Conversations in Therapy

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;—poetry = the best words in the best order."

It’s not that Jiang Cheng doesn’t know he has daddy issues. It’s just that he doesn’t really mind them anymore, ever since he started seeing his awesome new therapist who works with his issues rather than enabling him in trying to eradicate them.

“I believe in acceptance,” she said when he brought it up in session last week, with the goal of thanking her for her approach. “I believe in working with the shape of things as they are if they aren’t bent to or on destruction. I believe in practical problem-solving in the moment. I believe in telling the narrative that best frames the moment for changes that will better the next moment, and the one after that, and then on into tomorrow and the rest of your life. And I believe, Jiang Cheng, that you can make a happy life even if your father’s a total shithead.”

Okay, so she didn’t say that last part, but she might as well have, considering how much encouragement Jiang Cheng took from the words she did say, as he left her office and went home, holding them in his heart, as the week passed and then turned.

Father is a shithead. That’s the narrative that’s freed Jiang Cheng from blame and shame and that’s empowering him now to go out into the world and claim it as his oyster.

Yes! The world is his oyster! The pearl is his own! Hear him roar!

And at that exact moment something catches his eye.

Jesus, he thinks, and stops in the street.

He’s never noticed this bar. It must be new. Its sign certainly looks brand new, blinking “The Oyster” at him in lime and lemon and fuchsia neon.

That’s…an incredibly literal manifestation of his metaphor, he thinks, and so he goes in, and takes a seat at the bar, and orders a sea breeze.

The pink drink comes complete with a wedge of lime and a yellow straw. All the colors of the sign outside, then, are there in his glass, and not the colors nor his drink nor the bar’s decor have anything to do with oysters.

Such are his profound thoughts when a man sits down next to him and says, “You’re the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. Be mine.”

Jiang Cheng’s about to snort his amusement when he turns and looks, and the man who just fed him that line is the sexiest thing he’s ever seen. He just barely refrains from gasping. But the man—older, impossibly handsome, richly dressed—catches his reaction anyway, and smiles, a slow, assured, magnetic thing; and before Jiang Cheng’s caught his breath he’s in a bed in a suite in a fancy hotel being fucked, gloriously, through the mattress.

So that’s how Jiang Cheng meets Wen Ruohan and starts to date him. Or rather, that’s how he starts being dated by him. It’s the best thing ever, being showered with exquisite jewels and splendid bouquets and bespoke suits. And—being loved. Jiang Cheng knows he’s loved. He knows this is how Wen Ruohan loves.

“I love him, too,” he tells his therapist. “It’s so fucking hot, watching him be so competent. There’s nothing the man can’t do. He can bake a soufflé on a rainy day. He can shoot a three-pointer from midcourt. He can build a computer from scratch. I feel so taken care of, I feel in such good hands. It’s what I always wanted…”

He trails off.

“Growing up?” his therapist asks with a smile.

“Yes,” Jiang Cheng says. “It’s what I always wanted from my father.”

“And you’ve found for yourself now what you were denied then,” his therapist says. “You’ve made your own happiness, now, as an adult.”

“Yes,” Jiang Cheng says. “I have.” He grins. “And I’m totally going to bring Wen Ruohan home to bimonthly brunch on Sunday,” he adds. “Seeing the expressions on my family’s faces when they lay their eyes on my sugar daddy of a lover will add to my happiness as an adult, too, haha.”

And boy, does it ever.

The best expression is Wei Wuxian’s, goggle-eyed and gape-mouthed. Wen Ruohan makes Lan fucking Wangji look like a schoolboy in shorts.

Jiang Cheng’s never claimed to be a particularly gracious adult.

When Wen Ruohan moves his company’s headquarters across the globe as part of his plan to conquer his next continent, “I’ll never forget you, sweet boy,” he says. “You’ll always be the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Jiang Cheng laughs through his tears. “There’s something dubious going on in your verb tenses there,” he says, and hugs Wen Ruohan close, and lets him go.

Jiang Cheng’s second lover who’s old enough to be his father happens out of sheer vanity.

Because Jin Zixuan is trying to get into Jiang Cheng’s good graces in order to get into Jiejie’s pants, he’s offered him the use of the pool at his father’s house. Jiang Cheng has exactly zero scruples about taking the offer up alongside exactly zero intentions of letting Jin Zixuan anywhere near his precious sister. He may be all right, but everyone knows his father is a womanizing pervert who doesn’t take no for an answer.

Or, Jiang Cheng realizes, when he strokes up to breathe at the end of a lap and notices the man standing and watching him with covetous eyes, not just a womanizing pervert.

He tests his hypothesis on the next two laps, and, having proven it to himself to his own satisfaction, rises up out of the pool flexing and peacocking worthy of Jin Zixuan himself.

“Who are you?” Jin Zixuan’s father says, clearly lusting, clearly at a loss what to do with his lust.

Jiang Cheng walks up to him, gets right up in his personal space, and whispers in his ear, “I’m your first boy.”

Ten minutes later in Jin Guangshan’s palatial bed, he only has his swim trunks to pull off when he bares his ass to be fucked into next week. As it turns out, Jin Guangshan fucks him into next year, and just like that Jiang Cheng is in love. How can he not be, knowing he turned the man gay for him?

“Nothing could have appealed more to my vanity,” he admits to his therapist. “Being singular. Being singled out, even if just for my beauty. As I never was as a child. As I never was by my father.”

“Does vanity have to be a bad thing?” she asks. “Isn’t it self-affirming?”

“Yes,” he says thoughtfully. “Yes.”

Mrs. Jin’s vanity, however, suffers a rather terrible blow when Jiang Cheng brings Jin Guangshan to the next bimonthly brunch all unknowing that Mother invited her childhood best friend to the meal too.

Husband and wife stare at each other, appalled.

Father and Mother stare at Jiang Cheng, appalled.

Jiejie and Wei Wuxian stare at Jiang Cheng, appalled.

“I think,” Jiang Cheng tells his lover, “that’s our cue to exit,” and drags him out the door, and tempts him to fuck him right there in the car, parked on the driveway of his parents’ home.

“I love you,” Jin Guangshan gasps at the critical moment.

“I love you too,” Jiang Cheng answers, only truthfully, and love sustains them for two more months before Mrs. Jin’s wounded vanity makes itself known in an ultimatum enforced with divorce papers.

Jiang Cheng can’t bring himself to do that to Jin Zixuan, or to his lover himself, who unlike Wen Ruohan truly defines himself by his extravagant lifestyle funded on his wife’s purse and wouldn’t know who he was if he had to make do on less.

So they part, Jiang Cheng and his older lover.

“I’ll never take another boy,” Jin Guangshan says. “You were the one for me.”

“Will you do something for me, going forward?” Jiang Cheng asks.

“Anything,” Jin Guangshan says.

“Will you make sure your women are willing, before you take them?”

“Yes,” Jin Guangshan says. “Force has lost its appeal to me, after having known you, my sweet cockslut.”

Jiang Cheng can’t let that go without a final goodbye fuck, and it’s glorious, and he knows a part of him will always be Jin Guangshan’s sweet cockslut, no matter who fucks him next.

As it turns out, the man who fucks him next is the love of his life.

Jiang Cheng falls in love with Lan Qiren at first sight, older and stern with a high, finely drawn handsomeness, stepping to the front of his classroom, writing “Introduction to Poetry” across the whiteboard, and turning to face his class.

“What is poetry?” he asks, voice deep and mellifluous. “What is a poem?”

You, Jiang Cheng thinks. You’re a poem. God wrote you for me.

So he raises his hand.

Lan Qiren nods at him, and Jiang Cheng thrills to feel those fine eyes on him, that fine attention on him.

“Poetry is words in order,” he says. “The best words in the best order.”

Lan Qiren raises his fine brows, and even his surprise is fine. For a moment Jiang Cheng wants to take offense—yes, he’s pretty, but that doesn’t mean he’s not smart—yet Lan Qiren seems pleased, and even better, thoughtful.

“If poetry is the best words in the best order,” he says, “then what distinguishes it from prose? Are we to say that an essay, or a short story, honed by its writer to a gleaming sheen, doesn’t have its words in the best order simply because it’s an essay or story and not a poem?”

Jiang Cheng, honestly stumped, thinks about it, and frowns.

“A poem,” he finds himself saying, slowly, “has line breaks. Deliberate points at which the poet chooses to arrest the reader’s eye, and then to make it do meaningful work when it has to leap to the start of the next line.” He pauses, dissatisfied. “Can that be it?” he says. “Can the difference between poetry and prose be merely—typographical?”

Yet all dissatisfaction, intellectual and otherwise, evaporates at the smile  Lan Qiren gives him at his question. It’s a slight thing, that smile, but it’s a fine thing. Of course it’s a fine thing.

“Yes,” he says. “At least, that’s my own opinion, and one I thought I wouldn’t be introducing till the class’s conclusion, much less be sharing on the first day. What’s your name, young man?” and just like that, Jiang Cheng is his forever.

“My name is Jiang Cheng,” he says, and I’m going to marry you, Lan Qiren. Just you wait.

He strategizes with his therapist.

“There’s no way this man would fuck his student,” he says, “so I’ll have to wait till the course is through. Or should I just drop it? So that I can commence Project: Marry Me straightaway?”

His therapist does that thing where she doesn’t speak her opinion but rather makes her silence do her speaking for her.

“Right, fine,” Jiang Cheng says with a sigh. “Patience is a virtue, and so is perseverance.”

“A third virtue is intelligence,” she says. “From what you’ve told me of this man you’re in love with, I would hazard that he appreciates all three. And what better venue is there than a class to demonstrate your possession of them all?”

None, as it turns out. Jiang Cheng is careful not to dominate class discussions, which turns out to be easy enough since another student, Meng Yao, takes on the role of that classmate. Meng Yao’s opinions are brilliant, but Jiang Cheng’s are more nuanced and also more textual. It pays, he thinks, to be in love with the instructor you’re trying to impress. Meng Yao is out for the gold, he’s out for that A, he’s out to be number one, but Jiang Cheng with his longer view, his heart’s view, has taken care to notice how carefully Lan Qiren grounds his own readings in the words on the page. Each point of interpretation he presents has six points of support in the physical poem, so while Meng Yao spins his gorgeous castles in the sky, Jiang Cheng busies himself building scaffolds instead.

Yet Frost confounds him. Robert Frost confounds him.

The poet doesn’t seem to confound Meng Yao, who looks at “Fire and Ice” and starts a long and lovely monologue on cosmologies and eschatologies, dichotomy and unity, irony and paradox, that’s as passionate and articulate as he is. Jiang Cheng listens, as does the rest of the class, all of them enthralled, but he also yearns with his whole being for something he can’t name.

“What do you think, Jiang Cheng?” Meng Yao asks him, one intelligent reader seeking out the opinion of another, and Jiang Cheng can only tell the truth.

“I don’t,” he says simply. “This poem is a rock face against which I feel myself break, like the waves of the sea. It breaks any and all analytic tools I try to bring to it. It presents itself to me not as an object of analysis, or as an object at all. It presents itself to me as being. It just is. It’s a very great poem, and I feel myself silent before it, and reverent.”

“That’s beautiful,” Meng Yao says softly, clearly moved, and that’s how Jiang Cheng makes the first friend of his life.

“Really,” he tells his therapist. “I’ve never had a friend till now. Jiejie and Wei Wuxian don’t count.”

“I’m happy for you,” his therapist says. “You’ve done well, and you’ve done this for yourself. A friend in one’s life gives it a certain kind of support and structure that a sibling, even two siblings, can’t bring. Good for you, Jiang Cheng. Good for you, doing this for yourself. Making this for yourself.”

It turns out Meng Yao knew from day one that Jiang Cheng has a thing for Lan Qiren.

“I watched you fall in love with him,” he says. “It was very entertaining.”

“It’s not a thing,” Jiang Cheng says. “It’s true love.”

“Sure,” Meng Yao says easily. “So what are you calling it? Your life’s current purpose? Mission: Get Hitched?”

“Close enough,” Jiang Cheng says. “Project: Marry Me.”

Meng Yao draws charts for Project: Marry Me. Flow charts and bar graphs.

“Your chances if you try to seduce him in office hours,” he says, pointing, “are—”

“I’m not going to try to seduce him in office hours,” Jiang Cheng says, exasperated. “He wouldn’t fuck a student. He’s too—”

“What? Noble? I think you underestimate him, friend mine.”

“Underestimate?” Jiang Cheng repeats.

“Yes, underestimate. And I think you underestimate your own appeal. You’re fine as fuck, Jiang Cheng. Bring it.”

Meng Yao marches Jiang Cheng to his closet and riffles through it.

“Wear this,” he decides. “I’m just the right degree of smaller than you, so it’ll be just the right degree of too tight on you. The line, friend mine, between sexy and trashy is a fine one.”

“What if Lan Qiren likes his boys trashy?” Jiang Cheng asks, plaintive.

“Be consistent,” Meng Yao chides him. “First it’s ‘oh no, he’s too lofty to fuck a student.’ Now it’s ‘oh no, he’s too base to want a classy piece like me.’ Get your head on straight, Jiang Cheng. You’ll need it for Project: Fuck Me. Which, by the way, will kick off tomorrow, since it’s Friday and no one who has a life goes to Friday office hours. Except for you, who’ll be going in the hopes of acquiring a married life, God help you. Anyway, you two will be undisturbed and can fuck to your heart’s content.”

So come Friday afternoon Jiang Cheng puts “this” on, which is simply a cashmere sweater in a shade of lavender that makes his skin look like alabaster and his eyes look like stars, pairs it with his skintight dark jeans, and makes his way to Lan Qiren’s office, outside which he pauses and breathes.

This is it.

I’m fine as fuck, he reminds himself, and taps on the doorjamb.

Lan Qiren looks up from his desk, and that smile, that slight and fine smile, appears on his face and knocks Jiang Cheng breathless.

Breathless, he takes courage.

He steps in, and very deliberately closes the door behind him—and locks it.

He stands, back to the door he just locked, and looks at his poetry teacher, the man he’s in love with, the man he’s determined to marry.

He looks at him, and puts the whole of his heart into his starry eyes.

Lan Qiren looks back at him, and understanding passes between them, throbs between them. Like electricity, Jiang Cheng thinks. Like light itself. But electricity is light, he remembers dimly. Nothing less than light, then, nothing less elemental, throbs between him and the man he loves.

“What’s this?” Lan Qiren says, softly. “What are you doing, Jiang Cheng?”

They both know he knows the answer to his own question. It’s just that it’s on Jiang Cheng to speak it in words. It’s on Jiang Cheng to speak his heart in words.

So he does.

“I’m trying to seduce you,” he says, “because I’m in love with you, and I want to marry you.”

Breathless still, Jiang Cheng watches Lan Qiren’s fine eyes darken.

“Are you?” he says, in his deep, mellifluous voice. “Do you? Why, Jiang Cheng? Why do you want to marry me? Why are you in love with me?”

Reasons swarm in their multitudes and catch in Jiang Cheng’s throat. He’s wordless—until all he is is words. They uncatch themselves in his throat, they pour out of his mouth in a passionate stream.

“Because you’re stern, and high, and fine,” he says. “Because you smile so rarely, but you smile to see me. Because your voice is deep and mellifluous. Because when you read a poem aloud it fills my mind, such that I forget even you and my love for you. Because when you take a poem apart, you also put it back together. Because when I first saw you, I thought you were a poem. A poem in the flesh. A poem incarnate. A poem God wrote—for me.”

He stops, then, because the look in Lan Qiren’s darkened eyes, darkened to black, makes him want to die. Then he dares to continue, because if he doesn’t say it all he will die.

“I love you, Lan Qiren,” he says. “Do you love me?”

There. That’s all of it. That’s his heart. That’s his whole heart, spoken in words, hanging between them, between himself and the man he loves.

What will Lan Qiren do? What will Lan Qiren do with his heart?

What Lan Qiren does is to reach out his hand—his fine hand—as if, like Jiang Cheng, he sees his heart hanging in the air between them—and then to draw it back, toward his own chest. Toward his own heart. He presses it against his own heart, and he speaks.

“How can I not love you, you precious creature?” he says, and his voice has so much passion in it there’s no melody to it now, only roughness. “You brilliant, beautiful creature? You’ve been driving me mad all term. From the first day, Jiang Cheng, you’ve driven me mad. With your alabaster skin and your starry eyes. With your tiny waist and your unstudied grace. With the subtlety of your mind and the depth of your insights. I’m mad with love for you, mad with desire for you. And here you are, today, now, in my office with me, the two of us behind my locked door, offering yourself up to me, temptation incarnate—my dream incarnate—my dream come true.”

Light, Jiang Cheng thinks. Light, elemental.

“Come here, sweet boy,” Lan Qiren says. “My sweet boy. My Jiang Cheng. Come here to me, and let me show you how much I love you. Let me show you how much I want you.”

Jiang Cheng does.

He goes to the man he loves, the man he wants to marry, and gives himself to his love and his desire.

“So just how much did he love you?” Meng Yao asks, sly and knowing. “Just how long? Just how good? Details, friend mine. I need them all. Dish.”

When Jiang Cheng brings Lan Qiren to bimonthly brunch, and it turns out that his lover is Lan fucking Wangji’s uncle, everyone is duly appalled, and then over mimosas everyone gets over it.

“We’re one big happy family,” Father says drunkenly, and wraps Jiang Cheng in a great big bear hug.

Jiang Cheng hugs back, gingerly.

“Yes, Father,” he says, “I suppose we are.”

“We are,” he tells his therapist a year later. “It’s ridiculous, but somehow it’s working. The last holdouts were Wei Wuxian and Jin Zixuan, but they seem to have worked out their mutual animosity. At least they’ve stopped trying to kill each other. So we’re literally going to hold a triple wedding. All three siblings, wed on the same day. Literally and ironically, of course, but only barely. There’s so much love in the air it’s hard to give irony its proper due.”

“Do you find them opposed?” his therapist asks. “Irony and love?”

“Yes,” he says, “I do. I think one is clever, while the other is good.” He answers the follow-up before his therapist has to ask it. “I think cleverness and goodness are opposed too, aesthetically. They hit different notes. They create different moods. But not personally, not in the flesh. A person can have both qualities. Lan Qiren has both qualities. He’s both clever and good, and he’s a perfect aesthetic whole. It’s what I’ve thought from the moment I saw him: that he’s a poem. A poem God wrote for me.” He pauses. “This is a rather abstract conversation, for psychotherapy.”

“True,” his therapist says. “Would you rather talk about your daddy issues?”

“Hm,” Jiang Cheng says, and thinks about it.

Then, “What daddy issues?” he says, and grins.

His therapist grins back at him.

“One big happy family,” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “One big happy family.”

Electricity is in fact not light, but it didn't occur to me to check until I'd finished the story. Oops!