A Cup of Light (23 page)

“Oh.” He looked uncomfortable. She was really crying now. She didn't say anything, so finally he spoke again. “What sort of news?”

“A family member passed on,” she managed.

“Oh.” There followed a long, disconcerting silence. He pulled out a handkerchief, which she refused. “Who?” he said.

“My father,” she improvised. In fact her father was still alive, as far as she knew.

“Oh,” he said. “I'm so sorry.”

“Thank you.” She crumpled again. “Mr. Li,” she said, “may I go wash my face?”

He hesitated only a second. “Of course,” he said. He looked over his shoulder. “It's in the hall.”

She stepped quickly into the hallway and into the bathroom. She pounded out Gao's private number.
Be there.

“Wei,”
he answered.

Yes.
“Mr. Gao, it's Lia Frank. I need help.”

“Where are you?”

“At the airport. I've been detained by a man named Li, a curator with the First Beijing Antiquities Museum. He knows about me. He wants to know what pots I've been looking at in China. They won't let me through Immigration. I'm—“”

“Please say no more,” Gao said, concealing his anger almost perfectly. “Do not worry. It will be taken care of at once. Accept my thousand pleas and pardon this gross inconvenience.”

“Mei shi,”
she rebuked his politeness, It's nothing.

“No,” he said, rebuking her back, “it's terrible. Just await me for a minute or two.”

“Thank you,” she said, and they hung up. She thought he was joking, a minute or two, but it had not been very much longer than that when she stepped back into the room and Li asked her if she felt better. She said yes, and then his phone was ringing.

“Wei,”
he answered shortly, but his annoyance turned quickly to awe. “Vice Minister Pan,” he said wonderingly. He had never spoken to anyone of so high a rank. “Who? Oh yes, Vice Minister, I have her here now. I'm asking her some—what's that? Oh yes. Yes, sir. At once, sir.” He clicked off his phone.

“You had better go,” he said to Lia Frank, just a trace of irritation and lost face breaking through his control. “Your flight will be boarding.”

“Thank you.” She stood and gathered up her things before he had a chance to change his mind.

“It's too sad about your father.”

“Yes, it is. Thank you.”

She backed out of the room and ran down the long corridor toward the gates. She felt almost numb. Her phone rang.
“Wei,”
she answered it.

“Miss Fan,” said Gao. “Everything's resolved?”

“Yes. A thousand thanks.”

“Please! You must not thank me. Again I apologize for the inconvenience.”

“That's nothing.” She could feel herself smiling.

“No. And again my compliments on your work. It has not been easy. Pure gold proves its worth in a fire, you know.”

“That's kind of you,” she said, surprised.

“Level road,” he said.

“The same.” She turned it off and looked up; yes, they were about to board. Now she was really leaving, it was over. Still, everything about her felt different, her skin, her eyes, her cells. She felt tall and beautiful, miserable with love. She pushed the sunglasses up over her red-rimmed eyes. There was the gate to Hong Kong, before her. People were getting on.

19

In Hong Kong that evening, in a warehouse, Bai waited by the forty crates. He had sold the frozen chickens and stored the truck elsewhere. Naturally he didn't want Stanley Pao to see his truck.

He heard the knock and crossed the concrete floor to open the door. There stood the plump, perfectly dressed art dealer, just as he had been described, full white hair, slicked straight back. “Mr. Bai?” the old gentleman said.

“Yes, Mr. Pao. Please.” He gestured, and Stanley Pao walked past him, a magnet to iron, straight to the rows of wooden crates.

“May I open one?” His voice was casual over his well-tailored shoulder.

“Of course,” Bai answered. He held out the manifest.

But Stanley signaled for him to wait. He didn't want to see it yet. He wanted to gamble on one.

He let his eyes roam. Eventually he settled on a particular crate at the edge of his field of vision. He walked toward it and pulled it open.

Inside, a tight nest of wood shavings. Good packing. The old-fashioned kind. He closed his eyes, arms extended, and then followed his will down into the crate, burrowing with both hands. A box called out to him, settled into his fingers. He pulled it out.

He put it gently on the floor and tipped up its lid. Oh. The light showed in his face, reflected. So
hoi moon
. He lifted it gently out of its silk, just a few inches, never taking it far from safety, just to tip it and turn it, a large
doucai
jardiniere, incandescently painted in emerald, royal blue, and rusty tangerine. Mark and period of Qianlong.

He replaced it securely in its box and reburied it in the wood shavings. He appreciated the chance to have his face turned away for a few seconds—to regain the diffident control of his age and his position. How long since he'd seen something so beautiful? “I'll see that list now,” he said, turning to Bai.

He took it and scanned it, flipping the pages. He could feel a smile growing on his face. What a firmament. “The bank is Victoria Shanghai,” he said to Bai. He continued reading. Then he removed a card from an inner pocket. “These are your account numbers,” he said, handing it to Bai. He never looked up from the page. He half listened as Bai called the bank to verify. He saw the excitement that Bai was quite unable to control upon hearing his own balance.

“All is well?” he inquired when Bai had closed his phone.

“Excellent.”

“Thank you for your service.”

“To you the same.” As soon as the ah chan had politely backed out the door, he stopped to dial up Pok Wen, the manager of the Luk Yu. “Friend Bai!” Pok Wen roared with the crafted gaiety that was his job. “How are you? Does fortune favor you today?”

Bai smiled in the dark linoleum hallway—there it was, the door to the outside. He pushed it open. The soft evening bath of Hong Kong wafted over him. It was the heaviest air in the world. It was pulled down, ripened, rotted just right by the power of cash. “Yes, Manager Pok, I am favored.” He laughed. “Start soaking the abalone for me!”

Jack Yuan received a call from his import agent as he stood in his lodge room at Crater Lake, Oregon, looking out through a wall of glass at the dark cascading outlines of mountains, the sky blazing with stars. He liked being up this early, in the dark. The edge of the lake was a sheer wall of granite, hurtling down past a silent mirror of black water.

It was the perfect sight to him. He came here to be alone, to drink coffee in the morning in big pine-pole chairs on the deck, to be where no one expected to find him. Sometimes Anna came with him, but this time she had not. And yet still the evening before he had seen someone he knew—a boisterous redheaded gentleman vintner from Santa Rosa, retired from early days in Silicon Valley and consumed with the pursuit of wine. He had been there with a wealthy gaggle of other grape-growers, and they all ate, and drank, and inside himself Jack was thinking: I could never spend my time thinking about wine. I could never pose at living in some country valley. I could never be white. I could never be them.

But he had his own piece of the universe coming, his porcelain. And finally he'd escaped back up here to the silence of his room and the magnificence of the deal he'd just completed, and he had slept. His phone went off. He flipped it up and glanced at the caller-ID line. Only a few calls were routed to this cell number. This was one. “Yes?”

“Mr. Yuan. Ashok Navra.”

“Yes, Ashok.”

“Your shipment of Chinese porcelain is in Hong Kong. I've talked to the consignee there, a Stanley Pao. He says the pieces are being repacked for airfreight now.” And Jack had felt a daze, talking to him, thanking him, signing off, looking out at the edges of dawn and the lake and the receding forms of glacier-scrubbed rock. The money was transferred. The art would be in his hands in a few days. Before he went downstairs he left a message for the curator he had hired to help him sort things out and make decisions, telling her to be ready to start in four days' time. He wanted to know exactly what he had. And then he wanted to keep this collection very, very private.

The next day Stanley Pao opened the door to Bai, the man who had brought in the shipment. He had been a bit surprised, an hour before, to get the man's phone call. But after speaking with him for a few minutes he had agreed to receive him. This ah chan seemed both careful and intelligent. Sometimes the ambitious ones made good allies. But sometimes they were the very ones a man should not trust.

“Jinlai, jinlai,”
Come in, Stanley said in Mandarin, for Bai knew neither Cantonese nor English. To get ahead he'd have to learn. Stanley led him into his back room, climate-controlled, carpeted and shelved like an English den, crammed with pots of all shapes and sizes. He noted with satisfaction the widening of the man's eyes. “You said you had something tasty for me?”

“Yes,” said Bai. He touched the box under his arm, his gaze roving the room. So many pots, and horse races on the computer monitor. “I have this piece,” he said, and extended the box.

Pao eased back the lid with his wrinkled, age-blotched hands. His first reaction was to gasp, for it was a chicken cup, a shockingly good one, and his first impression was all visceral—
It can't be! But it is.
Then he looked closer. Of course it wasn't. But it was almost identical to the chicken cup in today's cargo! Naturally, he'd gone directly to that one the minute he'd seen it on the manifest, as soon as Bai had walked out of the warehouse. He knew it was fake, for there was a small notation at the end of the document referring back to it—
Modern
fang gu,
included at buyer's request
—and yet it was so
hoi moon
he himself had been almost swayed by it. And he was never, never fooled.

This was also a fake, but so very good. He turned it in his hand, held it to the light. Even the color of the clay was correct, the warm off-white of the Chenghua reign, so rare to see it done right. Oh, it was fine. “It's a wonderful piece,” he told Bai. “One of the best reproductions I've ever seen. How much do you want for it?”

Bai snapped his head around a little too fast.

Ah! Pao watched him, fascinated. He hadn't known. He'd thought it was real. Interesting. Now Pao saw it. The ah chan had switched one fake for another, thinking he was taking out a real, Ming Dynasty cup and not a
fang gu
at all. “Ask another dealer if you don't believe me. It's a copy. But fine. Very fine.”

But the ah chan had believed him. It was as if he had known, underneath, that the cup was too good to be true, too much to expect after all the money he'd made. So he shrugged it off with a gambler's resignation. He accepted a thousand U.S. dollars for the reproduction, protesting that this wasn't his line of work but taking the money, folding it, and putting it in his pocket. “I hope we meet again,” he told Pao. “Maybe we can work together.”

“Of course, of course,” Stanley answered unhurriedly. “Let us keep in touch.” Stanley was always polite. But in fact he was too careful to ever do business with this ah chan again.

“So then he came back, and brought me the cup—your
fang gu
from the collection,” Stanley Pao said to Lia Frank later that afternoon. She had arrived in Hong Kong the night before. Now they were in his back room, looking at pots, having taken an instant liking to each other. “He'd switched them. I realized it as soon as I saw the one he brought me here, for I had read your most excellent description in the inventory. I switched them back. This is his copy. Yours is in the collection.” He peered at her eyes. “Am I right? This is his copy?”

“It is,” she said, noting a softer, more translucent quality to the glaze in this cup. No less perfect—only different. This was the one she'd seen Bai purchase from Potter Yu.

So this meant Bai had transported her collection. It was strange, but not unheard of. Ah chans were experts at shipping, after all.

“It's gorgeous, isn't it?” She held it up to the light and felt a full smile form on her lips for the first time since she had left Michael behind in Beijing.
Don't think about that.
She couldn't control the future.
This
was happiness, this cup. “Stanley.” Her eyes shone. “Will you sell it to me?”

“Not on your grandmother! How could I let go of this?”

“Oh.” She looked down. “So I don't even get to say that I'd double whatever you paid? I understand, though. I do. I'd never let go of it either.” And she smiled at him through her hair, which she had decided to leave down today. It felt strange. She had it tucked behind her ears but it kept slipping out.

“What do you say, Lia?” Stanley asked. He gave her a thoughtful look as if he'd been considering the subject for some time. “The repacking will take hours and hours. Shouldn't we go to Central and look at some pots?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

Another pair of colleagues would have repaired to a restaurant to enjoy a leisurely meal, but Lia and Stanley went instead to Hollywood Road. They started at the top, where the road twisted most tortuously and where the most discriminating, most exclusive shops held court, and worked their way down to the bottom where the shadows were deeper and the deals more murky.

In most of the galleries the owner would lock up, if they were alone, and take them to some back chamber, through a side door or up some narrow set of stairs. In this world there was always the interior room, the private admittance, the exclusivity shared by friends. There were small sofas grouped around a low table specially designed for handling porcelain—felt-padded, with a low lip shielding its edge all the way around. There were hours of shared enjoyment over the perfections that man, in his finest moments, had made of clay. It was a balm to Lia's heart. It made whole stretches of minutes go by in which she felt the glory of pots, the shared pleasure of connoisseurship, and managed to forget that a part of her felt like it had been torn away.

That night he called her, not knowing quite what to say to her but not able to go any longer without connecting. He went back to his room after work, where it was quiet, and dialed her cell.

“This is Lia,” she said when she picked up.

“It's me.”

“Hi.” Her voice changed for him, opened, softened.

“How are you?” Already he felt back in her nexus.

“Okay. And you?”

“Not good. I don't like it here without you.”

“I know,” she said. “I feel the same here in Hong Kong. It'd be better if you were here.”

He felt a wave of pleasure inside him when he heard this. “Then come back,” he said, simple, quick, straight out.

“But I can't. I have to see the pots off.”

“And then?”

“Then I have to go to New York. Immediately. They're all waiting for me. This was a big thing for us, this deal.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” he said.

“I know. Me too.”

He felt his longing start to skid. While she was in Hong Kong they were still close, or it seemed that way. They could talk and things could shift in a moment; she could turn around. Going back to New York would change things. Then they'd have to go to lengths. Then if they were going to see each other again they'd have to start climbing that long and arduous ladder of intention.

This was what he'd said he wouldn't, couldn't, shouldn't do. But he kept thinking about her. She was always in his mind. “I have to admit I was hoping it would be easy, it would just happen. You'd come back.”

“I could,” she said. “Not right away, but I could. Michael. What happened meant a lot to me. I would really like to get to know you. I mean that.” She was enunciating. He could tell she was speaking from her center. “I really, really would.”

“I was hoping that too,” he said. “I'm sorry it took so long for things to happen.”

“Never mind that now,” she said.

He knew it was his turn. It was time for him to say, let's try it. Let's meet again and see. It was up to him.

But he couldn't walk out on the plank just like that. He had to have a little time to think. And so he hesitated. He held the silence.

On her end, she felt hope draining away from her as he said nothing. While she waited, she unlatched the sliding glass door and stepped out on her balcony. The damp, briny air made her feel clearer. “Think about what I told you,” she said softly. “Let me know if you feel the same. If you want to see me again, you know, I'll figure something out. Call me. If that's what you want, call me.” She was putting the ball firmly in his court. “I'm not leaving for a day and a half.”

She closed her eyes. Had she done right, or wrong? She had opened her heart and shown her willingness. She couldn't do any more. She waited.

“You know all about me,” he said.

She knew he meant his illness. “I know all about you.”