Peony in Love by Lisa See Page A

“A wife has been chosen for me too.”
    “Then we shouldn’t be meeting.”
    “I could say good night,” he said. “Is that what you want?”
    From the stage, I heard Liniang confide to her scholar her worries that now that they had done clouds and rain together he would only want her as a concubine and not as a wife. Hearing this, indignation suddenly bubbled up inside me. I wasn’t the only one doing something wrong here. I turned to face him.
    “Is this what your wife can expect in her marriage, that you would meet strange women?”
    He smiled guilelessly, but I thought about how he had prowled through our garden when he should have been watching the opera with my father, my uncles, Commissioner Tan, and the other male guests.
    “Although men and women are different, in love and desire they are the same,”
he recited the popular saying. Then he added, “I’m hoping not only for a companion in the home but in the bedchamber as well.”
    “So you’re looking for concubines even before you’re married,” I responded tartly.
    Since marriages were arranged and neither the bride nor the groom had any say in the match, concubines were every wife’s fear. Husbands fell in love with concubines. They came together by choice, had no responsibilities, and could delight in each other’s company, while marriages were a matter of duty and a way to provide sons who, in time, would perform rites in the ancestral hall.
    “If you were my wife,” he said, “I would never have need of concubines.”
    I lowered my eyes, oddly happy.
    Some might say all this is too ridiculous. Some might say it could never have happened this way. Some might say this was in my imagination—a fevered imagination that would eventually lead to my obsessed writings and no-good end. Some might even say, if everything happened the way I’ve recounted, that I deserved my no-good end and had earned
worse
than death, which in truth is what I got. But at the time I was joyous.
    “I think we were destined to meet,” he said. “I didn’t know you would be here last night, but you were. We can’t fight fate. Instead, we must accept that fate has given us a special opportunity.”
    I blushed deeply and looked away.
    All the while, the opera played in our garden. I knew it so well that even though I was distracted by what was happening with my stranger, a part of me was letting the story seep into my consciousness. Now at last I heard Liniang admit who she was: a spectral image locked between life and the afterworld. Mengmei’s terrified screams echoed through the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion. I shivered again.
    My young man cleared his throat. “I think you know this opera very well.”
    “I’m just a girl and my thoughts are of no importance,” I answered, trying to be modest, which was foolish given our circumstances.
    He looked at me quizzically. “You are beautiful, which pleases me, but it is what is inside here”—without touching me, he reached out and brought the tip of his finger to a spot over my heart, the seat of all consciousness—“that I’d like to know.”
    The place on my chest where he’d almost touched me burned. We were both bold and reckless, but where Liniang’s enticing words and her scholar’s equally suggestive actions eventually ended in consummation, I was a living girl who could never give herself away so easily without paying a severe price.
    In the garden, Mengmei overcame his fear of the ghost, proclaimed his love, and agreed to marry Liniang. He painted the dot on Liniang’s ancestor tablet, something her father had been too hurried with his promotion to do. Mengmei opened the grave and removed the jade funeral stone that had been placed in Liniang’s mouth. With that, her body once again breathed the air of the living.
    “I must go,” I said.
    “Will you meet me again tomorrow?”
    “I can’t,” I said. “They’ll miss me.”
    I considered it a miracle that no one had come after me on either