The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  ‘Qian Ma!’ she calls. The old servant appears, a pitcher and basin balanced on her tray. ‘The – the picture,’ Yuliang says shakily.

  ‘Which picture?’

  ‘The picture,’ Yuliang says, pointing. ‘The Shi Tao. How long has it been gone?’

  Qian Ma sucks tooth. ‘Why, the man just came for it on Wednesday.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘The man who was sent here to fetch it,’ Qian Ma says. Quite slowly; as though Yuliang is an idiot. ‘The man the master said to expect.’

  Wednesday, Yuliang thinks. Wednesday. For a moment her scattered thoughts can’t even place the day. Then she remembers: Wednesday was their journey to the gardens. A trip Zanhua had made seem like a last-moment impulse. It’s only now that Yuliang realizes he didn’t notify anyone else about it. No runner to the docks, no call placed through to his office. He must have notified them in advance.

  Stricken, she stares at the wall. ‘What – what did he look like?’

  ‘The master?’ Qian Ma says, with exaggerated surprise.

  ‘No, no. The man.’

  Qian Ma, savoring Yuliang’s frustration, ponders a good twenty seconds. ‘Big,’ she says finally. ‘Strange haircut. No queue. But not one of those ocean-devil styles either. More like he’d done it himself.’

  The Hall manservant. Shaken, Yuliang touches the wall again. The empty space before her is all the evidence she could need that Zanhua has kept his word, that she will stay. And yet, staring at the blank expanse, what she feels is not relief, but grief over the loss of what she now realizes was a little daily miracle for her. A small wonder of ash, water, and brush. It’s worth more than your whole life, from start to finish, Qian Ma had said, and at this moment Yuliang fully believes this.

  ‘Lady?’ The amah’s tone deflates the title of all deference.

  Yuliang tears her gaze away. ‘Yes?’

  ‘This tray is heavy on my old arms.’

  Yuliang holds Qian Ma’s rheumy eyes for a moment. And it’s in that moment that she senses that something else has changed as well: she has finally moved beyond the scope of the old woman’s spite. Not that Qian Ma has stopped feeling it. Simply that now, in this new and Shi Tao–less order, it has ceased to have relevance.

  ‘Yes,’ Yuliang says cautiously. ‘I mean, go. Go, but come back immediately. After you’ve filled those for Master Zanhua, go and heat water for me.’

  The weathered face furrows further. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Water,’ Yuliang says. ‘Hot water. Lots and lots of it.’

  She doesn’t need to elaborate, not to a mere servant. She does anyway. Just to hear herself say it: ‘I think,’ she says, ‘I shall take a bath.’

  16

  ‘Salt Guild dinner,’ Zanhua says with a groan a week later, having arrived home to find an invitation waiting in the hall. ‘It’s bad enough that they all pretend to care for me now that General Sun is back.’

  ‘You should go,’ Yuliang chides from the doorway. ‘You have a duty.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘To – to the nation,’ she says, waving vaguely. ‘If you won’t accept their money, at least don’t insult their food.’

  ‘It’s not their food, Yuliang.’ He snorts. ‘It’s paid for by funds all but stolen from my own office.’

  ‘But how will it look? It’s the third trade dinner you’ve refused.’

  Which is true: it’s the third time in three weeks Zanhua has declined an invitation from one of the groups he polices. And it worries her. For while she welcomes Zanhua’s growing attentions – almost as much (it should be said) for their own sake, as for the continued proof they offer of her place here – she is also fully aware of how tenuous his own place is in the porous hierarchy of Wuhu’s business world. Yuliang knows these men he’s snubbing – all too well, in some cases. She knows how ruthlessly they can act. The Hall has feasted politicians who then fell from grace so fast that a month later they were hiding from Godmother’s debt collectors.

  ‘What’s the problem, little Yu?’ Zanhua is asking. ‘Want me out of the house already?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Good. I brought you something. This is the periodical I told you about.’

  Yuliang takes the magazine. ‘New Youth?’ she reads slowly.

  ‘Good. Yes.’

  A small flush of triumph. But Yuliang’s attention turns quickly to the artwork on the cover. It shows two strong hands stretching across a giant globe to clasp together. One is slightly darker, callused and muscled like a peasant’s. Curious, her eyes home in on the small artist’s chop below the logo. Of course she can’t yet read it. She contemplates asking Zanhua, but he’s already striding to his office.

  Sighing, she sets the journal down, giving it one last, faintly envious stroke with her own hand, which (she can’t help but notice), looks small, and oddly vulnerable by contrast.

  Zanhua dines in the next night as well, and breakfasts late both days, displaying an almost rebellious leisure in his meals, his talk, his plans. They live as Yuliang sometimes imagines newlyweds in exotic places like New York, Shanghai, and Paris live: eating, talking, retreating often to his bedroom to make love. He touches her frequently as he reviews her writing, brushes hair from her eyes, dusts lost lashes from her cheek. Yuliang still rarely reciprocates such gestures. But bit by bit, she finds herself sharing with him not only her day’s work but the small thoughts that occur in his absence. She talks about Qian Ma’s latest superstitions: ‘She thinks Western cars have evil spirits in them!’ About an etching of an English factory; ‘Was this what you mean by labor and capital?’ About a foreign woman she has seen whose hands and feet seemed almost as small as her own: ‘Are you sure they don’t bind them?’ He shook his head: ‘Positive. But some of them do bind their waists.’

  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 parti
cular. 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…