The Binding Chair (20 page)

“But, Mrs. Benjamin, think of the laundry,” Eleanor said encouragingly.

“Yes, Mother,” Cecily said. “Smell your dress!”

Dolly pressed her nose into her sleeve. “That does help a little.”

In the midst of the cleaning and recarpeting, the scrubbing and whitewashing and repainting, all of which had taken a month, Dolly had consulted a number of local authorities, one of whom had suggested the Kobe-Shanghai laundry boat. A small steamer picked up soiled clothes and linen on a Monday and returned them the following week. It took eight days, but it was worth it. The tailor sewed Benjamin labels to every item, to every sock and vest, to knickers and bust bodices, even to May’s binding cloths. It all went off and the next week came back white as white, and folded with merciless precision.

C
IRCUMNAVIGATION

W
HAT ENDED AS HABIT HAD BEGUN BY CHANCE
. Alice and Evlanoff had returned to his flat in the midst of their first quarrel, a stupid one: looking for the restaurant where they’d planned to have dinner, they’d lost their way.

“You never get addresses right,” he’d said. “You never do. You don’t bother.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No. Obviously you don’t.”

“Is it hunger that’s making you so cross?” Alice had stopped walking to face him. She was talking loudly, her hands on her hips. She didn’t care about making scenes; in fact, the presence of a potential audience encouraged her to raise her voice.

“No.” Evlanoff cared very much about avoiding scenes, and the even, low tone of his voice was a measure of his irritation. “I’m just saying that details like street numbers are the sort of thing you can’t be bothered about. It’s part of your slapdash relationship to life.”

“Slapdash?”

“Yes. Careless, if you prefer.”

They returned to his room without having eaten. He stood at the window, arms folded, staring out. After Alice tired of sitting on his bed, fidgeting and sighing and rattling the pages of a magazine, she got up and stood behind him. Saying nothing, she rested her cheek between his shoulder blades. When he stepped back from the window and turned, she stepped back with him, her arms around his waist. He walked to the bookcase to lay his wristwatch and cufflinks on its top; she followed, arms still locked around his ribs; then together to the closet where he used the toe of one shoe to push down the heel of the other and kicked them both in.

They kept walking. “Why is it like this, anyway?” Alice asked on the first lap around the big, unmade bed.

“Like what?” Evlanoff said.

“Bed in the middle.” Her voice was muffled against his back.

“It’s as it was when I moved in.”

“You never thought of moving it so that the headboard was against a wall?” The apartment was an almost perfect square and had a sink and mirror but no private bath or water closet. It was furnished with bed, bookcase, desk, two chairs and a wobbly drop-leaf table. Of these, all except the bed were pushed tightly against the wall. The bed sat in the center of the room, a margin of five or six feet on all sides.

Evlanoff walked, she followed, moving her feet in step with his, the occasional stumble, breasts and stomach tight against his back. “No,” he said.

“Really not?”

“Is that so odd?”

Alice shifted from walking with her feet apart, outside of his, to short quick steps following his longer stride. Too awkward; she switched back. They’d circled the bed a half dozen times and still hadn’t found a rhythm. “Most people,” she said, “I think they’d want to, you know, take possession of a place by moving things around.”

“What are we doing?” Evlanoff asked.

Alice squeezed him. “I’m not letting go until we make up.” She closed her eyes, and rubbed her forehead up and down against his spine. “Besides, you like it, don’t you? Being in step?” Alice tripped as she made this observation, stubbed her toe on a chair leg.

He laughed. “Except you never seem to be, quite.”

“I like the clumsiness, too. Element of suspense. And your back. It’s … I don’t know. Big. Warm.”

“Well, then,” he said, his voice no longer cold. “It must have been for you that I didn’t move the bed.”

Alice looked around the room; she walked on her toes to see over his shoulder. “You don’t think it might be that if you moved it against a wall it would block the door or the window, or be too close to the radiator, or keep you from opening your closet?”

He shook his head, bumping hers. “No. Not for those reasons.”

“Maybe you really are a romantic. Rather than a pragmatist.”

“Oh, I think so. I am Russian, after all.”

“Well, then, why be so mean and curmudgeonly about addresses? Why, when one restaurant disappears, not be charming and romantic and find a charming romantic bistro? Instead you invent character flaws for me. Carelessness. Slapdashery.” Alice nipped the tender crease between his arm and shoulder blade, pressed her groin suggestively into his buttocks.

“Not fair,” he said. “To use my own lust against me.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll stop.” And she stepped away, separating their bodies. He reached around, pulled her back against him. She let one hand drop to the front of his trousers, felt how hard he was. “Very effective strategy,” she said. When he took her hand she thought he was going to move it away, but instead he guided her fingers up and down the shaft of his penis.

“It’s not that restaurants disappear,” he said. “But that spoiled little girls don’t bother to check addresses.”

Alice had undone all but the top button of his trousers and was trying to find her way past his underclothes. “I’m lost again. If you rescue me, perhaps you’ll find that spoiled girls have desirable qualities, as well. Abilities more important than those used to locate restaurants.” Evlanoff took her hand and pushed it past the waistband of his drawers, curled her fingers around the taut smooth skin of his penis.

They continued in a slow rocking gait, tilting left, tilting right. Around and around the big bed, some laps silent, others bantering, his stride more even than hers. “It’s difficult for me to stay in step,” she said defending her stumbles. “Your legs are longer, you have the advantage of being in front.”

“Take the lead,” he offered.

With her hand Alice directed the shaft of his penis right, left, up, down. “No. Instead, I’ll use this for a tiller.”

“You can be in front and still use your tiller. They are at the back of boats, you know.”

Alice shook her head against his back.

“Why not?”

“I like it like this. I like how big you are in front of me, pulling me along. And I like not looking where I’m going. Walking with my eyes shut.”

“Ahh.”

“What do you mean, ‘Ahh’?”

“I mean that at last we have the answer to the puzzle of Alice.”

Alice’s hand stopped moving. “What is the puzzle of me?” she asked. Evlanoff put his hand over hers in order to guide it back into motion.

“The historic question of why the little girl got off the train. It’s the inevitable fate of a personality who wants to be pulled along with her eyes shut.”

“You don’t think you’re making a bit much of this?” Alice said.

“Of what we’re doing now, or of the train?”

“Well, I meant now, but either, I suppose. Besides, haven’t you ever done a thing you can’t explain?”

Evlanoff, attending to questions posed by fingers rather than lips, didn’t answer.

“Haven’t you?” Alice asked again.

He nodded, eyes closed, his whole body rocking forward with his head. Forward and backward, Throwing her off balance once again.

“What?” Alice persisted.

“It’s, it’s a thing of a different order. It’s not to do with going off with anyone.”

Alice waited through a few laps of his silence. Then, “Won’t you tell me?” she asked, and she gave his penis a little shake.

“Yes. All right. My father bought me a microscope when I was ten. Not a child’s toy but a real one—he got it from a jeweler. A power of magnification of eight hundred and fifty.” Evlanoff stopped for a moment, then continued. “The body was brass. It had an oak case lined with velvet. Little indentations to hold the eyepieces that weren’t being used. It wasn’t new, but it was magnificent.”

“Go on,” Alice prompted when he paused, using the same method as before.

“If it’s a story you want, you’ll have to stop squeezing. Otherwise you’ll get something else.”

Alice withdrew her hand from his trousers. “Story first.”

Evlanoff replaced the hand. “I didn’t say stop
touching.
”

Around the room again, Alice sighing with impatience. “I loved it more than any gift I’d ever received,” he finally said. “I was in awe of it. Truthfully, such a microscope seemed too good a thing for a boy to have. When I was apart from it, at school, I thought of what might happen to it, how the case could be knocked from the shelf in my room, how a thief might steal it. And when I was home, when I wanted to use it, I imagined myself dropping the eyepieces. Breaking one of the lenses.”

“What did you use it for?” Alice asked. “What did you look at?”

“Insect wings. Blood from a scrape. Feathers. Hair. Bits of plants. Dirty water from the fishbowl. That sort of thing. No great science, no revelations. Except to me.”

“And? What happened?”

“I put the microscope, case and all, into my knapsack, and I took it far from our house, to a field, and with a hammer I smashed it. I broke the case, the lenses, bent the body. Everything.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. That was the point of my telling you this story, remember? It was to be a thing I’d done and couldn’t explain.”

Alice was silent. Then, “Were you angry about something?” she suggested. “Were you angry at your father?”

“I told you, I don’t know why.”

“Were you sorry after?”

“I was. I wished for it back.”

“Your father, did he find out?”

“No. I lied and said it had been stolen. And I was sorry about that, as well, because suspicion fell on one of the servants. She’d done a few other things my mother hadn’t liked, so I suppose her position was not secure anyway, but she was let go because of the microscope. I used to think I saw her in the street, following me.”

They had stopped walking. “Do you think you broke it because you loved it so much, that it was a way of, I don’t know, escaping from worry over it?”

“If that were true, then wouldn’t you be in danger?” he asked. Alice pulled away, intending to punish him with a little pinch or a slap, but he caught one of her arms and pulled her back. He pushed her onto the bed. “At last,” he said, “we’ve arrived. He used one knee to keep her down as he pulled off her skirt. “I’d thought of it myself, that breaking the microscope was a way to end its tyranny, but I don’t know that it was as simple as that.”

Alice nodded up at him. “So we’re even.”

“A good match. Two authors of inexplicable acts.”

“Don’t you think everyone must be?”

“Do you?” Evlanoff was heavy on top of her. He’d pinned her arms, her legs, and she squirmed under his weight, claustrophobia intensifying lust, compounding the need for release.

“Well, everyone except Eleanor Clusburtson,” she said, struggling to breathe, freeing one leg for no more than a moment before his stronger one recaptured it.

“Is she supremely rational, your Miss Clusburtson?”

Alice’s eyes were closed. Under her lids, the color changed each time he thrust. It went from red to purple. “I think so,” she said, finally. “Did you get another?”

“Microscope?”

“Yes.”

“No. My father offered … He offered to replace it. But I said no.”

“Didn’t he … He didn’t …”

Evlanoff stopped moving. “No more talking,” he said, and he released her to reach for a pillow.

“He didn’t want to know why?” Alice folded the pillow in half; she put it under her head, plumped and shoved and pushed her fists into it until her mouth was at just the right height.

“Why what?”

“Why you didn’t want another.”

“He,” Evlanoff said, straddling her face, sucking in his breath as she bit down, very gently, just teasing, moving her teeth against the smooth, smooth skin, grazing it, reminding him: yes, there were teeth to consider; it wasn’t that she was at his mercy; no, he was at hers.

H
EROES OF THE
G
REAT
W
AR

“L
ISTEN TO THIS.”
A
RTHUR WAS READING FROM
the editorial page. “Never will a horse forget any place where previously he had been wounded. When, for instance, he is taking ammunition up to a battery, he will shiver and tremble and hurry past at a gallop any exposed spot or dangerous crossroads where, perhaps months before, he stopped a bit of shrapnel.”

May set her cup down. “Which animals are those?”

“I’m off,” Dick Benjamin said. He rose from the table. “Before Arthur has me saving the warhorses of Flanders.”

Eleanor Clusburtson stood with him. “Just let me get my coat.” She hurried out of the breakfast room and up the stairs.

“Call the boy! That’s what he’s for!” Dick yelled after her. “Dashed peculiar woman!”

But Eleanor had already run up both flights. Since arriving in Shanghai, she had taught Cecily and Alice nothing—“Not a simple sum!” as their father said—but her presence had made it unlikely that the Benjamin sisters would ever be troubled by the kinds of trivial calculations a girl might do in her head, figuring the cost of four yards of silk satin against that of the same length of crepe, subtracting that from … But what difference? Because of Eleanor Clusburtson—more accurately, because of her false tooth—the Benjamin family was no longer well-to-do. They had become fabulously, ridiculously rich.

It happened this way:

In 1914, when Alice and Cecily returned to Shanghai with their aunt and their maths teacher, Dick Benjamin was too excited about rubber to be worried about whether or not his daughters were growing up ignorant. Europe was going to war, and fortunes were going to be made, one of them by himself. He planned to invest all his capital in rubber. Armies needed a great deal of rubber: rubber for gaskets and rubber for tires and rubber for boots and hoses and the linings of greatcoats and heaven knew what else. The market was strong; it hadn’t yet surged.

One evening, trolling past trays of canapés vanishing and crudités wilting under the pressure of false pleasantries at the French Embassy’s annual Bastille Day open house (not one wedge of Stilton to go with a drop of dry sherry), he’d overheard a drunk military attaché drawling an interesting word.
Blockade
. Especially interesting was this word when attached to a port like Maracaibo, through which most of the world’s natural rubber passed. He forgot his search for Stilton; he hurried Dolly into her wrap.

That very night, he made calls, he cabled Hong Kong and London, and yes,
yes:
it was confirmed, the Allies were blockading rubber. The following morning, as soon as the market opened, Dick Benjamin quietly bought up all the rubber he could and nervously watched the price per share climb and climb again. When the strain of his multiplying fortune grew so intense that he began to see auguries everywhere—in the trash floating on the river, the drift of leaves across his path—he sold. Then, a month after he’d unloaded the shares, a month during which he asked himself each day why he hadn’t waited, came word of a fantastic new substance. Dimethyl butadiene. A polymer, a magic polymer, C
₆
H
₁₀
was going to make natural rubber obsolete—that was what was being said by the privileged few who knew about it, one of whom owed Dick Benjamin a favor. Dick liked doing people good turns; it always worked out well for him. What was once the limited product of a single small factory in Manchester—the formula invented by a Russian, smuggled by the Germans, and captured by the English—would change the course of the war and of history. Just before the inevitable rubber crash, Dick reinvested all the money he had made in dimethyl butadiene, getting in at the bottom of the market, just beginning its own volatile rise when Eleanor Clusburtson arrived.

“Pass the sugar, would you be so kind?” he asked one morning, a few days after the girls had returned from London. He spoke without looking up from the
North China Daily News
. The maths teacher—What could his sister-in-law have been thinking in bringing such a creature back to China?—said something unintelligible. Dick stopped reading. “I beg your pardon?” His hand dangled expectantly, waiting for the sugar.

The woman flushed a deep crimson and shook her head. She ducked her face into her napkin. When she looked up at him she was smiling with her lips pressed tightly together, not a happy smile but a miserable sort of sociable grimace. May pushed the sugar bowl toward Dick.

“Thank you,” he said. He folded the paper, stirred sugar into his coffee, still looking at the peculiar new governess, or whatever she was.

“Miss Clusburtson has had a bit of trouble with her teeth,” May explained.

Dick raised his eyebrows. “What sort is that?” he said, not really interested, but not wanting to appear unkind either.

“I have a plate,” Eleanor said slowly, enunciating more clearly now that the subject of concern was hidden in her napkin. “But it i
th
n’t … it ha
th
n’t …”

May sighed. “Before we sailed I took Eleanor to a London dentist, who replaced her plate. She’s too polite to complain, but it’s proved quite inadequate. It’s falling apart in her mouth.”

“Not at all your fault,” Eleanor said, looking into her lap. “You were being kind.”

“I had hoped I was being kind,” May clarified.

“I have a plate,” Dick said. “Rotted two of my molars with toffee.”

“It’s my front tooth,” Eleanor said.

“Mmm,” Dick said absently. “What’s wrong with the plate?”

“
Ith’s
made with a new
thubthanth
. The old one
wath
vulcanite,
thith ith
dimethyl thomthing. And it wath fine for a month, but now i
th
cracked, i
th
falling apart.”

“It was supposed to be a wonder,” May complained, “a—”

“Diethyl, did you say? Or dimethyl?” Dick interrupted, his voice suddenly avid. “Dimethyl
what?
”

“Buta, buta thomething,” Eleanor said.

Dick stood up, jarring the table. Coffee slopped from their cups into their saucers. “May I see it?”

“I beg your pardon?” Eleanor held the balled napkin tightly in her lap.

“I want to see your plate.”

“Dick!” May said.

“Give it to me!” He held out his empty hand, impatient. He’d used up whatever reserves of pleasantries he possessed.

“I haven’t got it in,” Eleanor said.

“I know that. It’s in your lap. You’ve spat it in your napkin. Give it to me.”

“But why!” May said. “Why on earth would—”

“Look.” Dick ignored May. He put both his hands on the table and bore down on Eleanor. “I’m happy to have you as a … a guest in my home. For as long as you wish to remain. But there’s one condition. You must give me your plate.”

“Really, Dick!” May said.

“What’s all the—Why, what is happening?” Dolly asked, arriving late for breakfast, an amah following with fresh coffee.

“Your husband is attempting to impound Miss Clusburtson’s tooth,” May said.

“Her tooth?” Dolly looked at Dick, bewildered.

“Her
false
tooth,” Dick said. “The plate, to be specific. Now will you give it to me, or won’t you?” He walked over to Eleanor’s side of the table, and she curled protectively over the balled napkin in her lap. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll send you to my own dentist this afternoon,” he promised. “I just want to see the plate. I need to.” He squeezed the bony shoulder, a little too tightly. A bit menacingly. After an agonizingly long minute during which Eleanor, her eyes shut, told herself that of late her life had taken many peculiar turns and asked herself what was the harm, really, in showing a gentleman a false tooth? An etiquette book would certainly proscribe this as an act of unwonted intimacy, but it was also true that an etiquette book would never acknowledge the transaction as one a polite person was likely to encounter. Oh, well, perhaps Eleanor wasn’t polite. Perhaps she’d become the very type of person against whom her father’s sister had always warned her: a vulgarian.

Hunched over and hiding her face, she held up the napkin like a crumpled white flag of surrender. Dick seized it and, hurrying to unwrap the plate, dropped it on the floor, where it cracked a little further, freeing the tooth, which bounced under the sideboard, to be retrieved by the silent amah.

“Brittle,” said Dick, holding the grayish-pink arch, molded to fit Eleanor’s palate.

Miss Clusburtson nodded, her face crimson.

“Was it always?” he asked.

She shook her head.

May and Dolly stared on in silence.

“What—I want you to tell me all about it,” he said.

“Dick, what is this nonsense!” Dolly exclaimed.

“It’s not nonsense! It’s of the greatest importance!” And he sent Dolly and May away, mystified, and sat with Eleanor at the breakfast table, and she told him that, yes, it had been good for a few weeks, maybe more, it tasted funny but it was comfortable, slightly flexible, but then it had begun to crumble in her mouth, it had cracked, it was not nearly as satisfactory as the old vulcanite one had been.

“Everything to do with this tooth,” she lamented, “has been very unfortunate.”

But Dick was smiling at the plate in his hand. “No,” he said. “I think perhaps it’s going to prove to be a most astonishing instance of serendipity. Lucky for you, lucky for us all. I’ll need to take it with me.” He stood from the table and left, patting the pocket that held the plate and humming what sounded like the syllables of the words he’d just spoken.
As-ton-ish-ing, as-ton-ish-ing, ser-en-dip-i-ty!

Chemical analyses confirmed that the plate was of C
₆
H
₁₀
, the same polymer that was to win the war. That was supposed to win … But C
₆
H
₁₀
was unstable; it broke down. The question being
when
, and under what conditions? Did saliva make it less stable? And what about temperature? Would it crack in freezing weather? Dick brought a fragment home and hid it in the icebox.

The biggest question of all was this: How long before everyone knew what Eleanor had discovered? Shares were still climbing. When,
when
should he sell? Dick said nothing to anyone. For a week, two weeks, three, he whistled, he walked, he fiddled, hummed, drummed his fingers on the table, and tapped cigar ash onto the rug.

“What
is
the matter with you?” Dolly complained, but he just shook his head. He owned three hundred thousand shares and had borrowed five hundred thousand more against the promise to return them in two months, with interest. After twenty-nine days he sold out—value quadrupled—and then paced and smoked as the price of dimethyl butadiene continued to climb. In the icebox, the fragment of Eleanor’s plate crumbled at his touch.

Then, at last, on the thirty-fourth day, on a field in Düsseldorf, the air temperature negative two degrees Celsius, the tires of twenty-eight German trucks burst. One hundred and twelve tires: all flat. The market in dimethyl butadiene began its precipitous plunge. By the sixtieth day, when, as stipulated by his loan agreement, Dick Benjamin had to buy back and return the five hundred thousand shares he’d borrowed, they were worth only 11 percent of their value at the time when he’d acquired them, a mere 3 percent of what he’d sold them for. Nothing illegal had transpired, and yet the profit, it was criminal. What might it have been if he’d had the nerve to wait just a few more days before the tires burst? But he wasn’t going to calculate it—well, he was, he’d succumb to hindsight. He knew that he’d had to err in the direction of prudence, responsibility; still, he’d succumb. But not today.

Dick Benjamin almost skipped down the Bund as he left the meeting with his private banker. Came home with Swiss chocolates, Italian silk stockings, French perfumes, smoked North Sea salmon, a magnum of champagne. No one at home cared for truffles or caviar or Camembert, but he bought these as well. He emptied shop shelves of every item that the war had made scarce and even more expensive than usual, and when he arrived home, he erupted into the foyer like a holiday firework, discharging tissue and ribbon.

“My dear dear
dear
Miss Clusburtson,” he said to Eleanor, who had come downstairs to see what all the noise was about. He embraced her; he kissed each of her pale cheeks and watched them turn red. “What can I do for you? Only say the word. Travel. Furs. Jewels. Anything!”

Eleanor blinked. “W-well,” she stammered. “I … I …” She looked at May, who nodded in encouragement. “I am a bit bored. Perhapth, would you con
th
ider …”

“
Say it,
” May hissed.

“What I’d like ith to work at your offithe.”

N
OW, FOUR YEARS
later, she was a partner, and Benjamin, Kelly, Potts, and Clusburtson was the only hong in Shanghai to include a woman. Eleanor, they discovered, enjoyed nothing so much as work. She didn’t smoke or drink or play cards or have any bad habits to divert her from her labors. And the money she’d made the family—about which she cared little—was more than enough to compensate for the extravagances of Arthur. A thousand times over enough.

“Dear May,” Dick toasted his sister-in-law, on the night they celebrated Eleanor’s partnership. “By bringing us Miss Eleanor Clusburtson, you have, against all odds, redeemed your ridiculous husband.” The family raised glasses of Pommery to Eleanor, her face flushed with pleasure and embarrassment.

“Dick!” Dolly said.

“Thank you.” May executed a rare little bow to Dick.

“Yes, thank you,” Arthur said to Eleanor. “I think.”

Every morning, Dick Benjamin and Eleanor Clusburtson set out together in the pony trap to work all day on Jinkee Road, and every night they returned in it. At first Dolly was jealous, but “Dearest,” cried her husband, “you know how I feel about clever women! And, why, compared to you, Eleanor looks like, well, like a wet brown paper parcel! How could I possibly!”