A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  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 ey
es 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.

  But there might be these pieces, on the move. Maybe he could stop them, though he wasn’t sure how. All he could do was keep looking. And keep asking.

  Michael Doyle walked out into the hutong the next morning to go to work and saw an American woman with a satchel and computer bag waiting at the gate. She had a long braid. Her back was turned to him. “Are you staying here?” he asked her.

  She jumped. She hadn’t heard him. He was used to this; people were startled by him. They said he moved like a cat, big as he was. But then he also saw she wore hearing aids. “I didn’t mean to walk up on you,” he said.

  “It’s okay.”

  And he saw her wary expression relax into one of bright-eyed humor. He liked her smile. She was nearly as tall as he was, though slighter. He smiled back.

  “Yes, I’m staying here,” she said.

  “I haven’t seen you.”

  She had seen him. “I haven’t been here long.”

  He looked her over, all her bags, her quirky work clothes. “What’re you doing in Beijing?”

  “I’m here to look at art.” This was her standard answer; it was truthful but limited. “I do pots.” She took out a card and handed it to him. The card was the quickest way to convey everything, her credentials, her affiliation. Most people didn’t know anything about porcelain, or what it meant to “do pots,” but Hastings was a well-known name. People’s faces always notched with understanding when they glanced at her card.

  “Lia Frank,” he read. He slipped a card out of his back pocket and held it out to her. He was broad but she saw his hands were fine, and the hair down to his wrist soft and sand-colored. She took the card. Michael Doyle, Biochemist, Chongwen Children’s Hospital. On the other side the same thing in Chinese. “Are you a doctor, or a researcher?”