My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (66 page)

It was not yet dark, but the neon lights were shining; in the daylight they looked even more artificial, like costume jewelry. They passed a shop with lamps for sale, innumerable lamps under the neon glow, the whole place blazing with light. Behind the tin grill of a snack shop, a waitress leaned forward to pick up a piece of pastry; her rouge-red cheeks looked good enough to eat. Did old people also see it like that? Walking next to the old woman, Zhenbao couldn’t help feeling the brevity of youth. A row of shiny round-head spikes, their heads indented on four sides, marked off a pedestrian crosswalk; beside them the asphalt road looked as dark and soft as rubber. Zhenbao swayed along, letting his body go. He couldn’t tell whether it was his own gait that was rubbery or the road underfoot.

Mrs. Ashe praised the fabric of Jiaorui’s dress. Then she said, “I saw a piece like that, last time I was at the Huilou fine goods shop. Dolly turned it down because she thought it was too dark. I still wanted to buy it, but then I thought, well, I don’t often have an occasion for wearing such clothes . . .” She didn’t seem to feel that what she said was sad, but the others all fell silent, unable to respond. “So Mr. Ashe must be very busy?” Zhenbao finally asked.

“Oh, yes. Otherwise, we’d go home for a visit this summer. But he really can’t get away!”

“Some Sunday when I have the car, I’ll come and fetch you all and take you to Jiangwan to have some Chinese snacks made by my mother.”

“That would be wonderful! My husband simply dotes on Chinese things!”

She sounded just like a rich foreign visitor; no one would have guessed that her husband was half Chinese.

After saying good-bye to Mrs. Ashe and her daughter, Zhenbao remarked to Jiaorui, as if in explanation, “That Mrs. Ashe is a really good person.”

Jiaorui looked at him and smiled. “I think you are a really good person.”

“Just how am I so very good?” Suddenly his face was right in hers.

“I’ll tell you—don’t get angry. When a woman sees a man who’s good like you, she wants to fix him up with someone else. She doesn’t even think of keeping him for herself.”

“So you don’t like good men?”

“When a woman likes a good man it’s because she thinks she can trap him.”

“Oh-ho! So you’re planning to trap me, is that it?”

Jiaorui paused. She gave him a sideways glance and started to smile but she stopped. “This time, it’s the bad girl who’s been trapped!”

That sideways glance, those soft words—they were intolerable to him at the moment. Later that evening, stretched out in Jiaorui’s bed, he thought about the meeting with Mrs. Ashe on the street, about his studies in Edinburgh, when his family had sent him money and packages, and about how it was now time to repay his mother. He wanted to get ahead, move up in the world, and the first step was to rise in his profession. After he’d made it to a suitably high position, he’d contribute something to society—for instance, he could set up an industrial-science school for poor boys, or a model textile factory in his hometown, Jiangwan. Vague as it all was, even now he had a fuzzy intimation of the warm welcome awaiting him—not just from his own mother but from a whole world of mothers, tearful, and with eyes only for him.

Jiaorui was fast asleep, curled up close to him, the sound of her breathing loud in his ear. Suddenly she seemed a thing apart, and somehow alien. He sat up on the edge of the bed and groped around in the dark until he found a cigarette and lit it. He didn’t think Jiaorui had noticed, but in fact she was awake. After a long while she reached out, feeling for his hand. “Don’t worry,” she said softly, “I’ll be good.” She laid his hand on her shoulder.

Her words made him weep, but the tears too were a thing apart, and somehow alien.

Zhenbao didn’t answer, letting his hands roam over familiar places. Soon the sun would rise. The city was full of the muffled noise of crowing cocks.

The next day, they spoke again of her husband’s return. “Anyway, he’ll be back sometime in the next few days,” Jiaorui said with great certainty.

Zhenbao asked her how she knew, and only then did she tell him that she’d sent Shihong a letter by airmail telling him everything and asking for her freedom. Zhenbao gasped, the sound coming from deep within. He stood up and ran out onto the street. When he looked back at the towering apartment building, with its tall, flowing red-and-gray lines, it looked like a roaring train—incredibly huge and barreling straight down upon him, blocking out sun and moon. The situation was beyond repair. He’d thought that he had it all under control and that he could stop whenever he wanted, but now things had rushed forward on their own, there was no use in even arguing. The worst thing was that he didn’t even want to argue—not when he was with her. It was so clear, then, that they loved each other and should go on loving each other. It was only when she wasn’t there that he could think up all sorts of reasons against it. Right now, for instance, it struck him as all too likely that he’d been played for a fool in a deeper game with her true love, Timmy Sun. She’d pulled the wool over Zhenbao’s eyes by saying that it was because of him that she wanted a divorce, and now if there was a scandal,
his
future would be ruined.

He walked a long way without caring where. At a little restaurant, he had a few drinks and a bite to eat. When he came out, his stomach hurt. He got into a rickshaw, thinking he would visit Dubao in his dormitory, but in the rickshaw his stomach felt worse still. He lost control of himself—the tiniest tremor of pain was more than he could bear—and he panicked. Imagining he had cholera, he told the rickshaw driver to take him to the nearest hospital. Once he’d been admitted, he informed his mother; she rushed to the hospital right away. The next day she came bearing lotus-root powder and grape juice that she’d bought for him. Jiaorui showed up as well. His mother suspected that something was going on between them, and she made sure to scold him in front of Jiaorui.

“Getting sick to your stomach, that’s nothing in itself, but I tossed and turned all night, worrying about you—a grown man and you still don’t know how to take care of yourself ! How on earth am I supposed to look after you all the time? And if I just let you do as you please, I’ll be constantly worrying. But if you had a wife, I wouldn’t have to. Mrs. Wang, please tell him—he’ll listen to what his friends say, even if he won’t listen to me. Oh, dear! Here I’ve been waiting so long till you’d finished your schooling and begun your career. Now that you’re finally getting somewhere, don’t think you can just let go, let everything fall apart! You have to earn the respect you receive. Mrs. Wang, please, you tell him for me.”

Jiaorui pretended not to understand Chinese; she just stood there smiling. Zhenbao’s thoughts were in fact very similar to his mother’s, but when he heard her, he felt that the way she put things was somehow humiliating. He was embarrassed, and found an excuse to send her away.

That left him with Jiaorui. She walked over to the bed and leaned over the white metal railing, her whole body a painful question mark. Zhenbao rolled away impatiently; he couldn’t explain and he couldn’t escape his mother’s logic. Jiaorui closed the curtain, and the sunlight on his pillow turned to cool shadow. She didn’t leave, but stayed to nurse him, bringing tea, water, the bedpan. The enamel basin was icecold against his skin; her hands were just as cold. When he happened to glance her way, she seized the chance to speak: “Don’t be afraid . . .” He hated her saying that he was afraid; his expression changed, and she stopped. More time passed. “I have really changed . . .” she said. Again he shifted uncomfortably, to keep her from speaking. “I won’t bring you any trouble, I promise . . .” And then, “You can’t leave me, Zhenbao . . .” Her broken sentences hung in midair like the pendulums of several clocks, each ticking along at a different speed, each following its own logic and reaching its own conclusions, each rising up at a different moment, each hammering its bell at a different time . . . to Zhenbao it seemed that the room was filled with Jiaorui’s voice, even though she had long since fallen silent.

Evening came, and with the lamps still unlit she threw herself on him and wept. Even in her humiliation she had strength. Through the blanket and the sheet he could feel the firmness of her arms. But he didn’t want her strength; he already had his own.

She threw herself across his waist and legs and she wailed. Her hair, a mess of soft, loose curls, exuded heat like a brazier. She was like a child who’s been wronged, who cries so much that she can’t stop, doesn’t know how to, hoarsely crying on and on, having forgotten why she started to cry in the first place. For Zhenbao it was the same. “No, no, no . . . Don’t go on like this, it won’t do . . .” The words required an enormous struggle; he was fighting hard to subdue the surging waves of longing. He spent all his strength in saying “No, no, no” even though he’d forgotten what it was he meant to refuse.

But finally he found something suitable to say. With great effort, he raised his knees, making her get up. “Jiaorui,” he said, “if you love me, then you have to consider my situation. I can’t cause my mother pain. Her way of thinking is different from ours, but we have to think about her, since she has only me to depend on. The world would never forgive me. And Shihong is, after all, my friend. Our love can only be love between friends. What happened before is my mistake, and I’m very sorry. But now you’ve written and told him without letting me know—that’s your mistake. Jiaorui, what do you say? When he comes, tell him you were only fooling, that you just wanted him to come back early. He’ll believe you—if he wants to.”

Jiaorui lifted a red, swollen face and stared. In a flash, she stood straight up, apparently astonished to find herself in such a state. She took a small mirror out of her purse, glanced into it while tilting her head this way and that, tossed her hair back loosely, wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, blew her nose, and, without looking at him once, walked out.

Zhenbao didn’t sleep well that night, and with dawn came new awareness; it seemed as if someone had come during the night and fallen across him, weeping. At first he thought it was a dream, but then he realized that it was Jiaorui: probably she’d been there for a long time now crying. The warmth of the woman’s body lay over him like an eiderdown quilt on satin sheets. He luxuriated in the moment, breaking out in a gentle sweat.

When he was fully awake, Jiaorui left without a word. He didn’t say anything either. Later he heard that she and Wang Shihong had decided to divorce, but it all seemed very remote. His mother cried in front of him a few times, urging him to marry, and he put it off for a while, then finally agreed. His mother arranged the introductions. “She’s the one then,” he said to himself, when he met Miss Meng Yanli.

They met first in someone’s living room. Yanli was standing by a glass door wearing a silk shift with ruddy orange stripes on a gray background. Zhenbao’s immediate impression, however, was of a vague, enveloping whiteness. Yanli was tall and slender, like a single straight line; the only hint of a twist or turn came at the tips of her girlish breasts and the jutting bones of her hips. When a breeze stirred, and her dress swept out behind her, it made her look thin and frail. Her face was soft and very pretty, and yet the main effect was of whiteness. Yanli’s father had died, and her family’s fortunes had gone into decline, but at one time they had been a wealthy merchant family, so the two of them had similar family backgrounds. The young lady was twenty-two years old and would soon be graduating from college. Her college wasn’t a very good one, just the best she could get into, but Yanli was a good student in a mediocre place; she studied hard and didn’t associate much with her classmates. Her whiteness, like a portable hospital screen, separated her from the bad things in her environment. It also separated her from the things in her books. For ten years now Yanli had gone to school, diligently looking up new words, memorizing charts, copying from the blackboard, but between her and everything else there always seemed to be a white membrane. In middle school, she’d received letters from some boys—the elder brothers of her classmates, for the most part. When her family found out about it, they told her not to get involved with people like that. Yanli had never written back.

Zhenbao planned to marry her in two months, after her graduation. During this time, he took her out to the movies a few times. Yanli rarely spoke or raised her head and always walked a little behind him. She knew very well that according to modern etiquette she should walk in front, let him help her put on her coat and wait on her, but she was uncomfortable exercising her new rights. She hesitated, and this made her seem even slower and more awkward. Zhenbao himself wasn’t a natural-born gentleman, but he had worked hard to learn the part: he took the matter seriously and thought Yanli quite remiss in this regard. Fortunately, a shy shrinking manner in a young girl is not too unpleasant.

The engagement was short, and secretly Yanli was very disappointed; she’d always heard that these were the best days of one’s life. Even so, she was very happy when the wedding day arrived. That morning, combing her hair while still half asleep, she lifted her arms up, looked in the mirror, and felt a strange sense of invigoration—as if she’d been crammed into a glass test tube and was now pushing her head up to pop the lid off, ready to leap from the present into future. The present was good, but the future would be better. Yanli stretched her arms out of the window of the future, and a vast wind blew through her hair.