The Painter of Shanghai (11 page)

‘It’s my birth sign,’ she remarks.

Yuliang looks at her quickly. ‘Didn’t you say you were a rat?’

‘I’m too young to be a rat!’ Jinling replies indignantly. ‘I’m a dragon, through and through.’ And in truth, Jinling, with her fiery spirit, her intense charm, her way of slipping past all the rules, does seem like a dragon. And yet Yuliang is almost certain her friend told her she was born in the year of the rat.
Rat and boar,
she recalls her saying one night, as they lay intertwined and panting.
The astrologers say they’re destined for each other.
Then again, she also remembers something about her being a rooster…

‘Can I borrow this for today?’ Jinling is asking now. ‘It would go beautifully with my dragon jacket.’

Yuliang agrees. She decides not to question further. Hall girls don’t have many rights. But one of the few they do have is this: everyone is granted her own version of her story, which, like her name, she can change at will. Though Yuliang has sworn she won’t change her name again. She needs one thing, at least, that she can hold on to for good.

Later that night a tap comes on the door. Jinling pushes her head in. ‘Here’s your dragon bracelet.’ She slides the piece from her wrist. ‘Can I borrow a wrap? None of mine match this new dress.’

Yuliang studies her friend’s slim curves and shadows, sheathed in a dress of plum-blossom lavender planted with silver flowers and butterflies. Yuliang helped to design it with the dressmaker. Seeing how well Jinling wears it still gives her a faint glow of ownership.

‘Where’s the call?’ she asks, standing and rifling through her silks.

‘At the teahouse. The deputy customs officer has been promoted to Beijing. Yi Gan didn’t mention it to you?’

Yuliang shakes her head, studying her friend beneath her lashes. They still haven’t discussed the fact that the merchant now visits Yuliang more often than he does Jinling – or that for all of his earlier protests, he recently offered to make Yuliang his third concubine. It’s the sort of arrangement flowers are supposed to yearn for: a simplifying of life, sex, expenses. A promise of a future, perhaps children. Somehow, though, the thought of being
slowly nibbled down like one of four sweets makes Yuliang shudder. She’s relieved that he hasn’t pressed her on the matter.

For her part, Jinling said she didn’t care. ‘
Aiya
,’ she said, shrugging. ‘You need him more than I do.’ Still, the subject makes Yuliang uneasy. Jealousy is like a sex-sickness in the Hall. It can hover in the blood for months, or even years, before infecting even the closest friendships.

Scarf in hand, Jinling moves to the mirror. ‘Are you sure this matches?’

‘It’s very pretty. You look like a candle.’

Jinling quirks an eyebrow. ‘You put things oddly sometimes, little sister.’

Embarrassed, Yuliang tries to make the comment a joke. ‘It’s the orange silk,’ she says, stepping over, running her hands down Jinling’s arms. ‘That’s the flame. See? And the purple is smoke. Take off the shawl, and
poof
.’ She blows lightly in Jinling’s ear. ‘You’ve blown yourself out.’

The top girl giggles and squirms. ‘I’ll be late tonight,’ she says. ‘But wait for me – I want to see you.’ She turns once more to leave, then pauses. ‘I’ve an errand to do tomorrow after lunch. Come with me?’

Yuliang is actually looking forward to washing her hair tomorrow. But she hears herself saying, ‘All right.’ Just as she always does when Jinling asks her for a favor:
Can I borrow the dragon?
or
Can you embroider this bag with a lotus?
She watches her friend’s figure flicker around the corner. What, she wonders, will it be this time? A new dress she needs advice on? An unplanned trip to the palm-reader? Or perhaps, for once, a surprise for
her
– for Yuliang?

From downstairs the call comes:
Master Feng for Miss Yuliang.
Yuliang winces and twists the ring on her finger. Feng Yitmieng comes once a month, when his business is good. A small man with thin white legs he saws over hers, he reminds her of a cricket in mating season.

‘He’s very down-to-earth, for gentry,’ Jinling says the next day, as they zip along on their appointed errand. ‘He comes out with all sorts of things that surprise me.’

‘Like what?’ Yuliang asks. She grasps her seat as the rickshaw swerves to avoid what appears to be a pile of rags. But as they pass, bits of flesh and shriveled limbs take shape in it, and a head turns toward her weakly. The face is as dark and as crisscrossed with cracks as old leather. With a jolt, Yuliang also sees that it looks a bit like Xiaochen.

‘I’m sorry,’ the boy calls. He doesn’t look more than twelve, but his bare back is a mosaic of scars and dirt. His jacket is rolled under the girls’ feet as an added amenity. Yuliang and Jinling splay their legs to avoid it: it is crawling with lice.

‘Did you see that?’ Yuliang asks.

‘See what?’

But the woman is already behind them. And to mention her breaks an unsaid rule: when girls disappear, you act as though you never knew them. So Yuliang just shakes her head and turns her gaze back to the street.

At least she knows where they’re going now: they are riding to Jinling’s jeweler. The top girl has her jewelry box in her little blue bag. She wants to sell some things and to have others appraised. She hasn’t told Yuliang

why, although Yuliang has a sinking sense that she knows already. Moodily, she lets her friend babble on about the new client she’s cultivating, the second son of a high-up family from town.

‘The way he talks, for example. He comes up with the funniest curses.’

‘Really.’ Yuliang can’t keep the skepticism from her voice.
She doesn’t enjoy it
, she tells herself.
She never really enjoys it.
After all, isn’t that what Jinling herself says?
You’re only
really
a whore if you enjoy it
… At least, with the men.

‘I think he’s a populist,’ Jinling adds, and frowns. ‘Or was it anarchist?’

‘There’s a difference,’ Yuliang says. ‘Populists are for the people. Anarchists are for nothing at all.’

It’s something Yuliang’s uncle explained to her once, although, as with many things Wu Ding explained, she’s never been sure of its accuracy. Still, Jinling slaps her arm with feigned annoyance. ‘You always make me feel like such a simpleton. How on earth do you know these things?’ She laughs. ‘Anyway, it’s all only about fashion in the end, isn’t it? About word fashion. It’s strange, isn’t it?’ she adds thoughtfully. ‘Men can change what they’re called. They can say, “I’m a populist,” and people will call them that. And yet we can call ourselves anything – singers, entertainers, taxi dancers. In the end, they’ll always call us whores.’

They’re unusually bitter words from the usually blithe top girl. Oddly enough, though, Jinling looks genuinely happy. Her pale cheeks are peach-toned with the chill. Yuliang feels her mood lift, just looking at her, even as
she feels a tart envy at such effortless loveliness.
I wish I could draw her,
she thinks.
Just like this.

Unaware of her friend’s scrutiny, Jinling bites her lip. ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I want to tell you about something.’ This is how Jinling begins all her lessons.
Listen,
she’ll say.
I want to show you how to make my fat feet look thinner. I want to teach you the difference between silver taels and the fake ones. I want to tell you about Actor Peng; I’ve found something he’ll pay you extra for.
Yuliang sits up dutifully and listens. But what Jinling says this time is, ‘I’ve done it. I have enough to buy out.’

For a moment the words all but extinguish the world: the coolie’s slap-slapping feet, the street’s scrambling commerce, the stick-woman left behind in the dust. Yuliang blinks, but sees nothing but her friend’s oil-black eyes.
You can’t leave,
she thinks.

‘I can
leave
,’ Jinling says, as if on cue. ‘I can buy out my contract. Godmother’s accounts have me just two hundred taels away. Even if I just sell my diamond ring, it’s enough.’

They’ve reached the river; an offshore breeze brushes Yuliang’s face with a chilly kiss. She will break, she thinks, if she moves. Even slightly.

Jinling laughs at her expression. ‘Oh, stop frowning for once!’ She takes Yuliang’s chin, turns her face. ‘Come. Come with me.’

Her fingers are so cold Yuliang shivers.
‘What?’

‘I mean it,’ Jinling says. ‘Listen. I’ll explain.’

The boy runs along, his stride lending quiet percussion to the top girl’s words. They pass the temple with its monks robed in orange and saffron, then the market with
its wares of clay and fish and human flesh: the lines of shuffling girls being paraded before prospective mothers-in-law and sharp-eyed middlewomen. Jinling continues talking as the market fades from view, and then they’re at the docks, where boats strain toward the Yangtze’s amber bend.
Slap-slap-slap.
She’ll build a Hall of her own. It will be better, more splendid than the Hall of Eternal Splendor. She’ll model it on the Shanghai house where she started, the Hall of Heavenly Gates. ‘I’ve got enough jewelry now to pay for things while I set up. And Ren Kuanti says he’ll invest. He’s bringing some of his rich friends, too, to meet with me.’ She drops her voice. ‘We’re supposed to gather at the teahouse at six.’

Yuliang pictures Ren Kuanti, a pale but dapper young man whose ‘investments’ to date have mostly comprised drinking, gambling, and vomiting in the Hall courtyard. But this doesn’t seem to bother Jinling. ‘Yuliang!’ she says. ‘You can be my top girl.’

‘What?’ Yuliang blinks.

‘My
top girl
, little fool! We can be together always! I’ll help buy you free too… Say something!’

‘But what about my contract? What about all my debt?’

Jinling strokes her purse, like a cat in her lap. ‘I told you. There’s plenty here. Along with Ren’s investment, we’ll have more than enough.’

Yuliang’s head reels with the implications. The rickshaw lurches around a corner that leads to a jeweler-lined street filled with windows winking with gold. The girls are thrown together for a moment, and then reluctantly pull apart. Catching her breath, Yuliang inhales her friend’s
favorite scent: floral, powdery. Faintly foreign.
It’s an important decision
, she tells herself.
I must be sure to use good sense.

Yet as the rickshaw pulls up to Jinling’s shop, senses skip ahead of good sense. Wind takes caution, blows it over the water.

Yuliang shuts her eyes, tips her head back. ‘Yes,’ she says with a laugh. ‘Take me with you.’

An hour later they part ways, Jinling to meet Ren Kuanti, Yuliang to cover for her at the Hall. ‘If the old centipede asks,’ Jinling instructs, pulling Yuliang’s orange shawl around her shoulders, ‘tell her I’ve gone to have my hair trimmed. I should be back in time for my nine o’clock call.’

Yuliang nods, gleeful at the thought of hiding something beyond tips from the spiteful manager. She will keep this secret under her pillow, like the knife the girl in the old story keeps there to ward off evil ghosts and bad fortune. She will wield the thought of it – a new home! a new role! – through the evening’s scheduled visits. And when they’re done, she’ll carry it down the hallway. She’ll creep into Jinling’s room and huddle in the top girl’s red-draped bed, and they’ll stroke and sigh away all scent and sign of those male bodies. They’ll fall asleep intertwined, whispering plans for their new life. And in the morning they will will step out and start it.

But Jinling doesn’t return – not that night, and not the next. Yuliang covers for her for as long as she can. On the third day, sick with sleeplessness and bruised by
Godmother’s second beating, she finally confesses at least part of the truth: her friend went not to the hairdresser’s but to meet her future financial backer. Clinging fiercely to fading hope, she holds back the other details – the jewelry bag, the escape plans. Her own corner room at the brand-new brothel. In the end, though, neither these things nor the withholding of them matters. The detectives track Ren Kuanti to an opium den in Tongling. There, it is learned, he has been smoking and gambling away Jinling’s jewelry for nearly a week.

Two days later they find Jinling herself, bound and abandoned in the trunk of a stolen automobile. The top girl’s throat has been slit, her sex mauled and disfigured. Her clothes, including Yuliang’s shawl, are gone.

10

Yuliang is in bed. Not her real bed – Xiaochen’s loathed bed of lost virtue – but Jinling’s bed, with its red silk sheets and gilded headboard. A familiar hand is on her arm, and for a brief moment Yuliang thinks that this too is Jinling’s. Taking it in her own hands, though, she quickly sees she is wrong: the fingers aren’t the plump, soft digits of her beloved friend. These fingers are almost skeletal. Prayer beads wrap the yellowing palm. They cut into Yuliang’s skin like teeth. With a gasp, Yuliang wrenches her own fingers away and turns toward the face next to hers.

‘Mama?’

‘Don’t be afraid, little Xiu,’ her mama says. Her breath is so ragged it barely seems to carry the words. ‘I’ve made arrangements. You’ll be safe.’

Jerking upright, Yuliang stares wildly around the room. It’s still Jinling’s room – Jinling’s bed, Jinling’s armoire. Jinling’s phoenix wine cups shine dully from a small shelf on the wall. But the heavy hand on her arm and the dense figure behind her tell her that she’s awake now: this isn’t a dream clasped in yet another dream.

‘Another night-fright?’ Merchant Yi says grumpily. ‘That’s the third one this evening. Go to sleep. We’ve got the banquet tomorrow.’

Yuliang lies back down obediently, wrapping her shivering shoulders in Jinling’s quilt and her guilt in the waking
nightmare of her reality: that in the end, Jinling kept her promise after all. Not by sweeping Yuliang off to a new life, but by leaving her her old one.

For all of Jinling’s fabled jewels, her funeral was spare. There were no necromancers, no monks chanting. There wasn’t even a coffin. The surviving flowers burned paper trinkets they’d pooled hidden tips to buy: a little dress, a little pair of paper lily shoes that were just a shade too wide. A few false golden ingots. There was no money for anything else; Godmother had claimed the dead girl’s belongings as ‘compensation.’