The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  ‘You are the last woman I’d call a fool.’

  Looking into his dark eyes she senses something tightening between them. ‘Tell me,’ she manages, indicating the glittering river. ‘How – how could you carve something this dark and rich, this complex?’

  He squints toward the Sorbonne, thinks a moment. ‘I’d center it around that dome. And have that gargoyle over there positioned on the left, as though it were about to fly over and shadow the whole city.’ He frowns. ‘Although getting those shadows in at night, in wood – that would be very difficult.’

  ‘So why not just paint it?’ Yuliang asks, honestly baffled. ‘Wouldn’t that be easier – and really more beautiful, in the end?’

  ‘That’s the point,’ he says firmly. ‘Beauty in art can be used to mask truth. False but beautiful images are too often used to distract us from dangerous realities.’

  Again Wu Ding’s voice drifts into her thoughts: Artists are after life’s reflections, not life itself.

  ‘Have I offended you?’ Xudun asks, misinterpreting her silence.

  ‘I – I was just thinking of Li Bai. He died chasing beautiful but false images.’

  He smiles. ‘The moon’s reflection.’

  ‘He truly thought the moon was underwater,’ she says, a little defensively. ‘At least, that’s what my uncle told me.’

  ‘And China lost its greatest poet. You’ve just illustrated my point.’ He toasts the moon, then hands back the flask. Yuliang takes it.

  ‘What if Li Bai was a great poet because he chased life’s reflections?’ she asks slowly. ‘If he’d spent all his days writing only about ugly truths, perhaps no one would have wanted to read him.’

  ‘What people want to read isn’t always what’s best for them.’

  ‘But can you make them read what they don’t want to read?’

  ‘You explain to them that it’s for the greater good.’

  ‘And if that fails?’

  Xudun sweeps the flask back, in a movement both abrupt and unexpected. ‘You take away other options.’

  His face seems suddenly hard, as though he – like the Gothic hawks and taloned serpents of the great naves – were chiseled from stone. He drinks again, his strong neck etched against the darkness. ‘Your turn, Mademoiselle Pan. Paint this for me.’ He waves a hand at the view.

  Madame, Yuliang thinks reflexively. But the thought’s like a little fish that leaps once and is gone. ‘I’d use thick swatches of vine black, ultramarine. Phthalo blue. Maybe a little like Monet’s paintings of that English river – what is it? The Thames. But my Seine would be different, I think.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘A silver swirl down the center. The color of the moon.’

  He lifts a brow. ‘The moon underwater.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says defiantly. ‘But I’d lay it on thickly. Perhaps even knife it.’

  ‘Knifing,’ he says admiringly. ‘I like the sound of that.’

  His approval sparks a small burst of pleasure. ‘A fauvist technique, really. But I’ve used it a lot recently. It adds texture. In this case I’d knife from that building to… there.’ She runs her palm over the scenery, smoothing it like some vast, windblown sheet. Inadvertently – because she’s too close; because of the vodka; certainly not because she plans to (does she?) – she ends up brushing his shoulder. It’s an innocuous enough contact at first. But as her hand remains, white and limp against his shoulder, the gesture sheds any resemblance to chance or accident. And by the time he’s covered it with his own, it is something else entirely.

  Yuliang stands completely still for a moment, feeling not only his warm fingers but the moment’s vast significance through its shimmering strangeness. Tentatively, she strokes his lip, where the beer foam had been earlier. I cannot do this, she thinks. I must…

  But by that point she’s already on her toes, reaching up. And when she kisses him it’s with as little hesitation as she’d felt taking his arm, sharing her table. Calling his name: ‘Xudun,’ she says, against his lips.

  And then his big arms are around her.

  Yuliang tastes his tongue, feels the vast land of his back. She strains toward him; she would pour herself into him if she could. It’s just his skin, his warm skin, keeping her out…

  Only when the cathedral’s great bell chimes does she pull back.

  ‘What –’ he begins.

  ‘Wait.’ She claps a hand over his mouth, loath to have the moment broken.

  ‘What will we do?’ he asks through her fingers, at last.

  ‘Wait,’ she repeats. (I can’t I can’t.) ‘Let me think.’ But her mind feels as dense and heavy as the sound still reverberating through the old stones. Don’t think.

  ‘We’ll go home,’ she says at last.

  He blinks again. ‘To China?’

  ‘No. Home to my studio.’

  They make the trip to rue St. Denis in half the time it normally would take, their steps quick and matched, tight with purpose. They don’t touch on the street. But he is hard behind her as they take the four flights to her room, and his hands are on her hips as they reach her floor. He’s kissing her neck as she turns the key in the lock. When the door opens they fall inside together, landing half sitting, half kneeling on the paint-splotched floor.

  He is frantic at first, and shy, and touchingly unschooled. He fumbles with her blouse; she furiously strips it off. When he cautiously runs his fingers over the sheer fabric of her undershirt, Yuliang yanks the garment up to her chin. It’s only when he pulls her skirt up that she stops him, for it is her only one. ‘Wait,’ she tells him again. And with unfailing fingers she frees the four hooks from their blind eyelets.

  They clamber out of their underthings, and then at last they are naked, and he leans over and takes her face in his hands. ‘I want you to know,’ he says, very seriously, ‘it is all right. If you tell me you can’t.’

  Sweet boy, she thinks. ‘All right.’

  His face falls. ‘You – you don’t want to?’

  ‘No,’ she says, and wraps her arms around his neck. ‘I know that it is all right.’

  Though she doesn’t know it’s all right – she doesn’t know it at all. (Don’t think.) There is no trace, in fact, amid the aching turmoil that now fills her, of right or wrong. Of caution, or duty, or regret. There is simply a need – entirely new to her, and searing, and – the painting – far, far too true to deny.

  Yuliang takes Xudun’s hand, strokes the strong, hard fingers for a moment. Then she leads him across the room.

  On the cot, unexpectedly comes a tremulous confusion. Not because Yuliang doesn’t know what to do, but because the things she’s always done – all those small acts and moves and murmurs – fail her. Because every bed act she’s ever learned seems so utterly insufficient. She could, she thinks (kissing his lips, his big chin, the pulsing point in his neck, swallow him), bit by bit. She could sap him of his life, like the voracious Fifth Wife in The Golden Plum Vase. For the first time she understands some of the things done to her in the past, the bitings and the bindings. The occasional, dreaded burns. It isn’t always cruelty, she suddenly realizes. Sometimes true desire bears a semblance to cruelty. Sometimes it’s too strong even for skin… She pulls away for a moment, disturbed by her own longings.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Propping herself on an elbow, she tries to smile.

  ‘Come here,’ he breathes, warmly. And finally, in that moment, the last of her hesitations melts away.

  She lies still as he traces the whorl of her ear with his tongue, letting the lush agony wash over her until she can no longer stand it. She traces each of his eyelids, runs her lips from his neck to the small mouth of his navel, and then down further as he groans again. She studies it, this strange, stiff stalk that she has catered to, slaved for, and feared for so many years. Astonishingly hasn’t really known at all. Or rather, she knows the obvious things; things taught by nuns and books and diagrams. She knows it well enough to pleasure it,
to paint it. But no matter what her various teachers have said about it, and no matter how abstractly Yuliang has considered it, she has never before seen it this way. Not even (she realizes, flinching slightly) with Zanhua.

  Guilt, however, lingers only for a moment, until she looks up once more at Xudun. She waits until his breathing slows again. Then, slowly, she moves back over him. ‘Open your eyes,’ she commands, reveling in her strange and new sense of power. ‘Look at me.’

  She lowers herself onto him gently, taking stock of the sensations. Of the sheer novelty of the way they meet here, then here, then here. As they begin to move together joy just nips at her at first, barely noticed. But then somehow it’s bigger than she is; she is gritting her teeth against it. It can’t, she thinks as he arches and gasps beneath her. There can’t be more.

  But there is. There’s a moment of shivering silence – an enormous inner breath – not unlike the emptiness she’d felt atop Notre Dame. And then she’s falling, tumbling down to him, Washing Silk Woman hurling herself into a surge of skin and fluid and rippling muscle. There are waves and then more waves. She is washed onto his chest, astonished. And when the tears fall, she doesn’t question them. She barely feels them at all.

  34

  The next day breaks with the bright vengeance of early summer. Sun pours through the small, square window overlooking black rooftops and pink chimney pots, bouncing off the cracked red tiles of the floor. It pounds Yuliang’s eyelids open; and groggily, she takes in her tiny, top-floor alcove: the little stove, the chipped washbasin and pitcher. The piles of books, papers, and sketches. The untouched canvas against the wall. It is the latter that sparks the first wave of panic. The salon, she thinks. I still haven’t even started.

  Then a leg moves against her thigh, and the rest of it comes back. Bolting upright, she sees Xudun in bed beside her. For an instant there is there nothing other than a sheer and shocked horror. Then he opens his eyes. Smiling sleepily, he rolls over and wraps her in his arms.

  And for one of the very few times in Yuliang’s life, her mind goes almost as blank as her waiting canvas.

  It is late afternoon by the time Yuliang finally manages to push him out the door. Afterwards she straightens up distractedly; making the tiny bed, sweeping crumbs from their lunch off the floor. When she at last sits down between her easel and her mirror – still naked, in her brightly patterned old armchair – the light coming through the window is tinged with garnet. Taking stock of her image, Yuliang sees she is too: she looks pink and dreamy, touched by the day’s reflections. Her eyes ache from lack of sleep, her muscles from stairs and new exertions. There is a familiar and yet entirely new soreness between her legs, and even noticing it is enough to tempt her to race into the street after him. And yet this, she knows, would be disastrous. Almost as disastrous, in fact, as allowing herself to truly contemplate what’s just happened. (Don’t think.)

  Instead, she forces her focus to the canvas before her. She lets all her unmade decisions, her confused affections, her unfinished letter (Beloved husband) hover beyond her thoughts, like white moths tapping at her happiness. She will think about it all later. After the painting’s painted. And after it’s dried, wrapped, delivered to the salon. After she meets Xudun again in one week, back at the Café de Cluny, and has had a chance to think away from these paint-thinner fumes.

  For today, there is just this: her new-old skin. Her blank canvas. Mirror Girl, watching her with languid interest. Arms folded behind her head, Yuliang takes in the lazy eyes, the flushed cheeks. The sated flesh. Humming to herself, she reaches for her palette. She will, she decides, paint herself just like this: in her lush chair, her skin the color of a summer sunset. A triad of color: peach and gold and rose pink. A neutral violet for unity and control – qualities she’ll examine, for today, on the canvas alone.

  PART EIGHT

  The Wives

  To yield, I have learned, is to come back again.

  Taoist proverb

  35. Nanjing, 1936

  ‘Before we begin,’ Xu Beihong announces, ‘I’d like to remind everyone that Teacher Pan’s seventh solo exhibition is in two weeks.’ He turns to Yuliang. ‘It’s at the Shanghai Exhibition Space again, isn’t it?’

  Yuliang nods. Her old friend and mentor takes a sip of his coffee before setting it down with a grimace. He drinks it like a rich man now: as black as pitch, as black as crow, made fresh each morning by a fetching young secretary. Despite his attentive tutelage, however, the girl (at least, according to Beihong) still doesn’t make it strong enough for his liking.

  ‘Please mark the date in your calendars,’ he concludes.

  Yuliang surveys her fellow teachers. Only one, a fellow oils instructor, has actually written down the date. Other reactions reflect a familiar spectrum of emotions from indifference to barely stifled insecurity. All, that is, but that of the calligraphy instructor, Shu Meiyi: her broad face reveals something close to outright malice. It’s a look Yuliang encounters fairly often from Teacher Shu and others of her plain, disgruntled colleagues. I don’t like you, it says. And: It’s not fair. And as intended, it hurt her – at least in the beginning. When Yuliang was still naive enough to believe things might change. She knows better now.

  Vaffuncuolo, she thinks, and even considers accompanying the insult with its peculiarly gratifying hand gesture. She satisfies herself instead with snapping open her sterling silver cigarette case, a farewell gift from fellow students when she left Rome.

  ‘Ah, excellent. May I?’ Xu Beihong extends his hand. As dean of arts at National Central University the diminutive artist can easily afford his own smokes these days. As the old saying goes, though, rivers and mountains may be malleable; only man’s nature is eternally hard to overcome. It’s a lesson, Yuliang thinks (extending both cigarettes and her lighter) that she seems destined to keep learning. And relearning.

  Bending toward the flame, Xu Beihong puffs appreciatively. ‘Now, for the first item…’

  The meeting begins with the usual lineup of trivia and complaints: the tardy relinquishment of a classroom by the one o’clock seminar for the two o’clock. The dire need for easels, paints, and models. Xu Beihong uses this opportunity to point out proudly that the plaster David he brought from France has been refurbished and will be on display in the Fine Arts Library for students to sketch. ‘Should the current outcry over his loins continue,’ he adds delicately, ‘we’ll consider covering them. Perhaps.’ He clears his throat. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘As long as we’re on coverage,’ interjects the classics teacher, ‘I was wondering if anyone else would consider a dress code.’

  ‘A dress code,’ Xu Beihong repeats.

  ‘At least for the female students. You must have noticed how girls in the art school dress far less’ – he glances at Yuliang – ‘appropriately than those in other departments. Hardly any of them wear qipao anymore. And yesterday we saw three skirts that were not only absurdly tight but actually showed the knees.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Well, when the girls sat down.’

  Dean Xu directs a wry glance at Yuliang. She crosses her trousered legs, blows a smoke ring at the ceiling. Her own fondness for pants – not loose-flowing Chinese trousers, but the trim style favored by Dietrich – is another source of much muttered resentment.

  ‘I see,’ the dean says. ‘And you believe, no doubt, that we should require our young women to adhere more strictly to the standards suggested by Madame Chiang. Skirts safely at shin length, slits no higher than three inches. Ah, and let’s not forget – shirts that cover the entire buttocks. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘The other disciplines do all that,’ Teacher Shu chimes in staunchly. ‘We stand apart.’

  ‘We’re artists,’ Dean Xu snaps back. ‘No one expects us to dress like damn accountants.’ He takes a swig of his coffee. ‘No dress code. Next item?’

  Teacher Shu, undeterred, lifts her plump hand. ‘We were wondering whether the dean has considered o
ur petition yet.’

  ‘The one on classroom morality?’ he asks. ‘No.’

  ‘But we gave it to you –’

  ‘Last month.’ He cuts her off. ‘I know.’

  ‘Did you read the item on staffing standards?’ she persists.

  ‘The one on “not permitting persons of dubious backgrounds and questionable histories to come in excessive contact with our students”? Not a word,’ Dean Xu replies smoothly. ‘And if you ask me why I did not, the answer will remain just the same. It is still my position that no person in this department fits that particular description.’

  No one looks at Yuliang. But she still feels the grip of their attention like some vast vise.

  ‘But…’ Teacher Shu splutters.

  ‘That,’ the dean snaps, ‘is my final word on the subject. If you wish to take it further, you will have to do so with the university president. Or, better yet, Madame Chiang.’

  The calligraphy instructor’s round face takes on the approximate color of a ripe eggplant. To celebrate, Yuliang sketches one in her notebook’s margin.

  She spends the rest of the meeting as she almost always does: doodling. A cobbled street. The Ponte Vecchio. An orchid. When she looks up, the room is filling with paper rustle and scraping chairs: the staff has been dismissed.

  Xu Beihong leans toward her as he pulls his folders together. ‘Ignore them,’ he says quietly. ‘They’re just jealous of your success.’

  ‘I know,’ she tells him.

  And she does. Still, Yuliang throws him a grateful look as she gathers her things. How many times has this man now come to her rescue? He set her up in Paris, wrote her Rome Art Academy recommendation. Over the four years she was there he introduced her to numerous contacts, and secured her participation in several salons and exhibitions. Not least of all, he offered her this job after her much-publicized split with the Shanghai Art Academy.

  Much to Liu Haisu’s delight, the tabloids ran various versions of the story for weeks. How the painter Madame Pan attacked a fellow teacher at the school, how the victim wore a French scarf wrapped around her face for two days afterward (although in Yuliang’s opinion, this was more for dramatic impact than because of injury). What the papers didn’t mention, of course, was that the Hermès-draped instructor (the same woman, in fact, who had made Yuliang’s life a misery as a student) had called Yuliang a whore to her face, in front of students. ‘She’s had that slap coming for twenty years,’ Yuliang fumed when Liu Haisu called her into his office. ‘That woman is a snake.’