by Amy Tan
“Expressions. That’s interesting. How about scent, the odor of his body and breath?”
“That’s not what returns to me unconsciously. With effort just now, I can remember it somewhat.”
“I remember everything, especially the sex scent, the two of us together. It’s my poet nature to remember and imagine the forbidden. Misery is the source of my poems.”
Here was my chance, at last. “Did you know your last poem caused a flurry of requests for me to perform it again in other houses?”
“Mansion told me. I’m glad. I looked through the hundreds I’ve written, trying to decide what else you might like.”
Hundreds. My career was saved.
“I chose one of my newer poems, part of a collection I call City of Two Million Lives. You should be completely frank in your opinion of it. I am always working to improve my poems.” He cleared his throat.
“The rich surge in power like a flooded river,
and wash downstream the honor of men.
On ocean waves, the foreigners land
and erode our homeland shore.
Their anthems become our funeral songs
for our forebears who drowned in their rising tide.
They make our heroes lie in their beds
then proclaim, ‘Shanghai is our bastard slave!’”
I was struck dumb. It was nothing like the beautiful poem he had read before. This was like a speech given by students with black armbands on Nanking Road. Down with imperialism! Abolish port treaties! Take back the concessions!
“It’s quite powerful,” I managed to say, “inspiring … excellent commentary on the problems our Shanghai faces.”
“You may use it anytime,” he said proudly. “Tonight even. My cousin has invited me to come. I already told him I have a new poem.”
I had to tell him the truth: “This would not be the best poem for our guests to hear. Our customers are the people your poem denounces.”
“Where’s my brain? I’ll try to find others that might be better suited. What’s your desire?”
“Perhaps one about wistful love,” I said, “like the last, the aching suspension of having what you desire. Youthfulness is also good. Our guests enjoy remembering their first love.”
The following week, Perpetual gave me a new poem, which he said was about wistful love.
Through the window of my studio,
I see the peonies, still unfurled.
I see the path, the bridge uncrossed.
How I long to hear her footsteps
And hold her tiny feet once more!
How I long to embrace her
and watch her robe unfurl!
But alas, my breath steams the window
and clouds all memory but of that day
she crossed the bridge to the underworld.
At least it had nothing to do with a depraved society. Magic Gourd suggested I take out the words to the underworld, so that it would sound like the lady in the poem might be late, rather than dead. Against my better judgment, I performed the poem that night as it was written, and a pall fell over the room. Only one man was enthusiastic. He had just lost his favorite concubine to suicide.
Perpetual was encouraged by my false report that it was well received. He brought me another, even more wistful than the last.
The leaves once fluttered, as did my heart.
The nude branches are now burdened with snow.
And the silkworm weavers are gone,
But her silk robe remains beside her empty bath.
Under cold moonlight, no longer golden,
But white as her corpse on her new slab bed.
I was aghast. The corpse of his wife had returned. I summoned up effusive praise, noting how beautifully the still branches contrasted with fluttering leaves, how wrenchingly he had placed the white image of silkworms next to the cold one of snow and the final one of a corpse.
Magic Gourd and I debated whether I should perform the poem. We finally agreed it was so bad it would inspire only laughter and damage my career. I would lie once again and say it was a great success.
Magic Gourd was disappointed, but not discouraged. “If he has hundreds, as he says he has, perhaps he can give them all to you so you can choose the best. Poets are blind to what is good or bad in their poems. You’ve already known him for over a month. You should have been able to pull out a few good poems by now. Yearning love, wistful love, love fulfilled, anything but tragic love. I think the best way to do that is to take him to bed. Give him some fresh inspiration to replace the tiresome one of his wife.”
“I FEAR MY mind is withering,” I said to Perpetual a few days later when he returned to Shanghai from what I assumed was a business trip. “Would you be willing to give me lessons in calligraphy? Perhaps I could practice by copying all your poems. That would provide both discipline and inspiration.”
As I had expected, he was flattered and instantly agreed to help. I had already bought the brushes, ink, and a thick stack of rice paper. He took his role as teacher quite seriously. He told me I had to prepare my mind, prepare the ink, and prepare to create each character by seeing the flow of the brushstrokes required. I prepared to seduce him.
“You can’t write the character as if it were broken pieces glued together,” he said after my first effort. “It’s done with a rhythm and a stillness. No shaky hand, no stiffness either.” He showed me how to hold the brush perpendicular to the paper, and I deliberately held it at a slant. He put his warm hand around mine and guided me through the strokes. I deliberately made my arm stiff and jerky so that he had to stand behind me to guide my movements. I swished my hips in rhythm to his guidance and brushed against his thigh. Most men would have stiffened and immediately taken the subtle invitation to finish the lesson in bed. Perpetual, the faithful widower, moved away.
The poem I copied was the turgid diatribe from the collection he called City of Two Million Lives. Shanghai is our bastard slave! Perpetual had said true love came from sharing higher ideas, and this poem contained a heavy assortment of them. I had to show an interest in them if I were to compete with a dead wife who had already inspired five years of chastity. “People should want to live by higher ideas—altruism, self-sacrifice, honor, and integrity. They shouldn’t give in and simply say, ‘Oh well, that’s impossible, so I’ll just go along and be greedy like everyone else.’”
“But men must be pragmatic. Ideas do not feed mouths or create progress.”
This fueled him to explain what he meant. I stopped listening after ten minutes and he went on for an hour. My plans to seduce him were a failure. He was excited, but not in the manner I had planned. I suggested we stop and resume our lessons again the next day.
“This has been fortifying to me. It’s good to talk aloud about these ideas. My wife and I used to do this all the time.”
I later told Magic Gourd that any inspiration I might have over his poems could not compete with the combined forces of his high ideas and his dead wife. It was useless—and costly, given how much he enjoyed snacks with tea. When Perpetual next called on me, I told him a new suitor wished to visit me in the afternoon. I would let him know when we could resume our calligraphy lessons again. He could not hide his disappointment.
“You’ve been much too kind to have spent so much time with me,” he said in a formal manner.
The afternoons went by without visitors. I read a novel, then another. I sent a manservant out to buy newspapers, one in Chinese, one in English. While I had often tired of Perpetual’s political talk, I now found myself reading the news from his point of view, the one that despised progress: more ships, more buildings, more ribbon cutting, more handshakes between two tycoons about to make themselves even richer. I thought of my mother telling each customer: “You’re just the one I hoped to see,” which served as a prelude to fostering the merger of power. As I read the news I asked myself whose view was better—Mother’s or Perpetual’s? Which was self-serving? Which one destructive to t
hose left behind?
When Perpetual returned two weeks later, I was genuinely pleased to see him. I had been lonely. He hurriedly said he knew that I was busy and only wanted to tell me that I had inspired him to write new poems, more like the first one he had shown me the night we met.
“Poems rise from the force of emotions,” he said. “Mine arose from our separation. I found that I missed your company, and then I yearned for it, and after a while, I ached for it, and that’s when poems of wistfulness poured out, unstoppable. For that reason, I’m grateful that I have been away from you. But I must also confess something that may shock you. I have been dishonest. I told you that grief for my wife blocked all desire for other women. Shortly after I met you, I no longer imagined that the corpse of my wife was the illusion before me. It was you. So it was both my longing for you and shameful dishonesty that created the most powerful poems I have written in many years. They are still quite poor, I’m sure, but, if you like, I offer them as gratitude for poetic inspiration and for stirring feelings of love I thought I would never again experience. Be assured, I don’t expect anything from you in return. I will remain your admirer, since I’m too poor to transform myself into anyone else. The pain of unreciprocated love will lead to even more powerful poems over the years.”
Of all the bashful men I have had, he certainly had the oddest way of telling me he wanted to bed me. Imagine it: I was more desired than the corpse of his wife! Nonetheless, I was eager to see the poems I had inspired. “If I gave you what you yearn for,” I said, “would you lose your inspiration?”
His face contorted into the agony of sexual desire. “The poems would be different, yet no less powerful. They might be even stronger, given the strength of my love.”
I was quiet as I thought about this prospect: If I allowed him into my bed, I would have conversation that would fill otherwise lonely afternoons. I would receive a flood of poems to choose from. Those were reasons enough, yet there was another. I would also fulfill my own longing for love—and it was not for him. I wanted to feel that I was loved once again, and by someone who ached to have me.
“I’d like to see the wistful poems you wrote,” I said, “as well as the ones that will be different.”
I lay on the bed and let the new poems begin.
HIS POEMS ABOUT his yearning for me were not bad, but they were still not good enough to perform. At least they were not about politics. He visited me in the afternoons three or four times a week. After a month had gone by and no worthwhile poems had come as a result, Magic Gourd said Perpetual might be more of a one-rocket pop-and-fizzle kind of poet. She regretted telling me I should seduce him. “Look at all the time you’ve wasted—and he did not even pay for all the tea and snacks, let alone those afternoons he happily wallowed in your bed.”
Naturally, I was disappointed with my inability to inspire better poems from him. It was a matter of pride. But I did not feel those intimate afternoons had been a waste of time. For one thing, my calligraphy was much improved. I had what he called “a lightning blur literary style.” I had also enjoyed being treated as an equal during our debates over subjects I knew little about: antifeudalism, social realism, the rural worker class, and the like. The boring subjects had become more lively now that I actively argued. I also felt a sense of accomplishment in having conquered his five years of chastity and laid to rest his wife’s corpse. As every courtesan knows, marriage as the First Wife would be the best ending for a career. Marriage to Perpetual, however, would mean living somewhere in An-hwei Province, and I could not draw from him any information that would indicate whether his family home was fifty miles away from Shanghai or a hundred and fifty. He still remained secretive about his finances. He claimed to be poor, but Mansion said he had businesses elsewhere. Obviously, it did not involve foreign trade, but at least he had means for making money. And it goes without saying that any family with ten generations of successful scholars would have accumulated some degree of wealth over the years.
If I had deeply and wildly loved him, any distance from Shanghai would not have mattered. But I did not love him. Instead, I had a feeling for him that was like love. These lovelike feelings were far from the light-headed, cross-eyed, stormy-hearted ones I’d had for Loyalty. They were not at all like what Edward and I had shared. This kind of love was more one of growing contentment that would come from being adored for the rest of my life. It would not matter that sex with Perpetual was not that exciting. He was inexperienced, I reasoned, having made love to only one woman. I could teach him without him even knowing it. Then again, I would not mind having nights of less demanding sex. After years of work, retirement had its pleasures, too, as did the aphrodisiac words Ten Generations of Successful Scholars, which conjured in my mind the thrusting power of ten generations of important and respected men.
PERPETUAL AND I were engaged in another of our debates of higher ideas when I heard our gatekeeper shout: “The bastards shot him!” We ran to the front courtyard where almost everyone had gathered.
“Is he dead?” Vermillion asked.
“No one knows for sure,” a manservant said.
A distant rumble of voices grew louder. Magic Gourd told us that people were angry to the point of crazy because the British police at Louza Station had fired into a crowd of student demonstrators who had surrounded the station, demanding the release of their leader who had organized the antiforeign protest. None of us knew how many were wounded or dead, only that our manservant Little Ox had gone out on an errand and had not returned well beyond the time when he said he would. Five minutes before, a manservant from the house across the street told Old Pine that Little Ox was lying in the road. He did not know if he was dead. Old Pine was Little Ox’s uncle who had raised him since infancy. The old man was moaning between words: “He must have detoured to Nanking Road to see how big the demonstration had become. Why else would he have gone? The bastards!”
We opened the gate and looked out. A stream of chanting people was rushing by. The noise was getting louder by the second.
“We have to find him!” Old Pine said, and he slipped into the running masses.
“I’ll go with him,” Perpetual said. He looked at me, and I knew he was asking me to join him. This was a moment that represented all that we had talked about: justice, fairness, unity in making change. I paused for perhaps three seconds, and then I took his hand.
“Don’t go!” Magic Gourd shouted. “Stupid girl. You want to be lying next to Little Ox?”
Perpetual and I reached an area where it was so crowded no one was moving. We were caught in a squeeze box of anger from both sides. Perpetual yelled, “Let us through! My brother was shot!” We pushed in.
I was the first to see Little Ox lying facedown on the road. I recognized him by the crescent scar on the back of his head. We saw Old Pine coming toward him and he fell to his knees and turned his nephew’s head to see his face, then wailed. Epithets and a unified groan of sorrow rose. Just then the ground shook with an explosion, and in an instant, I was swept into a stampede of rioters. I felt a hand on my back. Magic Gourd shouted, “Don’t fall! Don’t fall!” I could not turn around for fear that I would do exactly what she warned me not to do, and then I would be trampled. So I let myself be carried in that millipede of legs. Around me were students with armbands, bare-chested laborers, servants in white jackets, rickshaw men and streetwalkers. I might die with these strangers and felt the numbness of acceptance and an odd dismay that I would be found dead wearing a dress I had never liked. It occurred to me only then that Perpetual was nowhere to be seen.
Along the sidewalks, protestors were hurling rocks at shop windows with Japanese characters and stepping inside to help themselves to the loot. “Out with the Japanese.” “Down with the British.” “Kick out the Yankees.”
As I approached the House of Vermillion, I was relieved to see Old Pine standing near our gate. He was looking upward at a burning effigy with a sign that said it was the police commissioner.
“They’ve taught that bastard the last lesson he’ll ever learn.”
His eyesight had been worsening over the years. From three meters’ distance, he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between a white-turbaned Sikh and a white-haired missionary. He was crestfallen when I told him that the commissioner was not burnt to a crisp and would live to learn a few more lessons. We pounded on the gate, and Vermillion’s frightened voice asked who we were before sliding the bolt. We rushed into the large reception hall. My flower sisters were clustered in a corner. I was about to tell them the sad news about Little Ox when a rock sailed through a window and everyone ran to the back of the house. We heard jeering. Old Pine said that people thought our house was where the British diplomat lived. They were going to break down the gate. Two days ago, the diplomat had thrashed a pancake seller with his cane for refusing to make way, and an outraged crowd had descended on him in reprisal and broken his legs. When word went out that the pancake seller had died, the furor had mounted to the pitch of madness. And now this!—a rumor that the damned diplomat lived in our house.
The girls ran to their rooms to gather their jewelry from hiding places, in case they had to flee. Where would they go? What would happen if they were caught with those hard-earned baubles? I was glad that mine were in a shallow false bottom I had made under the bed. Only Magic Gourd knew where the cases were and which panels had to slide open first. It was only then that I realized I had not seen Magic Gourd. I had assumed she had returned to the house.
“Where’s Magic Gourd?” I cried aloud as I ran through the room. “Did she return?” I went to Old Pine. “Did you see her?”
He shook his head. Of course he had not seen her. He was nearly blind! “Open the gate! I have to find her.” He refused. It was too dangerous, he said.
“Get away from here!” I heard Magic Gourd say on the other side of the gate. “Are you so blind and stupid that you cannot see this sign? Read it. House of Vermillion. Are you all from the countryside and can’t read? You, over there, you look like a student. Do you know what this place is, or are you still drinking mother’s milk? This is a first-class courtesan house. Where does it say House of British Diplomat? Show me!” We heard pounding on the gate. “Old Pine, you can let me in now.” When it swung open, only a few sheepish young men were standing outside. They craned their necks to see inside.