“A fern will not protect the living from someone such as you. And mirrors?” She snorted at their relative insignificance. “They can hurt you if you get too close, but they won’t destroy you.” She stood and kissed me.
“You won’t be able to come back until you’ve settled things in the earthly realm. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Rely on the lessons you learned when you were alive.” She began to drift away from me. “Use common sense and be wary. I’ll watch out for you from here and protect you as best I can.”
And then she was gone.
I looked down at the Wu household. Madame Wu was walking to her inner chamber, where I was sure she would retrieve the confidential book to give to her future daughter-in-law.
I took one last look around the terrace, and then I lifted myself up and over the balustrade and dropped down into the main courtyard of the Wu compound. I went straight to Ren’s room. I spotted him by the window, ( 1 4 5 )
staring at a stand of bamboo as it swayed in the breeze. I was sure he would turn to me, but he didn’t. I swirled around him so that I floated just before the bamboo. The light played on his high cheekbones. The ends of his black hair hung over his collar. His hands rested on the windowsill. His fingers were long and tapered, perfect for holding a calligraphy brush.
His eyes—as black and limpid as the waters of our West Lake—stared out the window with an expression I couldn’t read. I was right before him, but he didn’t see me; he didn’t even sense me.
A band began to play. This meant Ren would soon meet his bride. If I was going to stop this, I had to try someone else. I went quickly to the bridal chamber. The girl sat on her wedding chair, the mirror held securely in her lap. Even alone, she hadn’t pushed aside her veil. She was dutiful and obedient, this one. She was also strong. I don’t know how to explain it, but in her absolute stillness I felt her fighting against me—me personally—as though she knew I’d be here.
I hurried to Madame Wu’s bedchamber. She was on her knees before an altar. She lit incense, prayed wordlessly to herself, and then put her forehead to the ground. Her actions didn’t frighten me or drive me away.
Instead, I was filled with resolve and a kind of peace I hadn’t felt in years.
Madame Wu rose and crossed to a cabinet. She slid open a drawer. Inside, two books nestled in silk: to the right, her confidential book on marriage; to the left, Volume One of The Peony Pavilion. Her hands reached down and touched the confidential book.
“No!” I screamed. If I couldn’t stop the wedding, at least Ren and his wife’s first night together would be miserable.
Madame Wu’s hands drew back as though the book were in flames.
She tentatively reached down again.
I whispered this time: “No, no, no.”
It was all so sudden—that I was here, that the marriage would happen in minutes—that I acted without thinking about the consequences.
“Take the other one,” I whispered impulsively. “Take it. Take it!”
Madame Wu stepped away from the open drawer and looked around the room.
“Take it! Take it!”
Seeing nothing, she adjusted a pin in her hair and then, in the most indifferent way possible, picked up my book as though it were the one she’d come for and carried it out through the courtyards to the bridal chamber.
“Daughter,” she said to the seated girl, “this helped me on my wedding night. I’m sure it will help you too.”
( 1 4 6 )
“Thank you, Mother,” the bride said.
Something about the girl’s voice chilled me, but I shrugged it off, believing I was finding my powers and that my revenge would come soon.
Madame Wu backed out of the room. The girl stared at the cover of the book where I’d painted my favorite scene from The Peony Pavilion. It was The Interrupted Dream, where Du Liniang meets the scholar and they become lovers. This scene had to be a common one used to decorate women’s confidential books, for the girl didn’t seem distressed or surprised by the subject.
Now that The Peony Pavilion was in her hands, I realized I’d acted rashly when I told Madame Wu to take it. I didn’t want this girl to read my private thoughts, but then a plan slowly began to form in my mind. Maybe I could use my written words to scare this bride away from her marriage. As I’d done with Madame Wu, I began whispering.
“Open it and see who’s here with you. Open it and run away. Open it and admit you can never do what you need to do to be a wife.”
But she wouldn’t open the book. I raised my voice and repeated my orders, but she sat as still as a vase on a nightstand. Even if I’d done nothing, she hadn’t planned on opening the confidential wedding book. Putting my destructive desires aside, what kind of wife did she think she’d be if she didn’t read the instructions for her wedding night?
I perched on a carved chair across the room from the girl. She didn’t move, sigh, cry, or pray. She didn’t push aside her veil to look around the room. With her sitting so quietly, I could see that she’d obviously followed all the rituals for a girl of good breeding and great wealth. Her tunic was of bright red silk, and the embroidery on it was so exquisite that I was sure she’d done none of it herself.
“Open the book,” I tried again. “Open it and run away.”
When nothing happened, I got up, crossed the room, and knelt before her. Our faces were just inches apart, separated only by her opaque red veil. “If you stay, you will not be happy.”
A tiny tremor rippled through her body.
“Go now,” I whispered.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, but other than this she did not move. I went back to my chair. I was as ineffectual with this girl as I’d been with Ren.
I heard the band outside the door. Someone came into the room. The bride took the book from her lap, set it on the table, and left to meet her future husband.
( 1 4 7 )
.
.
.
duri ng th e we dd i ng ceremony and the celebrations that followed, I tried to intervene in many ways. Always I was unsuccessful. I’d been so sure that Ren and I were meant to be together. How could fate be so cruel and so wrong?
After the banquet, Ren and his wife were escorted back to the bridal chamber. Red candles nearly a meter long burned, filling the room with a golden glow. If they burned all night, that would be seen as an auspicious sign. The trickling down of the wax was like the shedding of a bride’s tears on her first night alone with her husband. If one of the candles went out—
even by accident—it would be an omen of a premature death for one or both parties. The band and the party were raucous and loud. Each crash of the cymbals terrified me. Each beat of the drum pounded fear into me.
Bands played noisily at weddings and funerals to scare away bad spirits, but I wasn’t a bad spirit. I was a heartbroken girl, deprived of my destiny.
I stayed at Ren’s side until the firecrackers were lit. The rattling pops tossed me from side to side. It was more than I could bear and I floated up and away from him.
From a safe distance, I saw my poet raise his hands to his wife’s headdress and veil, take out the pins that held them in place, and lift the covering from her head.
Tan Ze!
I was doubly incensed. On the first night of the opera all those years ago, she’d said she wanted her father to make inquiries about Ren. Now she’d gotten what she wanted. How I would make her suffer! My spirit would haunt her. I’d fill her worldly days with misery. I’d felt much pain and wretchedness these past years, but seeing Ze—her perfect white breasts now bared—filled me with excruciating agony and raging despair.
How could Ren’s mother have chosen Tan Ze? I didn’t know why she’d done it, but the result was that out of all the women in Hangzhou, my home country of China, and the world, she’d arranged for her son to marry the one person who would hurt me the most. Was this why Ze had been so still when she was waiting in the bridal chamber? Had she put up hard defenses around herself, knowing I’d be there? The Book of Female Filial Piety calls jealousy the sickest of all the ancestral emotions, and I was sinking in it.