The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison Page A

ambition, covered their faces with their hands. One young Cantonese had closed her eyes and stuck her fingers in her ears, as if expecting an explosion rather than a quick exam.
    “What are you running from?” the partner wanted to know when May was dressed.
    “Fate,” May said, after a silence.
    The partner raised her eyebrows. “Good luck,” she said. “No one before you has escaped.”
    May smiled, said nothing. Silence didn’t seem to make her uncomfortable—nothing did—and this, too, worried the partner. Just how inexperienced was the heart hidden inside that cool silk bodice?
    The partner called down the stairs for a kitchen maid to bring a tray with teapot and cups. Watching May, she poured two and offered May one. May set the vessel down without drinking from it.
    “A third of what you bring in is yours. Out of it you must pay a room tax, a laundry fee. ‘Accidents,’ visits from the physician, these also are your responsibility. Board is provided, but you must buy your own clothes, or receive them as gifts—if you inspire such affection.” The partner paused. She licked her lower lip. “One day off each week, and one afternoon. If after a year you’re still with us, you get half of what you earn.”
    After a calculated silence—she didn’t want to appear eager—May nodded.
    “Do you have any questions?”
    “A provision,” May answered.
    The partner raised her eyebrows. “What is that?”
    “I won’t … I’ll do anything for na guo ning ”—a foreigner—“English, French, Russian. A black African, for all I care. But”—May reached forward, as if to pick up her tea, withdrew her hand before her fingers were around the cup—“Chinese I won’t touch.”
    “Well,” said the partner after a pause, a frown. “If you can afford it, that is your business.” They stood, the table and the steaming cups between them, and bowed.
    F OR THE FIRST WEEK , May watched. This was Grace’s established means of educating a prostitute, and at no loss of revenue; there were always customers who paid extra for an audience, especially one so beautiful, so seemingly rapt. As her exemplar, May was given an American woman, Helen, from San Francisco. Until she’d earned enough in her capacity as voyeur to pay the tax for a room of her own, she would sleep on the other side of a yellow curtain strung across a corner of Helen’s.
    Accustomed to servants, to lacquered tables, silk-hung walls, and cloisonné dishes, now May had only her one new blouse and trousers, a silk tunic and shawl, and the stained clothes in which she’d traveled. Her shoes. Two pearls. A borrowed blanket. The wall beside her bed was clean but unadorned. In the morning, a crack of sun came through the curtain and crept across its plaster surface. When the angle grew sufficiently extreme, the light picked out and shadowed imperfections. Awake but not up, May touched the wall; with her fingertips she felt the otherwise invisible blemishes.
    Helen knew enough Mandarin that she and her apprentice could converse, if simply; and May learned English. She learned it with the speed of a prodigy. When the older woman entertained a client, it was her mouth that May watched attentively, more interested in the forms of language than of copulation. Sitting on her cot, the curtain open, she listened to the foreign words as they emerged from Helen’s lips, short ones like arm and take and longer ones, absolutelydarling . Silently, May formed the sounds with her own mouth, ignoring the rest. She’d seen enough of the silk merchant with her maid to understand what intercourse would demand of her. As her employer suspected, her virtue was only technical.
    Helen told May that afterwards men sometimes asked if she had been praying, if prayers were what she mouthed, and May smiled. How stupid men could be, how bullying. Prayers. They would like to inspire such fear.
    At the end of a night, Helen wanted to sleep, but May cajoled until she agreed to