by Josef, by their marriage, by time. Sometimes when she did not hear the garage door, or her mind was lost in the hissing of cooking oil under a closed lid, she would be startled by the sudden reappearance of Josef. Who are you, and why are you here in my life, she had half-expected him to ask her, half-wondering whether he, catching in her eyes a momentary hostility, had been waiting for her to ask him the same question.
In her adult life, Moran believed, she had not failed to foresee what was going to happen: her migration to America, her marriage to and later divorce from Josef. People would say that she was simply living toward what she thought she had seen, but that was not true. One could have wrong visions, one could have vain hopes, but deceiving oneself is more difficult than deceiving the world. Impossible, in Moran’s case.
The odd thing, though, was that her clarity of vision did not apply to the past. Early in their relationship Josef had been curious about her life in China. She had been unable to share as much as he had wished for, and he had felt hurt, or at least saddened, by her evasiveness. But how does one share the memories of a place without placing oneself in it? Certainly there were moments that would stay alive for as long as she did. Her mother, before pulling Moran out of her fortress of quilts and blankets in the winter mornings, had rubbed and warmed up her own hands while singing a song advocating early rising for a healthier life. Her father’s bicycle bell, a rusty one that sounded as though