A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  The image of the chicken cup was up on the screen. “Yes. Isn’t it lovely?”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, surprising himself. He had never really looked at porcelain. Yet this cup was so perfect that just glancing at it, on a computer screen, gave him a jolt. “Is it valuable?”

  She smiled. “It would be, if it was real. It’s a fake.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Totally fake.” She grinned in delight. “But it’s gorgeous. Isn’t it? Isn’t it gorgeous?”

  “I admit it. It is.”

  “Do you know what it would be worth if it were real?”

  “No.” He smiled down at her, waiting.

  “Four million dollars.”

  “What! For this little thing?”

  “Some people will pay anything for the perfection that will never come again. This was from the emperor’s collection. It was the greatest art collection on earth.” He watched her delicate shoulders shift, her arms, her fingers move over the keyboard. “Look at this view.” The cup turned on the screen.

  “And it’s a fake?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many people are there on earth who can tell the difference?” he asked her. “Besides you.”

  She saw where he was going and laughed. “Four,” she said. “Five.”

  “Well?” He lifted his hands.

  She picked up the soup again and scraped out the last spoonful. “Michael,” she said again, “I really needed this. You are wonderful.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said. She had her face turned up to him. She looked happy. He could just drop his hands right now and rest them on her shoulders. He could do it, gather her to him. Or he could hold back. But the thought had arisen and was now lodged in his mind. He stood looking down at her shoulders. “What?” she asked, sensing something.

  “Nothing.” She was so serious. “I ought to go. You have a lot of work to do.”

  She sprang up. “Thank you. You brought me such a perfect dinner.”

  “It’s nothing.” He looked at the screen. “And it’s a great cup too,” he said, “by the way.” He brushed his legs, somewhere in his loose pants. “Okay then.”

  “Okay. Thanks again. Really. Thanks.” She stood and held the door while he left. They still had not so much as shaken hands.

  The ah chan stepped out of a taxi on Stanley Street in Central, into the honking line of cars that bumped down the narrow road between the lunchtime streams of walking, hurrying Hong Kongers, a few light-haired Europeans riding along above the black heads.

  Stanley was an older street. The buildings that lined it were only four and five stories high, their stone fronts stained with the gray of decades, their upper-story crank metal-case windows open to the hot, damp air. Stanley was a step up the hill from Des Voeux Road and Queen’s Road, where flowed the magnificent skyscrapers. There were no glittering towers on Stanley. This was the start of the ur-city, the Chinese jangle that coiled away from the main business district and climbed the hill.

  Bai ran up three marble steps into the Luk Yu, its doors framed in the understated dark wood of one hundred years earlier. The foyer paved in marble gave way to a large main dining room floored in old-fashioned tile. The ceilings were dizzyingly high, and even with the clusters of tasseled silk lanterns the room was an open hangar of sliding, deafening Cantonese.

  Bai and his friends preferred the second floor, the northeast corner. This spot commanded a superb view of the stairs and of everyone coming or going. As he topped the steps and approached the table, he saw that his friend Shen had ordered baat-tow abalone, which was indecently expensive. Shen must have had a great run. This was the celebration, the customary squaring of accounts after harvest. He smiled, walking toward the table covered with abalone, fresh slabs of it brought up alive by divers. He could smell it with its deep bottom notes, perfectly braised, hanging shamelessly over the sides of the plates.

  Today was Shen’s turn to spread his feathers of success. Waiter Kwan was off to the side, smiling broadly at them, leaning ever so slightly forward in his white tunic, his swollen hands clasped. Bai was smiling too. Soon he’d be the one celebrating. He’d get in here with Gao Yideng’s shipment. He’d receive half a million ren min bi. That would definitely earn him a new name. Emperor Bai. Success was stirring in him, he could feel it.

  “Ei! Bai!” The voices rippled up in Mandarin, the language they all shared. The table groaned under platters of slippery rice noodle with scallions and soy, steamed chicken feet in five-spice, emerald-crisp Chinese broccoli, and whole steamed fish from a mountain river in Guangdong Province.

  He raised a joyful hand in response to them. “Ei, congratulations, Shen!” He grinned his greetings at his friend. “You’ll live the rich life now! Light fur and well-fed horses!” He picked up one of the full, thimble-size wineglasses. It was brimming with xian jiu, immortal wine, made from rooster testicles. This was a favorite of rough men in Jingdezhen and brought in specially for this occasion. It would be the first thing he swallowed this morning. “Isn’t it so?” he called, raising the glass high, and all his friends gathered up their glasses in response.

  “Long life for all of us, present and absent! Long life!” Bai held the glass high with a smile that was as broad and full of promise as the midday outside, then tipped it back and drank the foul, clear liquor.

  Everyone followed, everyone drank, but there was a tremor of uncertainty. Bai felt it instantly. Then he saw the glasses replaced on the table, half full. “What?” Bai said.

  “Bai.” He looked down. It was one of the younger men he knew from Ningbo.

  “Hu and Sun were caught,” the man said.

  “Caught?” Bai said dumbly.

  “Arrested,” the man said.

  In a terrible instant Bai raked his glance around the table, but no one contradicted, no one said it was not so. The men looked down at their plates, their teacups, their smoldering cigarettes. Someone’s cell went off. The man reached into his pocket and silenced it. Everyone knew what would happen to Hu and Sun now.

  Nevertheless, Shen, their host, raised his glass. “Drink to their safety,” he urged, and this time everyone drained their glasses.

  10

  “Would you like to see my ducks?” Gao Yideng asked when she answered her cell phone.

  Her comprehension was fairly good, but she wondered if she’d heard him right. “Mr. Gao? Your ducks?”

  “My ducks,” he repeated. “I keep ducks and chickens and pigs on a place out in the country, not far from the city’s edge at all. It is my dacha,” he joked, using the sinicized version of the Russian word. “Right now I will take a short ride there. If you like, I can pick you up.”

  He made it sound entirely incidental, a casual excursion, when in fact he was an enormously busy man and she had left word that she wished to talk to him. He was so seamless. “Of course,” she said. “When?”

  “Trouble you to come out to the gate, facing the lake. In fifteen minutes I will be there.”

  So they drove out through Beijing’s southwestern suburbs until wooded valleys unfurled between jagged green hills. She marveled again at the personal, very private treatment she was getting from this mogul. Obviously the collection mattered to him. She looked at the light from the sunroof gleaming on his bare head, his imported sunglasses. Prada. She smiled. Real, not fake.

  They drove up beside a little stone house with a low-walled animal yard; ducks and chickens, pigs. A garden on the south flank of the house teemed with vegetables.

  “This place is always kept for me.” He unlocked the door, opened several of the windows to the June air. “That’s better. Let us drink some tea.” He went into the small kitchen to prepare it. She asked if she could help, but no, he would do it. She watched him at the simple stone counter. That was all there was. A sink, a half refrigerator, and a single wok-ring. It was crazy, she thought; it was theater. It was a fake dacha, but the rustic kitchen and the plants pushing up were real,
the ducks genuinely clamorous. He poured boiling water into the teapot. Back at the table he let it rest a few minutes and then filled two plain cups with it, frothy, astringent green. He raised his cup to her and they both drank. “Now tell me how you progress with the collection,” he said.

  “It’s magnificent. Overall. I have found more copies, though.”

  “Really. What?”

  “A so-called pair of Daoguang wine cups. Tiny, delicate, quite lovely. But fake. This tea is excellent.”

  “It’s just what happened to be here.”

  “As forgeries the cups are of no consequence. The pieces that they impersonate are not terribly valuable.” She shrugged as if it were perfectly normal for them to come all the way out here to discuss such a trifle. “Rather it is a matter of . . . accumulation.” She had found the chicken cup, the Daoguang wine cups, and earlier today two more fakes. It was then she decided to leave him a message. She smiled at him. “Now I’ve seen several more. I thought you’d want to know.”

  He looked at her with a faint, constructed touch of a smile. “I am grateful that a collection like this should even pass through my hands, no matter what its flaws.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “Both sides depend on you to look at it most carefully.”

  “I will. But, Mr. Gao, I think it would really be best if I had one of my colleagues come to Beijing and look everything over with me. In view of the situation.”

  “As you wish,” he said.

  “Not that I’m not confident,” she said. “I am.” She drew the plain gray fabric of her tunic loosely away from her body. “But forgeries have been found. A second person should go through it.”

  “Miss Fan.” Gao was already looking at his watch. “Women gai zou-le,” I think we should go.

  Michael took her to An Xing’s place the next night to see the bowl. The Chinese man came to the door in shiny athletic warm-ups and led them in to a couple of rooms, commodious but cramped. “Welcome to my ancestral home,” he joked.

  “I love it,” said Lia. She saw that one wall of this main room was all books; the others were hung with Asian minority textiles. There were a few shelves of well-chosen contemporary lacquerware and one especially charming row of ceramic goldfish pots in motley sizes.

  “I’m a bad host!” An said delightedly. “Ah, you are looking at my things. There isn’t much.”

  “I like it.”

  “It really was my ancestral home, for three hundred years.”

  “Is that so?” So they had let him stay, she thought, or come back, and now he was down to what was basically a small corner of the place.

  “I still have a few things. Books. Family papers. Old records.”

  “Records?” Her eyes lit. “What kind of records?”

  “Family holdings. Financials. Genealogies.”

  “Art collections?”

  “Yes.”

  “Inventories?”

  “Yes.”

  “Porcelain?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see?”

  “Of course!” He pulled out a chair for her at the small table and turned his back to scan the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He touched his ponytail absently, looking, then after a minute he reached up with a jubilant cry and pulled out a crumbly stack-paged book. It was open-bound in old Chinese style. She and An bent over it. Doyle stood behind. It had a hand-brushed character title. An Family Porcelain Holdings, from the Ivory Fan Study.

  “How wonderful that you’ve kept this,” she said.

  “It’s come down to me, that’s all,” An said. “I’m not the only descendant, but there are no others in China. Just me. Look. Here are the lists of their art collections.” He opened the first page for Lia.

  She scanned through it. “Oh, it’s marvelous.”

  She could feel Michael’s eyes on the back of her head and smell him, a spiky brown-eyed smell, softened by his fair hair, individuated by the turns of his life. How old was he? Past forty, by the look of him. But he’d been very sick. He might have been younger.

  “Do you want to memorize it?” she heard him say behind her. “Because An and I can go in the other room.”

  She smiled back up at him. “That’s nice of you.” Ordinarily she might say yes, please, go away and let me work. There was never enough for the memory world. Never enough histories, gazetteers, catalogs, auction descriptions, records, inventories. But she didn’t want to do it now, in front of him. She’d rather talk to him. “An Xing, thank you for showing me, thank you. Another time perhaps I’ll read it line by line.”

  “These are only some old lists, hardly worth an hour of your attention.”

  “Nali,” she said, Nonsense. “There have been great collectors in your family.”

  “But speaking of porcelains! We are forgetting the bowl I have to show you.”

  A ringing sound bleated out. An’s cell phone. He took it from his clip, excusing himself with his eyes. “Wei?” He listened. “Ei. Dui, dui. Deng yixia.” He turned to Michael. “You show her,” he whispered, covering the mouthpiece.

  Michael opened a door. “In here,” he said, and slipped ahead of her into a small anteroom lined with shelves, a bathroom at the far end. He switched on a lamp, took down a plain indigo box, unhooked the bit, and opened it. There was the ruby ground Kangxi bowl. He reached in.

  “No,” she said. “Let me.” He pulled back. Her long fingers made a net under the bowl and she lifted it out. “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Really hoi moon.”

  “Hoi moon?”

  “That’s Cantonese. Hoi moon geen san. The Mandarin would be kai men jian shan. Let the door open on a view of mountains. The dealers in Hong Kong, the runners who bring the pots out of China—they all say this. They love to say it.”

  “And it means?”

  “It means, it’s beautiful. It’s right. It means, look at it! That’s when it’s said admiringly. When it’s said in exasperation it means damn you, don’t you see, don’t you get it? Of course it’s right. You idiot! It’s gorgeous.”

  “What does it mean when you say it?”

  “When I say it right now, about this piece? My God. It’s lovely.” She looked at him. “Don’t you think so?”

  “I do,” he said. “I think so.” He did like the bowl. He had seen it before. But right now he was watching her.

  She held it closer to the light and he caught the soft pink of her hearing aid.

  She felt his eyes there. That’s me, she thought; take a good look. I wear them to hear, to be like everybody else. She could still hear her mother’s voice: “Don’t ever take them out! Don’t do it! Ever! You’re to leave them in at all times!” But I’m all right in here, she would think. And in time she learned to just take them out when she could, when she was alone. “Do you see the enameling?” she said to Michael. “The painting, the Jesuit style. Very fine. This bowl was fired in the biscuit in Jingdezhen, then brought to the Palace to be painted.”

  “Where’s Jingdezhen?”

  “In the south, in Jiangxi Province. The emperor’s porcelain was made there for almost a thousand years. It’s still the center of pots culture. The best artists are there. Ah, it’s too bad about these cracks. That’s what An meant when he said it was damaged. Remember?” She ran the soft pad of her finger along one, coming down from the rim. The crack itself was a rift as wide as the ocean under her skin, a wilderness canyon, tragic. She felt a stab of such empathy. Would that she could heal it. “Do you know this bowl would be valued at one or two million dollars if it wasn’t damaged? Even as it is, it could fetch twenty thousand U.S.”

  “I don’t think he’d ever sell it.”

  “No. He shouldn’t.” To possess something of this order was to possess the past, but she sensed she didn’t need to say it. He knew; she could tell by the way he looked at the piece. She could feel the warmth of him. “Look,” she said. “Look w
ith me when I turn it over. It will have a four-character reign mark in puce. So rare, the puce. Usually the reign mark was cobalt. Ready?” She upended it. “See?”

  He looked. She was right. Four characters in puce on a white background. And rarer still, a collector’s seal was applied to the base in tiny spaced droplets of sealing wax. Not quite connecting, impressionistic, a tiny masterpiece of dripped-wax calligraphy, they suggested the characters for Ivory Fan Study, the family collection name.

  “Watching you, I see . . . you use your hands with pots, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You’re right. In some way I know how it’s supposed to feel.” She fitted the bowl back into its box and hooked the lid down, put it in his hands.

  He pushed it back on the shelf, all the way against the wall. He could hear An talking on the phone in the outer room. He turned to her, right next to him, her eyes on a level with his, and to his faint surprise he saw the web of exhaustion around her eyes, the shadows on her face. “You’re tired,” he said. “You look tired.”

  She met his eyes gratefully. “I am. I haven’t been sleeping. Not enough anyway. My pots are so incredible. And there are so many of them.”

  “You have to sleep.”

  “I know.”

  “Come on, I’ll take you back,” he said, and he reached to touch her shoulder in an easy American way. Then An Xing was in the doorway. “Well,” he said, “zenmoyang?” What do you think?

  “It’s fantastic,” she said to An, “completely lovely. Thank you. And thank you,” she said to Michael in English, with an inflection she was sure he would understand, because in the nicest possible way she felt shepherded by him and she wanted him to know she got it, she felt it, and she liked the way it felt.

  Back in her room she settled down in her favorite spot on the bed. She had really enjoyed herself with him. She felt the link with him. She wished she didn’t live on the other side of the world. She wished she weren’t leaving soon. But she did and she was.

  So she worked. After calling Dr. Zheng and leaving a message asking him to send Phillip, she found herself pulled back to the chicken cup. She brought the image up again on her screen. The form and shape were sublime. The pots of the Chenghua reign had low, ideally balanced bodies, with a graceful emphasis on the horizontal. Relaxed yet precise. This little cup nailed it.