The Valley of Amazement (34 page)

“I had always been a prankster and liked to scare people. I enjoyed their misery. That day, I grabbed the girl’s doll and swung it up in the air. The girl shrieked, as I expected she would, and then I caught it in time. No harm done. She was relieved, and came toward me to retrieve her doll. I threw it up in the air again. Again she shrieked and begged me: ‘Don’t let her fall! She’ll break!’ She started to cry and I was about to stop, but then the boy got up and shouted at me: ‘Let go of her doll right this instant!’ No one ever ordered me around. I said to him, ‘What will you do if I don’t?’ And he answered: ‘I’ll give you a black eye and a bloody nose.’ The girl was screaming, ‘Give her back!’ Their father said something in a warning voice. All
this excitement of emotion made me determined to keep up what I was doing. Their mother and father rose and were coming toward me. I shouted: ‘If any of you comes one step closer, I’ll let the doll fall right onto this rock.’ They didn’t move. I remember the feeling of power seeing them so distressed and helpless. I kept swinging that beautiful doll up in the air. Meanwhile, my father had moved to the spot the family had vacated, where he was looking at the falls through his binoculars. The boy took a step toward me and I swung the doll up by one arm to make it go higher. But then the arm tore off, which surprised me. I stared at that odd little arm and wasn’t paying any attention to the doll in the air until I saw the boy rush by me, his face turned up, holding out his arms so he could catch the doll.

“I can still see every bit of what happened next: the doll was falling headfirst. The girl’s mouth was open, horrified. The boy wore a fierce heroic face. ‘I’ll get it!’ he called to her, still looking up. All at once, I saw the doll was not coming down where I had caught it before. It must have been that the torn arm had pitched it to the right, toward the cliff. I saw the doll plummet past the cliff. The boy managed to stop at the edge and his arms were bent and flapping like chicken wings. I willed him to tilt backward to safety. But instead he tipped forward and he groaned—it was an awful sound that came from his gut—and then he was gone and there was nothing but clear blue sky. All the air in my lungs emptied. It couldn’t be true, I told myself.

“I heard the boy’s father call sharply: ‘Tom!’ as if to order the boy to come back. His mother called, ‘Tom?’—as if to ask if he was hurt. The little girl was screaming, ‘Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!’ I heard his name so many times. His mother and father went to the edge. I don’t know if he was still falling and they could see this. They kept saying his name, louder and higher. I was shaking. I was hoping there might be another ledge right below, and that he was still alive. I slowly walked toward the cliff. But my father grabbed my arm, and led me away, and my mother immediately joined us. The man saw us and yelled, ‘Stop! You stop! You’re not getting away with this!’ My father did not look back. He shouted: ‘He did nothing wrong.’ He pushed me forward to make me go more quickly. My mother said to me: ‘It was an accident.’ My father added: ‘What kind of boy would run toward a cliff without looking?’ And then I heard the woman wail: ‘My boy, my boy! He’s gone! He’s dead!’ So then I knew. My father did not need to push me anymore. I was running as fast as I could.

“At home, they said nothing more about what had happened. Everything went on as usual. But I could tell they were still thinking about it. I went to my room and vomited. I was terrified because I could not stop seeing the boy pitching forward. I kept hearing the girl calling him—Tommy! Tommy!—making him alive and gone at the same time. He was gone and I was alive, but evil. Two days later, I saw my father tear a page out of the newspaper, crumple it up, and throw it in the fireplace. He lit it on fire and did not bother to watch it burn. He walked away, just as we had walked away from that family and what I had done. It occurred to me then that he had been standing at a vantage where he would have seen the boy falling. How could he remain so unaffected by what he had seen? Yet he said nothing and I said nothing. I hated myself for not being able to speak. He had saved me from blame, and I was a coward for letting him. I never confessed what I did to anyone.

“I’ve lived with this for thirteen years, and no matter where I run to, the memory of what happened is still with me. It’s as if that boy were my constant companion. The way I imagine him, he’s looking at me, quiet, waiting for me to admit I killed him. In my mind, I do tell him it was my fault, that I was cruel. He doesn’t forgive me. He wants me to tell everybody, and I need to but can’t. Every day, all around me, I see reminders—the clear blue sky, a little girl, the newspaper on the table, those paintings of waterfalls—and I think, It was not an accident. I meant to be cruel. I caused it to happen, and I never admitted it to anyone.”

His eyes looked emptied of life. I was standing on the other side of the room by the time he finished.

I could not stop picturing the boy. I had become the little girl watching her doll and brother disappear from view. I was sickened by his confession. I had allowed myself to trust him and that trust had turned into a poison in my brain.

“Condemn me,” he said.

“Don’t give me that burden,” I said. I was shivering, suddenly cold. “That girl is your judge. Go find her.”

“I’ve tried. I’ve looked for the newspaper story. I asked those who lived in the area.”

Edward put on his coat and gathered his belongings. I would no longer see him. He was leaving me with his confession. He had entrusted his secret to me, and I wished he never had. He meant only to be cruel to that girl, but the death of that boy was still his fault. What he had intended was evil enough—his selfish need, his disregard of others. My mother intended to go to San Francisco to see her son. She may not have intended to leave me behind. Or perhaps she did. The result was the same and she should bear the guilt for all of it, and no matter what excuse she had, whatever trickery it was, she wasn’t any less to blame. Look at my life. I could not go back to being that girl I once was any more than that girl with the doll could. I would always feel betrayed. Edward would always carry guilt, and that was how it should be. We understood that, as victim, as culprit. We both suffered from a hollow in our souls, and only two damaged people could understand what that meant and suffer in that hollow together.

He asked if he should leave. I shook my head. “Oh, Edward,” I said. “What now?” I allowed him to embrace
me. I could feel his chest heaving and shaking. He had wanted love so great we would ache with the fullness of it. I ached, knowing it would be less.

O
VER THE NEXT
few days, Edward and I talked about our wounds. “I have had storms of rage,” I told him, “and when I was caught in them I could think of nothing else and my whole body was filled with poison. Why does love end so quickly and hatred last without end?”

“Could you ever hate without hurting so much?” he said. “Is there no relief? Would constant love from me fill your mind with thoughts of another kind so that there was no room for rage?”

Edward asked if I could trust him enough to leave the courtesan world and live with him. He had asked the very thing I desired for so long. Yet I was not prepared to exchange one uncertain life for another. He had once been reckless with other people’s hearts and lives. Instead of believing he would keep me safe, my need for him made me fragile. I needed honesty, and I was afraid to hear what his next confession might be. I needed complete trust in him, but I could not rid myself of doubts. Instead of loving him freely, I restrained myself, unable to let go.

Over the weeks, I slowly gave in to my longing to entrust myself to love. He poured out every transgression he could recall to prove he would not keep anything from me. He kept to himself after his despicable act and had storms in his mind, as I had, but his were of such ferocious guilt that he thought he would go mad. He had released them to no one. When his parents hired the tutors to write his essays, he now confessed, he let them. When he met Minerva, he had sex with her in a field and had little feeling for her. He had seen prostitutes after he left his wife. He had gone through drunken spells. He masturbated. I laughed at that one. I confided in him my loneliness as a child and the terrible fear I had had that I might be half-Chinese. I told him the story of my father enflaming my mother with emotions I had never seen in her, about my shock to discover she had a son, who was more important to her than I had ever been. I spoke of her heartlessness in putting me in the hands of her lover, a man even she did not trust, and who turned out to be an animal who would eat his own mother. I spoke briefly of those days when I believed my mother would return, how I alternated between hope and hatred, until I gave up, and all that remained was hate.

He comforted me. He wanted to understand my sadness and anger. But how can anyone truly understand another’s suffering unless he has felt the wound being made and the moment trust died? He could not go back in time and inhabit my mind as a child, an innocent heart, and my spasms of uncertainty day after long day, night after long night. How could he ever truly understand what it was like to see love fleeting like migrating birds, leaving you with the horror that you were never loved and never would be? He felt only my sadness, just the aftermath. And it would have been enough had I not heard his confession. Now there would always be doubts and not complete trust. Our love would never increase with more gifts of ourselves. Our love would be solace, companionship, and the careful mending of wounds.

I
CONTINUED TO
attend parties and charm men who might become suitors. I was a good actress caught between love and necessity. Loyalty came back on occasion and tried to renew the better days, as he called them. “Should I be sorry I introduced you to the American?”

The hot moist weather of June descended and made me feel heavy and listless. I brought out my lightweight dresses. One was too worn to wear at parties but was good for idle afternoons. I slipped into the dress. How strange: I could not close the fasteners on the bodice. Had I gained that much weight? Or perhaps it was all those salty pickles I had been eating. I looked at my breasts. The nipples were larger than before. Another thought came hard on the heels of the last. I cast back to when I last had my monthly flow: seven weeks ago, just before a big party. Or was it eight? I had recently complained to the cook that he had served food that was spoiled and had made me ill.

I was pregnant. Magic Gourd always talked about pregnancy as if it were a sex disease you could catch from men. This was Edward’s baby, my baby, and I would give this baby love, trust, and complete devotion. The moment I thought that, I knew the baby was a girl. I could see her, opening her eyes for the first time. They were green, a shade between my green eyes and Edward’s hazel ones. I imagined her at age four, walking next to me in the park, pointing to birds and flowers, and asking me to name them. And then she was six and reading aloud from a book as I listened. She was twelve, learning history and elocution, and not the tricks of seducing a man. I imagined her at age twenty, my age, with men who tried to win her favor—not to deflower her or bed her in her boudoir—but to ask her to marry. Or maybe she would not marry at twenty or ever. She would run the Ivory family business. She would be Edward’s only heir. This baby girl would have too many choices to count. She would be who I was supposed to have been.

When I told Magic Gourd I was pregnant, she wailed and ran over to stare at my belly.

“Ai-ya!
Didn’t you stick the little herb pillows inside you? Did you drink the soup? Or did you do this on purpose? Do you know what trouble you’ve given us? How many weeks? Tell me the truth. If it’s less than six, I can still pack the herbs inside you—”

“I want this baby.”

“What? You want to look like you’re growing a watermelon in your belly and two winter melons for breasts? You’ll soon be big out to here and even a man with the cock of a horse wouldn’t be able to reach your precious portal.
Baby!
What man wants to ride a nursemaid with soppy tits squirting all over the place? You’ll lose your
suitors, your money, your position in this house, be kicked out, and soon you’ll be a whore—”

“—lying in a filthy shack with my legs wide open for dogs and rickshaw pullers. You don’t have to tell me anymore.”

“Good. Now you’ve come to your senses. I’ll call a woman who’s taken care of this same problem for a lot of careless girls. And don’t you listen to those maids from the countryside who tell you to drink tadpole soup. That’s a recipe for twins.”

“This is Edward’s baby. I want to keep it.”

“Wah!
Edward’s? What difference does that make? You’ve known him for only four months and now you’re willing to ruin your figure and throw away your life for a spoiled American who deserted his wife.

“How many times have you learned that a man’s loyalty never lasts more than a few seasons? Look at Loyalty. He told you he couldn’t live without you. He said you knew him better than he knew himself. He was your patron for four seasons, then he came by one night here, two nights there, he took another season with you, then it was again one night here, one night there, and now it’s
how are you
and
see you later.
You loved him, Violet. It has taken you so long to overcome the wounds. And now you love Edward, who was disloyal to his wife.”

I regretted telling her that part of Edward’s confession. I only did to let her know he was not a prospect for marriage.

“How loyal will Edward be in another year—or another five when you have no looks or suitors? And how do you know this is his baby? What if your baby pops out with black hair, crying
wah-wah
in Chinese? Is your Edward so stupid to think he’s the only one to shoot seeds into you?”

“No other man could possibly be the father,” I said.

“Nonsense. You were still seeing Auspicious Liang last month. You were probably too lazy to use the herbal pillows with him, too. Or did you just recite poetry together and look at the moon?”