Lisa See - Peony in Love

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“What if it’s a son?” Ren asked.

The doctor wavered. When he saw Ze’s writing scraps scattered about the room, he said sadly, “Every day I see it and I don’t know what to do.

Literacy is a grave threat to the female sex. Too often I’ve seen the health and happiness of young women fade because they will not give up their brush and ink. I’m afraid”—and here he put a comforting hand on Ren’s arm—“that we will look back and blame the lovesickness caused by writing for your wife’s death.”

I thought, not for the first time, that Doctor Zhao knew very little about women or love.

at t h i s m o st grim moment, as the Wu household settled in for the deathwatch, my adopted brother arrived. Bao’s appearance shocked us all, for we were all so focused on someone who was literally wasting away while he was abundantly fat. In his pudgy fingers he held the poems I’d written when I was dying and hidden in the book on dam building in my father’s library. How had Bao found them? Looking at his soft white hands, he did not seem the type to be commissioning or designing a dam.

His little eyes seemed too narrow and close together to find joy in reading out of intellectual curiosity, let alone pleasure. Something else had caused him to open that particular volume.

When he demanded money for my simple poems and I saw that this was no gift from one brother-in-law to another, I understood that things could not be well in the Chen Family Villa. I suppose I expected this.

They couldn’t ignore my death and not expect some consequences. Bao had to be dismantling the library and had come across the poems. But where was my father? He’d sell his concubines before selling his library.

Was he ailing? Had he died? Wouldn’t I have heard something if he had?

Should I rush back to my natal home?

But this was my home now. Ren was my husband and Ze was my sister-wife. She was sick, right here, right now. Oh, yes, I’d been angry with her at times. I’d even hated her on occasion. But I would be at her side when she died. I would welcome her to the afterworld and thank her for being my sister-wife.

Ren paid my adopted brother. Things were so bad with Ze that he didn’t even look at the poems. He selected a book from his library, tucked the papers inside, placed the volume back on the shelf, and returned to the bedchamber.

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We went back to waiting. Madame Wu brought tea and snacks for her son, which he left mostly untouched. Commissioner Tan and his wife came again to see their daughter. Their harshness faded as they realized Ze was actually dying.

“Tell us what the matter is,” Madame Tan begged her daughter.

Ze’s body relaxed and color flushed her cheeks when she heard her mother’s voice.

Encouraged, Madame Tan tried again. “We can take you away from here. Come home and sleep in your own bed. You’ll feel better with us.”

At these words, Ze stiffened. She pursed her lips and looked away. Seeing this, tears streamed down Madame Tan’s face.

The commissioner stared at his intractable daughter.

“You’ve been stubborn forever,” he observed, “but I always go back to the night we saw The Peony Pavilion as the moment your emotions con-gealed to stone. Since that time, you’ve never listened to a single warning or piece of advice I’ve given you. Now you pay the price. We will remember you in our offerings.”

As Madame Wu showed the Tans back to their palanquins, the sick girl moaned the ailments she would not tell her parents. “I feel a floating numbness. My hands and feet will not move. My eyes are too dry for tears. My spirit is frozen by the cold.”

Every few minutes she opened her eyes, stared up at the ceiling, shivered, and closed them again. All the while, Ren held her hand and spoke softly to her.

Later that night when all was darkness and I had no fear of reflection from the mirrors, I let myself down into the room. I blew open the curtains so that moonlight illuminated the bedchamber. Ren slept in a chair.

I touched his hair and felt him shiver. I sat with my sister-wife and felt the cold piercing her bones. Everyone else in the household was wandering in their dreams, so I stayed at Ze’s side to protect and comfort her. I placed my hand over her heart. I felt it slow, skip beats, race, and slow again. Just as darkness began to give way to pink, the air in the room shifted. Tan Ze’s bones crumbled, her soul dissolved, and just like that she was flying across the sky.

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The Blood-Gathering Lake

z e ’s s ou l b r o ke i n to t h r e e. o n e part b e gan i t s journey to the afterworld, one part waited to enter its coffin, and the last part roamed until it was time to be placed in its ancestor tablet. Her corpse submitted humbly to the rites that had to be performed. The doctor cut the baby from Ze’s stomach and threw it away, so it wouldn’t go with her to the Blood-Gathering Lake and would have a chance at rebirth. Then her emaciated body was washed and dressed. Ren remained at her side, refusing to take his eyes off her pale face and still-red lips, seemingly waiting for her to waken. I waited in the bedchamber for the roaming part of her soul to appear. I was convinced she would be relieved to see someone familiar. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The moment she saw me, her lips drew back and she bared her teeth.

“You! I knew I would see you!”

“Everything will be fine. I’m here to help you—”

“Help me? You killed me!”

“You’re confused,” I said soothingly. I too had been disoriented upon my death. She was lucky I was here to ease her mind.

“I knew even before my marriage that you would try to harm me,” she went on, in a no-less-furious tone. “You were there on my marriage day, weren’t you?” When I nodded, she said, “I should have smeared your tombstone with the blood of a black dog.”

This was the worst thing a person could do to a dead soul, since this ( 1 9 4 )

type of blood was believed to be as odious as a woman’s monthly excre-tions. If she’d done that, I would have been set on a path to kill my natal family. I was surprised by her bitterness, but she wasn’t done.

“You haunted me from the very beginning,” she continued. “I heard you crying in the winds of stormy nights.”

“I thought I made you happy—”

“No! You made me read that opera. Then you made me write about it.

You made me imitate you in everything I did, until finally there was nothing left of me. You died from the opera, and then you made me copy you copying Liniang.”

“I only wanted Ren to love you more. Couldn’t you tell?”

This calmed her somewhat. Then she looked at her fingernails. They’d already turned black. The harsh reality of her situation crushed her remaining anger.

“I tried to protect myself, but what chance did I have against you?” she asked pitifully.

So many times I’d said the reverse of this to myself: My sister-wife didn’t have a chance against me.

“I thought I could make him love me if he read the commentary and believed the work to be all mine,” she continued, reproach creeping back into her voice. “I didn’t want him reading about your lovesickness. I didn’t want him believing I’d continued your project as a way of honoring the

‘first’ wife. I was the first wife. Didn’t you hear my husband? You two were never married. He cares nothing for you.”

She was ruthless in death.

“We are a match made in Heaven,” I said, and I still believed it to be true. “But he loved you too.”