RAIN ON THE CITY
CHAPTER ONE
The train that Dean Priest boarded in Moncton was a local. If a train was a snake, Dean thought, this one had just eaten a water buffalo and was none too pleased to be moving at all; it belched and shuffled its way southwest toward Boston tiny town by tiny town, pausing with gasping, side-heaving relief to disgorge and receive passengers at twenty-mile intervals.
Dean, accustomed to frequent travel, usually planned ahead and booked a sleeper compartment for such journeys. But there was nothing usual about this trip, and he was too desperate to put Canada behind him even to wait six more hours for a faster, more comfortable train. First class it was, then: softer seats and better food than the noisy, crowded coach cars, but no way to elevate his bad leg without propping his foot up on the opposite seat, and that he could not bring himself to do.
No gentleman would.
"The human body craves symmetry," one of his doctors had told him, back when he was young and hopeful enough to go looking for cures from anyone who would promise them to him. "It seeks balance at every turn, and will cripple itself again and again in search of it."
What that meant, of course, was that the thigh muscle of his longer leg was never fully extended while striding, not even when Dean wore the built-up shoe that particular doctor had recommended for the shorter leg. It bunched and cramped in protest, and - when forced to immobility for any period of time - knotted itself into a hard, defiant lump of shrieking nerve endings just above his knee.
There was another spot just like it below his shoulder blade on the opposite side. Yes, balance in all things, he thought, and smiled grimly to himself. For every action, an opposite reaction. For every moment of stolen joy, a lurking abyss of retributive agony.
Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes, wrote Rumi the Ascetic in one of his flowery Persian sermons. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.
Dean wondered what Rumi had to say about broken engagements. Not much, he imagined. Being an Ascetic had its advantages.
Nearly to Bar Harbor. Sixteen more hours to Boston.
Sixteen hours farther away. What matter how slowly he was moving, if he was moving in the right direction?
He braced himself against the juddering side of the train, gritted his teeth against the pain, and tried to sleep.
Boston was humid and crowded and smelled of coal exhaust, body odor, and day-old fish. Dean managed to winch himself to his feet and descend the steps from the train to the platform without assistance, but stumbled after three or four paces and would have gone to his knees if a nearby porter hadn't caught him by the elbow.
"Steady, sir," the porter said, his gaze skating over Dean's raised shoulder and then rapidly away again. "Let me help you with your bag."
Dean took the help. His knee was screaming. The rest of him was numb.
It was a trick he had mastered back at school, for moments in which his body called unwelcome attention to itself. The trick was to leave the imperfect flesh to its own devices and let the soul float free of it, hovering, disconnected. Whatever humiliation the body endured, it could endure by itself; it would not drag the rest of him down to degradation along with it. Even now, the curious and pitying eyes that followed his limping progress through the station: those eyes, he told himself, were only looking at the wreck of his carcass. They did not see him.
No one ever saw him.
The porter flagged down a hansom and shoehorned Dean and his valise neatly into the back seat. Dean dropped coins into his hand, keeping his face averted. The sooner the porter ceased to exist, the sooner he could pretend that the near-fall on the platform had never happened.
"My bag to the Parker House," he told the driver. "I have a room reserved."
"And you as well, sir? To the hotel?"
"No," said Dean, making a decision, and gave him an address.
Boston's Chinatown district was a puny, fledgling David to San Francisco's Goliath – just a few thousand workers who'd come over to make shoes during the factory strike in North Adams, thirty years ago, and never left. Jolting past the laundries and noodle shops on Harrison Avenue in the back of the cab, Dean saw men but next to no Chinese women. The Americans had seen to that in typical xenophobic hysteria, with their Chinese Exclusion Act and their endless series of immigration raids.
No matter, for his purposes, anyway: in any community where there were working men and no marriageable women, there were prostitutes. Most for the workers, a few select better ones for their employers. Sweet-smelling, soft-voiced comforts to remind them of home, to resign them to their exile.
Liu - the queen of them all - did a very brisk business.
"This corner," he told the bemused driver. "No need to wait."
You will not fall, he said to himself, white-knuckling the handholds on the outside of the hansom and fumbling for more coins. You will put one foot on the ground, and then the other in front of it, and then the other again, and it doesn't matter that you are in pain because you are going to the one place in this godforsaken city that can make - it - stop.
He was at the corner, hissing through his teeth with every dragging, unlovely step but still upright. He was at the red carved door with the green awning.
And here, yes, here was Liu, elegant in a grey silk gown that proud Elizabeth Murray would not have been ashamed to wear to Sunday service, with perhaps another faint line or two at the corners of her eyes but still graceful, still smiling, flawless skin, pure Mandarin profile, offering him her arm and pulling him through the silver brocade door-curtains into her jewel box of a parlor.
"Mr. Priest," she said, taking his measure in a single sweeping glance. "You have been away from us for a long time."
"Travel," said Dean shortly. This was not enough of an explanation – Liu had introduced him to the jeweler where he'd bought Emily's emerald, in a gesture that at the time had seemed very much like a ritual farewell – but she nodded after a moment, took his coat and hat, and hung them in a rosewood armoire.
"We can converse later," she said, "after you are more comfortable. For the moment, I will have Xiaoling show you to the Blue Room."
It might have been a mistake to come here, Dean thought.
The Blue Room was hung with shadowy slate-colored silk and lit with candle-lanterns. A fountain splashed in the corner. He leaned heavily on an upholstered arm-chair and tried not to look at Xiaoling, kneeling to remove his boots.
Xiaoling – 'little comforter'. Almost too apt a name; probably she had chosen it, or had it chosen for her. He wondered what her parents had called her.
She was more slightly built than … well, than. And her eyes were dark instead of smoke-grey. But she was young and soft-skinned and folded into a shimmering loose garment the color of moonlight, her hair a shining fall of blue-black, and the sight of her small sure hands unfastening his buttons lit dangerous fires inside him. He was relieved when she stepped away for a moment to the table, then took his arm to draw him with her.
"Sit," she said, pushing him into the chair. The sound of her voice – soft, tinged with the musical tones of Canton, no hint of arch, familiar, heartbreaking impishness – shattered what remained of the mirage he'd conjured; he blinked and sat, and allowed her to lift each leg in turn and settle it inside a bucket of hot water strewn with sharp green-smelling herbs. A length of silk drifted over his lap – more for his own modesty, Dean knew, than for hers.
Next was an herbal tisane in a thick stoneware mug without a handle. He had drunk it before – it was chokingly bitter, but carved out a thin layer of distance between himself and his pain.
No opium, he had told Liu the first time, years ago. Never any opium; I will not lose the only part of my poor self that I still value to poppy worship.
This was not as effective. But it let him breathe again.
He closed his eyes and listened to the plashing fountain behind him, and only jerked a little when Xiaoling came back with muslin bags of heated dry rice to pack over the aching muscles of his thighs. A moment later, he caught a whiff of strongly mentholated herbal ointment as she moved around behind him, and groaned aloud as her hard little thumbs found the sensitive spots at either side of his nape.
This was a luxury, certainly, but also more pain than pleasure – the punishing pressure of her elbow against the stubborn knot of muscle in his back; the insistent repeated drag of knuckles over the twitching, protesting soles of his feet; her murmured litany of apology (sorry, sorry, so sorry) as she dug her iron fingers into the shrieking mass of dysfunction in his leg and forced the twisted tendons to release. Hands on his hump, even, matter-of-fact and unhurried in their hard rhythmic massage.
Perhaps she was truly not disturbed by his deformities. More likely, he was simply paying her well enough to pretend.
Dean longed to escape into his mental haven, but every twinge of sensation, welcome or not, pulled him back into visceral awareness of his damaged body. He fought surrender as long as he could, then – when exhaustion and sheer tactile overload claimed him – began, silently, to weep.
One blessing there, he told himself, and only one. If most of these tears were for Emily, who would know it?
It went on and on. The tears dried, eventually, leaving a hollow and not unwelcome lassitude in their place. Her touch hurt him less, now, but felt – more, as though her hands had scoured off a layer of epidermis, leaving him vulnerable and newborn. Dean scrabbled in his mind for the door that would let him escape, and found it too heavy to open. For this moment, for better or worse, he was anchored – all of him – inside this sea of sensation.
Xiaoling peeled the silk back over his groin. He felt her small hard hands vibrating gently on his bare thighs. When he opened his eyes, she was staring up at him from between his legs, eyebrows lifted in mute inquiry: yes, or no?
Sometimes, in the past, he had said yes. To her, or at least others like her. But not for more than a year now, not since he'd thought –
Well. Best not to dwell on it.
He wavered for an agonizing instant on the edge of temptation. That black hair, that slim creamy silhouette against the candles. Warm and wet and attentive, drawing the poison of his grief away from him a ribbon of sensation at a time, the way a spool of thread unwinds when you hold it up and let gravity take the loose end.
A moment of pleasure amid all this despair. A light to hold against the darkness.
He could thread that shiny hair through his hands, touch that satin skin. He could pretend …
"No, thank you," he said, swallowing the high tide of his lust. "I have everything I need at the moment."
A lie, of course.
He paid her fee. After only a moment of hesitation, he sorted through his clothes until he found his waistcoat, and dug into the tiny inner pocket for the emerald ring. Her eyes widened when he dropped it into her hand.
"Perhaps it will help you to go home sooner," he said in his broken Cantonese. "There may be people there who love you."
Unspoken: I envy you that.
Liu summoned a hansom cab for him and slipped a neatly wrapped packet of the analgesic tea into his hands. He did not offer to answer the questions banked in her deep gaze, and she did not pry. Another advantage of dealing with professionals.
"Where do you go next?" she asked lightly as she helped him into his coat. "Is it usually Egypt, this time of year?"
"Not this time," he said, though truthfully he'd thought no further than where he was standing now. "Europe, I think. Italy, perhaps."
"Come and see us again," she said, "when you return. And safe travels to you."
Dean nodded. His leg really did feel very much better.
"Xiexie," he said, and – giving in to impulse – leaned in and kissed her flawless cheek.
Who knew? Maybe this time it really was goodbye.
You could never tell, with human beings.