Six women and six children stood stock-still and silent in the bare courtyard. Respectfully reserved, I figured, in an old-fashioned way. Their clothes were well made but of dull-colored cloth and in somber hues of blue, brown, and gray, and, as I had feared, in the style of widows and old women. Even the younger women were dressed like this. The clothes we had brought were not fashionable in Shanghai, but here they were unfortunate. We were peacocks among crows. Bedraggled peacocks. Perhaps they were waiting for me to speak first, as is the case with imperial visitors. Didn’t Magic Gourd say their traditions harkened back thousands of years? Perpetual had said five generations lived under one roof. I quickly studied the faces of those who should receive my obsequious words. The oldest woman must be the great-grandmother. She had the driest face I had ever seen. Her eyes looked dull, as they do on those who are soon to depart this life. Another old woman had fewer wrinkles. The grandmother, I deduced, and the woman who was his mother was likely the woman with the stoniest face and upright posture, the mother-in-law I would have to win over or conquer. Sweet talk was necessary for now. There were two other women, one younger than me and another a little older. She wore a hairstyle that had been fashionable in Shanghai several years ago: parted at the middle, creating two curved locks that framed her face. I gave them no more than a glance, since they were less important. I searched for Perpetual’s son. There were five boys and an older girl, and I soon recognized his four-year-old son by his ears, eyes, and eyebrows. He was studying my unbound feet.
My new mother-in-law finally spoke in a harsh voice. “So you have arrived. What do you think of your new home? Surprised? Pleased?”
I recited the stilted phrases I had rehearsed—extolling the reputation of their family, its ten generations of virtue, my honor in joining them as the First Wife of their eldest son, stopping short of saying I was undeserving of this position.
She turned to the woman with the curved lock hairstyle and said something, which caused the woman to tilt her chin up, and sneer at me, as if I had just insulted her. I noticed that she was actually quite striking.
Magic Gourd chattered in a simpering voice, “We were worried the entire journey that you were growing impatient. The roads, the weather, and there was a perilous mudslide that nearly swept us away—”
The mother-in-law cut her off. “We knew when to expect you. We even knew the color of your theatrical clothes.”
Theatrical! Did she mean to insult us? Two men at the far end of the courtyard waved to us. The leering sons of the wine seller.
Old Jump yelled at his sons to unload our belongings. They smacked the ground and a halo of dust rose around them. A servant looked warily at the mother-in-law.
“Put her in the north wing,” the mother-in-law said.
North! That was the worst corner of any house, the direction of wind and cold sun. Surely Perpetual would not have his rooms there. Or was it tradition to place a bride far from the main wing until the official marriage ceremony?
“And put her maid’s things in the room next to hers.”
Magic Gourd tilted her head and put on a fake small smile. “I apologize to even mention this. I am her elder sister, not her maid—”
“We know who you are,” the mother-in-law cut in, “and what you both did in Shanghai.” She sniffed. “This isn’t the first time Perpetual has brought back a whore as a concubine.” She looked at me. “But you’re the first foreign mix.”
I was too stunned to think or speak. Magic Gourd talked excitedly, “She was no common whore. She was—” She stopped herself just in time. She straightened up, gathered herself, and said in an authoritative voice, “She has come here as Wife, not concubine. That was the promise. Why else would we come all the way from Shanghai? You must talk to Perpetual to correct this misunderstanding.”
“A maid is not allowed to say what I must do. I’ll beat you senseless if you try that again.”
My own senses returned, and I grabbed Magic Gourd’s arm. “Never mind. When Perpetual returns, we’ll put this in order.” Finally I understood what this ill-treatment by a future mother-in-law was about. Did this rusticated bitch think I would be cowed? I had the skill to defeat the plots of courtesans and madams. She was no match for me. I would simply have to be patient and learn what was most important to her. There lay her weakness, which I would expose and wound.
“We’re tired,” I said. “Please show us to our rooms.” The woman with the handsome face told the mother-in-law she would take us there. And the mother-in-law gave her an odd smile.
As we passed through the house, I noticed an odd combination of new furniture and old in ill repair. The altar table was large, of good quality, but the top was burned. The ancestor paintings had been torn in half and clumsily repaired. We went through the corridors of two courtyards, and finally we reached the farthermost courtyard, a neglected small place, more like an alleyway, and with only two bushes, a skinny scholar rock propped next to a dry pond, and two lichen-spotted benches. A spider’s web lay across the door, as if to keep me from entering. I swept it aside and opened the door. It was worse than I had expected—furnished with a rickety-framed bed, without curtains on its sides, a wardrobe closet of cheap wood, a low stool, a bench, and, underneath the bed, a short wooden chamber pot. The room had been swept, but the corner pockets were dirty. If I stood in the center of the room, I could take only one step in any direction before I bumped into the furniture.
Magic Gourd peered into her room from the doorway. “Oyo! I am living in a chicken coop. Where are my eggs?” It held only a narrow bed, stool, and chamber pot. She cursed repeatedly. “What manners do people have here? We were not offered tea or food, only insults. They called me a maid!” She turned around and said to the handsome woman. “Why are you still here? To take glee in our misery?”
The woman called to a maid passing through the corridor. “Bring tea, peanuts, and fruits.” Our bags arrived. I would not bother to open them. Perpetual would come any day now, and then my belongings would be placed in his room. I would have to see what I could do about Magic Gourd and her accommodations. I could not solve everything at once. We sat in the courtyard, and when the tea arrived, we drank greedily, dispensing with the dainty sips between idle chat. Why should I bother to impress this woman with my manners?
“Who are you?” I asked the woman.
“I’m Second Wife,” she said simply.
I was astonished that she spoke Shanghainese. She must be the concubine of Perpetual’s brother, or uncle, or cousin.
“That makes you Number Three,” the woman said. “You can bow to me later.”
Who was this Shanghainese woman? “You may be Second Wife or Sixteenth Wife to someone else in this house,” I said. “But I am First Wife to Perpetual.”
“Shall I do you the favor of telling you what kind of household you’ve come to? It will save you from as many beatings and heartache as I endured. Your shock and disbelief will only entertain others in this house.”
“What nonsense,” Magic Gourd muttered. She held herself stiffly, a sign she was nervous. “I’m sure you’ll concoct all sorts of lies in hopes you can drive us away. If we leave, it will be because we choose to do so.”
“I would not do that, Auntie,” she said to Magic Gourd.
Magic Gourd shot back: “I’m not your auntie or anyone’s maid, Elder Sister.” It was a weak insult. The woman was at least ten years younger.
“Even if I wanted to chase you away, how could I? Where would you go instead? The man with the cart has left. You cannot hire another in this village. And why should I lie? I have nothing to hide. Anyone else in this house will tell you the same. You are Perpetual’s Third Wife, just another Shanghainese courtesan who came here for a comfortable future.”
My heart and head were pounding.
“Did Perpetual tell you about a first wife?” she said. “Azure. His true love before he met you. As smart as a scholar. Dead at age seventeen. Or was it twenty? Such a sad story
, wasn’t it?”
“He told me,” I said. “There are no secrets between husband and wife.”
“Then why didn’t he tell you about me?”
What trap was she setting?
“Still don’t believe me?” she said with mock disappointment. “Let me guess. Did he recite this poem: ‘It was an endless time before we met, but longer still since she left.’ Did he fail to say it was Li Shangyin who wrote that?” I wanted to slap her to make her stop.
“You see!” Magic Gourd said. “I knew that man was a trickster.”
“It’s a poem that causes many a woman to lose her heart,” she said. “Ah, I can see you are losing your doubt in me and growing doubt over him. The knife of knowledge is piercing your brain. It takes time to adjust, but once you learn your place, you and I will get along. But if you fight me, I will have to make your life miserable. Don’t forget that we’ve all been courtesans and know the art of destroying each other. When we come to the end of our golden days in the flower house, we don’t change our character. We still need to avoid being trampled.”
Magic Gourd sneered. “What does a streetwalker know about golden days?”
“You don’t remember the name Luscious Peach?”
There had been a celebrated courtesan by that name who came several times to my mother’s house on party calls. It was always a big occasion when she did. But she could not possibly be the same. The Luscious Peach I knew had firm round cheeks and a gay manner, as if she were always amused by everything she noticed. This woman had dull skin. She had more of the no-nonsense harshness of a madam. She stood up and walked in front of us, and transformed into an ageless beauty, moving with the flowing water style, reminiscent of the old days. Her limbs were soft and loose, her hips gently swayed, her shoulders moved in turn, and her head tipped back and forth ever so slightly, all with a perfect rhythm of ease. It was the look of a seductress, an adept yet pliant woman. Luscious Peach had been famous for it. No one could copy exactly how she walked and what she had done, though we had all tried.
She smiled, victorious. “I’m known as Pomelo now—a bit drier than a peach. I came for the same reason you did. A few poems, honorable wife in a scholar family, a fear for my future. When I arrived, I learned his wife was still alive. You heard right. She never died. He only hoped that she would. You’ve already met her. The woman who spoke to you when you arrived.”
“I spoke only to the mother-in-law.”
“That was Azure, First Wife. As you saw, she is quite healthy.”
I felt the same as I had when my mother left me, not anguish, but anger rising as I realized all the ways I had been duped. What else would I learn?
“I think you’ve heard enough for now,” Pomelo said. “It is too much to understand all at once. Just remember, we are not the only ones.”
“There are others here?” I asked.
“Two others—at least two—but no longer. I knew one but not the other. Come to my courtyard tomorrow afternoon. The west side. We can have lunch and I will then tell you more about this house and how we happen to be here.”
I couldn’t speak. I expected Magic Gourd to recount all the warnings she had given me, all the reasons why she had not trusted Perpetual. She could have blamed me for a stupid decision that had brought her to this same madhouse. Instead, she looked at me with a sad mouth and pained eyes.
“Fuck his mother,” she said, “fuck his uncle and fuck his wife’s rotten cunt. What a pile of shit he fed you. He should lick his own anus where all it came from. And then a dog and a monkey should fuck his ass.”
I went to my room. I took off the silk jacket and used it to wipe the dirt out of the corners of the room, cursing him the whole while. “Fuck his mother, fuck his uncle …” I opened the valise where I kept those things most precious to me. I pulled out his poems between stiff covers. I spit on them and tore them to pieces, then put them in the chamber pot and pissed on them. I took out Edward’s and Little Flora’s photographs and I placed them on the bed. I said to them, “I’ve never loved anyone else,” and I felt victorious because it was true.
The next day, Magic Gourd told me the wall between us was thin and she could hear that I forgot to say that a dog and a monkey should fuck Perpetual’s ass. “You also didn’t cry,” she said.
“Didn’t you hear me vomit?” Throughout the night, I had been gathering in my mind pieces of what had happened, what he had told me, what I had offered, what he had taken and what he refused until I offered it again. I compared those pieces against what we knew so far, and it was enough to make me sick. I didn’t even know who he was.
“We have to leave this place,” I said.
“How? We have no money, none of our jewelry. Don’t you remember? He said to put it in a strongbox that he would carry for you. And then we went separate ways.”
A maid came and announced the family was gathering for breakfast. I told her we were sick and pointed to the chamber pot. Magic Gourd claimed the same. We did not want to see the others until we knew more. At noon, we went to Pomelo’s courtyard on the west wing. We sat outside under a plum tree. She did not invite us into her room, but by the number of windows, it looked much larger than ours.
The maid brought lunch, but I was not hungry. Although Pomelo had an honest face and open way of speaking, I didn’t know how I could trust anyone in this house. As she spoke I listened with one ear attuned to lies.
Like me, when she arrived from Shanghai, Perpetual was not there. The coward did not want to be present when she learned the truth. When he finally arrived, he told her that he truly thought his wife would have been dead by then. She would not last much longer, he assured her, and soon, he said, Pomelo would be his rightful wife.
“Why did I believe him?” she said. “We courtesans are experts at spotting men’s outward lies and half-truths. They leave out facts, the most important ones. We can still see through them. But with Perpetual, I was fooled. Why was that? When I came here, Azure really was ill. He took me to her room. There I saw a woman who looked like a skeleton. She lay motionless on the bed, and her eyes were open, staring upward like a dead fish. Her skin was pulled over her bones like a shroud. I was both horrified and happy that what Perpetual had said was true. Azure would soon die. Yet, I thought it odd that he did not go to her side and speak a few tender words. Hadn’t he talked about their love as their reunion from past lives? What was it he had said about their fate? Their spirits were like twin constellations, fixed in the sky and eternal! That was it. He knew he was going to be devastated without her, so he had to prepare by pretending she was already gone. Imagine that! My heart was so wide open, I would have believed him if he had said he was the God of Literature and I the lowly Milking Maiden.”
Pomelo learned over time that Perpetual had twisted the truth to its opposite in nearly everything about her. Bit by bit, the real facts came out. From the age of ten, he had been shackled to a marriage contract, unbreakable because of the large dowry paid. His family needed the money. What does a ten-year-old boy know about marriages, dowries, and who his bride behind the veil might be? Perpetual was sixteen when he first saw her, and he was aghast that she was a scrawny woman ten years older than he, with one squinty eye and a wide mouth whose upper row of teeth leaned out. The lower row was as crooked and discolored as the kernels in a bad ear of corn. He was angry—not at his family for taking the dowry—but at Azure for being ugly. He went to his wife’s room only to perform his breeding duties. “Once she gave birth to our son,” he told Pomelo, “I no longer had to seed the furrow.” Thereafter, he traveled to other villages and satisfied himself with prostitutes.
“Furrow!” Magic Gourd said. “What kind of man uses an expression like that for the mother of his child? A donkey ought to seed his ass!”
“He told me he grieved as a chaste man for three years.” Pomelo said.
“With Violet, it was five,” Magic Gourd said, and snorted. I did not appreciate her letting Pomelo know I was even more
of a fool.
“When I came I knew none of this. I could not tell how old Azure was or what she looked like. She was an apparition hanging on by a fingernail. But it was strange, very uncomfortable to see how little feeling Perpetual had for her. He never went to her room and I did not remind him of his years of being chaste. Like him, I was waiting for Azure to die, which I was sure would happen the next week, then the one after that.”
Every few days, Pomelo had gone to the room to see how much more flesh had fallen off Azure’s bones, whether her eyes were still moist or were dull and flat, signaling death had come.
“It was like staring at an old tortoise that never moved,” she said. “I would have had sympathy for her if she weakened more each day until her face turned gray and she died. But she was the same every time I saw her. It made me so mad.”
One day, Pomelo said, she decided to settle into her role as Wife sooner than later. She went to Azure’s room and took a tally of Azure’s furniture and other belongings. She wrote down what she wanted and what she did not, talking aloud as she criticized the jewelry or clothes. “Cheap stuff. This would make a beautiful woman look hideous. She sat before the mirror of the vanity table, and pinched her cheeks to make them rosy and healthy-looking. She practiced her facial expressions, which she then could pull out as needed—agreeable, trusting, willing, dutiful, pleased, and grateful. She put extra effort into looking enamored. She opened a drawer and took out a necklace that had been in the family for hundreds of years, a mosaic of pearls, rubies, and jade set into linked curved bars, with a large pendant of pink topaz. She draped it around her neck and looked in the mirror. It was crude in design and the stones were not the best quality. But it was the family heirloom that each generation of wives had worn.
Just as she reached to undo the clasp, she heard someone calling her. “Second Wife, Second Wife.” It was a raspy whisper, like that of a ghost. She nearly jumped out of her skin, thinking that Azure was using her last breath to curse her for wearing the necklace before she died. But then Azure spoke again, and her lips actually moved. “He can be cruel,” she said to Pomelo. “He cannot help it. He has a sickness in his brain. You should escape before you suffer from it.”