A Flower’s Shade (12 page)

Miss Yu, soaked to the bone, only emerged from the bathtub when the hot water had all but completely cooled. Since Mrs. Wu had controlled her too much, Miss Yu now liked after her bath to do everything herself. She liked to put on the loose bathrobe and sit in front of her dressing table to do her make-up, filled with admiration for the image in the mirror. She liked to comb her hair slowly, coiling her hair in different styles. She liked to deploy her appreciation to gather back the youth which was deserting her.

It was a very hot night. Miss Yu, having just finished her bath, her forehead steadily perspiring, was sitting in front of the dressing table, her clothing disheveled, combing her hair. Feeling too hot, she called for Huaifu to come fan her. When he arrived with the fan, Miss Yu took a towel to rub away the dripping sweat, and continued to coil her hair, her one hand hanging in mid-air. Her hair was now coiled high, and she was wondering how she ought to fix it in place. Very patiently, she looked at herself in the mirror, and without meaning to do so, her gaze drifted to the reflection of Huaifu's eyes in the mirror. She noted the male desire in Huaifu's eyes. His eyes were fixed embarrassingly on Miss Yu's half-hidden high breasts. It was obvious that he had been peeking for some time, but Miss Yu had failed to notice.

"Hey, what are you looking at?" Miss Yu, looking down, now saw that her high breasts were peeking out from her loose clothing. At the thought that her own breasts were being gazed at by a man, her face went red. Not long before, as she had been soaking in the tub, Miss Yu had been fondling her restless nipples, wondering what kind of passions they might stir if men were to see them. Doubtless a man's eyes would see them sooner or later. Despite herself, she had been thinking of Xiaoyun. What would Xiaoyun do if he saw them? Thinking of the tone he set with those dark glasses, Miss Yu all but laughed. With those glasses on, Xiaoyun could stare at them unswervingly. They were such adorable little playthings, and yet they had never been seen by a man.

Instead Huaifu had become the first man to see them. Once her instinctive blush had passed, Miss Yu was not really very angry. Since she had been given such a nice thing, there was nothing against having men see them. Huaifu had seen them first—that was his good fortune. Miss Yu straightened out her collar and rolled her eyes at Huaifu. Huaifu stood like a man who's had an electric shock, his gaze timorously moving off. An enormous fear enveloped him like a huge net. The frogs were croaking irritatingly; Miss Yu, taking note of Huaifu's look of misery, snickered disdainfully. "You hopeless lug. So you saw them. What are you so afraid of?" Privately she was thinking that what men really needed a little backbone, and that in this department Xiaoyun was better than Huaifu. Huaifu was too gormless, too much the honest country bumpkin, and certain still to be innocent of women.

Miss Yu suddenly rose and walked over to the opium bed where she threw herself on her side. Without waiting for orders, Huaifu discarded the fan and obediently approached. With a crackle he struck a match and used it to light the opium lamp, then he began to vaporize the opium pill for Miss Yu. Miss Yu looked at Huaifu unabashedly. Huaifu seemed to know that Miss Yu was looking at him, and he squirmed uneasily. He lifted the opium pipe and blew the smoke for Miss Yu while he continued to vaporize more. The croaking of the frogs had grown weaker—it was like the intermission in a concert program. Clouds of smoke rose in front of Miss Yu, and she shut her eyes in intoxication. After a moment, she opened them again and stared at Huaifu. In that moment, the timid, honest man seemed very cute.

Miss Yu said casually, "Shall I tell you what your good points and what your bad points are?"

Huaifu looked at Miss Yu with wide-open eyes.

Miss Yu said, "Your good point is that you're obedient. Your bad point is also that you're obedient. You're a man after all, so how can you act like an obedient dog, doing whatever you're told to do."

Huaifu was dismayed, and the corners of his mouth trembled, as though he had a premonition that something was impending. He knew that Miss Yu had seen him stealing a look at her breast. Miss Yu could easily have denounced him as a lowlife, could have given him a dressing down, but she hadn't done so, she hadn't. Miss Yu took a deep breath of the smoke floating before her and said dreamily, "Huaifu, do you know what I've been thinking? I think you're just like a pet dog of mine. Like pet dog that's sometimes is very annoying, and other times not so annoying."

Huaifu wanted to say that he was indeed a dog, that he was fully willing to be a dog like that. "Will you really be my dog?" Miss Yu was already rather drowsy in the smoke. Huaifu didn't know how he ought to answer, but his expression was one of complete submission. He lay on the opium bed and fussily put away the opium things. Miss Yu burst into laughter, saying "I just knew you would be my dog!" She pressed his head down, like she really was going to treat him accordingly. He stayed there on the opium bed, on all fours like a dog. With her slender fingers, Miss Yu ran her fingers over his head as over the keys of a piano. Under her touch, Huaifu trembled. The starlight was brilliant and the frogs were loud. An irrepressible passion erupted simultaneously in the bodies of Miss Yu and Huaifu. Huaifu clumsily crawled over to Miss Yu and began to sniff like a dog about her knees. Miss Yu cackled.

Huaifu realized that he was receiving encouragement, he understood that he was doing what was desired. He sniffed and sniffed, and suddenly could no longer bridle his impulse, he suddenly threw himself on Miss Yu's stomach and clumsily embraced her, clumsily caressed her body. It was obvious that he had frightened Miss Yu half to death, but it was also obvious that Miss Yu had been hoping for such a scene. Miss Yu was a little nervous, and even more excited. She allowed him to fondle her as he liked, and breathed deeply and heavily, while her hands also caressed his body. Huaifu discovered more and more courage, and was less and less able to control his impulses. Suddenly he roughly flipped Miss Yu over on the opium bed. Miss Yu was stunned, and her face distorted into anger. She thrust him off powerfully.

This act brought Huaifu back to his senses, and he suddenly understood what he had been doing. Uncertainty and panic mingled in his eyes, and as though he had precipitated some great disaster he ran for the door. "I…" Huaifu said, having reached the door and speaking full of fear and pain and without rhyme or reason, "I…I…Damn me!" Miss Yu, blushing red, raised herself up from the opium bed and said to Huaifu, trembling at the door, "Go on, then. You didn't do anything wrong."

Huaifu was so grateful that he almost began to cry. If Miss Yu didn't hold it against him, that really was a great kindness on her part. Like a prisoner whose sentence has been commuted, he wanted to run off, but Miss Yu suddenly called him back. This situation had been entirely of her own making, she had instinctively taken to teasing the naïve Huaifu. For Miss Yu, Huaifu's fear was stimulating, she felt that now the real man wasn't Huaifu, but was Miss Yu herself. Desire was burning in her heart; she was already an old maid, she should exact her compensation for her lost youth, she found that she really wanted to know what "it" was really like. Resolutely, she shouted to him, "Don't go, Huaifu, come back here." Huaifu, dejected, had already reached the doorway, and now turned back, incredulous.

Miss Yu closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, face-up, her limbs sprawling on the opium bed, and authoritatively commanded Huaifu: "Don't be afraid, I need you to come here." Huaifu hesitated, standing still, too frightened to move. Miss Yu again repeated her invitation, this time in a forceful whisper, "Come here!"

"Come here!" These two words acted on him like a thunderbolt. Huaifu's eyes filling with tears, trembling, he solemnly approached Miss Yu. Lying face-up on the opium bed, Miss Yu suddenly opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling as she waited for Huaifu. Huaifu, reaching her, knelt down reverently.

The noisy croaking of the frogs resounded, resounded and then suddenly left off. In that moment of the silence, the sacred ritual was drawing to a close, and Miss Yu's hysterical cry was heard. It was a very long sound, painful in the extreme and extraordinary joyful, echoing in the night through the Estate. When the silence all around had resumed, the sky filled with the mysterious gaze of the stars, and the frogs began once again their loud croaking.

A
fter experiencing the bursts of passion for the first time at the age of twenty-seven, Miss Yu fell into utter indifference. Although Huaifu was a close cousin, she had no fear of incest. Nobody had ever told her how one handled sex life. As a girl raised in an atmosphere brimming with debauchery, and a girl whose sexual education had come via an erotic novel, The Plum in the Golden Vase, she had for many years been sexually repressed, a repression which had now easily exploded. It was a kind of burning fire which came out of her interior world. Miss Yu's father and brother had possessed so many women. Now that she held full power over the Zhen Estate, she had half-consciously been looking for men. For her, sex was just a kind of possession or acquisition. Men could possess or acquire women; thus women could also possess or acquire men.

The extreme pain of losing her virginity, had almost made her want to kick Huaifu off the end of the opium bed. She couldn't understand why something that seemed like so much in books was in reality so unbearable. She didn't want to blame him, since she understood that if there was anyone to blame, it was herself. She couldn't remember how she had got Huaifu to leave, in any case by the time she rose from the opium bed and walked painfully to the toilet, it was already the middle of the night, and there was no one left in the empty room but her. Huaifu had long since slipped covertly away, and the croaking outside had substantially diminished. Besides the remaining pain, all that happened seemed incredible, something already distant from her. The first man had finally appeared in her life, but the identity of this man seemed to have no importance. Men were only a sign, a tool to be made use of, a station she had to pass through on her onward journey, and one she had naturally reached.

In contrast to Miss Yu's peace of mind, Huaifu felt oppressed by the great dread of incest, which weighed upon his heart like a mountain. In Yaoshan Village, there was talk of the brother-in-law with the wife; the father-in-law and the bride—these moral offenses were no more than ugly rumors, and were not such a serious matter. But that people with blood relations, sharing the same clan name, that there should be sexual relations between them, this was certain to cause a great uproar. Miss Yu and Huaifu shared a same great-great-great-grandfather, and so their act was a heinous offense, an unpardonable sin. For Huaifu, it would never have occurred to him in his wildest dreams that they would take it so far. He couldn't believe that he had so easily tumbled into the quagmire of incest. He felt a great danger in front of him, waiting for him.

Just as Miss Yu had suddenly gone from being a virgin to being a genuine woman, Huaifu had gone from being a boy with no sexual experience to being a man in the real sense of the word. Lying in the dark, Huaifu sighed to think of that second time he had met Miss Yu, when he had been so humiliated. It seemed it was his fate to be humiliated at her hands. In all those years, he had been unable to forget Miss Yu's cutting words. Although they shared an ancestor, although in the clan it had often been mooted that Huaifu ought to be adopted by Old Master Zhen, yet Huaifu had understood that he could not become Miss Yu's real brother. In fact, even after Huaifu had entered the Zhen Estate, every time he had called her "sister" , he could never prevent himself from dimly hearing what Miss Yu had said after rolling her eyes at him,

"Don't call me sister, you're not my brother."

Unwillingly, Huaifu would always recall the humiliation caused by his first wet dream about Miss Yu. Even though it had been in a dream, Huaifu still imagined it as a continuation of the humiliation wrought by Miss Yu. In the dream, she had ruthlessly teased him, scolded him like a servant who needs disciplining, had even furiously slapped him in the face. In his dream, Miss Yu she was an even more coarse, pugnacious, figure. He had eagerly borne the humiliation, or rather than borne one should rather say that he had thrown himself into it with enjoyment. The way she mistreated him had actually given him great pleasure. Dimly, Huaifu realized what the result of humiliation could be, for Miss Yu's anger always brought him excitement. The excitement would give him an erection and his blood would boil in his body as though it were pure alcohol. Her mistreatment of him made him see a great green field in his mind's eye. He realized that he was riding on a noble steed, Miss Yu was borne behind him, and the horse was galloping indefatigably, off into the grasslands.

The moon had risen, and its dim light had quieted the croaking. Miss Yu had already risen from the opium bed and was preparing to go to her own bed to sleep. Perturbed, Huaifu was still in his room, still running over the scene they had just acted out. He couldn't bear to think what meeting Miss Yu tomorrow would be like. He remembered when he was ten years old, one day in spring. Huaifu's family had a tomcat which he had seen in the vacant place in front of their home, mounting a female cat. The tomcat was born of that same female cat. A great pack of children had stood not far off, all of them covering their mouths in laughter. The children all knew that only wild beasts would act this way.

As far as Huaifu could remember, the first case of incest in Yaoshan village had concerned a distant uncle of his had tricked his own niece into sleeping with him. The girl had been a bit dull-witted, and even at age eighteen she would often pull down her pants and pee in the fields, without checking at all if there were people around. The uncle had just lured her with some malted candies to the place with the mulberry trees, and taken her there. The matter quickly came to light, because the niece's belly grew bigger and bigger, and she had given a straightforward explanation of what had occurred.