The Painter of Shanghai (13 page)

He clears his throat. ‘“River…” ’ he begins; then stops again. At last he opens his eyes and shrugs. ‘Your game, my lady.’

Smiling, Yuliang finishes it for him as she refills his cup:

Sea swallows have not returned;
people amuse themselves with the game
of vying green herbs.
Plum blooms are withered, willows bear catkins;
Twilight falls, light drops of rain
Wet the swing in the garden.

When he drinks, the fine-stretched cords on his throat tremble like
erhu
strings. When he’s done he studies her, his face unreadable.

‘Have I offended you?’ she asks.

‘I wouldn’t have expected you to know Li Qingzhao so well.’

‘I would have expected
you
to know her better.’

It comes out more tartly than Yuliang had planned. But he doesn’t seem to take offense.

‘It’s women’s verse, in the end. More music than proper poetry, really. We didn’t study women’s poems. No one I know did.’

‘That, perhaps, is your loss.’

‘Perhaps.’ He finishes off his drink. ‘Do you know more Li Qingzhao?’

‘Almost all, I think.’ Once more, the words are out before she registers how unseemly it sounds. But the look he gives her isn’t one of disdain. It’s more one of intense
concentration. As though he’s struggling to solve a perplexing problem.

‘So,’ he says. ‘The classics are included in your… training.’

‘No. At least, not those classics. We aren’t taught many poems, beyond what we learn to sing.’

‘So where –’

‘My uncle was… unusual.’

‘Unusual in what way?’

Yuliang hesitates, unsure how to proceed. She never talks about Wu Ding. And yet, looking into this strange man’s eyes, she finds herself inexplicably tempted to tell him not just her
jiujiu
’s story, but her own.

She is so conflicted about proceeding that she barely notices Mingmei standing up to trip around to Yi Gan’s free side. She does notice, however, when the weary complaint of the musician’s
pipa
begins filling the room: as top girl, she is the one who decides when to cue music.

Around them, diners call out their approval: ‘A song. Yes, let’s have a song!’

Mingmei’s hand flutters to her neck, a ring-glint of protest: ‘My throat is sooooo dry tonight,’ she chirps. ‘I think I’m getting ill… Perhaps my sister will do us the honor. If, that is, the new inspector will share her with the rest of the room.’

‘Ah,’ says Yi Gan, smirking. ‘How about it, eminence – can we borrow her?’

Pan Zanhua blinks at the tipsy crowd, as though he has only just become aware of its presence. ‘It’s not a question of lending,’ he says stiffly. ‘I certainly don’t own her.’

And without further ado he stands and excuses himself.

Stunned, Yuliang watches him make his way to the doors to the courtyard. The cries for a song reach a crescendo. But it’s only after he has left that she forces herself to her feet, past the outstretched hands and beery breath of her audience.

Later, as waiters clear up the slopped remains of the feast, and guild members stagger home to wives and concubines or to the Hall, Yuliang and Mingmei, friends and colleagues again in the wake of Pan Zanhua’s ultimate coldness to them both, shrug themselves back into their padded jackets. Shuffling through her remaining call-cards, Yuliang thinks wearily of the remaining events to which she has been summoned. Then, of course, there is Yi Gan, who will stay the night as he does most Saturday evenings. The thought makes her grimace: she knows all too well how his anger translates in bed.

As she makes her way toward the door, however, he materializes before her. ‘I won’t be seeing you later,’ he says briskly. ‘I’m booking you for someone else.’

‘Someone else?’ He’s never sent her to another client before.

He’s watching her the way a boy might watch an insect in magnified sunlight. ‘Our new customs inspector. It seems he needs a little more persuasion.’

For a moment Yuliang’s mind spins, both at the thought of seeing Pan Zanhua again and at the idea of his actually paying for her services. He had struck her as the last man under heaven who would ever place his chop on a brothel chit.

‘He is coming to the Hall?’ she manages.

‘No. You are going to him.’

She takes a breath. ‘When am I expected?’

The merchant smiles. ‘Ah. That’s the beauty of it. You aren’t.’

12

The new inspector’s house is both elegant and impressive, with three full stories, glass windows, a cobbled courtyard. Passing through the moon-shaped gate, Yuliang is forced to admit that it’s certainly the nicest house she has visited. Still, outside the doorway there’s a sharp, shrill urge to flee. Not just because she is still mortified from their encounter, but because the situation presents her best chance yet. The Hall’s sedan chair is needed elsewhere, as is the manservant; the Hall hadn’t planned on a lastminute call, and she won’t be expected there now until morning. What’s more, she has Yi Gan’s deposit in her purse.

For a moment – just a moment – Yuliang lets herself consider it: lying. Leaving. She sees herself on a boat, sailing away. When her thoughts delve beneath the water, though, there’s the girl in Wuhu Lake.

The Japanese maple tree in the courtyard’s center stirs in the wind, and in its whispers Yuliang hears the voice she misses most:
The only way to escape this place is by doing it their way.

Oh, Jinling.

Yuliang wipes her hands on her jacket. ‘It’s just skin,’ she reminds herself.

She knocks once. And again.

∗

As her eyes adjust to the dim light inside, Yuliang surveys the foyer’s offerings: a long redwood table. A carved sofa, simple but of superior quality. On top of the table is a Ming vase filled with chrysanthemums. Above that, a large picture-poem. The little image exudes loneliness like a damp aroma. The mountains are black and craggy, wreathed in mist so real she actually feels a chill. The poem is a delicate spider-dance on the right that she can’t read. Shadowed pines blanket the peaks, dappled by raindrops so real that Yuliang reaches a finger reflexively toward the wetness. All this from ink. Mere ink! It seems to her an almost godlike act. Like Pangu’s eighteen-thousand-year battle to separate the earth from the sky.

Yuliang is still standing there, her nose nearly against the picture’s glass, when the amah who’d admitted her reappears. Her seamed face is still tight with barely concealed outrage, and when she sees Yuliang by the painting, she all but crackles. ‘Don’t touch that,’ she says indignantly. ‘It’s worth more than your whole life, from start to finish.’

Reluctantly, Yuliang steps away. ‘Will – will he see me, auntie?’ she asks.

‘Hmmph’ is all she gets in return. Turning on her tiny heel, the old woman starts hobbling back toward the hallway. After a few steps, though, she looks over her bent shoulder. ‘Come along,’ she croaks. ‘He is a busy man.’

Pan Zanhua has changed. Instead of his Western suit he wears a Chinese robe, scholar-style. A book lies open on the desk before him, and a notepad. His writing is neat,
with disciplined curves, succinct slashes. Yuliang waits in the doorway while he finishes, the amah at her elbow like a stooped jailor.

When he finally looks up, the inspector’s eyes widen. He puts down his pen in careful alignment with his inkstone. He has an ink smear on his left cheek.

‘Good evening,’ Yuliang says, and then finds herself fumbling for the remainder of her introduction. ‘I – that is, the Merchant’s Guild, Master Yi…’

He picks up his pen, and Yuliang finds herself laughing a laugh that sounds more like a nervous hiccup. ‘I hope you’re not planning to write that down.’

He eyes her as though she has just tumbled from the sky and broken his roof. But she has no choice but to continue. ‘I’ve been sent by friends,’ she stammers on. ‘They know that it’s hard being a newcomer in a strange city. And the nights are cold now. So damp and lonely…’ On the way here the statement had seemed sophisticated and poetic. Uttered, it’s unambiguously absurd.

Losing her nerve, she pulls out Yi Gan’s wad of cash, sending the inspector’s eyebrows flying toward his hairline like alarmed little birds. ‘What’s that?’

‘Your deposit. Master Yi paid it on your behalf. He humbly requests that you keep it.’

The amah snorts in disgust. The inspector frowns at her. ‘You can leave, Qian Ma.’ When the servant doesn’t move, he repeats the command. ‘Out, please.’

‘
Aiyaaa
,’ the amah mutters. ‘I’d rather have died than seen this.’ But she backs out the door, stepping exaggeratedly around Yuliang as though she is the night-soil man come for pickup.

The inspector watches without expression. After she has disappeared, he beckons to Yuliang. ‘Come all the way in, please.’ He indicates the chaise longue with his chin. She sits, feeling like a little girl about to be punished. She even has the urge to swing her feet.

‘Do you always work so late?’ she asks at last, if only to break the silence.

‘It’s not work. At least, not the work your friends are so interested in influencing.’

‘They’re not friends.’ The phrase darts out with the same unplanned impulse with which her hand had darted for his glass. She cringes, expecting her impudence to close him up again:
snap.
But his face reflects just mild surprise. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

You don’t need to apologize
, she almost says;
men do that too much.
But that too seems rude. As well as false: in her experience, men never apologize. Which also sets him apart.

‘It
is
work, a little bit, I suppose,’ he goes on, indicating the book with his chin. ‘After our discussion, I felt the urge to reexplore Li Qingzhao.’

‘You just don’t want to lose another wager.’

He smiles slightly. ‘Maybe so. At any rate, I keep coming back to this line.’ He points to a sentence. Yuliang just shakes her head, embarrassed. ‘It’s the one called “Stream,”’ he says, understanding quickly. ‘It begins like this: “Thousands of light flakes of crushed gold/for its blossoms – ”’

‘“And of trimmed jade for its layers of leaves,”’ she interrupts. Which, again, is unspeakably rude. But for some reason she needs for him to know she knows it.
‘ “Plum flowers are too common,” ’ she continues. ‘ “Lilacs, too coarse, when compared with it./Yet its penetrating fragrance drives away my fond dreams of faraway places./How merciless!”’

Another short silence. He is watching her again, with that strange look of trying to solve a puzzle. ‘What do you think that means?’ he says finally.

Yuliang thinks a moment. ‘I’m not a scholar,’ she says at last. ‘But I’ve always thought she was telling us that… that no matter how we long for the past, we are rooted in the present.’ She drops her eyes. ‘Coarse as it might be.’

He picks up his pen, scribbles something on his pad. Blacks it out. ‘You said you know almost all of her poems.’

‘Yes,’ Yuliang says, and feels a small pride in spite of herself. ‘Though she’s only a woman, she is my favorite of the poets. Not just because her works are so lovely, but because she was so strong. She lived through such hardship – losing her land, her husband. Living in exile.’ She hesitates. ‘She bent but did not break. I think that perhaps it was her poetry that helped her survive.’

He looks at her curiously. ‘Why do you say so?’

‘It helps
me
survive,’ she says honestly. ‘The words are comforting, don’t you think?’

‘And you – you need comforting. Sometimes.’

The thought that he might think otherwise is so disconcerting she can’t answer.

‘Will you recite another?’ he asks quietly. ‘For me?’

Don’t
, Yuliang thinks.
Don’t, don’t, don’t.
Nothing’s less seductive than a woman pretending to be intelligent. But
the poem spills out anyway, almost of its own accord: ‘“Who planted the bajiao tree under my windows?”’ she begins. ‘“Its shade fills the courtyard;/Its shade fills the courtyard…” ’

The words come faster and freer, liquid from a tipping cup. But Pan Zanhua’s expression isn’t one of distaste. He is leaning forward, his brow furrowed. And as Yuliang finishes – ‘“Lonely for my beloved, grief-stricken,/I cannot endure the mournful sound/of rain”’ – his fine hands seem to tremble slightly.

‘You said, I believe,’ he says, ‘that you learned this from your uncle.’

Yuliang nods. ‘He is – was – a scholar of the classics.’ Which, given Wu Ding’s untutored upbringing and muddled grasp of literature, is as far from the truth as calling the moon’s reflection the moon. Still, she finds herself adding, ‘He was an official too. Back in Zhenjiang.’ Even less true: her
jiujiu
took the local-level civic exams three times and failed them three times as well, before the halcyon dreams of the den washed away his ambitions.

‘What’s his position?’ the inspector asks. ‘I go to Zhenjiang on business.’

‘He died,’ Yuliang invents quickly, wondering
Why do I keep lying?
‘He… he fell off a boat. Four years ago. Bringing me here.’
Stop talking
, she tells herself.
Just stop.

There’s a small scuffle in the hallway outside. ‘Hmmph,’ Yuliang hears.

‘Qian Ma!’ Inspector Pan calls. ‘Go to bed!’

The thin voice filters through the door again: ‘Hmmph. In all my days…’ But again, the complaint is followed by the stilted patter of retreat.

Pan Zanhua smiles self-consciously. ‘You’ll have to forgive her. She still believes respectable women don’t even speak in public if they can help it. Much less visit male friends.’

Respectable? Friends?
Yuliang looks at him incredulously. But his face and voice both remain blithe. Still, the interruption brings her back to her mission: she looks down at the money stack still clasped in her hand. She thinks of Mingmei, raped and beaten. Of Dai kneeling in the rain. She stands, puts her purse, handkerchief, the money on the table. ‘Well,’ she says softly.