After his table is bare, every ring and bracelet and hairpin and necklace returned to its owner, Howar finds a note lying at his front door. It looks as if it has drifted here—carefully written, starting to curl, without an envelope and unsigned.
Brother Lee,
Song of Songs 8:7: Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned.
27
BETWEEN THE HABERDASHERY and Locke’s oldest building is a restaurant with a dance floor on the second level. It has wood floors, waxed and treated to minimize the half-moons and nicks left by dancing heels. Chloe finds herself there more often. Richard has not been by in a week, and Chloe must pay her room and board to Madam See.
She starts with a smile and a glance away. The men are surprised to see a whitegirl so coy. They scoot nearer to her chair. She watches the dancers, but there are always little looks to the men to make sure she has not lost their attention. Sometimes they are not Chinese. In the evenings, the revelry opens to everyone and she finds herself talking to Japanese, Filipinos, and whites.
The other girls guide her, because she’s never had to hustle before. Julia leans over and tells Chloe she’d better stand up and dance. Not only that, she’d better grab a guy and pull him in. She’d better flaunt herself.
Chloe dislikes being the center of attention, but she loves to dance. She eases herself into the dance floor crowd and begins to show off what she learned in New York. She spins and stamps until she’s lost in the furious noises of men going mad with the passion of music-making; the insistent thrum of a bassist’s finger and the pluck of a guitar. The horns wail their piece too. every one of them, she thinks, has sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. The pomade in her hair gets warm, her curls come loose, and her body gets damp.
Her hips nudge against other dancers. The attention that was once on her and her stylish moves shifts away; she is part of the crowd. Chloe delights in the anonymity, especially as Julia’s hoots and shrieks draw the looks away. I can’t dance! Julia exclaims and laughs as a man grabs her and spins her and leads the way. It is just Chloe dancing, alone, eyes closed in a rising euphoria of hot bodies and loud music and the ground thumping beneath with the movements of a hundred feet. She wants to clasp this one moment of joy and not think of what comes next: a man too impatient to make it inside the brothel, tumbling under the levee-side porch, Chloe crying because her dress’ll be ruined in the dirt, and she had to pay three dollars for it out of the Bernard-Hewitt catalog. She closes her fist a little tighter and keeps dancing.
28
PASSING BY, RICHARD hears about Chloe’s tumble beneath the porch. He stops, tips his head: What? The laughing men, gathered at the back of the Lucky Fortune to smoke, muffle their snickers, concentrate on their cigarettes. even the man who has been drawn in from his bench seat returns to perusing the newspaper.
What did you say? Richard asks. He turns to Manny, who shouldn’t be in there anyway. He should be in the alley, giving the last kick to poor losing saps. Manny hocks into the spit-toon. Chloe. Last night. A snicker catches in someone’s nose, but Manny does not smile.
The anger swells up with such force that Richard coughs before he speaks: The problem with this town is that no one has anything better to do than gossip.
It’s clear you’ve had your hands full, says Arthur Sun. The cool voice, the way he glances off to the side when he exhales smoke—this man has suckled Chloe’s breasts and seen the shimmer-line of hair that leads from belly button down. Richard wants to throw himself on Arthur, knock the cigarette from his hand, break the smirk from his face. But the others would be upon him in an instant, pulling at his suit and urging calm. This would give him no satisfaction, so he goes to find Chloe.
POPPY JUMPS WHEN he slams the door. He locks it. She smiles a little, stops.
You’re not here to say you love me. She turns back to her work. Richard swipes his hands across her desk and her books are on the floor, bindings humped, pages bent, edges dust-marked.
What are you doing? She acts as if outraged men lock themselves in her office everyday. She takes a pack of cigarettes out of her drawer and taps one out. I’d offer you one, but with that sort of behavior . . . She lights her cigarette.
What are you doing? He shoots the question back to her.
One must hold up his end for the other to hold up hers. Chloe has bills to pay.
He kicks a book. You’re not fair, Poppy.
He watches her face for some revelation. She’s beautiful—tiny lines by her eyes like crackled porcelain, a pert mouth and indifferent black eyes—but too cold to be attractive. Chloe chooses how she pays her bills, Poppy says. I just collect the rent. Talk to her.
He leaves the office. George is on his heels, stuttering: Mr. Fong, s-stop. You can’t go up there. Then Poppy’s voice floats out of the office like a salvation, Goddammit, George, let him go.
CHLOE BACKS HERSELF against the bed. Richard clenches his fists. He brings his hand up to his mouth and coughs. His heart has never beat like this. His stomach wrenches in happy anticipation of a fight. Chloe’s eyes are wide and blue and unfazed. Why does everyone refuse to be startled by him today?
He kicks the nightstand. This is thank you? He kicks the nightstand. This, this is thank you? The drawer cracks and falls askew.
Madam See will make you pay for that. He detects a tattle-tale rise and fall in her voice.
Richard slams his fist on top of the nightstand. The wood caves. I paid for this! I’ll break whatever I want! The pain feels good, cuts into the passion poisoning his blood.
Richard, calm down. A quiver of crying in her voice, but no apology. His hand sweeps the vase to the floor. The shatter pops like breaking bones.
Why can’t you say you’re sorry? Aren’t you sorry? He coughs. He tears the curtains from the rod. He stumbles backward, out of the way of the dowel that swings free from its bolts. The red gauze still clenched in his hands. Back to the window. He hefts it open with one hand and lets free the curtains. They drift toward the ground, then snag, hanging off the building in a frayed wrinkle of red.
Chloe scoots herself against the headboard and brings her knees to her chest. What was I supposed to do? What did you want me to do? She begins to cry, but the remorse comes too late.
He leaps onto the bed. Through her hiccups and crying, she pleads, Stop it stop it stop it. She crosses her arms in front of her face. Richard pulls at her arms with one hand and grabs her hair with the other. He smacks her face. Chloe screams. Richard throws himself on top of her, yanks her head toward him, and, not knowing quite what else to do, bites her neck. She tears at his hair and tries to knee him away. When he tastes blood, the whirlwind of all the minutes, the blankness of his mind, clears. He releases her. The poison subsides. He moves to the end of the bed, coughing. everything’s been released in the press of teeth on tendons. The circle of bloody teeth marks on Chloe’s neck starts to bruise. Richard’s hands shake. Chloe curls up and cries quietly.
He stands up. Sweat pinpricks his forehead. Compared to blind blank fury, his mind feels full and chaotic and phlegm clots his chest. He looks around the destroyed room.
He says over and over, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. He leaves the room. George and Poppy are not waiting outside with reprimands. He swallows and waits for the taste of Chloe’s blood to leave his mouth.
AFTER MADAM SEE leaves the room, broken vase carried in a dustpan, Chloe’s fingers lift up to touch the tenderness of her cheek. She takes a mirror from the splintered drawer and looks at the bruise that cradles her eye like a split plum. Her lids are not swollen, thank goodness, the eye unharmed and protected by bone. She tips her head and looks at her neck. Splotchy red and adorned with two facing crescents of broken skin. The bite is not deep—just enough to scab a little, and to bruise around the scabs. She runs her fingers over it lightly. The marks are small and even.
She takes a deep b
reath and replaces the mirror. The drawer takes some jiggling to close and the splinters nip at her skin. It is the nipping, not the sight of her battered skin, that finally makes her cry again.
She wants to dig her nails into her flesh, grab hold and peel it back. She wants to shear away her hair, leaving bristles and white scalp behind. She wants to scrub at all the places where the world enters her body until they bleed and renew. She grabs her hair and presses back her screaming sobs. She kicks her feet against the bed. She doesn’t want to leave home, or New York, or Madam See’s, she realizes—she wants to leave herself.
The impossibility makes her cry harder. She turns and muffles her mouth in her pillow, bites hard on cotton and down. When she was ten, all she’d wanted to be was a school-teacher. She’d been diligent with her letters, with her math, but could never rise beyond being a mediocre student. This she had not imagined. She wonders if any woman in Madam See’s had—no, this was the alternate future, the life that tumbles down when being a nurse or a schoolteacher or a secretary or a shopgirl fails.
Whore. Chloe whispers the word to herself; it’s the first time she’s let it come off her tongue. I’m a whore. It startles her to speak it. The words linger in the broken red room, their presence suddenly transforming the room from a romance of brocade wallpaper and lantern light into a contrived space where money is exchanged for her flesh. She touches her cheek and whimpers at the soreness.
Her skin tingles as her tears subside—all the discrete moments of the past two years come together into a stomach flutter, a quickening heartbeat. Her back on the cold tile floor in New York, belly rising six months fat. Alfred turning her away in San Francisco. Her brother in the movie theater, and then her swaggering promise to Sofia that she will step out of this town just as she stepped out of her own two years ago. The twinges of intuition gather, shape themselves as coherent words in her mind. She must leave Locke. She will leave Locke.
IT WAS ONLY a dime-store vase, milky white and adorned with Mediterranean-blue flowers that bloomed around the circumference. But the clatter of the shards into the trash made Poppy cringe, and so she finds herself knocking on Richard’s door. She hears shuffling inside. She knocks again and Richard answers.
When he had left the brothel, she’d not noticed how haggard he looks. He stands in the doorway now with thin sagged shoulders, a pale tint to his lips. He coughs into his shoulder, rubs his mouth against the angular joint, and says, I’m sorry, Poppy. His face is expressionless and the smears of darkness under his eyes seem to draw them down. With such blankness in his voice, how can she be sure of his sincerity?
What were you—
Please, can we talk about this later?
No. Let me in.
My wife, he says in english.
I don’t care. She pushes gently against the door. It nudges past Richard, then swings open. Richard sighs and looks to the couch.
His wife sits there, looking at Poppy. Ming Wai. Poppy’s memories of her face from the day of the Dragon Boat Festival are not too clear and now it is like seeing her again for the first time. She is small—smaller than Poppy, even—with a thin, compact body. The darkness of her eyes seeps from corner to corner, the whites barely visible. And her complexion—cast in blue like skin on boiled milk. Poppy cannot speak.
And then there is the smell. Poppy purses her mouth. on the surface, it is the smell of a small apartment lived in for days by two people without a fan or an open window. every breath that leaves the body contained in a few rooms until pore-stench, lung-stench, and shit smell combine. Below this, heightened by Poppy’s senses, it’s the smell of the dead stealing from the living—the way a decaying corpse can poison a river or a house. Richard brings his fist up to his mouth, coughs, and says, Come in if you must come in.
Ming Wai challenges Poppy with her eyes. Though she is small, she sits as if she owns the couch. As if she owns the card table that sits off to the left, the short shelf of knickknacks out of sight that Poppy remembers from her only visit, the nubs of stained carpet. Poppy realizes there is more at stake than Chloe’s bruised face or Richard’s bad behavior. Poppy’s dreams and panic, she is now sure, lead back to this source—to this apartment and to this woman. Is Ming Wai there, but not there? With the heaviness of a body but the ephemerality of a spirit?
Poppy drops her gaze. I’m sorry, Richard. I won’t bother you. I must go.
Richard clears his throat and nods as he eases the door shut.
Poppy turns away to face the sun.
29
The River Ghost (1910)
A WHOOP AROSE from the riverside. Not a yell of joy, but of alarm and warning that caused Po Pei to stop tossing stones and look in the direction of the river. Houses obscured her view, but she saw her neighbor, Old Chan, run past the field with the soles of his shoes flopping, followed by a pack of dirty-faced children. Po Pei stood stork-still to watch them pass, caught up in the swirl of kicked-up dust and excited cries.
Girl, what are you doing? her father yelled from a few rows over. His shoulder muscles tensed under the strain of the plow. She glanced at him, then stooped to find more stones, moving slowly so as to untangle the commotion of sound that wound from the river, around houses, and to her father’s turnip field. The sun was hot on the back of her neck and burned through her thin cotton shirt. She swiped her arm against her sweaty forehead. Dirt had crept into the crack of a broken toenail and stung. The voices at the water grew more insistent, broken up by the oohs and aahs of children.
The whole field seemed to be stone-filled. Po Pei wondered where they came from each planting season, because she was sure she’d cleared them all away the year before. She brushed her dirty hands on her pants. How could she get to the river? She tried to swallow with a dry mouth and felt the tightness in her throat.
Ba, I’m going for water, she shouted. He looked at the expanse of rock-cleared soil between the two of them and nodded.
She walked slowly to the house. Against the east wall, she leaned to unroll her pant cuffs and shook out the dirt. When she rounded the corner, out of sight from her father, she broke into a run to the river. She glanced from side to side into the round courtyard doorways of her neighbors, glided past walls made of packed mud and straw. She held her breath as she skipped by the henhouse to avoid its hot, feathery scent. Finally she broke through the winding dirt alleys and approached the waterfront.
There were three men waist deep, struggling with something large in the water. Old Chan, Po Pei’s neighbor, stood close by. He tried to ease forward to help, but there was room only for three and he inched back, stepped from side to side, and tried to be useful. The children, elbow-high to Po Pei, clung to each other on the shore, occasionally turning their faces into another’s shoulder, or stamping giddy feet and crying out.
What’s going on? she asked them.
They found a woman, one answered.
Some sampans gathered, steadied in the water by long poles. The observers left an arc of space around the men, their faces were grim, and one could nearly make out the squint of disapproval.
One of the men turned away with a scowl, brought his hand to his face, and covered his nose and mouth. Then, with a breath, back to the body. Another man, shirtless, backed up onto the shore, dragging two swollen legs. The other two held her arms. Old Chan followed them out of the water, saying, Gently, gently.
Po Pei stepped forward. She tried to peek beyond the men’s shoulders and saw only the gleam of their skin. She stepped forward again, four paces, and finally she could see through the space between their bodies.
The woman was so bloated that her skin shone. The lace of algae across her face further obscured her identity. Was it an accident? the people asked one another. They didn’t utter the other possibility. This alternative fascinated Po Pei. Not murder, but suicide arising out of a scandal. She had heard that in other villages unfaithful women were bundled up in baskets like pigs and tossed into the water. She’d never seen the punishment her
self, and in most cases the offending woman drowned herself first to save face. Fifteen years old and feeling the first ripples of passion, Po Pei realized yet another motivation. Perhaps the women killed themselves not to save face, but out of passion, out of frustrated desire. Po Pei tried to move even closer.
The woman’s wrist had swollen around and nearly hidden a thin jade bracelet. Old Chan saw it and cried out his wife’s name. She went to see her mother, he explained, three days ago. He grimaced, as if he wanted to hold the body, but couldn’t bring himself to. Instead he pulled stones from the pockets of her torn coat.
See Po Pei! She turned at the sound of her father’s angry voice calling her name. The men gathered around the body looked up and the children snickered. Worthless girl! I should trade you for a bag of rice! Better yet, I’ll sell you to America. He grabbed her arm. Po Pei tipped her head and blushed as the children laughed. When I’m done whipping her, I’ll come back for you, her father shouted at the children. They shrieked and giggled as they tried to hide behind each other.
Po Pei’s father began to pull her away, but her feet resisted and dragged in the sand. He stopped and followed her eyes to the body. His loosening fingers caught her attention. In his face, there was a glancing recognition and the shimmer of a hundred other things. She watched him and tried to tease out the meaning of his expression. Old Chan’s wife was twenty-six, and had not yet had children. She smiled too easily, Po Pei’s mother had complained, but her father never seemed to mind. Old Chan was much older; she was his second wife, and he had grown children in other villages. She didn’t slip, despite what Old Chan muttered over and over. She threw herself. Her father’s nostrils flared. He remembered himself, yanked Po Pei away. As they walked quickly toward the field, he pressed his mouth to her ear and said, That is what happens to women who don’t obey.
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