A Beer Without Tax Equals Six Years

Man:

Five years have passed, and she hasn’t changed. I still love that sharp, high-bridged nose on her fair face. I love the kindness and maturity beneath her childish surface. The exact quarrel that broke us up isn’t worth digging out of the dusty attic of memory anymore. What I remember more clearly is the awkwardness of our first meeting.

Woman:

A thousand times over these five years, I wanted to reach out to him again. After that fight, when I left our shared apartment, I didn’t mean to break up. I wanted, rather, to settle things once and for all—get married. I knew he loved me, but when it came to real decisions, he was a coward. He didn’t want marriage to bind him. Even without marriage, he was never truly free. He kept compromising with whatever reality threw at him. I loved that acceptance of fate. Every day I made him wash dishes, buy groceries, drag him out of bed, carry him home drunk. Two opposite people working well together. Back then, the dress was chosen, the venue booked. I was going home to tell him, the same way I’d told him a hundred breakfasts, “go downstairs and buy some beef.” Ordinary. But after just one month away, the home was in ruins. His clothes, and the man I loved, were gone. Half of me was gone.

Man:

What would you like to eat? Still beef noodles? Two beers?

Woman:

I don’t eat meat anymore. I’ve been vegetarian for four years. Let’s just have a drink. It’s been so long since we drank together.

Man:

Didn’t expect that. Back then she sent me for beef almost every day. Strange now, not sure how to speak. The truth is, the reason I left was to try making a choice on my own. I was tired of waiting for choices to come to me. From university to work, I was always with her. I loved her, but those years I was wrapped in a fog I couldn’t name. I wanted out.

I moved to Shanghai. In Jing’an, on a noisy street, I opened a café. When no customers came, I wrote fiction. Two novels. Two couples. In the first, I gave the characters the promises I never kept with her. The man planned to propose at Everest base camp. On the way up, he had a heart attack and died. In the second, the couple divorced in the end. In Shanghai I shed that gray fog. Nights, when bored, I drank with friends, met women, mixed my stories with theirs, like weaving music into a track. Everything I owed her, I paid back in fiction.

Woman:

I stopped eating meat because that part of me belonged to the youth I spent with him. Six years isn’t short for a twenty-four-year-old woman, yet it vanished in a blink. The city of our youth—San Francisco—has changed, except for that beer shop at Fisherman’s Wharf. First time I saw him there, he just looked familiar. A beer without tax equals six years.

Later I returned to Shanghai. I worked in an independent bookstore in Jing’an, so I could read every day. I discovered an author whose stories reminded me of the man before me. In each line I patched over some regret. With every patch, I treated myself to a bowl of beef noodles. His pen name is French—I can’t read it—but I know he’s also in Shanghai.

Here I met my fiancé. Two years with him, and I haven’t touched beef noodles or beer again.