紫丁香上的一只蜂-2

A Bee Over the Lilacs

 

Innocently the rain fell without knowing the urgency of Stella. The humidity of the greenhouse became palpable as the rain dampened the air outside and spirit inside. Stella sighed and her sigh made the bamboo leaf by her lips sway. The attendant stood in a rainy mood by the cash register half leaning her body on the counter in an ill-posed melancholy befitting her high-cholesterol heart. She stole a final glance off her sole, potential customer as a sudden bolt jolted Stella out of her reverie. The middle-aged shopkeeper’s sigh was of a different quality and tonality from Stella’s because hers was a jealous kind.

When Stella ran to her car the rain had cut a sculpture of her figure about which the florist sighed a few minutes ago. She hadn’t had time to visit her hairstylist and the hair’s tickling at her nape had made Stella’s sleep too conscious to be tight of late. Presently the rain-soaked silk, strand by strand, clung to her cheeks and neck in a cool caress of a black swan’s tightly wound feathers. As Stella wiped the water off her face she also smudged the makeup and the natural rim of bright eyes emanated a touch of gauntness as a blink led to a long second of distant gaze. Rainwater rolled over her clavicle jutting like a white dolphin’s spine after a period of silent dive as her hastened breath from the dashing eased itself out. Furtively the stream tickled her left breast and she shuddered as if Ming was again leaning over. Quickly she tightened her bra to stop the flow of her little Seine river. She put on her sunglasses and started the engine and turned on the radio. As she readied herself to drive she found that the sky was overcast and she could see her eyes’ own pupils reflected off the polarizer. She took the glasses off and drove on.

One mile on the way Stella realized that she didn’t buy flowers for Melanie after all. She didn’t have time to turn back because Melanie’s plane would be half a hour from landing. She didn’t find the flowers she liked in the shop anyway. Stella thought tomorrow they could stroll together in Gallagher Park and see wild lilacs without hustles and sighs. And maybe with a sentiment ground so fine by time’s pendulous wheels. Why Melanie needed a flower to welcome, Stella didn’t give herself the time to consider.

When Melanie first saw Stella in the greeting area she didn’t express her thought in any perceptible way. Many of her first impressions had been done in by second thought. The two women hadn’t seen each other for ten years and in the four years when they shared a dormitory room in a Chinese University they shared less the space than a quiet rivalry. What they were rivaling for was not important, then and even less now. When they came to the United States seven years ago Melanie was on the strength of her GRE and Stella on the weakness of a bright PIGS whom she married open-mindedly so that their respective pleasures would not be delayed. The two women had not met since arriving in the US but had talked over the phone and lavished attention on each other through knowing intermediaries who reveled in exaggerating the slightest unhappiness of one to the other. So the winner of the long-running jealousy was a sudden burst of nostalgia for the by-gone time when they simultaneously realized that time belonging to itself is eternal and time belonging to one woman is very fleeting.

Melanie had a secret fear. She wouldn’t admit it even to herself unless she was in an uncontrollable situation, such as a nightmare or aircraft landing. The 767’s approach to the runway was rough, making Melanie think about the ground blocked by the rain clouds. She longed not for the panorama of a postcard city but the familiar earth of a trimmed open field where lilacs sometimes glowed to diffract the weary landing lights of passenger planes whizzing by. The dense fog frustrated her distracting search and the turbulence rocked the plane in a sea of immense gray pliancy. Melanie yielded and closed her eyes. Not necessarily waiting. When the purple finally showed through, Melanie was peeved that there were merely runway lights guiding the plane in bad weathers. She did not hear the release of the landing gear and her memory of it was from previous flights which would not have been useful. The plane thus glided in her sensation like a footless flamingo heading inexorably toward the whale-like terminal, until a terminal boom. As was her habit, Melanie spent the four hours of flight calculating novels ways in which the landing gears would fail and foil her meeting with Stella. An amateur palm reader sometimes Melanie had read too many things into her own hand that she was suddenly paralyzed because of the weight, like a setting sun dragged down to drown under that ocean of twilight.

Melanie paused to think how to return Stella’s warm greeting. That her fatalistic prophecy had again turned false was not a source of relief but awoke that restless fatigue. Having failed to find the proper pleasantry, Melanie said what she truly felt, “I’m hungry.”

Stella led her friend Bonker’s Grille and Bar and the two women sat down at a table after their orders. Melanie frowned at her burger and did not say why. She did not ask why of life anymore. Stella’s mood had been sunny as soon as she smelt the faint fragrance of Melanie. The rain made a snarling fizzle and a rainbow arched an incredible expanse of sky and it was a fun game for Stella to imagine how Melanie had weathered time’s many rainfalls.

“You are wet,” said Melanie and then cast another glance of Stella for additional study.
“So? It’s raining.” Stella laughed as she blew another huff at the steam curls from the coffee she hadn’t had a sip.

“Couldn’t you bring an umbrella?”
“It was sunny when I left,” explained Stella.

“Fate is such that we cannot meet on a sunny day?”
Teasingly Stella sung the first line of “I am sunshine, in a cloudy day.”
“I think days are all sunny when they are in the past,” said Melanie.
Stella didn’t give a pause to chew the juicy philosophy of Melanie’s lament. She pulled her still wet blouse straight, highlighting her personal pride almost to public immodesty. After that they left the airport.

The balcony of Stella’s apartment overlooked a quiet corner of the bay, at an ideal distance, far enough that waves don’t show in the sea-watcher’s eye more than sinuous lines corrugated by obliquely propagating ripples but not too far to make the view a dull painting from an artist on the street. A palm tree grows just to have its top level with the balcony and on the top mysteriously hangs a straw hat attracting curious seagulls. The long view of the hazy ocean sharpens into the short view of the green tennis court and the blue shins of the swimming pool. As the day drew to a close, half a dozen condo dwellers sat by the poolside grouching over the heat and feasting mosquitoes. Between the long and short views is a street of high-end specialty shops opening to the generous lawn watered by sprinklers twice daily. A boy was throwing a freesbie against seven o’clock’s hesitant breeze. His dog ran after the saucer and barked, after seeing that the cyclonic wind caught the freesbie and lifted it upward, spinning before Melanie who broodingly contemplated the sea. She snapped her index finger at the freesbie and obediently it fell down to the pool like a striking meteor. Like a fluorescent moon it floated there; the dog stood by it silently, dazed.

“Red or white?” Stella stepped out to the balcony and looked intently at Melanie’s profile. It had a certain holiness, like that of Virgin Mother holding the baby Christ.

“What do you prefer?” Melanie retracted her seaward eyes and said a silly Hail Mary to the lone sailboat going out to the evening water. She forgot that actually she preferred not to drink wine at all.

“White,” said Stella.
“Red,” said Melanie. Then they laughed.
“Make it rosé,” said Stella as she went inside. Melanie saw the back of Stella’s silk bathrobe girdled in the middle to make the top and bottom halves look looser than they actually were. Melanie found the bare feet of her friend unspeakably moving.

The two women leaned on the balcony rail and drank as the night became certain. They didn’t talk much more than Stella’s lighthearted introduction to a city “losing its light,” the melancholy echoes from the wall of the departing day. Melanie followed Stella’s pointing hand and found she still wore her wedding ring. Stella gave a naughty squint and continued on.

Stella acknowledged Melanie’s interest by taking off the ring and described the diamond. “The love for jewelry always outlast the love for the man,” she said casually. She took the glass from Melanie and drank the remainder in one gulp. Melanie avenged by doing the same. Right there the two women came to the simultaneous conclusion that their previous jealousy was the fault of not having drunk the other’s wine. They smiled understandingly at this mutual discovery, clanked the empty glasses, and as if by prior design, threw the glasses down the balcony to shatter on the pebbled pathway to startle the pool party. Breathlessly they ran into the living room before the smashing sounds made the victims jump. They laughed and, as if not enough, cried with hysteria.

”All right, I confess first.” Stella, trying bravely to recover, lit a cigarette and sat cross-legged in the leather rocking chair before the almond cabinet displaying collector’s crystals. “It is all because of a cat.”

“What was it?” asked Melanie.
“My divorce. Aren’t we going to close the chapters?”, said Stella.
“And also chapels the way you are going,” said Melanie.
“Don’t be too sarcastic, Melanie, you are next.?
“But not as a repeat offender, you did it twice”, smiled Melanie to beg Stella’s mercy when her turn was up.
“Gee, I forgot about the PIGS. But that was six years ago!?”
“Why you broke up?”
“My first? Well, he just didn’t come home early enough. He loved his experiment more than love itself. What you expect really? They all believe the Uncertainty Principle. When you have the energy, you don’t have the time. When you have the momentum, your position is skewed. Dirty Heisenberg!”
“You are trying to be outrageous,” said Melanie.
“Okay. Let me try an understatement then. He was just too smart for me. Satisfied?”

“So what about the cat?” asked Melanie.
“I got through the two years of school despite three boyfriends. Whew!” Stella feigned to wipe her forehead. “After I landed my first job all I lacked was a cat. Being outrageous again, sleeping by a furry cuddly cat is better than dealing with morning breath of another person.”
“You said it yourself,” laughed Melanie.
“It was a Persian. Purest breed. Gorgeous eyes and danced like a ballerina,” Stella finished the cigarette and could not find the ashtray. She walked to the balcony. The pool party had dispersed. She threw the butt down. The dim reddish light dropped slowly. Then the scented Player exploded into a hundred fireflies upon impact with the pavement. Melanie followed Stella outside and the revelation of the evening was all open to her. She looked at Stella as Stella looked at the last light to extinguish on the pavement.

“Yeah, the cat,” continued Stella. “She was beautiful but very dumb. Kind of like Snow White. That was her name. One day she returned home smelling like piss. The next time I followed her and found out that she let an ugly dog pee on her.”
“Gross,” said Melanie.
“So I went to the dog’s owner. He lived in another condo building two blocks down. I knocked at his door and he showed up in underwear. He said he would get dressed, but I was too angry to let him go. Middle way through I thought, yikes this is too gross and stopped to think of some euphemism of peeing. When I got the idea I found myself in his bed making wild love. That is how I first met Ming.”
“So you married him because he seduced you?”
“Or his dog peed on my cat. Who cares! We married because Ming felt like being patriotic.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Melanie.
“Ming had romanced American women mostly. He was tall and handsome and spoke great English. Then his American wife had an affair with a partner in his firm and he began to come home to the virtuous Chinese sisters.”
“Virtuous as the way you guys met??
“Yap. He sung the Chinese national anthem when he was in the mood in the morning. Like, wake up, those who do not submit to slobbery.”
“You must mean slavery,” corrected Melanie.
“But he meant I was too lazy to please him in the morning.”
“You two are sick people.”
“More like born-again patriots. If we all can love our mothers like we love China!”

“So how long were you married?”
“Two and half years.”
“Why did you divorce?”
“Snow White died.”
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“You are sicker than I thought.”
“But not as foolish as a dead Snow White waiting for the Prince’s kiss.”

“How about you, Melanie?” asked Stella.
“Let us wait for tomorrow. I am tired,” Melanie ended the evening anticlimatically.

The sun of Saturday morning had risen above the leaves of the palm tree and Stella grew impatient. In her morning jog she had past Gallagher Park and knew the ephemeral lifetime of dew on the lilacs there. If Melanie kept on sleeping late, the flowers would be less than spectacularly alive. Stella entered the guest room and checked for the third time what Melanie was up to. The reading lamp on the nightstand was on -- the purplish light now seemed almost ultraviolet, touching Melanie’s exposed left arm and ionizing foreign molecules attached to her soft skin. Stella looked at the open bottle on the nightstand; they were sleeping pills. Stella sighed understandingly. Above the headboard hang a painting Stella bought when she was in Barcelona. A young girl, a la mode, stood on the sidewalk with an open parasol. The foreground was full of brilliant sunlight and a few autumnal leaves falling beside her and the background was a rainy cityscape of Gotham-like features. The girl was looking at the distant rain contemplatively.
“What time is it?” asked Melanie, “sorry I overslept.?
“It is Eastern standard time,” said Stella. “Just kidding. Slept well?”
“I think yes,” said Melanie. “The pill was new. I didn’t know it would be so effective. Awful if you started to count lambs past midnight. The painting here. It reflected off the glass door of the closet under moonlight. The girl came alive under the full moon.”
“Wolf!” Stella said laughingly. “Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you are, there is a nice restaurant, Bavarian according to the chef but really he meant Slovenian. They serve nice breakfast till 11.”
“What if I am not hungry?”
“Then we can walk past the restaurant. You can say hi to Hans because he has been searching for a Chinese wife for 50 years,” said Stella. “We walk about half mile and there is Gallagher Park. Lilacs of the most brilliant blossoms strung the creek. The creek then goes into a cave I never dared to enter.”
“I guess we will see if the sum of two cowards is equal to a hero,” laughed Melanie as she got up. She was naked.

It took only five minutes to get to Gallagher Park in Stella’s car. On the way Stella made sure that Melanie was really not hungry and that Hans was a nice guy. She felt a little silly about spending so much anxiety about making sure that Melanie saw the lilacs under morning dew. In fact she felt silly that they would see lilacs at all. She wouldn’t have been so silly, she knew all along, had Melanie not been so crazy about lilacs in her university days. In the season, Melanie would pick fresh lilacs everyday and sink into another world by simply looking at them.

After five minutes of seeing the lilacs of Gallagher Park, Melanie decided that the flowers she saw were different from the ones she remembered. The forms were too grand and colors too uniform to be dreamy. But they still were the best lilacs she had seen in a long time and she thanked Stella for remembering her passion by leaning to touch her, shoulder to shoulder.

When their hands touched, Melanie knew that it was her time to confess. She struggled for her opening remark and then thought of Stella’s yesterday.

“It was all because of a bee,” said Melanie. “It had nothing to do with my divorce. But then everything. You will know after all is told.”

 

When Melanie was known as Deng Yingchao, Deng Yingchao was known in China as the Big Sister. Melanie's parents, pious people, paid homage to the ageless matron by calling their Yingchao Xiao-mei. Their apparent effrontery was not as blasphemous as it appears in English because Melanie's Yingchao writes and accents differently from the "super sharpness" the genshen-stoned Big Sister's name connotes. The circumstance Xiaomei grew up in was in no time equaled by the Big Sister and the hardship had made Xiaomei an absorbed companion of herself and an easy prey to the dream world's many-fanged flying wolves.

One spring day, Xiaomei sat in her grade 6 classroom, tracing the shadow of the old gate tower of the storied Western Hunan town as history crept up her young heart to make everything as old as the crumbling fortress where the pheasants hatched their young. When the shadow suddenly disappeared Xiaomei thought the black wings of mountain ghosts were again beating up the smoke of forest fire to hover over the last cough of the town's tubercular life. Slowly she wiped off the trace touched with her moist finger and looked out and found the sky perfectly sunny.

"That's how I first met Yang Lian," said Melanie. "She came as a happy shadow to erase a sad one. My new deskmate."

"Was she pretty?" asked Stella.

"I don't know. She was just happy. She had reasons to. Her father was the new head of our township. The only way I could be attractive to her is that I was always sad. She was so happy that she would taste sadness as some exotic drink. Have you ever thought of it, Stella?"

"Of what?"

"That when a person is always happy, then happy is not the word to describe her condition?"

"Then what is?"

"I've thought about it a long time. I think the word is angelic."

"Do you believe in Jesus or just in angels?" Stella shot with intimate alarm.

"Neither. Just that religion often gives you the best words," said Melanie.

"Maybe she took pity on me, a politically damned father and a deaf mother half paralyzed by untreated arthritis. Her first name literally means pity. Anyway we became best friends from day one. Like a classical poem, sad things flowing in happy melodic meters and rhymes."

Stella didn't speak during the pause in which Melanie tried to untie the knotted handkerchief in her hands. She wondered, in comparison with Melanie, whether she was that angelic kind despite many absent-minded sighs amounting to an immortal's declaration "Heaven sucks."

"Last night I had a dream in your room." Melanie looked at Stella tentatively. Not until she saw Stella's blinking lashes did she feel that this was not another unreality. "You know, distant memory is often just dreams. I can't be sure it's just a dream, though. I think it happened and I was just so wrapped or scared that I can only remember it in dreams. Thanks
for breaking the glasses last night."

The cobble-stoned streets were narrow and steep in the northern section of the town where the houses were all built when China was still under the dynastical rule. As the black shingles of burnt clay cracked, the curling edges of the eaves were reduced to imprisoned bony dragons reminiscing the lost freedom and glory. Aside from a few blossoming pots of herbal plants of medicinal value at the parsimonious sills of cobwebbed windows with long-unused latches fused into the jams, there was no vegetation in the desolate place. Despite Xiaomei's subtle allusions, Yang Lian hadn't found the time to visit her home in the two weeks since they were acquainted.

The rain season opened ceremoniously on Sunday and the ferocity had driven Xiaomei's older kin out in search of things that could be placed up the roof to negotiate the leaks. Alone Xiaomei busied herself with the two washbasins they owned and hustled among the eight leakages dripping fast into gushes. Half a hour into the struggle Xiaomei saw that there was no heroism or hope in her gallantry, only the sad evocation of the bamboo basket carrying the lunch vegetables washed almost pale. Once she was in her natural state of gloom Xiaomei heard the knock of reality and that the bang at the door to the yard was not imagined. It became louder, as if in quarrel with the rolling thunders. She thought it was Father and ran through the curtain of rain. She gathered her breath under the eaves of the entrance way and to her pique found it was holding well under the torrent. When she opened the door Xiaomei was surprised it was rather her new friend Yang Lian in an umbrella of chrome frame and black cloth shield, Ke-luo-mi as it was called to give a foreign air to the symbol of teen affluence.

"Why you come now?" Xiaomei had to shout to overcome the thunder and her shy joy, "such a bad day!"

"I want to try out the new umbrella," Yang Lian answered in a humor so natural that there could be no room for suspicion of gloating. "Let's go outside."

"I haven't an umbrella. My parents took them."

"Go under here. It's big enough for both of us."

Before she stepped to take Yang Lian's arm, Xiaomei spent a split second thinking of her futile and gloomy task inside. Yang Lian's beaming eyes made her believe that the rain could be liberating if she would just expose to it wholeheart. There would be no leak that was too big if she had no care. She jumped under the umbrella with a gleeful scream and kicked up splashes up Yang Lian's rolled up trousers. The rain fell innocently in a zigzag impossible if not for the imitation of the way the two girls walked.

"The first thing I thought when it rained was to come to visit you," smiled Yang Lian. "I came last week but saw a donkey before your door unloading bricks. I'm scared of donkeys. I thought the big rain should have left the street without a soul and I was right."

"Why was she afraid of donkeys?" asked Stella.

"I didn't ask." After a brief reflection Melanie tilted her head quizzically and rejoined, "why was the tiger in Liu Zhong-yuan's parable scared of the donkey?"

"Heavens!" Stella exclaimed. "I pray for the safety of the poor donkey."

"We went to climb the old fortress," continued Melanie.

"I'd never climbed the tower by myself. The steps had been eaten away by time and termites. When I was little, my brother took me there on his back but never on my own feet. It was a hard climb. Rain made everything hard but we made it. Our fingers bled from having to grab too many places for too many times. We sucked the bleeding for each other for tenderness was something to give."

"How romantic!" said Stella. She felt the surreal air Melanie created was like the cave she never dare enter.

"It was very windy at the top. Wind made the great rain weak and inconsequential. Yang Lian was so excited she opened her arms to hail a celebration. The wind took her umbrella and blew it down to the dark street and its murmuring currents. When it finally disappeared it flew like a black dandelion."

"There is no black dandelion," said Stella.

"In dreams there are," said Melanie. "I thought she would cry and maybe go down to chase the umbrella, because it was a very expensive thing in our time. But Yang Lian was so thrilled by the conquest she didn't seem to notice that her umbrella was blown away. I came to ask whether we should go down to find it, she just said `there is not much rain here, we don't need it.' I asked if her parents would punish her for losing the umbrella, she said `they don't know I took it.'"

"Gee, she really was a happy soul," Stella had to admit even she at her best would at least curse the wind for the robbery.

"Wind made the fortress cold and us shudder. But from the height we could see the waterfall I had only heard of many lis away. The sight alone was worth it but Yang Lian said that the first thing we should do when the rain past was to go there and see the fall up close."

"Did you?" asked Stella.

"Finally we had the sense that listening to our own teeth clacking was not a good idea and went into the old gate tower to shelter us from the wind. It was a dark batty place. I'm sure we were both scared of bats or raccoons or whatever. But two together we had no fear. There was a faint light coming in from the leaky roof and at the end of it was a pheasant hen hatching her eggs. I saw it for real for the first time. We stayed quiet so as not to disturb the brooding mother. Funny thing was that my trembling got worse inside and Yang Lian said we should stay close to keep ourselves warm. Five minutes together her body warmed first and I sensed it was because hers was much fuller than mine. I don't know. I just felt warm when she took pity on me by hugging me tighter and asking if I'd `had it coming'."

Stella used her eyebrows to substitute for verbal prodding because only silence was subtle enough to make sense of it and make her own sympathy known.

"We fell asleep in the old tower. We were too tired. When we woke up, it was past supper time. My head was stuffy but nose very clear1think about it. I was nervous that I would be late coming home and Yang Lian got up slowly and looked so lazy that suddenly I realized all didn't matter if I was happy. It was the happiest day in my childhood. When I got home my father beat me for leaving without permission and worse, coming so late to besmirch his already besieged reputation. He was very angry and beat me very hard. But the harder he whacked, the happier I felt. It got so crazy that my mother had to kneel before Father and take the abuse for me until Father realized whom he was hitting. Mother thought I was getting insane but in truth I was merely happy."

"My Golly, was it you who said I was sick yesterday?" Stella sighed and found two ironies added to a spur of blush. "But what has it to do with the bee?"

"About a week later the rain past and the sun worked hard to dry up the road so that Yang Lian and I could carry out our plan to see the waterfall. Yang Lian knew about my father's outburst and never mentioned the plan but I was determined to go there and find an undisturbed puddle of glacial water to see my face through and say it for once that I was beautiful. We worked out a plan. I sneaked out Sunday morning telling Father I had to join a "good-deeds" squad to learn from Lei Feng. That pretense always worked magic with him.

"The fall was not as far as I thought, about eight lis but we didn't have bus or bikes. We had to walk there. So it was still an adventure. On the way I asked Yang Lian what her parents had said about the umbrella. She said she made a deal with her younger brother so that he would take the fall for her. Her parents never tried their son to the threshold of tears. The price was two homework. She could be so sneaky!

"I don't know if you have read Shen Cong-wen but Xiang Xi is just ten times more beautiful than his pen could convey. When I was many lis out of the town and looked back I saw the hated prison in her grace only distance could render in full. The drabness and decay were no longer and all that was visible was the bare breasts of a suffering mother who had fed me the blood-threaded milk. The thought literally drove me to weep hoping my wild tears could save the dying tree I pressed my face against. Even my silent pity and hatred of Father were turned into a repentant love; I wanted to run home to tell him the real deed I was doing. I made up my mind that I would tell the truth after I got back and tell him I loved him before he either hit or hug me.

"Yang Lian didn't know what I was crying for but she cried with me just for the comraderie. Girls that age can cry faster than you can say period. Seeing her tears I felt I'd committed a crime to depress our happy outing with my hysterical reaction to the monthly flood. So I held her hand and implored that she came up with a happy thought. Soon we saw a wide field of lilacs, in a lush mild valley grazed by a herd of sheep. A shepherd Yang Lian joked was one hundred years old was playing a bamboo flute, of a tone that must be one thousand years old. Only the water fall behind understood him and danced to the music. We sat holding hands and leaning heads to give each other support. After a few tones, Yang Lian asked if I was still sad and I answered `look, even the lilacs are happy'.

"Yang Lian took me by the hand and ran down the slope into the lilac field. She and I picked the flowers. She had such nimble hands she made a wreath from tree branches and we were plugging the flowers into the wreath to make it a crown. There was no road in the field but we beat a path ourselves laughing and bleeding but winning over the thorns.

"I don't know when the bee appeared. It didn't even leave a shadow or buzz as it approached. Yang Lian first got stung at the nape and she cried ai-yuo and warned me about the thorny vines. Then the bee got inside her clothes and she realized it was a bee. Laughing while crying after each sting, she loosened her clothes to let the bee out. Whether he got out or died inside after breaking his poison-tipped sting, I don't know. Yang Lian joked that what if this was really a Learn-from-Lei-Feng exercise. Then she would have the swells to show the class how heroically she'd fought to return the one cent to the policeman. We laughed like hell.

"We came near the water fall and sat on a rock looking at it. It was not as high as I imagined, about ten meters, but its beauty was beyond the grasp of words. It fell off a mossy gorge bridged by a felled tree, long dead and home to giant ants under the creamiest mushrooms. The wall the fall hung was not vertical but curved inward so that when wind blew in the right direction the curtain swayed and sprayed. Once in a while the water was breached for a split second to give an ephemeral view of the caved wall behind.

"Yang Lian asked me if I'd had read the Journey to the West, the palace where the Monkey King revolted against Heaven. I said no. She said it must be this. There had been people who had the same thought and they had built a makeshift bridge with two fallen tree trunks to link to the back of the fall.

"Yang Lian rubbed her nape and asked how bad was the swell. I said pretty bad. She said she wanted to wash the wounds with cool water and asked if I liked to accompany her down to the bottom of the fall. I said `you don't mean to bath down there naked, do you?' She answered `why not?' I didn't have her abandon or guts and said `I will stay here and make sure nobody is coming.' She said `we will hide behind the curtain and nobody can see.' `But we can see each other,' stupidly I insisted. She laughed saying `what is in me that you are afraid of?' I said the bee when she took her clothes off. She said `all right I will go alone but I wish a bee will sting you on the way back and you won't have the waterfall to wash yourself.'

"You asked whether Yang Lian was pretty. Yes. Now you should know why and where she was beautiful. If you narrow the interest in a visual way, the answer is still yes. The way her vernal  body crossed the tree bridge, her arms extended in an eagle cross to balance the tease of wind, her hair flung up and coiled around her face, the light cries when she had a slight slip; think of it, a fabulous life exposing herself to the perilous world for the simple caprice and curiosity of a weekend adventure, that's beauty in its purest form."

"She didn't fall off the tree, did she?" Stella had a foreboding of tragedy and the anxiety had driven her to link arms with Melanie nervously wringing their hands to dissipate the throbbing pulse.

"No," answered Melanie. "Up to the middle point she got good at the walking and turned to look at me. `You coward,' she said, `I won the crown.' Then I noticed that she had the lilac wreath dangling around her elbow. She took it off and wear it on her head. Then she made a fast run on the beam and jumped into the cave behind the water curtain.

"Yang Lian was right. No one would have seen us bathing. I couldn't see her body, only her clothes hanging on the tree bridge and heard only her exhilaration of how wonderful it all felt. The flash of her princessly  crown."

"You should have gone down," said Stella. "That was my first thought after she went. I went back to the lilac field to make a crown for myself and was to wear it behind the curtain bathing with Yang Lian like two goddesses of the legend." "Did you?" "When I got back to the lilac field, the shepherd was at his last tone. He looked very strange because he face was red like a setting sun. He kept an air so long and so monotonous that the sheep stopped their grazing and were driven to stampede in all directions by the shepherd's spell of magic, trampling the lilacs and bees. He was not a man, not mortal anyway. The last tone lasted like an eternity to me and it stopped only because the bamboo tube was not strong enough to contain the force and burst into pieces. After that the shepherd looked at me with the saddest eyes you could look at a living person. And I turned back to the fall running faster than the crazed sheep.

"I only saw Yang Lian's lilac crown swirling in the pool before the fall."

"Where was she?" asked Stella.

"I didn't call her. I knew she went where she was supposed to. Like the Seventh Princess of God her real home was not this world."

"Is that it?"

"That's it."

"That's not it!" protested Stella. "She wouldn't have gone down if she hadn't known how to swim."

"I didn't know how to swim and I was about to go down. And I was chicken compared to her. Anyway you don't ask Shakespeare why he had to drown Ophelia so that love could live to haunt the living."

"What?" Stella was still disbelieving the abrupt ending and didn't get what Melanie was saying in the last sentence.

Melanie didn't explain. She knew that if Yang Lian had lived the love would have turned completely into another thing. She was indecisive which was worse. Deep in her heart she would prefer her dream stay a mystery.

A bee flew over the lilacs in the Gallagher Park. Both Stella and Melanie saw it but they projected their eyes beyond the bee to send the old memory to the fallside grave for a tender burial. The bee hurried between flowers and flew in knots against the sun. Minutes later it got so close to the two women that they couldn't ignore it anymore.

"A bee," said Stella.

"A hornet," added Melanie.

"Why do they sting?"

"An instinct."

"Can flowers do without bees?" asked Stella.

"Then they lose the carrier of their pollen. Flowers are beautiful and fragrant because they try to attract bees. Carry their legacy beyond one season."

"God fucks the bee," Stella rose and forgot that she used to be a lover of honey.

 

The morning sun added a golden rim to the lilac flowers. The dew, abundant from the ground moisture of yesterday's rain, lingered beyond the normal time and wetted the hems of the two women's skirts as they walked to chase the bee away. Lilac flowers kissed their shins and tiny pollen stuck to their ankles. The air was pregnant with a silent magic of passing meanings through barriers of the impossible. The bee knew that his sting had lost its power of seduction or deterrence. He fled in the foreground, away from the lilacs, and disappeared into a cave.

"Is this the cave you talked about?" asked Melanie.

"Yes."

"Shall we go inside?"

"I have already gone inside," said Stella. "Thanks to your story or dream. It's brighter and dearer than outside. If I were a flower, I would choose to live in solitude for one season without the bother of the bee."

"The sad thing is that we don't have a waterfall here," sighed Melanie.

"But we can pretend under the shower," smiled Stella. "It's safe and warm."

"As it was meant to be," concluded Melanie.

She remembered the day when happiness to her was a crazy pursuit. Now she knew how to capture fate.