The Painter of Shanghai (38 page)

Yuliang reaches for the wine. Using the same jade opener, she breaks the red wax at its neck and uncorks the bottle. As she drinks, she thinks of her husband’s long fingers, his lush-lashed eyes. She feels the force of his longing – a husband’s longing. A
reasonable
longing. And she is deeply, unspeakably ashamed. For what she feels in return is not a reciprocal love or gratitude. It is something entirely different: apprehension.

The sun is setting now. Outside shops are shuttered. Bells toll. A whore barters harshly with a client. Two of the unlikely foursome who live a floor up – a red-faced Russian who maintains two wives and one infant – burst into their nightly battle. The words, as usual, are unintelligible to Yuliang, but for a few French signposts:
francs
and
vin, café
and
bébé.
Eventually, the door slams, and the man’s feet pound heavily down the stairs. The woman weeps, her sobs harmonizing sourly with her child’s.

After a long while and a full glass of wine, Yuliang replaces Zanhua’s letter, in its envelope. She allows herself a bite of stew, then another, straight from the pot. The salt and fat and spices merge so richly on her
dried tongue that for a moment she almost thinks she’ll faint again.

Forcing herself to pause, Yuliang refills her glass, watching Mirror Girl do the same. For an instant, that framed image seems inexplicably shocking. As though she were pouring herself a glassful of blood. And yet lifting the glass again, she can’t help but think that she’d like to fill a canvas with this color. With
precisely
this color, which is not cadmium or terra rose or even manganese violet but some uncapturable combination of them all – a tone both illicit and essential.

32

A month later classes at the École des Beaux Arts have ended, and Yuliang sits in a Latin Quarter café. Studies are scattered on the marble tabletop; poses charcoaled, considered, and then rejected as themes for her submission painting to the salon. In fact, Yuliang has just decided that she despises them all. But when a breeze skates one off to a neighboring table, she leaps after it in a panic.

The man who retrieves it, however, gives it little more than a glance.
‘Vous êtes étudiante?’
he asks, and when Yuliang nods, he says,
‘C’est très bien.’

Sitting down again, she finds herself smiling. In Shanghai, the picture (which of course shows her own, nude form) would at minimum raise a few eyebrows. In more conservative Nanjing, where she’s expected by summer’s end, it could quite possibly get her arrested.

Anchoring the errant sketch beneath her saucer, Yuliang tips her chair back and lights a fresh cigarette. She scans the insipid urban stars for the celestial lovers of Mama’s stories: Weaver Girl, her Heavenly Shepherd. As usual, though, they remain overwhelmed by the battling neon of Montparnasse, or else disguised in new and foreign positions. The only constellation she vaguely recognizes is the Celestial Mansion of Emptiness, although she’s used to seeing it in the north. Everything else is out of place.

Then again, she muses, perhaps it is
she
who is out of
place. Perhaps Zanhua is right; she should go home. At the very least she should finish the letter she started to him two weeks earlier, which still hasn’t progressed beyond
:
Beloved husband.

Dispiritedly, she begins gathering up her sketches, glancing around for a waiter. Spotting a tall figure in dark clothes, she lifts her hand. Then she drops it again, stunned.

Xing Xudun stands just outside the
terrasse
area. Seeing her at almost the same moment she spots him, he breaks into a broad smile; that beloved, beaming smile that seems to touch every feature on his large face.

‘Madame Pan!’ he calls.

He makes his long-limbed way toward her table, bumping and apologizing, finally beaming down at her from what seems an almost unearthly height. The café lights are behind him, and for a moment he looks to Yuliang the way Klimt might have rendered him: silk-skinned. A limpid, body outlined in gold.

Without preamble he leans over and, grasping her shoulders, plants kisses on each of her cheeks.
That’s new,
Yuliang thinks blurrily, and, almost simultaneously,
He still loves me.
The thought passes through with as little surprise as a note on the weather
(the sun is out)
before she throws it away.

‘Sit!’ she says breathlessly.

‘You aren’t waiting for someone?’

She shakes her head. ‘I come here to work.’

‘Lucky for me. May I?’ He folds himself onto a seat and, setting down the journal he’s carrying, reaches for Yuliang’s sheath of papers.

‘No!’ she exclaims, hastily sweeping them into her purse. ‘They’re all just awful.’

He looks her in the eyes again. ‘I doubt that anything from your pencil could ever be awful.’

Smiling again, he turns toward the group of Chinese and Indochinese students who often gather here by the window. He waves at one, mouthing something. Studying his profile, Yuliang finds herself thinking,
He’s changed.
But she can’t quite put her finger on what exactly is different. His gaze seems steadier, perhaps; his lips a little harder. She spots a dozen or so white hairs as well: They look like sleet cutting through a tousled night.

‘You look well,’ he says, picking up the menu. ‘A bit skin-and-bones. But that’s what’s in fashion here, I hear.’

She lifts an eyebrow. ‘I can’t afford many chocolates.’

‘It suits you. When I first saw you, I thought you were a French girl.’

‘You didn’t!’ She laughs; it feels like the first time in weeks.

‘I did. I thought, “How on earth does that chic French girl know my name?”’

Yuliang assesses herself mentally. Her scarf is frayed; her hemline pinned and pinned again to hit the ever-moving mark of Parisian fashion. The only truly chic thing about her is her lipstick: she recently bought a gleaming tube of Arden’s Scarlet Sauvage from a Gypsy vendor, a block from the Rue de la Paix salon from which it was very likely stolen, and applies it in a pouty bow at her lipline’s center. Suitable, perhaps (she thinks skeptically). But chic?

Still, like everything Xudun says, he appears to mean it – emphatically. Even perusing the menu, he still strikes
her as so pure in purpose that she can all but see him standing heroically at the helm of some great ship. ‘I wanted to see you sooner,’ he is saying, wistfully eyeing the café’s offerings. ‘But I had no idea at all where you were living.’ He looks at her reproachfully. ‘You didn’t write to anyone with your new address.’

‘I – I was a little overwhelmed,’ she tells him. Which is true. What she can’t bring herself to tell him is that since coming to Paris, she’s had an almost superstitious fear of writing home. As though reminders of the past might somehow break the magic spell of her life here.

‘Overwhelmed by school?’

‘Yes. It’s been very busy.’ She finishes her
noisette.

Xudun watches her a moment, his eyes as warm and rich as she remembers. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘we’re finally doing it.’

‘Doing what?’ she asks, faintly alarmed.

‘Having that coffee.
S’il vous plaît.’
He puts the menu down. ‘Although actually what I’d really like is beer.’

He thrusts his arm up for a waiter. No one takes any notice but a bushy-browed southerner just inside the door. ‘Comrade Xing!’ the boy shouts. ‘I heard you’d come back. Come over here! Catch us up on Moscow!’

‘In a moment,’ Xudun calls back. ‘I’ve got a prior engagement.’

‘Don’t waste much time, do you?’ The boy hoots.

Xudun turns back to Yuliang. ‘Don’t mind him.’

‘Why do you always choose such rude friends?’ she asks dryly.

He laughs. ‘That one’s Zhou Enlai. He’s our minister of mimeography. Does most of our printing.’

Yuliang throws the boy a stiff smile before turning back to Xudun. ‘Were you really in Moscow?’

‘Stalin’s set up a school there. You haven’t heard of it? The University of the Toilers of the East.’ He says it both in Chinese and in Russian, the words rolling from his tongue in rich mystery.

‘You speak Russian now?’

‘More now than I did at the start, anyway.’

Yuliang sets down her cup, genuinely impressed. She herself recently attempted an exchange of language lessons with Perelli, the Italian painter in her class. She stopped after their third session, when he pulled her into his lap. ‘Is it much harder than French?’ she asks, honestly curious.

‘It won’t be when they come out with a Sino-Russian dictionary. We had to make do with a Japanese
jiten
.’ He frowns. ‘Which, I might add, caused a problem at first.’

‘Because no one spoke Japanese?’

‘Because the only one available is put out by a Japanese publisher. No one wanted to put money into their pockets.’

Yuliang laughs. ‘Surely a publisher isn’t to blame for Hirohito’s crimes.’

For once he doesn’t return her smile. ‘You can’t blame the fox’s head and not its legs, Madame Pan. They’re all part of the same enemy.’

She looks at him, curious. ‘You say
enemy
as though we were already at war.’

‘It will come soon enough. And don’t let China’s greater size lead to complacency. If we don’t rid ourselves of old ways, we will lose.’

Yuliang ponders this. She can’t help recalling one of
Xu Beihong’s recent comments: with typical bravado, he declared that no art painted after 1880 was worth emulating. She remembers, too, Zanhua, on that long-ago day in the Lotus Gardens:
The traditional ways don’t have to resist newer ones.

‘Can’t the old and the new exist together sometimes?’ she asks. ‘In harmony?’

‘Perhaps. But don’t forget that we lost Formosa to Japan twenty-five years ago because the empress built up her summer palace instead of her navy. Sometimes you must strip off the old in order to rebuild a sounder structure.’

‘I’m not saying we shouldn’t modernize, or strip away corruption,’ Yuliang says. She’d forgotten how she enjoys arguing with Xudun. The way he hears her out – not indulgently, as Zanhua sometimes does, but as though she might actually have something to teach
him
. ‘If you carve away all of China’s old ways, then what do you have left?’

‘You still have the roots. Land. People.’

‘Yes, but at what point do you stop? What’s to keep you from continuing to change and change until there’s nothing of your true self left inside?’

Xudun digests this for a moment, his big thumbs tapping the table. ‘There will always be something,’ he says at last. ‘You choose to wear French lipstick and French dresses.’

Yuliang purses her lips. ‘Actually, the lipstick is American.’

He waves impatiently. ‘Either way. Does the fact that you wear it make you less Chinese?’

‘No,’ Yuliang says immediately. ‘It’s obvious here that I’m Chinese.’
Too obvious, sometimes
, she notes wryly. She thinks of all the schoolboy taunts she’s endured here, of
the old man who, mistaking her for Indochinese, harassed her recently at the Louvre.
Dirty native,
he’d sputtered.
Go back to Hanoi!

‘Whether I like it or not,’ she goes on, ‘my skin will always tell the truth. And unlike my clothes, I can’t take it off.’

She fights back a blush at the unintended implication. But Xing Xudun just presses on. ‘Say you could. Say you were dead, soon to be buried. The dress you wear into your coffin will be your outfit for eternity. Would a French dress make you any less Chinese?’

Yuliang chews a thumbnail: the thought is surprisingly complicated. On the one hand, it would seem hypocritical to say yes, given that she’s worn nothing but Western clothes these past few years. At the same time it is faintly disturbing; the idea of the coffin door closing on her own form. Resplendent in her short skirt, silk stockings, and sheer blouse. ‘I don’t know,’ she says at last, honestly.

He grins as though he’s won a point for himself. ‘All right, then. Listen. Say this is China.’ He holds up his journal. ‘By peeling back a few layers’ – he bends back one page, then another – ‘you’re not changing its true nature. What remains in my hands is still land.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s a journal.’

Yuliang smiles again, to show him that she’s teasing. But the look he gives her is unexpectedly sober. ‘I have missed you,’ he says, simply.

Another silence unrolls between them. Inside the café, the minister of mimeography curses his bridge partner. When Xudun speaks again it’s an enormous relief for some reason. ‘And when,’ he says, ‘are you going home?’

Yuliang clears her throat. ‘I – I haven’t quite decided. There’s a scholarship that would pay for me to study in Rome. I want to study sculpture there, too.’ She scrapes at the small heap of sugar crystals at the bottom of her cup. ‘It may be nothing but a dream. In any event, I’m not done here. I have to finish up one last painting.’

‘Self-portrait?’

Yuliang nods.

‘Nude?’

She nods again, though she can’t meet his eyes. Thankfully, at that moment the waiter finally chooses to notice them, and Xudun orders his beer.