The Binding Chair (13 page)

“He can’t have
no
money,” May said.

“Nothing except what he gets from his brother-in-law.” Helen yawned without covering her mouth. Her teeth were small and even; like a child’s, they had spaces between them. “I know Shanghai,” she said. “I’ve lived here for fifteen years, and I know who lives in every house on Bubbling Well, and on Weihaiwei and Avenue Foch. His sister is married to a taipan, to Dick Benjamin, and Arthur Cohen has nothing apart from what he wheedles out of his sister’s husband.”

May lit a taper from the flame of her spirit lamp, and its glowing end broke off and fell on the rug so that she had to step on it. She said nothing, lit it again.

“Fine,” Helen said. “All right. I’ve noticed it’s always the clever people who do stupid things.” She flapped her hand at the smoke coming from May’s pipe. “Didn’t you know—every opium den is crowded with geniuses.”

“The problem is—”

“Don’t talk about love. It’s not something you can afford. Not you or anyone else in this—”

“I wasn’t going to.” May wasn’t as naive and romantic as that. She’d listened to all the lectures. She’d learned that love was nothing more than a calculus, an equation whose variables could be manipulated.

But how was she to remain unmoved by a man who unbound and kissed her feet, who bathed them and then washed himself in dirty water from the basin? All the rest—gifts, tender words, the eager expression on his face when she opened the door, how tall he was and how good-natured—May was not lacking in discipline, and all these she could deny herself.

But not his desire for what she had to hide from everyone else.

…   

A
S FOR
A
RTHUR
, he knew he was in love, he didn’t hesitate to say so. He told everyone he met how perfect May was and how much he wanted her. She was beautiful, but anyone could see that. How many women of any nationality were as cultured, as educated? May spoke four languages, and just ask her who was Robespierre, or Diderot, or to list the Stuart monarchs and the dates they ascended the throne. Or why not challenge her to a game of chess, because it wasn’t rote memorization—she was smart. A person had to be, to have so keen a sense of humor.

Arthur dined out with May. He introduced her to his friends and saw how they enjoyed her high-spirited company. Quick-witted, she got the best of them, but who could object to her teasing? To the source of such brilliant, intoxicating smiles? Who couldn’t May bewitch, sitting with her feet tucked under a table or folded under her silk skirt, hidden, as Arthur preferred them to be. Hidden, because they belonged to him alone.

Arthur didn’t tell even one soul how he worshipped May’s violated, broken, and sometimes pungent feet. He kept them a secret, and he cautioned himself that if he shared this secret with even one person, then the mysterious revelations they promised would be denied him. As soon as he uttered a word, the silence of sex would be shattered; in would rush ceaseless shrill chatter, the siren of tinnitus.

And when she put her feet on his shoulders he moved slowly, so slowly, and tried his best to last. “Open your eyes!” he said, the first man who had ever asked her such a thing. The others, they wanted their privacy. “Please. I want to look in them. I want to see them when you … When you …”

“When I come?”

“Yes!”

So she left her eyes open, and he looked into them for words she didn’t say, noises she didn’t make. May soundless beneath him: this excited him more than any moan or cry. No matter if all the lights blazed, her silence made her every touch mysterious, unknowable. The hot sun of a lunchtime tryst grew as dark as midnight. Inside Arthur’s head a thick scroll unrolled. On it, he knew, was written the past and the future. On it was explained every hidden truth. On it was a map to salvation. But then he came, the scroll burned up before he had a chance to read it.

Privately, in the hours he spent alone, apart from May, Arthur paced and chewed the skin around his lips. Why couldn’t he despise her feet? Why didn’t he recoil from them, as he should? Not because they were unnatural, but because they caused her such pain.

In years to come, Arthur would catch May doubled over, weeping, holding her feet in her hands. This didn’t happen often—only a handful of times in their life together—but each time it seared him, and all the more so when he tried to comfort her, and she straightened up and said he was mistaken. She hadn’t been crying at all.

What was the matter with him that he could love not just her, but her disfigurement? A Chinese could blame the attraction on ignorance or custom, but Arthur was not Chinese. Arthur would spend his life in quixotic pursuit of utopias, of societies cleansed of folly and affliction. Devoting himself to an ill he could not cure: that would be romantic. What Arthur felt was not romance; it was lust. And though he scourged himself for the thought—a thought he would never confess, never speak aloud—he was glad they couldn’t be straightened. For then how could he resolve the conflict? How could he choose between the woman and her anguish, between May and her feet?

Arthur proposed thirty-seven times before May consented to marry him. “You can’t refuse me!” he would cry. “You cannot when I want you so!”

May looked at him, considering. “My first husband seemed kind, too, before the wedding,” she teased, trying not to be a fool, trying not to succumb to love, which, as everyone knew, was either evanescent or fatal.

“I will be kind to you forever. For as long as I live. And after. I will leave you all my money.”

“You haven’t any money.”

“I’ll make some. If you would only just marry me, I’d be able to settle down. To think about something else.”

“So you say. But perhaps you are no better than the others. Perhaps you think—”

“Just let me prove myself to you. If you are unhappy, I will release you.”

“If I am unhappy I will run away.”

Arthur fell to his knees and embraced May’s legs. “So, you consent! You are saying—At last, you are saying
yes.
”

May stroked the rough curls on his head. “Yes,” she agreed. For, in the one essential way, he had already proved himself to her.

A
DVENTURE AND
A
RREST

T
HE DAY AFTER THE SÉANCE
, A
LICE VISITED THE
captain in his compartment. It was the first time she’d been alone with him since the day he’d frightened her with his tears, his hot, shuddering embrace. “I’m … I’ve brought you some Sanaphos. It’s for nerves,” she explained.

Litovsky patted the side of the berth. He was dressed, but evidently had not risen, not completely; his bed had not yet been made up.

“Sit with me,” he said. Through the window beside him, the flat, open steppes organized themselves into small hills and then larger ones as the track cut through the somber woods of the Ural Mountains. Everything was dripping and gray. A freight train passed on the opposite track, loaded with logs, their ends raw, yellow circles, stacked up and bleeding sap.

Litovsky put his hand on Alice’s knee. “Russians,” he said, as if by way of explaining his indisposition, “are prey to homesickness. They suffer homesickness everywhere and at all times.”

“Even when they are at home?” Alice asked.

“Yes. Even in their own beds!” The captain nodded, vehement. “Especially in their own beds,” he said. Against the white linen pillow slip his face looked smudged; his cheeks were not—as they usually were—freshly shaven.

“Yes,” Alice nodded. “I understand.”

“Do you?” He searched her brown eyes. “Yes, I think you do, even though you are still young. I am sorry for that.” He fell silent. Then, “Shall I tell you how they make kopecks?” he asked, as if he were talking to a girl much younger than she.

“All right.”

Litovsky sat up a little. “Copper bars from copper works in the Urals are melted down into bands about this thick.” He put his thumb and forefinger together so that no more than a sliver of light shone between them.

“The bands are fed like ribbon into a cutting machine that makes blank coins. Some are good,” he said. “Some not so good.” He made a so-so gesture with his hand, let it drop heavily to his side. “They throw the bad ones back into the pot, polish the good ones. Stamp a coat of arms on one side, a likeness of the czar on the other, and polish again.” He paused, sighed. “There are a few more steps, but that’s the idea. The coppers in your purse come right out of the mountain.”

The train passed a frozen river, as dull and gray as a road. On it stood sheep. Alice said nothing and Litovsky, too, was silent. After some minutes there was an announcement that the train was approaching Kuybyshev.

“Be quick and get your cloak,” Litovsky said, pulling himself to his feet. “Your hat and muff.”

Alice did as he told her. She walked back to her own compartment where her coat was hanging.

“Where are you going?” Miss Waters asked.

“The platform. Some air.”

And perhaps that was what she had thought in the moment. That she would go no farther than a few steps beyond the train’s blue door. Afterwards, when she asked herself, when others asked her, if she knew then what she was going to do, Alice couldn’t remember. Later, much later, it would seem to her that after the séance, after Litovsky’s faint and her mother’s hysterics, after her own “shocking meanness,” as Dolly would forever put it, she had at last gone to sleep and dreamed of going to the Old City with May, a familiar dream, and one that often ended badly. But this time the execution turned out to be a conjurer’s trick. A blink of the eye, a billowing scarf passed over the platform, the pole, and the Chinese girl stepped whole from the basket where the stones had been. She pulled up her tunic and showed the crowd her smooth white midriff, without even a scratch.

But it couldn’t have been as tidy as that. Alice rarely remembered her dreams past breakfast. Like all of us, she raveled the dramas of childhood, made of them a fabric more seamless than fate allows. After all, how could the punishment of a girl in China have any bearing, really, on Alice’s detour from the long journey to Miss Robeson’s Academy?

No one followed Alice and the captain; no one stopped them. She put her hand in his, and together they disembarked. They didn’t see the
provodnik;
he must have been otherwise occupied. A guard checked Litovsky’s pass and waved Alice on through. Once outside the station house, she saw a town that bristled with church spires.

Litovsky used his walking stick to hail a troika, and after a terse negotiation, its driver took them to a hotel eleven blocks from the station. Alice counted as they passed the street lamps on the corners, standing black, solemn, waiting for the lamp-lighter’s flame. When they dismounted from the trap they found a sidewalk made of boards. Immediately the tip of Litovsky’s stick got caught between two of them.

What were you thinking! people always said to Alice. Did you imagine that you could just step off into another land? Another life?

Her mother and father, her sister, governess, friends, teachers, and, later, lovers: all of them expected answers. And Alice would discover that the less she said, the more they thought they understood. If she let them, they told the whole story for her; they furnished whatever justifications they wanted.

You were infatuated with him, a girlish crush. The uniform, the boots and cap and military posture—such things have their effects. And the confinement of such a long trip! That would of course be disorienting.

A change in schedule, in diet, and sleeping on those hard narrow berths—it doesn’t take much to disturb the equilibrium of certain constitutions. Something to consider when you travel, Alice.

The snow. The ice. The threat of boarding school. How irrational young persons can be! Angry with your mother for sending you away from home, away from your aunt May. You never got on with your mother. Or your sister, for that matter.

There are individuals—did you know?—who are affected by coal gas leaking from the engine. You didn’t know that? Such people can’t take trains; train travel makes them absolutely mad.

Whatever theories were offered, Alice accepted. After all, she didn’t have any better explanation, not the kind that would satisfy people. What could she say—that it was the warmth of the captain’s gaze, the
heat
of it? She’d been frightened two days before; she’d hated his embrace, so desperate, claustrophobic. She’d run, but then she’d had to return. Unaccountably, she wanted to feel it again. As for being angry with her mother—when hadn’t that been true?

The tip of the captain’s cane came out from between the planks with a squeal. He held her by the shoulders. “Another chance,” he said. “I’ve one more chance. I won’t be … this time I won’t be … I only wanted—you know that I only wanted you to be proud.”

He had a room booked and asked for another. “I didn’t know I’d have the pleasure of my daughter’s company,” he explained to the concierge, touching his mustache, smoothing it. The sallow man nodded and wrote something in a ledger. He handed Litovsky two keys. Upstairs the rooms were papered with a pattern of yellow flowers; the windows had double glass to keep out the cold.

Alice sat in an armchair upholstered in horsehide. The seat’s corners were worn, exposing a pale, dry skin pocked with dark, empty follicles. It was impossible to resist worrying more hair from those places, making the bald patches bigger. From his suitcase Litovsky withdrew a few neatly folded shirts and some clean linen, a pair of gray trousers and two pairs of socks, his books, his clock, and his toiletries, which he arranged on the top of the dresser. He turned to Alice.

“Unpacked so quickly, Olga?” She nodded. “Then take off your cloak. Your room—it isn’t too cold?”

Alice shook her head.

Litovsky looked around, rubbed his palms together. “A long while yet before dinner. Perhaps I should order tea?”

“Please.”

“I’ll just talk to the concierge, then.”

When he left the room, Alice jumped up. She counted his shirts: four. She picked up his toothbrush and smelled it, examined the varnished wooden backs of his two hairbrushes, set together with their bristles interlocking. From between them she pulled one silver hair and let it fall to the floor. A pocketknife whose blade folded into a sheath set with a lozenge of amber—when she picked it up she found it warm to the touch. It must have been in his trouser pocket rather than his valise. She held it to the window to see the stone’s gold flecks and what looked like lace, the membrane of an ancient insect’s wing. At the sound of Litovsky’s footfall, Alice slipped the knife into her jersey pocket and returned to her place on the worn horsehide chair.

“What?” He touched her cheek, chiding her gently. “Still sitting here? It grows dark, Olga, and you haven’t lit one light.” He pulled a table out from the wall and set it before her, placed the desk chair on the opposite side. “I ordered a jam cake; however I’m not sure it will be any good.” The table was spotless, but he dusted it with his handkerchief.

“There are usually tragedies on the Moscow stage.” Litovsky looked out the window as he spoke, watching snowflakes spiral down into the cone of light coming from a street lamp. “The people of that city have a penchant for moral entertainments. They want punishments. In Petersburg … In Petersburg we want. Solace.”

They heard a knock at the door, and he stood, expecting a waiter with tea. Instead, it was the police.

…   

W
EREN’T YOU FRIGHTENED?
Not even a little? Didn’t you think the train would go on without you?

But no, Alice wasn’t, she hadn’t been thinking about the train or her mother or anyone else. She’d slipped—it was possible to do this for an afternoon—into another skin. She wasn’t gone very long. Only two hours and forty-one minutes from the sounding of the station’s bell to the policeman’s knock.

Of course, the train did go on, it went on without all of them. They had to wait three days and take the local. Bad beds in a bad hotel, and they missed their Paris connection; it was a mess and all Alice’s fault. Each afternoon, Miss Waters took the sisters out in the frigid air for exercise.

“Girls,” she said, “I want you to run around the hotel fifteen times each.” And a Russian soldier in a uniform of blue and black, carrying a long-barreled gun with a bayonet attached, watched as the two sisters obediently circled the brick building, Cecily loping with the languid, pale ennui that would characterize her every movement for all her life, and Alice running in earnest, as if pursued.

Afterwards, they walked alongside a pond that had frozen, thawed enough to crack, and frozen again. The ice was smooth, but beneath its surface, black fractures reached toward them like bony fingers.

“A girl,” Miss Waters said on their inaugural trip outside, “a girl who would do a thing like that is a girl who would do anything.” Alice didn’t reply. “It’s all the fault of your aunt,” she went on. “Of that I am certain.”

Cecily, smugly innocent, said nothing. What more could she add to Alice’s torment?

Back at the hotel, Dolly suffered palpitations, attended by a physician who spoke neither English nor French. The amah, unsurprised by yet another complication, scolded perfunctorily over lost luggage and squatted for hours in the drafty hall, thinking how good it was that Chinese children never dared behave in so dishonorable a manner.

But it was worst of all for the captain: taken to the police station and asked repeatedly who he was and who Olga had been and exactly what had happened to the cars derailed from the viaduct over the Olkhana Gorge. What could any of it have to do with mistaking someone else’s child for his own? Litovsky’s explanations made no sense and perfect sense and ended with equations drawn on the backs of envelopes. He handed his hat around; everyone peered at the photograph. A policeman cut it out from under the celluloid and put it in a file. As he watched, Litovsky’s heart felt suddenly empty, as if it had pumped itself dry.

To be sure, the girl in the hat did resemble Alice, who was questioned twice: once in front of all the others; and once privately in a room the size of a coat closet, by an enormous wheezing clerk whose Russian was translated by his niece, a schoolteacher summoned to the police station to serve as interpreter.
Did he touch you, did he touch you anywhere?

“No, he just looked at me,” Alice told her. “He said that was all he wanted to do, and that was all he did do.”

“Looked you? Only looked?”

Alice nodded. It had all taken place so quickly, it hardly qualified as an abduction. And yet, thinking of dusk in that quiet room, it seemed that the sun, as white as the moon against the cold, slate-blue sky, had taken a very long time to set. She couldn’t make sense of the time that had or hadn’t elapsed. They had faced each other across the empty table and he had reached across it once as if to touch her cheek or her chin, but then he pulled his hand back. He said nothing, and she said nothing as well. The chairs were not comfortable, and she fidgeted. She remembered that when she blinked her eyes had felt dry, as they did when she was feverish or in need of sleep. That twice Litovsky put his hands before his face and then replaced them on the table, sweeping them over and over its surface as if to be sure it was clean. She remembered that she had sat as ladies ought not to sit, with her chin on the heels of her hand, both elbows resting on the table.

In the end, Litovsky was remanded to the armed services. A military attaché came to collect him. Someone cabled his wife.

“May I speak to the captain before he leaves?” Alice ignored Miss Waters’s protests. The
gorodovoi
nodded. Litovsky stood as she approached. “I wanted something … I wanted,” she began, but then stopped. She found she didn’t want to confess about the knife.

Litovsky gave Alice a crushed, puzzled look, then nodded excitedly. “Yes. Yes, of course.” He touched the cord around his neck, withdrew the pouch containing the last of the czar’s rubles, but before he had teased it open, he thought of a truer gift, one he was more likely to miss. He reached into his pocket for the little worn icon. “Here,” he said. “For you.” Alice took the coin bearing the Virgin’s benign and somnolent face, her golden eyes and mouth rubbed clean of expression.