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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  She ’d provoke a man, and when he responded accordingly, she ’d glance over at Zhenbao with a humble smile, as if to say, “This is what I know—

  and if I didn’t, where would we be?” That Timmy Sun of hers was still in a sulk, and yet she found ways to tease him. Zhenbao understood what she was doing; it was tiresome, he thought, but he put up with it because it was just her childishness. Being with Jiaorui was like living with a swarm of teenagers—enough to make you old in no time.

  Sometimes they discussed her husband ’s return. Zhenbao would

  wear a dark, defeated smile. His eyes and his eyebrows drooped; his whole face hung down in a mess like a mop. The entire relationship was illicit, but he kept using this sinfulness as a spur, pushing himself to love her even more fiercely. Jiaorui didn’t understand the full nature of his feeling, but it made her happy to see him suffer. Back when she was a student in England—jumping out of bed, putting on lipstick without even bothering to wash her face, and running out to see her boyfriends—men had of course threatened to kill themselves for her sake. “I spent the whole night pacing under your window,” they’d say. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  That meant nothing. But making a man suffer for real—that was something else again.

  One day she said, “I’ve been thinking about how to tell him when he comes back,” just as if it had already been decided that she would inform Shihong about everything, divorce him, and marry Zhenbao. Zhenbao wasn’t brave enough to say anything then. But his dark, defeated smile was not having the desired effect, so later on he said, “Let ’s not rush into this blindly. Let me talk to a lawyer friend of mine first—get things clear. You know, if this isn’t handled properly, there could be quite a price to pay.” As a businessman, he felt that merely by uttering the word

  “lawyer” he ’d gotten seriously involved in something—much too seriously. But Jiaorui didn’t notice his qualms. She was full of confidence, sure that once the problem on her side was solved, it would all be clear sailing.

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  Jiaorui often called him at his office. She had no restraint, and it upset him. One day she phoned to say, “Why don’t we go out later and have some fun?”

  Zhenbao wanted to know why she was so happy.

  “You like me to wear those prim and proper Chinese fashions, don’t you? I had a new outfit made, and it came today. I want to wear it someplace.”

  “How about a movie?”

  He and some colleagues had chipped in together to buy a small car, and Jiaorui liked to go out for a ride. She had a plan that Zhenbao was going to teach her to drive. “After I’ve learned I’ll buy a car too,” she announced. So Shihong would buy it for her? Her words stuck in Zhenbao’s craw; he couldn’t quite digest it.

  Jiaorui didn’t seem all that excited about seeing a movie. “Okay,”

  she said, “if we can take the car.”

  “So what are your feet for?” he laughed.

  “Chasing you!” And she laughed too. After that, things got busy at the office. Zhenbao had to get off the phone.

  But that day another colleague happened to need the car, and Zhenbao was always self-sacrificing, especially when it came to pleasures.

  He was dropped off at the street corner—from the apartment window Jiaorui saw him stop to buy the evening paper, though she couldn’t tell if he was looking at ads for the movies. She rushed out to meet him at the street door. “If we don’t have the car, we can’t make it to the 5:15 movie.

  Let ’s forget about it.”

  Zhenbao looked at her and smiled. “So do you want to go someplace else? You look great.”

  Jiaorui hooked her arm in his. “Won’t it be fun just to walk along the avenue?”

  But Zhenbao kept fretting, wanting to know how she felt about this place, then that one. They passed a Western-style restaurant with music.

  She turned it down. “The truth is, I’m pretty broke these days!” he said.

  “Oh, dear,” she laughed. “If I’d known that, I’d never have gotten mixed up with you!”

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  Just then, Zhenbao recognized an old foreign lady that he knew—

  somebody through whom his family had sent money and packages when he was studying abroad. Mrs. Ashe was British but she ’d married a Eur-asian, which made her self-conscious and as British as British can be.

  She was tall and stooped and wore an elaborate dress, a foreign-style print that sagged around her frame and made her look like an old beggar. Her hat was a robin’s egg blue, mottled with black, and she ’d stuck a pearlheaded hatpin and a swallow feather in it. Under the hat was a circle of gray hair, pressed flat like a wig, and her eyes looked as if they were made of pale blue porcelain. Her English came out very softly, her voice breathy and conspiratorial. Zhenbao shook hands with her. “Are you still living in the same place?” he asked.

  “At first we were going to go home this summer, but my husband

  just can’t get away!” Going to England was “going home” even though her husband ’s family had lived in China for three generations, and she herself had no living relatives in England.

  Zhenbao introduced Jiaorui. “This is Mrs. Shihong Wang. Wang

  was in Edinburgh also, and Mrs. Wang spent many years in London. I’m living at their place now.”

  Mrs. Ashe was accompanied by her daughter. Zhenbao, of course,

  had considerable experience with mixed-blood girls. Miss Ashe pursed her red lips but didn’t say much. She had dark brown eyes peering out of a pointed, white-peach face. A woman who doesn’t yet have her own household, her own portion of worry and duty and joy, will often have that watchful, waiting look. And yet Miss Ashe, young as she was, didn’t yearn for domesticity; she wasn’t a girl with a heart “launched like an arrow toward home.” Career girls in the city often have a harried look, and Miss Ashe ’s eyes were puffy, her face drawn and pale. In China, as elsewhere, the constraints imposed by the traditional moral code were originally constructed for the benefit of women: they made beautiful women even harder to obtain, so their value rose, and ugly women were spared the prospect of never-ending humiliation. Women nowadays

  don’t have this kind of protective buffer, especially not mixed-blood girls, whose status is so entirely undefined. There was a razor edge to Miss Ashe ’s exhausted peering gaze.

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  Jiaorui could see at a glance that in going home mother and daughter would be headed straight into the English lower middle class. But they were Zhenbao’s friends, and she was eager to make a good impression; also, for some reason, the presence of other females made her feel like a “proper woman” again. She was a full-status wife. She ought to exude an air of dignified affluence. Zhenbao rarely saw her smiling so serenely, almost like a movie star; suddenly she became a sapphire from whose depths a flickering lamp draws waves of light and shadow.

  Jiaorui was wearing a cheongsam of dark purple-blue georgette, and a little heart-shaped gold pendant gleamed faintly at her breast, cold and splendid—as if she had no other heart. Zhenbao looked at her, and he was both pleased and suspicious; if there ’d been a man around how different things would have been!

  Mrs. Ashe asked about Mrs. Tong, and Zhenbao said, “My moth-

  er’s health is fine. She still looks after the whole family.” He turned to Jiaorui. “My mother often does the cooking, and she ’s a very good cook.

  I always say we ’re very lucky to have a mother like that!” Whenever he praised his widowed mother, he was reminded of the many years of grievous hardship his family had endured, and he couldn’t help gnash-ing his teeth. He smiled, but as the full weight of his ambitions bore down on him, his heart was like a rock.

  Mrs. Ashe asked about his younger brother and sisters. “Dubao is a good kid, he ’s in technical school now, and later on our fac
tory might send him to England to study.” Even the two sisters were praised—the whole family was ideal—until Mrs. Ashe had to exclaim, “You really are something! I’ve always said that your mother must be very proud of you!” Zhenbao was suitably modest. He asked how things were going for everyone in the Ashe family.

  Seeing the newspaper rolled up in his hand, Mrs. Ashe inquired if there was any news this evening. Zhenbao handed her the paper, but her eyesight was so poor that even when she held it at arm’s length she still couldn’t make anything out. She asked her daughter to read it for her.

  “I was planning to take Mrs. Wang to see a movie, but there aren’t any good ones,” Zhenbao said. In front of other people his attitude toward Jiaorui was a little stiff—he wanted to show that he was only a family

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  friend—but Miss Ashe ’s quiet, watchful eyes made him feel he was giving everything away. Zhenbao leaned close to Jiaorui. Very familiarly, he said, “I’ll make it up to you another time, okay?” He looked at her with shining eyes and laughed. Immediately after, he was sorry—as if he ’d gotten too excited while talking and sprayed spit in someone ’s face.

  He had always taken this Miss Ashe for a keen observer. She was young and she had nothing, not even a personality; she was just waiting for the approach of everything in the world. Already its huge shadow had fallen across her otherwise expressionless features.

  Jiaorui was young, and she had all sorts of things, but somehow they didn’t count. She seemed scatterbrained, like a child who goes out and picks dozens of violets, one by one, gathers them into a bunch and tosses them all away. Zhenbao had only his future to bank on, a future he ’d prepared for all on his own. How could he bear to see it thrown to the wind? Rich young men and women are free to be careless—security is an inheritance for them—but for him it was not so easy! The four of them walked slowly down the same street, Mrs. Ashe in the safety and comfort of a room full of flowered wallpaper, while the three young people faced menace on every side—it boomed beneath them like a drum.

  It was not yet dark, but the neon lights were shining; in the daylight they looked even more artificial, like costume jewelry. They passed a shop with lamps for sale, innumerable lamps under the neon glow, the whole place blazing with light. Behind the tin grill of a snack shop, a waitress leaned forward to pick up a piece of pastry; her rouge-red cheeks looked good enough to eat. Did old people also see it like that?

  Walking next to the old woman, Zhenbao couldn’t help feeling the brev-ity of youth. A row of shiny round-head spikes, their heads indented on four sides, marked off a pedestrian crosswalk; beside them the asphalt road looked as dark and soft as rubber. Zhenbao swayed along, letting his body go. He couldn’t tell whether it was his own gait that was rubbery or the road underfoot.

  Mrs. Ashe praised the fabric of Jiaorui’s dress. Then she said, “I saw a piece like that, last time I was at the Huilou fine goods shop. Dolly turned it down because she thought it was too dark. I still wanted to buy it, but then I thought, well, I don’t often have an occasion for wearing

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  such clothes . . .” She didn’t seem to feel that what she said was sad, but the others all fell silent, unable to respond. “So Mr. Ashe must be very busy?” Zhenbao finally asked.

  “Oh, yes. Otherwise, we ’d go home for a visit this summer. But he really can’t get away!”

  “Some Sunday when I have the car, I’ll come and fetch you all

  and take you to Jiangwan to have some Chinese snacks made by my

  mother.”

  “That would be wonderful! My husband simply dotes on Chinese

  things!”

  She sounded just like a rich foreign visitor; no one would have

  guessed that her husband was half Chinese.

  After saying good-bye to Mrs. Ashe and her daughter, Zhenbao

  remarked to Jiaorui, as if in explanation, “That Mrs. Ashe is a really good person.”

  Jiaorui looked at him and smiled. “I think you are a really good

  person.”

  “Just how am I so very good?” Suddenly his face was right in hers.

  “I’ll tell you—don’t get angry. When a woman sees a man who’s

  good like you, she wants to fix him up with someone else. She doesn’t even think of keeping him for herself.”

  “So you don’t like good men?”

  “When a woman likes a good man it ’s because she thinks she can

  trap him.”

  “Oh-ho! So you’re planning to trap me, is that it?”

  Jiaorui paused. She gave him a sideways glance and started to smile but she stopped. “This time, it ’s the bad girl who’s been trapped!”

  That sideways glance, those soft words—they were intolerable to

  him at the moment. Later that evening, stretched out in Jiaorui’s bed, he thought about the meeting with Mrs. Ashe on the street, about his studies in Edinburgh, when his family had sent him money and packages, and about how it was now time to repay his mother. He wanted to get ahead, move up in the world, and the first step was to rise in his profession.

  After he ’d made it to a suitably high position, he ’d contribute something to society—for instance, he could set up an industrial-science school for

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  poor boys, or a model textile factory in his hometown, Jiangwan. Vague as it all was, even now he had a fuzzy intimation of the warm welcome awaiting him—not just from his own mother but from a whole world of mothers, tearful, and with eyes only for him.

  Jiaorui was fast asleep, curled up close to him, the sound of her breathing loud in his ear. Suddenly she seemed a thing apart, and somehow alien. He sat up on the edge of the bed and groped around in the dark until he found a cigarette and lit it. He didn’t think Jiaorui had noticed, but in fact she was awake. After a long while she reached out, feeling for his hand. “Don’t worry,” she said softly, “I’ll be good.” She laid his hand on her shoulder.

  Her words made him weep, but the tears too were a thing apart, and somehow alien.

  Zhenbao didn’t answer, letting his hands roam over familiar places.

  Soon the sun would rise. The city was full of the muffled noise of crow-ing cocks.

  The next day, they spoke again of her husband ’s return. “Anyway, he ’ll be back sometime in the next few days,” Jiaorui said with great certainty.

  Zhenbao asked her how she knew, and only then did she tell him that she ’d sent Shihong a letter by airmail telling him everything and asking for her freedom. Zhenbao gasped, the sound coming from deep within.

  He stood up and ran out onto the street. When he looked back at the towering apartment building, with its tall, flowing red-and-gray lines, it looked like a roaring train—incredibly huge and barreling straight down upon him, blocking out sun and moon. The situation was beyond repair. He ’d thought that he had it all under control and that he could stop whenever he wanted, but now things had rushed forward on their own, there was no use in even arguing. The worst thing was that he didn’t even want to argue—not when he was with her. It was so clear, then, that they loved each other and should go on loving each other. It was only when she wasn’t there that he could think up all sorts of reasons against it. Right now, for instance, it struck him as all too likely that he ’d been played for a fool in a deeper game with her true love, Timmy Sun. She ’d pulled the wool over Zhenbao’s eyes by saying that it was

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  because of him that she wanted a divorce, and now if there was a scandal, his future would be ruined.

  He walked a long way without caring where. At a little restaurant, he had a few drinks and a bite to eat. When he came out, his stomach hurt.

  He got into a rickshaw, thinking he would visit Dubao in his dormitory, but in the rickshaw
his stomach felt worse still. He lost control of himself—the tiniest tremor of pain was more than he could bear—and he panicked. Imagining he had cholera, he told the rickshaw driver to take him to the nearest hospital. Once he ’d been admitted, he informed his mother; she rushed to the hospital right away. The next day she came bearing lotus-root powder and grape juice that she ’d bought for him.

  Jiaorui showed up as well. His mother suspected that something was going on between them, and she made sure to scold him in front of Jiaorui.

  “Getting sick to your stomach, that ’s nothing in itself, but I tossed and turned all night, worrying about you—a grown man and you still don’t know how to take care of yourself ! How on earth am I supposed to look after you all the time? And if I just let you do as you please, I’ll be constantly worrying. But if you had a wife, I wouldn’t have to. Mrs.

  Wang, please tell him—he ’ll listen to what his friends say, even if he won’t listen to me. Oh, dear! Here I’ve been waiting so long till you’d finished your schooling and begun your career. Now that you’re finally getting somewhere, don’t think you can just let go, let everything fall apart! You have to earn the respect you receive. Mrs. Wang, please, you tell him for me.”

  Jiaorui pretended not to understand Chinese; she just stood there smiling. Zhenbao’s thoughts were in fact very similar to his mother’s, but when he heard her, he felt that the way she put things was somehow humiliating. He was embarrassed, and found an excuse to send her away.

  That left him with Jiaorui. She walked over to the bed and leaned over the white metal railing, her whole body a painful question mark.

  Zhenbao rolled away impatiently; he couldn’t explain and he couldn’t escape his mother’s logic. Jiaorui closed the curtain, and the sunlight on his pillow turned to cool shadow. She didn’t leave, but stayed to

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  nurse him, bringing tea, water, the bedpan. The enamel basin was ice-cold against his skin; her hands were just as cold. When he happened to glance her way, she seized the chance to speak: “Don’t be afraid . . .”