A Cup of Light (24 page)

“All right, Lia,” he said, with such gentleness in his voice that she felt for a yearning instant everything was going to be okay, “I'll call you.”

So he wanted time to think. There was nothing else she could say. She looked out over the harbor, crowded with its descending mass of white towers. Night was falling and the water glowed up from beneath, bathing the sampans and junks and massive cargo vessels in pure aquamarine light. “So, then,” she said after a moment. “Even though I don't want to hang up, even though I want to talk to you all night and do a million other things to you, with you, I guess I should say good-bye.”

“Okay,” he agreed again. He didn't try to hold her. They hung up.

The line was dead, a blank space ringing down a cold stone floor in an empty hall. She felt her stomach twist. Now she could only wait. She couldn't let this reduce her. She had work to finish. Some other time, when she had the space and peace, if necessary, she would cry. Not now.

Lia and Stanley saw the crates lifted into the underbelly of the jet and then drove back into Central, weak with satisfaction. “What shall we do?” he asked her.

Lia smiled at the white-haired man. She liked being with him. And it helped keep her mind off Michael.
Don't think, don't want. Expect nothing. Let go.
The car was twisting and veering down along the curving, banana-leafed, terraced two-lane road, down toward the heart of Hong Kong. But how could she let go? After what they had done, how could they just forget? In a minute the car came out in Central, just above the business district. “You know what I'd really like to do?” she said. “Let's go back to Hollywood Road.”

Pao's face lifted in a gradual grin of agreement. He spoke in Cantonese to the driver, who turned the car around.

When Michael finished that day, he stopped at the ward on three south. His friend Little Chen had recently been readmitted. Chen had come to Michael's attention some months before because his levels of lead were so high. He had a high-risk profile; his family lived on a corner of two of Beijing's busiest streets, and their apartment windows opened on to the intersection with all its exhaust fumes. Little Chen had already been ill from lead poisoning. But then he had also been diagnosed with leukemia. He'd been in for a while, very sick. He'd improved and been discharged. Now, after being home for many weeks, he was back. Michael had stopped and seen him that last day—the day he had met Lia after work. The day they became lovers. The day she left. And now he had to decide whether to risk everything again, or not.

He had hurt her by hesitating on the phone. He didn't want to hurt her—the opposite. He wanted to make a bed for her to lie on. He didn't think he would ever feel that again, but now he did.

He pivoted lightly through the door at three south, his footsteps soft on the tile, and strode past the small beds toward the end where his young friend would be waiting.

Suddenly disoriented, he stopped and rocked his weight from side to side. Here was the door to the bathroom, here the wall against which he'd stood the other day when he talked to the boy. He was sure of it. Yet now there was only a row of empty steel carts. He'd missed it. He turned back.

He walked more slowly and looked into the face of each little child. Little Chen was very distinctive, with a triangular face and a wide, thin mouth. Or was he on the wrong aisle? No, Michael was sure; this was right. This had been his bed. Maybe the staff had moved him.

A female worker polished the bed table. “Where's Little Chen?” he asked her.

She started and turned to look at him, then started again because he was an outsider.

“Little Chen,” he said again, and pointed to the bed.

“Gone,” she said.

Michael frowned and shot back a different word. “Discharged?” he asked.

Color went out of the woman's face. “No. Gone away.”

Gone away. That meant dead, when they said it.

Tears came up out of him and spilled right over from his eyes before he even knew they were coming, before he could think about stopping them. He wrapped his hand around the spindly bed frame.

The woman looked at him with direct Chinese kindness. “It's too pitiable.” She handed him a clean square of cloth.

He wiped his face. “Thank you,” he said.

“Go home, sir.” She patted his arm. “Go home to your wife.”

He looked at her.

“Go home to your wife,” she said again, as if it were obvious.

“All right,” he said, as if he could simply do that, do what she said. He could walk out of here and go to her. Now the hurt he had caused Lia by hesitating, by not stepping over the line right away, tugged at him more than ever. It was almost a physical pain in the center of him. He never wanted to hurt her.
Good-bye,
he thought to Little Chen. And with an effort he walked back out of the ward.

He felt his cell phone in his pocket. He could dial her. Tell her. Make it right. He kept walking, right out of the hospital. But calling her didn't seem like enough, not now.

He should go to Hong Kong.

He took a taxi to the head of his hutong and walked in, under the soft-speaking lindens. There, over his worn limestone lintel, in his tiny room, he clicked on the Internet and looked at airlines. There was nothing available to Hong Kong tonight, not in confirmed seating. But he was adept at navigating margins. Two of tonight's flights had standby potential. He'd go out to the airport and try. He had to leave instantly. And he'd take his cell phone with him. If in the end he couldn't get on a plane, he'd call her.

It felt right to him to go now. It was the correct seed to plant.
Qian yin hou guo,
he had heard his friend An say. It's on the basis of what comes before that what follows bears fruit.

After a long day of studying bank reports, of weighing the life and viability of various loans, some made by him, some borrowed by him, all part of the frighteningly spit-supported structure that was Chinese banking, Gao Yideng went home to his private study. There he logged on to his personal computer, and through a series of proprietary portals brought up a string of accounts one by one. Even his most trusted advisers did not know everything he had. In the United States, on deposit, he now had one hundred twenty-six million dollars. For a moment, he could enjoy this triumph. He had ninety days to make certain delicate decisions about declarations and taxes. In the meantime he had taken at least one substantial asset and turned it into accessible cash, outside China.

He didn't feel any tugs of remorse over so much treasure leaving the country. In fact he believed it was better. Before he got it, this had been buried in the ground. Let the rest of the world see it. Let it end up preserved and be forever protected from chaos.

A soft knock sounded at his study door. His wife. “Everything's ready,” she said, and he knew she meant his two sons, his daughter, their evening meal. They would never know the privations he and Peng had endured. He wondered where Peng was tonight. He was certain the other man was alive, on earth; he had faith that he would know if Peng had passed through the gate and gone away.
“Wo jiu lai-le,”
he told his wife.

And he stood up, turned off his computer, followed his wife down the long wainscoted Shanghainese hallway to the stairs, curving down, and around, to the hallway and the dining room and the eyes of his children waiting under the bright crystal-dripping chandelier. For them, he accumulated. For them he built a future. He met their faces with a smile.

At the airport, Michael was lucky enough to clear standby on a flight that would land in Hong Kong before midnight. That was okay. They'd have some hours together, at least. And they'd go from there.

He kept his cell phone on until they fastened their seat belts on the plane and the order came to turn them off. The crew strapped down, but the plane did not move. They waited, and then they waited some more.

Finally the pilot made a long announcement in Chinese, which was followed by a confusingly brief translation into English. “Because of the crash of China International Flight Sixty-eight, all the flights now are frozen for a new list of safety checks.” Michael rearranged the scrambled words in his head. How many safety checks? How long would it take?
All
planes? He sank. The crew got up and moved around. The lights flickered up. The passengers sat belted in, and the jet did not move.

An hour ticked by, every minute digging at him. He tagged a stewardess. “Would I be able to use a cell phone?”

“No!” She looked at him sternly. “No cell phone now.”

He had to laugh. Fate always displayed such incredible irony. Belted upright, head back, eyes closed, he laughed silently until his body shook and his seatmate inched away from him.

In Jingdezhen, Bai walked along Jinhua Lu at the bottom of the park with its small, picturesque bridges and gazebos. He passed men hauling back empty carts, old women taking slow, duck-footed steps, clots of children giggling, racing home for the night.

Though it was getting dark, the day was early for him. He had just come from his bed. What was more, he had an obscene amount of money in his pocket.

He was holding himself differently. Was it not obvious? People were looking at him with respect. He was a new man now. He didn't feel like Old Bai anymore.

He covered the winding sidewalk along the bottom of the hill, marked by a stone wall. Up there, somewhere above all that lush foliage, was the Research Institute, where they dispensed with the history of porcelain in a series of desultory cases. Down here, the cars and trucks and buses honked through the street. Exhaust smoked up and joined the kiln grit, in the air for a thousand years. Bai swung his arms with his stride, happy to be walking.

And then he was at the Perfect Garden. He pushed open the double doors and walked into the dim-lit dining room, to his friends, at their usual table. Beer, tea, and food were piled up in front of them. They raised their hands to him. “Emperor Bai!” he heard,
Bai Huangdi.
“Emperor Bai!” And he shook his own hands back to them, and let his smile of triumph light his face like the sun.

They had sat on the runway for almost two hours when the pilot finally crackled on and said, with no explanation, that safety checks were complete and that they were tenth in line for takeoff.

Michael sensed a light sweat break out all over him as he looked at his watch. He felt like he could melt in his seat. He could make it.

By the time Lia was down to the last few hours, her heart was burning. She hadn't heard from him. Apparently he didn't even think he ought to say good-bye. She wanted to kick a hole in the wall, throw something out the window. Instead, she folded all her clothes in tight little squares and stuffed them in her suitcase. She couldn't believe it. She had been so sure he'd call her. But why? Just because she felt something real with him and she wanted to go on with it, at least try, she couldn't expect him to want the same. So he didn't. He had a right to make that choice. That's what memory rooms were for. They had doors that could be closed. Still. She looked at her silent phone and felt everything well up again. It wouldn't have been so very hard to say good-bye with love.

Despite him, outside of him, the irony was . . . she was changed. She felt like a different person, not quite newly minted but restirred. The composition of her cells was altered. She could see it in the mirror. It had been more than two days since she'd been with him, and still she was luminous, perversely so, tragically. Now here was the dress in her hands, the sleeveless, box-necked dress in sage silk.

She dropped her clothes and zipped into it. Made for her, it hugged her all the way down. Oh, she was beautiful in it, with her hair only caught back, and if she wore high-heeled sandals—she looked at herself over her shoulder. She could see the truth and the anguish, the shimmering cloth against her body. Trying to be beautiful was just another form of forgery. The feeling of her and him was a forgery. Admit it. He didn't want it. So I do need my tired old world, she thought, my maze, my rooms; I do. I'll put him there. She took the dress off and told herself, let go of hope. Let it go now. But she felt the same, pulled by wanting. Delirious with it. It overwhelmed even her anger. She folded the dress on top of everything else and closed the suitcase.

Then there was a knock on the door, polite, soft, insistent. First shock wiped every thought from her mind, then a smile formed inside her, deep down. That's why he didn't call, because he came. Hope was a river, bringing back optimism and acceptance and forgiveness. Thought could not begin to contain her. She yanked the dress out again, hurried back into it. The knock sounded again. “Just a minute!”

She pulled the silk down over her hips and opened the door.

Facing her was the concierge. “Miss Frank?”

She thought she might sink all the way to the ocean floor. “Yes,” she said.

“A package.” He handed her a small box. “From Mr. Stanley Pao.”

“Thank you,” she said. He was gone.

She went inside and opened it. When she lifted the lid her mouth went soft in surprise. It was Stanley's copy of the chicken cup, the one she had watched Bai buy from Potter Yu. Ah, what genius. She held it up. It gave off a world of grace all its own.
For you,
read the card,
with my regards.
So sweet, she thought, her heart running out to Stanley. So kind. As if somehow the elder man knew.

Because it wasn't him at her door, the American man she couldn't stop thinking about. It was this perfect little object. It was easy, profound,
hoi moon,
just like what she'd had with Michael. Had. Past tense. Let it go, she thought. She balanced the cup on the desk and curled up on the couch looking at it, eye level. It was immortal, whether six hundred years or six days old, the same. A thing perfect and still.

Unlike her. She stood up and pressed her face to the window. The harbor below was a late-night dream of lights, the water glassy and reflective. She had a vision of herself floating down there, alone, safe, spread-eagled on a raft in calm water. Surrounded by lights. It was peaceful and water-silent. She remembered all the good of being alone, the opportunity. She thought of all her fakes back in New York.