The director wisely sidestepped Mr. Gummer’s question and called for a scene without his two male leads. The actresses playing Othello’s wife, Desdemona, and Iago’s wife, Emilia, were sent for.
Fong looked around the theatre. Its mustiness was familiar. Comforting. He’d spent many, many joyous hours here watching his brilliant wife rehearse and perform. Since her death, he’d haunted the theatre – finding it a good place to think. There was hub-bub and chaotic energy everywhere, but since none of it concerned him directly he found a profound stillness amidst the whirlwind. A deep peace to which he often retreated. Lily didn’t know. She wouldn’t have approved. He didn’t want to have to explain.
He fingered his copy of Othello. Fu Tsong had played Desdemona. She had used the very script that sat in his lap with its Mandarin on the left and its English translation on the facing page. On some pages she had written notes about the text – insights etched in her remarkably delicate hand. He treasured them as access points to her. To her privacy.
She’d loved Shakespeare’s plays and had made Fong read and discuss them with her as she developed her characters. It was during one of these discussions that she’d told him of the Iago conundrum. Like so many memorable conversations with Fu Tsong it’d taken place mid-coital. He was on his back, she straddling his legs.
“Inside hug,” she’d announced as she tightened her muscles around his member – and he’d gasped. Then he opened his eyes and saw her staring down at him.
“What?” he’d protested.
“You like it when I take control,” she said sliding her right foot forward so she could push off and rise up and down his length. “You like that.”
“So?” he’d croaked.
“So why do you resist me?” she’d asked and quickly rose and fell twice. “Don’t you want to be swept away, to be bowled over, to fall hopelessly in love?”
He nodded slowly.
“Then why do you resist? Give over!”
Fong slipped a foot over her bent knee and dragged himself to a sitting position. They were equal now. He rose when she did and fell as she fell.
She smiled.
“What?” he demanded again.
“In your head this feels better – less being swept away – but Fong, in your heart this feels like you’ve stopped a mighty river. And of course in your thing you feel nothing.” Then she’d smiled broadly and announced, “It’s the Iago Conundrum of Sex.”
“What?” he’d asked yet again.
“You have to work on your vocabulary husband – how many ‘what’s’ is that in one sex session?” Then she’d explained the conundrum. At the end she said, “However, in the Iago Conundrum of Sex there’s a way out.”
“How? I’m not backing down, Fu Tsong,” he announced through gritted teeth as he followed each of her rises and falls so that no one led and no one followed. Nor did anyone get much pleasure.
“How?”
Fu Tsong said, “Like this.” She tightened her muscles again and announced, “Inside hug.” He gasped and stopped his resistance. “A little something I’m sure Desdemona would know all about. Now Fong, let go. Have the faith that I will bring you safely home. Have a little faith, husband.”
As the image of Fu Tsong’s memorable inside hug faded, the actress playing Desdemona in this production stepped onstage. Fong’s jaw almost hit his chest.
Fong had never seen the famous Chinese film actress Tuan Li in the flesh. Although lovely in film, she was luminous in person.
At the far side of the theatre, Robert Cowens watched Tuan Li steal every eye. He had finally completed a particularly complicated bit of “antiquing” and was anxious to take his mind off what he had just learned about Shanghai in the early forties. And what better way to forget than to be with Tuan Li? For an instant he thought that despite her beauty she wasn’t worth all the trouble she’d caused him. Then he dismissed the thought as bullshit. Robert was many things – but a bullshitter was not one of them.
Tuan Li was well aware of her effect on both the men and women in the room. She was also deeply honoured to play the part of Desdemona in the same theatre where the great Fu Tsong had made the role famous. She allowed her eyes to scan the seats. Could the small, delicate-boned man at the back be Fu Tsong’s husband? It was rumoured that he was here on occasion.
Then her eye caught Robert and she smiled. Not at him – but definitely for him.
CHAPTER SIX
The next morning, Lily’s elderly mother picked up Xiao Ming as she usually did just before 7 a.m. “Where to today, Mom?”
“The Children’s Palace.”
Lily had walked past the former mansion almost every day of her married life on her way to work.She’d avoided going into it because it was a place for “artistically inclined children.” No doubt Fong’s first wife, Fu Tsong the actress, would have spent time as a child in such a place.
“I like to watch.”
“Watch what, Mom?”
“Foreigners. They love to see our children and they also come to see the house, which I think was built by some famous foreigner.”
“Could be.” Lily bent down, kissed Xiao Ming, then touched her mother’s fingers lightly. Mother and daughter were much closer now that Lily had a baby.
Before 8 a.m. Lily walked quickly past the long line of women waiting for therapeutic abortions in the Hua Shan Hospital. Although Lily had been sexually active since she was eighteen, she’d always been very careful about birth control and never had to avail herself of China’s free answer to overpopulation. And now that she and Fong had their child she had re-instituted her strict birth control regimen of spermicide in addition to the IUD she’d had implanted shortly after Xiao Ming’s birth.
But these sad-eyed women at the clinic, many from the countryside, faced the stern governmental consequences of having more than one child and waited stoically to be “unpregnanted.”
“At least only a few were showing,” Lily thought as she hustled by them. She ascended the long set of steps to her office that was situated directly above the Hua Shan’s six operating theatres, which performed more therapeutic abortions in half a week than were done in a month in most American hospitals.
Twenty-three minutes after Lily entered her lab, a therapeutic abortion operating theatre in the People’s Twenty-Second Hospital down by the Huangpo River burst into flames.
Seven people were instantly immolated – one doctor, three nurses, two technicians, and of course, poor Ms. Wu who was on the table. By some people’s count there were not seven human lives lost in the blast but rather eight – assuming Ms. Wu wasn’t carrying twins.
It certainly was the way that Angel Michael and his people counted.
But it wasn’t the blast that brought frantic calls to Special Investigations – it was the scrawled note found at the hospital’s reception desk moments before the blast – the note was in English. It said: THIS BLASPHEMY MUST STOP.
Fong carefully sealed the note in a plastic evidence bag. All around him sirens were screaming and people were staring bug-eyed, some through dust-encrusted faces.