The Binding Chair (23 page)

D
RINK THE
W
ATER

D
ON’T GO OUT OF THE ROOM
. P
ROMISE ME
you’ll stay right here. I’m afraid when you go out.”

“Oh, you really are a baby.” May sat next to Arthur.

“Tell me about the horses.”

“They’re wearing cashmere sweaters and drinking port from your sister’s cut crystal.”

“That’s good. I like that. Tell me something else.”

May looked at her husband. To die of influenza, the doctor said, was a slow drowning. Arthur’s lips and cheeks were mottled, purple, and he was panting, but no worse than Eleanor, and Eleanor was pulling through.

Still, seeing his cracked lips open for breath, May suffered the familiar confusion of trying to sort out apprehension from premonition. Had all his selfless crusades, his campaigns for hygiene, for rehabilitating tubercular rickshaw men and sick horses—had they all proceeded from a shadow cast backward over his life, a shadow cast by this illness? It was the same with Rose: impossible to think of the child without remembering how she hated baths, screamed if the water came up over her legs.

“Won’t you try to sleep?” she asked Arthur.

“Talk to me. Please just talk to me. Tell me about the horses. I’ll close my eyes.”

“I’ve taught them to play mah-jongg. They’re clumsy—their hooves are useless—so they each need a boy to handle the tiles. But we spend very pleasant afternoons together. Everyone disapproves, of course. Dick wants them to learn proper trades. He thinks they should go to mechanic’s school now that the age of the automobile is phasing them out. He says they could open a garage.”

Arthur said nothing. He didn’t smile.

“Wasn’t that good?” May put her hand on Arthur’s forehead, as if to test for fever, left it there as he spoke. “Wasn’t that at all amusing?”

“Do you know?” Arthur said. “I expected that the years would help. That it wouldn’t be so sad for us after ten or fifteen years. But it doesn’t make a difference, does it?”

May was silent.

“It seems so unkind that she would vanish when everything was perfect. When the day was so lovely, and I was thinking, just a minute before, that I was so happy. Ever since that day, happiness frightens me. I catch myself thinking how much I love you, and I’m afraid. Inside, I correct myself. I say no, she’s not that lovely, she’s not perfect. She doesn’t make you perfectly happy. As if to fool the gods into letting me keep you.”

“Because you love me, I’ll be taken away?” May asked. “Surely you don’t think that’s why Rose died.”

She was lying, of course, and he knew it. How could she not think the same as he: the magpie of fate—its prey is always someone or something that beckons. That shines with light or with love.

“Yes. No. I don’t know what I mean.” He was speaking quickly; fevers did that to Arthur. With a fever he was talkative, expansive. Brilliant. His thoughts moved with such speed, his mind leapt, it jumped sideways, he could barely speak fast enough to keep up. Sometimes his childhood stutter returned; and often, as now, the tinnitus grew worse: it got louder, and he had to outtalk it.

He grasped her hand. “That trip on the boat,” he said. “It has such a strange, paradoxical quality. It was just a day that we had together, one day measured against thousands, and yet it’s as if it has broken out of time, out of the measure of time, and spread into years. But it also seems an instant, a knife blade dividing one age from another. And it’s so familiar, I’ve looked at it from every angle in my mind so often.

“Do you remember the tree? The one on the bank? I know just what we all looked like from the boughs of that tree, from the low bough versus the high one, versus the one in between. And from the vantage of a bird overhead. A bird watching us from so high and seeing the shape of the boat on the water, the way the boat sat in the water, ripples coming out from around it. Ripples of contentment. No, more than that. Exultation. The bird saw them and I see them, too, through the bird’s bright eye. There was an unnaturally green bloom of algae in the water that day—you remember, I know you do. The water was an emerald mirror around the boat. The whole of creation glistened. Everything I saw was … it sparkled with life.

“I’ve gone over every part a thousand thousand times. Each stone in the temple—even at that distance I could make out the individual stones, the lines of mortar separating them. And the worms in the riverbank. Those odd, red worms that looked like threads of blood, like veins—as if the very earth were flesh. The eels, and that animal we saw but couldn’t identify. Muskrat. Something. Every last creature.

“At night in bed beside you, in the dark as I hear you breathe, sleep, I lie awake and with every second that passes the scene takes on more intense color and life. It’s … it’s fantastic, revelatory, it sickens me. Because it’s never over. It unfolds and unfolds. The night trembles and chatters around the boat, around our bed. Inside me, the sound in my head, it’s like the gods are laughing at us. Your silhouette on the prow. The teapot beside you. You lifted the teapot—I loved it when you did that. You could do that now.”

Arthur dropped May’s hand and reached for her leg. “You could make tea, you—you could drink it from the spout. It’s so … it … it makes me want …” He squeezed her thigh.

“You think of me taking you in my mouth.” May’s voice was low.

“Yes! God. I’ve never been happier, May. I never expected to be as happy as we’ve been together, as happy and alive. Or as miserable. Like being killed.”

Tears ran from Arthur’s eyes. “I remember the sound of the turtle’s shell as the boy broke it. I know what he was thinking as he prepared dinner. And I know what the turtle thought—Yes! the dead turtle wishing for his life again, fearing the pot. I know what the water was thinking. And the mud below the boat—its secret dark observations. Its desires. I know each rice shoot. I know, I know—” He struggled up, sobbing; he held his arms out wide, empty. “May! I don’t know what happened! What? What did happen? How did she drown? Why?” His voice keened and cracked, sounding as it must have when he was thirteen.

“Arthur. Please. Please.”

“No! Don’t stop me! Don’t! You think these things, too! Don’t tell me you don’t. What do you dream about when you’re smoking? Aren’t you thinking about Rose?”

May put her hands before her mouth and shook her head. “No.” When she spoke her voice was a whisper. Arthur couldn’t hear; she had to repeat the words. “Sometimes. Not often.”

“Why? Why!”

“Because. I can’t stand to. That’s what opium is for. Not thinking.”

Arthur fell back on his elbows, panting. “So she’s just one of a list of those you don’t think about? Your mother. Your grandmother. Your father. Your first husband. The men you … the ones you entertained—”

“Arthur,” May said. “Please. Please.”

“—your first daughter. The one you had with someone else.” He nodded, jerked his head violently up and down. “Except you do—you do think of her. You’ve found her. Seen her.”

“No!” May reached forward as if to cover his mouth, keep him from saying any more, but then she dropped her hand onto his chest. “How?” she said, after a silence.

“It doesn’t matter.” Arthur was still nodding his head, but slowly now, his lips pressed together. When he opened them, he drew a breath and held it, as if preparing for exertion, or pain, something that required fortitude. He let the breath out. “I was … wounded. It felt …” He stopped speaking, looked down at her hand, her fingers worrying the button of his night shirt. “I felt it like a, a … I don’t know,” he said. “A wound, that’s all. A … an accident. Something broken. Knocked out of place.

“In the days just after I found out, when I moved, I held my body carefully. As if I were afraid of …” He closed his eyes and let his head fall back. When he opened them, he was looking at the ceiling. Arthur breathed, sighed. “I wanted … I always wanted to share everything with you. But … but you didn’t allow me everything.” He looked back at May, her dry eyes, smooth forehead. “I would have helped you to … to find her. I would have …”

“How?” May asked again. “How did you find out? When?”

Arthur smiled at her, not sadly—he looked genuinely amused. “Years ago. When you began searching. You didn’t imagine—did you, darling? My supposedly worldly darling—that a Shanghai solicitor could resist gossip?”

May pursed her lips as she did when catching herself in one of her infrequent grammatical mistakes. “And people say,” she said, “that of the two of us, you are the fool.”

“Have you seen her?” Arthur asked, after a moment.

She shook her head no.

“But you know where she lives?”

May dipped her head in the slightest tremor of acknowledgment. Only a person who knew her well could read such an admission. “I didn’t …” She lowered her eyes, then looked back up, into his, began again. “I didn’t do what you said. I didn’t have her with someone else. I had her alone. I had her by myself.”

Arthur let himself fall the rest of the way back onto his pillow. “Sometimes,” he said when he had caught his breath, “I wonder, if I understood you better, would I love you less?” He held his hand back out to her. His fingertips were blue. “No,” he answered himself. “It wouldn’t make any difference.”

“Please,” May said.

“I’m going to die. I haven’t the strength not to.”

“Arthur. Please.”

“Stop it!” Arthur cried. “You keep saying the same thing.”

“I can’t help it. Myself.”

Arthur stopped talking, gave himself over to the task of breathing. A week ago, his collarbones were not so prominent. Now, when he struggled to inhale, the hollow between them deepened; it collected a little pool of shadow. Seeing this, May was frightened. Without meaning to, without knowing what she was doing, she touched the same place on her own body.

“Come,” he said, after a minute. “Sit by the bed and wash your feet like you do.”

“Now? Not now.”

“Yes, now! Do it!” Arthur, suddenly flushed, wild, his red hair like a flame over his face, picked at the edge of the sheet, kicked fretfully at the blankets.

“All right,” she said. “Yes.”

May got the big bowl she used and filled it in the bathroom. She spread a linen towel on the floor beside the bed and sat before the bowl, unwrapping her feet. Arthur held his hand out, and she put the old bindings in his palm. She bathed her feet, left and right. He watched as she gingerly soaped and rinsed each folded toe.

“Give me the water,” he said when she had finished. “Hold the bowl for me.”

“What for?” May was wrapping her feet in fresh cloths.

“I want. It.”

“Why?” she said, and she asked him again. “What for? For what?”

“I’m going to drink it. Then I’ll. Know who you are.”

May looked at Arthur. She saw he wasn’t teasing. To herself she was the least mysterious of women. Who was she? She was still that woman, that girl, that desirable girl about whom it was possible to say to a suitor:
She never cried out
.

May picked up the blue porcelain bowl, its lip decorated with a thin line of vermilion.

“Give it to me,” Arthur said. He reached his arms out. “Hold it for me. So I can drink from it. So I can know.”

The water spilled over his chin; it wet the bedclothes. Ran trickling through his beard and into his ringing red ears. A few swallows more and he began coughing. May pulled the basin out of his grasp.

“Well?” she said, when he had caught his breath. “Have you figured it all out? Me?”

Eyes closed, he shook his head.

“Nothing?” she asked.

He inhaled, coughed. “No,” he said when he could speak. “But,” he reached out for her, caught her smallest finger and gave it a little shake. “I think you’ll. Be very rich and famous. Your foot water, dearest, it cures tinnitus.” He smiled with his eyes closed. “I can’t hear. A thing.” He brought the finger to his lips, kissed it. “Wonderful. A nice blue bottle, I think.” He paused to breathe. “A ringing in the ears? Try May’s. Magic. Water …”

T
HE
P
IPE
D
REAMS OF A
R
AT

“W
HERE IS EVERYONE?
” A
LICE ASKED, ENTERING
the shadowy foyer of Dulcie’s home. “Too frightened to come?”

Dulcie said nothing.

“They can’t all be ill.” Alice looked into the dining room. There were glasses on the table. A bottle of claret, a bowl of white peaches.

“You look beautiful,” Dulcie said. “I knew you’d choose flamenco.” Alice twirled around so that her full skirt swung out. Her makeshift mantilla caught on the arm of a chair, and she freed it and draped it around her shoulders.

“I had the tailor cut one of Mother’s lace tablecloths in half and dye it black,” she said.

The house was dark, silent. Behind Dulcie the empty salon, like the dining room and hallway, was lighted only with candles. Dulcie unfastened her cape. “I have something to confess,” she said. She was wearing a toreador’s costume, complete with flat black shoes and tight knee pants.

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t invite any others.”

“What do you mean?” Alice asked.

“I didn’t invite anyone except you. Not that I meant to deceive you.” Dulcie touched Alice’s arm as she spoke. “Just that, well, after I talked with you, Tsung asked me not to ring anyone else.”

Alice felt for the high comb holding her mantilla. “Well,” she said awkwardly. “I imagine you’re always in the position of owing him a favor. Aren’t you?” Because it was Tsung who got Dulcie her opium.

“Please don’t be angry.”

Alice looked at her friend. “I’m not. Not much.” She adjusted her headdress in the hall mirror. “Where is he, anyway?”

“Bathing.” Dulcie was in the salon, putting a record on the phonograph. She’d wound it too tight, though; the music’s tempo was accelerated.

“Where’s your father?” Alice raised her voice to be heard over the music.

“Don’t know,” Dulcie called back. “Singapore?”

“What? Does he leave you alone? No chaperone? No amah?”

“I sent them away. I paid them to leave. All of them. Dah Su, cook boy, houseboys. Every last one of them.” Dulcie wandered into the dining room, looked at the long table, the twelve empty chairs pushed as far as they would go under its surface. She stroked the table’s gleaming finish. “By now they must be miles away. Fleeing from the fever.” She poured claret into the three glasses she’d set on the table.

“How do you eat?” Alice asked.

Dulcie laughed. “I go through the pantry,” she said. “We still have a lot of biscuits. Tins of things. Water. Wine.” She lifted her shoulders, hunched them in a way that made her look younger, a naughty child.

“What about the peaches?” Alice said. “It’s much too early for any from Kobe.”

“I don’t know where they’re from.” Dulcie picked up a peach and held it under Alice’s nose. “There isn’t anything, not anything, like that scent. Tsung got them. Somehow. Didn’t you?” she asked, turning around. He’d come in without speaking, announced by his reflection in the mirror over the sideboard. Barefoot, he wore a long shirt, half buttoned, nothing more.

“Hello,” Alice said. “All dressed up for me?”

Tsung took the peach from Dulcie’s hand, brushed his pale lips over its furred skin, replaced it in the bowl without biting it. “This mine?” he asked, picking up the fullest glass. It spilled a little, wine dripping down over his long pale fingers. Tsung was tall for a Chinese, long-boned and slender, with a languid, disappointed air, only half cultivated. His artistic looks were misleading in that the only art he’d ever pursued was satisfying his desires. “I’m hot,” he said, explaining his attire. “The bath made me hot.” He spoke English with an American accent, picked up in a Massachusetts boarding school, along with a gonorrheal infection of his rectum that he endured for eleven months before coming home to consult with family bone-setters and apothecaries. “Apparently, my roommate had never seen a Chinese before and mistook me for a female of the species,” he had said, betraying no bitterness.

Alice put her glass down, and Tsung slid his hand down the front of her skirt. “Carpe diem,” he said. He kissed her on the mouth. “Do you know what I saw today? On the river? A coffin barge. Too many to count. I imagined they had bodies inside, but then I saw that the barge was floating high on the water, that the coffins must be …” He paused to lick the spilled wine from the back of his hand. “Empty.” He drifted toward the kitchen, the long tail of his white shirt floating after him in the dark hallway.

“Father never checks on anything,” Dulcie said. “He hasn’t been back here since Mother left.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. Singapore? She has a lover.”

“Does she?” Alice tried to imagine such a situation.

“Haven’t you heard? An industrialist from Bonn. Herr Groeder or Grouper. Something unappetizing like that. He has much more money than Father and he’s buying up all the tungsten in the world, I can’t remember what for. The way Shanghai talks, I thought everyone knew.”

Alice shook her head. “I wish my mother would run off,” she said.

“It is best like this,” Dulcie agreed. “It’s when they’re home that I feel lonely.”

Alice didn’t answer.

“Tsung’s laid a fire.” Dulcie swung her cape through the door, in parody of trying to incite a bull to charge. “Come in,” she said.

Alice followed her from the dining room to the salon, where the dark velvet drapes were drawn, no light save that from a candelabra dripping wax on the piano lid. Then Dulcie got the fire going, and the room was filled with a shuddering orange glow.

They sat on cushions before the hearth, held their glasses self-consciously. “Do you like this?” Dulcie asked. “There’s other things, if you’d rather. There’s brandy.”

“This is fine.” A pocket of gas popped in one of the logs and threw a cinder onto the rug. Neither girl moved to brush it off, and as it burned the wool it made an acrid smell. Alice took a deep swallow from her glass. She’d never had more than a sip before. “Guess what
my
mother’s doing,” she said.

“What?”

“She has an absolute
idée fixe
that someone’s infected our books. Last week, when one of Daddy’s associates came to pick up some papers, Number Three put him to wait in the library, and Mother’s sure she saw him lick his finger and turn a page.” Alice took another swallow of wine. Firelight lit the contents of her glass so that it seemed to be holding embers.

“And now she’s found out he’s dead, she’s sure the library is contaminated. She doesn’t know which book, so she’s burning them all. She lies in bed during the day, awake, and throws books into the fire at night.”

“What about your father? Can’t he usually talk sense into her?”

“Stuck in Hong Kong.”

“Your aunt?”

“Sealed off in another part of the house with Eleanor and Arthur. They’re both ill, that’s the incredible part of it. There’s influenza in the house already. But Mother’s sure it’s the books that will kill us.”

“She’s mad,” Dulcie said matter-of-factly.

Alice drained her glass. Her tongue felt spongy against the roof of her mouth. “Well, she’s always been highly strung. And after David …” She turned her glass upside down, watched the progress of a red drop as it moved slowly toward the lip. “When David died, we all became more ourselves. Mother more nervous, Daddy harder-working, Cecily withdrawn. I fled them all. Divorced them for my aunt.”

“Are you seeing Lawrence?” Dulcie asked.

“Who wants to know, you or Tsung?”

“I do.”

“We play tennis, that’s all.” Alice lay back and balanced her empty glass on her stomach, holding its stem so it wouldn’t fall.

Dulcie unfastened the buttons of her tight jacket and took it off. She got up to retrieve the claret from the dining room, returned with the bowl of peaches as well. She took Alice’s glass and refilled it.

“Here,” Dulcie said, and Alice sat up.

“Drink it,” Dulcie said.

The two girls leaned back against the cushions, saying nothing, watching the fire. Dulcie used a piece of kindling to poke the coals. Its end caught, and she threw it in with the rest, set a new log on top. Two beetles emerged from under the bark and ran back and forth, trying to escape the sudden heat. “Poor things.” Alice watched them. “Here’s a question,” she said.

“What?”

“May told me that once when she was smoking opium—”

“If only I’d had an aunt who smoked,” Dulcie interrupted. “It would have made all the difference, really.”

“—she looked up and saw rats. Rats on the rafters. And they weren’t moving. They lay on the beams with their eyes open. She could see the glitter. They were intoxicated, inhaling opium. And what I wonder is, what are the pipe dreams of a rat?”

“Cheese,” Dulcie said. “And bacon. Not attached to traps.”

“No,” said Alice. “That’s too easy. That’s obvious. And pipe dreams never are. Obvious.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dulcie said. “A rat wants what a rat wants.” She stood up. “Speaking of which …”

Alice looked up as Tsung came in.

H
IS MUSCULAR TONGUE
tasted of wine. “Don’t push so hard,” Alice complained. “You get the whole of yours in and I can’t even move mine.”

“Sorry. Overeager, is all.”

The phone rang eleven times and stopped.

“Who would call now?” Alice said. “It’s the middle of the night. It’s—oh, God—it’s after three.”

“One of Mother’s friends.” Dulcie put on another record, sat on the piano bench and watched as Tsung, shirt unbuttoned, straddled Alice’s chest. He used his hands to force her breasts together around his penis, wet with his own saliva, and moved it back and forth, eyes shut in concentration. Alice, eyes open, tried but couldn’t get her arm around him to touch herself. When he came, semen landed on her throat, her face, and in her hair.

“And to think”—Tsung opened his eyes—“your virtue is still intact.”

“My hymen, anyway.”

He wiped her chin with his hand. “You know that’s all that counts.” Tsung offered Alice his index finger. “Taste it,” he said. “Me.”

Alice sat up, arms around her knees. “Why?”

“Education. Besides, you are fond of me, aren’t you?” Tsung smiled, his usually pale lips flushed and full from his exertions.

But before Alice could answer, there was a knocking on the front door, and the two of them jumped up from the hearth. Before they could gather their clothes, the door opened, followed by steps in the hall.

“My … my aunt,” Alice said, as she recognized the sound of the jade cane; and May walked into the room.

“Goddess of Mercy.” May looked at Alice standing naked by the mantel, Tsung sitting naked on the divan, his legs insolently open. There was a pillow beside him, but he didn’t use it to cover himself. May stared at both of them with undisguised contempt. Alice looked at the floor, but Tsung returned May’s gaze. He said a few words in Chinese, his voice low, drawling, and she answered in English.

“A whore, am I? And what about you?” May’s voice was slow, as if she’d been smoking. “The spoiled, lazy, sixth son of a Green Gang underling?” She was sober, Alice could see that she was. Still, it was as if she and the Victrola were winding down together. “Alice,” she said. “Dress yourself. So we can go.” Alice remained motionless, and May stepped forward. She raised her hand as if to slap Alice’s face, let it remain there, frozen in the space between them. “How dare you. Is this—This is how you repay me?”

“But Aunt—”

“With a Chinese. A Chinese.” May’s hand wavered. Her voice—how strange it was. Unfamiliar—no, not unfamiliar, but somehow wrong. It sounded angry, and yet it lacked emotion, inflection. Its pitch was constant, unprecedentedly regular. It didn’t rise; it didn’t fall. Alice caught her aunt’s hand and forced it down by her side.

“What can you be saying? What can you mean when—when you married Uncle Arthur? When you’ve encouraged me to …”
To disregard rules
, she had been going to say, but she could see May wasn’t even listening. She’d sat down on the piano bench. Her cheeks were white, and she bent over suddenly, she hid her face in her arms. “What
is
the matter?” Alice asked. From her mother she would expect hysterics, catatonia—anything. After all, staying out all night was no minor crime, notwithstanding influenza, the curfew. But her aunt? May was different.

“Arthur,” May said at last.

“What’s happened? Has he—”

But May just shook her head.

Dulcie came forward with Alice’s Spanish shawl. She put it around her shoulders. “What has happened?” she said. “Has something happened?”

May sat up. She rose from the bench, leaning on her cane, looked around the room as if slowly taking into account the fire, the bowl of discarded peach pits, the mantel clock’s black hands approaching the hour of four, the candles dripping on the piano lid. At last her eyes came back to Alice. “Your mother has burned down the house,” she said, her voice still slow, uninflected.

Alice covered her mouth. “Is—”

“She’s dead. And Arthur. Arthur is dead. They didn’t get out.”