A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  “Do we get a discount?”

  He pushed her gently. He had gone over the sample descriptions until his eyes ached. It was pages and pages of descriptions, of digital photos, of resemblances and relationships to other known works in museums, in catalogs, in collections, and sold at previous auctions—sold “in these rooms” was the way they liked to put it. He began to glimpse the net of connections and references under everything. It was numbing, thrilling. “Prices for this stuff have gone nowhere but up,” he said.

  “You keep saying that,” she said. “I know. People have mostly made money.”

  “Consistently,” he said, going a little too far.

  “Consistently recently. But you’re still talking about . . . china.”

  “People buy paintings for more.”

  “Paintings don’t break.”

  “Insurance.”

  “It just seems—“”

  “Two million isn’t even the top,” he told her. “One of the Chenghua chicken cups sold in Hong Kong a few years ago for four million.”

  “A cup?”

  “A cup.”

  She frowned. “We don’t have one of those, do we?”

  He couldn’t suppress the start of a grin. “No. We don’t have one of those. There are only eighteen in the world. We have a copy of one in the collection, though—a forgery. Quite masterful, apparently.”

  “A copy!” Her voice went up to a squeak.

  He laughed. “No, no, the appraiser caught it. It’s offered only as a curiosity. At a fractional price. But they say it’s gorgeous and quite convincing. Actually, there are several copies. The latest e-mail says she has found nine. A little collection of fakes, inside the collection.”

  “How convenient. It comes with things we can put on our sideboard.”

  “And at our beach house.” He went earnest. “I actually think we should keep some at our beach house. The real ones.” He reached down and pulled a blanket of the Skokomish tribe up over them, settled back with his arm behind her head.

  “That’s crazy,” she said.

  “Not crazy,” he corrected her. “It’s our life. Listen,” he said. “We’ll have eight hundred pieces. An unparalleled group. We could have a museum with that, just with that, if we wanted. But I think I’d rather keep it private.”

  She shrugged. It appealed to her, though. A whole Chinese past. “We could look into it,” she conceded.

  The sun’s rim crested the horizon.

  “What’s his total estimate?” she said.

  “Oh,” said Jack confidently. “I think we could get it for a hundred and fifty million . . . about the cost of three great Van Goghs.”

  “Have you heard anything about Hu and Sun?” Bai asked Zhou over the phone. He knew Zhou had just come back from Guangzhou. Somewhere near there, the two men were being held. It was at Guangzhou they had been arrested, for it was there, the most crowded, most anonymous overland point, that most ah chans these days chose to cross the border.

  “I’ve heard nothing,” Zhou replied.

  On his end, Bai swallowed. They’d already been arrested. Now only two possible outcomes remained. One was that Hu and Sun had bought their way out and were already free. That could only have happened if they had enough cash on their persons to do it quickly, persuasively, unobtrusively. That was one possibility. The other was that they could not bribe their way out and were already scheduled to be stood up against a wall, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, and shot.

  12

  She saw the older man look up from his worktable at her, a foreign woman standing in the gate to his courtyard. She shouldn’t have just come here. She should have gotten his number and called.

  “Huanying, huanying,” he said, standing up, Welcome. “You speak Chinese?”

  “I do,” she said. “Is it convenient? May I enter your studio?” Her eyes raked behind him, took in the rows of pots, saw a prevailing harmonic balance that was immediately exciting to her. He was good.

  “Come in. Please. You’re a porcelain person?”

  “I am. I study pots and appraise them.”

  “An artist too?”

  “No—just a specialist.” In China it was more commonplace for experts to also make pots themselves. Not her. She dug out her card.

  He held up his hand. “Wait.”

  She looked up. Cards always came first in China.

  “A small joke! An amusement! Listen. I’d like your opinion.” He gleamed with coconspiracy. “I have in mind to make a wucai stem cup after the style of Xuande. I seek among these”—he gestured to the thousands of unfinished pots in straight lines—“the right body, the right set of ratios.”

  She understood at once and followed him down the path, between the shelves, the rows, tightly packed, everything in the biscuit. “Flared rim?” she said. “Everted sides?”

  “Just so!”

  “What for decoration?”

  “Four floral medallions. Flowers all the way open, reds, yellows, and greens.”

  “Lovely.” They walked a moment in silence, then separated, scanning, sidling up and down the tributary rows by themselves. Both knew the feeling they were looking for.

  And then after a time she stopped and stood still. “Pardon me,” she said.

  He turned.

  “What about this one?” She motioned to it with her chin. It truly was the ideal stem cup. It was finely potted, faintly squat. There were four sides for painting and a bamboo-node stem. “Beautiful,” she complimented him. “So nicely made.” She could see what he would do with it—the iconic flowers, spare, outlined, slightly Islamic, in near-primary colors. The reign mark not enclosed in a shape, as it usually was, but instead free characters, circling the base. Perhaps a single or double blue line around the foot and inside the rim.

  Lia looked up from the biscuit cup at the thousands of unfinished pieces aligned around her. He had quite a factory here.

  She knew how this game worked. Rich collectors in Hong Kong sought to unearth artists like Yu and then would keep them strictly to themselves. And for a while, one fang gu after another would be commissioned, and everyone would be happy. But eventually the buyer would grow unsure as to whether it was actually the master or only his assistants making the commissions. One would inevitably find that the master did the pieces he wanted to do, and no more. In time the relationship would sputter down. And then someone else would discover the artist, and it would begin again. She wondered who his patrons had been. He was very, very good. “Very hoi moon,” she said.

  “Guojiang,” he said modestly, Pass praise. But he wore a wide smile when he picked up the cup and carried it to a worktable. Turning back, with some ceremony, he removed a card from a pocket beneath his apron. She had hers ready too. They both used two hands. It was quite a show of manners.

  “Yu Weiguo,” she read from his card.

  “Fan Luo Na.” She watched him continue reading and register the name, Hastings. “You must come and see our finished pieces,” he said. “Please. You will enjoy them.”

  “With pleasure!”

  “You like fang gu?”

  “More than you imagine!” At the other end of the work yard they entered a low brick house through double wood doors. Yu snapped on the lights. She stared for a minute and then circled the room, lined with all-glass shelves, the pots loosely organized by dynasty. “Oh, they’re beautiful,” she said to him. Then she stopped in front of a flat-sided moon flask in underglaze blue-and-white, with a scene of musicians playing against a landscape. So rare, for usually moon flasks were painted with birds on flowering branches. But these were musicians, dancing past each other on the path, mountains behind them layered and leveled by mists. “The reign of Yongle,” she said softly. “Am I right?”

  “You are right.”

  Because she could barely let herself believe it, but this one looked real. It looked right and gorgeous and real. Another fiction? Or the truth?

  And then, looking closer, sh
e saw the crack and, dialing in further still, the accumulation of centuries of fine dirt in the crack. So the flask was real—and damaged. “A fantastic piece,” she told him. “So fine. Too pitiable about it.”

  He shrugged. “If it was not cracked, how would I be privileged to have it?”

  “That’s so.”

  He turned to her. “I have an idea,” he said. “Will you allow me . . .”

  She shrugged. “Of course.”

  “Sit.” He waved to an armchair upholstered in plastic leather. “Be at ease.” And he moved quickly around the room, collecting pieces from one shelf and then another, clustering them on the table. It was an echo of her on-the-spot test with Dr. Zheng, so many years ago. “Have a look at these,” he said.

  Yu had the table covered with pots of every height and shape and description, an ad hoc diagram of the past exhaling the cold clay scent of age. She looked a long time through narrowed eyes, in silence. Finally she went to one end of the table and started touching each pot in turn, wrapping both hands for a moment around each one.

  Yu didn’t say anything. He stood and watched her.

  When she came to the end she looked at the assemblage for a moment, the whole group, and then with brief economic swipes began shifting the pots’ positions. The low Zhengde dish with fish and water weeds she put to the left; the green box with its domed cover, its soft lingzhi and classic scroll design typical of Chenghua, to the right.

  She did this in silence. Real on the left. Fakes on the right. As she shifted each, she held it again for an extra second before releasing it.

  She didn’t speak until she was done. “Stunning. So hoi moon.” She picked up a dish with a double vajra design in underglaze blue and switched to Mandarin. “So kai men jian shan,” Let the door open on a view of mountains. “Mr. Yu, this one is the mountain itself.” She pointed to the four dragons carrying lotus blooms in their mouths, each flower centered with the Buddhist vajra emblem, also suggesting the Chinese character shi, or ten.

  Then she turned the bottom of the fang gu dish to the light, with its six-character reign mark da ming cheng hua nian zi, made in the reign of Chenghua, in the great Ming Dynasty. The Chenghua emperor had brought back this design, which had not been prevalent since the Yuan Dynasty. Indeed, the reign mark was perfect, encased in a double blue ring. Oh, brilliant. “Excellent. I truly commend you.” She put the vajra dish back on the table.

  But was he the Master of the Ruffled Feather?

  She covered the table with a look. She didn’t think so. If she had to guess right now she’d say no. She had seen all kinds of designs here, painted flowers and birds of every type, and nowhere had she seen that exact little fillip of style.

  She picked up a globular, narrow-mouthed jar with a lotus-pond decoration. It was painted in bright doucai of brick red, yolk yellow, and green. “The Mirgentesse jar!” she exclaimed, naming the current owner of the famous piece this fang gu reproduced. “Incredible.”

  “Your eye’s not bad at all. Not in the least!” he said.

  “Pass praise.” She put back the jar.

  “You missed only one!”

  She stood still for a second. “What?”

  “I mean, you missed one pot. One only. That is excellent.”

  “I missed one?” She turned to her assembly of pieces.

  “Come,” he said. “You were marvelous! Who could get every single one correct?”

  “I should have.”

  He lifted a brow.

  “I know pots. I can’t get one wrong.”

  “It’s of no consequence.” He raised his hands.

  “It is to me.” She couldn’t stop her mind, her memory—already she was flipping through the Beijing pots, one by one. “Mr. Yu. Did you ever—pardon me for asking—did you ever make a blue-and-white rectangular flask, Yuan Dynasty? With cranes and peonies?”

  “No,” he said.

  Okay, she thought, that one’s safe. But the images continued to parade before her memory. “What about an an-hua-decorated white glazed bowl, incised with dragons, reign of Yongle?”

  “No.”

  “And a big broad-shouldered famille-rose jar, painted with chrysanthemums, that one, from the reign of Yongzheng?”

  “No again.” But now his long lantern face, cut in its folds and crevices, creased up in amusement as a light came into his eyes. “It sounds like you have talked to someone who’s seen the Wu Collection. Is it so? Are we thinking of the same one? More than seven hundred pieces?”

  The world seemed to rock a hundred eighty degrees. “Eight hundred,” she said before she could stop herself.

  “You know! You have seen it?”

  “No.” She hesitated. “Someone I know told me.”

  “Ah.”

  “What about you?” She turned it around. “Have you ever seen it?”

  “No. Wouldn’t that be the good fortune of three lifetimes! But even just hearing about it’s enough to make me so jealous my spittle’s three feet long.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Ei, the same thing one always hears, isn’t it so? It was hidden in the countryside and forgotten. Then discovered again, and sold. But no one knows who has it now. That’s why I was excited when you began to describe it! I admit it! I thought perhaps you had seen it.”

  “No,” she said, growing comfortable with her falsehood. “But I’d like to know more about it. The Wu Collection, you said?”

  “Yes, that’s how they call it.”

  “Where did it come from? Did someone have it hidden?”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I can try to find out, if you like.”

  “Thank you. I’m grateful.”

  “Your e-mail’s on your card?” He pulled it out and looked at it.'

  “Yes.” E-mail; of course he’d prefer e-mail. She’d seen a satellite dish on top of the little building too. “Thank you for checking into this. Let me know, please.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Potter Yu.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which one did I get wrong?”

  “Ah! Yes! I was too distracted by the stream of words. This one.” And he pointed to a miniature celadon vase in the archaic style of a bronze urn but shimmering, pale green. It bore the mark and period of Qianlong. A minor piece. And that was the first thing for which she kicked herself—that once again she’d failed to look as closely as she might have, precisely because it was modest.

  She had to remind herself that most of the pieces up in Beijing, some five hundred of the group in fact, were modest pieces, good pieces, no more. Dread cut through, a ripsawing cord in high wind. She ought to go back and check things again. Maybe she wasn’t even close to being finished. “You made this?” she said, picking up the celadon and spreading her fingers all around it.

  “I made it.”

  “It’s terrific,” she breathed. The truth was, modest or not, it had fooled her. Now that she knew, of course, she could feel it; the newness of it, the calculation of composition and glazes, the twenty-first-century science applied to every aspect of it. She had to be more careful. Focus better, go deeper, accept nothing but the real truth.

  A knock sounded then and the glass door pushed open. A man with a poor chin, a long, ropelike body, and an upsweep of black hair stepped in. “Ei,” he said. “Old Yu.”

  “Miss Fan,” Yu said, “meet Mr. Bai.”

  “Hello.”

  “My pleasure,” Bai said.

  If she had not already known by his slickly provincial style that he was an ah chan, she would have known when he made no move to produce a card. Ah chans used multiple names, changed numbers frequently. They moved among their wives. Business cards were not for them. “My pleasure too,” she said.

  “What brings you to Jingdezhen?” He was looking at her with undisguised curiosity, but that was normal—she was a foreign woman.

  She smiled. “As a porcelain person, I am always needing to learn more about pots.”
>
  “My feeling exactly,” he smiled, and then he and Yu switched over to Jiangxi dialect. She was able to follow only the faintest outlines. The man Bai was coming to pick something up. He was hoping Potter Yu had it ready for him. Something like that.

  Yu left the room and came back with a small box. He presented it to Bai with pleased formality. The younger man lifted the lid and a glow of pure happiness suffused his face.

  “Can I see?” she asked.

  “Of course.” Bai turned the open box toward her.

  She looked into it and almost lost her balance.

  It was a chicken cup.

  Oh, she would kill for this. It was perfect. Ineffably right, perfectly potted, it was executed with the light touch that looked so easy though it was so hard. The best thing was the warm, white glow of the clay, the Chenghua light perfectly reproduced. Oh, why can’t I have it? I want it. I’d be so good to it. “It’s devastating,” she said with deep appreciation. “It’s wonderfully good.”

  “Old Yu can really make a pot.”

  “That he can.” She watched Bai stare down at the cup with the slack-mouthed pleasure of love. He might have been looking down at a beautiful woman, arms and legs open. He had scored. Here was a thing that had the power to make him feel whole.

  She wondered what he planned to do with it. It seemed unlikely to be a money transaction, the acquisition of something to resell as a forgery. The chicken cup was too rare. No knowledgeable buyer would fall for it, as the whereabouts of those still known to exist could be verified with a few phone calls.

  No, this ah chan wanted the cup for himself. He loved it. She could tell.

  “Xingsi rongyi, shensi nan,” Bai said, To attain physical likeness is easy, to capture the spirit, hard. “That is what distinguishes Potter Yu.” He held the cup up to the light. “I have many books, you understand. I study them all the time. Now I have a cup I can study too.”

  So he was one of the would-be scholars. Among the ah chans, one always met those who were book hounds. They were frantic for learning. They were the ones always pestering you for catalog references and attributions. After any exchange, they were always the ones who stayed around for ten minutes of probing questions. And in return, they’d tell you who was making fakes. “Congratulations, Mr. Bai. It’s a wonderful purchase.”