The Painter of Shanghai (20 page)

But there’s one observation Yuliang takes pains to hide from him – at least at first: her own, growing fascination with life and its sketched reflections.

Doodlings, she thinks of them. Her little worthless scribbles: tiny fruits, flowers, monkey faces. The occasional dragon topped with Qian Ma’s head. These are the figures that almost of their own impetus bud and unfurl in the margins of Yuliang’s copybook these days. To her eye, the small pictures are as inexcusably inexpert as was that first grief-stricken sketch of Jinling. More than once, appalled at how her pencil has mauled a plum, she’s vowed to stop. And yet the little pictures keep coming, in a process both addictive and mystifying. It’s the same need that once drove Yuliang to stay up through the early morning hours, coaxing peonies and fresh-faced peaches onto cloth with her needle. But there is, she is discovering, something liberating about ink and lead. Unfettered by thread, she can bring the whims of her thoughts – whispering trees, wilting flowers – to life. When the images are inept the solution is refreshingly simple: Yuliang simply rips the page out and starts over. And over…

As more and more of her study time is devoted to art she starts to worry as she hands Zanhua her ‘study’ sheets; it seems impossible to her that he won’t reprimand her for putting so little effort into them. To her astonishment, though, he doesn’t even seem to notice the fact that characters she once spent hours on are now dashed off in half that time, in half panic. He still praises her brushwork, the surprising delicacy of her execution. At least, until one afternoon when he is home, working in his office.

Yuliang is lying on his bed upstairs with her writing things. Lulled into a dreamy daze by the rain-patter on the glass, she is thinking about the old French priest from on their outing; about the deft assurance with which those meaty hands captured a flower’s frail beauty. The same feeling she’d had then – a thrill, blended with longing – fills her, and almost without thinking about it, she pages past the day’s vocabulary in her copybook. Tongue between her lips, she makes soft gray sweeps on the paper. She adds more detail: a faint line there, a smudge here. A dark crease to show the dainty fold of a leaf. The flower’s flaws – its unevenness, the unnatural cast of attempted shading – needle her. And yet she keeps on trying.

On her fourth try she takes a different approach. Instead of drawing line by line, she tries to tap into that flashquick association between image and meaning that is the key to her growing literacy.
Orchid
, she thinks.
Orchid.
And without letting her mind go any further, she puts her lead tip once more to the paper’s surface. When she is done, she shuts her eyes, then opens them again.

To Yuliang’s surprise, what she has drawn is just that:
an orchid. It’s still a bit crooked, a little chunky in the stem and stamen. She’d do better if she had one right in front of her. And yet anyone looking at this picture – a schoolboy, a child not yet capable of reading the word even – would know it for what it was.

Flushed with victory, she’s just turning a fresh page to try it again when Zanhua flings himself on the bed, almost on top of her. ‘Ah-ha! Caught you!’ he cries, nuzzling her neck. ‘You didn’t hear me come up?’ He pulls her, copybook and all, into a rough embrace. ‘The old sons of turtles are crazy,’ he complains. ‘There’s no way in hell we’re going to be able to check all small craft in the harbor before they reach the docks!’

‘No way, certainly,’ she says into the lime-sweet pomade of his hair, ‘if you don’t ever leave the house.’

He pulls back slightly. ‘Ah. You
do
want me out.’

She laughs. ‘Of course I don’t.’ Snaking her arm out from under his weight, she tries to drop the book over the bed’s edge. But he catches her hand.

‘Not so quickly. Let’s take a look at your work, little scholar.’ And, still pinning her beneath him, he parts the book’s pages.

Yuling feels her face flush again as he looks at her image, then at her. ‘Did you do this?’

She nods.

Zanhua rolls off her. Bending over the book, he begins paging through it intently. She watches him take it in: the scrawled-off characters, the little pictures that she’d thought good enough to keep. The not-so-bad orchid, and the one that looks like a lion. And the one that looks somehow squashed. But it’s the good one he returns to,
tracing the black lines with his white fingers. Frowning at it as though it were a puzzle.

‘I was having difficulty concentrating,’ Yuliang mumbles. ‘The rain…’

He doesn’t answer. Oddly anxious, Yuliang chews a cuticle. When it stings, she looks down to see that she’s bitten too hard again: blood wells.

‘This is how you spend your days now?’ he says.

‘I mostly do them after I study.’

‘Have you had lessons?’

She laughs. ‘When would I have had lessons?’ Then, realizing he means at the Hall, she bites her lip. ‘No. Never. I – I just like to try to draw things sometimes. I’m no good at all.’

He purses his lips. ‘Actually, you are. You’re very good.’

The compliment all but takes her breath away. ‘I’m no Shi Tao,’ she manages finally. ‘You can surely see that –’ She breaks off, flustered. They have never discussed the painting’s disappearance.

‘It’s interesting,’ he goes on, ignoring the comment.

‘What?’

‘That you decided to do… this.’ He points to where she’s tried to show depth with clumsy crosshatching, a technique she’d seen on the cover of a
New Youth
issue. ‘None of the old masters would pay this much attention to depth.’

‘I know. It’s silly.’

‘Don’t apologize. Artists – modern artists – should paint the world as it is. Not just as some empty exercise in aesthetics.’ Turning slightly, he waves at the scroll that
has hung in the room since before he first led her up to it. ‘How many versions of that picture hang on people’s walls, do you think?’

Yuliang follows the gesture to where the wispily bearded scholar contemplates a barely indicated stream. A carp looks back at him, its goggle-eyes turned up in admiration. Yuliang has contemplated this image often, usually in moments of boredom. It strikes her as skillful, but she has no feelings for it. Zanhua has told her he bought it from a lakeside vendor in Hangzhou. She ventures a guess: ‘Hundreds?’

‘Millions,’ he retorts, as though he’s counted them personally. ‘But have you ever
seen
that scene? A scholar by a stream? A carp coming up for a little chat?’

‘No?’ she ventures.

‘Of course not!’ He rubs his cheek. ‘Just as no one has ever seen the esteemed Master Tao’s mountain covered top to bottom with pine trees.’

‘But they must have,’ Yuliang protests, struggling to think back to the shoreline vistas of that long-ago river trip with Uncle Wu. ‘
I
have, even. Or something like it.’

He shakes his head. ‘No one could get that perspective from the ground. They’d have to be painting from high up. Maybe even from an airship. Not very likely, four hundred years ago.’ He hands the book back. ‘You should sign it. All artists sign their work.’ And as she shakes her head modestly, ‘You
should.
But you should also keep up with the lessons. I’ll always trust words over pretty pictures.’

He says this last part sternly, looking so much like a
schoolteacher that Yuliang can’t help teasing him a little. Stretching back, she folds her arms beneath her neck. ‘What,’ she asks, ‘about pretty women?’

At first he’s faintly startled, as he always is when her humor catches him unawares. Then he laughs. ‘That,’ he says, reaching for her, ‘is a completely different story.’

Two days later the rain has washed the sky a crisp blue, and the spring sun shines as if it has never done otherwise. Yuliang sits in Zanhua’s office, trying her hand at butterflies.

Since their discussion, she’s worked more openly on her art. He’s even offered her some supplies: a box of sharp-tipped charcoal, some new brushes, thicker than those used for calligraphy. A sketchbook from a Wuhu art store. The bright white paper is far finer than Yuliang’s copybook pages, with their smoothly mashed and faintly discolored surface. It feels different too, not so much absorbing as resisting the brush’s damp kiss. It allows a sharper line, with much more sheen.

She is bent over this discovery when the phone in the main hallway starts to ring. The sound at first makes her leap slightly in her seat. But Zanhua has left strict instructions that no one answer the ‘electric voice-box’ when he’s away. It is a welcome directive for the servants, at least, who see the machine as vaguely preternatural. Qian Ma eyes it with open disapproval. ‘Any people we’re meant to talk to, we’re meant to meet,’ she mutters.

Still, for the next half-hour the device continues ringing, on and off, and Yuliang finally shuts the office door against it. Almost at the same moment the front door bursts
open. ‘Why is the floor so damned wet? Can’t a man walk in peace even within his own house?’ Zanhua bellows.

It’s Thursday, the maid’s floor-washing day. But Yuliang doesn’t note this when he clatters into the study. Instead she stares up at him, taken aback not only by his abrupt presence but by his whiteness, his outraged expression. When the telephone lets loose its shrill call again, he makes no move to answer it. ‘I’m going to have to work now for a few hours,’ he says. He waits, tapping his thigh with the rolled tabloid he is holding. Yuliang makes out the banner: the
Crystal.
It’s a lowly publication, one Zanhua normally says isn’t worth his money. ‘Singsong girl gossip,’ he sniffs. ‘Tissue paper. All rustle.’ Following her gaze now, he tosses the paper on the chaise. ‘Please, Yuliang.’

With as much grace as she can muster, Yuliang stands and walks past him, butterflies held carefully flat to prevent drips. He shuts the door behind her.

She’d planned to move upstairs. But she finds herself lingering, shuffling her feet just outside her former workspace. Somewhere in her mind a small, shrill chorus begins, like the malevolent hum of summer locusts:
He’s leaving you. He is leaving.

Which, she tells herself, is of course ridiculous. It’s probably nothing. Just some ordinance or tax. Another blow to the war-torn new economy. But then, she knows the tabloids, and the
Crystal
in particular. It cares about two things only, sex and gossip about sex. Its coverage of the economy doesn’t extend beyond the luxurious lifestyles of local tax collectors. As for war, Yi Gan once read Yuliang two full columns describing how General Fang,
the ‘dog meat’ general, once allowed a ranks inspection to be conducted by his concubine’s toy chowchow.

Yuliang looks down at her butterflies. She all but feels them fluttering around in her stomach. But she makes herself knock. ‘I – I forgot something.’

When she pushes the door open, he is sitting in the chair, head propped on his hand.

‘I – I just wanted this pencil,’ Yuliang lies, picking up the tool from the desk. ‘And the
New Youth
.’ He’d brought her another copy this week. This one shows an enormous Sumo wrestler, Japan’s flag wrapped around his loins, preparing to devour all of China with his chopsticks.

‘Go ahead,’ is all Zanhua says.

The magazine is on the shelf right over the chaise. Yuliang makes her way to it slowly, her eyes on the
Crystal.
The paper is folded open to the ‘Seen in Town’ section. She makes out two words:
tax inspector
and
gardens.
Heart in mouth, she bends over to get a better look. ‘Don’t read that,’ he says, too sharply. ‘It doesn’t concern you.’

Yuliang stands up slowly. ‘That’s not true,’ she says.

He stares balefully at her for a moment. Then he sighs, passes a hand across his cheek. ‘You’re right. I’ve never lied to you yet. I’ve promised you I never will.’

He heaves himself to his feet, walks slowly past her to the chaise. He retrieves the cheap tabloid. ‘This came out today.’ He reads:

Word has it that Master Pan, the new deputy customs inspector, has been spending much time (and, dare we suggest, city monies?) on a young girl from our beloved Hall of Eternal Splendor. The two, said to be living in a ‘union of the wilds’ in Master Pan’s home, were spotted last week at
Zeshan Wanlu, where the feet of Inspector Pan’s lovely companion were said to be even more exquisite – if significantly larger – than any of the blossoms. Inspector Pan, it’s well known, prides himself on being one of China’s new, ‘modern’ thinkers – too modern, it seems, to avail himself of traditional courtesies extended to him by his many admirers. It is therefore gratifying to know that in some areas he’s as old-fashioned as the rest: the Place of Clouds and Dew beckons all men, high and low…

A sharp snap. Yuliang looks down to see that she’s broken her pencil in half. The sound detonates through the room like a firework.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispers. It’s all she can think of to say. Other than what she’s thinking, which is:
Of course.
Of course, it must end.

‘I suppose it was inevitable,’ Zanhua says, as though once more divining her thoughts. ‘Yi Gan is a powerful man. And your Madame Ping was quite angry. I knew some brows would lift when I took you in. But I didn’t think this would become such a scandal. My intentions from the start were nothing but honorable. I don’t understand why they can’t see that.’

‘See what?’

‘That I wanted to save you. To… to rehabilitate you. That the rest simply wasn’t planned.’

As Yuliang meets his eye, she realizes with a jolt that he is speaking the absolute truth: his intentions
were
honorable. What’s more, she realizes something that he does not: that the
they
he speaks of do see this. All too clearly. And it’s this very sight – of his honor, the unstained shine – that makes them hate him as they do.

The thought comes starkly:
This will be your downfall.
‘What’s in your mind?’ he says.

She feels her ears redden. ‘That – that you’ve done more than I can ever thank you for. Or repay you for.’