A Cup of Light (5 page)

Geng Tie understood. He meant the woman. “It was a little slave from Guizhou,” he answered. “Right after Spring Festival six years ago. We hid her in this court until she delivered.”

Vaguely, Xuantong recalled the encounter. He had been walking back to his quarters from an audience with his ministers. His retainers walked a short distance behind. He surprised a girl with a covered bowl stepping out of an arched gateway. Their eyes met and there was an insouciant smile to her, a careless light of laughter, until she realized who he was and froze. He found this diverting. She set the bowl on the sill and made to lower herself to
koutou,
but he stepped close to her and stopped her. He didn't want a reverence from her. Instead, he parted her skirts and slid one hand between her legs. He could feel her trembling. After a minute he pulled her skirts all the way up. He lifted her a few inches to sit on the edge of the stone wall, and he favored her, without thinking about it, opening her jacket to play with her at the same time. It only took a few minutes. The eunuchs stood back on the stone path, watching.

A quick pleasure with a slave. He had forgotten it. “Does she still live?”

The eunuch nodded.

“Elevate her rank. And the child . . .” Xuantong considered. Continue to keep him a secret, or name him crown prince right away? He had a son!

Now, approaching the Temple of Heaven, he felt connected to all the earth for the first time. He watched the pale iridescence come alive on the marble under the rising sun. Flawless, he thought. As perfect as the sacred porcelains waiting on the altars within: the red, yellow, blue, and white, colors of the sun, the earth, heaven, and the moon. Perfect as his paintings, his jades and bronzes, but most especially his porcelains. Porcelain lived forever. And the potters at Jingdezhen were doing magnificent work, the best since the reign of Xuande. He was about to commission them to make a set of wine cups, in honor of his son. The prince.

Xuantong saw a hen-and-chicks motif, after the Song painter Huang Chuan. It was a supreme paternal symbol. And it echoed the design of a much more ancient ritual cup pictured in the Book of Rites. The cups, the chickens scratching in the dirt with their little babies all around, would invoke the love of a parent for his children, of an emperor for his subjects. They would be truly celestial.

At last the deep tolling bell ceased. He glanced across the great expanse of trees to the tiled roofs of the capital. He knew that throughout the city, men, women, and children had heard the bell and emerged from their homes. They would be standing in their lanes now, facing the Temple of Heaven, facing him, the Son of Heaven. He smiled. His face was lit with an easy benevolence. In his mind's eye he saw the chicken cups.

“I found a fake,” she blurted out the instant Zheng picked up the phone. She'd been beside herself waiting to call him. She knew exactly when he got to his office, when he clicked the lid off his steaming mug of tea. She knew just when he'd be ready to pick up his private line.

“A fake what?”

“A Chenghua chicken cup! Can you believe it?”

“Hmm,” he said with a smile in his voice. “Audacious.”

“Oh, it's good too,” she assured him, “it's beautiful. The clay color is fantastic.”

“How did you know?”

“The painting—the painting is awfully good. But it's too intentional. You know.”

“Oh yes.”

“And the reign mark is too clear. Too nice. You know, the artist thought of everything. Even the wear marks are random. But to paint with that Chenghua subtlety—this was done by a master! I have to admit.” She swallowed. “It had me going for a while. I had to look at it a long time.”

“A chicken cup!” Dr. Zheng was still taken with the boldness of it. “Doesn't he realize how much it would take to convince us there is a nineteenth cup in the world?”

“Who? Gao? Maybe he doesn't know it's a fake,” she said. “We don't know who put the cup in there. Or when. But I'll tell you, it's good. Amazingly good.”

“A chicken cup!”

“I know. And who knows what else? This could be just the start.”

“Oh,” he said. “Expect more. You'll find more.” He said it matter-of-factly, with the half-charmed rue of someone who knows. “Marvelous, isn't it?” She heard the popping skitter of his laugh. “That the first one should be a Chenghua chicken cup. It's so impertinent! When was it made?”

“Recently, I think.”

“How I'd love to know the artist.”

“And I,” she said. Because whoever had created this cup understood what
hoi moon
meant. Yes, she wanted to meet the maker of this cup, very much. “I'll try to find out,” she promised him.

“Luo Na,” Dr. Zheng said. “If anyone can do it, it will be you.”

In Shanghai, in Sophia's Teahouse on Huashan Lu, Gao Yideng waited for the ah chan. He was an executive and a master at delegation, but this was his extremely personal matter and he would handle it himself. If he succeeded in selling this collection, he could take payment anywhere in the world, and almost no one would know. It was a private lifeline into which he had put a great deal of thought.

He watched the door. While he waited he drank the delicate tea called
bai xue yu,
snowy buds of jasmine. From speakers behind the creamy walls a saxophone rippled quietly. The square, border-inlaid table in front of him was set with clean, contemporary tea ware and, for the ever present and soothing reminder of the past, an ancient wooden caddy filled with antique tea implements: wood tongs, a paddle with a twirled handle. This place was both safe and quiet. No one knew him.

The bell jingled above the door, and a string-bodied southerner came in. They knew each other at once. Gao took in his puffed-up hairstyle, his weak chin and insufferable sunglasses.

“Bai Xing,” the ah chan said, touching his hand briefly to his chest in introduction as he slipped into the sage-green leather chair opposite. “Bai Xing” was as close to a real name as he ever gave out. It was not his original name given by his family either, but his long-standing, most-favored sobriquet.

“Thanks for coming,” Gao said.

“You too.”

Then the waitress was there in khakis and a black T-shirt, silver drops in her ears, pretty. Bai quickly scanned the menu.
“Gong ju hua cha,”
he said, Paying tribute to the emperor chrysanthemum. This tea choice was a luck charm for the ah chan, since Emperor was the name he wanted to earn when this was over. Emperor Bai.

Gao Yideng was watching the waitress. She was one of the young cognoscenti, with her hair cut straight across at chin length and her eyes well-honed and world-weary. Quite a contrast to this ah chan, who was still too fresh and unschooled to realize he was risking everything, his life, which was of inconceivable value, for half a million
ren min bi,
which was nothing, only money. Yet the man from the provinces wanted this risk. He was keening for it. That showed in the attentive angle of his face and the glitter in his eyes.

Gao looked briefly away from the ah chan and out the window. Facing them was an apartment building called White Pearl, the characters still carved in its lintel stone. It happened to be the first building Gao Yideng had ever bought. It was five stories, fifteen apartments. He had strung together a barely tenable web of bank loans, investors, and money from overseas relatives to do it. In the end all of them had profited hugely, but at first it was terrifying. He had the unbearable, pounding press of other people's money riding on him. He had to look at the drab shell that was still Shanghai back then and say, yes, in ten years it will be transformed. And he'd been right. It had sprouted a gleaming, futuristic skyline. Land prices soared, though as in Beijing, building went too far and vacancy rates had been frightening. But Gao's positions had been good, well timed and well chosen.

And he had chosen well with this art collection too. He had acquired it at the right time and now he'd release it at the best moment. He knew a veiled government sale was perfectly plausible to the Americans, as long as the visa was in order—which it was. The visa to Hong Kong was the main thing. And the visa had cost him dearly.

It was in Hong Kong that the Americans would take delivery of the art. And once in Hong Kong, the porcelains would be untouchable. That was what Hong Kong had always been, a free port, no questions asked. It had been so under the British and now, back under Chinese rule, it still was. Once art or antiquities were in Hong Kong it ceased to matter who had owned them, or how they had gotten there. They were legal.

Caches of such past glory turned up all the time in China. To find art, to buy it as Gao had done and resell it in China—this was perfectly legal. It was getting it out of China that was hard. “Mr. Bai,” he said to the ah chan. “This contract will be quite demanding.”

“I'm ready,” Bai said. “If you get me the right vehicle I can do it.”

And Gao smiled his thin smile.

Lia drew out a white Yongle vase, high and round-shouldered in the
meiping
style, incised with a design of delicate mimosa leaves. A pot like this was called sweet-white. The dulcet glow came from advances in clay and glazing made during the Yongle reign. She had once sorted through fragments of sweet-white discovered in a Ming stratum of an ancient kiln off Zhongshan Road in Jingdezhen. She saw through and through why sweet-white lent itself so perfectly to the subtly traced, incised style the Chinese called
an-hua
. And here it was in its fullness and perfection, right in front of her. The
meiping
vase was six hundred years old, and as nuanced and lovely as the day it was made. Similar to another one mentioned in an inventory of ceramic monochromes from the Palace Museum in Taiwan.

She put her hands on the vase, wrapped her fingers in a loving net around it, closed her eyes to take it in. It was her fingers that finally understood a pot. It was through her tracing skin that she truly knew the softness of a sweet-white glaze.

The more she had learned to touch pots, the less she had wanted to touch other things. It was too much. And her touch sense had too many memories of men in there too, men who had held her and had their hands on her and now were gone from her life. Each had left his imprint behind, snowflake-specific. Every man had had his own way of showing love, and not-love—removal, disdain, distractedness, impermeability, all the things that hurt—through the touch or the stroke or the supportive cupping of his hands. It was not easy to live with touch memory. So she reserved her hands and fingers. She wore clothes with pockets and used them.

She'd been selective with men; at least there was that. She was glad now, but when she was younger she'd felt diminished by the fact that she hadn't had so many lovers. She often waited a long time before meeting someone. She had learned not to look, not to wait, to focus on her work. Then she met a man she came within an inch of marrying.

Evan was an heir to a newspaper family, fifteen years older and more confident. He had left the Midwest and come to New York to prove himself—he wanted to make money, lots of it, enough to show his family theirs didn't matter. So he developed real estate. By the time she met him he was forty, and wealthy in his own right. Now he was ready for a new challenge—he confided this in her as soon as they became lovers—he wanted to collect art. He was like so many men who collect after earning their fortunes: impatient, omnivorous, wanting all the knowledge right away; wanting exactly what money cannot buy—taste, connoisseurship.

Only much, much later was Lia able to understand how good she must have looked to him at first; how perfect an opening she represented. He saw how she would be, standing next to him, and this he loved, but the essential Lia, the heart still waiting, went unseen. He loved what she brought and not what she was.

She always remembered a certain moment after they were engaged. He was on the phone and she in the next room, on the other side of a glass window. He held up his palm in greeting to her, his tan, comfortably lined face split in a grin of affectionate embarrassment that let her know he was talking about her. She smiled back, but tuned in. He never remembered her proficiency in reading lips. He never edited himself. And with the insecure curiosity of the younger woman, she wanted to know everything he said, especially about her.

That's right, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Evan was grinning into the phone. Lia knew he was talking about buying art. She watched as he spoke again.

Of course she's going to help me! She's going to make me a pile of money.

He listened, and laughed.

Naturally. Why do you think I'm marrying her?

He laughed and raised his hand to her again from the other side of the glass, smiling, that sly, contrite look. She turned away, churning, until he got off the phone. When she confronted him he said: Oh, Lia, grow up. Of course that's one of the reasons I'm marrying you. It's not the
only
reason. I can't believe you're complaining about this! He treated the whole thing as if it were silly.

But it was not silly to her, not at all, and that was the true problem beneath the false problem—that even her honest admission of this did not move him. This was the beginning of her backing away. It hurt, breaking it off. But she'd never regretted it.

And now she was past thirty, more realistic. Somewhere there would be someone with whom she could feel at ease. Someone she could help, who could help her. It shouldn't be so impossible. As for that jolt of what she used to think was love, that seemingly perfect mirror that puts the inner self up in ecstasy, for judgment by another human soul—at least she knew by now that that was not love at all but a forgery of the most insidious kind. She didn't believe it anymore, she didn't want it, and she didn't wait for it.