The Painter of Shanghai (37 page)

It is that she has never been happier.

‘Are you all right?’

Yuliang drops her gaze from the courtyard’s iron and glass rooftop. Her friend Fan Junbi is peering at her with concern. ‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Why?’

‘You were swaying again. And your eyes look… odd. Red.’

‘I think I’m tired. I had to embroider until nearly two last night, and then translate that piece for art history.’

‘Oh, Yuliang. You know you could have read my translation. It takes me half the time it takes you.’

This is true. And yet Yuliang shakes her head. ‘I need to do it myself.’

‘You,’ Junbi pronounces, ‘are as stubborn as a water buffalo.’ She reaches into her bag. ‘What were you embroidering?’

‘Men’s silk cravats.
Le Louvre, Paris,
1924.’ Yuliang holds up her fingers morosely: they are dotted with tiny sores. ‘I lost my thimble, too. I practically sewed it into my own skin.’

‘Eat this.’ Junbi pulls out a small package. Inside the folded newsprint is a croissant: the scent hits Yuliang like a waft from heaven. It is every bit as rich and light as one of Van Gogh’s glowing wheatfields. ‘The baker gave us a dozen of them at closing yesterday,’ her friend says.

‘But you should keep it,’ Yuliang protests. ‘You have more mouths to feed.’

Junbi, who has been in France for nearly a decade, lives with her husband (a rising star in the Republican Party) as well as her young son and one surviving sister. The other, an early anti-Qing revolutionary, was beheaded during the first rebellion. ‘We have too many,’ she says. ‘I’ll bring another for you tomorrow.’

Gratefully, Yuliang rewraps the little parcel. She’s hungry enough to eat it now, but food isn’t allowed in session. And she certainly doesn’t want to jeopardize her hard-earned position in line by greeting Vincent with a mouthful of crumbs.

At 8:45, Vincent appears with his clipboard and his hat. ‘
Alors
,’ he says. ‘Many people are under the weather again today, it seems. Pay November’s
masse,
and you all get to work.’ To Yuliang, he says, ‘Ahead of the crowd again, Mademoiselle Pan.’

‘Madame,’ Yuliang reminds him. ‘I get up early out of habit,’ she adds, trying both to summon and to translate that old saying about rice fields and dawn, before deciding
that she’s too tired. Instead she hands over her handful of mixed bills and coins.

To her surprise, however, Vincent pulls the tin away. ‘
Vous savez
,’ he says quietly, ‘if you need the money you can hold off. Pay me later.’

Yuliang looks at him warily, wondering whether he’s taunting her – or, worse, trying to seduce her, as he tried to once last term. This time, though, his gray eyes reflect only honest sympathy. ‘Maître Simon gives me license to help those who need it. But don’t worry. We keep a record.’ He grins. ‘You can repay us when you become rich and famous.’

For a moment, Yuliang actually lets herself consider it. Three hundred francs would mean the new tube of cadmium green she’s been putting off buying. She could replace her easel, which has lost several screws and totters slightly when she strokes too heavily on the right. And of course there’s the new winter hat she’s wanted. Perhaps a felt derby with a feather or sparkling brooch. She would wear it low, to accent her self-trimmed fringe, and to keep her ears warm in the winter wind…

But even as she weighs the option, a thick and oversweet voice seems to breathe into her inner ear:
Pretty, isn’t it? You can buy it. I’ll just add it to the black book.

‘I’m fine,’ she says curtly. And drops the money in the tin.

Inside the amphitheater the mood has settled. Students work in an absorbed semicircle around the nude’s block, their easels lined up against worn tape marks on the floor. Sunlight spills through the high windows, illuminating tin
cans of brushes and flat glass palettes as well as the impressive frescoes on the walls – life-sized portraits of seventy-five of the West’s greatest figures in art. All (Yuliang noted immediately) are men; the only females are those depicted by Delaroche as the four great art periods: Greek, Roman, Gothic, and Renaissance. There is also
la Génie des Art
, buxom and bare-breasted, distributing laurel crowns to the men who flank her. The painting, rendered in wax, still bears the mark of a fire eighty years earlier, which melted the
genie
’s navel and streaked Renaissance’s face with glutinous, soot-toned tears.

Still, as always when setting up, Yuliang finds her spirits rising. She devours these hours as she once devoured the sweets her uncle splurged on, usually after an unexplained absence. ‘Your veins must be filled with sweet bean paste instead of blood,’ her
jiujiu
would joke. ‘I’ve never seen such a greedy little demon.’ She never told him, of course, that such bingeing stemmed not from greed but practicality: too many of Wu Ding’s gifts vanished, once sobriety and debt cast their long shadows in the daylight.

Now, using her brush, Yuliang checks her angle against the model, whom Vincent pokes and prods so his member falls as it did yesterday. In the beginning, such sights so mortified one other Chinese student that she actually fled the room. Yuliang, though, feels less discomposure than sheer sympathy for the boy. He can’t (she reflects) be here by choice – he’s no more than fourteen, an age at which (as Yuliang knows only too well) offering up one’s body for inspection isn’t easy. His slumped form, the shoulders newly broad but the chest still bare of manly
hair, strikes her as a study in conflict; like the full lips shadowed with the mocking down of adolescence. It is these contrasts, she decides now, that she wants to capture in her painting: the battling forces of vulnerability and manhood. The simultaneous dread of and longing for adulthood.

Unsheeting her palette, Yuliang takes a moment – only one – to reflect on the fact that she herself never harbored such conflict. That her childhood was stripped away with such brutal efficacy that she barely noticed that her wounds had left her a woman. She doesn’t, however, linger on this. As she once told her husband, we are rooted in the present. And at this particular present, for better or for worse, there is no place she would rather be.

She dips her brush in Venetian red, and begins.

31. Paris, 1925

May arrives overnight, touching the Luxembourg Gardens with soft shades of pink and violet and green. But while fresh blooms materialize, Yuliang’s monthly allowance does not.

The last she’d heard from Zanhua was a telegram in late March, sent shortly after Sun Yat-sen’s sudden death:
The loss of the general is a disaster. Am being reassigned to Nanjing. Will send details and monies when settled.

But that was more than five weeks ago. There has been nothing since. And there have been no further notes from Xu Beihong’s wife, offering work. Down to her last few centimes, Yuliang waits – and worries: she has only one month left in the Beaux Arts program, but even if Zanhua’s allowance arrives, she’ll barely make
masse.
The heel on her Mary Janes has broken, forcing her to buy cheap new shoes. At twenty francs, they all but clean out her grocery budget.

She eats the last of her canned sardines and peaches, her boiled eggs and dried macaroni, before resorting to a stealthier subsistence: secreting away hors d’oeuvres at art openings. Collecting bruised apples left behind by the vendors at day’s end. Sometimes, even rescuing brioches left for pigeons in the parks. Yuliang has always been a selective eater, if for no other reason than that she’s had so little choice in other matters. Now, though, sheer
hunger drives her to eat anything. Her mouth even waters at the crumbling gray cheese that looks like plaster and smells of used foot-bindings.

Happily, the warming weather makes at least a few things easier. It nullifies the need for charcoal at night, and graces her easel with longer, richer light. The outdoor diners who flock to the Rues Montparnasse and Vavin often leave bread and scraps on their tables. Following Xu Beihong’s example, Yuliang spirits these away, always keeping a sharp eye out for waiters. She still rebuffs Vincent’s offer to defer paying
masse
. But she does allow him to give her food left over from the still-life displays. She makes the orange an appetizer. The pear is the main dish; she cuts into sheer slices with her palette knife.

As the days drag by, the hunger worsens. But she tries to tell herself that it’s no worse than a cold or a headache. That there will be plenty of time to eat later, when she’s back home. She reminds herself of her mama’s tales of eating bark, and dust. She tries to treat the sensations of starvation – the dull ache replacing her gut, the blurred vision, the starlike sparks that perpetually seem to orbit its periphery – as a luxury: as sensations, after all, they are far preferable to many she was forced to live through at the Hall. And besides, there are so many other things to fill her attention: her slow mastery of painting with the tip of her knife, and of pointillism. Of fauvist coloration. The endless array of masters waiting at the Louvre. Most encouragingly, there is Lucien Simon’s recent and unexpected encouragement for her to submit to the Salon d’Automne.

The
maître
, a known champion of both women and
foreign students, stopped by her easel recently on one of his leisurely ambles around the room, during which he critiques each student’s work in turn. With most he corrects and counters; picking up a paintbrush or a maulstick to highlight an eye or a dark pleat. But when he arrived at Yuliang’s painting, a sober-toned Mary Magdalene based on a plaster cast of the Michelangelo sculpture, Lucien Simon simply watched, his long fingers stroking his carefully trimmed goatee.

‘What is that?’ he asked at last, pointing to one of Yuliang’s three central colors.

‘Cadmium yellow, mixed with white and phthalo green.’

He nodded. ‘Not so far off. And where will the cheekbone be?’

She indicated a slanting line just beneath one of Mary’s sad eyes.

‘Excellent. You must always be looking for the bone.’

With a nod, the
maître
moved on to the next student. After class, however, he pulled Yuliang aside. ‘Your work is quite distinctive. Have you considered submitting it to the salon?’

‘Me?
’
she asked, astounded.

‘You shouldn’t be so surprised. Your paintings have exoticism, a fresh face. They are looking for such things these days.’

Yuliang left the seminar that day in an even greater haze than usual. But despite his encouragement, she can’t settle on a subject. Every idea that comes seems neither exotic nor fresh enough to satisfy her, let alone the salon
judges. More disturbingly, her mind and eyes are beginning to betray her. In class, she has difficulty distinguishing between the simple tones on her palette. Her productivity drops. She can’t concentrate in session. She sits through lectures and seminars in a fog, penciling in notes –
sensi-bilité moderne, le fruit defendu dans le paradis, les ouvriers se font passer pour des bourgeoises
– in a blurring mélange of French and Chinese which later confounds her completely.

Finally, one day, while she is working on a still life in class – a teal vase filled with velvet-petaled roses – the room starts to reel in concert around her. When Yuliang drops her gaze the worn pine floorboards lurch toward her. Their age-old tape marks and splatters of ink black, Canton rose, Egyptian violet bleed and recede, then abruptly rush forward again, to blanket her in a rainbow of darkness.

She wakes slick with sweat, in her own small bed. A metal pot of some sort has been left on her painting table. So has some wine, some bread and cheese, and a short note in French:

The doctor said you simply need nutrition and rest. Please stay
home Monday. I promise that you can make up the time later.

Vincent

Yuliang rises and lifts the lid on the pot. Fat has congealed like wax over the beans. But the mere smell of it – salt and meat, lard and garlic – cramps her stomach in anticipation.

It’s not until she replaces the lid that she spots the
letter lying next to it, in the familiar yellow envelope sealed with an Anhui Prefecture seal. A note is jotted directly on the envelope:
Have sent your allowance
, it reads.
Check with funds manager at legation.

For several moments she just stares at it. Then she picks up her jade letter opener and breaks the red wax of the seal. Carefully, she slides free Zanhua’s note.

Its contents are nothing unusual: complaints about incompetent superiors, delayed paychecks and office intrigue; updates on the ongoing antiwarlord campaigns; musings over the power struggle between right and left that has emerged following Sun Yat-sen’s death. The latter, Zanhua writes, is largely the reason he was passed over for another promotion.
Which was just as well
, he adds.
The supervisor is both corrupt and inept. And at least now I can focus on our new home and on Guanyin’s health.

At the characters for
Guanyin
, Yuliang catches her breath: it’s the first time Zanhua has mentioned his first wife by name in two years. It is also the first concrete confirmation of something Yuliang has long suspected: that they are finally living together.

Stunned, she traces the characters with her fingertip, remembering the expressionless girl in the matchmaker’s photograph. When Yuliang had first heard her name (Guanyin! Goddess of Mercy!), she’d actually laughed. Now, though, an emptiness seems to spread through her, bleak and damp-fingered, and utterly unrelated to her hunger.

She fully realizes that the insertion of Guanyin’s name is far from casual. It is, rather, the iceberg’s tip; a tiny, deliberate hint of the enormous and icy discontent that
lies just below the short letter’s blithe surface. And the picture it paints could not be clearer. Zanhua’s attempts to advance himself are being rebuffed. He can no longer afford a big house. The wife who doesn’t suit him is sick – apparently sick enough for clinic visits – which must be why he has finally moved her into his home. Moreover, Yuliang knows his son is attending an elite private school, adding yet more financial pressure. The note’s true message might just as well be scrawled on her own wall in large red characters:
I need you, Little Yu. Come home.