A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  “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 mo
ment 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.

  Now, the Yongle vase in front of her, she finished typing and pressed a button that would send the vase to her own private computer archive at the same time it went into the inventory. Everything in her memory world was in computerized files too. Naturally she wouldn’t take a chance on losing things. But it was a point of honor with her not to retrieve information from the computer, only to store it there. She made herself rely on memory.

  She took the sweet-white vase back in her fingers, wrapped the whole surface of her palm around the swelling glazed body, the magic, mathematically perfect swirls of the design against her skin. She cradled it back into its soft little white manger and closed it up.

  4

  That night, walking across the lamplit entry court, she noticed a far gate opening into another set of courtyards. It was arrestingly irregular. Up close, she saw it was built of jagged ornamental rocks. She ducked her head and slipped through it. A court cut by rose-lined paths opened out in front of her. Thin steles of rock, shaped by nature, stood up punctuating the grass. Four rooms looked inward. Three of them had windows that were jammed: blue-and-white porcelain, severed stone Buddha heads, cups with fanned arrangements of brushes, knockoff ceramic san-cai camels and horses after the manner of the Tang Dynasty.

  She saw at once that foreigners lived here, long-term residents. They used arty fakes to evince their personas, to specify and declare themselves. She did the same; she knew she did. She liked to think she did it with greater deliberation.

  At home, in New York, the rooms of her apartment overflowed. In this she was like her mother, who had similarly packed the little Virginia place in which she’d grown up. She remembered easily the ripe tang of humidity on a day twenty-five years before, as they stood in the summer flea market together, rifling a bin of old buttons. Those were the times she remembered her mother happy, walking home, laden with finds, eyes alight with new things; she remembered herself basking in this reflection.

  Though Lia’s apartment was full, her objects were fakes—great fakes. She had phony Russian icons and da Vinci drawings, a heaped-up altar of Buddhist statuary, and a Fabergé egg. And she had her pots, of course, the few copies she’d found that were good enough to live with. She was very demanding when it came to the pots in her home. And then her books; she kept her best, most transporting porcelain books stacked in squat columns, around the floor. She knew where everything was. The place mirrored her mind. She could put her hands on a book, on an image, in an instant. Now, her apartment was interesting, she thought with a vain thrill as she cast an appraising eye around the lit-up windows.

  She saw a movement on the path and stopped. A thin cat with butterscotch stripes and high, skulking hindquarters walked in front of her.

  She called to it. It froze.

  She sank close to the ground, called it again. The animal lifted its amber eyes and looked at her, tail straight up and cocking steadily.

  “Be that way,” she said to it. Then she stood and looked at the room at the end of the court. Vermilion support columns framed the door; its glass panel was etched in a repeating wood-scroll pattern. But the windows were empty. They were hung with plain white cloth at half-height, for privacy. Nothing else.

  Just then a light flipped on in the room. She stepped out of the pool of brightness. A fair-haired man with a boxy chest walked across. He was carrying something. A CD player. He was changing the disc, and he spun the new one as he dropped it in; it caught the light. She held her breath. But he wore headphones. He couldn’t hear her.

  He could hear music, though; she could tell by the rhythm in his step as he passed out of view. American, she thought. Though she couldn’t say why. It might have been carriage, or maybe attitude, or a way of wearing clothes. But she could tell.

  She backed up. Then she was in the shadows and she slipped back out under the irregular rock gate, into the circle of lamplight, past the geysering fountain and the driveway, through the main gate, to the street.

  Lia made her way to one of the theme restaurants currently popular in Beijing. She liked them. Some were based on gimmicks. There was a place called Fatty's, for instance, with a big triple-beam scale right inside the door. Anybody who weighed over one hundred kilos got thirty percent off for their whole table.

  Other places were based on historical eras. Those were Lia’s favorites. There were the Maoist places, the Cultural Revolution places, the imperial places. The restaurant she walked into now was a faux-world of 1920s Beijing. The staff sported frog-button tunics, while old-fashioned acrobats, singers, and storytellers entertained from the stage. The food ran to pickled radishes and cabbage in mustard seed dressing and earthy braised soybeans mixed with the chopped leaves of the Chinese toon tree. Her chopsticks roved around the table, and she thought about her eight hundred pots.

  She was an experienced appraiser. For nine years she had worked at Hastings. She remembered the job interview. She was given the on-the-spot test. It was the way Hastings always evaluated new hires.

  “Don’t be nervous,” Dr. Zheng had said as he laid objects out in front of her. “Just tell me what you think.”

  She knew to him she must have looked all wrong. She was tall. Her hair was pulled up in a tight braid, defiantly strict. And her clothes didn’t make sense.

  No, as Dr. Zheng often said to her in the years that followed, laughing about it: She didn’t look anything like most of the women he hired. They wore pearls and suits and had pert Anglo-Saxon hair. But that didn’t matter, as he always reminded her. What mattered was the test. “Just tell me what you think,” he had urged her that day. She remembered how he extended his dry fingers to the first pot on the left, a blue-and-white bottle-formed vase, meiping style. They were all blue-and-whites. But not all the same. Not at all.

  She remembered how she looked from one to another, comparing them. Then she lit on the first one. “It has a high-shouldered form in good proportion,” she said quietly. “Porcelain smooth, a good clear white—may I?” She moved to pick it up.

  “Of course.”

  She lifted
the vase and rotated it. “No mark and period,” she said, and tilted the base, which was empty, in his direction.

  She returned it to the table. She came closer to study the painting, hibiscus blooms framed by ornate medallions of scrolling leaves. “Beautifully rendered, spacing just right. But the blue—the intensity of it—there is something about the heap-and-piling.” She moved right up next to it now, studying the infinitesimal mounding of cobalt grains that fooled the eye into seeing a field of blue.

  Yes, he thought. Keep going.

  Now she put her hands on it again. She closed her eyes and brushed her fingers over the little mounds of cobalt. She looked like a person reading braille. “It’s just too deliberate,” she said. “It feels contrived. It’s in the right style for the Ming prototype, but it’s troweled on too much. I’d say it was made in the Qing, maybe in the Qianlong reign. Though it wants you to think it’s a vase from the Yongle reign in the middle Ming. That’s what it wants you to think.” She shot him a glance, half questioning.

  He would only answer with an encouraging smile, and she turned to the second one, a Ming blue-and-white fruit bowl. “Sturdily made,” she began. “A little thick. The design is lingzhi fungus.” She turned it over and read the six characters, da ming xuan de nian zi. “Made in the Xuande reign, great Ming Dynasty,” she translated. “And this heap-and-piling . . .” She lifted it to the window, where the natural light was most revealing. “This one is deep, but free. It’s naturalistic.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “It has that artlessness.” She looked at him. “It might really be from the Ming.” The bowl had a faint filmy coating all over it. She angled her index finger to set the slightest ridge of nail against it and scraped a patch clean.

  She held the bowl up to the light. “I have seen more vivid blues,” she admitted. “It’s not quite the best of its type, is it?” She glanced at him for confirmation. “But I think it is from the Ming.”