Lisa See - Peony in Love

“You were sick with cleverness. You made me cold, kept me in darkness, and hunted me in my dreams. You made me careless with my meals and careless with my rest—”

That this line came from The Peony Pavilion didn’t reassure me, because I had made her careless.

“The only way I could escape you was in the safety of the pavilion on the pond,” she went on.

“The zigzag bridge.”

“Yes!” Her lips drew back again, showing her dead-white teeth. “I burned your copy of The Peony Pavilion to exorcise you from my life. I thought I’d succeeded, but you never left.”

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“I couldn’t leave, not after what you did next. You let people believe our husband wrote the commentary.”

“What better way to show my devotion? What better way to prove I was an ideal wife?”

She was right, of course.

“But what about me?” I asked. “You tried to make me disappear. How could you do that when we’re sister-wives?”

Ze laughed at the stupidity of my question. “Men are the flowering of pure yang , but ghosts like you are all that is deathly and sick in yin. I tried to fight you, but your constant interference killed me. Go away. I have no need or want of your friendship. We are not friends. And we are not sister-wives. I will be remembered. You will be forgotten. I made sure of that.”

“By hiding the missing pages that describe the true authorship—”

“Everything you made me write was a lie.”

“But I gave you credit. Almost everything was about you—”

“I didn’t pick up the commentary out of a desire to continue your work. I did not write from the heart. You made your obsession my obsession. You were a ghost and you wouldn’t admit what you’d done, so I tore those pages out of the book. Ren will never find them.”

I tried again to make her see the truth. “I wanted you to be happy—”

“So you used my body.”

“I was happy when you got pregnant—”

“That child was not mine!”

“Of course he was yours.”

“No! You brought Ren to my bed night after night against my will. You made me do things. . . .” She shivered with anger and disgust. “And then you put that baby inside me.”

“You’re wrong. I didn’t put him there. I only watched that he’d be safe—”

“ Ha! You killed me and the baby too.”

“I didn’t . . .”

But what was the use of denying her accusations when so many of them were true? I’d kept her up all night, first with her husband and then with writing. I’d made her room cold, closed her in the dark to protect my sensitive eyes, and sent breezes with her everywhere she went. When I forced her to work on my project, I’d kept her from joining her husband and mother-in-law for meals. Then, when she retired to her room after burning my original work and giving all credit to Ren, I hadn’t encour-

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aged her to eat because I was so dispirited. I’d been fully aware of all this even as I’d denied what I was seeing and doing to myself. I started to feel sick with the truth. What had I done?

She pulled back her lips, once again revealing her ugly essence. I turned my eyes away.

“You killed me,” she proclaimed. “You hid in the rafters where you thought no one could see you, but I saw you.”

“How could you?” All my earlier confidence was gone. Now I was the one who sounded pitiful.

“I was dying! I saw you. I tried to close my eyes to you, but every time I opened them you were there, staring at me with your dead eyes. And then you came down and put your hand on my heart.”

Waaa! Had I truly played a part in her death? Had my obsession for my project made me so blind that first I had died and now I had killed my sister-wife?

Seeing the horror of understanding on my face, she smiled triumphantly. “You killed me, but I’ve won. You seem to have forgotten the deepest message of The Peony Pavilion. It’s a story about fulfilling love through death, which is exactly what I’ve done. Ren will remember me and he will forget about the foolish unmarried girl in her inner rooms.

You will waste away to nothing. Your project will be forgotten and no one— no one —will remember you.”

Without another word, she turned away from me, left the room, and went back to roaming.

f o rty - n i n e day s later, Ze’s father came to dot her ancestor tablet, which was then set in the Wu family’s ancestral hall. Since she’d died pregnant and married, one part of her soul was sealed inside her coffin, which would remain exposed to the elements until her husband’s death, when the family would be reconstituted through simultaneous burial, as was proper. The last part of her soul was dragged to the Blood-Gathering Lake, which was reputed to be so wide that it would take 840,000 days to cross it, where she would experience 120 kinds of torture, where she would be required each day to drink blood or be thrashed with iron rods.

This was her eternity, unless her family bought her freedom through proper worship, offerings of food to monks and gods, and prayers and bribes to the bureaucrats who governed the hells. Only then might a boat ( 1 9 7 )

carry her from the lake of anguish to the bank where she might become an ancestor or be reborn into a blissful land.

As for me, I realized that if I’d helped Tan Ze and her baby die—know-ingly or not—then I no longer had moral thoughts: no empathy, no shame, no sense of right and wrong. I thought I’d been very clever and even helpful, but Ze was right. I was a ghost of the worst sort.

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gggggggggggggggggggg

p a r t i i i

Under the

Plum Tree

ggggggggggggggggggg

Exile

mama u se d to say that g h o st s and sp i ri t s we re n ’t bad by nature. If a ghost had a place to belong, it would not become evil. But many ghosts are roused to action by the desire to retaliate. Even a small creature like a cicada can bring about savage vengeance against those who have harmed it. I hadn’t thought I wanted to hurt Ze, and yet if what she said was true I’d done just that. Filled with a desire for self-punishment and terrified that I might do something deadly to my husband by accident, I banished myself from Ren’s home. In the earthly realm, I was twenty-five and I’d given up. I wasted away to almost nothing, just as Ze predicted.

Exile . . .

Not knowing where to go, I made my way around the lake to the Chen Family Villa. The house, to my surprise, was more beautiful than ever.

Bao had added furniture, porcelains, and jade carvings to every room.

Shimmering new silk tapestries hung on the walls. But as magnificent as it all was, a disturbing quiet infused everything. Far fewer fingers lived here now. My father was still in the capital. Two of his brothers had died.

My grandfather’s concubines had also died. Broom, Lotus, and some of my other cousins had married out. With fewer Chen family members in the compound, servants had been sent away. The villa and the grounds screamed beauty, abundance, and great wealth, but they were poor in the sounds of children, joy, and miracles.

Into the eerie silence came the haunting sound of a zither. I found Or-