When Fox Is a Thousand Page 7

  “The guy’s a total slime bag, no question. But if anyone’s to make a profit off of him, it may as well be me.”

  “So what do you have that you’re going to sell him?”

  “Nothing yet, but I have a couple of ideas where I can get a few things that should bring in enough for two plane tickets with enough left over for a couple of months’ rent.”

  “Wouldn’t your mother say something if she knew where the money came from?”

  “I never tell her.”

  Diane leaned into Artemis’s chest. Her smooth hair, with its fruity aroma of salon shampoo, was cool against Artemis’s cheek. “I don’t have very many women friends. It’s funny how I feel so close to you even though I hardly know you.”

  Artemis put a tentative arm around her friend’s waist, for a moment not sure what to say. She was aware of the sound of water moving stealthily towards them. “And now you’re going away.”

  “Yeah, but not for two weeks. That’s a long time.” She looked off towards the horizon and said, “We’d better get going before it gets dark.” She squirmed out of Artemis’s grip and fell to the ground with a soft thud.

  Artemis looked down at her. She looked smaller. Artemis cast her eyes skyward and the blueness rushed through her skull. Then she too leapt to the ground.

  They walked back along the edge of the tide that had risen by then to the brink of the driftwood line. The sand was damp with a chill that made Artemis think of the ground in another country.

  They arrived back at the picnic tables. The greasy aroma of hot dogs and fries wafted from the direction of the snack bar.

  “I’m hungry,” said Diane, heading towards the tall boy with wirerimmed glasses behind the counter. “You want anything?”

  Artemis shook her head. She sat down at one of the picnic tables and began to brush the sand from her feet. When she looked up again, Diane had disappeared around the back of the snack bar to the public washrooms. Artemis pulled on her socks and jammed her feet into her sneakers, not bothering to do up the laces. She lay back on the seat of the picnic table and stared into the darkening sky.

  “Hey, your sister’s fries are ready!”

  She turned towards the boy with the wire-rimmed glasses. “What?”

  “Your sister’s fries. They’re here.”

  “Oh.” She approached the counter. “She’s not my sister. Just a friend.”

  He pushed the yellow cardboard container across the counter. “She looks like you. Ketchup?”

  A moon twice the width of the highway balanced on top of a hill and threatened to plunge towards them as they drove away. Diane sped mercilessly down the road with the window wide open and Tom Waits on the stereo, all gutteral and rumbling. She held a half-smoked Winston firmly between her lips to keep the wind from carrying it away.

  Through the curtains of the sedan where I sat alone in a new red dress, I could see I was being carried through the neighbourhood of my childhood. My father’s old house came up on the right, but the place had all but vanished under tall grasses and overgrown trees. The top of the wall behind which I used to play just barely showed above the weeds. There used to be an abandoned house at the end of the road. It was dilapidated, but the roofs of the pavillions beyond the high walls sloped with the kind of grace that can be obtained only with money. I had aways been afraid to go there. Neighbours used to whisper about fox spirits.

  I never dared approach it until one dusk, some weeks after my mother had passed away. My father had been at his shop all day, or at least, he had not been home. Night was advancing quickly and the dinner I had prepared for him was getting cold. I put on a pair of his old shoes and an old coat, more comfortable than my own, and hurried out to find him. Instinct drove me to the end of the road. I walked with trepidation as I passed the last inhabited house on the road. The abandoned property was still half a mile away. I walked that distance with wobbly knees. I found him there, standing among the tall yellowed grasses, calling her name through a chink in the broken wall.

  As the four thick-armed sedan bearers carried me down this street now, dread welled up from the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want to go near that house. In my head, I told myself it was still a long way off. Surely my new in-laws would be the inhabitants of one of the modest, comfortable houses that were rushing past. The faces of my childhood neighbours did not come easily to me, but perhaps I would recognize them when they greeted us. I imagined warm food smells and lamps blazing. Perhaps they would remember my father.

  I recognized the gates of the last inhabited house as we drove by.

  Even from a distance I could see the house at the end of the road. Bright lights streamed from the windows. As we approached, I could see that the hedges had been neatly clipped, grass mown, and trees pruned. The sweet odour of tree peonies filled the air. We alighted from the carriage and walked up to the gate. The iron handles were old and worn. But the sunken stone wall had been artfully returned to its original state. I had not thought such a thing possible. I remembered thinking as a child that the crumbled wall, the tattered gate, the sinking foundations had long since deteriorated beyond repair.

  Under the bright lights of the front hall, we were greeted by the elder Li, a thin old man with a long trailing white beard like wisps of mist. He pressed his lips together and averted his eyes when he was introduced to me. But I was so astonished by the opulence of this house that I hardly noticed his rudeness. Lu Ch’iao stepped into the front hall, took my arm, and guided me down a long hallway and across a courtyard to her own quarters. With her own paints and powders, she touched up my makeup. She adjusted my headdress and added to it a jade hairpin of her own. When the last traces of my long journey had been erased, she took a little silver bell from her dressing table and rang it. Four young girls in festive dress arrived within minutes.

  “Mother-in-law and Father-in-law are greeting the guests now,” she said. “I will signal you when it’s time to come in.”

  In the distance, I could hear chatter and laughter and clinking glasses. Presently a deeper bell rang and two of the girls tugged at my elbows. They guided me back the way we had come, into the large dining hall, where we were to eat a celebratory feast. The young women pointed out my new parents-in-law and the important guests, urging me to bow deeply to each. Then they seated me squarely between my new mother-in-law and my new father-in-law, with my new husband seated just to his father’s left. On his left sat Lu Ch’iao, smiling graciously. Of course, I felt terribly nervous, but still, I could not help gawking at the expensive decor.

  There were screens printed with ibises, unearthly princesses, and peonies that seemed lit from within. There were couches covered with embroidered silk. There were mirrors and carvings of jade and rhinoceros horn. Many servants and attendants hurried about, heaping the tables with food. Each dish was arranged in the shape of a fantastic animal, detailed down to wings and claws and eyes. I also noticed, however, that astonishing as the dishes were, there was not a single meat dish among them. I was not sure whether this was a strange custom of the Li family, or whether this was meant as an insult to me. The goblets were of a strange design, irregular in shape and engraved with the kinds of birds that appear in dreams. Between my fascination with them and my duty not to leave my parents-in-law without drink, I hardly averted my eyes from these cups all evening.

  My father-in-law looked momentarily pleased when he learned that I was from the same neighbourhood. He even expressed a wish to have met my father. He asked nothing of my recent past, but his silence on that matter didn’t register until later, when I was alone and shame could sneak in. I felt Lu Ch’iao’s eyes on me the whole time, but I could not look back at her, so I did not know whether her gaze contained sympathy or resentment. I was glad when the evening closed and the three of us were free to return to the younger Li’s section of the house.

  The younger Li’s resemblance to Lu Ch’iao was uncanny. I had thought so upon first meeting him, but now, alone with him on the wide
sea of the bed, the likeness was utterly unsettling. He reached for me. I closed my eyes and imagined her face tilting towards mine. This was bearable for a moment, but then there were his hands. His hands were smooth, smoother than hers, smoother than any hands I had ever known, and cold. Not ice cold, but just a touch colder than comfortable, like the stillwarm fingers of a man just moments dead. My teeth skated dry, top against bottom. His touch was flaccid, without substance. No warmth came to it even as the hours wore on. I thought of her lying in the next room, only a thin wall away. Was she sleeping, or was she lying awake counting the whispers of trees and trying not to hear our noises of pleasure and distress? It struck me later how similar not only the sounds but also the emotions could be. Pleasure and distress.

  I tried keeping my eyes open. He so much resembled her that I could almost believe it was her, even with those cold hands. I kept my eyes open because it made my repulsion bearable. Let the morning come soon.

  In the morning, after he had left for his study, she called to me. She sat on her bed in a loose green robe. Her hair had not been arranged, but flowed around her as it had on that full moon night months ago. I realized I had never seen her in daylight before, had never noticed the creases beginning to form in the corners of her eyes or the strands of grey scattered among the locks of black hair. I gazed at her and she smiled at me, but there was an uncertainty or a weakness in her smile that was not present before. I looked at her, and in the length of time it takes for a mouth to open and begin speaking, something terrible happened. I looked into her eyes and in them our husband gazed back.

  Just as quickly he vanished, and we were alone again. She reached out and brushed her warm fingers against my cheek, and I could feel the edges of the deep whorls of her fingertips, rough as sack, particular to her and only her.

  Later in the week, to congratulate me on my freedom, an old client sent me two bolts of silk. One was raw, pink silk with a crimson undertone running through it that caught like hot jewels in certain light, the other as fine as human skin and as white as the moon. He was an aging minor official with a big heart and a talent for comic rhymes. We used to sit up late at night drinking and making light fun of the emperor’s foreign policy. I realized I would miss him.

  I was drinking tea when my husband came into the room.

  “Don’t tell my father about the silk,” he told me.

  “Why not?”

  “One of those fancy goblets we drank from the other night is missing and he says it was you who took it.”

  “Because he thinks that my former profession was a dishonest one?”

  “He says thieves and actresses are one and the same.”

  “I was never an actress.”

  “Still, if you begin wearing fancy new silk clothes, that will be just the evidence he wants. He will say you stole the goblet and sold it, and are now flaunting your dishonesty.”

  “And will you stand up for me?”

  “What will I say?”

  I flung the teacup to the floor in disgust and it smashed into tiny white fragments.

  The following evening, Lu Ch’iao came into my room and set down a tray with a cup and a jug of cold water.

  “No tea?”

  “He says if you insist on breaking teacups then you will have to content yourself with water.”

  “That stingy old badger. I bet he’s the one who pocketed his father’s precious goblet.”

  But I was thirsty, so I poured some water and drank it. The cold rushed into my belly and I shivered. We played chess in silence. Armies moved voicelessly beneath our hands. The cold in my belly did not recede, but began to feel like a brick of ice chilling my vital organs. I lost the emperor too easily and she said my face was pale. She went to the bed and pulled back the quilts for me. I climbed in. She slipped in beside me and blew out the candle. The night had barely settled when his voice boomed down the hallway, calling her name. She lay silently for the longest moment possible before answering.

  “I’ll come see you first thing in the morning,” she told me.

  I dreamt of a snake sleeping beneath the foundations of the house. In the morning, I was heaved awake by a wave of nausea. I thought of the window and tried to get up, but the snake dream spilled out of my mouth before I could leave the bed.

  Later, the doctor prised my lips apart, poked at my tongue, and declared me pregnant. I was ordered to lie in bed. Li assigned his old wet nurse to attend me. Entering the room for the first time with an armful of fresh linen, she eyed me as though I were already planning to escape.

  Every morning my mother-in-law came in to feel my stomach, and every morning, satisfied that it was growing, she ordered me not to leave my bed. As though the creature inside me would drop out the moment I stood upright. As though I were a dead thing housing something living. Then she would leave content, apparently not having noticed the chill that emanated from the centre of my belly, filling the room.

  The old nurse noticed. She shovelled coal into the heater under the bed all day. But she was an old woman and at night she dropped off and the fire died.

  Li visited sometimes, but I discouraged him, telling him it upset his son. He always left.

  Lu Ch’iao came less and less frequently too, without any explanation.

  Thoughts of escape had not yet entered my mind, although I was slowly consumed by a restlessness that made my limbs twitch.

  I watched the old nurse’s head dipping between sleep and wakefulness as a shard of moon rose outside the window. On this night, restlessness was my sole occupation. I could think of nothing but escape. I had been lying in bed for four months. I hadn’t seen Lu Ch’iao in two. I wasn’t sick. There was no reason for them to imprison me like this.

  I was lucky that Li had left a set of his own clothing in this room, since none of my own clothes fit anymore. I dressed quickly and padded out of the house and into the garden. The air that flooded down from the hills was redolent with the scent of pomegranate flowers. As I stepped into a pool of shadow I glimpsed the figure of a man pulling a loose stone from the base of the north wall. Legs first, he slipped through the hole. On an impulse, I followed, although it took me some time to get through the narrow gap. I trailed him at a safe distance, hiding in the dry ditch beside the road until the man came to the door of the establishment where I used to work. He turned his head in my direction as he raised a closed hand to the door. I recognized none of these things. I did recognize the sound of her knock at the gate. But this time it was for someone else.

  I waited for the length of time it took for the moon to move its own width across the sky. I knocked softly and the doorman let me in, smiling when he recognized my face and smiling even wider when he saw how big I was.

  I raised a finger to my lips and he guided me to a spot in the shadows where there was a clear view of my old window. As I settled on a flat, well-placed stone, I realized that this was not the first time someone had thought this a convenient place to spy from. I turned to say something indignant to the doorman, but he was already hurrying soundlessly around the corner of the building and back to his post.

  Lu Ch’iao reclined beside the window with the young acrobat from the south who had taken my room. The room blazed with the light of so many candles I couldn’t count them all. In the middle of the table sat a large golden goblet, from which they took turns drinking. I could hear their voices as clearly as if I too were in the room.

  “When the invasion from the north comes, what will you do?”

  “What can I do but wait and hope?”

  “You could leave the city with me.”

  I stared into the open window as though there were no other window in the world. As soon as I was able, I got up from the rock and hurried home.

  The same dread that had filled me on the first night riding the last half-mile after the last inhabited house filled me now as the pebbles crunched beneath my feet. I wanted to run, but was compelled to walk with a kind of nervous reverence towards the dark sha
pe in the distance. There was a crumbling wall and a broken gate all overgrown with weeds and the drooping branches of willows. There were foxes at work here. A whole family of them, under the direction of the elder Li. It was the only way to explain the strange metamorphosis of the house. At a loss for what to make of this situation, I found myself still driven by panic. I had to get back into bed before my escape was discovered, before I found out any more secrets that I didn’t want to know.

  I followed the broken wall to the place where the stone could be pulled out and was relieved to find the stone still there. I was trying to dislodge it when there was a shriek from my belly. I felt something cold and fishlike turn inside. I fell back and the sky filled with a million pieces of broken moon, turning wildly at random like autumn leaves. My belly lurched.

  Then Lu Ch’iao stood above me. There was a cool sticky trickle between my legs and my stomach was flat again. And warm. She held something towards me: human in form, clear and soft as jellyfish, with blue veins running through it.

  A small wooden chest clattered over the wall.

  “Now that you two conspiring ghosts have stolen my son, you can keep the rest of your stolen goods.”

  There was nothing for us to do but pick up the chest and walk back through town to the teahouse. We travelled slowly because of the dull ache between my legs that ran up to my belly. The first light of day spilled across her face, emphasizing the wrinkles and deep circles under her eyes. She took my hand and the fingertips burned in my palm. We walked.

  “You knew they were foxes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to free you.”

  The smell of coffee invaded her sleep for once just a touch too casually. Artemis wondered what morning she had first woken up to this smell and thought to herself, hey, this is comfortable, cozy, familiar. She remembered how her father drank coffee, not regularly and usually in the afternoon, but then it was instant decaffeinated, not this heady European stuff.