My Last Empress (12 page)

“I am inviting Pi-Jin as our night guest. It is settled.” He looked at me with the confidence of one who is rarely contradicted. “Tonight, six p.m. sharp. Isn’t that joyous, my dear?” he asked.

She shrieked back, “Give me a cigarette or something. I’m freezing to death, can’t you see?”

“I am not your servant,” replied S mildly, “and you should quit smoking, among other things.”

“You are the virtuous one, huh?” Q lunged at S, who nimbly dodged out of the way.

I caught her, falling, in my meddling arms.

“What can I get for you?” I asked, not knowing what was amiss.

“Big wolf, you don’t have what I need. He hides it! He is the one who has to pay. Get out of my way.” Q picked up an inkwell and threw it at S, missing him but knocking down my collection of history books. The jade well, undented, fell on the posh carpet.

The crisis only ebbed when eunuchs, without warning, as is the rule herein, appeared and carried her away, with S sinking diminished into his chess chair. Onward he complained in a manner that was remorseful and teary, generous on the
part of his wife but critical of himself. “One day,” he said, “this would all be over. She will be undone. And I don’t know what will become of me.”

Here was the tale that flowed out of S’s mouth.

Q had been a lively child bride who had caught S’s eyes in their first encounter when she had been presented to Grandpa upon return of Q’s father’s foreign service. No one had been more enamored by Q’s easy charm and quaint beauty than the dowager herself, who fancied herself an arbiter of all arts and tradition and who daily surrounded herself with talented and artistic personages. Among the dowager’s close companions was a noted Peking opera singer named Yu Fang, a diminutive man who played a woman’s part (singing and dancing being the rarefied trade of men), winning the hearts of both female and male patrons. Another favorite was a famed calligrapher whose style of calligraphy the dowager herself mimicked with great success.

Qiu Rong, however, was a novelty, trilingual and white-skinned, the latter being seen as
gui
, which meant noble, versus dark and lowborn. All the Chinese nobility painted their faces and necks with powder when seen in public to appear “pale as jade,” a phrase worth more than the value of the stone itself. Q also possessed musical talents, playing the
oomphing
organ, which her father had imported from Frankfurt.

Q became the favorite of the dowager’s daily companions. Her days were filled with Q’s music. The dowager even sponsored a soirée for all the foreign diplomats’ wives at the Summer Palace for the sake of Q, who acted as an interpreter among the attendees, much to the dowager’s pride.

It was at the height of such buoyancy that the dowager
had decided that S should be married a year earlier than previously intended, as required by the Manchurian law of royal matrimony. He, S, would conduct an abbreviated bridal search to round up the rest of his empresses, the first, second, and third consorts, giving the fourth designated position to Qiu Rong, notwithstanding the blemish that she was of mixed blood and an adoptive offspring rather than an inherently born girl of the Yellow Banner Clan. The dowager took it upon herself to advocate it against the naysayers of this matter as a sign of the Queen Mother’s being advanced in thinking and progressive by example, though she pointedly made clear that no one was to ever discuss the pedigree of Q outside or inside the palace. The only thing the dowager mentioned was the prospect that the coupling would produce, if any, the finest-skinned heir to the throne, thusly reducing the darkness of S’s skin and adding further purity to the Qing tradition, which the dowager believed was tellingly manifested by the color of their paler skin in contrast to the darker tan of the inferior Han nationality, the bulk of the Chinese citizenry under her rule.

The emperor himself was the most joyous, for he not only fancied the blue-eyed blonde as his consort but he also cherished the bridge that Q would span across the cold shores between him and the dowager, whom he had regarded with fear since a young age, and who had subjected him to many torturous disciplinary acts whenever a deviation or dereliction had been committed. At one period between ages seven and eight, S had trembled whenever coming into the presence of the dowager. Q, in sum, was to be the sunlight that
thawed all the rigidity of that cold frontage, and warmed his desolate chambers with her beams of light.

The beginning months of their matrimony were music and talk—talking till night had long faded and strolling along all the ponds and lakes. She took up nearly all his nights, including those rationed to the first, second, and third empresses, the latter two a twin set of beauties from the southern province of Fukien, chosen for their beauty and talents in calligraphy, which won the dowager’s heart, and their ability to sing throaty Hing Hua opera melodies. But soon a certain light began to fade in Q, and boredom seeped into their married life. The lakes seemed dry despite their clear water; the ponds, rich with fine memory, seemed sour. Q became an insomniac, staying up nights, slumbering away days, forsaking the trivialities of many a Court ceremony, most vitally the Sunrise Homage to Grandpa Dowager, resulting in her being alienated from the dowager’s inner circle, which resulted in more petty dereliction on Q’s part that the dowager increasingly blamed on Q’s bastardly seed. The alienation did little to lessen Q’s deviation. She resorted to that which he now had to hide. “Tonight at six,” he said curtly. Peeling himself off the chair, he dragged his leaden feet in chase of his beloved Q.

Dancing in my head, awake or in dreams, was nothing but Qiu Rong, my empressly fugitive, not of this earth but of my soul at large, largely waiting to be marshaled and tamed.

Oh, her legs apart, her calves inwardly plump. A memory of a mole gradually surfaced, right under her left ear along a blue vein. And that smile … sisterly to Annabelle’s, rightfully all mine.

Had my Annie patently given her likeness to Qiu Rong’s keeping? Had my old love finally given way to the new?

I bathed myself in the tub. To dull my urges, I drank a shot of single malt while phantoms of the past flew around me, the scent of muggy hair, of Annie and Q, the fragrance of summer weeds all mixed together.

Upon arrival at his royal dwelling, an enthused S met me, wearing a mysterious smirk. Q, my piquant gadfly, was nowhere to be found, though her faint shrieks and silvery giggles lurched amidst us deep in an adjoining grove, an iridescent yet muffled hide-and-seek, hidden and sought.

A certain emptiness drove me to down with S toast after toast of my own brew, ignoring a supper of steamed hairy crabs, simmered bear paws, stewed leaping rabbit, and braised fatty goose, to name but a few. Dim prospect dulled
all things around and above but not my fiery urge. More shots of whiskey finally emboldened me to inquire S about Q’s absence.

“It’s not her night here per palace rule,” he intoned solemnly. “This night belongs to my first consort. Q, being the fourth, my last empress, has few rights or honors that way, though I will have more say after an heir is born of my first empress, per Grandpa’s advisement. It’s the bargain agreed upon when I was granted permission to take Qiu Rong as consort.”

“Intriguing.”

“Indeed, it is. What you see here is not what it is. Few things here are of my own will, except Qiu Rong, and now you.” He sighed. “I endured much to have you here for her.”

“For her?”

“Much melancholy she has. Palace life hasn’t been easy. To you.” He raised his cup, downing it before refilling it with my bottle. “One thousand cups of wine intoxicates this host not at all.”

I followed readily with the closing verse of the famed and much lorded couplet composed by Li Bai, a Tang Dynasty poet. “Ten thousand volumes would pale against the depth of my gratitude.”

“Well versed you are.” Emptying another shot, he challenged me to a poetry contest and alcoholic consumption.

“Gin Shi, you and I?”

“Rhymes and meters?”

“Style and polish.”

S called out to Dome Head, hidden behind a teak screen. “Servant, bring more wine and four treasures.”

A battalion of eunuchs appeared, some adding plates of fresher food, others bringing jars of fine brew, still others carrying in an oblong writing table, a jade inkwell, rolls of rice paper, and quivers of wolf-hair brushes. Rice ink was circularly ground in the inkwell by In-In, the palace’s finest, his hands as soft as bird’s feet, ensuring the silkiest fluidity. Risen sheaves of paper were smoothed out and settled by a jade ruler.

The tawny wine of Shaoxing origin was only to be served in a silk-thin porcelain ware and sipped carefully and slowly. But imperially, S tilted the earthen urn and took a big wincing swallow before handing it over to me for the like taking.

A game of poetry making ensued with each brushing a worse entry than the other, producing an array of limericks, sonnets, and stanzas filched somewhere, ranging from quasi brilliant couplets—
“A drunken poet wades deep into a river, foggy; he wonders if it pours asunder from a sky, high”
—to frivolity—
“Three monks sit side by side nude in the bathing sun; six heads swing right to left without a stir of peeping wind.”

Ink bled and brushes flew, soiling rolls of rice paper. Jars poured and cups emptied, filling full the throats of fools. It was then when the muse of poetry possessed us both.

Haunted, drunk, and self-absorbed in his glee, one was prone to act in roles of his invention. Gripped, one could reach the moon, climbing the lanky ladder of darkness: many prior poets had perished falling off bridges and cliffs, their heroism lauded by similarly inclined souls. This state of airy consciousness was likened to a state of transcendence by monks and poets alike and deemed a glimpse of the Isle of Bliss promised by Guanyin, a lotus-leaf dwelling deity.

S slipped away, only to return singing Peking opera arias rather expertly, costumed as a woman in a trailing gown, vivid with soft hand gestures and supple with a hippy gait.

Eerie? To be sure. Alarming? Not at all.

Noble-blooded and augustly descended he might be, S was no more or less than an odd elk of my very own ilk, a novel chip off the aged and rotten block; madness and singularity were twins conjoined, inseparable. He bloomed into a full blossom, as a peacock would fan its tail.

Absorbingly, S inched toward me, singing a throat-swelling number while dancing a notoriously arousing routine known as Floating Lotus Leaves with his feet squirming forward, toes touching, heels gliding like a silkworm, other body parts unmoving. His hand faked a porous fan as he swiped a subtle wrist, urging a wordless breeze. Lyrics strained from his pursed lips smeared with red. Sorrow and anguish—the melodic widow’s remembrance of her dead spouse—were arced and raised between his freshly painted brows in the slender shape of two willow leaves. Genuine tears trickled down his faltering cheeks as he clicked his teeth and smacked his lips, enunciating each and every weighty word of widowhood, singing a requiem ending with his slowly falling forward, reaching to grasp my left knee with his trembling fingers as if holding onto the ghost of that sung operatic hero crushed under a rock rush from the Great Wall of his own ancestors’ making.

S remained in such posture long after the last note was voiced and my applause receded. Then feebly he raised his head, gazing forlornly into my eyes, and uttered the closing lyrics of the aria in a singsong tone, “Don’t take her away. She
is all that I’ve got, and all that I will ever have in this life and the next. Please …”

Since the Mandarin language makes no distinction between a
he
or
she
in sound, when he uttered the above plea, I mistook him to be restarting another musical stanza, complete with the gesture of falling, weeping, tearing, and knee jerking that was unfinished from his last solo act, taking
he
to mean a flat
he
rather than a new
she
, a suddenly ascended syntactic phoenix.

Sensing no reply from me, he shook my knee some more and this time cried out the following: “You do fancy my Qiu Rong, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t!”

“And she fancies you. I saw it—her kisses, her hugs. It all means nothing. She is all mine, do you know? I will conquer her, that wild child, just you see. I saw the way she looks at you—
Big Man
—that nonsense.” He sneered. “You don’t think I could be a Big Man, do you? I’ll show you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I could kill you with this silver stick.” He picked up a chopstick, pausing to examine it.

“But you won’t!”

“Servant!” S shouted.

Dome Head availed himself, bowing before S.

“Bring Qiu Rong here for her bedding duty this very moment,” S ordered.

“The first empress has been readied for you. It is not Qiu Rong’s turn,” Dome Head said with head lowered. “It’s by Grandpa’s order.”

“I am the emperor, can’t you see?” S demanded, looking
hardly imperial: his makeup was soggy, running down his cheeks, one brow blurred into an enlarged olive leaf big in the middle.