The Painter of Shanghai (27 page)

‘The rest?’ Yuliang asks faintly.

He winks. ‘How best to approach the esteemed Master Pan.’

22

‘You will,’ Teacher Hong announces, ‘refrain from picking up your pencil until I give the order.’

He frowns at the crammed but silent classroom, briefly meeting Yuliang’s eye. Embarrassed, she looks away. ‘The examination will run for exactly two hours. Any scribbling beyond that will disqualify the offending applicant. Am I understood?’

A chorus of voices, seventy strong and overwhelmingly male, shouts back, ‘Yes, teacher!’

‘Good.’ Stepping around the young men who sit cross-legged on the floor (there aren’t enough seats for all the applicants), he picks up a large hourglass from the windowsill. ‘Three… Two… One…
begin.
’

The air fills with the tap of pencils hitting paper. Yuliang stares down at her blank page, her mouth as dry as the sand trickling lazily through the timepiece.
I can’t do this,
she thinks miserably.
What under the heavens was I thinking?

She finds herself surreptitiously studying the other applicants in the room: slick-haired boys, a haughty handful of well-dressed girls. They’re all rich – she can tell. And of course this makes sense. For while a poor family might spare a son for scholarship, who’d spare one for something as frivolous as Western painting? And what poor family would send their daughter to school to start with?

‘It’s all
shit.’

Abruptly her deskmate flings down his pencil and crumples his first attempt. The room chuckles, but Yuliang feels a ray of gratitude: at least she’s not the only one facing an empty page.

Sighing again, she turns her gaze back to the still life.
Don’t think of it as a whole at first
, Teacher Hong told her yesterday.
Break it up. Use one object as a road into the next
. But what if all the roads seem blocked?

Her deskmate is now well into his second attempt. His face no longer reflects frustration but intent focus.
Just draw,
she commands herself, fighting back a wave of panic.
Just draw something.

Obediently, she sketches something: a square. It is an approximation of the red table’s surface. The shape isn’t quite right. But it’s always easier to start over than it is to start from nothing at all.

Tearing off the sheet, she tries again, this time with better results.
Use each object as a road into the next.
She proceeds to the easiest object on the table, the orange… And in the space of a moment that neither registers nor matters, she is no longer outside the still life but working within it, running her mind’s hand over nubbly fruit skin. Pressing her face against the smooth tang of bottle glass. Exploring a vase’s crevices with both finger and pencil tip, each item part of a visual sentence she is translating. It seems a mere five minutes later that Teacher Hong raps his desk and says mildly, ‘Time.’ And then more crisply, ‘
Time.
Pencils down.’

A swell of groans. Yuliang has just enough time to scribble her name down the left margin. She hands over
her paper, averting her eyes. She’s come to realize this about her work: that no matter how she feels while she’s sketching, her first sense upon finishing will be one of failure: they all fall so short of her initial hopes for them. She sometimes wonders – particularly since Zanhua’s last visit – whether this is the way new mothers feel about their babies, sliding wet and puckered from the womb. Her mother, of course, claimed otherwise.
You?
Yuliang recalls her saying.
You were the prettiest baby in the world.

Was I really?
she had asked, fascinated like all small children by the improbable idea of her own infancy.

Of course
, her mama had laughed, moistening sky-blue thread with her tongue.

When she reaches Ocean Street Yuliang’s mind is still on her test, reexamining each twist and pass of her pencil tip. The cut-glass vase in particular had been hard – all clear corners, reflected shadows. She is undoing her frog buttons, pondering her choice to use her eraser to create glints, when she hears it: a low, unarguably male murmur in the parlor.

Burglars!
is her first thought; there has been a rash of gang-related robberies in the neighborhood. Her satchel crashes to the floor. She is just backing toward the door when Zanhua materializes in the hallway. ‘Where on earth have you been?’

He starts toward her, then stops as a pencil rolls underfoot. Yuliang looks down at her spilled art supplies. ‘I’m sorry,’ she stammers, although whether the apology is for the mess or her tardiness she doesn’t know. Belatedly, she adds, ‘You’re home.’

‘Yes,’ he concurs.

Yuliang swallows. ‘Your letter said you’d in Tongcheng for the holidays.’

‘My plans changed.’ He smiles grimly. ‘I wanted to surprise you.’

‘You did,’ she says weakly. Her heart seems somewhere in the vicinity of her eardrums. ‘Zanhua, I –’

There’s a quick, light tap of additional steps in the hallway. For a petrified moment Yuliang pictures First Lady Pan, here to approve her new subservient fellow wife. Thankfully, though, it’s just Qihua. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘You see. I told you she’d come back. Welcome home, Madame Pan. I trust you had a pleasant afternoon.’ His gaze drops casually to the floor. ‘Charcoal,’ he observes, poking a piece with the tip of his shoe. ‘What a coincidence. I was just telling your husband of your new pursuits.’

‘My pursuits?’ Yuliang quavers.

‘Your private study program at Master Hong’s.’ He grins. ‘It’s been quite the topic among our elderly neighbors.’

Yuliang’s heart sinks. ‘I wanted to tell you,’ she says to Zanhua. ‘Really. I just – I didn’t know how to write it.’

‘I’ve no doubt,’ he interrupts coldly. ‘Between traipsing around in other men’s homes and doodling away the hours, you can’t have had much time left for your studies.’

‘Zanhua,’ she says, ‘it’s not at all what it seems. I
have
been studying. I’ve just –’

‘Perhaps, comrade, we should hear your lovely wife’s story.’ Unasked, Qihua begins gathering up her sketches.
He hands them, not to Yuliang, but to Zanhua. ‘My congratulations,’ he says. ‘I’ve heard much of your progress.’

‘Progress?’ Yuliang repeats blankly.

‘The academy’s founder, Liu Haisu, mentioned you last week. We ran into each other at a photography lecture at the French Consul.’

‘Liu Haisu?’

‘It’s not often they’re faced with a serious woman candidate.’

For an instant Yuliang can only gawk. She’d entirely forgotten that Qihua knew the artist, who used to paint photography sets. She turns giddily back to Zanhua. ‘He knows about me. Liu Haisu knows about me!’

‘No doubt the whole city knows about you,’ Zanhua says, with asperity. ‘You’re paying visits to a man who pays women to strip.’

Yuliang’s ears sting as though he’s boxed them. But she struggles to keep her tone even. ‘He’s been giving me lessons,’ she says. ‘Painting and drawing lessons. He thinks I can get in. As a
student.
’

‘I don’t suppose these lessons are chaperoned at all, are they?’

In fact, they are not. To Yuliang’s surprise, though, Qihua again comes to her rescue. ‘To be fair,’ he says, fishing a pack of 555s from his vest pocket, ‘anyone who knows Madame Hong couldn’t doubt that they’ve been appropriately supervised. I’ve dealt with her over her daughter’s engagement portrait. The woman is a tigress.’ He shudders theatrically, strikes a match. ‘And for what it’s worth, the academy is highly respected. Haisu told
me they offer courses in anatomy, history, and even political painting.’

Zanhua is studying Yuliang’s sketches. On top is the little broken doll. For some reason Yuliang wishes it were something else – a bamboo forest. A picture-poem. ‘This Hong Ye,’ he says, still not looking up, ‘he really thinks you have talent.’

A tendril of hope – pearl green, vulnerable – unfurls. ‘More than almost anyone he has seen.’ She says it not in arrogance, but in desperation.

‘And one gets into the school – how?’

‘There’s – there’s an examination.’

‘And when is this examination?’

She swallows. ‘This afternoon,’ she whispers. ‘Between three and five o’clock.’

He stares at her, stunned.

‘Zanhua,’ she says. ‘I was going to tell you if I got in. I wasn’t trying to deceive you. Please –’

But it’s too late: with a single motion he crumples the doll sketch and throws it at the wall.

‘You had no right to do that,’ she cries. ‘That’s my
work
!’

‘That’s a
lie
!’ he shouts back, just as furious. ‘You have lied to me! After all your talk of honesty.
Honesty!
’ His laughter is cold, utterly without humor. The step he takes toward her is so quick she actually cowers. But he just kicks the paper ball viciously across the floor before turning and striding toward the door. At the threshold, though, he pauses and turns back. For just the barest of moments, his lips twist into a bitter smile. ‘And I thought,’ he says, ‘I was surprising
you.’

He stalks into the frosted courtyard, his footsteps fading onto the street. Sobbing in frustration, Yuliang hurls her charcoal against the wall. It leaves a dot-dash, a black streak against whitewash. She makes no move to try to clean it off. Instead she kneels, picking up the little drawing and smoothing it against her knee.

Yuliang doesn’t weep. But her shoulders heave – his anger, sparked by nothing more than her own cowardice. For he’s right – her silence was as good as a falsehood. Why on earth didn’t she write to him? Is her distrust still so deep that she can’t share her real hopes with him, untainted by shame?

She stares down at the ruined sketch. The doll’s blank face is now as wrinkled as an old woman’s. Yuliang shreds it into small, smudged bits. She lets them slip between her fingers, like dirty snow.

‘Madame Pan.’ Behind her, Qihua’s voice is uncharacteristically stripped of sarcasm. Starting, Yuliang twists toward him. She’d forgotten he was here.

‘I’m very sorry,’ she murmurs, rising to her feet. ‘I’m behaving shamefully.’

‘To be honest, so is he.’ He hands her back her charcoal. Very gently, as though returning a toy to a child. ‘But I’ll talk to him. We artists should stand up for one another.’

Yuliang gazes at him in surprise: it is the first time he’s addressed her almost as an equal. ‘He’s in the right,’ she says dully. ‘I’m a poor excuse for a wife.’

‘You underestimate both yourself and your husband.’ Brushing off his hands, Meng Qihua walks unhurriedly to the doorway, pausing to light another cigarette. Looking
back at her, he winks. Then, flicking his match into the darkening courtyard, he follows its arcing ember outside.

When Zanhua returns, it’s nearly midnight. Yuliang is hunched in her study, sketching flowers in sputtering gaslight. As he enters the room, the smell of
maotai
drifts in with him like an excuse.

But Zanhua doesn’t make any excuses. He moves toward her, his step unsteady, his eyes red with fatigue and drink. He sinks to the floor and hugs his bent legs to his chest, resting his head on his knees. He remains this way until Yuliang finally goes to him and kneels by him. Touching first his cheek, then his hair. Both are wet. ‘Is it raining?’ she asks.

‘Snowing.’

Surprised, she looks out the window, something that, in her absorption in her work, she hasn’t done for at least an hour. Sure enough, cold flakes tap against the glass. It’s not the heavy, gentle snow one expects here, fattened by ever-present moisture and falling with the grace and softness Shanghai itself lacks. This is a vengeful snow. It hurtles in harsh lines and slashes. Somehow, the sight of it disturbs her.

‘I didn’t mean to deceive you,’ she tells him. ‘I was so afraid you wouldn’t let me go.’

He lifts his head and stares at her for a moment. ‘I came home this afternoon half believing you’d be gone. And when you were, I feared it was for good.’

‘Why would you think that?’

‘You hadn’t answered my letters. Even the telegram I sent two weeks ago went unanswered.’

Yuliang drops her eyes guiltily: it’s true. In her frantic race toward today’s exam, she hasn’t written to him in over five weeks. The telegram – one line drawn from one of Li Qingzhao’s poems (
Her possessions are here, but her essence is gone: everything has ceased
) – she had placed beneath her pillow, then forgotten.
I’m so selfish,
she thinks – but less with shame than a dawning kind of wonder.

‘And then you did come back,’ he goes on. ‘But Qihua had already told me how you’d been spending your hours. Perhaps I reacted badly. But the thought of you with another man…’ His voice cracks. ‘I’m so afraid you’ll leave me.’

She just stares at him at first, stunned as always by this fear, so precisely the opposite of her own.
Boar and rat
, she finds herself thinking.
Perfectly matched.

‘I’ll never leave you,’ she tells him. Turning, she picks up the sketch of the flowers. ‘Please look at this. There’s something I want to show you.’

He stands, lifting the picture to the dim light. ‘It’s good,’ he says simply.

‘It’s not that. Look at the left border. At the name.’

‘Pan Yuliang,’ he reads as Yuliang stands and steps behind him.

‘Do you remember,’ she murmurs, her lips right by his ear, ‘when you told me to sign my work?’

He nods, shutting his eyes.

‘I do now. And there you are. You are a part of every picture. Even the ones that take me away from you.’

Leaning into her, he traces their name with one, white finger. Then he sets the picture down and, pulling her
into his arms, rests his lips on her hair. ‘Promise me one thing.’

‘What?’

‘Promise you’ll always come back.’

She parts her lips to answer, but her tongue seems frozen. Instead she drops her face onto his damp shirt. Apparently taking this as a nod, her husband doesn’t press her. Lifting her into his arms, he carries her through the doorway. Then up the stairs, and into the darkened bedroom.