ARTHUR AND MAY MET ONE EVENING IN 1899. Afterwards, he was sure it was a Monday, the twelfth of June; May thought the fourteenth, a Wednesday. Expecting an overnight guest, she received him in her room on the fifth floor. What light there was came from under a dark shade. There was a smell of gardenias; an amah offered Arthur two trays, one with an opium pipe, the other with a teapot. He declined both.
“Are you difficult to please?” May asked.
“I beg your pardon.” Arthur took hold of his left earlobe and gave it a series of impatient tugs. “I’m a little hard of hearing.”
At Chiverly House School, in Melbourne, Australia, Dolly’s brother had been whipped. He’d been strapped, caned, and flogged. His ears were boxed so often and so violently that he developed tinnitus, a ringing in his ears that had never subsided.
Of course, many people hear what others can’t. They pray and hear answers; they sing and hear music; they hear their names called out in warning or whispered in secret messages. But what Arthur heard was a relentless, shrill whistle, like the noise of an approaching siren—except that it never arrived but trilled on, on, on, growing sometimes louder, sometimes softer, according to its own illogic and to certain aggravations. Fever made it worse; so did headache powders, as well as coffee, tobacco, chocolate, and drinking cold drinks too quickly. If he managed not to pay attention, it receded; but if he was listening for something, a bell or a signal, a song or a voice, it drew near, it blocked out whole registers of sound.
He was twenty-six. He hadn’t been able to read law, hated literature, was hopeless at mathematics. Pressed by his father, he had pursued architecture, and it fled from him. His drawings all listed, each line leaning off the page as if refusing to be fixed in the company of that vexatious, ringing, buzzing jangle of a noise. Since disembarking in the city of Shanghai—for a protracted visit with his sister, Dolly, and her new husband, one that had lasted, so far, nearly a year—Arthur had spent hours going for long walks, up and down the streets and even into the countryside, where the natives regarded him, not incorrectly, as just another British eccentric pursued by his demons.
“I asked if you were difficult to please,” May repeated.
Arthur answered by telling May that what had happened to her—he indicated her feet with a pained gesture—was immoral.
May looked at him sharply, blew air from her nose in an exasperated gust. “Immoral?” she said.
Arthur nodded, vehement. “Wrong.” He explained himself as a member of the Foot Emancipation Society, his first philanthropic association since having arrived in China. “You’ve been badly used,” he told May.
May smiled. “Really?” she said.
“Yes. Look at you. You’re lame.”
May leaned back into the cushion of her velvet chaise longue. She looked at the red-haired man standing before her, at his wide, round blue eyes, his black coat with its too-short sleeves that revealed wrists also sprouting red hair. She had encountered them before, the Foot Emancipationists; they hosted tea dances in the big hotels. During the orchestra’s breaks, they delivered homilies and passed a gleaming silver collection plate. Shouldn’t every woman waltz? Shouldn’t she, if she felt so inclined, leap, pirouette, even skip? The Chinese women in attendance, those few cosmopolitains who mingled with the Europeans, tucked their feet further under their chairs.
“What need have I to walk?” May asked. “I have boys who walk for me.” And before Arthur could answer, she called her amah back and asked for her pipe.
Oh, dear, a zealot, a reformer, a do-gooder: one of the inevitable drawbacks of her profession, and of Shanghai, crawling as it was with missionaries. Arthur sat with his hands on his knees, looking at May. His earnestness, his coat that looked as if he’d inherited it from someone else: both of these irritated her. Once again, here was a useless sort of foreigner, a man with big ideas and little money. She’d have to get rid of him; then she could go to bed and read.
“Unwrap them!” she said, suddenly and frantically angry, as she hadn’t been for years. Her voice shook with rage.
“I beg your pardon?” Arthur stammered.
“Unwrap my feet! Or one! Unwrap one!” May pulled up the hem of her blue cheongsam, a garment that had confused Arthur when he entered her room: its color matched that of her chaise so perfectly he couldn’t tell where woman ended and furniture began. She unfastened her left shoe and thrust her foot out at him, the end of its white bandage untucked, dangling.
Arthur hesitated for a moment, and then he kneeled. He took the end of the linen and began to unwind. It seemed to go on endlessly, dizzyingly. He was astonished to find that with every layer he removed he grew that much more eager to see beneath the next. Having missed the Emancipation Society’s indoctrination meeting and the lecture by Dr. Fallow, the surgeon who explained the crippling fractures of the binding process, handing around radiographs of ankles balanced on grotesquely folded arches, Arthur pictured May’s foot like that of a doll: Tiny. Perfect. It would fit in the palm of his hand. Absurdly—What am I thinking? he asked himself—he saw the two of them by the bandstand in the public garden, May dancing on fence posts and flower stalks.
The last loop of cloth fell away from May’s foot and revealed a warm claw of flesh, luminous and slick and folded in upon itself. It wriggled slightly, and he let it go, then grasped it again.
“You were saying?” May said.
“What?” Arthur spoke slowly, as if hit on the head. “I was saying what?”
The tiny foot in his hand shape-shifted. One minute it repelled him, the next it seemed suddenly to express the beauty of the whole female body. Wasn’t it all there, in May’s foot? The smooth white of her neck, the curve of her breast and hip, the crook of her smallest finger, the delicate, mauve folds of her most intimate places.
Arthur’s head felt hot inside. The thought sickened him, but he wanted to take the misshapen foot in his mouth. To swallow it, her, whole.
“That I am wronged and crippled and immoral?” May withdrew the foot from his grasp, her voice still shaking. She felt strangely capable of striking or even biting the man kneeling before her. “And if I am, what advice do you have for me? Is this something that can be straightened out? Fixed? Undone?”
“Oh, no. No. Don’t!” Arthur said.
“What!”
“I don’t want you to.” He looked at her, each black nostril dilated round with fury, her red-painted mouth closed over clenched teeth. A muscle in her cheek ticked.
Arthur groaned and sat back on his heels. He closed his eyes and dropped his face in his hands. Those lips, he thought. What a color. So unnatural. But determined as he was to dismiss them, their bright image hung before him as if burned into the backs of his eyelids. He felt intoxicated, lost. Inspired, bewildered. Perhaps opium induced amnesia, perhaps he’d smoked the pipe he’d been offered and then forgotten he’d done so. He had an erection of bewildering, almost insistent rigidity—what if she were to see it?
Arthur opened his eyes and stood clumsily, holding his coat closed. “Please,” he said, “I apologize.” And before May had a chance to respond, he’d backed out of the door to her room, he’d knocked into her amah and upset the tray and pipe she was carrying.
May lay back on her chaise and abandoned herself to a fit of silent tears. “Oh, what’s the matter with me,” she said to the amah, who, having picked herself and the tray up, held out her mistress’s pipe.
What was the matter? After all, Arthur Cohen was hardly the first man to have left in a hurry after seeing one of May’s feet. The amah, no more than fifteen, her cheeks pitted by smallpox, lifted her narrow shoulders in a gesture of muddled solidarity. She brushed a strand of hair from May’s white forehead.
“Tired. I’m awfully tired. That’s it.” May dried her face, and the girl nodded. Although she wasn’t mute, she might just as well have been.
“It’s just that I can’t do this all my life. Be insulted.” May watched dully as the girl lit her pipe for her. “It will make me ill.” She exhaled smoke as the girl pulled the combs from her thick hair, brushed it so that it hung in a mass over the chair back, so long it coiled on the floor. May transferred her pipe from one hand to the other as the amah unbuttoned and undressed her, brought her a long red-and-gold robe.
DOWNSTAIRS, OFF MADAME Grace’s parlor, was the water closet Arthur had used on the way up, and he slipped back behind its blue door, slid the latch into place, and unfastened his trousers. He held himself for a moment before setting to the task of dispatching lust with the hasty, pragmatic strokes of an habitual onanist—one who rarely indulged in fantasy, who had only enough experience to supply him with the most meager repertoire of worn, thin, homely images: the suggestion, while at the shore, of his cousin Amelia’s nipples, dark and erect and suddenly visible through the wet wool of her white bathing costume, and two stolen flashes of a housekeeper’s naked lower back, the set of nicely matched dimples over her less interesting buttocks. In the looking glass over the washbasin, Arthur’s reflection gazed mournfully back at him. Water dripped with dysphoric rhythm from the cold-water tap onto the roses painted inside the basin. No. He was not going to bring the lonesome act to its usual graceless conclusion.
With some trouble Arthur rebuttoned himself into his clothes and made his way back up the stairs. He stopped, four times—once on each flight—to reconsider the impulsive extravagance of losing his virginity to a Chinese temptress. What if he were to catch an exotic disease, or even a prosaic, domestic one? What if—but what was the point in trying to think when he was entirely and irredeemably overcome by desire?
Pausing outside May’s door, Arthur readjusted his coat so that it fully obscured the front of his trousers. He wondered if perhaps the other foot might be naked now as well. At his knock, the little amah opened and then looked back at May, who sat up and put her long pipe on the table by her chair. “Have you forgotten something?” she said, and now her voice sounded not so much angry as languidly sarcastic. “Some pamphlets, perhaps? A tract?”
Arthur, his thoughts newly disorganized by the sight of her hair falling down the front of her opulent dressing gown, shook his head.
“Well?”
“May I come in?” he asked, when he had regained the use of his larynx.
May shrugged.
“I’m sorry.” Arthur emptied his pockets, spilling coins on the floor, incidentally parting the front of his jacket to reveal the outline of his unmistakably erect penis. “I’m sorry. I’m very terribly sorry. Please, will you please, please, please undress?”
May looked at this strange white man, at the ginger-colored foreign-devil hair that sprouted not only from his head and face but from his arms and, if experience could be trusted, his everything else. She quoted a price five times the usual and watched him nod eagerly. “Anything to touch you,” he said. “If you would please just let me.”
“I may be lame,” she said. “You, however, are a fool.”
PERHAPS A FOOL, but then, what virgin isn’t? It would be the same all his life: each time Arthur entered May it seemed to him that he was about to understand something, an important something—about himself, about her. About life or even about God. Of course, in the sudden glare of his orgasm this truth eluded him, but only just. He was always sure that the next time he would last a little longer, everything would become a little clearer.
It would because there was silence inside May—not just inside her, but inside his head when he was in her. For the first time since he was a child, since he was a child in his mother’s lap, Arthur heard what he’d been waiting to hear for all those years: nothing.
He tried to be patient, polite. The first dozen times he visited May, he tried to make conversation, to arrive and casually deliver anecdotes he’d rehearsed as he walked through the city and perfected on the way up the stairs to her room. But once the door closed, once he saw her, all he managed was to fall on the floor before her feet and beg her once again to unwrap them. How smooth she was. How absolutely smooth and hairless were her arms and her thighs and the nape of her neck, that sweet curve of leg just below her groin. He brushed his lips against her, pressed them wherever she would allow his touch, anointing his mouth with her taste.
Arthur had a horror of body hair. Once, at five or six, unable to sleep, he’d felt his way down dark halls to his mother’s room and as she got out of bed at the sound of his footsteps he collided with her, naked, reaching too late for a nightgown. He dove forward to bury his face where he always did and his mouth found his mother’s crotch, bristling with hair, rank and scratchy and wild. In his panic he thought first that an animal had attacked him, then—more horrible!—that under her clothes his mother was entirely hirsute. Though he later believed the incident a nightmare, he grew up repelled by women with body hair. He liked them smooth all over, with no more than three tidy triangles, in the right places. The sight of hair straying down legs or dusting forearms made him ill. A cousin’s collection of stereopticon cards included a Greek dancer whose navel was ringed with hair, and just looking at it, the saliva welled up under his tongue.
Arthur returned and returned to May. He quit the Foot Emancipation Society—How could he, under the circumstances, hope to convince any woman to unbind?—and devoted himself to May instead. He brought silk, he brought sweets. He borrowed from his sister and brought flowers, furs, perfumes. Each week he went to Kelly and Walsh, searching for new books.
May’s friend and mentor, Helen, watched him run up the stairs with his purchases. “Not that one,” she said after he’d left, arms empty. “He’s all wrong.”
“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.
…
AS FOR ARTHUR, 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.