When Fox Is a Thousand Page 6

  “I don’t hate you,” I said.

  The revelation overwhelmed me, in spite of all those brief flashes of thinking I had seen a hand move that way before, or known someone with a similar step. I didn’t know what to say. Outside the wind whirled like a mad dancer and the rain clattered, clamouring to get in. It seemed so far away. I picked up the bar of soap and rubbed it between my palms. I like the way a half-used bar of soap feels, smooth from contact with hands and water. The smell of sandalwood and steam rushed into my lungs as I lathered her shoulders, her chest, the soft space between her breasts. Her skin stretched taut over her flesh, fine over the lip of her collarbone. Even with the temperature of the bath there was a heat which came distinctly from her body. It seeped through the skin of my palms, up my wrists to my elbows, and flooded straight into my heart. Then the room was quiet, only the sound of bathwater lapping and my blood roaring in my ears.

  I bent over the tub and kissed her. She pulled me into the water.

  The church was impenetrable. Grey stucco with heavy oak doors. There was an electronic device outside, perhaps an intercom or an alarm. The windows were dark. The lower ones were an intricate lattice of clear bevelled glass. Above them were long stained-glass arches depicting biblical scenes. From the outside there was no way of determining what lay within. Artemis lifted the iron door handle, expecting it to be locked. The door swung smoothly open. It took her eyes a few moments to adjust from the bright sunshine outside to the cool darkness within.

  The windows were the first thing her eyes adapted to. God creating the world in blues and greens, a large compass in one hand. Eve tempted by the Serpent. Jonah vomited out by the whale. A startlingly gory image of soldiers hammering the hands and feet of Christ to the cross. Through these strange images the sun cast shards of coloured light across the pews and floor. She stepped into the body of the church, conscious of how small she was, and how made of flesh and bone. The size and emptiness of the place conspired to this. Her mind flitted involuntarily to the memory of Diane’s mouth, the heat of it.

  A small figure knelt in one of the pews. It was absolutely still.

  “Mercy?”

  The small head reared up. “Last place on earth I thought I’d see you.”

  “I’ve been calling and calling. Your mother told me I’d find you here.”

  “You didn’t come when you said you would.”

  “Nor did you, if you recall.”

  “That was different. I had a family crisis. Where were you?”

  “I, well, I ran into this –”

  “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I mean, it’s your business, isn’t it? I hate my brother because he’s so nosy, but I’m more like him than I thought.”

  “You don’t really hate your brother.”

  “No, I suppose not. He’s just a boy, like any other boy. I don’t know. What would you do if you discovered you didn’t like any of the members of your family? Not just that you didn’t like them, but didn’t respect them.”

  “Move out, I suppose, if I hadn’t already.”

  “Yeah, so okay, then what? Does that make you any less related to them?”

  “No, but at least you wouldn’t have to see them all the time.”

  “Would it stop them from doing what they’re doing? It wouldn’t. I’m helpless and guilty at the same time.”

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s that bad or not. My father and my uncle own this factory in China. It burned down with the workers still inside. There was only one door and they couldn’t all get out in time. The human rights people are having a field day.”

  “The older generation is ruining the world for us.”

  “He’s my father, Art. My family. A part of me.”

  “You can’t think like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because then it makes you responsible for what he does.”

  “But I am, don’t you see?”

  “You’ve got to change the way you think about it.”

  “I told you, we’re family. We care for each other the way people who are not family don’t.”

  “Your friends care for you.”

  “Yeah, like who?”

  “Well… like me.”

  “Then where were you when you were supposed to come see me?”

  She didn’t come back again for a long time. For some reason, I expected her to return after dark. Each day was an unbearable wait until nightfall. Guests breezed dizzily in and out of the house. Not my usual self, I avoided them as much as possible, which, however, still meant a considerable number of engagements. The bright light and the heat weighed on me, and I longed to burst through it for a single breath of cool air.

  A party was arranged at the local temple to celebrate the autumn moon. I dressed slowly in my room. The gauzy sleeves of my robe slumped as heavily as wool blankets. I tied my sash carefully in front of the mirror and gazed at my reflection for a long time. I combed my dull hair and arranged it, somewhat mechanically, so that while the form was impeccable, it weighed like stone.

  When the other girls stepped out of the house onto the bright street, I followed them, but soon I was lagging behind, absently examining the lush leaves of plants that flourished in this kind of weather. Ahead of me, the laughter and chattering diminished to the sounds of a faraway ocean, continuous and indeterminate. I got lost in the echoes of my own footsteps and the smell of a village full of garbage rotting in the heat. Rows of brick houses flowed by monotonously. Outside town, something broke the evenness of my footsteps – a scrambling of claws into earth, irregular, a four-legged creature with a lame leg. I listened to it for a long time before I could bring myself to turn and look.

  It was an old woman with a walking stick, grey and gnarled as though it were an extension of her own fingers. She must have had good ears, or known this path exceptionally well to be able to walk it unaided, for her eyes were turned up to heaven, staring blackly at her own blindness. Her face was as bleak and dry as the Gobi Desert and crisscrossed with deep ridges like those the wind builds in sand. She scrambled after me, one two three hiccup, one two three hiccup, and when I got used to the rhythm it struck me as having an odd kind of grace. I looked at her again and thought to myself that she must have been beautiful once. I slowed to a stop and she approached me and took my hand. I couldn’t help but wonder with what faculties she sensed me and knew where my hand was. She turned her face towards me.

  “You will get what you want,” she said, “but you will be sorry you wanted it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She smiled, revealing a single brown tooth, then turned away and hobbled back down the path.

  “Wait!” I took a step towards her, but a wall of thick summer heat hit me in the face and gushed into my lungs. When I looked again, she had disappeared around a bend in the road, or perhaps vanished altogether.

  A fat moon was pushing up from the ground like a mushroom when I reached the temple. It was festooned with clever lanterns, some in the shapes of animals and fish and flowers, some in more conventional styles, with riddles penned elegantly onto the translucent rice paper. Women in dresses that might have been spun from spiders’ threads strolled by, hot flowers adorning their hair. Slender, refined-looking young men mixed with full-bearded soldiers, their stout bodies carrying the weight of skirmishes and wars that were becoming increasingly frequent in the hills to the north. Three young dancers in different-coloured robes of matching design teetered on three-inch feet enclosed in dainty slippers embroidered with birds, leaves, and flowers. A few men looked on admiringly, and a few women snuck curious glances of envy or contempt. I had heard from a dancer who lived in our compound that more and more dancers were binding their daughters’ feet. She said it was very painful, but that it all but guaranteed a good career. In a quiet corner a few bearded men were drinking a newly fashionable drink, tea, and marvelling at its fragrant bitterness.

 
Two young men caught my eye. What I noticed first was how much alike they looked. The same height, the same lean boyish frame and slender face. They had the same way of tilting the head to ask a question. One of them was her. The other must have been a man, since there was a fine sparse growth of hair trailing from his chin. He leaned into a thick arc of light cast by an orange carp, his hands gesturing earnestly. I moved closer, pretending to ponder the wiry riddle posed on a round white lantern. They were arguing about whether the empress Wu-tse Tien, one hundred and fifty years dead, had been a good ruler.

  “After her coup succeeded, she put so many of the people who supported her into office that the bureaucracy almost sank under its own weight,” said the bearded man.

  “But she accepted criticism for that, and punished the man who tried to slander the critic.”

  “She believed too much in fate. It made her easy to flatter. I remember a story about how she promoted a man who told her he dreamt she would live for eight hundred years.”

  “And I remember a story about how she invited flattery with a pear tree branch blossoming out of season, but rewarded the man who criticized the flatterers.”

  “I seem to remember that story differently,” he said. “Let’s ask this little sister what she remembers.” And he turned to me, for indeed, I was there at his elbow before I realized it. “Do you know the story about the empress and the pear tree branch?”

  “Well,” I said, startled at this directness, “I’ve heard it only once.”

  “Everybody knows that story,” said the bearded man. “Come on, tell us what you know.”

  He gazed too intently at me as I opened my mouth to speak. I felt self-conscious about the sidelong glances I could not prevent myself from taking at her. She caught my eye for the briefest moment and knew that I recognized her. “The story goes that the empress produced a branch on an autumn afternoon as she sat in council with her ministers. Since pear trees bloom only in the spring, the ministers all murmured how auspicious it was that spring should come in autumn. But the prime minister said it was because yin and yang were not in harmony, and as the harmony of yin and yang was his responsibility, he should be punished. The empress praised him for his honesty.”

  “So,” said the young man, his eyes sparkling in a way that suggested he thought I might have guessed at the gender of his companion, “the minister was not punished for treason, but for failing in his responsibility for the actions of nature. An unfortunate situation either way.”

  “No one really knows whether he was punished or not, only that he was praised for his honesty,” said the disguised woman.

  “And how do you explain her killing her own son in order to accuse her rivals of the deed?”

  “Yet emperors kill their sons and fathers and brothers all the time. We call it politics and take scant notice.”

  That night back in my own quarters, I sat up late. After the first taper I lit burned down to a stump, I took the luxury of lighting a second. I wanted to write my own poem for the autumn moon that hung outside my window, begging for an inscription. Holding the ink-soaked brush at a perfect angle, I thought that for next year, perhaps I would have the right words. The night was very still, a night for secrets. When the sound of footfalls echoed under my window, I could not mistake them for anything else. I leaned out. She stood in a pool of moonlight. The light was so precise that when she smiled I could count her teeth. She pulled a man’s hat from her head and tossed it up at my window. As my fingers snatched it out of mid-air, her hair sprung loose, a glossy black cascade engulfing her. She winked at me through the bright strands. Then I heard her silver laugh as she hurried away under the cover of trees.

  The next day came the offer to buy me out.

  The sky had been clear for three days in a row. The air smelled green with an undercurrent promise of balminess to come. Diane was supposed to come by Artemis’s place at noon. They were going to the beach. At one o’clock she still wasn’t there. Artemis called the house where she was staying.

  “I’m still in bed,” she said. Her voice was rough.

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  “Not exactly. Why don’t you just come over? I’ll give you the address.”

  Artemis got on the bus and sat by an open window, feeling the breeze on her face.

  She walked several blocks through a quiet neighbourhood. The sun was hot. She felt the back of her T-shirt beginning to soak through.

  The house lay in the leafy shadows of an old chesnut tree. She knocked on the door.

  “It’s open,” Diane yelled from the upper floor. Artemis pushed the door gently and stepped into the house. The ceilings were high. All the windows in the house were open so that a cool breeze blew in. The floors were strewn with large and small rugs, Chinese and Persian. A kimono hung, displayed on a wall in the front hall, and looking into the living room, she could see a Chinese opera costume under glass above the fireplace. Futon furniture. Cushions covered in Central American fabrics.

  “I’m upstairs.”

  The stairs creaked pleasantly as Artemis climbed them.

  “In here.”

  Artemis walked into the room. Diane lay in bed, her bare shoulders peeking above the top edge of the covers. Beside her, with his eyes closed and long lashes brushing his rosy cheeks, lay a man who might have been carved from marble except for the vivid brown curls splayed against the white pillow. He opened his eyes and smiled warmly at Diane’s guest.

  “You like this house?” Diane asked. “It belongs to white girls.”

  The god laughed self-consciously.

  “Yeah, I could live here,” Artemis said.

  “That would have been great, but they want to kick me out. The woman whose room this is, she’s coming back from Chile and so I have to go.”

  “Chile?” Artemis repeated, and she and Diane both groaned knowingly.

  “Another spoiled brat for whom the world is a Disneyland of exotic adventures.”

  “You could move in with me,” said the god.

  “No thanks,” said Diane, winking at Artemis. Artemis grinned.

  “I’m gonna have to move soon, too,” Artemis said, “somewhere cheaper. Unless I find a really amazing job in the next week or two.”

  “We could move in together,” said Diane. “I’ll live anywhere. I can’t move back in with my parents.”

  “How come you’d move in with her and not with me?” the god asked, hurt.

  “Because,” said Diane, smiling at Artemis the whole time, “I don’t trust you. Besides, if you would lend me the money I need, I could move into the room coming up in this house.”

  “How much do you need?” Artemis asked.

  Diane shook her head. “You don’t want to be lending me money, babe.”

  Late afternoon found them walking along the high edge of a beach, shoes abandoned by the picnic tables near the public latrine. Artemis kept her head down, thinking of nothing but the ocean. The sand felt warm as flesh. The sun was bright and she squinted to calm her stinging eyes. Diane walked ahead, taller, slimmer, with the relaxed, elegant stride of those who have lived in the West for a long time.

  Artemis’s legs were too short to keep up. The hot sand burned her feet and the dry beach grass cut her legs. She would rather be walking along the lip of the ocean where the ground was firm and cool. She heard the blueness roaring in her ears, but caught only glimpses between the ends of the tremendous driftwood logs, large as the bodies of animals, that separated them from the ocean. A quiet menagerie of bones.

  Diane came to a halt beside a giant trunk as thick as she was tall. The log could have been a lion, ghost white and still as death. Artemis caught up with her and paused, trying not to reveal that she was heaving for breath. She looked at Diane perhaps just a second too long.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Diane lowered her shades and warm brown lights flickered merrily behind her eyes.

  “I was just thinking that you have the same kind of hair as me. A
nd the same kind of eyes.” The lion yawned lazily and pawed the ground.

  “Like we could almost be family?”

  “Yeah. Well, no, not really. I mean, you’re tall. I’m short. You have freckles. I don’t. Your face is long, mine is kind of round. We couldn’t really be family, but it’s kind of nice, you know, having the same kind of hair.” She giggled and then was afraid the giggles were childish.

  “Boy, you’re funny.”

  Diane slipped her foot into a cranny in the log. Her foot went where a hip bone seemed to turn in. She hoisted herself astride the creature’s back. The high ocean wind ruffled her neat hair. She flashed her straight white teeth in a wide grin.

  “You want to come up here?”

  She offered a sturdy hand. Artemis slipped her foot into the same hipbone cranny and grabbed the hand. It felt warm in hers as she hoisted herself astride the patient beast. It was not as windy as it had appeared from below.

  Diane pulled a packet of Winstons from the pocket of her denim jacket. The paper packaging was crushed carelessly in a way that made Artemis think of worn jeans with a threadbare hole at the knee.

  “Two more weeks and I’m out of here,” said Diane, staring up at the wide blue sky as she held the open packet towards Artemis. Artemis fished a cigarette out of the narrow hole with her thumb and index finger, placed it between her dry lips, and cupped her hands around the dancing flame her friend held towards her face. As she inhaled, she was caught for a quick moment by the sharp odour of propane wafting off the lighter. Taking that breath was almost like breathing in Diane herself.

  “Where are you going?”

  “With my mother to Hong Kong.”

  “I thought you said you were broke.”

  “I am, but I just figured out where I’m going to get money.”

  “Where?”

  “That guy you met this morning – his father is a collector. He collects antique clothing of all kinds, but specializes in the Far East.”

  “I didn’t think you’d approve of that kind of thing.”