The Valley of Amazement (60 page)

I did not discover until I was fifteen that Father’s urges were plentiful and he took them elsewhere. By then I was in the habit of stealing into Father’s study to peruse his pornographic books, especially one with fifty-two
photographs between blue cloth covers, showing muscular men and plump women engaged in a variety of coital contortions.
Classical Anatomy of Calisthenics
it said. I also found a large box made of burl wood with a top that slid off sideways. It contained love letters to him, many of them and in different handwriting, written by both men and women, which described lusty acts, memories of old or recent or soon-to-be consummated ones.

The more I read, the more upset I became. He gave many people his love, whereas it had been years since I had received any special attention from him. His lovers called him “the God of the Vortex of Love,” “Thunderous Zeus,” “Colossus of Cocks,” “Grinding Goliath.” They described themselves as his “Awakening Volupta,” or “Voracious Vulva,” or “Vibrating Vagina.” They were factual about length, width, turgidity, timeliness, and durability. They talked about sex as if they were gluttons eating certain foods, which I would never be able to eat again: pudding, gravy, cream, and sausages. They praised my father for his effectiveness in causing geologic disaster and bad weather—fissures and earthquakes, floods and tornados, the upheaval of new islands out of ocean depths. And all I had wanted was simple affection. He had given it away, so freely to so many, and in an unfathomable variety of ways.

I was furious. I did not need his affection anymore. I had urges, too.

F
OR MY FIRST
sexual adventure, I selected the location before I did the boy. The grove was at the far corner of the grounds of the university where Father taught. The fall weather was warm, and the hydrangea bushes were softly lush with pendulous blooms. The grove reminded me of the settings of the paintings of nude gods and goddesses, an opportunity for divine fornication.

Only young men attended the university, and I gathered a lot of attention simply by sitting on a bench under an oak tree. The faculty knew me as Dr. Minturn’s daughter, and thus, it was not unusual that I would be there, lolling on the lawn, studying up on calisthenics. The pictorial book lay in my lap, and to any young man walking by, I appeared to be both reading and waiting for someone. A number of boys who took the path near where I was seated paused to ask what I was reading. To the first six young men, I replied that it was a book on the principles of sewing. To the seventh, I said teasingly, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” This young man was worthy of an audition. He had the requisite virile broad-shouldered torso and godlike features: thick dark hair and sky-blue eyes, beautiful strong hands, a sensuous pouty upper lip, and a deep furrowed philtrum, which, according to one letter to my father, was an erotic groove between lip and nosetip, which, like other grooves, should be thoroughly licked. I remember also that he had a confident attitude and was at ease flirting with me and let his language become quickly lurid—”I would very much like to see what’s in your lap”—the sign of a man with coital expertise. He offered me his hand and pulled me up with such grace I felt like a ballerina.

Among the hydrangeas, he kissed me with earnestness, banging his lips against my teeth and covering me with saliva from nose to chin. I turned my face upward so that he could kiss my neck instead, and this sent ticklish chills of pleasure down my spine. He placed his beautiful hands, now rather shaky, around my adolescent breasts and kissed them through the cotton blouse. As my blouse grew damper with his kisses and with no sign that anything further would happen, I considered cutting short the audition. But then he unbuttoned my blouse and licked my nipples. I again felt chills of excitement. They soon died down as he fumbled with more of my buttons. I gave him a peek of just one page of the calisthenics book and told him to hurry. I waited as he struggled like a hare in a trap to unbutton his trousers with his beautiful but clumsy hands. At the very moment his penis sprang loose, we heard voices, and he pulled on his trousers and stuffed his cock back in with apparent pain. The image of his cock remained—how different it looked from the photographs, not smooth and still as white marble, but beefy, veined, and oddly helpless, like a blind hairless rodent seeking a milk-filled breast. I buttoned my blouse, smoothed my hair, and retied the bow. The voices passed. I stood up. I gave the young man my address and said to wait for me by the oak tree at ten o’clock that night.

He was precisely on time. I took him through the back door into the kitchen and we climbed the narrow stairs that the servants used. Halfway up, he asked if I was sure this was wise. “Wise?” I said. “How could this ever be wise?” We passed the landing to my bedroom and continued up the curling staircase to the turret. I had draped the room with Indian saris and covered the floor with a mishmash of small Persian carpets I had cut up, ones discarded because of cigar burns and spilled wax. A ladder of seven steps led to a sleeping loft adjacent to a bay window. A thick featherbed sat on the loft floor. This was my retreat, where I read and napped, where I sometimes hid when I wanted to kick and scream and did not know why. I had already lit the candles, sprinkled the quilt with rosewater, and set
Classical Anatomy of Calisthenics
in the bookshelf with its spine jutting out. We climbed up and I plopped on my back with a friendly smile, and we began. He provided kisses on my mouth and neck, these being gentler by my request. He undid the buttons on my blouse, but with more deftness than before, having practiced during the intervening hours, I suspected. I had already removed my undergarments, all of them, so we would not have to waste time with the rest. My Would-Be Vortex seemed hesitant about what we were about to do, because I had just told him I was Professor Minturn’s daughter—and I admit, it was just to see his reaction. He was awestruck as he watched me take off my clothes, and he stared at my pubis, before
surveying the rest of my illicit parts from breasts to buttocks with religious solemnity. After enough staring had gone on, I helped him remove his clothes. His penis swung out, and I ran a finger up one vein and down another. What a strange apparatus. He groaned and was about to fall on me when I told him to wait. I then pulled out the pictorial book from the low shelf and showed him the calisthenics exercise I thought we might try. My selection looked simple enough to do and required no standing, which would have been difficult because of the low height of the ceiling. The young Titan nodded, accepting the challenge. I swung my legs up and back, fully exposing all my privates, and he got into the correct position, one knee by my waist, the other by my rump, and his head squeezed halfway under the crook of my leg. But now his penis was out of alignment with my pudenda. So he checked the photograph, made an adjustment of his left knee, and that slight movement was enough for him to expend himself on my thigh. I was hugely disappointed—”You’ve ruined it!”—and was sorry I had not stopped myself from blurting that out. He was crushed. After half an hour, he recovered from embarrassment and we laughed about our overexcitement. But when we tried the same position, he achieved the same result. He begged me not to tell anyone and promised he would practice. The following night, he came fortified with whiskey. He chose an easier calisthenics position, and finally, after bearing down and pushing and making adjustments to see if he was in the right place, he penetrated me. I bore the pain well, I thought, and I was glad to be done with the opening of the portal. But all at once, he sat bolt upright, patted the sheets, and realized he had caused the spillage of virgin blood. He was deeply troubled. I said to him: “If you had known, what would you have done instead—packed up your pulsating penis and gone home?” We had another four encounters, which improved his stamina somewhat. But I did not think I was receiving full advantage, given I had not yet experienced anything I would have equated with geologic disasters.

Over the next year, I recruited half a dozen willing young men from my post on the university lawn. Most of them acted as if they had seduced me. They became solicitous once we were in bed. “Are you sure?” “Do you mind?” They were older than I by a few years, yet they were immature, exuding confidence one moment and then awkward boyish uncertainty the next. I disliked having to encourage the bashful ones without sounding critical or teacherlike. If my young man was nervous, I took this as a sign he felt that what we were doing was morally wrong. I would have none of that. One Adonis was quite effective. Bad weather appeared—a small whirlwind, high waves—but after two months of jouncing, I was bothered by his dull personality. I continued with him and took on another who was less adept but able to hold his end of a conversation after we were finished.

Mother and Father, meanwhile, were oblivious to my sexual adventures, just as they had been to nearly everything I did. I don’t know why I expected more from them. If you have never had love, how would you know that you were missing it? Perhaps it had always been part of My Pure Self-Being to be born expecting a mother and a father’s attention—their care, more important than a bug in resin or a fetish manikin. That place of higher importance would have made me believe I was loved.

I wanted Mother and Father to know about my promiscuity—to punish them and have them look at me with open disgust. I could then tell them in shouts of fury how selfish they were, how great my own disgust was, and I would name incidents I had written down. I would tell my father that I had enjoyed many volcanic eruptions, like those discharged by pen in letters to him.

O
N THE NIGHT
my Chinese emperor came to dinner, my parents invited eight other guests who were frequent visitors to our house: Dr. and Mrs. Beekins—an astronomer and his wife—an opera singer, Miss Huffard, and her lover, Charles Hatchett; my piano teacher, Mr. Maubert, and his maiden sister, Miss Maubert; the esteemed suffragette Mrs. Croswell; and a well-regarded landscape artist, Miss Pond, whose reputation included having had an illegitimate child she had had to give away. My father visited her often for well-described sex.

We gathered in the salon for sherry. Father introduced our Chinese guest as “Mr. Lu Shing. The first name, Lu, is actually his family name, and Shing is the given one.”

“To Americans, our names are backward,” Lu Shing said with an amused smile. “But in China, it’s the natural order. Family comes first in name and duty. I go by both names, Lu Shing, always together, the son indivisible from the family.”

Lu, I thought, like Lucia and Lulu. When it was my turn to be introduced, Father called me Lulu, and I corrected him and said: “Lucia.”

“Ah, she is Lucia tonight,” Father said, and winked. My face grew heated.

“Mr. Lu Shing,” the astronomer said, “your English is better than mine. How can that be?”

“British tutors from the age of five. My father is in the Ministry of Foreign Relations and saw an advantage in speaking English.”

He is privileged, I said to myself. He has social standing. He has a beautiful voice.

“Lu Shing is a student of Western art,” Father said. “He has been under the tutelage of landscape painters of the Hudson River School for the last three years. And now he has the rare opportunity to apprentice with Albert Bierstadt, who is returning to California to capture the Farallon Islands and Yosemite once again.”

Murmurs of congratulations followed.

”I am more of a butler and porter,” Lu Shing said. “I arrange for accommodations and travel needs. But I am indeed privileged to help. I’ll be able to watch Mr. Bierstadt at the earliest stages of his work.”

Father started a lively conversation over the differences between American art and Chinese art, oil paints and black ink. Lu Shing talked easily, as if these people, many of them years older, had been friends through the ages. He was politely deferential at the right times, but anyone could see that he had outshone them in whatever he said. He showed appreciation when they expressed ideas he had not heard of before. He seemed secretly amused much of the time.

Father threw out more conversational topics, as if he were teaching a class: Chinese traditions and Western influence. The changing society of Shanghai. Changing art forms. The influence of art on society and vice versa. Every time Father started another boring subject, I wanted to shout, “Enough!”

“How do we capture a moment of emotion in art?” Miss Pond said, and looked at Father.

Opinions made the rounds, and when it was Lu Shing’s turn, he said, “The moment is altered as soon as I try to capture it, so for me, it’s impossible.”

How true, I thought. Moments are gone as soon as you think about them.

Father was unstoppable, Mother was quiet, and Miss Pond admired too often what Father said. And then Miss Maubert also chimed in with much praise for Father, and with shining eyes, and so did Mrs. Croswell, who had a coquettish tilt to her head. Even Dr. Beekins, the astronomer, had a twinkle in his eye for Father. They were enamored of him. Were they his coven of sex acolytes? Did Lu Shing notice? Was I the only one who saw it? All around us, the conversation grew louder. They spoke as a chorus on Redemption. The symbolism of gods. Christian salvation. Vice and virtue. Purgatorio. Sins. Karma. Fate.

“Lu Shing,” Father said, “what’s your opinion on fate?”

“I am Chinese, Dr. Minturn,” he said. “I cannot recommend it highly enough.”

I went to stand by him and tried to look calm and sophisticated. “Mr. Lu Shing, I could not tell if you were joking. Do you truly believe in Oriental fate?”

“I do indeed. We are all here by fate, Oriental or otherwise.”

I was about to ask him more, but Father tapped his wineglass and announced that we would now see what Lu Shing had achieved while studying in the United States. He held up a small, framed painting. Even from a distance, I could tell it was a masterpiece. It had lovely colors. And I saw by the faces on others that they had the same opinion. The painting was passed around, and praise upon praise were heaped on both the painting and the artist: “I did not expect to see such skill in a student.” “The colors are rich yet subtle.” “It captures a perfect moment.”