by Tan, Amy
I took my second step, then a third. My plan was clearly a good one. What a clever lad I was! Yankee ingenuity. Reader, I am sure you are smarter than I in knowing what was about to happen. When I crouched to spin the board around, I heard a loud sucking noise as the board pulled away from the mud. The teeter-totter tipped me face forward into the mud and I received a good whack at the back of my head to teach me not to ignore Chinese advice again.
I had laughed throughout, and I saw how pleased he was that I liked it. “Stupidity must be rendered with subtlety,” he said.
I turned back the pages to read more, but he snatched it from my hands.
“I would like to read it aloud to you later when we visit those places that inspired the words.”
I was glad that he spoke of future adventures. There were many pages yet to read. We finished our lunch quickly. He took my hand as we went into the dark cave. The coolness of the cave sank into my damp clothes. Halfway in, I could no longer see Edward in front of me. He must have sensed my trepidation. He squeezed my hand. He moved steadily, and I was glad I could depend on him. This was the safety and trust I had grieved for in my heart. I wanted to stop in this dark place and simply stand there with Edward holding my hand. But we continued to move ahead, and in a short while I saw the soft light of an opening around the curve. We emerged into a beautiful bamboo forest with green and yellow light. This was the other world, a peaceful place, more lovely than the sex-wracked Peach Blossom Spring. We moved forward along a slippery path. He laced his fingers more firmly through mine. His hand was warm. My damp blouse, which had felt unbearably hot, now chilled me. “Careful,” he said every now and then, and squeezed my hand. The forest was thick with vegetation covering the ground. There was no path that I could make out. I was confident that Edward would know how to return us safely. At that moment, I was filled with longing for him. It was not sexual. I wanted the physical comfort of being held. I wanted to feel protected and safe. Giving my body was the only way I could express what I needed. And yet, in the past, once I had done so, the brief comfort and safety the man had provided became tawdry, merely sexual urges satisfied, which left me feeling foolish and lonelier than ever. Golden Dove had warned me not to close off my heart because of bitterness. Loyalty had told me that I should take love and kindness when they are offered. Had love ever been offered? He claimed it had. Was a contract love? Was inconstancy love? Maybe the kind of love that would comfort me did not exist. Perhaps I expected too much of love and no one existed who could ever meet my unceasing and bottomless need for it. I certainly would not find it with a vagabond who took no responsibility for anyone. Yet I still wanted his arms around me.
“It’s cool in the shade,” I said, and shivered. This was not a lie.
“Are you cold?” he said.
“Could you wrap your arms around me to keep me warm?”
Without hesitation his arms enclosed me. I lay my face on his chest. We stood in the green light, still and quiet. I could hear his fast heartbeat. I felt his warm breath over my neck. His rigid penis pressed against me.
“Violet,” he said. “I think you know how happy you make me.”
“I know. I’m happy, too.”
“I always want to be your friend.” He stopped and was quiet. I could feel his heart beating faster. “Violet, I’ve held back saying something because I don’t want you to think that my feelings for you as your friend are not true. But now that you’ve allowed me to hold you, I must tell you that I desire you, too.”
I was light-headed, anticipating what would soon follow. I remained still. He tipped up my face, and I must not have shown what he had hoped to see.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have presumed.”
I shook my head and stepped back. I watched his face change from confusion to gratitude as I unbuttoned my blouse and camisole to reveal my breasts. He kissed each breast, then my lips and eyelids. He embraced me once again. “You make me so happy,” he said. We moved deeper into the forest, and when we saw an old tree with a thick trunk that listed to one side, we hurried toward it. He gently leaned me against it and lifted my skirts.
Our lovemaking was simple and necessarily brief, owing to the discomfort of an upright arboreal bed shared with ants. I did not lose my head to wild sexual desire, as I had experienced with Loyalty. I was elated that our friendship, which was so dear to both of us, had safely crossed the threshold into intimacy. We had shared the same neediness. We were glad to let go of loneliness. We were happy to make each other happy.
All the way home, we talked exuberantly about places we wished to visit, and the emotions we had at dawn and dusk—the expectations of the new day, the reverie at dusk—often tripping over each other’s words. But when we returned to the house, our mood turned awkward. Evening was coming, and I would have to prepare for the parties. Once again, I would become a courtesan with suitors waiting to gain my attention and my favors in bed. I decided immediately that tonight there would be no suitors.
“Can you come to my room?” I asked. “I must attend the parties, but I will return alone.”
That night he memorized the geography of me: the changing circumference of my limbs, the distance between two beloved points, the hollows, dimples, and curves, the depth of our hearts pressed together. We conjoined and separated, conjoined and separated, so that we could have the joy of looking into each other’s eyes, before falling into each other again. I slept tucked into him and he wrapped his arms around me, and for the first time in my life, I felt I was truly loved.
In the middle of the night, I felt a shudder followed by three smaller ones. I turned around. He was weeping.
“I’m terrified of losing you,” he said.
“Why would you fear that now?” I stroked his brow and kissed it.
“I want us to love each other so deeply we ache with the fullness of it.”
He had expressed the kind of love that I had nearly convinced myself did not exist, except in the spiritual twin of my own self-being.
He fell quiet, then took a deep breath and slipped out of bed and began to dress.
“Are you leaving?”
“I am preparing for you to ask me to leave.” He sat down on a hard chair and buried his face in his hands. And then he looked at me and said in hollow voice: “I’m damaged, Violet. My soul is damaged, and if we were to join our souls, I would damage you. There is something about me you should know. I’ve never told anyone about it, but if I kept it from you, I would feel vile that I had accepted your love. Once you learned what I had been hiding, it would poison your soul. How could I let that happen to you? I love you too much.”
I immediately put up the old ramparts that had shielded my heart and waited. I still wanted to believe that nothing he would say could be as dire as he felt it was.
He looked me in the face. “I’ve told you my family is rich. I was privileged, spoiled. My parents and grandparents gave me whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to take responsibility for anything. They acted as if I could never do wrong. I’m not blaming them for what I did later. By age twelve I had my own conscience. I could have chosen to do right or wrong.
“What I did happened on a beautiful summer day. My parents and I had gone for a walk in the mountains, to a place called Inspiration Point, where we would have a clear view of Haines Falls. My father had a painting of that waterfall. In fact, he had many paintings of waterfalls, and the one of Haines Falls was not even particularly special. When we arrived, we saw that a family had beaten us to the spot and set up a picnic. I heard my father say ‘dammit’ under his breath. They were exactly where my father had wanted to stand to see the falls. It was an outcropping of flat rock, set back a safe distance from the cliff, about twenty feet. The man and woman greeted us. They had a son about my age, and a girl who was perhaps six or seven. The girl had a large porcelain doll seated next to her, and it looked like her—the same blue dress, curly blond hair.
“I had always been a prankster and liked to scar
e people. I enjoyed their misery. That day, I grabbed the girl’s doll and swung it up in the air. The girl shrieked, as I expected she would, and then I caught it in time. No harm done. She was relieved, and came toward me to retrieve her doll. I threw it up in the air again. Again she shrieked and begged me: ‘Don’t let her fall! She’ll break!’ She started to cry and I was about to stop, but then the boy got up and shouted at me: ‘Let go of her doll right this instant!’ No one ever ordered me around. I said to him, ‘What will you do if I don’t?’ And he answered: ‘I’ll give you a black eye and a bloody nose.’ The girl was screaming, ‘Give her back!’ Their father said something in a warning voice. All this excitement of emotion made me determined to keep up what I was doing. Their mother and father rose and were coming toward me. I shouted: ‘If any of you comes one step closer, I’ll let the doll fall right onto this rock.’ They didn’t move. I remember the feeling of power seeing them so distressed and helpless. I kept swinging that beautiful doll up in the air. Meanwhile, my father had moved to the spot the family had vacated, where he was looking at the falls through his binoculars. The boy took a step toward me and I swung the doll up by one arm to make it go higher. But then the arm tore off, which surprised me. I stared at that odd little arm and wasn’t paying any attention to the doll in the air until I saw the boy rush by me, his face turned up, holding out his arms so he could catch the doll.
“I can still see every bit of what happened next: the doll was falling headfirst. The girl’s mouth was open, horrified. The boy wore a fierce heroic face. ‘I’ll get it!’ he called to her, still looking up. All at once, I saw the doll was not coming down where I had caught it before. It must have been that the torn arm had pitched it to the right, toward the cliff. I saw the doll plummet past the cliff. The boy managed to stop at the edge and his arms were bent and flapping like chicken wings. I willed him to tilt backward to safety. But instead he tipped forward and he groaned—it was an awful sound that came from his gut—and then he was gone and there was nothing but clear blue sky. All the air in my lungs emptied. It couldn’t be true, I told myself.
“I heard the boy’s father call sharply: ‘Tom!’ as if to order the boy to come back. His mother called, ‘Tom?’—as if to ask if he was hurt. The little girl was screaming, ‘Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!’ I heard his name so many times. His mother and father went to the edge. I don’t know if he was still falling and they could see this. They kept saying his name, louder and higher. I was shaking. I was hoping there might be another ledge right below, and that he was still alive. I slowly walked toward the cliff. But my father grabbed my arm, and led me away, and my mother immediately joined us. The man saw us and yelled, ‘Stop! You stop! You’re not getting away with this!’ My father did not look back. He shouted: ‘He did nothing wrong.’ He pushed me forward to make me go more quickly. My mother said to me: ‘It was an accident.’ My father added: ‘What kind of boy would run toward a cliff without looking?’ And then I heard the woman wail: ‘My boy, my boy! He’s gone! He’s dead!’ So then I knew. My father did not need to push me anymore. I was running as fast as I could.
“At home, they said nothing more about what had happened. Everything went on as usual. But I could tell they were still thinking about it. I went to my room and vomited. I was terrified because I could not stop seeing the boy pitching forward. I kept hearing the girl calling him—Tommy! Tommy!—making him alive and gone at the same time. He was gone and I was alive, but evil. Two days later, I saw my father tear a page out of the newspaper, crumple it up, and throw it in the fireplace. He lit it on fire and did not bother to watch it burn. He walked away, just as we had walked away from that family and what I had done. It occurred to me then that he had been standing at a vantage where he would have seen the boy falling. How could he remain so unaffected by what he had seen? Yet he said nothing and I said nothing. I hated myself for not being able to speak. He had saved me from blame, and I was a coward for letting him. I never confessed what I did to anyone.
“I’ve lived with this for thirteen years, and no matter where I run to, the memory of what happened is still with me. It’s as if that boy were my constant companion. The way I imagine him, he’s looking at me, quiet, waiting for me to admit I killed him. In my mind, I do tell him it was my fault, that I was cruel. He doesn’t forgive me. He wants me to tell everybody, and I need to but can’t. Every day, all around me, I see reminders—the clear blue sky, a little girl, the newspaper on the table, those paintings of waterfalls—and I think, It was not an accident. I meant to be cruel. I caused it to happen, and I never admitted it to anyone.”
His eyes looked emptied of life. I was standing on the other side of the room by the time he finished.
I could not stop picturing the boy. I had become the little girl watching her doll and brother disappear from view. I was sickened by his confession. I had allowed myself to trust him and that trust had turned into a poison in my brain.
“Condemn me,” he said.
“Don’t give me that burden,” I said. I was shivering, suddenly cold. “That girl is your judge. Go find her.”
“I’ve tried. I’ve looked for the newspaper story. I asked those who lived in the area.”
Edward put on his coat and gathered his belongings. I would no longer see him. He was leaving me with his confession. He had entrusted his secret to me, and I wished he never had. He meant only to be cruel to that girl, but the death of that boy was still his fault. What he had intended was evil enough—his selfish need, his disregard of others. My mother intended to go to San Francisco to see her son. She may not have intended to leave me behind. Or perhaps she did. The result was the same and she should bear the guilt for all of it, and no matter what excuse she had, whatever trickery it was, she wasn’t any less to blame. Look at my life. I could not go back to being that girl I once was any more than that girl with the doll could. I would always feel betrayed. Edward would always carry guilt, and that was how it should be. We understood that, as victim, as culprit. We both suffered from a hollow in our souls, and only two damaged people could understand what that meant and suffer in that hollow together.
He asked if he should leave. I shook my head. “Oh, Edward,” I said. “What now?” I allowed him to embrace me. I could feel his chest heaving and shaking. He had wanted love so great we would ache with the fullness of it. I ached, knowing it would be less.
OVER THE NEXT few days, Edward and I talked about our wounds. “I have had storms of rage,” I told him, “and when I was caught in them I could think of nothing else and my whole body was filled with poison. Why does love end so quickly and hatred last without end?”
“Could you ever hate without hurting so much?” he said. “Is there no relief? Would constant love from me fill your mind with thoughts of another kind so that there was no room for rage?”
Edward asked if I could trust him enough to leave the courtesan world and live with him. He had asked the very thing I desired for so long. Yet I was not prepared to exchange one uncertain life for another. He had once been reckless with other people’s hearts and lives. Instead of believing he would keep me safe, my need for him made me fragile. I needed honesty, and I was afraid to hear what his next confession might be. I needed complete trust in him, but I could not rid myself of doubts. Instead of loving him freely, I restrained myself, unable to let go.
Over the weeks, I slowly gave in to my longing to entrust myself to love. He poured out every transgression he could recall to prove he would not keep anything from me. He kept to himself after his despicable act and had storms in his mind, as I had, but his were of such ferocious guilt that he thought he would go mad. He had released them to no one. When his parents hired the tutors to write his essays, he now confessed, he let them. When he met Minerva, he had sex with her in a field and had little feeling for her. He had seen prostitutes after he left his wife. He had gone through drunken spells. He masturbated. I laughed at that one. I confided in him my loneliness as a child and the terrible fea
r I had had that I might be half-Chinese. I told him the story of my father enflaming my mother with emotions I had never seen in her, about my shock to discover she had a son, who was more important to her than I had ever been. I spoke of her heartlessness in putting me in the hands of her lover, a man even she did not trust, and who turned out to be an animal who would eat his own mother. I spoke briefly of those days when I believed my mother would return, how I alternated between hope and hatred, until I gave up, and all that remained was hate.
He comforted me. He wanted to understand my sadness and anger. But how can anyone truly understand another’s suffering unless he has felt the wound being made and the moment trust died? He could not go back in time and inhabit my mind as a child, an innocent heart, and my spasms of uncertainty day after long day, night after long night. How could he ever truly understand what it was like to see love fleeting like migrating birds, leaving you with the horror that you were never loved and never would be? He felt only my sadness, just the aftermath. And it would have been enough had I not heard his confession. Now there would always be doubts and not complete trust. Our love would never increase with more gifts of ourselves. Our love would be solace, companionship, and the careful mending of wounds.
I CONTINUED TO attend parties and charm men who might become suitors. I was a good actress caught between love and necessity. Loyalty came back on occasion and tried to renew the better days, as he called them. “Should I be sorry I introduced you to the American?”
The hot moist weather of June descended and made me feel heavy and listless. I brought out my lightweight dresses. One was too worn to wear at parties but was good for idle afternoons. I slipped into the dress. How strange: I could not close the fasteners on the bodice. Had I gained that much weight? Or perhaps it was all those salty pickles I had been eating. I looked at my breasts. The nipples were larger than before. Another thought came hard on the heels of the last. I cast back to when I last had my monthly flow: seven weeks ago, just before a big party. Or was it eight? I had recently complained to the cook that he had served food that was spoiled and had made me ill.
