Peony in Love by Lisa See

see a real girl whose tears I want to kiss away.”
    Twin drops overflowed and ran down my cheeks.
    “How can I be a good wife now?” I gestured around me hopelessly. “After this?”
    “You’ve done nothing wrong.”
    But of course I had! I was
here,
wasn’t I? But I didn’t want to talk about it. I stepped away, folded my hands in front of me, and said in a steady voice, “I always miss notes when I play the zither.”
    “I don’t care for the zither.”
    “But you won’t be my husband,” I responded. A pained look came over his face. I’d hurt him. “My stitches are too large and ungainly,” I blurted quickly.
    “My mother does not sit in the women’s hall all day for needlework. If you were my wife, the two of you would do other things together.”
    “My paintings are weak.”
    “What do you paint?”
    “Flowers—the usual.”
    “You are not the usual. You shouldn’t paint the usual. If you could paint anything you wanted, what would you choose?”
    No one had asked me that before. In fact, no one had ever asked me anything quite like it. If I had been thinking, if I had been at all proper, I would have answered that I would keep practicing my flowers. But I wasn’t thinking.
    “I would paint this: the lake, the moon, the pavilion.”
    “A landscape then.”
    An actual landscape, not a landscape found hidden in cold slabs of marble like the ones in my father’s library. The idea intrigued me.
    “My home across the lake is high on the hill,” he went on. “Every room has a view. If we were married, we’d be companions. We’d go on excursions—on the lake, on the river, to see the tidal bore.”
    Everything he said made me happy and sad at the same time as I longed for a life I would never have.
    “But you shouldn’t worry,” he continued. “I’m sure your husband isn’t perfect either. Look at me. Since the Song dynasty it has been the ambition of every young man to achieve distinction in official life, but I have not taken the imperial exams and I have no ambition to take them.”
    But this was how it was supposed to be! A man today—one who was loyal to the Ming—would always choose an interior life over one of civil service in the new regime. Why had he said that? Did he think I was old-fashioned or just plain stupid? Did he think I wished him to be in business? Making money as a merchant was vulgar and low.
    “I’m a poet,” he said.
    I grinned. I had intuited it the first moment I saw him through the screen. “The greatest calling of all is to have a literary life.”
    “I want a marriage of companions—one of shared lives and shared poems,” he murmured. “If we were husband and wife, we would collect books, read, and drink tea together. As I told you before, I’d want you for what’s in here.”
    Again he pointed to my heart, but I felt it in a place far lower in my body.
    “So tell me about the opera,” he said after a long moment. “Are you sad not to see Liniang reunite with her mother? I understand that girls love that scene.”
    It was true. I did love that scene. As the battles wage on between the brigand and the empire’s forces, Madame Du and Spring Fragrance seek shelter at an inn in Hangzhou. Madame Du is amazed—frightened—to see what she believes is her daughter’s ghost. But of course, by now the three parts of Liniang’s soul have been brought back together and she is a girl once again, of flesh and blood.
    “Every girl hopes her mother would recognize her and love her, even if she were dead, even if she were a ghost, even if she eloped,” I said.
    “Yes, it is a good
qing
scene,” my poet agreed. “It shows us mother love. The other scenes tonight…” He jutted his chin indifferently. “Politics don’t interest me. Too much
li,
don’t you agree? I much prefer the scenes in the garden.”
    Was he mocking me?
    “Mengmei brought Liniang back to life through passion,” he went on. “He
believed
her back into existence.”
    His