A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  Finally the man turned. He handed Bai the papers. “You can go,” he said in Mandarin. The men were locking the rear freezer doors.

  “Good.” Bai accepted the papers and folded them into his pocket, as if the matter were casual, insignificant. Silently, he was screaming in jubilation and gratitude. He would make so many offerings and spend many hours on his knees when he got back home.

  He waited a few minutes in the entrance lane and then finally pulled onto the expressway, winding down through the new territories. It was suddenly greener, more rural, its grass-and-shrub–covered crags dotted with electric towers. His numb happiness was giving way to excitement. The pointed, emerald hills, the blue sea and dome of sky, all of it fairly pulsated with money. His now, success.

  He sailed through a tunnel, a dark hurtling cocoon around his white truck, and then exploded out again into the light. The brilliant light of day. The road unrolled before him. He flew over a massive white suspension bridge with the sea far below. Container ships streamed silent on the blue horizon. Bai felt a part of life at last, here, in Hong Kong. He was at the center of the world.

  Lia lay completely at rest. He slept next to her. She felt she was floating outside time and memory, no different than the light on the tile roofs, the lacy pattern of the leaves. She wanted to remember this feeling.

  Because soon she would have to get up and go to the airport.

  He stirred, opened his eyes, lit up at the sight of her. His hands came down and scooped her up from below, squeezed her. “I feel so good,” she said, and wrapped her body around his, hard and tight. He curved around her in return, and they lay, and slept, and woke and talked again.

  Finally they got up and climbed in the shower. They were quiet. They washed each other, then stood together under the hot jets of water. Her hair was loose, streaming down. She wanted to stand there forever.

  But finally she stepped back from him and moved him under the water until his back was comfortable against the shower wall. She took him in her right hand. He protested, but she touched the middle finger of her other hand to his lips. “Just my hand,” she said, taking the soap. “Let me watch you.”

  She held his gaze the whole time. With a flash of shame she saw herself claiming him, just to show him she could, just to take him—there, she thought, watching his eyes lose their focus under the hot water, that’s it. But when he overflowed, her excitement was hot-crossed with the raw wound of her leaving, so that when he doubled over against her she burst into tears—hot, indecently vulnerable tears. And it was he, still gasping, who had to hold her and comfort her as she cried. “It’s all right.” He wrapped himself around her.

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “I know.”

  She leaned against him, she let herself go, all her weight, and he stood still as a tree and held her until she’d quieted. Then he turned her under the water and rinsed her face of tears.

  They went out and dressed and she put her suitcase by the door. The sun was setting. “Lia?” he said. He walked over to her and touched her ears, to see if her hearing aids were in, to see if she’d heard him. They weren’t. She hadn’t.

  He knows me already, she thought. She caught his hand and kissed it and pointed to the little plastic buttons, which still lay on the table. He brought them and pressed them in. “Is that right?”

  “Not quite.” She twisted them into place. “But thank you.”

  He smoothed back her damp-braided hair. She smiled at him, but there was something resolute in her now. She was leaving.

  They found a cab on Jiaodaokou. “We’re early now,” Michael said. “We have time. Let’s stop at the place on Houhai Lake. You’ll see, your pots are gone. You’ll feel better.” His fingers were twined through hers.

  “Thanks,” she said softly, and gave directions to the driver. When they pulled into the outer court, the sight of them brought the guard to his feet, crackling down the pages of his newspaper.

  “We just want to go in for a minute,” she called to him.

  He looked at her, still blinking surprise.

  She knew she wasn’t supposed to be here anymore. “I just want to look,” she said.

  He waved them past and went back to his paper.

  The two of them ran across the footbridge into the house, through the rooms, and across the back court. Up the steps on the other side, she clicked open the glass-paned doors and flipped on the lights.

  The room looked so vast in its emptiness, nothing but scraps, bits of brown paper, wood shavings, and the dust outlines of the crates. This she would also remember. A person could have so much in front of her one moment, and nothing the next.

  “Are you ready?” he said.

  “Ready.” She gave him her hand.

  In his apartment over the racecourse in Happy Valley, Stanley Pao took the call on his cell phone. He was sitting in his back room, the door closed against the humid air and his adored Pekingese dogs. In here the air-conditioning was precisely calibrated. Grouped around him, on the floor, covering the shelves and every available surface, were priceless porcelains and reproductions of priceless porcelains—indistinguishable from each other. “Wei,” he said calmly, one hand resting on his protuberant midsection.

  “Mr. Pao,” the voice said. Stanley made an instantaneous shift to full attention. This was not a voice he knew. “A shipment consigned to you has arrived.”

  “Ah, is that so? And the address?” He reached for a pen and paper, wrote it down. “I’ll be there—” He stopped, looked at his computer monitor on the side table; the racing finals were scrolling down. All today’s bets had summed up adequately. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said. “Accepted?”

  “Accepted,” the man answered.

  Pao hung up. He dialed a number he had been given. “Wei,” he heard. It was Gao Yideng. This was the tycoon’s direct line.

  “Wei,” Pao answered politely. “Your stray dog has come home.”

  “Ah, good,” he heard the man say softly, and they both hung up.

  In the back of the taxi, they leaned against each other. She felt she had exhausted every possible human feeling with him. All she could do was rest on his shoulder. She would remember it just like this, she thought, the quiet at the end of it. The silence before saying good-bye.

  They crossed the north end of Beijing and turned onto the Jichang Expressway, which soared through the high-rise forest to the airport. It wasn’t until they were almost to the terminal, right outside the departure gate, that she pulled back and looked at him. His eyes were soft. She had never seen him look so defenseless.

  “Okay,” she said. She gathered up her bags. He moved to get out but she stopped him. She leaned over everything, her satchel, her suitcase, and her computer, and kissed him one more time, final. “Stay here,” she said. “Keep the cab.”

  He nodded. They both knew it was better. She got out, shouldered her stuff, turned around, and walked in. He watched her. He waited until she was all the way in, then asked the driver to go back to town. They wheeled onto Jichang. Twilight had faded. The expressway unrolled out in front of them. He felt empty and dense, a dark star, as if he could sink right through the seat. His right hand moved to the empty leather where she had been a few minutes ago. After a while he put his head back and closed his eyes. It was hard to believe that a couple of weeks ago he had not even met her.

  In the airport, she went straight to the women’s rest room. She squeezed into a toilet stall with all her things and threw the latch. Then she leaned her forehead against the painted metal divider and cried as long and as hard as she had ever cried in her life.

  When she came out she winced at how awful she looked: Her eyes were puffy, her nose red, her hair undone. Errant strands flew past her waist. She covered her eyes with her big German sunglasses and left everything else. It was all she could do to walk out of there.

  She made it first to the Immigration line. But she didn’t want to leave the country, that was the
problem. She wanted a parallel world in which she would not get on the plane but would turn around and go directly back to his room, and knock, and tell him that she wasn’t willing to leave. She wouldn’t go. And if he did not care for her he would have to tell her so right to her face. This started tears again. Her turn came and she pushed her sunglasses tight against her nose and walked up to the booth.

  The Immigration agent took her passport, entered a few strokes, and then stared at the computer. He hit another key. “Step to the side, please,” he said calmly.

  What is this, she thought, but she did it.

  Instantly a uniformed woman was there. “Miss Frank?” she said in good English. “This way please.”

  Lia, almost a head taller, followed the woman off the concourse and into a small side office. She felt half out of her body. In the office, behind the desk, sat a flat-headed man with a short neck but quick, penetrating eyes. She was seated across from him.

  “I’m Curator Li of the First Beijing Antiquities Museum.” He slid a card across the wood tabletop toward her. He also looked hard at her. No wonder, she thought, with her face swollen and her hair bedraggled. “Your name came up in the computer. You entered the country to look at art. Correct?”

  “Relatively,” she said. “Relatively correct.”

  He looked at her. “You are a high-level porcelain expert.”

  “Not really—“”

  “What have you been doing in China?”

  “Looking at art.” She knew to stick to the script.

  “Where?”

  Where? she thought. Where? “In museums.”

  He let his eyes rest speculatively on her, then dropped them to some papers in front of him. “I see you are booked on a flight departing in an hour. I would hate for you to miss it.”

  “Me too.” Inside, time and the world stopped while she screened rapidly for her best card. Gao, of course. She needed a private minute to use her phone.

  She pulled her sunglasses off and laid them on the table. Tears still oozed from her eyes.

  He started. “Miss Frank, are you all right?”

  “No. I received bad news today.”

  “Oh.” He looked uncomfortable. She was really crying now. She didn’t say anything, so finally he spoke again. “What sort of news?”

  “A family member passed on,” she managed.

  “Oh.” There followed a long, disconcerting silence. He pulled out a handkerchief, which she refused. “Who?” he said.

  “My father,” she improvised. In fact her father was still alive, as far as she knew.

  “Oh,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you.” She crumpled again. “Mr. Li,” she said, “may I go wash my face?”

  He hesitated only a second. “Of course,” he said. He looked over his shoulder. “It’s in the hall.”

  She stepped quickly into the hallway and into the bathroom. She pounded out Gao’s private number. Be there.

  “Wei,” he answered.

  Yes. “Mr. Gao, it’s Lia Frank. I need help.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the airport. I’ve been detained by a man named Li, a curator with the First Beijing Antiquities Museum. He knows about me. He wants to know what pots I’ve been looking at in China. They won’t let me through Immigration. I’m—“”

  “Please say no more,” Gao said, concealing his anger almost perfectly. “Do not worry. It will be taken care of at once. Accept my thousand pleas and pardon this gross inconvenience.”

  “Mei shi,” she rebuked his politeness, It’s nothing.

  “No,” he said, rebuking her back, “it’s terrible. Just await me for a minute or two.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and they hung up. She thought he was joking, a minute or two, but it had not been very much longer than that when she stepped back into the room and Li asked her if she felt better. She said yes, and then his phone was ringing.

  “Wei,” he answered shortly, but his annoyance turned quickly to awe. “Vice Minister Pan,” he said wonderingly. He had never spoken to anyone of so high a rank. “Who? Oh yes, Vice Minister, I have her here now. I’m asking her some—what’s that? Oh yes. Yes, sir. At once, sir.” He clicked off his phone.

  “You had better go,” he said to Lia Frank, just a trace of irritation and lost face breaking through his control. “Your flight will be boarding.”

  “Thank you.” She stood and gathered up her things before he had a chance to change his mind.

  “It’s too sad about your father.”

  “Yes, it is. Thank you.”

  She backed out of the room and ran down the long corridor toward the gates. She felt almost numb. Her phone rang. “Wei,” she answered it.

  “Miss Fan,” said Gao. “Everything’s resolved?”

  “Yes. A thousand thanks.”

  “Please! You must not thank me. Again I apologize for the inconvenience.”

  “That’s nothing.” She could feel herself smiling.

  “No. And again my compliments on your work. It has not been easy. Pure gold proves its worth in a fire, you know.”

  “That’s kind of you,” she said, surprised.

  “Level road,” he said.

  “The same.” She turned it off and looked up; yes, they were about to board. Now she was really leaving, it was over. Still, everything about her felt different, her skin, her eyes, her cells. She felt tall and beautiful, miserable with love. She pushed the sunglasses up over her red-rimmed eyes. There was the gate to Hong Kong, before her. People were getting on.

  19

  In Hong Kong that evening, in a warehouse, Bai waited by the forty crates. He had sold the frozen chickens and stored the truck elsewhere. Naturally he didn’t want Stanley Pao to see his truck.

  He heard the knock and crossed the concrete floor to open the door. There stood the plump, perfectly dressed art dealer, just as he had been described, full white hair, slicked straight back. “Mr. Bai?” the old gentleman said.

  “Yes, Mr. Pao. Please.” He gestured, and Stanley Pao walked past him, a magnet to iron, straight to the rows of wooden crates.

  “May I open one?” His voice was casual over his well-tailored shoulder.

  “Of course,” Bai answered. He held out the manifest.

  But Stanley signaled for him to wait. He didn’t want to see it yet. He wanted to gamble on one.

  He let his eyes roam. Eventually he settled on a particular crate at the edge of his field of vision. He walked toward it and pulled it open.

  Inside, a tight nest of wood shavings. Good packing. The old-fashioned kind. He closed his eyes, arms extended, and then followed his will down into the crate, burrowing with both hands. A box called out to him, settled into his fingers. He pulled it out.

  He put it gently on the floor and tipped up its lid. Oh. The light showed in his face, reflected. So hoi moon. He lifted it gently out of its silk, just a few inches, never taking it far from safety, just to tip it and turn it, a large doucai jardiniere, incandescently painted in emerald, royal blue, and rusty tangerine. Mark and period of Qianlong.

  He replaced it securely in its box and reburied it in the wood shavings. He appreciated the chance to have his face turned away for a few seconds—to regain the diffident control of his age and his position. How long since he’d seen something so beautiful? “I’ll see that list now,” he said, turning to Bai.

  He took it and scanned it, flipping the pages. He could feel a smile growing on his face. What a firmament. “The bank is Victoria Shanghai,” he said to Bai. He continued reading. Then he removed a card from an inner pocket. “These are your account numbers,” he said, handing it to Bai. He never looked up from the page. He half listened as Bai called the bank to verify. He saw the excitement that Bai was quite unable to control upon hearing his own balance.

  “All is well?” he inquired when Bai had closed his phone.

  “Excellent.”

  “Thank you for your service.�
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  “To you the same.” As soon as the ah chan had politely backed out the door, he stopped to dial up Pok Wen, the manager of the Luk Yu. “Friend Bai!” Pok Wen roared with the crafted gaiety that was his job. “How are you? Does fortune favor you today?”

  Bai smiled in the dark linoleum hallway—there it was, the door to the outside. He pushed it open. The soft evening bath of Hong Kong wafted over him. It was the heaviest air in the world. It was pulled down, ripened, rotted just right by the power of cash. “Yes, Manager Pok, I am favored.” He laughed. “Start soaking the abalone for me!”

  Jack Yuan received a call from his import agent as he stood in his lodge room at Crater Lake, Oregon, looking out through a wall of glass at the dark cascading outlines of mountains, the sky blazing with stars. He liked being up this early, in the dark. The edge of the lake was a sheer wall of granite, hurtling down past a silent mirror of black water.

  It was the perfect sight to him. He came here to be alone, to drink coffee in the morning in big pine-pole chairs on the deck, to be where no one expected to find him. Sometimes Anna came with him, but this time she had not. And yet still the evening before he had seen someone he knew—a boisterous redheaded gentleman vintner from Santa Rosa, retired from early days in Silicon Valley and consumed with the pursuit of wine. He had been there with a wealthy gaggle of other grape-growers, and they all ate, and drank, and inside himself Jack was thinking: I could never spend my time thinking about wine. I could never pose at living in some country valley. I could never be white. I could never be them.

  But he had his own piece of the universe coming, his porcelain. And finally he’d escaped back up here to the silence of his room and the magnificence of the deal he’d just completed, and he had slept. His phone went off. He flipped it up and glanced at the caller-ID line. Only a few calls were routed to this cell number. This was one. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Yuan. Ashok Navra.”

  “Yes, Ashok.”

  “Your shipment of Chinese porcelain is in Hong Kong. I’ve talked to the consignee there, a Stanley Pao. He says the pieces are being repacked for airfreight now.” And Jack had felt a daze, talking to him, thanking him, signing off, looking out at the edges of dawn and the lake and the receding forms of glacier-scrubbed rock. The money was transferred. The art would be in his hands in a few days. Before he went downstairs he left a message for the curator he had hired to help him sort things out and make decisions, telling her to be ready to start in four days’ time. He wanted to know exactly what he had. And then he wanted to keep this collection very, very private.