The Binding Chair (30 page)

“Just one more discarded native girl.” Alice reached forward, as if to touch May, but then dropped her hand back into her lap. “And what has happened now?” she asked. “So many years later? What has changed to make you think of it—her—now?”

May lifted her shoulders. “I don’t know. New shoes?” She laughed, looked at Alice, frowned. “You cry,” she said. “I don’t. Why is that?”

Alice got out of her chair and onto her knees. “You don’t want forgiveness, but I do. Why,
why
won’t you give it to me?” She put her arms around May’s waist and lay her head in her lap.

“Forgiveness for what?”

“Evlanoff.”

May put her hand under Alice’s chin; she lifted it to look into her face. “I can’t. Don’t you see? You promised me you were mine.”

Alice shook her head. “Even real daughters fall in love. They marry.”

“Ah, well,
real
daughters,
real
mothers.” May raised her eyebrows. A person who didn’t know her might have mistaken the look for one of amusement. “Perhaps they can afford it.”

The word
real
, the way May had pronounced it: Alice found she couldn’t answer such bitterness. She buried her face in May’s silk trousers, thinking again of that afternoon, years before, when she surprised May in her dressing room. May standing for whole minutes, watching her reflection as it moved in the mirror.

“Did you mean it?” Alice asked. “About the shoes? About the shoes changing … anything?” She sat back on her heels. “Forgive me that. At least forgive me the shoes.”

“What about them?”

“Thinking they could help. They … They were a mistake.”

“Were they?” May leaned forward. Feature by feature she touched Alice’s face, all of it. Traced the orbit of each eye, its brow. Nose. Lips. “It’s odd, I couldn’t have predicted it. But I’m not sorry to have told you what I did.”

May straightened up, she brushed her palms together, a gesture, consciously ironic, of dusting them off after a dirty job. “As for the shoes.” She smiled brightly, a little too widely. “I’m not going to wear them. I’m going to throw them into the sea.”

B
IRTHDAY
C
ELEBRATION

R
OSE APPEARED TO
M
AY IN A DREAM, CALLING
her not Mother and not May but Chao-tsing.

My fourth birthday approaches
, the child said, speaking formally as she never had in life.
The occasion must be one that we will remember with joy and satisfaction. For, you know, it is to be my last
.

May nodded. She looked at her daughter and saw with shock that Rose was not a blending of Chinese and European but an awkward juxtaposing of differences. She had one round blue eye, one narrow black one.

Noticing how her mother stared, Rose smiled. Her expression was strangely melancholy and sophisticated for a little girl.
Yes
, she said, nodding, and she picked up her skirt to reveal one bound foot, one natural.

But how do you get about?
May said, understanding the question to be useless, even stupid, and yet unable not to ask it.
How do you play?
she asked.

Rose laughed, a high peal, so mirthful, so blithe that May smiled even though she didn’t find the sight of her daughter funny.
Oh, I manage
, Rose said. Her expression became serious.

Now, here is who must attend the party.
She counted off names on her small fingers.
Your mother and your father and your father’s mother, Yu-ying. My father and my cousins Alice, Cecily, and David. And
, she said,
you must write the invitations yourself. In your own hand
.

May nodded.
Of course I will
, she promised.

Rose listed the foods she wanted served. Sticky dumplings filled with red bean paste, hot soup dumplings with bamboo straws through which to drink the broth, quail eggs, and sweet yellow pickles. Weren’t these all the foods May had herself preferred as a child?

Rose told her mother what games she wanted to play:
Charades. Hide and seek. And that funny one, you know, where we build cities with mah-jongg tiles
.

But that—that was
I, Rose, May argued. Not you.
That was a game I played with my mother
.

Rose stamped her foot in anger.
No!

What presents shall you have?
May said, to placate her.

Side-button white
kid shoes, Rose said. As soft
as gloves. And both the same size, the size that fits the unbound one, so that in them I can hide my mismatched feet
.

And toys?

Yes, but I’m not going to tell you everything. I want you to surprise me
.

Once more she reminded May that as this was to be her last birthday, all must be perfect.
You know you have just two days
, she warned, and she looked over her mother’s shoulder as May wrote down lists of all she needed to accomplish.

When May looked up from the paper, Rose was gone.

In the markets, May went from stall to stall. On her own feet, without her cane or an amah, she searched the market for lanterns of the style Rose had requested—tall blue ones decorated with characters for luck and happiness—but she couldn’t find one. When she pleaded with a vendor to allow her to order them—she promised to buy however many he asked, a dozen, two dozen, three—he refused, he said there wasn’t enough time. And besides, didn’t she know where she was? This was Nice. This was France, not China. If she wanted Chinese lanterns, she wouldn’t find them here.

It was the same with the dumplings. She found soufflés and tarts and sausages, pots of caviar, trays of whelks and mussels, heaps of pastries, mountains of canapés, but there was not one sweet red bean dumpling to be had. There were no quail eggs or yellow pickles. And where was it that one could buy such things, the
boulanger
wanted to know. Surely not in the south of France.

No blue firecrackers. No red. No pink.

And not one pair of side-button white kid shoes in which Rose could hide her mismatched feet.

Then light was pouring through the open curtains, Suzanne was shaking May’s shoulder. She was awake and sobbing in frustration.

T
HE
B
AY OF
A
NGELS

S
EPTEMBER THE TWENTIETH
. A
LREADY THE SEASON
was over, the summer crowd had departed from Nice, the cafés were no longer serving outdoors. Bad weather was forecast, and the sky had darkened. The palm trees were tousled by a sudden wind; the sound made by their fronds rustling together was so like rainfall that, were she to close her eyes, May would have sworn that already the storm had arrived. Her teeth chattered, but perhaps this wasn’t from cold. In any case, she’d feel warmer in the sea. The previous day’s water temperature had been recorded as seventy-two degrees, the tide had reached its high point at 4:44
P.M
. Of late, this was the only section of the paper May bothered to read.

“Come on,” she said to Suzanne. “We’ll be brisk.” She used her cane to navigate the steps down to the water.

“I’m not brisk,” Suzanne complained, hugging herself as she walked. “And neither are you.”

“Not on land,” May said. “In the water we’re fine.”

“You are.”

The Promenade des Anglais was deserted, the sky an affronted, glowering purple. Thunder thudded over the bay; it made a noise that recalled fireworks discharged above the Whangpoo, a dull, shuddering report that mocked the celebratory showers of sparks. May looked back, over her shoulder. What light remained painted the hotels’ white façades an unhealthy yellow, like jaundice. The black gaps of their shadowed doorways looked like lost teeth, and the pretty buildings with their windowpane eyes seemed like suddenly aged faces. Each day, dusk came earlier and with increasing menace. The light had shifted, it had changed; but what May saw was not an effect of the season. She recognized the return of despair.

As the tide receded, it left the beach wet, pebbles bright. Two gulls balanced on the back of a bench, and another rested on the rocks, the feathers on its breast puffed out to conserve warmth. Others floated on the water, barking at each other like curs. May laid her folded towel on the last dry stair and sat down to unlace her custom-made shoes. The only time she wore them, grudgingly, was when she came to swim; the shoes made it possible for her to descend the stairs to the water by herself. She pulled the pins from her hair and undid the long braid she’d made that morning.

“What? Aren’t you wearing your bathing cap?” Suzanne winced as she pushed her hair under the tight rubber of her own. The sea lapped at the lower stairs, green and treacherous with algae.

“The cap makes my head ache. I’d rather leave my hair undone.”

“You’ll catch cold.”

“No.”

Suzanne sighed. “What’s the point in trying to talk to you?” she said. “You’d argue a cat’s hind leg off.” She held her towel around her shoulders. “Come on, then. The sooner we’re in and done with it, the sooner we’ll be home and in a hot bath.” Suzanne watched as May picked up one of her expensive orthopedic shoes and hurled it into the bay. She opened her mouth and left it open, too surprised to say anything. The shoe sank immediately, and May threw the other after it. Air trapped in the toe kept it afloat for a minute, before leaking out; then that shoe, too, went down. As it disappeared, Suzanne recovered her speech.

“What are you doing! What can you be thinking!” She stamped one foot in agitation. “How are we going to get you back up the steps? You told the boy to go home. You told him we’d have the doorman at the Negresco hail a car!”

May shrugged. “We’ll manage.” She scooted forward in a sitting position, using her arms to transfer herself onto the last stair, submerged below the sea’s surface.

The salt stung May’s feet; there were always open blisters. But once in the water, she moved swiftly out into the bay, and Suzanne followed doggedly. As they approached, the gulls flapped and lifted themselves off the waves, keening as they flew. The two women were soon out past their depth. Having mastered the crawl as well as the breast-, side-, and backstroke, May had succeeded in teaching only the breaststroke to Suzanne, who became competent but never enthusiastic.

May found the impulse cruel—she couldn’t explain it to herself as anything other than cruelty—but she enjoyed leading Suzanne out beyond the point where she felt comfortable. Without her glasses, Suzanne’s eyesight was so poor that she could see almost nothing; it all melted into a wet gray-green fog. Absorbed with the task of breathing, she trailed farther and farther behind, she didn’t speak. She couldn’t tell in which direction she swam, couldn’t tell where was the horizon, the shore.

May swam hard and ignored Suzanne’s panting. A wind blew west, along the coast, licking the waves into spray. Gusts played over the surface of the sea, and water slapped May’s face as she swam, stinging her eyes, forcing its way up her nose. It burned and dripped down the back of her throat, tasting like tears.

“I’m tired,” she heard Suzanne gasp. “Please let’s stop. Let’s just float for a moment. I haven’t—You know I haven’t the breath for these fast swims.”

“A little farther,” May said, and Suzanne, too blind to return to shore by herself, followed.

The water heaved beneath them. Who knew what it contained? The sea emptied Suzanne’s mind of everything but fear. Beneath her body she pictured gelid, black, oozing caves. Wet jaws. Pincers. Eels big enough to pull down a ship. She coughed her habitual, nervous, clattering cough. Everything that aggravated May was in its noise: everything that made her feel desperate, wild with aggravation. Usually when she heard the cough, filled as it was with the sound of catastrophe, May pictured herself falling down long staircases with trays of dishes. And yet now she felt composed, she felt calm, as she had for the past few days. A distance, even a dispassion, she hadn’t known in years, deep and absolute. The agitation and jealousy to which she was prey evaporated, and every action—pouring tea, braiding her hair, paring her toenails—was suffused with peace.

As she swam steadily, rhythmically, suddenly May knew when it was she’d last felt this way. She was fifteen and recently married. She was pouring lamp oil into a teacup. Looking through her clothes for a sash strong enough to bear her weight. Having made a decision, she was no longer impeded by the usual friction of human ambivalence and distractions.

Of course
, May thought, tasting the water, the salt of it. How obvious it was, how abruptly and almost laughably obvious. All along
this
had been the point of the lessons.

Drowning was the reason for learning to swim
. A secret she’d been keeping from herself, one she’d glimpsed, barely, and just a few times during her more reckless swims, but never admitted.

In her bedroom, just an hour before, May had picked up a photograph of Alice taken on her seventeenth birthday. Looking at Alice: it had been a test of May’s footing in the world, as well as an attempt to reattach herself. Not that she’d understood this while staring at the photograph. She knew it only now that she was in the water and far from shore, from home.

Except that she had no home. She could make a home for others, but not for herself.

May had held the silver frame, polished a faint smear from the surface of the glass. She’d recognized Alice; of course she had: Alice. The child who was to assuage her loss, who was to be a daughter, not a niece. And for a while—a long while, really—this had worked. Alice had been solace and affection. She’d been amusement. She’d been defiance; she’d been worry and argument and anguish. And she’d been a companion. She’d protected May from solitude. Sometimes, even, Alice had needed her.

But, holding the photograph, it was as if May were looking at a stranger.
Who is she?
she found herself asking, and she’d felt a quickening of pulse in her ears, a sensation she associated with fear. She even asked herself:
Am I afraid?
And answered:
No. Not afraid
.

Still, who was that young woman, a strand of pearls at her smooth throat, eyes tilting with mischief?

She was
na guo ning
. A foreigner. May turned the photograph face down on the bureau. She called down the hall to see if Suzanne was ready to leave for the beach.

I
N THE WATER
, May freed her right arm from her long hair that had tangled around it. Her eyes smarted with salt.

“Please,” Suzanne said. “Can’t we turn back?”

“We have,” May lied. “It’s hard to tell because the waves are high.”

As May spoke, one caught Suzanne full in the face. She spluttered, gasped. “How much longer?” She was breathing hard. “I can’t see the steps. The beach. I can’t see anything.”

“Not so long now. Five more minutes. Maybe ten.”

Suzanne stopped swimming. She turned onto her back, breathing, coughing. The swells were big enough to disorient even a person with good eyesight.

“I don’t know why I followed you,” she said at last, when she’d caught her breath. She laughed, a short, wry choke of a laugh. “I don’t know why, after I noticed that you’d left your cane uncovered.”

Because May hadn’t done what she usually did. She hadn’t folded the polished jade knob into her towel in case a passing beachcomber were to see its gleam and think to steal it.

May didn’t answer. She treaded water silently. They’d been in long enough to get chilled, and she felt the cold as an ache in her thighs and groin, an ache to which she was vulnerable.

“Poor Alice,” Suzanne said.

“No.” May shook her head. She spat to get the salt out of her mouth, wiped her stinging lips with the back of her hand.

The sun had set and it was dark enough now that the troughs between waves were filled with black shadows. Whenever either woman was in one, she was invisible.

“Why?” Suzanne asked. “Why not poor Alice?”

“Because she’s free. I’m setting her free.”

Suzanne snorted. “That’s self-serving,” she said. Her voice came as if from the water itself.

“But I am self-serving,” May answered.

“What will she do?” Suzanne asked, after a silence.

“She’ll stay with Evlanoff. Or she’ll find someone else. Whomever she wants. She’s an heiress, remember. Or will be. She can choose.”

The water was increasingly rough, and it seemed colder in the sudden shadows.

“Do you think so?” Suzanne said. “Do you think anyone chooses?”

F
ROM THE WINDOW
of Evlanoff’s apartment, Alice was watching the light die on the surface of the sea. Wind moved across it, making silver scrawls. “Baie des Anges.” She shivered, wearing only a slip. “Who named it that?”

“What?” Evlanoff said. They were dressing for dinner; he was looking for his cufflinks.

“Please,” Alice turned and opened her arms to him. “I want to go back to bed.”

“We’ve only just gotten up.” He put his lips to her hair as he spoke, the words tickling. As she felt this, the gooseflesh on Alice’s arms tightened, each bump tingled. On the windowsill behind her were pieces of sea glass, a few shells and pretty stones she’d collected. As they embraced, they knocked a few to the floor.

“
Please. Please let’s.
”

Evlanoff looked into Alice’s eyes. He’d been about to laugh, but then, at her plaintive expression, he stopped. “All right,” he said, and he began unbuttoning his shirt. “Three times in one afternoon is too much for an old man,” he teased, as she pulled the blanket up.

Alice cupped his testicles in her palm, felt them draw away from her cold hand. “You’re not old,” she whispered.

“Compared to you.”

“Besides, I’m not asking for that.” She put her cold feet on his warm legs, tucked her hands under his side. She was still shivering. “I just want you to hold me.”

Arms around her, he nuzzled his forehead down between her breasts. She felt the heat of breath on her skin, heard his words muffled by the blanket. “This is the only time I’m really happy. Not worried, not …” He trailed off, sighing. “The rest is just time in between,” he finished. She kissed his head.

In the dim light from the window, books piled by the bed (thick, illustrated medical texts in Russian—Alice liked to open them, to shudder at the pictures) resolved into a dark staircase. Voices floated up from the sidewalk. From the Negresco, a few doors down, it was possible to hear strains of music. Alice closed her eyes.

“ ‘The Blue Danube,’ isn’t it?” Evlanoff asked. She didn’t answer. She heard him, but she was hurrying toward sleep. Alice didn’t know why, but she had to get there right away, and the
yes
she spoke was only a thought; no word came from her mouth.

Such pleasure in his arms, such warm comfort. His arms and the smell of him, cologne, tobacco. The feel of his beard prickling, she loved that, she squirmed down to put her mouth and nose against it. That funny cooked smell of hair. She saw Dah Su’s kitchen, the shining pans, a long shelf of them. Scullery boys scrubbing. Odd what one thought of while falling asleep. She was safe in Ev’s arms, she was inhaling the smell of him and suffused with that enviable feeling—once having felt it, Alice recognized it as the thing everyone wanted: the sheer luckiness of love, undeserved and therefore a little scary. It arrived with giddy speed; would it depart as quickly? But Evlanoff was right, it was hard to worry in love’s arms, impossible, really. Love made everything else so … small, so much less than its object.

Alice was asleep, the landscape she’d traveled to get there familiar, though it had been years since she’d crossed it: a blue-white expanse, ice the color of sky, and a train running silently off its rails. Without a sound it penetrated a lake’s frozen surface, it sank through dark water. An enchanted realm, it must be—how else to explain the warmth, the
heat
, of such depths?

And then came the dancing, Alice in the captain’s arms, except the captain wasn’t the captain, he was Evlanoff. Magically, he was both men: the alchemy of dreams made it possible.

May was there. She danced, as well. But May didn’t dance with a man, she danced by herself, and her feet moved like anyone else’s. May was dancing in her new shoes, the ones Alice had convinced her to wear.