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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

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  cupboard, went back to the drawer for some string, found a string that was too short, wrapped up the vases and made a complete mess of it, even ripping the paper into pieces. Zhenbao watched the whole thing with growing irritation. All at once he strode over and grabbed the vases from her. He groaned loudly. “When a person’s stupid, everything’s a trial!”

  Yanli’s face flushed with resentment, like a slave girl’s. But then she smiled and laughed, glancing quickly at Dubao to see if he was laughing too, afraid he might not have caught her husband ’s joke. She stood to one side with her arms folded while Zhenbao wrapped up the silver vases. Her features were strangely clouded, as if a white membrane had been stretched across her face.

  Dubao was getting fidgety. At their house friends and relatives often got fidgety. He wanted to leave. Anxious to make up for the faux pas, Yanli rallied. She pressed him warmly to stay— “If you aren’t busy.”

  She fawned and smiled, her eyes narrowing, her nose wrinkling flirtatiously. She often surprised people with such an unexpected intimacy.

  If Dubao had been a woman, she would have taken his hand in her own moist palm and held on desperately—imposing herself in a way that was sure to prove distasteful.

  Dubao said he really must go. At the door, he ran into the old maidservant bringing Huiying back. Dubao took some gum from his trousers pocket and gave it to the girl. “Say ‘Thank you, Uncle,’ ” Yanli chimed in. Huiying dodged away.

  “Ah! So you’re embarrassed!” Dubao laughed.

  Huiying flipped up her Western-style skirt to hide her face, showing her underwear. “Now you should be really embarrassed!” Yanli cried out.

  Huiying grabbed the gum, flipped the skirt over her face again, and ran away laughing.

  Zhenbao sat watching his daughter, with her thin, yellow, prancing hands and feet. Before, this child had not existed. He had summoned her out of thin air.

  Zhenbao went upstairs to wash his face; downstairs, Yanli turned on the radio to listen to the news. Zhenbao thought it was a good idea for

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  Yanli to listen to the news—part of a modern woman’s education. Perhaps she ’d even pick up a phrase or two of Mandarin. He didn’t know that Yanli listened to the radio just to hear a human voice.

  Zhenbao looked out of the window. The sky was blue and the clouds were white, the oleander was blooming in the courtyard, and the flute was still playing in the street—as sharp and wheedling as the voice of a low-class woman. It wasn’t a very good flute. The notes were shrill and hurt his ears.

  Here on this lovely spring afternoon, Zhenbao looked around at the world he had made. There was no way to destroy it.

  The quiet house was filled with sunlight. Downstairs, a man’s confident voice came over the radio, droning on and on.

  From the moment Zhenbao got married, he ’d been convinced that

  everyone around him, starting with his mother, should be patting him on the back and offering him encouragement. His mother knew how

  much he ’d sacrificed, but he felt that even those who didn’t know all the details owed him respect, owed him a little sympathy in compensation.

  As a result, people often did make a point of praising him, though never enough, while Zhenbao devoted himself to doing all sorts of good deeds—things he ’d take upon himself, without even being asked. He paid off some debts for Dubao, found him a wife, set him up in a house with his family. His sister was a particular problem, and this made him especially considerate toward unmarried or widowed friends. He got them jobs, money—there was nothing he wouldn’t do. He spent a lot of time and effort obtaining a position for his sister at a school in the interior, because he ’d heard that the male teachers there were all recent university graduates, every one of them unmarried. But his sister wasn’t cut out for hardship; she threw a fit and came running back to Shanghai, not even finishing out her half-year contract. His mother sympathized with her daughter, and criticized Zhenbao for being hasty.

  Yanli watched all this from the sidelines. It made her very angry on Zhenbao’s behalf, and she complained to others whenever she could. But Yanli rarely saw anyone. Lacking a lively, sociable lady of the house, Zhenbao felt it was better to take people out, even if it did cost more. He never brought people home. But on those rare occasions when a friend

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  came looking for Zhenbao and found that he wasn’t in, Yanli proved an attentive hostess. She ’d treat the guest like the closest of friends, freely discussing Zhenbao.

  “Zhenbao always gets the short end of the stick—he ’s so good to people, so sincere, and then he ’s the one who suffers! Ah—but that ’s how it is, isn’t it, Mr. Zhang? Sincerity doesn’t get you anywhere nowadays! Even his own sister and brother are ungrateful, not to mention the friends who come around only when they want something—and they’re all like that! I’ve seen it all, and Zhenbao won’t change his ways, not one bit, even though he ’s the one who suffers, each and every time. A good man has no place in our world today! That ’s how it is, isn’t it, Mr.

  Zhang?”

  The friend would feel that soon he too would be numbered among

  the ungrateful, and a chill would creep into his heart. None of Zhenbao’s friends liked Yanli, even though she was pretty, quiet, and refined, just the wife for someone else, a perfect backdrop for men busily engaged in vigorous, freewheeling conversation.

  Yanli had no women friends of her own, so she had no chance to

  compare her life with others’ and find out how low she ’d fallen in her own household. Zhenbao didn’t encourage her to interact with other married women because he knew that she wasn’t up to it. Placed in an unfamiliar situation, she would just reveal all her weaknesses and encourage gossip. He forgave her for telling people he was unappreciated, because a woman’s perspective is always limited. Anyway, she was protecting him; she hated to see him exploited. But when she made similar comments to the old maidservant, Zhenbao’s temper got the better of him and he intervened. Then there was the time he heard Yanli complaining to eight-year-old Huiying. He didn’t say anything about it, but not long after he sent Huiying off to boarding school. The house grew even quieter.

  Yanli began to suffer from constipation. She sat in the bathroom for several hours each day. That was the only place where it was all right to do nothing, say nothing, think nothing. The rest of the time she also did nothing, said nothing, and thought nothing, but she always felt a little uneasy about it. Only in the day-lit bathroom could she settle down and

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  feel rooted. Yanli bent her head and stared at her own snow-white stomach, that stretch of pure gleaming white. Sometimes she stuck it out; sometimes she sucked it in. Her navel also changed its appearance: now it was the eye of a Greek statue—sweet, clean, expressionless—while the next instant it protruded angrily, like the eye of a pagan god, an eye with an evil little smile but adorable even so, with crow’s-feet tucked away in the corners.

  Zhenbao took Yanli to the doctor and bought her medicine as recommended by newspaper advertisements. Eventually, however, he decided that she wasn’t all that concerned—she seemed to want to hang on to her little ailment as if it contributed to her importance. He stopped worrying about it.

  One day, he had a business lunch. It was the plum-rain season, and before he ’d left the office the rain started. He hailed a rickshaw and went around to his house to fetch his raincoat. On the way he couldn’t help remembering that other time, when he was living at Jiaorui’s place, when the weather had changed and he ’d dashed back in the rain to get his raincoat—that very memorable day. He climbed out of the rickshaw and went in the front door, wrapped in the faint melancholy of his memories, but when he looked he saw that the raincoat wasn’t in the closet. His heart thumped
hard, and it seemed that events of a decade ago had come to life again. He walked toward the living room, his heart still pounding. He had a strange sense of destiny. His hand was on the doorknob to the living room, he opened it, and Yanli was in the room, along with a tailor who was standing at the end of the sofa. Everything was as usual, and Zhenbao relaxed. Then suddenly he grew tense again.

  He felt nervous—no doubt because the two other people in the room were nervous too.

  “Are you having lunch at home?” Yanli asked.

  “No, I came back for my raincoat.”

  He looked at the tailor’s bundle on the chair, not a trace of moisture on it. It had been raining steadily for at least an hour. The tailor wasn’t wearing galoshes. The tailor, when Zhenbao looked at him, seemed a little shaken; he went over to his bundle, pulled out a measuring tape, and started to take Yanli’s measurements.

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  Yanli’s hand gestured weakly at Zhenbao. She said, “Your raincoat ’s hanging in the kitchen hallway to dry.” She looked as if she meant to push the tailor away and fetch the raincoat herself, but she didn’t move. She just stood there while the tailor busied himself about her measurements.

  Zhenbao knew that when you touch a woman in front of others after sleeping with her, there ’s a change in your manner—no mistaking it. He looked at them both with a cold, clear eye. The great white mouth of the rainy day sucked at the window. Outside was nothing but cold disarray; inside everything was sealed off. There was an intense intimacy between those three people enclosed in that single room.

  Zhenbao stood high above it all, distantly observing the two inexperienced adulterers. He couldn’t understand. How could she choose such a person? Although the tailor was young, his back was already a bit bent. His face was sallow and there were ringworm scars on his scalp. He looked like what he was: a tailor.

  Zhenbao went to get his raincoat and put it on, buttoning it up as he walked back to the living room. The tailor was gone.

  “Don’t know when I’ll be back,” Zhenbao said to Yanli. “Don’t wait supper.”

  Yanli approached him deferentially and nodded. She seemed to be

  upset. Her hands wandered around, finding no place to rest but anxious to be doing something. She flipped on the radio. Time for the Mandarin news broadcast again—the voice of another man filled the room. Zhenbao felt there was no need for him to speak, so he turned and left, still buttoning his coat. He had no idea that his coat had so many buttons.

  The door to the living room was wide open, and the candid, straightforward man on the radio went on talking confidently: he was always right. Zhenbao thought: “I’ve been pretty good to her! I don’t love her, but there ’s nothing I owe her an apology for. I haven’t treated her badly.

  Such a lowly little thing! Probably she knows she ’s nothing—she wants to find someone even lower than she is if only for comfort’s sake. But I’ve been so good to her, so good!”

  Back in the room, Yanli must have felt less than sure of herself: she turned off the radio with a pop. Standing in the entryway, Zhenbao suddenly felt himself choking up. If the man in the radio station, who went

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  on discoursing so fluently, had sensed that his entire audience had all at once shut him off, he would have known what Zhenbao felt—an abrupt blockage, emptiness petrifying the gut. Zhenbao stood on the front steps of his house, facing the rainy street, until a rickshaw came by looking for customers. He got in without bothering to haggle over the fare and was pulled away.

  When he came home that evening, the steps were under a foot of

  water. In the dark and the wet the house looked very different—appropriately enough, he felt. But when he went indoors the hot stifling smell and the line of yellow lamps leading upstairs were as before: the house was still the house; nothing had changed.

  At the front door, he removed his shoes and socks, which were soaked through, gave them to the maidservant, and climbed barefoot to the bedroom upstairs. He reached out to flip the switch and saw that the bathroom light was on. When he looked through the half-opened door, the bathroom resembled a narrow hanging scroll in faded yellow-white. The light made Yanli her own faded yellow color. But never in dynastic history has a painting of a pretty woman taken up such an awkward subject: Yanli was pulling up her pants. She was bent over, about to stand up, and her hair hung down over her face. She had already changed into her flowered white pajama top, which was bunched high up on her chest, half caught under her chin. The pajama pants lay piled around her feet, and her long body wavered over them like a white silkworm. In America, the scene would have made an excellent toilet-paper advertisement, but to Zhenbao’s hasty glance it was household filth, like a matted wad of hair on a rainy day—damp and giving off a stagnant, stifling, human scent.

  He turned the light on in the bedroom. When Yanli saw that he had returned, she hurriedly asked, “Did you get your feet wet?”

  “I’m going to soak them right away,” Zhenbao responded.

  “I’ll be right out,” said Yanli. “I’ll tell Amah Yu to go heat some water.”

  “She ’s doing it now.”

  Yanli washed her hands and came out, and Amah Yu brought the ket-

  tle up. Zhenbao sneezed. “You’ve caught a cold!” said Amah Yu. “Don’t you want to close the door?”

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  Zhenbao closed the door and was alone in the bathroom, the rain still falling hard, clattering on the windowpanes.

  There was some sort of potted plant in the bathtub. It had flowers of a tender yellow, and even though it hadn’t been out in the rain, it smelled as if it had been. The foot basin was next to the flowerpot, and Zhenbao sat on the edge of the bathtub, bending over to wash his feet, careful not to splash hot water on the flowers. When he bent his head, he caught a whiff of a light, clean scent. He put one leg over the other knee, carefully wiped each toe dry with a towel, and suddenly was overcome with tenderness for himself. He looked at his own flesh, and it was as if someone else was doing the looking—a lover, full of grief because Zhenbao was throwing himself away for nothing.

  He shuffled on some slippers and stood at the window looking out.

  The rain had already tapered off and was gradually coming to a stop.

  The street was now a river; mirrored in the waves, the streetlamps were like a string of silver arrowheads that shot by, then disappeared. Vehicles thumped past, and behind each one a brilliant white wake unfurled like a peacock’s tail, washing across the reflections of the streetlamps. Slowly the white peacock’s tail sent out golden stars, then lengthened and faded away.

  When the vehicle was gone, the white-gold arrowheads returned, shooting across the turbid yellow river and disappearing, shooting by, then gone.

  Pressing his hand against the windowpane, Zhenbao was keenly

  aware of his own hand, his own breath, deeply grieving. He thought of the bottle of brandy in the cabinet. He got it down, poured himself a full glass, and stood looking out the window as he sipped.

  Yanli walked up behind him and said, “That ’s a good idea—hav-

  ing a glass of brandy to warm your stomach. Otherwise, you’ll catch a cold.”

  The warm brandy went straight to his head; his eyes grew hard and hot. He turned and looked at her with loathing. He hated that kind of tedious, polite small talk, and what he especially hated was this: that she seemed to be peering at him behind his back, trying to find out how much he knew.

  In the following two weeks Yanli kept peering. Apparently she felt that he hadn’t changed in any way—that he wasn’t suspicious of her—

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  and in time she relaxed and forgot that she ’d had something to hide.

  Zhenbao was befuddled: now it seemed that she didn’t have a secret after all.
It was like two white doors, tightly shut, flanked by a pair of flickering lamps on a wild plain at night: you pound at them with all your might, absolutely convinced that a murder is taking place inside. But when the doors open to admit you, there ’s no such thing. There ’s not even a building. All you can see, under a few stars, is empty mist and tangled weeds. Now that was truly frightening.

  Zhenbao started drinking a lot, openly consorting with women out-

  side the house. It was not at all like before, when he retained some scruples. He came home reeking of drink, or he didn’t come home at all, but Yanli always had an excuse, saying that he had a lot of new social obligations for his company that he couldn’t refuse. She would never admit that it had anything to do with her. She kept on explaining it away to herself, and when his dissipation gradually got to the point where it couldn’t be concealed, she explained it away to others too, smiling slightly, loyally covering up for him. Zhenbao was running wild—almost to the point of bringing prostitutes home with him—but everyone still thought of him as a fine upstanding man, a good man.

  For a month it rained constantly. One day, the old maidservant said that Zhenbao’s woven silk shirt had shrunk in the wash and needed to be let out. Sitting on the bed with his shoes off, Zhenbao casually remarked,

  “Get the tailor to come and fix it.”

  “The tailor hasn’t come in a long time,” said Amah Yu. “I wonder if he ’s gone back to his hometown.”

  “Eh?” said Zhenbao, to himself. “Broken off as easily as that? Not a bit of real feeling—how dirty, how petty!”

  “Really?” he asked. “Didn’t he come to collect his bill at Dragonboat Festival?”

  “His apprentice came,” said Amah Yu.

  This Amah Yu had been with them for three years. She folded up

  some underpants and put them on the edge of the bed, with a light pat.

  She didn’t look at him, but the smile on her gentle old face was meant to be comforting. Zhenbao was filled with anger.

  That afternoon he took a woman out for a good time, and purposely

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