The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  ‘They wanted this,’ she murmurs. ‘All of them.’

  Her husband grips her arm. ‘Come. There’s no reason to stay.’

  But Yuliang pushes him away. ‘No.’

  And with that one gesture, what remains of her self-control crumbles. Falling to her knees, she rips Strong Man from its frame. ‘Is this what you all wanted?’ She hurls the frame to the ground. ‘And this… and this…’ She stamps on the wood until it snaps. She tries to tear the painting as well, but the canvas, fortified with layers of hardened oils, resists her fingers. In the end, as cameras flash and click behind, she uses her feet, kicking the frame to pieces, grinding her heels into the varnish. She scrapes and stamps on the obscene scrawlings until they’re indecipherable.

  Then she turns back to the reporters.

  ‘There,’ she says. ‘At least write that I finished the job. If you write anything, write that. I always finish the job.’

  41

  In the end, the detectives assigned to the case confess to being at a complete loss. They have, they say, no idea who the vandals were, what their motives might have been. ‘These were very skilled,’ says one, who nevertheless can’t quite meet Yuliang’s eye. ‘I’d advise you to forget about them.’

  ‘About the vandals?’

  ‘Forget about everything.’

  ‘Do you really think I can do that?’ Yuliang snaps in disbelief.

  The look he gives her is one of sheer scorn, only slightly leavened by pity. ‘Madame,’ he says, ‘they’re just paintings. You can always paint new ones.’ His tone suggests that this is regrettable.

  Even more insultingly, the amount the gallery offers by way of compensation is barely enough to cover painting expenses for three months, let alone replace twenty years’ worth of work.

  ‘We’re aware that it’s entirely inadequate,’ Curator Ma says, his smile retrieved and as infuriatingly cheerful as ever. ‘Unfortunately, we have our own troubles now. Our insurance barely covered the damages. And our artists for the next two shows have pulled out.’

  ‘Well,’ Zanhua says (for by this point Yuliang doesn’t trust herself to speak), ‘I suppose that’s a kind of payment in and of itself.’

  Zanhua. He is, as always, attentive, thoughtful, sympathetic. He procures her sleep aids, French tobacco. Her favorite Pinot Noir. He urges her to return to Nanjing: ‘Please, Yuliang. There’s nothing left for you here. Let’s leave Shanghai tomorrow.’

  But Yuliang can’t bring herself even to leave their hotel suite, much less to return to the stodgy city that is surely reveling in her misfortunes. She brushes off his attempts to woo her out: to Champion’s Day at the races, to the French Club for dinner, to the new Dietrich film at the Lyceum. She refuses to see Liu Haisu, who arrives with flowers when the story hits the Shanghai papers the next morning (although she does read the little note he attaches to the gift: ‘The goal is not making art. It is living a life through art. Whatever else you do, do not give up’). She won’t even see her stepson, who calls from the front desk the next day. ‘You two go out,’ Yuliang tells Zanhua dully. ‘Take him to lunch. Go see The Devil Is a Woman.’ She laughs bitterly. ‘The papers will like that.’

  After he has gone she stares down at her quilt, smoking one Gitane lit from another. When the light starts to slant she finally picks up her sketchbook. She waits in the dimming evening for some event or sign; or of a moment she doesn’t fully understand – inspiration, perhaps. Forgiveness. Rebirth. Cigarette after cigarette, though, the flawless white just stares back, as bleak and blank as the gallery walls were yesterday. Reverting to childhood comforts she recites Li Qingzhao’s ‘Stream’ over and over (Its pene- trating fragrance drives away my fond dreams of faraway places/How merciless!). But even this does nothing at all. She is hollowed of hope, stripped clean of art spirit. Too beaten, even, to hurl her sketchbook across the room. And when, hours later, she finally drifts off to sleep, even her dreams are empty.

  It’s nearly a week before Zanhua finally convinces her – mostly on the strength of their dwindling finances – to return home. He hires a closed car, discreetly pays the bill, smuggles Yuliang past reporters lurking outside. They board the Blue Steel Express well ahead of other travelers and retreat quickly to their private compartment. They dine quietly together, and sit in continued silence until the porter comes to turn down their berths. Zanhua promptly nods off, his distinguished-looking head falling forward onto his new edition of The Heroic Life and Death of Sun Yat-sen.

  Yuliang, however, cannot sleep at all. She nurses her wine, toasts her receding city. After the sleepless scream and neon of Shanghai, the Jiangsu countryside, with its moonlit fields and shadowed hills, seems almost ethereally quiet. There are no Tudor mansions here, no doormen. Only quiet little huts. The windows of most of them are shuttered, humble faces shielding their eyes from railborne intruders. ‘Windows are symbols,’ Yuliang has always told her students. ‘They are gateways – clues to mysterious unseen worlds. Don’t think of them as simply lines and color values.’ For all her teachings, she herself has rarely wondered much about other people’s lives.

  Now, though, she does. Refilling her glass, Yuliang imagines families living behind these silent façades. She pictures fathers carving toys, smoking pipes by the kang. She sees mothers with lined faces, mending. For the first time she finds herself envious of such unmarked and ordinary existences, of lives made up of goals no more or less essential than ensuring that the rooms are clean, the tea hot, the children bountifully supplied. Running a hand over her own flat belly, she wishes anew for the motley badges of motherhood – the dimpled skin and aching back, bound endlessly to a howling infant. A body whose creative energies don’t perpetually bypass the womb in their never-ending rush to a brush…

  That’s when it comes to her: perhaps she should just stop.

  The thought, when it forms, feels wispy and unconvincing. Sipping her wine, Yuliang tests and tastes it. She fills in its outlines with detail, adds heft and substance. Really, she thinks. Why not? Surely by now she’s acquired the skills to live like an ordinary woman; worrying about nothing more than her clothes, the house, her husband’s needs and affections. Given Zanhua’s moribund civil salary, she would have to keep teaching. But no one says that she has to keep painting. She could sell the few works she has left in her studio, cash in on her name… and then end it. After all, an end would be welcomed on all fronts. Even, at this point, on her own.

  As Yuliang finishes off the wine, a kind of vertigo sweeps her, as though the train were flying straight off a cliff. But when she looks out again, it is still shuttling over the rails past all those reassuringly grounded little towns and cities. Before her lies the violet nightscape of her own vast, embattled nation, bound by ancient mountains, watched over by the Heavenly Cowherd and Celestial Weaver Girl. Behind her, her steadfast husband sleeps on.

  42

  A full hour after Zanhua has risen, donned his clothes, and left for work, Yuliang sits at her dressing table. She is working furiously. Not on a sketch or self-portrait but on a proposal for a class she wants to teach in the fall, on the works of Lady Guan Daosheng. Yuliang anticipates some resistance to the idea of herself, a controversial ‘modern’ painter, lecturing on a revered thirteenth-century artist. But she welcomes the debate. She welcomes, in fact, anything that takes her mind from her boredom; that fills the void her life seems to have become since her decision to stop painting.

  When she first returned from Shanghai she spent a week in the house, dodging Guanyin inside as she avoided the newsmen, students, and sympathizers who continually rang the bell. Having locked up her studio, Yuliang was forced to find other, more mundane channels for her fury: lowering hems, sewing on buttons, mending the cloth-soled shoes that languished unworn in the far corner of her closet floor. She reorganized her clothes by color and style, pushing the Western-tailored items – her Parisian trousers and suits, her ties and hats and low-necked blouses – to one side. She wrapped her high-he
eled shoes in flannel sacks, had new cheongsams made from silk and several pants sets made of heavy linen. All items of her new wardrobe adhere strictly to Madame Chiang’s New Life standards. Wearing them, Yuliang feels strangely disguised – almost, in fact, the way she felt the first time Jinling painted her face for her at the Hall.

  Her newly respectable role extends to the university as well. For the first time in her life, Yuliang is on committees. She votes on updating the art library, on examining teaching methods. She even sits in on Classroom Morality meetings, although more out of an interest in censoring budding gossip about herself than in any of the issues debated.

  She has proctored six examinations, curated three student art exhibitions, and delivered two lectures (‘Light in Painting: Impressionists vs. Pointillists,’ and ‘Fauves and Color: A Taste of the Wild’). The impressionist lecture pulled a mere five students. The fauves, just one – a lovesick boy who chases her around her lecture circuit with the fruitless ardor of a racecourse whippet.

  Still, Yuliang delivered both lectures impeccably, with not a single pause, stumble, or complaint. She has stayed silent through the inevitable snickers at staff meetings and in hallways. Overall, in fact, she’s been almost as serene as her own self-portraits – not to mention more conventionally attired. She barely blinked, even, when someone slid a note beneath her office door, bearing just one suspiciously beautiful line of calligraphy:

  It serves you right.

  Now she skims this class proposal quickly, searching for missing strokes or improper wording. She adds a list of proposed textbooks and picks out the day’s clothes – a demure skirt and jacket – with care. She dons the round black spectacles she has until recently resisted wearing (as much from vanity as from the memories they bring back of her uncle) and brushes her hair back neatly from her face. She takes stock of herself.

  For just an instant she feels it – the bleakness, seeping like damp mist through the tiny cracks in her resolution. Yuliang grits her teeth, forces a smile. ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ she announces defiantly to herself, or perhaps to no one (but certainly not to Mirror Girl, whose taunting visage has been banished from Yuliang’s presence). ‘I’ll take a walk around the lake before the Library Committee meeting.’

  Xuanwu Lake Park, this Thursday morning, is filled with the usual mix of schoolchildren, ambling visitors, strolling lovers. Yuliang walks among them, making her way unnoticed toward the lake’s western side. As she follows the crumbling traces of walls erected by Ming Dynasty laborers, she keeps her eyes trained on the water. She loves the way its surface reflects the colors of each season – the lush spring greens, the aqua skies of summer. In the winter the lake is as black and opaque as onyx, the bare trees reflected as gray streaks breaking through. But now, in early fall, it is all golden earth tones, a shifting collage of wet leaf and reflected sky.

  She pauses in her walk to give a visitor a clear view of the lake’s most famous sight: five islets linked by old stone bridges. Watching the man shuffle and fiddle with his expensive, bulky camera, she very nearly pities him. The islands are famous for their chrysanthemums: autumnal bursts of saffron, fuchsia, and yellow. She has painted them scores of times, often with students. Even now, no longer a painter, she can’t help but think they deserve more than photography’s bleak palette of mourning.

  The tourist takes his photograph, and Yuliang continues on, the sharp, short snick replaying in her inner ear. For an instant it comes back: the firestorm of camera flashes, the damning photos – particularly Tang Leiyi’s shot of her and Zhou Enlai (‘Nude Woman Painter Embraces CCP Cadre,’ read the caption). Zanhua, when he saw the piece (left conveniently for him by Guanyin), made no comment. But his stoic silence hurt Yuliang more than any spoken recrimination: it was as though her insides had been scraped out with a lathe.

  Passing a lakeside tea vendor, she fishes out her change purse and hands the man a coin, watching aimlessly as steam floats toward the lake. When her gaze lands on a park bench and the man who is sitting there, she smiles, amused by the silver-tipped cane by his side. Zanhua seems to have started a trend. She takes her cup absently, her eyes drifting back to the cane’s owner. Then she freezes and looks again.

  For the man is none other than Zanhua himself.

  She knows without a beat of question that it’s he. His cane leans against the seat. Yuliang recognizes too the satchel he packed last night, when he told her he had nonstop meetings today. But clearly he isn’t here to meet with anyone. He slumps, his news journal unread on his lap, his eyes bleakly on the summit of Purple Mountain.

  ‘Your change,’ prompts the vendor.

  Yuliang half turns and takes coins, her eyes still locked on her husband. Zanhua tosses his cigarette stub to the ground, where it joins a half-dozen others.

  ‘Do you set up here every day?’ she asks the vendor in a low voice.

  ‘Every day there is no rain.’

  ‘Has he been here before?’ She points.

  The vendor squints. ‘Him? Oh, yes. He’s always there. Sometimes he even sleeps there – takes a nap right on the bench. Can’t be too comfortable.’ The man scratches behind his ear. ‘But mostly he just sits.’

  ‘How long has he been coming?’

  The man frowns. ‘A month, maybe? A bit more perhaps.’

  It’s been nearly eight weeks since they returned from Shanghai. Six since the picture of Yuliang and Zhou Enlai appeared. ‘You’re sure it’s the same man?’ she asks shakily, though she knows the answer.

  ‘Sure. At first I thought maybe he was a beggar. But he dresses too well – that cane and all. And he pays for his tea and seems to have some to spare.’ He narrows his gaze. ‘Why? Do you know him?’

  How does one answer such a question? Yes, she imagines saying. He’s my husband, my savior. My conscience. Everything I have, I owe to him.

  Then again, how on earth, knowing what she now knows, can she even pretend that she knows him? She has been sleeping by this man’s side these past eight weeks. Embracing him most nights in her continued hope that she’ll conceive. Nestling into his softening arms and belly to sleep. In the morning she neatens up the tax forms and work papers he always seems to have left scattered around the room. Carelessly – or so she’s believed. But clearly it’s all a sham. The papers are a decoy: he has either lost his job, or is simply too ashamed to show his face there.

  ‘Why not buy him a cup of tea?’ the man is suggesting amiably. ‘I’m sure he’d welcome a little company.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  The man shrugs. ‘He’s always alone. Until you came, I didn’t think he knew anyone at all.’

  Yuliang gazes at him fixedly, then turns back to her husband. ‘Please do me a favor,’ she says quietly. ‘Don’t tell him I asked about him.’

  ‘I’d require something for my effort.’

  Numbly, she hands him back her change and the tea, which suddenly tastes like little more than steeped iron.

  ‘My lips are sewn tight.’ The man drops her mug into a tin of yellow water, presumably to clean it. Yuliang turns away, preparing to hurry off the way she came. After a step or two, though, she stops.

  What she really wants is to go to him, to put her arms around him. To sink her head onto his shoulder. She knows, though, that this would spell certain disaster. Catching Zanhua in his lie – the one true lie he has ever told her (and she shudders, for she certainly can’t say the same) – would strip him of his last remnant of pride.

  Instead she forces herself west again, back toward Zhongshan Road. It’s eleven o’clock – she’s going to miss her meeting. But suddenly this doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but getting to the one place where she’s all but certain she won’t see Zanhua again before tonight – the home that now, all too clearly, is no refuge for him.

  Arriving there a short while later, Yuliang picks up her mail and makes her way slowly upstairs, sifting through it. Two steps from the top she pauses, holding up a thin envelope stamp
ed with a Paris return address. Curious, she breaks the seal and reads the note once, then twice. Then she turns her gaze to the wall.

  Over Yuliang’s objections, Guanyin has hung an insipid carp-and-stream scroll by some third-rate guohua artist her family knew. Yuliang has never given it a second glance. Now, however, she stares at it, the mundane sounds of the little house filling her ears: the thunk-thunk of the cook’s cleaver, Guanyin’s voice scolding the maid, the mournful croons of a passing corn vendor.

  ‘Xiao taitai!’ she hears a short moment later. ‘Are you there?’

  Yuliang hesitates. But she doesn’t answer. Wrenching her eyes from the painting, she refolds the note. Then she resumes her slow climb to the top.

  43

  A short while later, Yuliang unlocks the door to her studio for the first time in two months. She enters the little space with a strange sense of entering a home she once lived in but has since sold; stripped of clutter and free of its perpetual smell of solvent, the spare bedroom feels almost like that – a spare bedroom. Somehow, though, its very emptiness makes it seem ominous. Her easel looks like a spindly wooden skeleton. Her glass muller and inkstone look less like painting tools than potential weapons.

  Yuliang makes her way over to her folding stool. She sits, staring out at the same horizon Zanhua had contemplated from his bench: Purple Mountain, its low slopes touched by jade green and light brown, the new observatory sparkling in the sunlight. It’s a scene she’s sketched aimlessly a thousand times in the past. Now, though, another image fills her thoughts: her husband by the lake. A pile of cigarette butts and an empty day before him.

  After lighting her own first cigarette in nearly two months, Yuliang exhales deeply, relishing the feel of smoke freed from her lungs. Again she tries to understand it: what she has just seen. How she could have missed what was right before her own nose. After all, Zanhua certainly noticed her work stoppage – and, for once, talked to her about her career at some length. He’d seemed gratified by her goals, if troubled by her methods. ‘Are you sure you should stop painting completely?’ he’d asked. ‘Can’t you simply paint things that are considered… well, more acceptable?’ Yuliang didn’t have the heart to tell him that painting only ‘acceptable’ work would be far worse for her than not painting at all. As Xu Beihong once said, dead dreams are poison…