The Art of Confidence

by Wendy Lee

  Reluctantly, Rong handed me the painting. I tried to look at it with new eyes, but despite all that I had read about the artist’s technique and the many times I had copied his pictures, I couldn’t tell whether it was a real Qi Baishi, either. I rubbed the corner of the paper the way Master Zhuo had. Looking at it closer, I could tell that the paper appeared worn, the coloring different from the fresh white paper we usually used. The ink, too, did not look like it had recently dried, but was faded from age.

  Rong observed my actions. “I didn’t consider the materials,” he admitted. “I didn’t think Master Zho would look that carefully at the ink or paper, just at the images.”

  I handed the painting back to him. “Well,” I said, “I think I liked the painting you did of the single shrimp better.”

  He gave me a half grin. “So, what are you going to do with your prize money?”

  I thought about what my father’s reaction would be when I told him I had won the contest. He’d be even more excited to know that I had gotten some money, which he undoubtedly would take away from me and use for next semester’s tuition. But maybe he didn’t have to know the contest had involved winning money.

  “I think I’ll go out to dinner,” I said to Rong. “Want to come?”

  * * *

  By the time I decided to go to America, two years after leaving school, I had lost touch with Rong Jiawen. I figured he had abandoned the idea of being an artist and gone to work for his family. It was what any sensible person would do, given the opportunity.

  When I met Wang Muping in New York, something about him reminded me of my old classmate Rong. They had the same easy way of living, the ability to act as if the world owed them something instead of the opposite. Without Wang, I wouldn’t have been able to pull off the Andrew Cantrell replica. That’s what I told him it was, a replica, a reproduction, a simulation; but I could tell from the way he looked at me, that first time we met up after I asked him for help, he was also suspicious of Caroline Lowry.

  “Did she pay you?” was his first question.

  “Yes, half up front,” I said. I didn’t tell him how much, knowing that he made much more off of one of his pornographic shanshui paintings than I would imitating a famous artist.

  “Good, because you’ll need that money. What’s the date of the painting?”

  I checked the Lowry Gallery catalog and told him 1969.

  Our first stop was not an art supply store, as would have been my instinct, but to an antiques dealer upstate. We took the train up the Hudson and stopped in one of the small, sleepy river towns that reminded me of the towns you might see traveling along the Yangtze River in China, the ones that had been evacuated and flooded after the installation of the Three Gorges Dam. The main street was lined with antique stores, all seeming to display the same Revolutionary War–era chests of drawers and chairs, fireplace andirons, and decorative mantelpieces, so I was confused when Wang headed straight to one particular store.

  We stepped into the clutter of furniture, and as we moved farther into the store, we seemed to move backward in time. Cherrywood tallboys gave way to art deco cabinets to midcentury-modern lamps, until we reached a section entirely filled with canvases. Some of them were the worst that American kitsch could offer—velvet paintings, paint-by-numbers, saccharine portraits of wide-eyed children and fluffy pets.

  I jumped when an elderly man appeared at my elbow, but he seemed to know my friend well. Wang introduced him to me and we shook hands, but I instantly forgot his name, which was probably for the best given the secretive nature of the project.

  Wang asked, “Do you have a canvas from the late sixties, oil, size five feet by three feet?”

  “Ah,” the elderly man said. “I have just the thing.”

  The canvas he extracted from the jumble was a color field painting, its bold, confident strokes not entirely unprofessional to my eye. “We’ll take it for a hundred dollars,” Wang informed the proprietor.

  “Two hundred. You never know, this might be an undiscovered Rothko.”

  “Ha!” I exclaimed, a little too forcefully.

  The elderly man winked at me. “You never know.”

  After getting the price down to a hundred and fifty dollars, we said good-bye and made our way to the train station, carrying the wrapped canvas between us.

  “How do you know about this place?” I asked Wang as we huffed down the street.

  “I like to collect porcelain,” he said.

  “Oh, like porcelain from Jingdezhen?”

  “Actually,” Wang said, without a trace of embarrassment, “I like Delftware. The store owner calls me whenever a plate shows up at an estate sale.”

  “Do you eat off of it?”

  “I just like looking at it. The blue and white pattern makes me happy.”

  I shook my head. Even though I’d known him for thirty years, my friend was still full of surprises.

  Wang instructed me to contact him once I’d stripped the canvas. I was used to doing this, for I often stripped and painted over many of my own, as a way to obliterate my failures. Only this time I didn’t have my wife to complain how I smelled of acetone and turpentine when I went into the house.

  “You smell like a house painter,” Jin would say when I sat down at the kitchen table, even though I’d scrubbed my skin raw in the shower. “Maybe you should become a house painter. There’s more of a future in that.”

  I would ignore her grumblings, and didn’t point out that whenever I went to pick her up from the hair salon, the odors that emanated from that place—from women getting their hair dyed, straightened, permed, or whatever was necessary to achieve the opposite of their natural state of hair—could make a strong man faint.

  As promised, when I was done with stripping the canvas, I called Wang and he stopped by my studio.

  “This canvas doesn’t look aged enough,” he said. “Do you have any tea?”

  I wondered if he had suddenly gotten thirsty. “Of course I have tea. What kind do you want, Chinese or American?”

  “Black tea,” he said and sized up the canvas. “About five tea bags.”

  Intrigued, I did as I was told and he pressed the wet tea bags one by one against the canvas until he had achieved a dull beige shade. Once, I asked him, “Where did you learn how to do this?”

  He grinned. “Ancient Chinese secret.”

  Afterward, we went inside the apartment while I made us some tea for real.

  “Not so bad being a bachelor again, is it?” Wang observed, looking around the kitchen at the dirty dishes piled in the sink and the grimy countertop. “Why’d Jin leave?”

  He’d never so much as mentioned her name before. When I invited him to our wedding, which had taken place at city hall with a lunch in Chinatown afterward, he had sent his regrets. I suspected that he preferred to stay away from anything that hinted at commitment.

  “The usual,” I said. “She wanted more from me than I could give.”

  “I see,” he replied knowingly. “It’s always about money, isn’t it? Get a better job, find a better place to live, give me a better life.”

  There was more to it than that, but I let Wang think what he would. Most of the women he became involved with, if he ever let a relationship get very far, probably thought that way.

  He leaned forward and clapped me on the shoulder. “Believe me, you’re better off without her. We artists, we need our freedom.”

  Many years ago I might have thought this, too.

  The next step in the process I took alone. I visited the Museum of Modern Art to look at its Andrew Cantrell painting, the only one in a public collection. Although some overlap was to be expected, the breed of tourists here was somewhat different from those I observed from my stall in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: fewer families, more couples; fewer sneakers and backpacks, more fashionable footwear and designer bags. I thought by going in the middle of the day and in the middle of the week, I might avoid the crowds, but it seemed to be a h
oliday in another part of the world and the place was deluged with European tourists, apparently looking for more recent masterpieces than their centuries-old museums could provide.

  The MoMA’s Andrew Cantrell was located on the second floor, in what I considered to be the most ignominious place possible, opposite the escalators and only a few feet from an information desk on one side and the bathrooms on the other. Most visitors probably walked by it without giving it a second thought. I tried not to get in the way of the people looking to either find a more famous painting or to relieve themselves. Finally, I stood with my back against the escalator divider and attempted to ignore the heads that passed in front of me, blocking my view.

  Meditation, painted in 1967, was smaller than Elegy, about three feet by two feet. But the single dark blue band across the black background was mesmerizing, shimmering with the strength of a neon sign in the dark night. I tried to imagine what Cantrell had been thinking when he’d produced this painting, at what point he was in his life. From what I’d read, at the time he’d been married for five years to Naomi Jordan, the daughter of a New York City corporate lawyer. Two years later, when he’d painted Elegy, the marriage was said to have gone sour over charges of infidelity. They’d moved out to East Hampton, to the summer house that her family owned, to escape the rumors—and, supposedly, to get away from Hazel Lowry.

  I visualized the movement from Meditation to Elegy, from the strength of black and dark blue to the chaotic gray and white, and wondered how much of Cantrell’s personal life had affected that progression. Of course, there may have been no connection at all, just the graspings of a desperate man looking at the paintings almost forty years later.

  I removed a sketchbook and pencil from my backpack, and began to trace the brushstrokes of the painting in front of me. I especially made sure to copy the signature exactly, as it was one of the more identifiable features. Because of the black background of Meditation, the signature was in a lighter color and clearer on this painting than the image of Elegy in the Lowry Gallery catalog or any other I’d been able to find. Sketching the painting was not easy to do, with all the people passing back and forth between us. I wanted to stop them, to make them take notice, to ask them what they saw. Finally, after a half hour or so, I gave up and went home.

  Over the next few weeks, Elegy entered my dreams. I awoke drowning in its gray waters, sucked into the white eye of the storm in its middle. Somehow I became confused and instead of the ocean I was in the mountains, descending too fast in a cable car, rushing toward the ground as my stomach lurched with indigestion and perhaps guilt.

  While my nights were spent battling waves, during the days I sought to find the right mix of paints. I couldn’t use anything with chemicals developed past 1969. Wang and I had taken such care to “age” the canvas that I couldn’t spoil everything now by covering it with something completely anachronistic.

  After I was done with the first coat, Wang paid another visit to my studio. I watched anxiously as he evaluated what I’d done, but all he said was, “Do you have a hair dryer?”

  Jin must have left one behind—it was ridiculous, as a hairdresser, for her not to have owned one—but after a thorough search, it looked like she had taken it with her. I couldn’t keep Wang waiting much longer.

  “I’ll be back in a moment,” I said, and ran out the door and down the few blocks to the salon where Jin had worked. I always thought Number One Modern Beauty Parlor was a ridiculous name, especially since the faded glamour shots on the walls featured feathered haircuts from the eighties. I recalled the many times I’d come by to see Jin at work, during my lunch hour, when I needed to take a break from my work in the afternoon, or in the evening just to walk her home. Her station was next to the front window, and when she caught sight of me, her face would brighten.

  The first time I’d gone looking for her was the day after we’d met at the continuing education class. When she recognized me in the salon, she looked more wary than pleased, but relaxed when I said, “I’d like to get a haircut.” She must have known it was an excuse to see her, as my hair, which I cut myself with a pair of clippers whenever I remembered to, was already quite short. But she played along with me, asked me to sit in a chair, and abstractedly plopped a women’s fashion magazine in my lap. I pretended to flip through it, watching out of the corner of my eye as she continued to color a white lady’s hair a shade that looked like buttered popcorn.

  When Jin was ready, she beckoned for me to come to her, but I announced, “My hair needs to be washed.” This was even more preposterous, as there was barely half an inch to wash, but she led me to the back of the room, where I sank into a recliner-like contraption with my head at an impossible angle. Perhaps in retaliation, she ran the water too hot, then too cold, but I endured it. She briskly kneaded my shoulders, allowing me to fantasize for a moment what our physical relations might be like, until she jabbed too hard with her fingernails and I gave a little yelp of pain.

  Finally, I let her lead me to her chair, where she draped a plastic sheet around me as impersonally as if I were a corpse, and produced her shears.

  “Just a little off the top, please,” I said, although I sensed she was going to do what she wanted with me.

  “Why did you come here?” she asked in between snips.

  “You came to where I work, now I’ve come to yours. Besides, you said you could get rid of my gray.”

  She paused and tilted her head. “Is that what you want? Maybe a little streaking would help you. I’m thinking red.” She couldn’t help but smile at my horrified expression.

  After a few minutes of silence, punctuated only by the snipping shears, I said, “I liked what you drew in class.”

  “I was trying to follow what you said. About looking into the person’s soul. It’s not so different from what I do here.”

  “Here?” I asked skeptically of the room filled with hairdressers and their clients.

  “I’m also trying to look into people’s souls, into what their true appearance is. Then I cut their hair according to what I see.”

  “I had no idea cutting hair was such an artistic activity.”

  “It takes as much skill as painting a picture,” she retorted. “And I probably make more money at it, too.”

  This, I did not bother to deny. I was only aware of her nearness, of her presence just over my shoulder with a dangerous weapon in her hand, especially when she cut close to my ears. I watched her in the mirror, and although she mostly kept her eyes on her work, occasionally her gaze would meet mine. Then, just as quickly, she’d avert her eyes, but I’d catch a trace of color on her cheeks.

  When Jin had finished cutting my hair and whisked away the plastic sheet, I turned my head to one side, then the other, pretending to admire her handiwork. In reality, I couldn’t tell much of a difference, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that in the space of an hour, I had fallen in love with this woman.

  I gave her a large tip, which she seemed to ignore as she stuffed it into the pocket of her apron, and then I blurted out, “Will you have dinner with me after you finish work?”

  “We’re open until nine,” she pointed out.

  “I’ll come back then.”

  I did, half-expecting her to already be gone, but she was still there, sweeping up the hair from the floor so it appeared there was a dark, furry animal clinging to the end of her broom. I took her to a local Sichuan restaurant that I knew to be cheap but good, and that was all we needed to begin our courtship.

  Now, as I approached the Number One Modern Beauty Parlor, I pictured seeing Jin in the front window. But there was another hairdresser at her station, a young Chinese man with bleached blond hair whom I’d never seen before. I took a deep breath to steel myself against the noxious fumes, and the inevitable questioning looks from those of Jin’s coworkers who knew me, and stepped inside. Her former boss, Old Guo, approached me.

  “She isn’t here,” he immediately said.

  “I k
now,” I said. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

  Old Guo and I did not have the best of relationships. Jin had told me he was a fair boss; unlike many others, he allowed his workers to keep their tips. He didn’t try anything shady with the female hairdressers, and he allowed them one day off a week. But when Jin announced that she was leaving the salon, he accused me of taking away his most reliable worker. I tried to tell him that Jin’s decision was as unexpected to me as it was to him, as well as troublesome, because that meant we had lost the steadier of our two incomes. But Jin had her reasons, which at the time I didn’t know.

  “What do you want?” Old Guo asked me, seemingly not antagonistic anymore.

  “I need to borrow a hair dryer.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m . . . painting my house and need to dry some . . . varnish.”

  I must have looked as desperate as I felt, for Old Guo relented. He motioned toward the fake-blond male hairdresser to bring over a hair dryer. “Be sure to return it!” he called after me as I ran out the door.

  “Professional grade,” I told Wang when I got home, triumphantly waving the hair dryer in his face.

  He ignored me, plugged in the dryer, tested it, and then turned it full-blast toward the painting.

  “What are you doing?” I cried, thinking the heat was going to ruin my work.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he yelled over the industrial-strength hum. “You need to dry out this layer before adding the next one. The heat will make the paint crack just enough so that it looks aged. But don’t do it too much, otherwise it’ll look like it’s from the nineteenth century.”

  When he was done, I had to admit that his methods seemed to work. The canvas now had a sheen of age and, in my mind, authenticity. I’d never doubt Wang and his peculiar tactics again.

  * * *

  A month to the day I had told Caroline Lowry I would take the job, I was done. I invited Wang over one last time to look at the painting and celebrate with a bottle of baijiu, the strongest Chinese alcohol. This liquor was usually poured into tiny, handleless cups, but I only had teacups, so we used those.