It is a strange little thing, this painting. There is a wooden table, partially covered by a patterned cloth formed from strokes and flicks of green and red and white. The left side of the cloth is shadowed by a heavy, purple fold where one corner of the table must be. Walter imagines its shape beneath the heavy fabric. It helps to project himself into the image, to place his body there rather than here, to imagine a better, healthier body gripping the table’s edge. He feels the cool, clean wood against his palm as, closing his eyes, he strokes the table.
His hand brushes the fruit stand that rests on top, colder than the wood and clammy under his fingertips. The glazed, creamy porcelain rings softly when he taps it. On top of the fruit stand is a pile of green-brown apples; grainy and rough, past their best, Walter thinks, slightly spongy when he squeezes one.
A reddish jug squats heavily at the picture’s core, wild flowers frothing from it in pink, yellow and white. A memory of blossom trickling through his fingers flutters across Walter’s hand and through his body, like petals falling, falling, falling.
Of all the works Walter owns this little Cézanne is not, by any means, the most valuable, nor is it considered particularly important, but it’s the only one Walter can say he has any genuine connection with. He bought it three years ago having asked his dealer, who’d alerted him to its inclusion in a forthcoming auction, to approach the owner and request its withdrawal from the sale. Thankfully, she’d agreed.
The woman, a New Yorker he never spoke to but who, his dealer told him, was clearly in need of a substantial cash injection, had decided to turn to her advantage the interest in Cézanne’s works created by Astonishing Paris, the movie released earlier that same year. Walter has real cause to hate that film because of its inflationary effect on Cézanne’s prices in the international market, though the irony is that he was secretly one of the movie’s major financiers.
He can’t remember exactly how much Still Life With Apples and Jug cost him, but his involvement with the film meant he’d paid twice over for this painting. “Still,” as his dealer pointed out with a shrug, “if you want the painting you want the painting.”
Luckily for Walter the woman who was selling was equally keen to avoid the publicity a high-profile auction would generate and a quick, quiet sale suited them both. Walter’s business dealings had taught him to recognise masked desperation and he sensed her discretion was tinged with dread. He made that a factor in his negotiation and, in the end, both of them got what they wanted from the deal.
However, Landscape, Mont Sainte-Victoire, the subject of today’s debacle, cost almost double what Walter would have had to pay before Cézanne’s increased celebrity status. Walter had attended that particular auction himself, advised that his appearance would be good publicity for his burgeoning collection, and that too had pushed up the price. Ah well, he’d made the main news bulletins all around the world, which will increase the overall value of his estate. The money doesn’t matter. It’s what he leaves behind that he will be remembered for.
He’s built an iconic, miraculous, building of his own and provided the materials to construct many, many more. The Gehry-designed art gallery he commissioned, no doubt an icon of the future, will house his collection and open, he has stipulated in his Will, on the same day as his funeral. From that moment on, the name Yeung will be spoken alongside Guggenheim, Tate, Thyssen-Bornemiza, Courtauld, Ullens, Frick. It might not have been his first choice of legacy, but the more he’d thought about it, the more it came to be the most fitting way to allow his family name to carry on. It will be another grand diversion of the kind he enjoys.
Watching Astonishing Paris, Walter had learned what an unhappy, frustrated man Cézanne was; trying and failing to make a go of things in Paris; his secret, and ultimately unhappy, marriage; how he’d returned to the countryside of his youth after his father died, to paint and paint for years before achieving any real recognition. The film starred some handsome young actor who’d surprised everyone with his convincing portrayal of a nineteenth-century French artist consumed with creative energy and self-loathing. He’d been nominated for some awards Walter remembered, though the film itself hadn’t been a success. Not surprising given it was a mess; scenes repeated from different angles and perspectives, its fragmented structure that was difficult to piece together, the stark visual shift from the dark, murderous tones of Paris in the 1860s to the light of the French countryside later on.
The novice director had said he wanted to experiment with form to create a work that captured Cézanne’s own use of multiple perspectives, his unique style-world — whatever that meant. But it was not a total waste of his money. He’d had his reasons for ensuring the film got made.
What Walter remembered most was Cézanne breaking all ties with his greatest friend, a writer whose name he can’t recall. They’d been known as The Inseparables when they were schoolboys and then young men, but that precious, deeply felt friendship had been simply discarded. It was hard for Walter to imagine anyone being friends with Cézanne. The guy was a pain in the ass, really. All that boo-hoo stuff about him being bullied, his father not understanding him, his paintings not appreciated as he thought they should be. He needed to get over himself. The world didn’t owe people like him anything.
And how small a thing it was to fall out over; some novel or other Zola — that was it, Émile Zola — had written, about a failed artist who kills himself. In the movie, he mails a copy to Cézanne who, like everyone else, assumes the book’s tragic hero is a portrait of him. Angry, betrayed, he replies to Zola with a brief note of thanks, and then never sees him again.
There should have been more understanding between them, but what does he know? Like emperors of old, Walter doesn’t have any real friends. People he’d connected to in his life, guys like Veep or Cecil Chao, were not guys he could ever pick up the phone and talk to at moments like this. He couldn’t show such weakness. Besides, the effect on his share prices if people knew he was dying would be fucking disastrous. But Zola and Cézanne, they had shared everything — their hopes, dreams, ambitions, opinions, desires, demons… they’d become The Inseparables. How many times in your life do you feel inseparable from anyone?
No, he has no friends, not since Annie died. He hopes he and she truly were friends, though that’s something he doesn’t care to consider too much.
Could he have had a friend in his son? Perhaps.
The questions agitate him and the ache of his reflections is worse than the treatment, worse than his illness. He can’t bear it on this, his last birthday. Though often he does bear it. He tries to focus once more on the image in front of him, but his eyes dart over the canvas’ unsettled surface, unable to settle.
He forces himself to concentrate on the fruit stand’s mountain of apples, outlined in brown against a pale blue wall, the same brown used, with a single stroke, to make their stalks, he notices.
The apple at the peak has a solitary leaf sticking out, its dark green almost black against the blue.
At the front of the table, two halves of a cut apple rest in the rumpled cloth.
He notices, possibly for the first time, that the cut apple sits beyond where the edge of the table would be. Cézanne has made a mistake there.
And the perspective is absolutely wrong, the table shown from above, but the objects resting there seen side on.
It’s all impossible.
That jug is about to topple over, spilling flowers and water everywhere.
The painting has too many points of view, makes his head spin. It must not be allowed to vanquish him.
He speaks directly to it, and aloud. “Why did Annie like you so much?” he demands, and the question ricochets off its surface, re-directs itself at him, landing squarely in his gut. He takes another deep breath in anticipation of rising nausea, but it does not come and he exhales, relieved.
He’d funded the Cézanne movie to compensate for not taking Annie’s own work in the artist seriously enough. She wou
ld have wanted the film to be made so he needed to ensure its existence. Like the painting, it was a gift he’d bought for her, even though she was not alive to see it.
And what does he think of it, this painting? What would he say to Annie about it if she were here? It taunts him for answers: Come on, Walter!
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if it’s any good or not. Most of the major collections contain works by this man; paintings of fruit and other improbable objects balanced precariously on tables like this one, surfaces that don’t make sense; portraits of the annoying wife; countless landscapes with that bloody mountain, some quite like his but many distinctly different.
No, he doesn’t know what he thinks of it, but something about it seems so — so alive, that’s the word. He speaks to it again: “You’re more alive than me, that’s for sure.” That is something, isn’t it, to have achieved that?
He glances at the touch-screen’s display. Not long to go. He knows the machine’s pump contains components made by CantoCorp. The level of wealth he has enjoyed throughout the best part of his life engendered a sense of weightlessness — despite the responsibility brought with it — a weightlessness generated, paradoxically, by some of the heaviest commodities imaginable. Sometimes, he feels so weighted down during treatment he visualises liquid steel being pumped into his body.
Steel and concrete and cement and reinforced glass all enabled him to float high above the global economic crisis, untouched by market chaos, untroubled by bank bailouts, relaxed about the collapse of governments and the ousting of despotic rulers often replaced by worse. It has allowed him to create his own reality, to enjoy a life that even the greatest writers and filmmakers, the most extreme fantasists, would find unreal. Globalization has been his great good-luck charm and, in the world created by, and for, Walter Yeung there was no problem that could not be smoothed over, nothing that he could not do, or have.
Except Annie back.
He shoots a look at the canvas from where those words emanated and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “Okay, you win.”
If he has a friend at all, he supposes it is this painting. This is the image he looks at when he contemplates his life, his death. It is what speaks the truth to him regardless of whether or not he wants to hear it. Some days he truly misses it, aches to see it, like a child. “And this is how you repay me,” he says. It haunts him in board meetings and at high-level discussions. It calls to him day and night. Rarely has he experienced such longing. Perhaps only once before. He knows that, when he communes — that is the only way to describe it — with this canvas, he is communing with his Annie, whom he misses so very much. He wishes she were here to teach him, to help him understand it.
There had been a ten-year age gap between Walter and An-Xie, or Annie as everyone called her. She was in the final semester of her Masters Degree in Art History when Walter asked her to marry him. She said yes, of course, but wanted to gain her qualification and work for a few years, maybe in a gallery or museum. Annie managed to resist the pressure from both their families to give up her studies and devote her time to her future husband, his career, and the children she would no doubt soon have. Walter had quietly admired her for it, certain she would comply in time.
He first saw her at an art exhibit, having been coerced to attend by his mother. She channelled all her spare energy into her only son, and had become totally exasperated that Walter could reach the age of thirty-four and remain unmarried. She insisted he accompany her to any event where there was the remotest possibility of meeting single, respectable women.
Walter had agreed, not because he wanted to meet his future wife, but because he thought the women involved in the art world might be a bit more exciting, racier even, than those he dated in the arenas of law and business. He had no interest in art beyond what it communicated in terms of status, and no knowledge of it beyond some headline figures, names like Picasso, Van Gogh, Warhol, Monet that conjured only composite, generic images of their life’s work.
But Annie… Annie had appeared to him that evening like the first work of art ever to make him really feel something.
He’d seen her the moment he entered the gallery, leaning against a stark white wall, fanning herself. It had been an exceptionally humid day, even by Hong Kong standards, and this beguiling woman was struggling to re-compose herself after leaving the outside world. He can see her now, eyes closed, head back, throat exposed; her apparently demure, cream chiffon blouse, tied in a bow at that graceful neck, was, he realised at a second look, see-through, its translucence accentuated by dotted patches of sweat.
She made no concession to the people around her, cared nothing at all for the impression she might be making, good or ill. She was young, and the young Mrs Yeung was the phrase that popped, astonishingly, into his head. And she looked so modern. That was the word he used most often over the next few months to describe her to his parents, colleagues, and business associates.
“You look as if you could do with this,” he’d said, holding out a glass of iced water. She took it with a laugh and a sigh, placing it first against her temple before sipping some.
She had the darkest, most intelligent eyes of any one he’d met — optimistic and brightly alive. When he looked into those glittering, dark chocolate pips that evening, as he tried to sound interested in the contemporary artworks she enthused about, he’d seen the many possibilities contained within the future they would have together as instinctively as he saw the future of world markets. It wasn’t too long before he stopped thinking of her as a commodity and fell deeply in love.
Annie did indeed work in a prestigious downtown gallery for a year or so after completing her Masters. Then they decided to start a family, but, after two years of trying to conceive, nothing. Walter agreed to IVF treatment on the condition they tell absolutely no one. As far as everyone was concerned, the Yeungs were a progressive couple, holding off having children until they really wanted. After many months of secret visits to the clinic a beaming doctor had assured them that two of the eggs implanted in Annie’s uterus had taken and that she was pregnant with twins. Twins!
Walter smiles at the memory of Annie dancing around the doctor’s office, him urging her to sit down and not strain herself, as he would do throughout her pregnancy. Oh —— and when they told their families, that was an even better day!
It had been Annie’s suggestion that she stop work at the gallery, even though she was gaining a considerable reputation as someone with an eye. “My eye isn’t going to go away,” she’d insisted. There were other things she wanted to do, like turning her Masters dissertation on Cézanne, highly praised by her tutors, into a monograph for publication. That was a dream she could focus on, later.
At night, lying in bed, Walter propping Annie up and gently fanning her or cooling her forehead with a damp cloth, they would talk softly about their plans for the children and all the things they wanted in life for them; happiness, freedom, creativity — it was Annie who’d included that — education, wealth, sheer brilliance in all its forms, and as the pregnancy progressed Walter would listen and feel for the children growing inside, his children, who were going to make him the proudest man alive.
They scrutinised the ultrasound scans of their babies with their massive heads and see-through bodies with spines like strings of seed pearls (inspired, Walter had rushed out afterwards and bought Annie a necklace of two pearl strands, intertwined). In one image the twins — “Two boys!” they were told — had their arms wrapped around each other, and, even though Walter was impatient to have his sons with him, as an only child himself it had seemed a shame that their birth would separate these inseparables.
Walter Junior, so called because he was the first to come into the world, and little Jeffrey were delivered by Caesarean section specifically scheduled on a day that augured great fortune in the Chinese calendar. Walter fell instantly in love with them both and found it a wrench to give either away, preferring to cradle one in the crook of each elbo
w until his arms went numb. He would phone home from the office five or six times a day for updates, sometimes cutting short meetings to get home early to them and Annie, who was truly blossoming.
All this had come to an end just two years later — that was the sum total of genuine happiness allotted to him in this life.
Annie had been driving home after lunching with a university friend who had a child the same age as the twins. The children would play together while their mothers chatted about old times, their husbands, art, Walter never really knew what. Annie always refused Walter’s offer of a driver for her and the children. She told him that she wanted to drive herself; “a small mark of autonomy in my narrowing existence,” she’d said. It was a phrase he’d never forgotten.
The drive home was a short one and involved a stretch of busy freeway. According to witnesses, as Annie merged with the traffic the car in front suffered a blowout and swerved in front of an articulated lorry. Its refrigerated container, transporting cut flowers to the market, jack-knifed, gliding across the freeway, and gently swept Annie’s car down a steep ridge.
Now, as Walter’s stomach begins to churn once more, he can’t help but place himself in that car, rolling over and over and over.
The lorry came to a screeching halt, its container doors burst open, and hundreds and thousands of flowers, a mountain of them, cascaded down over the ridge, smothering the car completely. Police, ambulance and fire crews were called and dug through heaps and heaps of chrysanthemums, peonies, primroses and orchids, wild lilies and thorny roses, stocks, hydrangeas, sweet peas. By the time they uncovered the car, an hour later, the air was sickly heavy with the perfume of crushed blossom.
Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is Page 5
