The Art of Confidence

by Wendy Lee

“Can you tell her that Mr. Liu and his agent stopped by? That is Mr. Liu.” Wang pointed to me. “She will know who he is.” He displayed the business card that I had neglected to take back from him.

  It seemed to mean something to the gallerina, for her eyes widened slightly. I could see they were a pleasant hazel, like a puddle of water that you look at more carefully and see an entire ecosystem within. “I definitely will,” she told us.

  “What was that all about?” I demanded when Wang and I had stepped outside, and I had swiped the business card back from him. “And what’s this about being my agent?”

  “This gallery owner doesn’t give many people her card,” Wang replied. “She’s very selective. And for some reason, she’s selected you.”

  “She hasn’t done anything yet.”

  “But she will once her assistant has passed on the message that you stopped by to see her. You can thank me later.”

  I shook my head, determined that even if Caroline Lowry did get in touch with me, I was never going to tell Wang. Least of all to give him the satisfaction that he was right.

  * * *

  When I returned home, I felt anew the loss of my wife. Our apartment on the first floor of a frame house in Elmhurst, Queens, appeared not to have been touched for hours, not even by sunlight, as I had not bothered to open the curtains when I had gotten up that morning and now it was too dark to do so. Before Jin had come into my life, I had lived like a long-established bachelor, with ingrained habits that came from years of either living alone or not caring what other people whom you lived with thought of you.

  While an art student I had lived with a bunch of classmates, including Wang, in a tenement in Chinatown. Then, when I’d needed more space, I’d moved to various apartments throughout Queens, always paying cash and even once agreeing to paint a portrait of my landlady’s daughter and future son-in-law as a wedding present in lieu of rent. About ten years ago I’d found my current apartment in a two-family house, owned by an absentee landlord from New Jersey, and agreed to rake leaves, shovel snow, and generally keep an eye on the place in return for the use of the garage in the back as a studio. The upstairs tenants continually shifted from groups of immigrant men who spoke Spanish, families who spoke Tibetan, and students who spoke Korean. They never stayed long enough for me to get to know them, and often the only way I was aware they were there was due to cooking smells seeping through the windows or foreign pop music thumping through the floor.

  After she moved in, Jin was especially annoyed by the music and thought nothing of climbing up on a chair and slamming the bottom of her slipper against the ceiling. “It’s rude,” she would say, and I would remind her that our upstairs neighbors could probably hear us arguing, which couldn’t be that pleasant for them.

  Our courtship was based on argument. Unlike me, Jin was a recent immigrant from Guangzhou, in the south of China. Because her first language was Cantonese, and mine was Fujianese—the language of my home province, Fujian Province, across the straits from the island of Taiwan—we either spoke to each other in Mandarin Chinese or, less fluently, in English. Although she had studied it in school, Jin’s English was not so proficient. She often made mistakes that I patiently corrected, that people were “hospitable” rather than “hospital,” they smoked like a “fiend” and not a “fink,” and so on. Whenever I did that, she would say, “You know what I mean, don’t be such a sticker,” to which I would say, “You mean, don’t be such a stickler,” and on and on it would go.

  Our very first argument, though, occurred when we met. I was teaching a live-drawing class for a continuing education course—the organizations that employed me then were considerably more prestigious than the ones now—that met at night next to a foreign language business class. Both classes had a break at the same time, and several of us, including myself, went outside to smoke.

  “What class are you taking?” I heard a voice ask as I took my first, much-needed drag (a habit that, with Jin’s convincing, I quit soon thereafter).

  I turned to see a young Chinese woman leaning against the wall, watching me. Underneath the sodium lights I couldn’t tell how old she was, but she appeared young, perhaps twenty-five or so. Like many of the young Asian women whom I saw on the 7 train, she wore a mishmash of fashion that indelibly marked her as a recent immigrant: tight jeans decorated with rhinestones, an animal-print top, a fake leather jacket. Her handbag bore a conspicuous logo, and her long hair had reddish-blond streaks. All these so-called embellishments could not distract from the fact that she was very pretty. I had no idea why she was talking to me, a man seemingly old enough to be her father. But, after fortifying myself with a lungful of nicotine, I replied, “The drawing class.”

  “A class just on how to draw?”

  “Well, it’s live drawing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We use live models.”

  It took a while for this to sink in. “That’s naughty!” she exclaimed.

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s the best way to see what’s really going on underneath the skin, the musculature and bones, and the way the tendons . . .” I trailed off when it became obvious that she could not get past the idea of being in the presence of a naked stranger.

  “Is it a fun class?” she asked.

  “I hope so. I’m the teacher.” This did not seem to impress her as much as make her think that I was a pervert for teaching such a class. “What class are you taking?”

  “Marketing. I want to become a ‘marketing manager.’” She spoke as if the job title were in a foreign language, or a euphemism for something much less respectable.

  “What do you do now?”

  “I’m a hairdresser.”

  That explains the hair, I thought.

  “I work at a salon in Elmhurst, on Forty-fifth Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street.”

  “That’s two blocks from where I live,” I remarked.

  “Then you should go get your hair cut there,” she said. “Or I could get rid of your gray and make you look younger.”

  I ran a hand over the back of my head—still full, thankfully—but yes, beginning to be shot through with silver. Was this an insult, or a come-on? I had a hard time believing a woman her age could be interested in me in that way. Perhaps she was just trying to drum up business, per the marketing class she was taking.

  “I’ll think about it,” I told her. “In the meantime, maybe you should rethink your marketing strategy of making people feel old.”

  “Learning marketing is much more useful than learning how to draw a naked person,” she retorted.

  “If you learn how to sell something to a person, all you know is how they spend their money. If you learn how a person’s body works, then you can see into their very soul.”

  “Tell me,” she said through half-lidded eyes, “how much money do you make, as an artist? No, as a teacher of artists?”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Of course it matters. It’s why we’re here.”

  I wondered if she meant the other people in her class, or the both of us, or immigrants in general. The last galled me a bit, because I had been in this country for almost thirty years at that point, longer than I had lived anywhere else, while she was obviously fresh off the boat.

  “You and I are here for different reasons,” I told her.

  “So you think you’re better than me? Because you’re a teacher and I’m a student?”

  Because you are young and I am old, I thought. Because you are beautiful, and I am someone whose own mother said looked like a monkey when I was born. “That’s not what I meant.”

  She had turned away from me now, fumbling in her purse for something.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “After the break, why don’t you come sit in on my class? Then you’ll be able to see for yourself what I mean.”

  She still wouldn’t look at me, so I shrugged, stubbed out my cigarette, and went back inside the building. As my students reassembl
ed, I looked at them with new eyes. Because this was a night class through continuing education, most of the students were middle-aged and looking for relief from their day jobs. A live-drawing class wouldn’t help them make more money, but at least it provided some kind of escape. Was it really useful for them, though? Did it give them, as I had told my companion during my smoking break, insight into human nature, into the soul itself?

  Just as I was about to call class back into session, I saw a movement at the back of the room. The woman I had been talking to had slipped through the door. She didn’t have an easel or a pad of drawing paper, and there were no extras for her to use, but with determination she found a chair, took out a pad of yellow legal paper and a pen, and tore off the top page, on which she had been taking notes. I watched her as that night’s model came to the front of the room, and saw that she did not avert her eyes, but unwaveringly regarded the subject in front of her. In turn, I looked at the model as if I were seeing him for the first time, the striation in the thigh muscle, the corded back of the neck. I guessed he did some kind of manual labor. Every crease and wrinkle mapped something about this person’s life, indicating at least how hard he worked.

  I moved among the students, observing their drawing. Some of them became self-conscious as I neared, pausing to erase something or darken a line. When I paused behind Jin, she acted like she wasn’t aware of my presence. I saw that, unlike a beginner who might try to first draw the face or a specific part of the body, she had just sketched a few quick, abstract lines to represent its general shape. I noticed that up close, her fingers were long and graceful, the nails unvarnished and cut short, the opposite of what I would expect from someone with her sense of style. Of course, I thought. She was a hairdresser; she used her hands.

  When the class was over, she departed before I could say anything to her. All she left on her desk was her sketch on the lined yellow legal page. I folded it up and put it in my pocket, taking it as the equivalent of someone giving you their phone number in a bar. Except I didn’t need to know her phone number; I knew where she worked.

  The next day I walked the two blocks from my apartment to the Number One Modern Beauty Parlor, where I got a haircut and convinced Jin to go to dinner with me after her shift, on our first real date. I learned that she was actually thirty-two and had come over from China five years before. She lived with her sister and her sister’s family in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which made for quite a commute, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that after we had been dating for three months—if you could call what we did dating; since I didn’t have the money, we usually ate out in Flushing, in one of the steamy cafeterias or food courts—she suggested she move in with me.

  “What are you doing with your life?” Wang said when I told him. Then he congratulated me on finding someone who was willing to be with me, not to mention someone that much younger than me. I might have thought he was envious, but especially after he had been picked up by his downtown gallery, he had any number of female hangers-on, from college students to middle-aged women who were looking to collect artists in the way their husbands were looking to collect art. I could tell, though, that he didn’t believe the relationship between Jin and me was real, or would last.

  It was difficult for me to believe, as well, even after Jin had moved her small amount of belongings from the bedroom she shared with her two nieces in Sunset Park into my apartment. Most of what she owned appeared to be clothes, fashion magazines, and the occasional stuffed animal or knickknack. That was most definitely not enough to make the apartment homey enough for her, so every day after I came home from teaching a class, or selling paintings at a craft fair or sidewalk stall, I would spot something new, as if this were a game she had devised for me. One day it would be a yellow paper lantern over the bare bulb that lit the living room; another day a set of red ceramic bowls in the cupboard; a third day a jade bamboo plant adorning the windowsill. She thought it was funny that although I was an artist, I barely lived with anything that had a color.

  This, of course, was not true of my studio. There I had paintings of all colors—well, shades within the same family, at least. But Jin didn’t like to go in there. She complained that the garage smelled of turpentine and musty canvas. After that one time she sat in on my class, she did not attempt to draw again. “That’s what you do,” she said. “I have to find out what I should do.” The marketing class she had taken when I’d met her had turned out to be a bust, and she was no closer to leaving the salon than before. I knew that she enjoyed working there, chitchatting with coworkers and customers about things she could never talk about with me, but was disappointed that at her age she was only a hairdresser. And shacking up with me, an unsuccessful painter, wasn’t going to help matters any.

  * * *

  Caroline Lowry did call me the day after Wang and I had spied at her gallery, and set up a time the following week to visit me at my studio. In the meantime, I agonized over which work to present, what to wear, what kind of refreshments I would have on hand. You would think that I was a teenage girl getting ready for a first date.

  The third thing was the easiest to figure out. At first I considered wine, but I couldn’t afford anything expensive, and our meeting was in the afternoon, so it seemed inappropriate. Naturally, I decided to play up my foreignness. I bought some gunpowder tea and dusted off an old tea set a student had given me as a present. As for my outfit, Caroline had already seen me in the paint-spattered clothes I wore for tourists. So instead I brought out my best costume, one I only wore when I was giving talks to groups of old white ladies—the Tang suit, with its long-sleeved jacket of black brocade and frog closures.

  As for my work, I displayed a couple of half-finished canvases that depicted traditional Chinese landscapes in an Impressionist style. Actually, I only painted variations on a single landscape—a gently sloping mountain—that existed solely in my mind. When some people asked me what it represented, I told them that was where I was born, although the truth was, I had grown up in the dingy alleyways of Xiamen, the island city in the south of Fujian Province. Now Xiamen is a popular tourist destination for the newly rich Chinese. But when I was a child, its beaches were littered with cigarette butts like they were one giant ashtray, and I spent most of my time either chasing or being chased by stray dogs past crumbling buildings that still bore traces of the island’s colonial history.

  At one point in my childhood, my parents took me on a trip to the province’s interior, and we rode a cable car to a mountain’s peak. I kept my eyes fearfully squeezed shut as my mother implored me to look outside, look at the bird in the tree, even promising me that she’d get me an ice cream at the top. Disgusted at his only child’s cowardice, my father said nothing. I knew I was a disappointment to him. His family had worked its way up from countryside farmers who used cow dung for heat to city merchants in dirt-floor houses. I’d been brought up with plentiful food and schooling. Yet I couldn’t stay attentive in class, was forever doodling in my notebook, on my desk, and on the chalkboard, to the amusement of my classmates.

  Finally, as the cable car neared the end of its laborious journey, I opened my eyes and moved my view from the top of my fat knees, clad in blue shorts, to the great green beyond. Outside the cable car window, the unending pattern of trees on the mountain opposite me repeated itself on my retinas so that I saw them every time I blinked. I remained stunned even as I sat on a bench at our destination, outside a flimsy stand for tourists, eating an ice cream cone with great hungry licks, which I threw back up during the cable car’s descent. My father blamed my mother for indulging me; she blamed the ice cream for being too cold. Later, many years after I’d immigrated to America, the land of milk and honey, I learned I was lactose intolerant.

  This mountain that I had seen during my terrifying ascent, however, had been imprinted on my mind. Objectively it was an unremarkable peak, but through my brush, it took on massive proportions. I painted it from various angles, in the winter, at sunset, in t
he fog. I was like Monet, painting the same Japanese bridge over and over, except at least he (and now I, by painting replicas) had made money off of his repetitiveness. For the past few years, I had painted nothing but variations on this mountain, and to what end?

  I thought Caroline Lowry was late to our appointment, but she’d actually been pressing the doorbell for the apartment above me and got a man who only spoke Spanish and was annoyed at being woken from sleeping off a graveyard shift. She stepped gingerly into my living room, where the traces of Jin still remained even three months after her departure.

  “Tea?” I asked.

  Caroline nodded. “With lemon, please.” I had the feeling she often made this request of her assistant.

  I went into the kitchen in a bit of a panic. Of course I should have anticipated that to Americans, tea couldn’t just be tea, but stuff adulterated with milk, sugar, citrus. I set up a tray, then at the last minute looked in the refrigerator, which I had not paid much attention to since Jin had left. Miraculously, I spotted the glow of a plastic lemon on a back shelf. I remembered Jin making fun of it after she brought it home from the supermarket, wondering why there weren’t plastic oranges or plastic apples with orange and apple juice inside.

  I placed the plastic lemon like a little yellow football next to Caroline’s teacup, like a half-formed apology. She ignored it and took a sip of the tea.

  “This has an interesting flavor, what is it?” she asked.

  “Gunpowder tea, from Fujian Province. That is in the south-east of China and where I am from.” I played the tour guide.

  “Oh.” She gave a hint of a smile. “I should have known better than to ask for lemon juice with Chinese tea.”

  I shrugged and indicated the ridiculous lemon. “I tried.”

  Now that the formalities of tea were over, I led Caroline into my studio and turned on the lights that I had angled to show off my work. I couldn’t tell by her impassive face what she thought as she walked from one end of the tiny space to the other. I tried to see the paintings through her eyes: a mountain in the mist, a mountain in the sun, a mountain in the rain.