Pavilion
by Yiyun Li

He was at the age that people would not think as young any more, but he was a young man to them, grandmothers or at least mothers-in-law now, with plenty of reasons to feel neglected by their married children and grandchildren. Before they had discovered him - or he them - they had gathered at the pavilion for other reasons, exchanging gossips, complaining about husbands and unpleasant in-laws, and reminiscing about their youth, but all those reasons seemed trivial now that they had him.

He was a singer, and he sang for them every morning, for hours until they had to go home and cook for their husbands. Few remembered how it had begun. Perhaps he had happened to walk past the pavilion and found them, or someone had introduced him to their world, though no one had claimed the credit. In any case, once the man, accompanied by a battered accordion, had started to sing the songs from forty and fifty years ago, the women could not let him go.

He talked little besides singing for them. They fed him - he did not accept their money, and they respected him for that - and they brought clothes of their husbands and sons to him when cold weather set in. He used to share a shack with two other street artists, but one of the women had successfully persuaded her husband to terminate a contract with a young couple and offered the one-room rental to the man. The husband did not know the rent was covered by the women. In return the man sang for the women. Once in a while a man would come with his wife, be moved into tears that he would refuse to let go, and never come back. The women shed quiet tears, too, their youthful dreams awakened in their seasoned hearts.

The man's fame spread. Visitors showed up uninvited, but it was the women's loyalty that kept the pavilion the center of their lives, going from one season to the next. They refused to ponder over the future. After all, the pavilion, which was five hundred years older than them, and the man, who was at least two decades younger, would both survive them when they exited this world.

Then one day the man did not show up. A sudden illness, the women thought, but soon they realized that the man had left them without an explanation. The key to the room was returned in the mail to the owner, no letter attached, and when days of waiting grew into weeks, the women accepted the reality that they had lost him. To whom, they wondered, but they knew too little of him to answer the question. They had become an episode in his life as he in theirs, and of all the things they had to themselves, the only one spared and not taken away by him was the pavilion, standing alone in the blooming bushes of pink and white peonies.