A Cup of Light (9 page)

Lia smiled to herself, watching the clerk in the Beijing shop wrap up the faux-enamel box. She loved her mother, even though the constant half-giddy improvisation that was Anita's parenting had included some terrible mistakes.

As a small child Lia had only one annual link with her father, a Christmas card. These cards were among her first treasures. She had whole myth systems around them. He existed; these were his relics. One day she'd find him.

And then when she was nine she learned that all the cards had been written and mailed by her mother. Every year her mother had sat down and invented a message to her daughter, faked another person's handwriting, and gone out and mailed it to her. Anita so needed everything to be right—at least, on the surface, to
look
right—that this for her was a nurturing act. Years later Lia understood. But then, on that day, she felt only rage.

She locked herself in her room. To her waves of tears and her kicking of the wall, Anita kept coming back with her sweet, half-reasonable protests. She'd lost track of him, she'd
wanted
to lose track of him, it had been best, she hadn't wanted Lia to be hurt. Anything to keep her from being hurt. Yet Lia felt at that moment as if she were being more than hurt, worse than hurt, maimed actually, killed by love. “But it's because I love you!” Anita kept calling to her through the door.

Lia threw all the cards, one for each year of her life, into her metal wastebasket. Fakes. They were fakes. She lit a match to them. She knew she would pay for this later, but for once in her life she did not care. They went up in a quick whuff of flames. Only then would she open her door and stand defiantly in front of the little fire, the backs of her legs smarting and tingling from the jumping heat.

Now she was a mature woman and she saw that her mother had done the best she could. Of course she could not remake the world for her daughter. Why would she even try? And yet Lia herself tried, she knew she did; she tried all the time. Her system was just a little different. Better too. She fit the package into her purse and stepped out of the shop into the roaring street.

At the same time in the south, in Jingdezhen, the ah chan answered his phone.
“Wei.”

“Old Bai.” It was Zhou.

“Ei,”
Bai answered companionably. In all the loose-knit society of ah chans, there were many who called themselves Bai's friends, but Zhou was one he really trusted. It was Zhou's help he had asked with this job.

“The others are worried,” Zhou said.

“About Hu and Sun?” Bai had a bad feeling himself about the two of them trying to move that pair of huge famille-rose vases.

“They've not arrived.”

“Oh,” Bai said. Not good. Very not good. This was their third day out. Hu and Sun should be in Hong Kong by now.

“They're not there. I've talked to Pak and Ling.”

Gentle knots formed in Bai's midsection. “Call Old Lu,” he advised. “As soon as there's word in Hong Kong, he'll know.”

“All right,” Zhou said. “Keep your handphone.”

“It's on,” Bai assured him. He was walking down the street, taking his wife out to an evening meal.

“I'll call you later.”

Bai slipped the phone in his pocket and went on walking with Lili along the putting, honking, cement-and-asphalt streets with their open-mawed retail stores and stalls. Bins spilling out into the street were piled with baskets, metal goods, hardware, but most of all porcelain, because porcelain was the heart and bones of Jingdezhen. Bai bought his wife a length of plum velvet and he saw with satisfaction how the package made an acquiescent weight against her legs, and how she smiled at the feeling of it against her.

He felt good in his fine cotton shirt, open two buttons down, his woven leather shoes. Bai liked to dress as if he were a wealthy Italian stepping off a yacht. An art dealer, a learned man.

It had rained the night before, leaving the low concrete town in a state of fresh-washed June optimism. Bai and Lili turned off Jingyu and walked down a repeating, narrowing pattern of side streets, their road surfaces cracked and potted, sidewalks heaved up around the swelling, pulsing roots of trees. Here in the south, life multiplied almost before one's eyes. It was one of the things that gave Jiangxi Province its red-soiled beauty. They stepped over the erupted, corrugated sidewalk and into the Hui Min, a tiny open-air restaurant.

Lili was the third wife he had taken. Each of the women knew, sketchily, about the others, but they preferred not to know much and also to forget what they did know, as it suited. Each of his wives was from someplace else, as he originally was, undocumented, part of China's floating population. He kept each of them in simple comfort if not in style. They all knew he had more than one place to lay his head, and with all things considered they accepted this. He was like a lot of other ah chans this way. They added wives. It was a tacit return to an old pattern of concubinage, although this was the modern world and one had to keep up appearances. The wives had to be in different places. They couldn't all live under one roof as was done in the past. The ah chans liked to joke to each other that their wives, of radically descending ages, would all meet only once—at the man's funeral.

Neither of Bai's other two wives lived in Jingdezhen. One lived in Houtai Township, a village in the hills forty kilometers northeast. The other—the original girl he had married near home, in his youth, under the naive impression he would remain tied to her forever—still lived outside of Changsha. He visited both of them when he could. He enjoyed seeing them. But Lili was his favorite. She was the love match. She was the newest and the youngest.

Still, here in Jingdezhen, he didn't stay with Lili all the time. He spent many nights in his own simple cement-walled apartment, a place he had bought and with it finally obtained his
hukou,
his residency permit, in Jingdezhen. It had been an important thing to have at the time he bought it and still today had value in the largely privatized economy, for it still got a person certain medical care and benefits and an acknowledged geographic notch in society.

In his own place, Bai liked to stay alone. This was where he kept his books, his collections of auction catalogs, his museum publications, his files of photocopied articles from art magazines and academic journals. If he wanted to be a great dealer one day, he had to learn. He knew it was so.

And as long as he could afford it, as long as he could continue to prevail over his risks, he'd keep Lili in her tidy little room down in the warren of quickie dwellings below Jixing Street. She didn't mind. It was better than the dirt village in which she grew up.

Lili was a good girl, round-faced and red-cheeked. She was completely open to him and he felt safe with her. She loved him without any adult reserve. It made him want to do anything for her. They had married quickly and informally at the county registry office. With her he had begun to think, for the first time, that he might be ready to have a son. Here in Jingdezhen, or—if he really got half a million
ren min bi
—maybe in Hong Kong.

When they married he had brought her to his apartment, just for a few days until he secured her a room down below the lake. The first night he had taken her on the bed. She had lain still with her arms and legs spread, as if nailed to the earth, but she had smiled up at him when he lay over her, her eyes round with surprise and pleasure, and he'd seen how she would learn. Late that night he awoke to see one light burning, on his desk, and to see her elegantly naked back to him, cut down the middle by her black braid, her face bent in wonder over the turned pages of an art book, porcelains, celestial perfections such as she, a village girl, had never seen. He lay perfectly still, watching her. For a moment he just wanted to watch her, her response to beauty, the glow of her pleasure over the rustling pages, while he let his imagination play over what he might do with her next.

And now they entered the restaurant by sidling past its two giant burners out on the root-buckled sidewalk, the powerful flames chuffing up around the woks. The owner let out a hoarse cry of greeting and they called back, loud and good-natured.

They sat in one of the two tables inside the stall, round, covered with white plastic. A tiny electric fan mounted on the wall rotated over them. “Have the eggplant with chiles and onions,” he told Lili solicitously. “Have the pork belly with potatoes.” Then he beckoned the owner in her sauce-splashed white apron. “Two Pepsis!”

Lili smiled at this unexpected pleasure, her polyester red-checkered sleeve touching his, her arm against him discreetly. He felt the warmth from her. The Pepsi came in big, cold plastic bottles. To him it was a slosh of too-sweet yin, it made his teeth hurt, but was it not what international people drank? And was that not what he was now?

His handphone rang. He fumbled and snapped it open.

“Ei,”
said Zhou.

“You talk to Old Lu?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

Bai pushed away the clenching feeling. There was still time. “We have to wait for them to surface,” he said to Zhou.

“Aren't you going to Hong Kong?”

“Yes, soon,” Bai answered. Nothing explicit needed saying. “I am trusting Hu and Sun will have arrived by the time I get there.”

“As am I,” answered Zhou.

They hung up and Bai looked back at his wife, her arm still next to his, her face tilted up to him; “Lili,” he told her gently. He poured Pepsi into her glass. “I'm going to be away for a while.”

Jack Yuan stood at the honed limestone counter in his kitchen, watching his wife make coffee. She had a small mouth. When she was concentrating, as she was now, measuring the beans, it hung slightly open to form an O.

“I got a few photos and descriptions in an e-mail this morning,” he said. “They're incredible.”

He saw the corners of that plum-colored mouth lift: recognition. The opponent was back in the ring. She straightened and poured the water. “You know what I think.”

Yes, he knew. She had made herself very clear. Anna Sing, self-confident, daughter of a prominent cardiac surgeon, Jack's match on all fronts, the original material girl. Anna did not want him to buy the porcelain. “Art should not be that much of our portfolio.”

He shrugged. She was right. But this was also the kind of opportunity that would never come again.

He looked at her; thirty this year. She glowed with beauty: her skin, her graceful limbs, the life in her eyes. It was impossible to believe she was not healthy in every way. Life should be all but bursting within her. Yet so far, nothing. They should buy the porcelain. Couldn't she see that? “We'll talk about the art later,” he said.

She gave him a look that said: You bet we will, Jack. And I'll end up on top. But then she returned the gentleness in his eyes with a softness of her own, slid the pot into place, pressed the
ON
button, and moved over to where he stood by the counter.

7

Lia worked through eighty pots that day. By now she had found a table and pushed it over to the window under natural light and covered it with extra felt. She had her lights set up, her camera on its stand. She had everything she needed to appraise treasure from heaven.

Only she was alone. There was no one she could whisper to, no one she could call, no one with whom she could exult.

If she could tell anyone she would tell her friend Aline. She looked at her watch. In L.A. it was three in the morning now. Aline would finally be asleep in her secluded place in Coldwater Canyon. She would have drunk too much, smoked too much, and stayed out with her friends too late, then driven home to her true friends, her Ming jars and her Song plates and her Qing jardinieres, not to mention her collection of masterfully faux Etruscan statuary. Aline had a wonderful eye for fakes. Her prize was a knockoff Stradivarius, which she liked to leave out, on the sideboard, its bow carelessly across it as if its owner had just left off playing for a moment. Oh yes. The very thought made Lia shiver with pleasure. Aline would have the breath knocked right out of her if she heard about this. She would get on a plane and fly to Beijing instantly. Lia would be unable to stop her. What fun it would be to call her, to dial her number and wake her up and tell her how many drop-dead pots were in this room, in Beijing, right now, right in front of her.

But she couldn't call Aline. She couldn't call David. “David is doing well,” Zheng had told her. “The Tokyo staff is with him. You concentrate.” Okay, she thought. And took a deep breath and lifted the lid on the twenty-third crate.

Bai made it out of bed at noon. The damp heat of his studio decided for him in the end. The sheets were twisted around his legs when he finally climbed out of them, his face puffy and creased. He dressed and walked in a gravel-crunching rhythm down the hill to town. It was cool, where he was going. It was dark.

He pushed open the door of the Perfect Garden Teahouse.
“Ei,”
he said to the proprietor, and passed through the next set of doors, to the tearoom.

His friends, his circle of smoking, serpentine men, were already there, talking in a mix of Mandarin and local dialect. He crossed to them. Bai loved to wake up at the Perfect Garden. He liked to be in this dimness when it was past noon and the hot sun was shimmering the sidewalks. To drink tea here, to smoke. To talk about the pots coming in and going out. To lounge on the leather-seated chairs around the tables, to smell the dank, sour note of beer from the night before.

They also liked to be here at night. Often they'd be waiting for the shipment of one man or another to arrive. There was always an agreeable gamble in it. One never knew exactly what the piece would be—how fine its condition, how rare its pedigree. Each time was like the first, a new chance, starting over.

They would drink and smoke through the waiting and the wagering and the laughing banter, then like a clap from heaven it would be time and they would roam outside, milling together. Cars would be waiting. They'd go to the river dock, or the back of the train depot, or to any one of the many warehouses down bumpy dirt-track roads out of town where they waited late at night to meet trucks.

Pots came from all over China. Some had been bought from families who had saved them as heirlooms, or
zu chuan
. Others had been robbed from graves, especially the more ancient pieces—but never by the ah chans themselves. Plundering tombs was low work. Men like Bai would never do it. It was with reluctant distaste that they even did business with the men who did. Whatever the source, when the goods came into Jingdezhen they would ride out that dusty track at night to meet them, bumping down between the red loam fields, the rice paddies, and the muddy river.

The truck might be small and the load light. Sometimes those cargoes were the most precious. The lid would come up, and then one of them, say Qing-Enamel Kan, would lift out the wares for which he was known: a snuff bottle in the shape of a gourd, painted in overglaze enamel in a curling design of leaves and vines and smaller gourds.

“Hoi moon,”
someone would breathe.

Someone else: “Mark and period?”

And Kan would turn it over. A four-character Qianlong mark in seal script.

Who would know, who would be able to connect it? It might be Old Zhang, the most erudite among them. Zhang might say: “See the form of it—the double gourd, covered with a design of smaller double gourds. See the color, the midpoint between tea and gilded gold. Both these aspects are like to a much larger piece, much older, a bronze double gourd inset with jade. It was in the collection of the Shenyang Palace. And in the reign of Qianlong this sort of tribute to it was made.”

“Jiu shi,”
they would say, admiring, Just so.

But on this day in the teahouse, they all sat in a circle, slouched low with their feet spread out. All the phones were on the table. Bai ordered tea, five-spice eggs, and preserved cucumber. Old Zhang shook a cigarette from his pack and extended it, along with a relaxed monosyllable of welcome. Bai took it and uttered the briefest, most implicit thanks. They were friends. Most things had already been understood between them.

He took a drink of tea, lit his cigarette, drew in from it. “Any news?” he said.

Old Zhang shook his head. He knew Bai was talking about Hu and Sun. “They aren't there yet.”

“No one has heard from them?”

“No one.”

“Maybe by the end of the day,” Bai said.

Old Zhang tightened his mouth. He knew, they both knew, it was really too late already. Their two friends should have been in Hong Kong by now, celebrating, having passed their pair of four-foot famille-rose vases down the line to the next owner and pocketed the substantial difference.

But they hadn't. No one had heard from them. The men around the table passed silent prayers up.

Two younger men from Ningbo went back to paging through a catalog from an art auction house in Shanghai. “See this fine oxblood plate, Xuande reign—“”

“That! You call that fine? That's only the midrange of fine.”

“Blow gas.”

“It's so!”

“He's right,” put in Han Fengyi from across the table. “I've seen that plate! I had the chance to buy it five years ago. I turned it down!”

“Suck pustules! You did not!”

They all laughed.

“I did! It was too expensive!”

“Yes, and in Sichuan dogs bark at the sun,” Bai retorted, which was a way of accusing Han of being afraid of his own shadow. They were merciless with Han. He was one of the few among them who attached himself slavishly to one dealer, supplying him as faithfully as a dog. The rest of them freelanced. Their business was fluid. They carried greater risks but their wins were fine, sometimes superb.

“Listen now,” Bai said quietly to his friend Zhou, seated next to him. The others were talking. No one else was listening. Zhou put down his polished wooden chopsticks.

“I have a big job coming up,” Bai said. “Transportation.” He turned his teacup to swirl the last few drops. “I'm going to need help.”

Zhou refilled Bai's cup.

“I'm going to Hong Kong tomorrow,” Bai said. “Carrying a few things and picking up some cash. Then when I come back—“”

“Call me,” said Zhou. “Let me know when you're ready.”

“I will,” said Bai. He would pay Zhou a few thousand
ren min bi
to do the overnight driving so Bai could save himself for the ordeal of crossing the border. That final gauntlet he would run alone. Zhou knew this. It didn't need to be said.

Bai smiled. This deal was brilliant, bright as the sun, that bright. He saw the avidity on Zhou's face. The plan had that streaking, powerful feeling, the unmistakable scent of luck.

“Good,” he said after a minute. He liked the way it was growing around him.

There was one other person Lia was longing to tell about these pots, and that was her former stepfather, Albert. He loved porcelain. He didn't have much money, but he knew to buy wonderful things in less than perfect condition. During the years he'd lived with Lia and Anita, two pieces stood in the dining room: a globular water pot with a mottled tea-green glaze, Kangxi period, and a chrysanthemum-shaped bowl in celadon from the reign of Qianlong. They were miraculous. They shone with their own light. And Albert made her feel that it was all right to sense a connection to objects, because objects in their perfection resembled love. And when they were imperfect, you loved them for their flaws too. As it was in life. She remembered holding the pale chrysanthemum-shaped bowl, with its curving ribs, to her cheek and feeling its diamond-clean glaze on her skin.

She'd looked him up again as an adult. He lived overseas most of the time now, but they'd managed to meet in New York six or seven years before.

Typical for Albert, he'd wanted to meet at the Met. There was an exhibit of Chinese scholar-objects he thought they ought to see. As she ran up the stairs she saw him standing at the top, his suit as shapeless as ever and he more corpulent within it. His face was ruddier and his eyes more pouched with age. But his brushy mustache was the same, as was the kind smile in his eye.

“Lia!” he said happily. “Look at you.” He took her in, her rangy height, her same long hair, only now she was a woman, grown-up and graceful.

She raised her brows ironically and made some joke of it. Now, looking back, it was clear she'd been younger and more attractive then, though at the time she hadn't thought so at all. Then she never thought she looked good enough. Always it seemed she could only appreciate herself in arrears. She was never happy to be exactly what she was at any present moment.

They walked together into the exhibit, past brush rests and water pots and scholars' rocks, calligraphy and table screens and vases, paperweights, boxes for seal vermilion, and inkstones. Walking beside Albert, talking, sharing memories of Anita and her things, Lia felt a sense of family love completed. It was only for a minute, and it was only a wisp, but she felt it. Why couldn't you have been my father? she thought, the way she often had as a child.

“Tell me about your work at Hastings,” he said.

She could see the pride in his eyes. “Best job in the world! I don't know how it happened. I get to look at pots all the time. I mean, that's actually what I get paid to do.”

“And who could deserve it more?” he said. They had paused in front of a brush holder made of
zitan
wood, burled and rolled like rushing water. Seeing it brought the past to life: the smell of charcoal in the brazier, the propulsive movement of the scholar's brush on silk. It was just one facet, only an instant, but it was a world. And now it was in her memory.

“Are you married yet?” Albert was asking. She saw him looking at her hand, which bore no ring.

“No.”

“No one?”

She made a rueful twist of her mouth. “I'm waiting. You know.”

“You have time,” he said kindly.

“I know.”

“You're unique, Lia. The right person will come.”

He meant it nicely, but she felt a sad thud at the well of perceptions she knew was behind it. She was not beautiful in the traditional way, though she had her own grace, a sort of serene allure that was the meeting point of intelligence and physicality. Still, she had no glamour. And so many men, even smart men, wanted beautiful women above all. Not women like her, not obsessive, hyper-internal women with thoughtful eyes and tightly pulled-up hair who lived in alternate mental worlds.

She couldn't think about this now. She had been pushing feverishly all day and she had to keep going. She put her hands into the crate, sank them into the pliant little wood spirals, and felt for the next box.

She tried to change her clothes before going out to eat in the evening, but it degenerated into another joust of self-doubt. Lia wasn't much good at her appearance. Even the hipper, more attenuated look practiced by worldly women of her generation didn't work for her. Most things she tried just looked wrong.

So she'd settled into layering knits to reasonably flatter the straight line of her body and carry her through all situations. It worked, even if it was only an accessory or two away from a uniform.

Tonight, though, she didn't like anything she had brought. She should be creative. She rooted through the drawer. She should buy something else. She stood in front of the mirror in her underwear, plain cotton, because when she was alone she wore only the most comfortable things, and undid her hair. It fell past her waist. She generally hated going out with it down; there was too much of it, it was too loose in the world, it attracted attention. Sometimes she clipped it at the back of her neck. She did that now.

For the rest, she would compromise. She settled on a close-fitting knit vest and a narrow bias-cut skirt. It almost didn't matter what she wore or what she did, she thought as she darkened her mouth with lipstick. She was still going to look dry and old-fashioned. Or maybe not. Her eyes were big and gray, not bad at all. She smiled and saw how it transformed her. And she picked up her purse and went out.

Curator Li was on the Internet, scrolling through museum sites and reading newsletters. He was searching for some mention of this thing about which he was still hearing whispers, this movement of a large number of pots. Nothing stayed hidden forever. If it existed he'd find it. Maybe here, in the electronically webbed art world.

Li jumped from a London-based art magazine to a Hong Kong auction house and watched the screen fill up with images. Nothing. Frustration hooked into him and gave a sharp, cynical pull. Was the story real or false?

He quit the server and turned away from the screen to a newspaper article. Their museum seemed to draw mixed public reaction no matter how much good it did. Last week they had bid on and failed to win an important piece of Tang ceramic statuary, more than a thousand years old. In the eyes of the public, they had failed to bring the piece home. What could they do! They had bid to the limit of their budget this time.