I can’t see details. I’m awfully uneasy about you. I had a talk with Chang Wo, but a Goddess can’t go more than so far. Things are closing in on you. My dharma, the personal law that rules me, the law of that-which-I-really-am, often makes me leave you when I want to be with you, when I could do more than crawl into bed with you—”
“Jade Lady,” he cut in, “I’m still people, and a thousand years ago, you were people. And people manage to carry on. How long can you stay in Orchid’s body?”
“If I keep her body too long, there’s the risk that she could die.”
Ju-hai frowned. “That would be a left-handed way of killing her?”
“It’s not that simple, but you’re not far off! That would be bad—awfully bad—for you and me—and there’s the law of what I am. No one and nothing makes that law—it is, just because I am.”
“Meaning?”
“I’ll be with you here as long as I can and I’ll be with you somewhere else when I can. I promise.”
Each caught the other and, mouth-to-mouth, they found the deepest darkness, beyond the moon’s reach.
Chapter XII
Ju-hai was so early for school that Master Wu was both amazed and happy. This was neither ambition nor filial piety; Ju-hai had much thinking to do, and school was his only escape from the mental and emotional turmoil stirred up when, awakening a little after sunrise, he found himself alone.
Then Orchid scratched on the drawn curtains of the alcove, and said, “Old Master, time for breakfast.”
As he soup-spooned congee with meat balls floating in it, he sensed that something was puzzling Orchid; before he’d finished his rice-gruel, he was sure that Mei-yu had quit Orchid’s body. This left him wondering when she’d return.
The nice thing about calligraphy was that he could two-track, digesting his experience with Mei-yu in Orchid’s body and at the same time getting the brush strokes to make perfect triangles, perfect wide lines ending squarely, and strokes that would taper into barely visible but unbroken hairlines which swept on and on, to swell again and become massive. There was also something intoxicating about the camphor bouquet which came up from the slab whenever he ground ink.
No doubt about it, he was woman-intoxicated. But he was wondering which woman?
Although Master Wu applauded Ju-hai’s amazing performance that morning and all that afternoon, the old man was puzzled. And when, after a long day of classics and calligraphy, Ju-hai begged permission to quit his teacher’s august presence, each wondered about the other. School was not loathsome; and Ju-hai was not a trifler with an engaging personality, but…
When Ju-hai got his daily exercise by walking from Master Wu’s home to his own cozy refuge, Orchid’s welcome enriched the day.
“I’ve been out shopping, thinking up surprises for you,” Orchid began, with a glow in her splendid eyes that set him wondering whether her thoughts were shifting from evening rice to the broad mattress behind the alcove curtains. “You’ll never guess what I found!”
If she’d allowed him another instant, he’d have blurted out, “The frailest silken shift. It must’ve been woven of moonbeams.”
But she chattered him down, most happily. “Sit down, and I’ll show you. I was prowling the market—” Orchid raised her voice so that he could hear her from the kitchen annex. “—and there was a very special duck roasting, but I talked the man out of it—he had time to do another for his promised customer.
“But first you’ve got to have some ng lea pai. You need a tonic after all day at school.”
Orchid danced into view with a small tureen on one upraised hand; on the other, she had a wine heater in which an onion-shaped jug barely raised its neck out of the hot water. Pot-lifters protected each hand against its steaming burden.
All on edge, Ju-hai bounced to his feet and sidestepped, ready to dodge when everything smashed to the floor.
Nothing dropped.
“Fooled you, didn’t I?” Triumphantly, the question came an instant after she got the little tureen to the table and slid the wine heater into place beside it. “Neat, wasn’t it?”
Ju-hai let out a long, quavering breath. “How’d a Buddhist nun learn a trick like that—”
Perplexed, Orchid blinked; then, instead of eying him, she picked it up, smoothly. “Master Wu got you more than you counted on! And you guessed wrong—ng ha pai’s really a tonic, and it’s good for you, and it’s not just for pure-awfully-pure Buddhists who want a high-powered drink without going against their religion. Aiieeyah! Maybe there is ginseng in it, but you need something to pick you up after a long day at school.”
Ju-hai began to suspect that his housekeeper knew that something had happened to her the previous night, and that she was still puzzled, groping for the answer; and he was asking himself how much tonic she had gulped while awaiting his return. Although let down because Mei-yu had been called away by the laws of her being, her dharma, his curiosity regarding Orchid-as-Orchid had a good chance of being satisfied.
And some day, there’d be Mei-yu in a body all her own.
Then Orchid brought him back to Ch’ang-an. “While you’re busy with duck soup, I’ll get the big event!”
The soup, made of the fowl’s bones and spare parts, was not the ninth or thirteenth heaven of Chinese gastronomy—not in the way of a tree fungus, or bird’s nest or shark’s fin soup—but it had body and flavor which a farmer could appreciate, as did all the non-elite Chinese soups.
And then Orchid brought what had become a not-surprise.
She uncovered a platter heaped with thin slices of fowl, a stack of pao-ping—paper-thin crêpes, almost as thin as the Mei-yu-plus-Orchid gown—thread-fine, slivered leeks and scallions, and a little dish of plum sauce.
Before he quit blinking, Orchid was busy with ivory chopsticks, the nastiest, the most treacherous, and the most elegant of eating gear, except, perhaps, for jade.
First, she set out the crisp skin of the duck—square flakes of it. That Ju-hai could have done, and so could any Chinese person, even half asleep and dead-drunk. Next Orchid plucked a pao-ping and set it on his plate. She arranged sliver-thin strips of duck and laid thread thin lengths of leek and scallion over the plum sauce she’d spooned on the supreme duck.
Then Ju-hai learned that he was a farmer!
Daintily, with supreme legerdemain, Orchid plied the chopsticks and quickly had the pao-ping rolled, enclosing the filling.
Mo-shu pork—any down could roll that one—but this—!
“Tai-tai, you’re too formal—too stately. Sit down and roll yourself one, so I can watch closely.”
Wide eyed, she regarded him. “Old Master—really—you don’t mean it—”
“Of course I mean it! Why not sit and eat with me. I’ve been wondering why you waste time as a student’s housekeeper.”
Watching
