Lisa See - Peony in Love

No wonder she was furious when we were walking back to the women’s quarters.

Ren stroked my cheek. He was ready for something more, but I had to try to make sense out of what had happened.

“So you decided it was me based on intuition?” I persisted.

He smiled, and I thought, If we had married, this is how he would have responded to me at those times when I couldn’t release my obstinacy.

“It was very simple,” he said. “After the announcement, your father dismissed the women. When the men stood up, I quickly separated myself from them and hurried through the garden until I saw the procession. You were at the front. The women were treating you as a bride already.” He bent down and whispered in my ear. “I thought how lucky we were that we wouldn’t be strangers on our wedding night. I was happy—with your face, your golden lilies, your manner.” He straightened up again and said,

“After that night, I dreamed about our future life. We were to spend our days in words and in love. I sent you The Peony Pavilion. Did you get it?”

How could I tell him that my obsession with it had caused my death?

So many mistakes. So many errors. So much tragedy as a result. In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only. If only I hadn’t left the opera on the first night, I would have gone to my marriage and met Ren on my wedding night without incident. If only I had kept my eyes open when my father pointed out Ren. If only my father had given me the peony the next morning or a month or even a week before I died. How could fate be so merciless?

“We can’t change what’s happened, but maybe our future isn’t hopeless,” Ren said. “Mengmei and Liniang found a way, didn’t they?”

I didn’t yet fully understand how things worked here, or what I would be allowed to do, but I said, “I won’t leave you. I’ll stay with you forever.”

Ren tightened his arms around me and I buried my face in his shoulder. This was where I needed to be, but then he pulled away and gestured to the rising sun.

“I’ve got to go,” he said.

“But I have so many things to tell you. Don’t leave me,” I pleaded.

He smiled. “I hear my servant in the hall. He’s bringing my tea.”

Then, just as he had on the first night of the opera, he asked me to meet him again. With that, he was gone.

I stayed right there all day and into the night, waiting for him to come ( 1 0 6 )

to me in his dreams. Those hours gave me a lot of time to think. I wanted to be an amorous ghost. In The Peony Pavilion, Liniang had done clouds and rain with Mengmei first in her dream and then later as a ghost. When she became human again, she still had her virginity and was unwilling to compromise her chastity before marriage. But could that happen in real life? Apart from The Peony Pavilion, almost every other ghost story in-volved a female spirit who ruined, maimed, or killed her lover. I remembered a story my mother told me in which the ghost-heroine kept herself from touching her scholar with the words “These moldering bones from the grave are no match for the living. A liaison with a ghost only hastens a man’s death. I could not bear to harm you.” I couldn’t risk hurting Ren in this way either. Like Liniang, I was destined to be a wife. Even in death—

especially in death—I couldn’t show my husband that I was anything less than a lady. As Liniang observed, A ghost may be deluded by passion; a woman must pay full attention to the rites.

That night, when Ren came again to the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, we talked about poetry and flowers, about beauty and qing, about lasting love and the temporary love of teahouse girls. When he left at daybreak, I was disconsolate. The whole time I was with him, I wanted to reach inside his tunic and touch his skin. I wanted to whisper the messages of my heart into his ear. I wanted to see and touch what he kept hidden inside his trousers, just as I wanted him to peel away my layers of longevity clothes until he found that place that was yearning, even in death, to be touched.

The following night, he brought with him paper, ink, inkstone, and brushes. He took my hand and together we ground the ink against the stone, and then we walked to the lake, where he cupped my hands so that I might bring back water to mix the ink.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me the words to write.”

I thought of my experiences of the last weeks and then began to compose.

“Soaring across the sky in never-ending sleeplessness.

The mountains are fresh with dew,

The lake glimmers.

You draw me to you from across the clouds.”

When the last words fell from my lips, he set down the brush and removed my padded jacket with the sleeves embroidered in the kingfisher pattern.

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He wrote the next poem, his calligraphy as sumptuous as a caress. He called it “Visitation from a Goddess,” and it was about me.

“Unable to express the sadness of your parting, Darkness without end.

You come to me in a dream.

I am flooded by thoughts of what should have been.

But I find it here, with you, goddess of my heart.

A sudden sob wakes me from my dream.

Alone again.”

Together we wrote eighteen poems. I’d say one line and he’d come up with the next, often borrowing from the opera that we loved. “Tonight I come to you whole in body, full of love, yours in every desire,” I quoted Liniang after her secret marriage. Each line was a revealed intimacy. Each line brought us closer together. And each poem got shorter and shorter as layer after layer of my longevity clothes fell to the ground. I forgot my concerns.

Everything was reduced to words like pleasure, ripples, temptations, surging, clouds.

Dawn broke, and he was ripped away from me. Simply gone. The sun was fully up in the sky and I was down to my last layers of clothes. The dead don’t feel heat and cold in the usual way. Rather, we feel something deeper, something connected to the emotions of these sensations. I shivered uncontrollably, but I didn’t dress again. I waited all day and into the night for Ren to come back to me, but he didn’t. The next thing I knew, strong forces pulled me away from the Moon-Viewing Pavilion. I wore only my inner garment and a gown embroidered with birds flying in a pair above flowers.

i had b e e n dead five weeks, and the three aspects of my soul began to wrench apart irrevocably. One part settled forever in my corpse, the roaming part began to drift to the ancestor tablet, while my afterworld soul arrived at the Viewing Terrace of Lost Souls. At this point, the dead are so sad and filled with longing that they are given one last chance to look at their homes and listen to their families. From my great distance, I searched along the shore of West Lake until I came to my family home. At first all I could see were trivial things: the servants emptying my mother’s chamber pot, the concubines arguing over a dish of lion’s head, Shao’s ( 1 0 8 )

daughter hiding her embroidery patterns between the folds of my copy of The Peony Pavilion. But I also saw my parents’ sorrow and was stabbed through with remorse. I had died from too much qing. I had left the world because an abundance of emotion had overwhelmed me, sapped my strength, and clouded my thoughts. Below me, Mama cried and I realized she’d been right. I should have stayed away from The Peony Pavilion. It had brought out too much passion, despair, and hope in me, and now here I was, separated from my family and my husband.

Baba, as the eldest son, was in charge of all the rites. His main duty and responsibility now were to see me properly interred and my ancestor tablet dotted. My family and our servants prepared more paper offerings—all those things they thought I might need for my new life. They made clothes, food, rooms, and books for my entertainment. They did not provide a palanquin, because even in death Mama did not want me to go abroad. On the eve of my funeral, these offerings were burned in the street. From the Viewing Terrace, I saw Shao use a stick to beat at the fire and the leaves of paper as they twisted in the flames to keep away the spirits who wanted to take my belongings. My father should have had one of my uncles do this to show he meant business and my mother should have thrown rice around the edges of the fire to attract the attention of the hungry ghosts who craved the food, because Shao did not scare away the spirits and nearly everything was stolen before I had a chance to receive it.