My Last Empress (5 page)

In the candlelit bridal room, the muggy summer night materialized. I continued the steamy job at hand, lifting the hem of Annabelle’s skirt, parting her legs. She moaned her sweet moans, her knees clamping in fake resistance, then the base of her hip tautened and slackened in wanton submission.

By sunrise my fresh bride was found kneeling, face buried in our satin settee, the silk gown barely draping her bare self, and the call for
charge
rang again in my foggy head. She was a living Annabelle, shy from the morning sun, begging for Captain Pickens to wake her with his bulbous baton. Oh, my submissive love slave! I crawled stealthily like a sunken-bellied leopard, eyeing my prey, adoring her in the faintest
of light. Had Annabelle been alive, she would have been this creature, thin ankled, fine-kneed, narrow-hipped, sirening for a reprisal of the night gone by.

When I caressed her unadorned tailbone with the tips of trembling fingers, my pale bride did not unleash an expectant sigh. A tender thrust was initiated along the valley of my doll. But my bride played an icy mannequin. Again I coaxed her with my throbbing staff, forcing my way onward as gently as a deprived and depraved soul could bear. The interior of my lover was cold as a cave. A certain irresponsive swaying of her hips, letting throw and toss whichever way I leaned on her, informed me that she was either still deep in her opium-induced stupor or coyly playing the fiddle for the mannequin-loving Pickens, who was accustomed to squeaking domination over his wooden love slave.

It was neither. When the slobbering Pickens cease-fired in the midst of his assault to investigate her mutinous silence by lifting the empress gown off her head, unveiling his one-night bride, the sight of blood dripping from the corner of her mouth, yielding a certain malodorous stench, was all I needed to see.

Who knows what I did to her in our foggy bed, upon the shaky chair, and over the satin settee. Had I banged her head against some sharp wall corner, my hands on her long curls, riding her, taming her in the act of ecstasy? Or had it been my Annabelle, acting out on her jealousies, from afar? The ceramist father-in-law’s words would soon save me from the hands of the law. He whispered her preexisting medical condition into the ears of the hulking sheriff: a rare case of extremely high blood pressure that rose in times of extreme
stress, which the county coroner explained had ruptured her cerebral vessels, causing her, and many others before and after, to die in the arms of their loved ones.

Mr. Sanders not only did not accuse me, as many would in such a case of neglect (the coroner confirmed her time of demise to have been about four hours before reporting), but he also credited me with the praise of making “her last day in life the happiest” and offered an unworthy apology for having promised “a cracked vase” into my hands, depriving me of lifelong bliss as a wedded man. I was rather moved by his generosity of shouldering all the blame that could have been borne by me, for which I could have spent lengthy years licking the keyhole of some smelly upstate prison cell.

As I sat in the front pew, six feet from my prettied-up corpse of a bride, a girl I barely knew, awash in the deep sorrow of her sobbing parents, I felt an extreme urge to burst out my criminal deeds: the mouthful of opium, that sordid urge of mine that brought us the unwanted ecstasy that killed her. But I didn’t and couldn’t! Annabelle-in-my-head, now an experienced, soothing ghost, rushed me to the door where the departing guests were and had me thank them as she had directed me at my parents’ funeral, my wedding, and now my bride’s departure. I, newly orphaned and now widowed, red-eyed and withdrawn, stood by the door where we had wed only days before, thanking those who had congratulated me as sincerely as they now consoled me, ignoring my ill-fated bride all prettied up in an open casket display.

I felt like a thief who had stolen someone else’s pearl. Susan, in another life, could have fallen in love and married
an even-tempered, less virile Harvard Man, who would have paled in every way in bringing her the kind of ecstatic satisfaction that I must have done. She would have borne her bucktoothed brood and lived to be an adorably toothy granny, but she was gone, sacrificing her youth for me and my Annabelle.

I had moved into my parents’ townhouse, now that I was the legal owner. Legal I might be, but was it moral? Three deaths in one summer? How summarily convenient. Jack the Ripper couldn’t have ripped a neater job.

I shall say that as I dug deeper, a certain speck of fact popped up, as it would occasionally in my mental upheaval, and clarity surfaced.

On the very deadly afternoon when Father and Mother went sailing with their yacht friends, I had been expected on board as well to get some fresh air, though I had not known that I was to be matched on the fateful cruise with a suitable girl just returned from finishing school in Paris. I had planned on going because an art curator, Bernard Hughes, who had dedicated his life to acquiring Oriental arts, portraits, and antiques for the Astors, was the guest of honor, and he, in Mother’s words, looked forward to meeting the young Pickens.

Minutes before I was to step out of the house with Mother and her company, Father had long been on board, I was suddenly attacked by a most severe case of diarrhea, the kind that threatened to empty one’s entrails. Strangely, I hadn’t eaten anything remotely trigger-happy as far as that kind of downpour was concerned. Neither had any part of me
been chilled; on the contrary, it was a summer day that needed chilling. As soon as I felt it was safe to go, the urge would return, rendering it utterly improper to board anything without embarrassing the entire Pickens clan and their friends. Exactly three hours and thirty minutes later the disaster would strike, and I would be the only Pickens left dry ashore. The incessant cramping of my lower abdomen only ceased upon hearing of the boat’s sinking.

Cosmic puzzlement? Perhaps. But that would not be the only coincidence of the day. An uncanny article in a newspaper that I usually never rested my eyes upon published a list of other minor coincidences stitched together by a snoopy newspaperman, fedora and cigarettes and all, I imagine. He wrote, and I quote from the article headlined as “The Eerie Coincidences Leading to New York Society’s Sink of the Decade,” that the skipper of the lobster boat was aged thirty-nine, the ninth child of a Great Neck Catholic clan. He had nine children of his own, and it was the ninth anniversary of his marriage (a prolific lobsterman) to one of twin sisters, who each had only nine toes. The accident took place on the ninth of the ninth month, exactly nine minutes after seven—a clock on board had stopped in the moment of the accident.

These might all sound like mindless rhyme concocted by a desperate newspaperman. Maybe the coincidences weren’t so coincidental after all. Let the preponderance of evidence paint itself: that portrait of a cunning criminal, my Annabelle-under-the-quilt.

Nine, the royal digit of the Chinese emperor, was Annabelle’s favorite number. She had professed to wanting to have
nine children, with the little runt, a curly girlie, to be named Nina. She believed in the cycle of nine lives, each one a reflection of the previous. “Which one are you living now?” she used to ask me. She yearned to soar up to the ninth heaven where the pears of immortality and the peaches of longevity were grown. Harmless it might seem, but in the end, nine were injured, including the curator and Parisian girl: the former lost his voice, his Adam’s apple slashed, rendering him a permanent mute—he, I gathered, was to talk me out of going to China—the latter lost an eye, making her a one-eyed beauty, and clipped her lip, popular not even in the eccentric city of Paris, making it an utter impossibility to be matched with anyone. In one act of genius, all paths to perdition were cleared of my Annabelle’s foes. No one, I mean no one, but the devil could have done it except for my sweet darling girl.

So there you have it. I had thought of doing in my folks, but in the end it was the ghost who took the charge with the cobweb of nines. There are no laws or tenets prohibiting her from such deadly vengeance: she is dead. No hanging or beheading could hurt her anymore. My conscience was utterly clean—no bloody fingers or smoking gun. Just a snugly hidden ghost doing what might very well have been my own intended deeds.

There were moments, many moments as I roamed in my dark world, when I felt as if I was the only seeing soul among the blind multitude. I was the clear-eyed chosen one who had crossed over to the dark side, secretly privy to the underbelly of a busy loom that wove the fabric of coincidences,
making them seem so conveniently and banally coincidental. Nothing happens randomly. Every occurrence is the result of much nail-biting premeditation in the mammoth cosmic game of chess played by angelic go-betweens, those butterflies of which my Annabelle is one, as the following chain of miraculous events will attest.

I wasn’t the only one on earth dreaming up little angelic ghosts as colorful butterflies. At the close of the previous chapter, on the point of my comparing all ghosts to butterflies, In-In, my presumed illiterate ink boy, tugged at my sleeve, picked up his little brush, and proceeded to draw a butterfly with the simplest of strokes, yet affecting such vividness, as if the little creatures in flight were futilely barred behind the red lines on our draft paper.

“You are an accomplished painter,” I complimented him.

“Baba painted paper lanterns, and I apprenticed at his shop, painting little creatures on the bottom,” he replied shyly.

When I asked him why he had painted me such a lively gift, he told me dead people soar up to become butterflies in China. I pinched his rosy cheek with affection and awarded him with a tael of silver for having stayed up past midnight to whet my ink.

All the little eunuchs in the palace had to work so very hard, and for what? A sunless living ahead of them all. He would have been better off, much better off, staying a lantern painter in the faraway village. But who am I to chastise him for what he had not chosen himself? It might have very well been his parents’ choice to make him a sacrificial lamb
to serve the palace so that the rest of the family would live forever in heavenly and material blessings.

In-In, as I observed, wasn’t really the country bumpkin that he pretended to be. This wasn’t the first time he had let out his secret. Upon rereading my unfinished memoir, I had encountered numerous corrections stealthily brushed in by the boy, making up a dot here, extending a stroke there. Though I marveled over his refined penmanship, I often wondered why he was hiding his literacy, and what else was he hiding from me. No matter, and no hurry, which seemed to be the pace of the palace. No one is without secrets here.

In-In’s drawing had to have been inspired by a much loved fairytale that I had read during my double-visioned senior year at Yale.
Butterfly Lovers
could have been plagiarized from the Bard’s
Romeo and Juliet
, except for two countering facts: it had been penned long before our bearded Brit had been fathered, and it had a happy ending—the mark of the prodigious Chinese art of melofantasy. Two doomed lovers, who had died separately yet were buried side by side, soar away from the dusty earth as butterflies. Now and again on starry nights, a common eye could spot the lovers blinking in the margins of the Milky Way.

I dwell on our beloved flyers because this very chapter under my dripping brush could well be named “My Butterflies.” Life, if one sees closely, does take on certain themes.

For two years following Susan’s death, I ensconced myself in my ill-gotten abode, barricading myself in Mother’s bedroom where I was purported to have been born. I felt a certain umbilical link to that space, which promised the possibility
of a new beginning. Mother was nowhere to be found, though her things, her scents, her motherly something, hung perennially in the air, mixed with the fragrance of gardenias seeping in from the garden down below.

The barricading was necessitated by my illusion that the entire house, three stories plus a little attic, were flown with little butterflies. Not your normal type but dark and white ones, choking themselves into every nook, vying for anything as a foothold to rest their busy wings. Everywhere I went they surrounded me, landing all over me. Annabelle told me that they were the nimble players of the aforementioned cosmic chess game, the undying spirits of rotten corpses and scattered bones. Without this nesting place, they would forever flutter in windblown graveyards and weedy cemeteries. Worse, at night they were hunted by ghost catchers to clock their time for a journey of finality—good men to heaven, bad fellows to hell.