He smiled. Had he found humor in my embarrassment or were his thoughts the same as mine? After a long and to me discomforting moment, he rose and came to my side. “Come. Let’s look out together.”
When we reached the balustrade, I gripped a pillar to steady myself.
“It’s a beautiful night,” he said, looking out across the glassy water.
Then he turned to me. “But you are far more beautiful.”
I felt overwhelming happiness and then a horrible wave of shame and fear.
He stared questioningly into my face. “What’s wrong?”
Tears welled in my eyes, but I forced myself to contain them. “Perhaps you see only what you want to see.”
“I see a real girl whose tears I want to kiss away.”
Twin drops overflowed and ran down my cheeks.
( 5 6 )
“How can I be a good wife now?” I gestured around me hopelessly.
“After this?”
“You’ve done nothing wrong.”
But of course I had! I was here, wasn’t I? But I didn’t want to talk about it. I stepped away, folded my hands in front of me, and said in a steady voice, “I always miss notes when I play the zither.”
“I don’t care for the zither.”
“But you won’t be my husband,” I responded. A pained look came over his face. I’d hurt him. “My stitches are too large and ungainly,” I blurted quickly.
“My mother does not sit in the women’s hall all day for needlework. If you were my wife, the two of you would do other things together.”
“My paintings are weak.”
“What do you paint?”
“Flowers—the usual.”
“You are not the usual. You shouldn’t paint the usual. If you could paint anything you wanted, what would you choose?”
No one had asked me that before. In fact, no one had ever asked me anything quite like it. If I had been thinking, if I had been at all proper, I would have answered that I would keep practicing my flowers. But I wasn’t thinking.
“I would paint this: the lake, the moon, the pavilion.”
“A landscape then.”
An actual landscape, not a landscape found hidden in cold slabs of marble like the ones in my father’s library. The idea intrigued me.
“My home across the lake is high on the hill,” he went on. “Every room has a view. If we were married, we’d be companions. We’d go on excursions—on the lake, on the river, to see the tidal bore.”
Everything he said made me happy and sad at the same time as I longed for a life I would never have.
“But you shouldn’t worry,” he continued. “I’m sure your husband isn’t perfect either. Look at me. Since the Song dynasty it has been the ambition of every young man to achieve distinction in official life, but I have not taken the imperial exams and I have no ambition to take them.”
But this was how it was supposed to be! A man today—one who was loyal to the Ming—would always choose an interior life over one of civil service in the new regime. Why had he said that? Did he think I was old-
( 5 7 )
fashioned or just plain stupid? Did he think I wished him to be in business? Making money as a merchant was vulgar and low.
“I’m a poet,” he said.
I grinned. I had intuited it the first moment I saw him through the screen. “The greatest calling of all is to have a literary life.”
“I want a marriage of companions—one of shared lives and shared poems,” he murmured. “If we were husband and wife, we would collect books, read, and drink tea together. As I told you before, I’d want you for what’s in here.”
Again he pointed to my heart, but I felt it in a place far lower in my body.
“So tell me about the opera,” he said after a long moment. “Are you sad not to see Liniang reunite with her mother? I understand that girls love that scene.”
It was true. I did love that scene. As the battles wage on between the brigand and the empire’s forces, Madame Du and Spring Fragrance seek shelter at an inn in Hangzhou. Madame Du is amazed—frightened—to see what she believes is her daughter’s ghost. But of course, by now the three parts of Liniang’s soul have been brought back together and she is a girl once again, of flesh and blood.
“Every girl hopes her mother would recognize her and love her, even if she were dead, even if she were a ghost, even if she eloped,” I said.
“Yes, it is a good qing scene,” my poet agreed. “It shows us mother love.
The other scenes tonight . . .” He jutted his chin indifferently. “Politics don’t interest me. Too much li, don’t you agree? I much prefer the scenes in the garden.”
Was he mocking me?
“Mengmei brought Liniang back to life through passion,” he went on.
“He believed her back into existence.”
His understanding of the opera was so close to my own that I was em-boldened to ask, “Would you do that for me?”
“Of course I would!”
Then he brought his face close to mine. His breath was redolent of orchids and musk. The desire we both felt warmed the air between us. I thought he might kiss me and I waited to feel his lips on mine. My body flooded with blood and emotion. I didn’t move, because I didn’t know what to do or what he expected me to do. That’s not quite true. I was not expected to be doing any of this, but when he stepped away and regarded me with his deep black eyes, I trembled with longing.
( 5 8 )
He didn’t seem much older than me, but he was a man and lived in the outside world. For all I knew, he had much experience with the teahouse women whose voices I sometimes heard floating across the lake.
To him, I must have seemed like a child, and in some ways he dealt with me that way, by retreating just far enough to give me a chance to steady myself.
“I can never decide if the opera has a happy ending or not,” he said.
His sentence startled me. Had that much time passed since I’d come here? He must have sensed my alarm, because he added, “Don’t worry.
There are several more scenes.” He picked up the peony that he’d brought with him with one hand and laid its blossom in his other. “Mengmei wins the top honors in the imperial exams.”
My mind and body were far, far away from the opera and I had to force myself to concentrate, which I suppose is what he wanted.
“But when he presents himself to Prefect Du as his new son-in-law, he’s arrested,” I said. When he smiled, I understood I was doing the exact right thing.
“The Prefect orders Mengmei’s baggage searched, and—”
“The guards find Liniang’s self-portrait,” I finished for him. “Prefect Du has Mengmei beaten and tortured, believing the scholar has defiled his daughter’s tomb.”
“Mengmei insists he brought Liniang back from the spirit world and that the two of them have married,” he said. “Outraged, Prefect Du orders Mengmei’s decapitation.”
The fragrance from the peony in his palm filled my head. I remembered all the things I wished I’d done last night. I picked up the willow sprig from the balustrade. Slowly I began to walk around him, speaking softly all the while, caressing him with my words.
“Will the story end sorrowfully?” I asked. “Everyone is brought to the imperial court to present their problems to the emperor.” I came full circle, stopped to glance up to his eyes, and then glided around him again, this time letting the willow leaves brush against his torso.
“Liniang is presented to her father,” he said gruffly, “but he can’t accept that she’s alive, not even when he’s looking at her.”
“In this way, the great Tang Xianzu illustrated how men can be limited by li. ” I kept my voice low, knowing my poet would have to work hard to hear me. “When something so miraculous happens, people can’t be ra-tional anymore.” He sighed and I smiled. “The Prefect insists that Liniang pass many tests—”