The Binding Chair (28 page)

The curt diagnosis, however, had the salubrious effect of making May angry. She sat up and had Evlanoff thrown out of the house; she ranted about Western quackery; she would have paced had her feet allowed such expression of agitation. Instead, she lay smoldering on her chaise, tapping her long fingernails against the side of a porcelain teapot growing cold on a tray.

The next week, she made a few investigative forays into town, up and down and back up and down the Promenade des Anglais, the Boulevard Gambetta, the Rue Dante. A rug over her knees, she was carried in a sedan chair by Boy and Brother Boy—both gone gray—and attracted much attention. But May was accustomed to stares and oblivious to all but the first of her projects: an organ-grinder whose monkey had died.

S
HOES FOR
W
ALKING

A
RTIFICIAL
L
IMBS AND
B
RACES READ THE SIGN
over the door. The words were formed with small, discreet, almost ashamed letters.

“Well, I don’t need one of those.” May’s tone was more than indignant. She stabbed the tip of her cane into the bed of begonias on the street corner.

“I know.” Already Alice had employed every means she had of containing her temper. Counting to ten—that she was immune to. Deep breaths—they’d worked for the car ride. Now she was trying to avoid seeing May’s face, to look whenever possible at her broken feet instead of at her perfected, icy disdain. “I know. I know. But they make shoes here, as well. This is the place.” She pulled at May’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “It’s hot.”

“Why are you standing with your neck at that absurd angle? Surely you don’t want to be taken for one of those dowdy little down-at-heel ladies who creep along streets with their eyes on the pavement.”

Alice snapped her head up, scowled. The Mediterranean sun was shining too brightly. At midday, it was the kind of light that picked out every flaw in a face, every disappointment in a life.

Someone had decorated the office window with false arms and legs arranged among houseplants. A tendril of ivy crept through the grommet of a lace-up truss. “That,” May said, “is a grotesque display. A person capable of such window dressing is not a person whose services I need.”

“May, please. It’s an hour, and then we’re through. We have the X rays. Everything’s been arranged.”

Alice and her aunt stood on the corner of Rue Rossini and Avenue Auber, neither speaking. May leaned on the jade knob of her cane; Alice watched the cars heading south, trying not to cry. Why was it that the accomplishment of this simple goal, to get a pair of shoes—real shoes, in which a person could walk, shoes that would help a person to walk—why did May respond as if Alice had devised a sly means of torturing her? It was almost as if she resented Alice’s attempt to relieve her pain. As if she felt Alice were stealing something from her. Something of value.

And the more strident May became, the more stubbornly insistent Alice felt. It had turned into a contest of wills. A voice inside Alice suggested that backing down would be wiser, that May would never use the shoes, that some disaster, even, would result from Alice’s obstinacy. But she couldn’t let go of the idea of getting her aunt into orthopedic shoes, and this was because suddenly she had become irritated—wildly, uncharitably, and unreasonably irritated—with May’s slow steps. The pace that had once seemed enchanted, evidence that her aunt inhabited a different world, a realm of grace and ease, now struck her as impossible, recalcitrant. Abruptly, her lovely aunt seemed to her not only crippled, but willfully and perversely so. And Alice was going to be the one to change this. She’d nagged; the two of them had fought.

“
They cannot cannot cannot be fixed!
” May had yelled at her the night before. And then this morning she’d apologized. “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding frostily insincere.

Alice didn’t answer but dipped her spoon into her coffee, communicating insult with her studied, careful, silent stirring, her resolutely avoiding—as she never did—the touch of metal on china.

“You can’t make me like other people.”

“Of course not. Who would want to? I’m just trying to make life a little easier for you.” Alice didn’t admit her increasingly violent impatience with May’s insufferable pace. Of course she didn’t. But she felt she was going to shake her aunt. Push her. Scream. The rest of the family wanted nothing to do with this conflict. As soon as Alice said the word
shoes
, Cecily, their father, Suzanne, Eleanor: all of them disappeared.

Alice put the spoon quietly on the saucer. “I never said we were fixing them. Or that anyone could.”

May nodded, as if in compliance, and they’d left for the appointment in good time. But now here they were, stuck outside the door. Alice watched the traffic, cars piloted by bright young people who looked happy and purposeful, heading determinedly into the future. Shanghai, Nice—neither was a place people actually came from.

A hand reached into the window display from inside the office. It pulled a string, and the slats of a jalousie blind came together to form a white backdrop to the ugly devices.

“Well?” Alice said.

“All right,” May said, “I surrender.” Like a hostage, she put up her arms and glared not so much at Alice as at Alice’s chest, as if devising a way to stab her. “What choice do I have when you torment me so?”

Alice kept her mouth shut and held the door open. May went in. She sat on a blue chair while Alice silently offered the big envelope holding the X rays of her aunt’s feet to the blond woman at the desk. “You have an appointment?” the woman asked.

Alice nodded. “Two-thirty,” she said.

The woman got up and went through a door framed by two jade plants, brushing past their fat waxy leaves. In a minute she returned with a bearded man wearing a red apron. “Come in, Mrs. Cohen,” he said.

“Would you like me to go with you?” Alice asked. May didn’t answer. Alice watched as her aunt followed the man in the apron, moving slowly, even for her, maintaining an imperious pace. Her beautifully contemptuous nostrils flared wide, and the skin around her lips was pale, drained white: two unmistakable indications of rage. Alice sighed and fanned herself with the magazine she’d brought, stared out the window.

T
HROUGH THE NARROW
door was a room outfitted with a reclining chair, like that in a dentist’s office. “So,” said the man with the apron, “I’m Dr. Dumonteil.” He held out his hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, long enough to convey distaste, May took it.

“You’ve never had orthopedic shoes before? Am I correct?”

“Yes.” May sat sideways on the seat of the reclining chair. She kept both hands on the cool jade knob of her cane.

“The process is simple. I make impressions of your feet, and from them I make positives. What I mean is that I use the impressions as molds to create a replica of each foot: a plaster cast. And around these I build shoes.” As he spoke, seemingly oblivious to the bad temper of his patient, Dumonteil opened the envelope and took out the X rays, set them carefully under the clip of a lightboard. He studied them with his back to May, who also looked at the films. She’d seen them before, in the bone doctor’s office. To illustrate their deformity, the bone doctor had hung them next to X rays of normal feet. In comparison with those, May’s looked like the extremities of another species.

Dumonteil stroked the hair on the back of his head. “Do you have much pain with this, mmm, condition?” he asked.

“That depends,” May said.

“On what?”

“On how much attention I am paying it.”

Dumonteil turned around, his expression mild. Either he was immune to the moods of others, or he was ignoring the acidity of her responses.

“You are fifty?” he asked, and May nodded.

“There are some arthritic complications,” he said. “According to your doctor.”

“Apparently.”

“But you’re not aware of them?”

May drew a deep breath. “Dr. Dumonteil,” she said, “I am here because my niece has undertaken the rehabilitation of her Chinese aunt with the sort of missionary fervor she reserves for those few projects about which she is unwilling to compromise. She believes that new shoes will improve me. I have agreed to go along with … with
this.
” The last word was pronounced with disgust.

The orthopedist sat on a wheeled stool. He rolled slowly forward until his eyes were level with the handle of May’s cane, her white, ringed fingers. “May I examine you?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“Perhaps you’ll remove your shoes. I’ve never seen any quite like them,” he added, and now he sounded solicitous, gingerly, as restrained in tone and gesture as if preparing to dismantle and defuse an explosive.

May untied the narrow black ribbons over the arch of each foot. Silently she unwrapped the bindings. Left, then right.

Dumonteil contemplated what he saw. Beneath the layers of cloth, as much as a third of the skin on each of May’s feet was ulcerated. The sides of her big toes were swollen, blistered, the knuckles of the remaining toes, curled under unnaturally to bear her weight, were thick with calluses and scabs.

“Dr. Guerin did call me,” he said, as if to himself. “So I knew the history. But I’ve never actually had occasion to address this particular kind of … injury.”

“No,” May said. “Why would you?”

He took her left foot in his hand, gently, trying to avoid raw spots. “I don’t know how you walk at all.” He used a caliper to measure the distance from the joint of her big toe to that of the smallest.

“I must say,” he said.

“What?” May asked, when he didn’t continue. “What must you say?”

The orthopedist looked at her. “I’m in the business of correcting for natural mishaps. Accidents, sometimes. But mostly organic or developmental failures. Birth defects.” Dumonteil turned May’s foot. “This is just a bit …”

“What?”

The doctor traced his index finger along the areas of unbroken skin. “Disturbing,” he said, finally.

“I should imagine.” The idea of Dumonteil’s trying to straighten bent backs and replace missing limbs reminded May of Arthur, and she found herself unjustly angry with him. She looked at the doctor’s thick, curling hair as he bent his head over her feet.

“In China,” she said, “parents forcibly bow the spines of their infants to create a scholarly stoop. In this way, their children—I’m speaking of boys, of course—are assured the respect due to men of letters.”

Dumonteil said nothing.

“I suppose I am telling you that I come from another world. Your pity is misplaced.”

He looked at her as if she’d slapped him. “I didn’t say I pitied you,” he said.

“Didn’t you?”

“No.”

Dumonteil stood and retrieved a shallow white enamel basin. “I use this to make the impressions,” he said, and his voice was businesslike.

May nodded. Her arms were folded, her legs were crossed; her jade-headed cane leaned by her side. She watched as he poured white powder from a stainless steel canister into a measuring cup. He added water and mixed it into a paste, spread it with a spatula into the basin. Over it he placed a layer of gauze, another of paste, then another of each. He looked into the basin, considering, looked back at May’s right foot—not tucked away beneath her, but hanging, unbound, from her crossed leg—and added one more layer.

Watching him, May suffered the memory of her mother bending over a dish of clay, preparing the surface on which she was to record the outline of her daughter’s small feet before May was led away to the binding chair.

As she stood on the clammy surface of the compound, her feet sinking slowly down, May moaned, a low noise, almost inaudible. Involuntary.

“Painful?” the doctor asked.

May didn’t answer immediately. When she spoke her voice was low, composed. “My feet,” she began. “My feet bother me when they are unbound. I need the binding for support.” She allowed herself to close her eyes.

We will tell your suitors, her grandmother had promised, that you never cried out. Tell me how you never cried out. Say the words, I never cried out
.

Dumonteil looked at his wristwatch, following the sweep of the second hand. “Half a minute more,” he said. When it was up he took her elbow and lowered her onto the stool. Then he bent and lifted each foot away from the white cast, examined his work in the light from the window. “That should do it,” he said. “I think you’ll be surprised how much support the new shoes will give you.”

May said nothing.

“What color would you prefer?” Dumonteil asked. “I can make them black, or brown. Navy blue. White.”

“Oh,” she said. “The color doesn’t matter. Not white, though,” she said, reconsidering. “And not brown. Or blue.”

“Then it will have to be black.”

She shrugged.

P
ROPOSAL

A
T THREE IN THE MORNING, ALL THE GUESTS
had retired, the servants as well. There was no sound from the kitchen. The wind had picked up after midnight, as it did every night, and the white curtains gusted in through the open French doors. Suzanne coughed.

May felt the side of the teapot to test its warmth. She poured a cup, unbuttoned the frogs on her long turquoise and green jacket.

“You allow me to stay out of pity,” Suzanne said, and May sighed loudly.

“Not this again.”

“Why else? You know the facts of my life. You know I’m alone. And poor.” Suzanne touched the button at her neck nervously. May set the teacup down in its saucer.

“I know a lot of solitary, impoverished people,” she said.

“So why? Why, then?”

May pulled the pins from her hair slowly. She lined them up on the tea tray. “I’ve never shared my bed, let alone my life, out of generosity. Not once. Much less pity. The guests you’ve met in my home—who eat here and sleep here because they have nowhere else—they are … they keep me from thinking too much.”

“About what?”

“The past.”

Suzanne coughed again, more from a need to make noise than to clear her throat. “What about me?” she asked. “What am I for?”

“Suzanne,” May said. “I am entirely selfish. Can’t you understand that?” She put her hands over her mouth, as if to warm them with her breath, left them there as she looked at Suzanne. Dropped them to her sides. “What am I?” she asked. “A displaced Chinese. Forty-nine years old. Widowed. My daughters lost. Who shall be my—” She paused to rephrase the question. “Who will keep me company?

“And,” she said, smiling, teasing. Trying to change the mood of the conversation. “You’ve gotten very good at mah-jongg. After all my hours of tutelage, I don’t want to start over with anyone new.”

But Suzanne refused to be cajoled. “You have your family,” she said.

“They don’t need me anymore. Cecily never wanted a thing from anyone, with the exception of her mother. As for Alice.” She snorted. “Alice has her … her doctor.”
Doc-teur
. May pronounced the two syllables as if they were as bitter as medicines in his bag. “She’s with him now. In his bed.”

Suzanne stopped pacing and sat on the hassock. She drew up her knees and hugged them. May watched her, noting, not for the first time, the girlish awkwardness of her gestures. “It’s remarkable,” she said, “how young you look. Dressed as you are, as if for school, those ridiculous, sensible pleats. But even more when you take off your clothes. Is it because no one’s touched you? I’m younger and look much older.”

Suzanne said nothing. She put her feet back on the floor.

“Silly,” May said, “I never thought such things mattered to me, but I am—I find myself drawn … 
portée
 … Is that the right word?”

“Drawn to what?” Suzanne asked.

“Compelled? Moved?” May shook her head. “Not exactly right.”

“To what?” Suzanne asked again.

May lifted her eyes from a loose thread she had found hanging from a seam in her sleeve. “Your virginity,” she said, pulling the thread, snapping it.

At the word, Suzanne cringed with embarrassment. She curled up, face in her lap.

May shrugged out of the jacket, pulled on a silk robe. She tied the sash, looked sharply at Suzanne. “It’s not as if you like men,” she said. “Mother of lightning! You told me the story of your father beating your brother and vomited in my sink. An incident that took place forty years ago!”

Suzanne spoke into her lap. “It wasn’t the story,” she said. “You know I hadn’t been well.”

“Yes, yes,” May said impatiently. “I don’t know why night after night we must pursue this pointless discussion.”

“
C’est parce que …
” Suzanne said, beginning to cry. “It’s because I’m very confused.”

“Why? Because someone is being kind to you?”

“No. Well, yes, perhaps. I don’t know.”

May stood at the glass doors that overlooked the garden from her balcony. It was growing cool, but she didn’t close them. Outside, the lamps were still lit; they made halos of light through the thin fabric of the blowing curtain.

“I’m not a …” Suzanne hesitated. “It’s not that a virgin is what I set out to be,” she said.

“No?” May turned, and Suzanne stood up from the hassock.

“No.” Suzanne unbuttoned her blouse, her skirt. “Of course it isn’t.” Her voice was unnaturally high, almost shrill. In a minute she was naked, her skin faintly blue, like milk from which all the fat had been skimmed. The fullness of her breasts always came as a surprise, such amplitude heaped on her bony chest.

May looked at her, smiled. “What are you doing?” she asked.

I
N BED, THE
lights out, the doors open and the curtains still blowing, ghostly under a quarter moon, May lay next to Suzanne; when she reached for her hand she felt the quick tripping of pulse in Suzanne’s wrist. “How?” May asked. “How am I to do it?”

“However you like,” Suzanne said. Her words were sharp, formed with precision; but even had she remained silent, May would have known her anger. Beside her, in the dark, she could feel the pressure of imminent outburst. The two of them lay without moving. In the street tires skidded, and the women tensed, but then the automobile recovered, it continued around the bend. May turned her pillow over, plumped it, and lay back against it.

“Why not use your fingernail?” Suzanne said. “What else could be the purpose of such long, red nails? Or, here.” She sat up and groped for a teaspoon left on the nightstand. “How about this?”

May accepted the spoon, saying nothing, feeling the cool weight of metal in her hand, how quickly it took on warmth from her touch. Abruptly, Suzanne swung her legs over the side of the bed, turned the light back on. Her usually pale cheeks were flushed, her eyes glittered.

“How about this? Or these?” Up now and stalking around the room, she gathered things from shelves and countertops, she dropped them on the bed. A letter knife and a fistful of pens. A button hook. Hair combs. Opera glasses. Nail scissors, buffer, and file. Family photographs in silver frames. A dish filled with jewelry—it hit the headboard, and rings, bracelets, earrings spun off it and fell around May like hailstones. An ivory-handled hairbrush and matching hand mirror; the bright circle of glass popped out, rolled off the bed, and, oddly, didn’t break. “What a relief,” Suzanne said, sarcastic. “No bad luck for us.”

She was moving more and more quickly, sweeping things up carelessly, throwing them toward May, if not exactly at her. A set of cloisonné boxes. Five little horses carved from pink jade. The empty teapot, the cups with their residue of wet leaves, the hairpins May had aligned beside them. Books. Papers. Perfumes. An antique brass carriage clock. May’s smoking tray complete with spirit lamp and tapers, the long ivory and silver pipe, her companion of so many years. The bellows hanging on their hook by the fireplace, and—“Yes! Why not!”—the poker, too. Suzanne hurled it like a spear; its tip streaked the bedclothes with soot.

May pulled her feet out of the way of the growing pile. With her legs drawn under her she sat, arms crossed, taking up no more room than her pillow, and occupying its usual place. “Are you finished?” Her voice betrayed nothing, neither censure nor amusement.

“No! No, I’m not!” Suzanne tore through the room, she heaped everything she could find onto the bed, as if preparing a bonfire. Yanked at the white curtains so that the rods came down with a muffled clang, and kicked the whole mess toward May. Hurled a vase of cut flowers, water soaking into the bedclothes, running dripping off the foot. From the bathroom flew soaps and towels, a box of scented powder that burst open in a choking cloud. Lotions, suppositories headache powders. A clutch of patent medicines in blue and brown glass bottles. Out from the closet: evening bags and shoes, May’s collection of canes, more than a dozen, all with ornately carved heads and metal-covered tips. Suzanne held them like kindling, dropped them with a clatter.

At last, when there was nothing left, when shelves were bare, the desk and the tables as well, Suzanne removed a set of four framed miniatures from their hooks over May’s vanity table. She put them on top of the pile. One slid off onto the floor, and she bent to pick it up.

Then she lay across what narrow space was left at the top of the bed, her head hanging off one side, her left foot between May and the towering heap, the right on the headboard. Her thighs were parted, her genitals exposed, held open for May to see. Suzanne lifted her head, the cords of her neck straining, to look at May, who remained expressionless, impassive.

“Now!” Suzanne said. “Go ahead! Now you can do it! Put it all in—everything!” She pulled a fistful of her own pubic hair, stretching the flesh so that her vulva narrowed into a tight mauve line, the color of an old scar. “Go ahead!” she screamed. Her voice was ragged, and the cry provoked a fit of coughing, but she wasn’t through.

“You! You who’ve been everywhere and seen all there is to see! Slept with everyone and had what you wanted and what you didn’t, and lost it and found it and, and … Go ahead! Force all of it in—your whole life! Souvenirs! Photographs! The things you’ve collected! The people! Your pipe! And here—” She sat up, seized something from the pile. “What about one of your shoes, your little red shoes? Don’t neglect those! Blood won’t stain a shoe like this.” With a chopping gesture, she forced its toe inside her.

Still May said nothing.

“Go on!” Suzanne screamed, and she reached out and slapped May. She struck her across the face. “Make it up to me! All I’ve missed! What else—what else besides my
virginity
—my, my emptiness—have I to offer you?”