Page 51 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
For example, the Roman bust could be from Sicily, or if Sebastien’s curse is to be believed, from Verona or Mantua. The yellowed book could belong to a printer’s apprentice. There’s a dented bucket (inexplicable), but next to that is a dress that looks like a cross between a Chineseqipaoand a 1920s flapper dress. I gasp as I recognize it, the burgundy silk flowers identical to the embroidery on my character Kitri’s favorite dress. All I have to do is close my eyes; I know the words of my vignette by heart.
Kitri Wagner is the daughter of an exporter from Germany, and her family has lived in Shanghai—“the Paris of the East, the New York of the West”—for a year. She knows her way around the city, although her favorite part is The Bund, a strip of waterfront that’s also home to some of the most exclusive social clubs in Shanghai. Being a young woman, Kitri isn’t allowed into most of them, but she loves to people watch, sketching the men in their expensive suits, admiring their beautiful wives with their perfectly bobbed hair and strands of real pearls draped over their colorful dresses. Kitri herself is plain, but she imagines what it would be like to be pretty, to know you would invite attention wherever you go.
“That’s a beautiful drawing,” a voice says from over her shoulder.
Kitri jumps from the bench she’s sitting on and instinctively covers up her sketch pad.
“My apologies,” he says. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I tried talking to you several times, but I suppose you were too lost in your work.”
He looks appropriately abashed, wringing his hat in his hands. He has a handsome face, Romanesque despite the crook in his nose and two silvered scars, one that starts at his left brow and finishes under his eye, the other, a curve like the letter “J” that traces his jawline.
“It’s all right,” Kitri says. “I just didn’t expect anyone to talk to me. I’m not accustomed to being noticed.”
“I think it would be impossible not to notice you.”
Now it’s her turn to be embarrassed.
“Forgive me for being bold,” he says, “but I was about to partake in afternoon tea, and I was wondering if you’d like to join me.”
Kitri finds her voice again, although she’s still not brave enough to look at his hypnotically blue eyes. So she focuses past him, at the quay, when she answers. “Thank you kindly for the invitation, but I’m not in the business of running around with strange men.”
He dips his head in acknowledgment. “I’m Reynier. Does that help? Strangers don’t have names, but I do; ergo, I’m no longer a stranger.
She laughs, but does not relent. “And yet, for all I know, you’ll take me to an opium den, drug me, and I’ll never see my family again.”
“For the record, I’ve never been to an opium den,” Reynier says. Then he tells Kitri more about himself—he’s a translator who works at one of the big trading houses on The Bund. She notices now that he’s dressed impeccably—his suit is well tailored, his shoes polished to a shine—and even though she doesn’t know him, there’s something about him that’s familiar, as if he is déjà vu in person form.
He presents his business card, further validation that he is who he claims. Their fingers brush as she takes the card from him, and a honeyed breeze blows past her. Kitri is suddenly overcome with a titillating buzz, the pleasant feeling of drinking a particularly fine glass of champagne.
“If I were to be interested in afternoon tea,” she sayscoyly, “where would you propose to take me? Lotus Flower Teahouse? The Society of Dragons?” She lists ritzy places she’s only heard of, let alone seen.
“No, somewhere even better,” Reynier says. “To a street of food carts selling the best Shanghainese cuisine you’ll ever taste—xiao long baodumplings, spicyma la tangsoup, and crayfish by the bucket.”
Kitri’s eyes nearly bulge out of her skull. “Crayfish by the bucket?”
Reynier bursts out laughing.
“I wager you’ve never had a suitor offer you crayfish, have you?” he says.
She gathers herself and crosses her arms. “Oh, are you a suitor now? I thought this was only an afternoon commitment for the sake of dumplings.”
He smiles at Kitri, and her knees turn to jelly. She’d like to look at that smile all day.
“Well, are you coming or not?” He offers his arm.
Kitri glances back across the street at the fancy buildings of The Bund and thinks of all the hours she’s spent here on these benches, imagining the exciting escapades happening to the beautiful people behind those gilded doors. And then she looks at this handsome man beside her, extending an invitation to have an escapade of her own. It might not be a sumptuous teahouse or club, but it’s more exciting than sketching by herself on the quay.
So she rests her hand on Reynier’s elbow and says, “You know, I’ve always wanted to eat a bucket of crustaceans.”
I open my eyes and look again at the dented old bucket next to the Chinese flapper dress. Could it really be the same bucket that contained Shanghainese crayfish? I can practically taste them on my tongue now, spicy and briny, just like Reynier’s kiss that I imagined afterward…
But that was just a story. Something I made up. It couldn’t be real.
Could it?
I tear myself away from the display and make my way deeper into the mini museum. The evidence begins to pile up. A ribboned medal bestowing the order of Knight Commander of the Bath matches up with a vignette I wrote about Sir Charles, a renowned botanist of the British Royal Society. A beautiful old monstrance clock could be a set piece in my story about Felix, a Swiss clockmaker, and Clara, the waitress he fell in love with. But my heart palpitates when I come across a velvet display containing a charred and melted bronze tag with Rachel Wil stamped onto it, the rest of her name lost to some fiery disaster.
That isn’t how my Pearl Harbor story of Jack and Rachel ended. They just went into the naval base library to find a book…So could it be true that my stories were wrong? Or had I just never seen past their beginnings?
