The Painter of Shanghai (40 page)

Xudun smiles again, as though to seal in their secret.
‘On peut?’
He indicates the next staircase.

The Frenchman puffs out his cheeks. ‘
Moi, non…
I climb to this spot and back three times every day as it is. You go, though.’ He winks again. ‘Take your time.’

‘He thinks we’re sweethearts,’ Yuliang whispers, mortified, as Xudun steers her toward the next landing.

‘
Mais oui
,’ he replies smoothly. ‘He is French.’

‘But…’ For an absurd instant she is convinced that she has to set the record straight, with this odd little man she’s just met. Step by step, however, the impulse dwindles, until once more there is just the sound of their climb together: leather soles, stepping lightly and in rhythm.

Now that Barton is no longer with them, they climb side by side. Xudun’s closeness is initially distracting. Counting her steps, Yuliang holds on tight to the small boar in her pocket, although she has no idea what she is wishing for.

‘Voilà
,’ Xudun says at last. ‘La Galerie des Chimeres.’

The Seine curves below, limned in reflected light. Yuliang, awed, lets out her breath. ‘Oh, I wish I’d brought my sketch pad!’ She traces the arching line of the river with the tip of her index finger.

‘Sketch it up there.’ He taps his head.

‘I can’t paint life from memory. Or from a postcard, like Utrillo.’

‘I agree with that. Pictures from pictures… I far prefer his mother’s work.’

‘Valadon,’ Yuliang murmurs. Another small thrill, at how easily they understand each other.

‘Are you too cold?’ He is reaching into his jacket pocket – for a lighter, she assumes.

‘No flames,’ she reminds him. ‘Or guns.’

‘This’ll only put fire in your belly.’ He pulls out a little silver flask. ‘Smirnoff.’

He looks so proud of himself she can’t help but laugh again. ‘Didn’t they ban liquor in Russia?’

‘I bought it here. They’ve just opened a factory.’ He twists off the cap. ‘I had to line up behind a dozen Americans to get this. They can’t drink there now either, you know.’

Yuliang nods. Actually, she knows little about Americans. But she certainly remembers the Russians who’d poured into Shanghai after the czar was overthrown. Many ended up indigent, playing cards on the street outside the China Inland Mission, waiting for handouts of rice and drinking water. Passing was like passing through a liquored cloudbank. ‘Imagine Russians not drinking,’ she says.

‘I don’t think
they
can imagine it. It’s the one area where their revolution might not succeed.’ He takes a swig, grimaces appreciatively, and hands over the flask. When Yuliang hesitates – she’s never had vodka before – he says, ‘Go on – it’s very pure. It won’t slow you down tomorrow, even if we drink a lot.’

‘Are we drinking a lot?’ she asks warily.

‘Not if you don’t care to.’

For some reason, it sounds like a challenge. ‘I do care to,’ she says defiantly. And drinks.

The liquid simmers in her nose and eyes, swells her throat. The second swig goes down more smoothly, although she still feels her gut convulse as she hands it
back. She coughs lightly. ‘Are you certain this isn’t paint thinner?’

He laughs. ‘Positive. I haven’t picked up a paintbrush in nearly a year.’

She eyes him curiously. It’s like hearing him admit that he hasn’t eaten bread, hasn’t sipped water. ‘You’re only drawing, then?’

‘The occasional cartoon. And woodcutting.’ He stretches his long arms up above him, rolls his neck.

‘You like woodcutting?’

He nods. ‘There are those who claim it’s not real art at all. But of all I’ve done, I find it the most satisfying. It’s a challenge, combining sculpting with drawing. Deciding where shadows fall with an awl.’

‘How did you start?’ she asks.

‘Woodcutting?’

‘No. Painting. Art.’ It strikes her suddenly as odd that she doesn’t know this.

‘I fell into it,’ he says. ‘My father was a farmer. He sent me to a tutor so I could read for him and do the accounts.’ He laughs. ‘I did learn to read. But I spent most of my time copying the images and engravings I found in his almanacs. And you?’

‘My mother embroidered for a living. Before she died.’

It is all she offers. He doesn’t press her. When he hands the flask back, Yuliang takes it, her fingertips sensing warmth left on the metal by his larger fingers. Her head swims from the unaccustomed strength of the drink. But it also eases that anxious tingling in her gut. Yuliang drinks again and holds out the flask to him, barely conscious
that she is shifting not just her hand but her whole body toward him.

Above, the stars are coming out again in full force now, sapped by the city’s lights, but still plentiful. ‘Xu Beihong – you know him?’ She is slurring slightly now, she realizes. ‘He hates Van Gogh, calls him a fool. He says
Starry Night
could have been painted by a child in primary school. I think he’s a genius.’

‘Xu Beihong?’

Yuliang giggles; then is faintly shocked by the sound. ‘In his own mind, certainly. But I meant Vincent.’

‘Maybe all artists are both fools and geniuses.’

‘Are you saying I’m a fool?’ she asks, with unaccustomed playfulness. (
I am getting drunk
, she thinks hazily.)

‘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.