They’re unusually bitter words from the usually blithe top girl. Oddly enough, though, Jinling looks genuinely happy. Her pale cheeks are peach-toned with the chill. Yuliang feels her mood lift, just looking at her, even as she feels a tart envy at such effortless loveliness. I wish I could draw her, she thinks. Just like this.
Unaware of her friend’s scrutiny, Jinling bites her lip. ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I want to tell you about something.’ This is how Jinling begins all her lessons. Listen, she’ll say. I want to show you how to make my fat feet look thinner. I want to teach you the difference between silver taels and the fake ones. I want to tell you about Actor Peng; I’ve found something he’ll pay you extra for. Yuliang sits up dutifully and listens. But what Jinling says this time is, ‘I’ve done it. I have enough to buy out.’
For a moment the words all but extinguish the world: the coolie’s slap-slapping feet, the street’s scrambling commerce, the stick-woman left behind in the dust. Yuliang blinks, but sees nothing but her friend’s oil-black eyes. You can’t leave, she thinks.
‘I can leave,’ Jinling says, as if on cue. ‘I can buy out my contract. Godmother’s accounts have me just two hundred taels away. Even if I just sell my diamond ring, it’s enough.’
They’ve reached the river; an offshore breeze brushes Yuliang’s face with a chilly kiss. She will break, she thinks, if she moves. Even slightly.
Jinling laughs at her expression. ‘Oh, stop frowning for once!’ She takes Yuliang’s chin, turns her face. ‘Come. Come with me.’
Her fingers are so cold Yuliang shivers. ‘What?’
‘I mean it,’ Jinling says. ‘Listen. I’ll explain.’
The boy runs along, his stride lending quiet percussion to the top girl’s words. They pass the temple with its monks robed in orange and saffron, then the market with its wares of clay and fish and human flesh: the lines of shuffling girls being paraded before prospective mothers-in-law and sharp-eyed middlewomen. Jinling continues talking as the market fades from view, and then they’re at the docks, where boats strain toward the Yangtze’s amber bend. Slap-slap-slap. She’ll build a Hall of her own. It will be better, more splendid than the Hall of Eternal Splendor. She’ll model it on the Shanghai house where she started, the Hall of Heavenly Gates. ‘I’ve got enough jewelry now to pay for things while I set up. And Ren Kuanti says he’ll invest. He’s bringing some of his rich friends, too, to meet with me.’ She drops her voice. ‘We’re supposed to gather at the teahouse at six.’
Yuliang pictures Ren Kuanti, a pale but dapper young man whose ‘investments’ to date have mostly comprised drinking, gambling, and vomiting in the Hall courtyard. But this doesn’t seem to bother Jinling. ‘Yuliang!’ she says. ‘You can be my top girl.’
‘What?’ Yuliang blinks.
‘My top girl, little fool! We can be together always! I’ll help buy you free too… Say something!’
‘But what about my contract? What about all my debt?’
Jinling strokes her purse, like a cat in her lap. ‘I told you. There’s plenty here. Along with Ren’s investment, we’ll have more than enough.’
Yuliang’s head reels with the implications. The rickshaw lurches around a corner that leads to a jeweler-lined street filled with windows winking with gold. The girls are thrown together for a moment, and then reluctantly pull apart. Catching her breath, Yuliang inhales her friend’s favorite scent: floral, powdery. Faintly foreign. It’s an important decision, she tells herself. I must be sure to use good sense.
Yet as the rickshaw pulls up to Jinling’s shop, senses skip ahead of good sense. Wind takes caution, blows it over the water.
Yuliang shuts her eyes, tips her head back. ‘Yes,’ she says with a laugh. ‘Take me with you.’
An hour later they part ways, Jinling to meet Ren Kuanti, Yuliang to cover for her at the Hall. ‘If the old centipede asks,’ Jinling instructs, pulling Yuliang’s orange shawl around her shoulders, ‘tell her I’ve gone to have my hair trimmed. I should be back in time for my nine o’clock call.’
Yuliang nods, gleeful at the thought of hiding something beyond tips from the spiteful manager. She will keep this secret under her pillow, like the knife the girl in the old story keeps there to ward off evil ghosts and bad fortune. She will wield the thought of it – a new home! a new role! – through the evening’s scheduled visits. And when they’re done, she’ll carry it down the hallway. She’ll creep into Jinling’s room and huddle in the top girl’s red-draped bed, and they’ll stroke and sigh away all scent and sign of those male bodies. They’ll fall asleep intertwined, whispering plans for their new life. And in the morning they will will step out and start it.
But Jinling doesn’t return – not that night, and not the next. Yuliang covers for her for as long as she can. On the third day, sick with sleeplessness and bruised by Godmother’s second beating, she finally confesses at least part of the truth: her friend went not to the hairdresser’s but to meet her future financial backer. Clinging fiercely to fading hope, she holds back the other details – the jewelry bag, the escape plans. Her own corner room at the brand-new brothel. In the end, though, neither these things nor the withholding of them matters. The detectives track Ren Kuanti to an opium den in Tongling. There, it is learned, he has been smoking and gambling away Jinling’s jewelry for nearly a week.
Two days later they find Jinling herself, bound and abandoned in the trunk of a stolen automobile. The top girl’s throat has been slit, her sex mauled and disfigured. Her clothes, including Yuliang’s shawl, are gone.
10
Yuliang is in bed. Not her real bed – Xiaochen’s loathed bed of lost virtue – but Jinling’s bed, with its red silk sheets and gilded headboard. A familiar hand is on her arm, and for a brief moment Yuliang thinks that this too is Jinling’s. Taking it in her own hands, though, she quickly sees she is wrong: the fingers aren’t the plump, soft digits of her beloved friend. These fingers are almost skeletal. Prayer beads wrap the yellowing palm. They cut into Yuliang’s skin like teeth. With a gasp, Yuliang wrenches her own fingers away and turns toward the face next to hers.
‘Mama?’
‘Don’t be afraid, little Xiu,’ her mama says. Her breath is so ragged it barely seems to carry the words. ‘I’ve made arrangements. You’ll be safe.’
Jerking upright, Yuliang stares wildly around the room. It’s still Jinling’s room – Jinling’s bed, Jinling’s armoire. Jinling’s phoenix wine cups shine dully from a small shelf on the wall. But the heavy hand on her arm and the dense figure behind her tell her that she’s awake now: this isn’t a dream clasped in yet another dream.
‘Another night-fright?’ Merchant Yi says grumpily. ‘That’s the third one this evening. Go to sleep. We’ve got the banquet tomorrow.’
Yuliang lies back down obediently, wrapping her shivering shoulders in Jinling’s quilt and her guilt in the waking nightmare of her reality: that in the end, Jinling kept her promise after all. Not by sweeping Yuliang off to a new life, but by leaving her her old one.
For all of Jinling’s fabled jewels, her funeral was spare. There were no necromancers, no monks chanting. There wasn’t even a coffin. The surviving flowers burned paper trinkets they’d pooled hidden tips to buy: a little dress, a little pair of paper lily shoes that were just a shade too wide. A few false golden ingots. There was no money for anything else; Godmother had claimed the dead girl’s belongings as ‘compensation.’
After the ceremony they all trailed home and did what’s done when a sister dies: they smoked, gambled, and gossiped. They painted their fingernails. They waited, as they must always wait, for the scandal to break. Yuliang didn’t talk to them – she didn’t talk to anyone, unless the words were beaten out of her. For the entire mourning period she sat in her room, in near silence.
The resumption of business as usual took more time than expected, in part because of the Ren family’s high social status. As the men trickled back, tabloids as far-flung as those in Suzhou followed the
court’s deliberations, accessorizing the crime with hidden details that their editors claimed to have exclusively unearthed. Some headlines announced that Jinling was a man-hating witch-whore. Others said it was nothing but her own fault – that sex-sickness had driven her young suitor mad. Only one blamed the local police, to whom Godmother paid a monthly sum to turn a blind eye to the Hall’s various infractions. ‘Outrageous,’ huffed Yi Gan when he read this to Yuliang. ‘Madame Ping may be sharp-tongued, but she’s not a murderess.’ Still, there was a small note of doubt in his voice.
Even this suspicion, however, barely cut through Yuliang’s haze of grief. She trudged through the days with mechanized efficiency, rising, dressing, eating, bedding, and embroidering merely as a means to keep from thinking. At times she almost succeeded. Most times, though, she failed, her legs and arms so heavy she couldn’t rise from her bed. She almost welcomed the beatings that inevitably followed. The leather whip felt like justice, hot and pure on her skin. She’d rise up the next morning aching but strangely purged, as though some guilt had been discharged with her blood.
Winter ended. The flowers awoke one afternoon to discover a new doorbell, installed because it was fashionable. No one could get used to the jangling ring, and the fact that it didn’t discriminate between honored guests and mere walk-ins. Call-cards resumed their rush in and out, and for some reason many of them requested Yuliang’s services. That was when Godmother took the unusual step of skipping naptime, and called Yuliang to her room.
‘You’ve done well this quarter,’ the madam announced, sliding two last beads of her abacus into place. ‘Even with your little set-in-stone face.’
Yuliang, who hadn’t slept in nearly four nights, weathered an urge to take the abacus and slam it down on the fat, smooth chignon. But when the madam beckoned her forward, she obeyed. She let the calculation-callused fingers grasp her chin.
‘You miss her,’ the manager remarked flatly.
You know I do, Yuliang thought. Just the previous night, Godmother had discovered the kitchen crate on which Yuliang had set candles and the few items of Jinling’s she’d managed to secret away: a silver hairpin; a lipstick case; the phoenix wine cups. She’d also added the sketch of Jinling she’d obsessively struggled over between clients, as though capturing her on paper might bring her back in the flesh. Jinling’s ears were too small, her neck too thin; her delicate nose had come out almost snoutlike. In fact, Yuliang fully expected Godmother to laugh.
To her surprise, though, the madam studied the sketch a moment. Then she pocketed it. ‘Put those flames out,’ she’d said as she left. ‘You know the rules.’
Now, though, she smiled coldly. ‘I know enough, at least, not to get so close to anyone that I’ll have to miss her once she’s gone.’ Turning Yuliang’s face to and fro in the light, she added reprovingly, ‘You’re as thin as a sesame stalk. Still, you’re pretty. And the men seem to associate you with her.’ Her dimpled chin sank to her chest as she pondered. At last she nodded. ‘Very well. Get the man to help you move tomorrow.’
Yuliang jerked her chin free. ‘Move? Move where?’
‘Into Jinling’s room. From now on you’ll take her clients.’
Yuliang gawked at her. ‘You mean…’
The madam sighed. ‘Yes, you little idiot. Congratulations. You’re the new top girl.’
Now gingerly prying Yi Gan’s fingers from her wrist (she can’t sleep with a man’s touch on her body), Yuliang remembers how the other flowers had muttered about it – Yuliang getting the biggest room and dress budget, the top billing at the gate and at banquets and events. Especially Mingmei, whom everyone had assumed was next in line for Jinling’s job. She’s been here barely two years! Yuliang heard her splutter to Suyin. She’s insufferable, too – won’t smoke, won’t play cards with us or join our chats. She doesn’t appreciate the honor she’s receiving!
Contrary to the gossip, though, Yuliang did appreciate her new post – although not for the reasons the others would have. The heavens themselves couldn’t have handed down a worse penance for her: the endless men, the longer hours, the requests of such casual and cultivated abasement that she sometimes wonders how Jinling rose so brightly most afternoons.
And then, of course, there is this: Jinling’s bed. The site of such delicious, forbidden memories. Yuliang still can’t lie in it without half-expecting Jinling to lie down in it too. She can’t wake in it without reaching for Jinling’s soft, warm waist – and, upon finding Yi Gan’s burly torso instead, being forced to remember. That’s her punishment: remembering everything.
11
‘Ho-ho!’ Merchant Ming shouts in triumph from across the banquet hall: he has just won a round of tiger-stick-insect. ‘Who is next? Lao Yi! Try me!’
‘Not tonight,’ Yi Gan calls back. ‘You’re invincible. I wouldn’t stand a chance.’
‘That’s what your wife says when you put your slippers by her bed,’ Merchant Ming calls back.
As the hot room resounds with manly chuckles, the guild leader leans past Yuliang with the wine pot. He’d carefully seated his guest of honor, the new customs inspector, between Yuliang and Mingmei at the evening’s start. ‘Essential thing, timing,’ he says now, pouring. ‘In drinking as in business. Don’t you agree, eminence?’
‘I know more about business than I do about drinking, I fear.’ Pan Zanhua is a handsome young man, though he sits slightly hunched, as though he’d like to pull his head into his shoulders. He eyes his host coolly, as though Yi Gan were a point on some unpleasant horizon.
‘Ah. Then clearly our lovely companions have something to teach you.’ The merchant’s voice is light. But the look he gives Yuliang is as weighted as his trading scales. Everyone knows about his agreement with the outgoing inspector: tax abatement on the one side, a well-stocked pantry on the other. It is clear to Yuliang, however, that despite his youth Inspector Pan will not be quite as accommodating: for all their efforts, neither she nor Mingmei has been able to coax so much as a smile from him. He is impeccably civil, utterly unencour-aging. He is, she’s decided, insufferable. But Merchant Yi has ordered them to give his guest ‘special attention.’ So reluctantly, she tries again.
‘Have you tried the abalone?’ she asks, picking out a plump one for him. ‘It’s a specialty here. It’s said the empress dowager had a plate sent out to her barge once. It came back as though it had been licked clean.’
Pan Zanhua looks affronted, as though she’s suggested they copulate on the table. Without a word, he turns toward the next table. Yuliang stares at his clean profile a moment. Then, affronted herself, she plops the greasy morsel gracelessly onto his plate. She knows this type. Oh, yes. He takes every smile, every female glance as a lure into scandal. But he’ll fling his ethics far from his bedside. One touch, Jinling used to say. That’s all it takes. They forget everything.
If only it were as easy for Yuliang.
Sighing, she turns back to her reluctant companion. He is, she must admit, very good-looking. A strong, square jaw. Full, almost womanly lips, though at the moment they are pressed so tightly together they’d have to be pried open for a smile. Yuliang watches him rub his cheek as the merchant leans over with the wine jug, topping his guest’s already full cup a second time. Not surprisingly, some wine slops over. ‘Aiyoo,’ the host cries, ‘I missed the mark.’
‘You did,’ Pan Zanhua agrees. Yuliang, already sopping up the spilled drink with her handkerchief, looks up at the tartness of his tone. ‘But really. It’s just wine.’
‘Ah,’ says Merchant Yi, ‘there’s where you’re wrong, if you’ll pardon my rudeness. This shaoxing is top-grade. From Sheng Huang Fu’s shop.’ He nods meaningfully. ‘Your predecessor had quite a stockpile, I believe.’
‘A man of taste,’ the inspector observes, ignoring the hint. He reaches out for the hot towel that’s been left for him, and starts as his fingers knock against Yuliang’s.
Yuliang sees him take in the little cloth square in her hand, its flo
ral border, its paired butterflies. When he looks up at her, the pools of his pupils quiver in surprise. She has the strange impression of a great deal of sadness.
‘Master Pan!’ Merchant Ming has arrived at the table. ‘How about a little wager?’
‘I’m afraid I’m no gambler either.’
‘I’ll go easy on you,’ Ming promises. ‘That is, if you will on me. What’s the levy on soaps from Shanghai these days? Ho-ho!’ Without waiting for a response he holds up his fist, chopstick rising from it like an ivory tusk. The inspector’s face stiffens in irritated resignation as his uninvited guest counts: ‘On three. One… two…’
‘Stick,’ Inspector Pan says quietly.
‘Insect!’ shouts Merchant Ming, just a hair after. ‘Ah-ha!’
‘Insect bores stick,’ pipes Mingmei from behind them, as though no one else would make the connection.
An exasperated look passes over the inspector’s face. He doesn’t want to be here any more than I do, Yuliang realizes in surprise.
That this important man, fawned over by the town’s most important names, might feel out of place seems very odd. As does the sight of a hand – her own hand – stretching out to take hold of his cup. ‘Here,’ she hears herself saying. ‘Let me.’
A small silence follows as she picks up the cup and downs the wine. It’s common for girls to drink for favored clients, but Yuliang does it only rarely. And only for her patron. As she sets the cup back down, Yi Gan sucks his teeth.
The Painter of Shanghai Page 9