My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  As they were drinking their tea, the doorbell sounded. Zhenbao got restless. For the third time now he asked, “Is that the guest you invited?

  Don’t you feel embarrassed?” Jiaorui shrugged.

  Taking his glass with him, Zhenbao went out to the balcony. “When he comes back through the door, I want to see the kind of person he is.”

  “Him?” said Jiaorui, following behind. “Very pretty. Too, too

  pretty.”

  “You don’t like pretty men?” said Zhenbao, leaning against the

  railing.

  “Men should not be pretty. Men get spoiled even more easily than

  women do.”

  Zhenbao lowered his eyelids, then looked at her. “You shouldn’t talk about others,” he said with a smile. “You’ve been terribly spoiled.”

  “Maybe. But you’re just the opposite. You deny yourself when in

  fact you like to eat and play around as much as I do.”

  “Really?” Zhenbao laughed. “And you know all about it!”

  Jiaorui looked down and started picking tea leaves out of her glass.

  She kept picking away, until at last she took a sip. Zhenbao too drank his tea in silence.

  A little while later, a man in a Western suit came out of the building.

  Zhenbao couldn’t see much from the third floor, but it looked like the man rushed around the corner, his body tense with anger.

  “Poor guy,” Zhenbao couldn’t help saying. “He came all this way

  for nothing!”

  “So what? He has nothing to do all day long! I too have nothing to do, but I have no respect for people like me. What I like most is to wrest a bit of time from a man who’s already very busy—the way a tiger seizes its prey. Pretty despicable, don’t you think?”

  Zhenbao was leaning against the railing. He tapped his foot against

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  the railing and then, bit by bit, not entirely intentionally, he started kicking at her rattan chair. When the chair shook, the flesh on her arm trembled slightly. She wasn’t fat at all, but because of her small frame she seemed plump. “So you like busy men?” Zhenbao smiled.

  Jiaorui hid her eyes with her hand. “Actually, it doesn’t matter. My heart ’s an apartment.”

  “So—is there an empty room for rent?” Jiaorui didn’t answer. “I’m not used to living in an apartment. I want to live in a single-family house.”

  She gave a little grunt of disbelief. “Well,” she said, “let ’s see if you can tear one down and build the other!”

  Zhenbao gave her chair a good hard kick. “Just watch me!”

  Jiaorui took her hand from her eyes and gave him a long look.

  “You’re wicked!”

  “Can’t help myself, with you.”

  “Come on, be serious,” Jiaorui said. “Why don’t you tell me some-

  thing about your past.”

  “What past?”

  Jiaorui’s leg swept out, almost spilling the tea in his hand. “Faker! I already know all about it.”

  “If you know, why ask? Wouldn’t it be better if you told me something about your past?”

  “My past?” She leaned her head to one side and rubbed her cheek on her shoulder. After a long moment ’s silence, she softly said, “There isn’t much to tell.” There was another long silence.

  “Well then, please tell,” Zhenbao urged. But Jiaorui fell into thought and said nothing, her eyes fixed straight ahead. “How did you and Shihong meet?” he asked.

  “In a very ordinary way,” she said. “The student associations held a meeting in London. I was a representative and so was he.”

  “Were you at the University of London?”

  “My family sent me to London to study, but the real reason was to find a suitable husband. I was quite young and had no wish at all to get married, but I used this as an excuse to escape from home and have a good

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  time. After a few years of having a good time, my reputation wasn’t all that good, so I looked around and grabbed this Shihong fellow.”

  Zhenbao kicked her chair lightly. “And you still haven’t had enough of the good times?”

  “It ’s not a question of having enough or not. Once you’ve learned to do something, you can’t just put it aside and give it up.”

  “Don’t forget that you’re in China now,” Zhenbao said with a

  smile.

  Jiaorui finished her tea in one swallow, stood, and spat the tea leaves over the railing. “In China, you have Chinese freedoms: you can spit on the street if you want.”

  The doorbell rang again, and Zhenbao guessed that it was his brother.

  It was in fact Dubao, and now that he was back, things took a different turn.

  Later on, Zhenbao reviewed the whole scene in his mind. Out on the dusky balcony he hadn’t been able to see her clearly; he ’d only heard her soft voice secretly rustling, tickling his ear like a breath. There in the dark, her heartrending body slipped out of his mind for a moment, and he had a chance to see what else there was to her. She seemed smart and straightforward, but with the emotions of a still-maturing girl—even though she was a wife already. That, for him, was her most appealing feature. There was a danger here, a danger much greater than simple lust. He could not, must not, get serious about her! It would only be looking for trouble. Maybe . . . maybe it was just her body after all.

  When a man yearns for a woman’s body, then starts to care about her mind, he fools himself into believing that he ’s in love. Only after possessing her body can he forget her soul. This may be the only way to free himself. And why not? Jiaorui had a lot of lovers—one more or one less wouldn’t make much difference. He couldn’t pretend that Wang Shihong wouldn’t care, but then again it wouldn’t make things any worse than they already were, for him.

  Suddenly, Zhenbao realized that he was digging for reasons to justify sleeping with this woman. He was mortified, and resolved to avoid her from this point on. He would look for another place to live. As soon as

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  he found something, he would move. Zhenbao asked someone to help

  him get a bed for his brother in the dormitory at the technical school.

  With only himself to look after, things were easy to arrange. He ’d been taking his lunches at a restaurant near the office; now he went out for dinner too. He stayed away until late at night and went straight to bed.

  But one night the phone rang for a long time, and no one picked

  up. Zhenbao had just run out of his room to get it when he thought he heard Jiaorui’s door opening. Afraid of running into her in the dark hallway, he beat a retreat. Jiaorui was groping around in the dark, seemingly unable to find the phone, and since Zhenbao was right by the light switch, he turned it on. He was stunned when he saw Wang Jiaorui in the light. She was wearing pajamas made out of a sarong fabric often worn by overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and it looked like she had just come from her bath. The design on the fabric was so heavy and dark that he couldn’t tell whether it was snakes and dragons, or grasses and trees, the lines and vines all tangled up together, black and gold flecked with orange and green. Night deepened in the house. The dim lamp-lit hallway felt like a train car traveling from one strange place to another.

  On the train you meet a woman quite by accident—a woman who could be a friend.

  Jiaorui lifted the receiver with one hand, the other hand search-

  ing along her side to find a little golden peach-stone button and slip it through its loop. She couldn’t get it to button properly. Zhenbao didn’t see anything, but he was shaken. His heart hung in midair. Jiaorui had turned sideways, and swept her loose, uncombed hair back across her shoulders. Her face was shadowy and golden, like an idol’s; her lowered eyelashes cast long shadows that touched her cheek like the fi
ngers of a small hand. She ’d been in such a hurry that she ’d lost one of her leather slippers. The bare foot rested on the slippered one.

  Zhenbao noticed a trace of heat-rash powder on her ankle. Jiaorui hung up the phone. It was a wrong number. She stood there unsteadily, then sank into a chair, the phone still in her hand. Zhenbao put his hand on the doorknob to show that he didn’t intend to chat. He nodded.

  “How is it that I haven’t seen you lately?” he said. “I thought you’d melted away like candy.” He knew, of course, that it was he who’d been

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  avoiding her, not the other way around, but jumping in before she ’d had a chance to speak was a form of self-defense. It was tiresome, no doubt, but when he saw her, he had to flirt. Some women are like that.

  “Am I so sweet?” she replied nonchalantly, feeling around for her slipper with her bare foot.

  “I don’t know,” Zhenbao replied boldly. “Haven’t tasted.”

  Jiaorui gave a little laugh. She still couldn’t find the slipper, and Zhenbao couldn’t stand it anymore. He walked over and leaned down to pick it up for her, but just then her foot slipped in.

  Now he was embarrassed. “Where have your servants gone?” he

  demanded, for no reason.

  “An old hometown neighbor came to visit the majordomo and amah,

  and the three of them went off to the Cosmo to have some fun.”

  “Oh.” Then, with a smile, he said, “Aren’t you afraid of being alone in the house?”

  Jiaorui stood up. Her slippers scuffed along as she went toward her room. “Afraid of what?”

  “You’re not afraid of me?”

  “What?” she said without turning her head. “I’m not afraid of being alone with a gentleman!”

  Now Zhenbao leaned back against the doorknob, his hand behind

  him, as if he had no intention of leaving. “I’ve never pretended to be a gentleman.”

  “A real gentleman doesn’t need to pretend.” She had opened her

  door, but then reached back to flick off the hall light. Zhenbao stood in the darkness, thoroughly shaken. In spite of his excitement, she was gone.

  Zhenbao tossed and turned all night, telling himself that it wouldn’t matter, that Jiaorui and Rose were not the same, that a married woman who did what she liked was the loosest of women, that he didn’t owe her anything. But he felt a sense of duty toward himself. When he thought about Rose, he thought of that night in the car in the open fields when his conduct had been so sterling: How could he shrug off the man he ’d shown himself to be?

  Two weeks passed, and all at once the weather turned warm. Zhen-

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  bao went to work in his shirtsleeves, but before long it started to sprinkle and a chill blew in. He went back during his lunch break to get his coat.

  It had been hanging on the rack in the hall, but now it was gone. He searched and searched for it and eventually he started to worry. He saw that the living-room door had been left ajar. He pushed it open and there was his coat, hooked on the frame of an oil painting: Jiaorui was sitting on the sofa beneath, quietly lighting a cigarette. Surprised, Zhenbao quickly retreated, squeezing himself out of sight. But he couldn’t resist taking another peek. Jiaorui, it turned out, wasn’t smoking at all. There was an ashtray on the arm of the sofa, and she struck a match, lit the stub of an old cigarette, and watched it burn all the way down. When at last it singed her fingers, she threw the butt aside, lifted her fingers to her mouth and blew on them lightly, a look of utter contentment on her face.

  The cloisonné ashtray, he realized, was from his room.

  Zhenbao was bewildered, and he slipped away like a thief. It seemed incomprehensible at first, and even after thinking it through, he was mystified: Jiaorui, smitten, sitting near his coat and letting the cigarette scent from his clothes waft down over her. As if that weren’t enough, she ’d lit his used cigarette butts . . . she really was a child, spoiled rotten, someone who’d always gotten whatever she wanted, and now that she ’d run into someone with an ounce of resistance, she dreamed only of him.

  The mind of a child and the beauty of a grown woman: the most tempting of combinations. Zhenbao could no longer resist.

  He still ate dinner in a restaurant and arranged to meet several friends there, but the longer he sat in the crowd the more insipid he found the talk, the more detestable the company. He was impatient throughout the meal, and afterward he jumped on a bus to go back to the apartment.

  Jiaorui was playing the piano: “Shadow Waltz,” a tune popular at the time. Hands thrust into his pockets, Zhenbao paced the balcony. The lamp on the piano lit up Jiaorui’s face; he had never seen her looking so peaceful. Zhenbao hummed along with the piano, but she seemed not to hear; she just kept playing, beginning a new tune. Zhenbao didn’t have the courage to sing. Standing in the doorway, he watched Jiaorui for a long time, tears welling up in his eyes, because he and she were really

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  in the same place now, two people together, body and soul. He wished that she ’d look up and see his tears, but instead she kept on playing.

  Zhenbao started to worry. He came over to turn the pages, intending to distract her. She paid no attention. She wasn’t even looking at the music, she knew it all by heart and was focusing only on the unhurried flow of it from the tips of her fingers. Suddenly Zhenbao was angry and afraid.

  It was as if there were no connection between them. He sat down next to her on the piano bench, put his arm around her, and pulled her close.

  The music stopped abruptly; she tilted her face—all too skillfully. They kissed. Zhenbao’s passion mounted. With a deafening crash he pushed her down onto the keyboard. There was a chaotic tempest of sound.

  Surely this was different from all the other times she ’d been kissed.

  Jiaorui’s bed was too fancy for Zhenbao; he didn’t sleep well on the thick bedding. Even though he rose early, he still felt as if he ’d over-slept. Combing his hair he found a sliver of clipped fingernail, a tiny red crescent moon. She ’d scratched him with her long nails; as he was drifting off to sleep, he ’d seen her sitting on the bed clipping them. Had there been a moon that night? He hadn’t checked, but it must have been a red crescent moon.

  After that, he came straight home after work, sitting on the top of a double-decker bus and facing the setting sun, the windowpane a sheet of light as the bus roared toward the sun, toward his happiness, his shameful happiness. How could it not be shameful? His woman ate another man’s rice, lived in another man’s house, went by another man’s name. But feeling that he shouldn’t be doing this only made his happiness more perfect.

  It was if he ’d fallen from a great height. An object that falls from high above is many times heavier than its original weight. Jiaorui, struck by that startlingly great weight, was knocked dizzy.

  “I really love you,” she said. But she was mocking him still, just a little. “Want to know something? Every day, when I sit here waiting for you to come back, I hear the elevator slowly clanking its way up. When it goes past our floor without stopping, it feels like my own heart’s gone up, that it ’s just hanging in midair. But when the elevator stops before it reaches our floor, it seems like my breath’s been cut off.”

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  “So—there ’s an elevator in your heart. It looks as though your heart is still an apartment.”

  Jiaorui smiled gently, then walked over to the window and looked

  out, hands clasped behind her back. After a moment, she said, “The house that you wanted has been built.”

  At first Zhenbao didn’t understand; when he did, he was staggered.

  He ’d never been one to fool around with words, but now he tried something new. Taking a pen from the desk, he wrote “Happy heartwa
rming!

  Many congratulations on your new home!” And yet he couldn’t really say that he was pleased. The thrill of pleasure had made his whole body sing, but all at once it was quiet. Now there was only a desolate calm; he felt sated and empty at the same time.

  When they embraced again, Jiaorui wrapped herself around him,

  she held him so tightly that she blushed. “It ’s the same, isn’t it, even if there ’s no love? If I could be like this with you, without any real feeling of love, you’d certainly lose all respect for me.” She gripped him still more tightly. “Don’t you feel the difference? Don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.” But actually he couldn’t tell. The old Jiaorui had been too good at feigning love.

  Never before had she been in love like this. Even she didn’t know why she loved Zhenbao so much. She ’d watch him closely, her gaze both tender and mocking, mocking him and mocking herself.

  He was a man with a future, of course, a top-notch textile engineer.

  His working style was special: nose to the grindstone, too busy to lift his head. The foreign boss was constantly calling for him: “Tong! Tong!

  Where ’s Tong?” Zhenbao pushed a lock of hair from his forehead, eyes gleaming behind his glasses, the frames flashing. He liked summer, but even when it wasn’t summer he ’d be so busy that he ’d work up a sweat.

  The elbows and knees of his Western-style suit were full of creases like laugh lines. Chinese colleagues would complain about the shabby way he looked.

  He told Jiaorui how competent he was and how efficient. She praised him, rubbing his hair. “Oh yes. My little one is really talented. But you know that. If you didn’t, where would we be? It ’s in other ways that you’re not so clever. I love you—did you know that? I love you.”

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  He showed off in front of her, and she showed off in front of him. The only thing she was really good at was leading men on. Like the tumbler who excelled at turning somersaults and turned somersaults for the Virgin Mary, Jiaorui was sincerely pious: she offered up her art to her beloved.