The Painter of Shanghai (48 page)

‘Why would you say that?’

The man shrugs. ‘He’s always alone. Until you came, I didn’t think he knew anyone at all.’

Yuliang gazes at him fixedly, then turns back to her husband. ‘Please do me a favor,’ she says quietly. ‘Don’t tell him I asked about him.’

‘I’d require something for my effort.’

Numbly, she hands him back her change and the tea, which suddenly tastes like little more than steeped iron.

‘My lips are sewn tight.’ The man drops her mug into a tin of yellow water, presumably to clean it. Yuliang turns away, preparing to hurry off the way she came. After a step or two, though, she stops.

What she really wants is to go to him, to put her arms around him. To sink her head onto his shoulder. She knows, though, that this would spell certain disaster. Catching Zanhua in his lie – the one true lie he has ever told her (and she shudders, for she certainly can’t say the same) – would strip him of his last remnant of pride.

Instead she forces herself west again, back toward Zhongshan Road. It’s eleven o’clock – she’s going to miss her meeting. But suddenly this doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but getting to the one place where she’s all but
certain she won’t see Zanhua again before tonight – the home that now, all too clearly, is no refuge for him.

Arriving there a short while later, Yuliang picks up her mail and makes her way slowly upstairs, sifting through it. Two steps from the top she pauses, holding up a thin envelope stamped with a Paris return address. Curious, she breaks the seal and reads the note once, then twice. Then she turns her gaze to the wall.

Over Yuliang’s objections, Guanyin has hung an insipid carp-and-stream scroll by some third-rate
guohua
artist her family knew. Yuliang has never given it a second glance. Now, however, she stares at it, the mundane sounds of the little house filling her ears: the
thunk-thunk
of the cook’s cleaver, Guanyin’s voice scolding the maid, the mournful croons of a passing corn vendor.

‘
Xiao taitai!
’ she hears a short moment later. ‘Are you there?’

Yuliang hesitates. But she doesn’t answer. Wrenching her eyes from the painting, she refolds the note. Then she resumes her slow climb to the top.

43

A short while later, Yuliang unlocks the door to her studio for the first time in two months. She enters the little space with a strange sense of entering a home she once lived in but has since sold; stripped of clutter and free of its perpetual smell of solvent, the spare bedroom feels almost like that – a spare bedroom. Somehow, though, its very emptiness makes it seem ominous. Her easel looks like a spindly wooden skeleton. Her glass muller and inkstone look less like painting tools than potential weapons.

Yuliang makes her way over to her folding stool. She sits, staring out at the same horizon Zanhua had contemplated from his bench: Purple Mountain, its low slopes touched by jade green and light brown, the new observatory sparkling in the sunlight. It’s a scene she’s sketched aimlessly a thousand times in the past. Now, though, another image fills her thoughts: her husband by the lake. A pile of cigarette butts and an empty day before him.

After lighting her own first cigarette in nearly two months, Yuliang exhales deeply, relishing the feel of smoke freed from her lungs. Again she tries to understand it: what she has just seen. How she could have missed what was right before her own nose. After all, Zanhua certainly noticed her work stoppage – and, for once, talked to her about her career at some length. He’d seemed gratified by her goals, if troubled by her methods. ‘Are
you sure you should stop painting
completely
?’ he’d asked. ‘Can’t you simply paint things that are considered… well, more acceptable?’ Yuliang didn’t have the heart to tell him that painting only ‘acceptable’ work would be far worse for her than not painting at all. As Xu Beihong once said, dead dreams are poison…

For Zanhua’s part, aside from that one trip to the Wuhu gardens, he himself never missed a day at work – at least, not in the days when Yuliang had first known him. ‘I may be ill,’ he’d say when she’d urge him to sleep off a wet cough or a hangover, ‘but the nation is even more ill than I am.’ It’s true that he has stayed home in Nanjing more regularly. But Yuliang has neither asked nor particularly thought much about these absences. She has simply assumed that attendance in the bustling headquarters is more lax than it was in Wuhu. And if anything, she’s welcomed his lighter workload for the opportunities it has given her to be with him; to complain about school, about the gossip. These days, Zanhua even walks her to classes, strolling across the campus with her. Discussing her lecture plans or her students.

And yet, staring at her empty easel, Yuliang realizes that for all the time they’ve spent together, for all their oaths of honesty and sacrifice, their life isn’t what they’ve pretended it is. They have both been lying. And in the end, his life is as broken as hers.

For several moments she just sits there, ash dropping lightly from her smoke. At last the hot ember against her finger brings her back. Blinking, she stubs her cigarette out. She picks up the hand mirror she uses for her self-portraits, smooths her hair, picks a flake of tobacco from
her front tooth. After a moment’s hesitation, she reaches into her pocketbook and pulls out her Arden lipstick. Opening it, she suddenly has an odd impression that this is the first true color she has seen since the white walls of the gallery. As she applies it, Mirror Girl purses her mouth mockingly.

‘Welcome back,’ Yuliang tells her. ‘I’ve missed you.’

44

That night Yuliang spends several more hours in her studio. Not painting, but sorting. She pores through notebooks, and the old or half-finished canvases she left leaning, faces turned to the wall. She leafs through the stack of reviews of her exhibits in China, of her entry into the Salon d’Automne, of her Shanghai-published book of prints. She rereads the handful of biographical pieces (all carefully edited by Yuliang herself) that ran when all of China seemed suddenly to want to know her story.

She also peruses a slim photograph album, and observes her own image evolving through the camera’s drab lens: Here a teenage bride, posing somberly with Zanhua and Meng Qihua. There, taut and anxious outside the Shanghai Art Academy, on her very first day of class. Here she is, slightly seasick on the
Canadian Queen
; then, later, on the Boulevard de Clichy, the one face in a group of toasting Beaux Arts students not smiling at the prospect of term’s end. There’s a picture from Rome, Yuliang in her sculpture studio. There’s another at the Silent Society exhibit.

The last photo was taken a little over four months ago, with sixteen of Yuliang’s graduate-level students. In the image, Yuliang stands at the group’s center, the atelier model beside her. The girl is naked, facing forward, as slim and pale as a slice of moonlight. Her small, high
breasts are captured unabashedly on film. The only part of her body you can’t see is her face, which she has turned away from the lens’s gaze.

Studying the picture, Yuliang can’t help noting of the odd duo they make: she in her fitted suit, Parisian scarf knotted stylishly at her neck, the model beside her a stripped and faceless shadow. If anyone had told her twenty years ago that she’d be the one in clothing – the learned one, the famous artist, the university professor! – she would quite simply have called them mad. Now, though, as she traces the photo’s frame, a long-forgotten voice drifts dreamily into her head.
You see?
her uncle is saying.
You’re very smart. You could be just about anything. A lady poet. A teacher.
The memory, she notes, is oddly devoid of the inner shudder that usually accompanies thoughts of her
jiujiu
. Is it possible that she has actually forgiven him?

She’s just replacing her photos when she spies something else: a French biscuit tin, dust-coated, its red paint half-eaten by rust. With some effort Yuliang pries off the tarnished lid. The sheafs of paper inside are so tightly packed that several of them spring right out, and it’s only then that she remembers what they are: Zanhua’s letters, sent to her while she was in Europe. There must be well over two hundred.

Kneeling on the floor, Yuliang smooths one against her knee.
My dear Yuliang
, she reads.
It has been barely a week since you left our land. Not so much time, I suppose, in the space of one lifetime. And yet it feels like a small lifetime in itself…

A lump takes shape in her throat. She remembers this
– it’s the first letter she received on arriving in Lyon. It was waiting for her at the Foreign Students Office. She reread it perhaps a dozen times during those first hazy days. The mere sight of his neat and yet sweeping handwriting had felt like a brief reprieve from an endless onslaught of foreign faces, sounds, food…

For a long while Yuliang sits, her old grief dampening her thoughts. It’s not until the travel clock on the painting table reads close to eleven that she returns the letters to their box. Making her way to her purse, Yuliang pulls out another envelope – the one from Paris she’d received earlier in the day. She reads it again, her mouth silently shaping French she feels she’s already half forgotten.

Dear Madame Pan,

I hope this finds you well. I wanted to inform you that my
colleague and I are finally opening the gallery we discussed.
Located on Rue Ste.-Anne, it will present modern paintings by
artists from China, Indochina, and Japan. We would still very
much like to feature your work in the opening exhibition, and
would of course reimburse shipping and traveling expenses.
Should you agree, please telegraph at your earliest convenience.

Behind this envelope is another, stiff and scented with fresh ink. Yuliang leaves this one closed. Having bought it herself this afternoon, she already knows its contents: a one-way ticket to Marseille. The ship leaves in less than two months.

A little after midnight she hears the door downstairs. There’s a rummaging in the kitchen, followed by Zanhua’s
measured tread up the creaking staircase. She visualizes her husband, passing first Weiyi’s unused room, then Guanyin’s, before finally reaching her own. The steps pause there, and Yuliang holds her breath. But Zanhua doesn’t knock on his concubine’s door tonight. He stands in silence for a moment, then continues on to the doorway closest to the studio – his own.

As Yuliang hears his door shut, her insides seem to contract. The sensation stays with her as she tiptoes down to her room, splashes her face in the basin, relieves herself in the tiny WC. It stays on, a cold coil in the center of her belly as she climbs into bed and begins reciting ‘The Double-Ninth Festival.’ Inevitably, though, she is sleepless again, beyond even the soothing reach of Li Qingzhao. Getting up at last, she crosses the room to her dresser and stares at herself in the mirror. She is greeted there not by Mirror Girl but by someone she barely recognizes: a middle-aged apparition, eyes lined by age. Her hair is tangled and lank. It seems pointless to pick up her hairbrush. Instead she turns and walks silently out the door.

Creeping down the hallway, Yuliang reaches Zanhua’s door. She waits a moment, then enters. With each step across the polished floorboards she expects him to wake, to see her. But Zanhua remains sunk in sleep. He lies on his back, one hand flung toward the headboard, the other resting in its favorite spot, against his cheek. His face in the half-light appears far more serene than Yuliang can remember seeing it in past weeks. He also, she sees, needs a haircut – an unusually long lock of it sweeps from his hairline, an inky brushstroke against the pale span of his brow. Yuliang reaches down and pushes it back.

When she climbs onto the bed, Zanhua murmurs but doesn’t move. Carefully, she frames her face against the pearl-toned square of the window: she wants to be the first thing he will see upon waking. She whispers his name: ‘Zanhua.’

And again: ‘Zanhua.’

His eyelids flutter. When he tries to sit up she presses him back again, gently pinning each of his limbs with her own. She travels down his length slowly, still holding his hands, keeping him in compliance until she knows for sure he is ready. When she moves back up, she kisses him again, brushing with her lips the features she’s come to know almost better than her own: eyelids and curling lashes, nose, cheek, pulsing temple, the soft indent that marks the parting of his clavicle. As she starts her slow descent he lets loose a soft groan and wraps his arms around her. He pulls her back up, and his thin fingers fumble first to free himself, to find her. To find his way in.

But Yuliang refuses on this night to follow their usual pattern of efficient and unthinking consummation. She tightens her legs against him and around him. And when she finally opens to him, she draws it out, second by second. Forcing him, with a murmur or a silent, pointed squeeze, to slow or even stop altogether. Until in the end they are barely moving at all.

Gazing into his sleep-softened eyes, she tries to pour everything she feels into him – her discovery today, her fears. Her vast regrets. Her deceptions. Her unspeakable, unpayable debt.
I didn’t choose to be this way
, she wants to say.
I’ve tried to change. I simply can’t.
She searches his face
for some sign of understanding as they slowly move together.

In the beginning it is barely a movement at all – simply the rise and fall of their twinned breathing. Gradually, though, she guides them both into an almost frantic rush. And in the end, the sensation that sweeps her is more profound than anything she has ever felt before, and almost painful. It seems to sweep not just her body but her whole being, carrying her high above him crashing her back down like a kite.

And yet, lying on him after, his chest damp and smooth beneath hers and her own body bruised and empty and aching, she still feels strangely alone. Almost as though – despite his warm and familiar breath, the steadfast press of his limbs – she is already miles away.