A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  Though it was getting dark, the day was early for him. He had just come from his bed. What was more, he had an obscene amount of money in his pocket.

  He was holding himself differently. Was it not obvious? People were looking at him with respect. He was a new man now. He didn’t feel like Old Bai anymore.

  He covered the winding sidewalk along the bottom of the hill, marked by a stone wall. Up there, somewhere above all that lush foliage, was the Research Institute, where they dispensed with the history of porcelain in a series of desultory cases. Down here, the cars and trucks and buses honked through the street. Exhaust smoked up and joined the kiln grit, in the air for a thousand years. Bai swung his arms with his stride, happy to be walking.

  And then he was at the Perfect Garden. He pushed open the double doors and walked into the dim-lit dining room, to his friends, at their usual table. Beer, tea, and food were piled up in front of them. They raised their hands to him. “Emperor Bai!” he heard, Bai Huangdi. “Emperor Bai!” And he shook his own hands back to them, and let his smile of triumph light his face like the sun.

  They had sat on the runway for almost two hours when the pilot finally crackled on and said, with no explanation, that safety checks were complete and that they were tenth in line for takeoff.

  Michael sensed a light sweat break out all over him as he looked at his watch. He felt like he could melt in his seat. He could make it.

  By the time Lia was down to the last few hours, her heart was burning. She hadn’t heard from him. Apparently he didn’t even think he ought to say good-bye. She wanted to kick a hole in the wall, throw something out the window. Instead, she folded all her clothes in tight little squares and stuffed them in her suitcase. She couldn’t believe it. She had been so sure he’d call her. But why? Just because she felt something real with him and she wanted to go on with it, at least try, she couldn’t expect him to want the same. So he didn’t. He had a right to make that choice. That’s what memory rooms were for. They had doors that could be closed. Still. She looked at her silent phone and felt everything well up again. It wouldn’t have been so very hard to say good-bye with love.

  Despite him, outside of him, the irony was . . . she was changed. She felt like a different person, not quite newly minted but restirred. The composition of her cells was altered. She could see it in the mirror. It had been more than two days since she’d been with him, and still she was luminous, perversely so, tragically. Now here was the dress in her hands, the sleeveless, box-necked dress in sage silk.

  She dropped her clothes and zipped into it. Made for her, it hugged her all the way down. Oh, she was beautiful in it, with her hair only caught back, and if she wore high-heeled sandals—she looked at herself over her shoulder. She could see the truth and the anguish, the shimmering cloth against her body. Trying to be beautiful was just another form of forgery. The feeling of her and him was a forgery. Admit it. He didn’t want it. So I do need my tired old world, she thought, my maze, my rooms; I do. I’ll put him there. She took the dress off and told herself, let go of hope. Let it go now. But she felt the same, pulled by wanting. Delirious with it. It overwhelmed even her anger. She folded the dress on top of everything else and closed the suitcase.

  Then there was a knock on the door, polite, soft, insistent. First shock wiped every thought from her mind, then a smile formed inside her, deep down. That’s why he didn’t call, because he came. Hope was a river, bringing back optimism and acceptance and forgiveness. Thought could not begin to contain her. She yanked the dress out again, hurried back into it. The knock sounded again. “Just a minute!”

  She pulled the silk down over her hips and opened the door.

  Facing her was the concierge. “Miss Frank?”

  She thought she might sink all the way to the ocean floor. “Yes,” she said.

  “A package.” He handed her a small box. “From Mr. Stanley Pao.”

  “Thank you,” she said. He was gone.

  She went inside and opened it. When she lifted the lid her mouth went soft in surprise. It was Stanley’s copy of the chicken cup, the one she had watched Bai buy from Potter Yu. Ah, what genius. She held it up. It gave off a world of grace all its own. For you, read the card, with my regards. So sweet, she thought, her heart running out to Stanley. So kind. As if somehow the elder man knew.

  Because it wasn’t him at her door, the American man she couldn’t stop thinking about. It was this perfect little object. It was easy, profound, hoi moon, just like what she’d had with Michael. Had. Past tense. Let it go, she thought. She balanced the cup on the desk and curled up on the couch looking at it, eye level. It was immortal, whether six hundred years or six days old, the same. A thing perfect and still.

  Unlike her. She stood up and pressed her face to the window. The harbor below was a late-night dream of lights, the water glassy and reflective. She had a vision of herself floating down there, alone, safe, spread-eagled on a raft in calm water. Surrounded by lights. It was peaceful and water-silent. She remembered all the good of being alone, the opportunity. She thought of all her fakes back in New York.

  And here was the greatest of them all. She picked up her little consolation prize, the cup, her treasure, and packed it safe away in its box. There was kindness in the world after all.

  It wasn’t so many hours now until her flight. She clicked the room into darkness and crawled into bed, spreading her loose hair over the pillow behind her. She had given the thought of him all of herself that she could—though she left one hearing aid in, just in case the phone still rang. Now she had to try and sleep.

  Stanley prepared the documents. He would send them to San Francisco the next morning, via personal courier. He had a man he could trust. Not an ah chan; an employee. He paged through the documents one last time before putting them in the package. For some reason he stopped to look at the special visa issued by China. He had seen a few of these before. Usually it meant the government was selling off something it owned. Often, as in this case, there was an intermediary.

  Yet just as there were famed and noted fang gu artists in the world of pots, each of whom turned out his own distinctive style of reproduction, so there were known masters in the world of forged documents. One did not know their names, of course. They were known by the names of their quirks—the same way he had heard Miss Frank call the maker of that marvelous chicken cup the Master of the Ruffled Feather. Just as these document copiers became known by their peculiarities of lettering, shading, and border.

  Stanley leaned closer. He knew this artist. He was one of the document masters people talked about. He worked with a flawed inlay machine, and his documents always had a pale patch in the lower left corner.

  Stanley looked at the visa. There it was. The pale patch.

  A fake.

  So this sale wasn’t for the government at all. It was inauthentic, a private sale with fake paperwork.

  Yet this visa in front of him had only been needed to cross from China to Hong Kong. Stanley smiled to himself. This visa was never presented at that border. It would have been spotted. That meant the pots were not brought through openly. They were smuggled. By the ah chan Bai. And so very many of them. Stanley’s esteem for the man, despite everything, increased.

  And now the collection was in Hong Kong, legal, unimpeachable. Of course, Stanley thought, with the present tensions between the U.S. and China, if someone on the American side noticed this fake visa, in Customs, say, there might be a problem. More for diplomacy than for legality. Because if the Chinese government found out about this, they would most assuredly strike multiple postures demanding it back. It was just too big, too priceless; and matters between the countries too uneasy.

  Well. Stanley Pao slid the visa back into the stack of pages.

  He certainly would not be the one to mention it.

  He slipped into the lobby of the hotel after two A.M. He felt his chest singing with excitement. He rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor and walked in quick silenc
e down the brilliantly patterned carpet. It was late. Everything was hushed.

  He came to her door and knocked. The sound seemed to echo all the way down the wallpapered corridor. He waited. Nothing.

  He knocked again.

  Inside, Lia sat up in bed. Her hair was down. She got up in the twisted confusion of dreaming. She found the door by its little pinpoint of light that gave out onto the hall. She looked.

  Michael. Really? Was it really? His shoulders under his loose white shirt, the sleeves rolled up . . . now she knew she was dreaming. This was false. But his broad face leaned toward her through the peephole, his hand came up and knocked again.

  She opened the door. She stood behind it, pale, half lit by the shafting light from the hallway. Three steps and he was in the room, turning, looking for her. Who knows about me, she thought. The door clicked shut and they found their way to each other in the dark.

  CHINESE DYNASTIES AND REIGN TITLES

  Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC)

  Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220)

  Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties (220–581)

  Sui Dynasty (581–618)

  Tang Dynasty (618–907)

  Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907–960)

  Song Dynasty (960–1279)

  Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368)

  Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)

  Hongwu (1368–1398)

  Jianwen (1399–1402)

  Yongle (1403–1424)

  Hongxi (1425)

  Xuande (1426–1435)

  Zhengtong (1436–1449)

  Jingtai (1450–1456)

  Tianshun (1457–1464)

  Chenghua (1465–1487)

  Hongzhi (1488–1505)

  Zhengde (1506–1521)

  Jianjing (1522–1566)

  Longqing (1567–1572)

  Wanli (1573–1619)

  Taichang (1620)

  Tianqi (1621–1627)

  Chongzhen (1628–1644)

  Qing Dynasty (1644–1911)

  Shunzhi (1644–1661)

  Kangxi (1662–1722)

  Yongzheng (1723–1735)

  Qianlong (1736–1795)

  Jiaqing (1796–1820)

  Daoguang (1821–1850)

  Xianfeng (1851–1861)

  Tongzhi (1862–1874)

  Guangxu (1875–1908)

  Xuantong (1909–1911)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my editor, Jackie Cantor, a sage and caring guide who somehow, at every turn, made me choose the way myself. Thanks to my agent, Bonnie Nadell, for intelligence, grace and good humor at the helm.

  Mee-Seen Loong took me by the hand and led me into her world of porcelain. Her knowledge and love of pots, her adeptness in the intersecting subcultures surrounding them, and her endlessly interesting ideas about them educated and inspired me. My research also owes much to published scholarship, especially the work of Julian Thompson, Regina Krahl, Liu Xinyuan, and Wen C. Fong.

  To those in Hong Kong and Jingdezhen who talked to me about ah chans, thank you for your candor and for cracking the door to this underworld, just enough.

  I am grateful to the Morgan Library for allowing me to examine the 1913 correspondence between J. P. Morgan’s office in New York and F. H. McKnight in Peking, and to James Traub for first writing about this historical episode and then generously answering my questions.

  Dr. Joan Rothlein and Dr. Herb Needleman were of great help in researching lead poisoning. In matters related to pediatric hearing loss I am indebted to Beth Cardwell, M.D., and the Audiology department at Oregon Health Sciences University.

  For insight, ideas, and information, my gratitude to Fred Hill, Sabrina Ullman Mathews, Richard Herzfelder, Jason Tse, Nicolas Chow, Jon Conte, Marta Aragones, Lucy Metcalf, Jin Mei, Rone Tempest and Laura Richardson, Anthony Kuhn, Kemin Zhang, Chris Perkins, Nancy Beers, and Huang Zhifeng.

  A debt of inspiration is due to The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan Spence, “Funes, the Memorious” by Jorge Luis Borges, The Recognitions by William Gaddis, and especially The Art of Memory by Frances Yates.

  Ben and Luke, I could never have written this book without your generosity in releasing me to the task. For everything else, my first and last thanks are for Paul Mones.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NICOLE MONES was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for her first novel, Lost in Translation, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

  Also by Nicole Mones

  Lost in Translation

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF NICOLE MONES

  A CUP OF LIGHT

  “Page-turning intrigue . . .” —The Oregonian

  “Unconventional and intriguing . . . [Mones] generates real suspense—moving cinematically from character to character and place to place—all the while deftly sketching the intricacies of Chinese porcelain and the world of imitators and smugglers that surround it.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “American Nicole Mones has worked and traveled in China for more than twenty years, and her knowledge of the country illuminates every page of A Cup of Light, her second novel . . . Mones weaves . . . many threads into a seamless whole, using pure and brilliant prose.”

  —BookPage

  “A pleasurable read . . . a page-turner.” —Winston-Salem Journal

  “Well-paced . . . intriguing . . . A CUP OF LIGHT has the rare distinction of bringing together an entertaining sequence of just-suspenseful-enough events with writing that is both spare and lyrical.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A story full of mysteries yet revelatory in its treatment of human nature.” —Eugene Weekly

  LOST IN TRANSLATION

  “A gripping story . . . An engrossing narrative of adventure and desire.” —San Franciso Chronicle

  “An adventurous and romantic tale . . . A remarkable first novel.”

  —Dominick Dunne

  “A satisfying romp through alien landscapes: China, the past, human love.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “The author . . . conveys with poignant élan the trance of unrequited love for the exotic.” —The New Yorker

  “A pleasurable, observant and exciting paean for China.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A gripping yarn with an exotic backdrop. It’s also a luscious love story, a political thriller, and a close-up of a China that is changing almost day by day.” —Associated Press

  A CUP OF LIGHT

  A Delta Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Delacorte Press hardcover edition published April 2002

  Delta trade paperback edition / May 2003

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Photo of porcelain cup courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Mrs. Richard E. Linburn Gift, 1987. (1987.85) Photograph by Sheldan Collins. Photograph © 1988 The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2002 by Nicole Mones

  Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001053782

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33398-2

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