The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  “Come in,” June said formally, as if she were inviting Cece into a Manhattan gallery, rather than a small child’s bedroom in Los Feliz. Cece stepped into the room and immediately sensed someone behind her. She whirled around: standing behind the door was a life-sized white papier-mâché figure, wearing a yellow turban.

  “Oh, that surprised me!”

  “That’s Raja. He’s old,” June said. “Look at this.” On the wall opposite June’s bed was a chessboard, mounted like a painting. Pieces of black and white velvet were pasted onto the wood, at random intervals, so that some of the dark squares became white, and some of the white ones, black. Pinned to each of the velvet squares was an extraordinary butterfly. The butterflies were not protected by any kind of glass, as they were in the Natural History Museum, and Cece was afraid to get too close, for fear of damaging them.

  “Those are gorgeous,” Cece said. “And what an unusual way you’ve mounted them. Did you catch them yourself?”

  June looked puzzled, and then suddenly smiled. “They’re not real,” she said. “Did you think they were real?”

  Now that June pointed it out, Cece could see that the butterflies were too dramatically colored, too perfectly whole, to be real specimens. They were exquisitely painted bits of silk, pinned to the board in such a way that, when a breeze came through the room, twenty pairs of wings gently fluttered. Cece had to remind herself that June was still in high school.

  “I can’t tell you how important I think it is—that you finish at St. Anselm’s,” she said. “You want to get into the best art school you can.”

  June shrugged, but Cece could tell she was pleased.

  “Your work is really very special—not that I’m an expert. But I used to be a docent at the L.A. County Museum. And I do collect art.” She noticed a pile of netting in the corner.

  “There’s nothing in there,” June said quickly.

  At first Cece thought June was talking about the net (she was relieved to learn the fish had been discarded). Then she noticed a black storage tube, half hidden behind the closet door.

  “I was just looking at your net,” Cece said. “I was wondering what you meant by it, what you were trying to express?”

  June seemed hesitant and eager at the same time, as if she wanted to talk about her project and also keep it a secret.

  “I wasn’t trying to express anything,” she said. “I mean, I was trying to express the tree. I didn’t think it belonged there, because the rest of the courtyard was all cement.” June blushed. “I thought it looked wrong.”

  “Like a fish out of water,” Cece said.

  June half-smiled. Then she began to chew on the inside of her cheek, a habit Cece recognized because she occasionally did it herself. The girl took a step toward the closet and picked up the storage tube, holding it against her chest.

  “I guess I can show you.” June uncapped the storage tube and pulled out a roll of ivory paper. Cece watched as she unrolled Mr. Yuan’s scroll calmly on her bed, and began searching for heavy things to pin down the corners. She found a basketball sneaker under the bed, and a biology textbook on the night table—the same edition Cece had picked up dozens of times from Olivia’s floor. June used an enameled jewelry box to secure the third corner and, with a sheepish smile at Cece, reached under her pillow to extract a beanbag crocodile. A crocodile, Cece thought, but a stuffed toy all the same.

  Mr. Yuan was born in the year of the dragon, which made him (Cece had looked it up that very first day) almost thirty-six. She remembered she had thought he was very young to have accomplished so much, and had felt inadequate. Now his age had a completely different connotation.

  “Did Mr. Yuan give this to you?”

  “No,” June said. “I’m just keeping it for him for a while.”

  Cece swallowed and forced herself to continue. “June, did Mr. Yuan ever do anything to make you feel uncomfortable?”

  The girl had turned her face away, and was looking at the scroll. There was no way to tell what she was thinking, but from the length of time it was taking her to answer, Cece knew she’d understood the question.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” Cece said. “Unless you want me to. But it’s very important that I hear it from you.”

  “No,” June said.

  “No?”

  She looked right at Cece. “He never made me uncomfortable.”

  “Oh,” Cece said. “Good. I mean, that’s what I thought.” It was exactly what she’d been hoping to hear. Why didn’t she feel more relieved?

  June switched on the bedside light: in the most elaborate scene, the men were picnicking with the immortal women. Intricately rendered plates and serving bowls were set out on a cross-hatched bamboo mat: a dish of tofu, a pot of soup, a curling heap of ferns, and a large basket of new peaches, the long green leaves still attached to their stems. Serving girls bent their heads to pour the wine and tea from two-handled ceramic pots. Each scene was separated from the next by a webbed curtain of Chinese characters.

  “Do you want to hear the story?” June asked.

  Cece was surprised. “Can you read that?”

  “Not yet. But I’m learning.” She handed Cece a packet of pages, photocopied from a book: Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the Oscar Tang Family Collection. “He gave me the translation.”

  The title was vaguely familiar. “So he used the story from another painting?”

  June frowned. “The story and the painting.”

  “The story and the painting,” Cece repeated. She was missing something.

  “Of course,” June said. “You know about art. But some people at our school thought this was just the way he painted. Like, just because he was Chinese, he had to be really old-fashioned. Can you believe that?”

  Cece glanced at the Xeroxed pages, but there was no doubt about it: the scroll was a perfect copy. The only difference was that Mr. Yuan hadn’t quite finished. The last scene he’d completed was of the two men taking leave of the women, their baskets on the ground near their feet. Musicians surrounded them, playing a guitar, a flute, and a strange mouth organ with a cluster of vertical pipes.

  “See,” June said, pointing a bitten fingernail to a paragraph in the translation. “Read here.”

  The two women persuaded Liu and Ruan to remain for more than half a month, but then the men asked to return home. The women responded, “Coming upon us and living here is your good fortune. How can the herbal elixirs of the common world compare to this immortal dwelling?” So they begged the men to stay for half a year.

  “Look, they’re so short. And they have weird beards.” June giggled: “Why do the immortal women like them?”

  Every day was like late spring, but the mournful cries of the mountain birds caused the two men to plead once more to return home. The women said, “Traces of your karma have remained here, which is why you still feel this way.” So they summoned the other female immortals to bid them farewell with music, saying, “Not far from the mouth of this cave is a roadway leading to your home. It is easy.”

  June was squatting, froglike, on her bedroom floor, waiting for Cece to finish reading.

  “Have you gotten to the part where they go home and find out that they’ve been away for seven generations?”

  “Not yet,” Cece said.

  “It seems like they’ve been away for half a year,” June explained. “But actually everyone they knew at home is dead. Isn’t that creepy?”

  “Like Rip Van Winkle,” Cece said.

  June frowned. “Is that the guy the kids follow around?”

  “I think that’s the Pied Piper.”

  June moved the scroll carefully aside, and sat down on the bed. “Anyway this is much older than any English stories,” she said. “It’s from the Song dynasty.”

  Cece felt as if she were still several steps behind. “But why would he bother to copy it?”

  “Why not?” June said.

  “His own work is so well known,” Cece said. “
You would think he would want to make something new.”

  June shrugged. “I don’t think Xiao Pangzi is that well known.”

  “What did you call him?” Cece asked.

  “It’s a nickname,” she said. “It’s pretty common in China.”

  “I know,” Cece said. “That’s what Harry Lin called him. But Yuan Zhao is famous. Not only for his art, but—”

  “You don’t get to see the seventh-generation descendents,” June interrupted. “Even the real artist doesn’t paint them.”

  “Yes,” said Cece. “But why do you say—”

  “I bet they wouldn’t even look that different. I bet seven generations was nothing in China.”

  “You’re probably right,” Cece said. “But June?”

  “What?” She finally looked up. “Why are you asking me? Who cares if he’s not a famous artist, as long as he’s a good teacher. He’s the best teacher we ever had.” The girl’s voice threatened to break; she scowled at the scroll.

  “I’m sorry,” Cece said, as gently as possible. She didn’t want to upset June, but she had to understand. What the girl was suggesting was impossible. “Are you saying that Mr. Yuan isn’t—Mr. Yuan?”

  June shrugged. She replaced the scroll in the tube, and sealed it firmly.

  “But who is he,” Cece exclaimed, “if he isn’t Yuan Zhao?”

  “Not anyone famous,” June said.

  “But I don’t even know his name!”

  June stuck the drawing tube under the bed, where it was concealed by the dust ruffle. “I could tell you,” she said. “But I’m not sure you could pronounce it.” She sat down on her bed and began playing with a loose thread. She picked up the beanbag crocodile, and let it slide, Slinky-like, from hand to hand. She was only a high school student, or rather, a former high school student, who’d been expelled. There was no reason to believe anything she said—except that only a few moments ago, Cece had decided to trust her.

  “He might still come back,” Cece said. “He might be staying with a friend.”

  June looked skeptical. “A friend where?”

  “I’m not sure,” Cece said. “But I’ll let you know when we hear something. I’ll give your grandmother a call after I speak with Ms. McCoy.” She hesitated. “I can’t promise anything, but I’m going to try to help you finish the year. Your AP portfolio is quite simply—” But June wouldn’t let her finish:

  “I don’t want to go back without him.”

  “Without Mr. Yuan?” She had to use that name: she didn’t have another. “I’m going to do my best,” she said. “That’s all I can do.”

  She had her hand on the bedroom door, under the watchful eye of Raja, when June spoke. Her voice was so soft that at first Cece thought the girl was talking to herself:

  “Can you give me that?”

  Cece realized she was still holding the Xeroxed packet. “Oh,” she said. “Of course. Let me just—do you mind if I write down the name of the book? I’d like to read the story.”

  June shook her head. “But you have it already. He left it for you.”

  Suddenly Cece remembered the volume on the desk in Mr. Yuan’s room. She’d thought he’d forgotten it; it hadn’t occurred to her that it might be a gift. “How do you know about that?” she asked.

  “He told us,” June said. “He felt bad that he hadn’t finished the painting. He wanted to give it to you, as a present. He thought you might’ve hung it in the living room, next to the Diebenkorn.” June smiled. “He’s kind of vain, even if he pretends he’s not. He pretends you can’t be vain if you’re just copying.” June looked down at the banquet scene. “Who cares if it’s a copy, anyway, if it’s beautiful?”

  “When did he tell you that?” Cece asked. “About giving us the painting.”

  “On Friday,” June said. “After the concert. Do you really have a Diebenkorn?”

  “Did he stay with you last weekend?” Cece asked.

  June nodded. She got up and went to the chessboard, adjusting a pin in one of her butterflies. Its purple wings shivered for a moment, and were still.

  “But then he left,” she said.

  “Do you know where he went?”

  June nodded, as if it were obvious: “He went back to China.”

  “China!”

  “Lucky him. I always wanted to go to China.”

  “But when did he leave?” Cece asked.

  “Sunday night,” June said calmly.

  Sunday night! If they had only called Harry on Sunday morning, Cece thought, they might’ve stopped him. But even if Harry had confirmed he was missing, no one would’ve known where to look. It suddenly occurred to her that the professor had to know a great deal more about their house guest than they did. Could he have known from the beginning?

  “Flights to China leave late at night,” June said. “Did you know that?”

  Cece shook her head.

  “You have to get to the airport around dinnertime, and then you have to wait. You fly for ten or twelve hours, and then you have to land somewhere, like Hong Kong or Seoul. The plane can’t get there without stopping for fuel. But that’s good, because when you finally get to China, it’s early in the morning.” June smiled. “That way, you have the whole day to look around.”

  77.

  SHE FOUND GORDON IN THE STUDY ALONE. HIS STUDENTS WERE TAKING their exams this week, and his work for the semester was nearly finished. She stood for a second outside the half-closed door, watching him. His hair, now that it was thinning, stood up sometimes in little peaks, giving him a boyish quality. The freckles on his forehead became a kind of sunburn up near the hairline, where the newly exposed skin was still delicate. Gordon was frowning, and the creases in his forehead were pronounced, but she could see that he was happy. He was transcribing information from a document at his left elbow. Every few seconds, he shifted his focus from the screen to the desk, or from desk back to screen.

  Cece couldn’t see the document from where she was standing, but it would be like all the others: the slightly greasy yellow paper, cracking at the folds, the script so antiquated it was almost foreign. The capital letters tilted like sails across the page. It was one kind of person whose narcissism led him to purchase family trees and take trips to ancestral villages, and another who actually tracked down these old charts and letters, census records and indentures, and took the time to copy and compare them until they yielded up their secrets. She felt a wave of protectiveness toward him that was much stronger than the feelings she’d called love when she married him. She wondered whether she wasn’t making a terrible mistake.

  She knocked lightly on the open door.

  “Hello, Wife,” said Gordon cheerfully. “How dost thee?”

  “We weren’t Quakers,” Cece said. “Were we?”

  “Lutherans,” Gordon said. “I’m just in an eighteenth-century mood.”

  Cece went over to the desk and looked at the document, pinned down by two of her glass paperweights. “General Warranty Deed,” read the heading, in a font Cece associated with Wild West cartoons, and under it, in stranger type (some of the letters were backward): Witnesseth. That the said parties of the First Part, in consideration of the sum of (“three hundred dollars” was written in) to (illegible) paid by the said parties of the Second Part, the receipt of which is hereby acknowledged…

  “I don’t know how you can read that,” Cece said.

  “Very slowly,” said Gordon. “This is connected to the Lancashire Traverses through a letter I found last week. They were Protestants who settled in Newfoundland. It’s much more convincing than the Travestère material from Normandy, I’m afraid. The case for the Canadian branch is becoming stronger and stronger.”

  “But you still haven’t found the crossing ancestor, right?”

  Gordon sat back in his chair. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. “Believe me, when I find him, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Cece moved away from the desk and sat down on the so
fa. The blinds were closed so that Gordon could see the screen; light was concentrated in the small interstices between the slats, bright needles in the dark room. She didn’t know where to begin.

  “Or her,” Gordon amended. “Of course it’s unlikely that an unmarried woman would cross alone.”

  “I found something out today,” Cece said.

  “What’s that?” Gordon’s face was a long shadow; she couldn’t see his expression.

  “Could you sit over here?”

  Gordon got up obligingly and came over to the sofa. He was wearing an old pair of khakis and a checkered, button-down shirt. Unless he was exercising, Gordon did not wear T-shirts. He didn’t own a pair of jeans.

  “About Mr. Yuan.”

  The computer made the automatic-save noise, and Gordon glanced reflexively at the machine. No matter how much they used them, their generation would never be completely comfortable with everything the computer did for you. They would continue to insist on the value of simple intellectual labors—basic calculation and spelling—even as they became unnecessary, the same way her mother had made soup stock from scratch, and her father had repaired the two boatlike old Lincolns, until he had to pay to have them towed from the garage to the wrecker.

  “You didn’t find him,” Gordon said.

  “Not exactly,” Cece said. “He—”

  But she couldn’t say that she’d brought a con artist into the house. She wasn’t even sure whether Mr. Yuan was a con artist. Were you a con artist if you’d perpetrated a single con? If yes, almost everyone she knew had been a con artist at one point or another. And if that was true, didn’t it depend on the seriousness of the deception? Were you a con artist if all you pretended was to be a real artist?

  Gordon waited patiently. He had accepted a long time ago that Cece would slow him down. Now he was used to it. He had a relaxed but interested expression she imagined he used on his patients, meant to encourage them to take their time. She wondered what he thought of in those moments. In many cases, he probably already knew what the patient was going to say. She imagined a background of soft classical music going on inside her husband’s head.