The Binding Chair (26 page)

“May. Yes, Madame May. How did you get here?”

“A gendarme brought me.”

“What did you do?” The man put down his cup and looked interested. His cravat, she noted, was pinned with a gold stud fashioned like a tiny roulette wheel.

“Nothing.”

“Neither did I. Don’t worry.
Elle a des bons avocats.
”

“But why should I need a lawyer?”

“Well, you just said you hadn’t done it.”

“Done what?”

“Whatever the police said you did.” He cleared his throat. “Me, I had trouble with the casino,” he said.

Suzanne nodded, lacking the energy to correct the misunderstanding. Perhaps all of Madame May’s guests were in trouble of some kind, lost in some way. On the other side of the man with the shaking hands was a big-boned woman with dramatically made-up eyes, rings on all her large fingers, and on her thumbs as well. Suzanne sipped water from her glass. A houseboy, dressed just like the one who had served her the previous night, was making his way down the table with a platter of poached salmon. Another followed with asparagus and another with a gravy boat filled with thick cream sauce.

The man next to Suzanne patted her shoulder. “It will all come out all right,” he said. “I’ve actually stopped worrying.” He picked up his spoon with his trembling hand and lifted a mouthful of soup from the plate before him. Suzanne watched as a drop of it fell from the spoon’s wavering tip before he could put it in his mouth. As her neighbor, M. Fantoni, would explain during the leisurely course of the meal, he had just the previous month been employed as a croupier in one of the Hôtel de Paris’s famed
salles privées
, not far from where he had lived, in a luxurious apartment in Monte Carlo.

“Rue Bel Respiro,” he said, sighing. But, as fate would have it, one night he fell under an unjust accusation. The casino director (a man hired for his suspicious nature—he tracked the outdoor movements of his croupiers by means of spies and telescopes set up on the hotel roof) observed M. Fantoni in a behavior not tolerated by the management. At five in the evening of March the eighteenth, on the corner of Boulevard de Suisse and Avenue de Roqueville he exchanged words with one of the guests of the Hôtel de Paris, a German who won that very night a hundred and thirteen thousand francs at M. Fantoni’s roulette table.

Despite his protests that the German had only asked directions to a certain restaurant, and despite a complete lack of proof—the wheel was examined by house detectives and found to be quite in balance—Fantoni, accused of conspiring to swindle the casino, was summarily fired. This turn of events damaged his already taxed nerves (the life of a croupier is one of unnatural strain), so that an incipient and occasional tremor in his hands became constant. On subsequent interviews he couldn’t handle a wheel without trembling all over.

“There wasn’t much point to being interviewed anyway. Once your reputation is tainted, not even the Kitchen will have you.”

“Are you a chef then, as well?”

“Not at all. You are ignorant, aren’t you?
The
Kitchen isn’t
a
kitchen, it’s the big public gaming hall.”

Suzanne smiled in embarrassment. While telling his story, Fantoni had interrupted his own travails to apprise her of those of their tablemates. The thin man with no hair, not even an eyelash, was a naturalist who had become suddenly and violently allergic to certain medicinal plants he had been trying to cultivate. The blonde was a Finnish opera singer—she’d lost her voice from fright when she debuted at Garnier’s. To her left was a perspiring man with a cad’s mustache. He’d lost all his money and taken an amount of chloral insufficient to kill himself but enough to induce his wife to go back to America without him. Sweat darkened the collar of his blue shirt. The woman with the rings on her thumbs was, naturally, a gypsy. “We were acquaintances,” Fantoni said. “In Monte Carlo. She made her living as a fortune-teller, and they ran her out of town when one of the numbers she suggested turned out to be genuinely lucky.”

“But what about Madame May? Who is she?”

“Oh, that’s a story more complicated than anyone knows. She came from Shanghai with her two nieces and their widowed father, as well as that woman with the dreadful lisp. You see her there, next to the opera singer?” Fantoni pointed discreetly. “She’s a retired spy, if you can believe it. Came from her post at a London boarding school from which the sisters were expelled. She’d been posing as a scholar and was ensnared in some peculiar contretemps. It had to do with smuggling Old Masters, I think, or sculptures on the black market. Something. At any rate, she finagled her way to China and followed them here. She has a real impediment; no one can understand her French. But, don’t laugh, she made a fortune during the war. It had to do with a market crash, blockades. She had privileged information, a stolen formula for chemical weapons.” Clearly flummoxed, Fantoni stared at Eleanor Clusburtson. “Perhaps it isn’t a real lisp at all,” he said. “Could be a disguise.”

“But what about the woman?” Suzanne persisted. “The Chinese woman?”

Fantoni was finished, however, with any story but his own. “Dreadful, isn’t it?” he said for perhaps the tenth time. He held his shaking hands out before him and considered their tremor. “I mean really just impossible.” As he was frowning and muttering, a young woman joined them, walking with what seemed to Suzanne self-consciously long strides. She took the empty seat beside Madame May.

“That’s the younger daughter,” Fantoni whispered.

“Well!” exclaimed the three seated at the head of the table. They spoke almost in unison, and Mr. Dick, the father, the one who’d just celebrated his birthday, stood up so suddenly that he bumped the table’s edge and upset his water glass. May rang a bell to the left of her plate, and a houseboy appeared with a cloth to mop the spill up from the table’s gleaming top.

“Explain yourself!” Mr. Dick said to the young woman, whose name, Fantoni said, was Alice.

“Dick, dear.” May put her hand on his sleeve. The other sister, Cecily, leaned, whispering, toward the slight, fierce-looking person on her left—“They call her Fräulein.” She had a liverish complexion, severe cheekbones, and deep-set eyes heavily rimmed in kohl. Apparently, the two shared an unusual sympathy: they ate from one plate placed between them; they drank from a single cup of coffee, neither using its handle but each in turn holding it by the rim, first and fourth fingers extended with arch, almost satirical, delicacy. In that Cecily was apparently left-handed and Fräulein right-, the two seemed formed for symbiosis—at table anyway, where their elbows never crowded or clashed, and they could lean into each other without being clumsy.

The sister called Alice sat down and smiled brightly. “Coffee my,” she said to the houseboy, who had finished mopping. “Wanchee all same. Piecee fish, soup.” She shook open her napkin with a crack. Her cheeks had the kind of proud and mischievous blush that can be acquired only in a paramour’s bedroom.

“Alice, dear, no pidgin. You know how many times I’ve asked you to speak in French.”

“Sorry, Aunt.” But Alice looked anything but.

“Where in heaven have you been!” Mr. Dick pounded the table so that everyone’s water glass trembled.

“Dick, shall we talk after lunch?” May suggested, and Cecily leaned a little farther into Fräulein, her whispering lips almost inside the sallow curve of the woman’s surprisingly large ear.

“Out,” Alice said.

“All night!” her father bellowed.

“And on the old fellow’s birthday, too.” Fantoni sucked his teeth disapprovingly.

Suzanne looked at her lap. She didn’t see May stand, indicating that lunch was over.

A F
ACILITY WITH
L
ANGUAGE

F
OR
M
AY, WHO HAD ALWAYS HAD A FACILITY, AN
impossible nimbleness, with languages—was it being otherwise hobbled that inspired this?—the movements of swimming seemed letters of a sublime new alphabet. It took months to develop the required strength, to learn to eat instead of smoke, and to use rather than ignore her body, but after initial falters and founderings she made almost inhumanly swift progress. As if assisted by angels, or demons—some unseen force—a keen, secret joy shook May. Her first unassisted laps reminded her of when she had at last mastered English and could hear herself speak sentences, whole paragraphs, without hesitation. Now each stroke was formed as surely, every kick produced an exultant spray; the skin on her face tightened with pleasure.

She conquered the pool quickly, and then it bored her. She said good-bye to the instructor; she had her driver take her to the shore. “Don’t wait,” she told him. “Come back in two hours.”

She couldn’t hobble over the pebbles, but at the far end of the beach one of the sanitariums had built a stair to make sea bathing possible for invalids, and with her cane May could slowly navigate its steps. It took as much as a quarter of an hour, but she got there. And seawater—how alive it was, how strong; its salt buoyancy did half the work. Nothing less than a revelation to move unhindered by her feet, to travel without help, as fast and as gracefully as any other person, and now unconstricted by the tiled barrier of a pool wall. How easily she moved, her body sufficiently occupied to set her mind free, to allow her thoughts to choose their own direction. Nonsense sometimes, disjointed images, scattered fragments.

A low table in a blue room, a table set with white cups, porcelain so thin the sun shone through them. Translucent, they glowed like candles. May snorted into the water. What pitiably small hopes the cups had represented! How surprising to remember a self,
herself
, who might hope for the happiness shed by such meager light. Though wouldn’t it be good—better—to be that person again? Could it be true that she’d once possessed a soul that thrived on bright morsels?

To forget the cups she conjugated an irregular Italian verb, she listed the principal rivers of Africa, she recited from Defoe’s
Journal of the Plague Year
, a book she’d first consumed during her years of feverish reading. In the passage she’d committed to memory, a man had swum the Thames. Infected, he’d outswum the plague, he’d outwitted and escaped his own illness.

May stroked; she breathed in deeply, exhaled lines of poetry, reviewed the rules of contract bridge and how they differed from duplicate. Strategies for chess, mah-jongg. Hangchow-Soochow binding style versus Canton versus the so-called Tientsin Trick for making the foot seem even narrower. Finger positions for the flute. Scruples, drams, and ounces; gills, pints, quarts. A quart was 2 pints, 8 gills, 32 ounces, 256 drams, 512 scruples.

Her mother, Chu’en, had liked to cook but Yu-ying wouldn’t allow it. Vulgar for a lady to be caught in the kitchen. Tiny feet on a hot clay floor. Chu’en could fill dumplings with bean paste so pink and so sweet, it made marzipan a disappointment.

Too strong, too big to resist, the tide carried May backward. Returned her to a time she wanted to forget. To stories her grandmother had told her, trying to distract May as she bound her feet. In the town where she was born, Yu-ying said, it used to be that each spring a girl was selected for marriage to the sea dragon. Clothed in rich gowns and placed on a bed, she floated out on the tide, approaching the depthless pit that lay far to the east, the pit into which all the waters of the world poured—even the celestial waters, the great rivers of stars. At last the girl disappeared, they could see her no more.

“But that was a long time ago,” May said, before her name was May.

“Yes, Chao-tsing,” her grandmother agreed, sewing the white cloths tight. “Many, many years ago. A century.”

“And I am not marrying the sea dragon.”

May used to picture the girl on her bed. She’d give her an oar with which to paddle, turn sheets into sails bellying out in the wind. She’d save her.

“No,” agreed Yu-ying, and she told May of the mythic island kingdom, a place no boat could reach. The water surrounding the island supported nothing heavier than a solitary swimmer, and only a woman who could swim as lightly as a feather drifting on the tide. All the women on this island lived peaceably together. Each month when they bled, they bled jewels, they bled rubies, and they used those rubies for money. As there were no men, they opened their legs to the south wind. Impregnated, they bore only daughters.

May could swim lightly. If there was any woman who could navigate treacherous water, it was she, accustomed to an undertow that returned her not only to her mother and grandmother, but to the daughters she’d lost.

Rose died too young for May to picture her as a woman, but May had seen Agnes as an adult, she’d seen her face clearly. She had made the mistake of memorizing it. What would life hold for a daughter who lived in a convent and yet turned her back on its promises, the consolations of heaven and God, mystery and glory? Sometimes when May thought of Agnes she couldn’t help but adjust things, endowing her daughter with fantastic gifts, like those granted in the old stories of the immortals. She’d make Agnes an archer and give her Shen I’s divine bow. Then May would kowtow to her daughter, she’d rend her clothes to expose her breast, she’d hold her head still so Agnes could put out her eyes. Unnecessary, as Shen I’s arrows always found their mark.

May swam quickly out past the breaking waves and swells. She let Agnes chase her, and now Agnes was Agnes with the nostrils of Heng. Nostrils that beamed deadly light and annihilated all in their path.

M
AY SWAM AT
all hours and in all weather, but there was nothing she preferred to the beach at night, when the stairs leading to the water were damp and cool. When there was no moon, and clouds obscured the stars. When the water was black, so black. She entered without hesitation, excited, her heart beating quickly. It was like meeting a lover. No—it was more like meeting a lover than meeting a lover could ever be.

May, who knew the sound of girls drowning, swam. They’d drowned in ponds, in streams, in rivers and lakes. They’d drowned in vinegar barrels. But she swam.

Soft-hearted mothers put a heavy stone in their daughters’ diapers to prevent the brief but piteous cries. And the next year it wasn’t difficult to guess who had scrambled through the dark with a kicking, muffled bundle. They were the ones who spread their porridge thickly, who emptied whole basins at the gates to the graveyard. Lakes of sticky gruel, their guilt soiled everyone’s shoes. They burned wads of spirit money, and the light it cast on their faces betrayed them.

Some had been cowardly—or were they brave?—and drowned themselves along with their daughters. Vindictive, they jumped into wells and poisoned the town’s water supply.

Li-kuei
. Hungry, wandering. Unable to tell night from day. Even hell denied such a ghost her place. Once a year, a bellyful of porridge licked from the dirt, a fistful of burning money. She could never reincarnate. The only escape would come when another woman drowned, when another drowned and agreed to take her place.

Still, until that time, a suicide had power she hadn’t had in life. Brave, cowardly—did it matter?—she had made herself fearsome now.

May swam far out, stroking evenly. Even when she realized she should be frightened, when she heard a boat whose pilot couldn’t possibly see her black, bobbing head in time to stop, even then she felt no fear. She was a good enough swimmer to take risks.

“There is no such thing!” Alice had argued, frightened when she discovered May leaving for the beach after dark.

May shrugged.

“Not at night. Not when there’s no one to see.”

“See what?”

“See if you get into trouble.”

May turned on her, eyes wild, hair long and unbound, flying out around her. “Who are you!” she’d cried, “to tell me what I can or cannot do! Do you listen to me? Do you!”

Alice said nothing.

The two of them stared at one another.