“I have cramps.”
“Come on, you like this.” He swung an arm across my shoulder and began to rub my stomach and my breasts with the other hand. Then he parted my legs, his hand going under the folds of my dress near my thighs.
I crossed my legs. “People will see us.”
“No one will see us.” He uncrossed my legs. His face, dim in the car, was upon me, his breaths driving away all the air in the Buick.
“I don’t want to do this, Cheng.”
He stopped. “We’re going to get married.”
“I want to wait.”
He straightened and pulled his tie. “Did you let the foreigner touch you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let him go. I don’t want to see him in the club.”
“I can’t. Customers love his piano. Business is doing well.”
“Find another pianist.”
“It’s not that easy. Not everyone can play the stride piano.”
Cheng was silent, his black eyes glittering. It was that type of silence when he, as a kid, pinched my shoulder when I refused to do hide-and-seek with him, the silence before he smashed the precious porcelain vases and plates because his dog ran away. I felt nervous.
“I want to go home.”
He kicked the seat in front of him; the Buick shook. I shuddered. He was twenty, no longer a boy; and the wildness of his strength and the rawness of his emotions were intimidating. If he forced himself on me, I wouldn’t be able to fight him off.
But he took me home. In my room, I scooped up water from a small basin and scrubbed, to rid myself of Cheng, rid myself of my own wretchedness. Finally, I flopped onto my bed. I didn’t think I would go back to work today.
Cheng and I were cousins, betrothed since we were in diapers when Mother, a cousin of his mother, thought it would be a beautiful thing to unite our families. We were born in the same month, the same year. Mother had believed it was an ideal marriage, matched in all facets of blood, status, and wealth, a marriage for a golden boy and a jade girl. You can marry a man you don’t love, but you can’t marry a man who doesn’t have money, she had said countless times. Cheng had money.
Such an early betrothal was like carrying a precious jade ball that required care and attention; with each step, the weight increased. I was not allowed to glance at other men, not allowed to play mah-jongg with other boys my age. Shopping was done with Cheng’s supervision, parties were attended with his accompaniment, and going to the movies required his approval.
It also became clear that Cheng and I were not made for each other. He was overbearing and controlling, often hanging around the racecourse and gambling tables, and I was, as he described, spoiled, selfish, and unable to stay away from the gramophone, jazz, and movie theaters. At least he was fastidious about clothes, so in all our finery we stood together like two carefully pruned trees in a garden, side by side but never intertwined.
As a child, I had adored Cheng, a playmate with whom I fought to ride wooden horses, did tugs-of-war, and played mah-jongg for five pennies. But my adoration of Cheng wore off in St. Mary’s Hall. By the time I invested in the nightclub, the connection between us had become tenuous. He made a sport of criticizing me, and I criticized him for doubting me. We only kissed a few times, a chore. When he demanded, I also sat on his lap, and my young body responded with fear and pleasure while he explored. But we had never shared a bed.
I supposed a marriage to him was like the expensive bird’s nest soup, the opaque netlike thing that had the texture of jellyfish and was sweetened with hard rock sugar, a delicacy, overpriced, but I had accepted it because Mother had chosen it for me. And never in my dreams did I think I would doubt this marriage because of another man, a foreigner.
22
ERNEST
Out of her office, into the hallway, and onto the stage, he felt dazed, his heart pounding with the sensation of holding her, his mind throbbing with the light of utter bliss. She was the magnet to his thunderbolt, the starburst to his gloominess, and the music to his silence, and unthinkable as it was, the converse was also true.
Only when he heard the voices of the customers did he realize the trap he had spread under Aiyi’s feet. She would need to explain to Cheng. It was not his intention to cause a rift between her and Cheng, but all the same Ernest wouldn’t mind having her, and he wouldn’t mind getting in a fight for her.
He began to play her favorite song, “The Last Rose of Shanghai,” ignoring the surprised looks of Mr. Li and the band. This was his confession. His pledge—he was hers.