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The Painter of Shanghai

Page 37

by Jennifer Cody Epstein


  For Zanhua’s part, aside from that one trip to the Wuhu gardens, he himself never missed a day at work – at least, not in the days when Yuliang had first known him. ‘I may be ill,’ he’d say when she’d urge him to sleep off a wet cough or a hangover, ‘but the nation is even more ill than I am.’ It’s true that he has stayed home in Nanjing more regularly. But Yuliang has neither asked nor particularly thought much about these absences. She has simply assumed that attendance in the bustling headquarters is more lax than it was in Wuhu. And if anything, she’s welcomed his lighter workload for the opportunities it has given her to be with him; to complain about school, about the gossip. These days, Zanhua even walks her to classes, strolling across the campus with her. Discussing her lecture plans or her students.

  And yet, staring at her empty easel, Yuliang realizes that for all the time they’ve spent together, for all their oaths of honesty and sacrifice, their life isn’t what they’ve pretended it is. They have both been lying. And in the end, his life is as broken as hers.

  For several moments she just sits there, ash dropping lightly from her smoke. At last the hot ember against her finger brings her back. Blinking, she stubs her cigarette out. She picks up the hand mirror she uses for her self-portraits, smooths her hair, picks a flake of tobacco from her front tooth. After a moment’s hesitation, she reaches into her pocketbook and pulls out her Arden lipstick. Opening it, she suddenly has an odd impression that this is the first true color she has seen since the white walls of the gallery. As she applies it, Mirror Girl purses her mouth mockingly.

  ‘Welcome back,’ Yuliang tells her. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  44

  That night Yuliang spends several more hours in her studio. Not painting, but sorting. She pores through notebooks, and the old or half-finished canvases she left leaning, faces turned to the wall. She leafs through the stack of reviews of her exhibits in China, of her entry into the Salon d’Automne, of her Shanghai-published book of prints. She rereads the handful of biographical pieces (all carefully edited by Yuliang herself) that ran when all of China seemed suddenly to want to know her story.

  She also peruses a slim photograph album, and observes her own image evolving through the camera’s drab lens: Here a teenage bride, posing somberly with Zanhua and Meng Qihua. There, taut and anxious outside the Shanghai Art Academy, on her very first day of class. Here she is, slightly seasick on the Canadian Queen; then, later, on the Boulevard de Clichy, the one face in a group of toasting Beaux Arts students not smiling at the prospect of term’s end. There’s a picture from Rome, Yuliang in her sculpture studio. There’s another at the Silent Society exhibit.

  The last photo was taken a little over four months ago, with sixteen of Yuliang’s graduate-level students. In the image, Yuliang stands at the group’s center, the atelier model beside her. The girl is naked, facing forward, as slim and pale as a slice of moonlight. Her small, high breasts are captured unabashedly on film. The only part of her body you can’t see is her face, which she has turned away from the lens’s gaze.

  Studying the picture, Yuliang can’t help noting of the odd duo they make: she in her fitted suit, Parisian scarf knotted stylishly at her neck, the model beside her a stripped and faceless shadow. If anyone had told her twenty years ago that she’d be the one in clothing – the learned one, the famous artist, the university professor! – she would quite simply have called them mad. Now, though, as she traces the photo’s frame, a long-forgotten voice drifts dreamily into her head. You see? her uncle is saying. You’re very smart. You could be just about anything. A lady poet. A teacher. The memory, she notes, is oddly devoid of the inner shudder that usually accompanies thoughts of her jiujiu. Is it possible that she has actually forgiven him?

  She’s just replacing her photos when she spies something else: a French biscuit tin, dust-coated, its red paint half-eaten by rust. With some effort Yuliang pries off the tarnished lid. The sheafs of paper inside are so tightly packed that several of them spring right out, and it’s only then that she remembers what they are: Zanhua’s letters, sent to her while she was in Europe. There must be well over two hundred.

  Kneeling on the floor, Yuliang smooths one against her knee. My dear Yuliang, she reads. It has been barely a week since you left our land. Not so much time, I suppose, in the space of one lifetime. And yet it feels like a small lifetime in itself…

  A lump takes shape in her throat. She remembers this – it’s the first letter she received on arriving in Lyon. It was waiting for her at the Foreign Students Office. She reread it perhaps a dozen times during those first hazy days. The mere sight of his neat and yet sweeping handwriting had felt like a brief reprieve from an endless onslaught of foreign faces, sounds, food…

  For a long while Yuliang sits, her old grief dampening her thoughts. It’s not until the travel clock on the painting table reads close to eleven that she returns the letters to their box. Making her way to her purse, Yuliang pulls out another envelope – the one from Paris she’d received earlier in the day. She reads it again, her mouth silently shaping French she feels she’s already half forgotten.

  Dear Madame Pan,

  I hope this finds you well. I wanted to inform you that my

  colleague and I are finally opening the gallery we discussed.

  Located on Rue Ste.-Anne, it will present modern paintings by

  artists from China, Indochina, and Japan. We would still very

  much like to feature your work in the opening exhibition, and

  would of course reimburse shipping and traveling expenses.

  Should you agree, please telegraph at your earliest convenience.

  Behind this envelope is another, stiff and scented with fresh ink. Yuliang leaves this one closed. Having bought it herself this afternoon, she already knows its contents: a one-way ticket to Marseille. The ship leaves in less than two months.

  A little after midnight she hears the door downstairs. There’s a rummaging in the kitchen, followed by Zanhua’s measured tread up the creaking staircase. She visualizes her husband, passing first Weiyi’s unused room, then Guanyin’s, before finally reaching her own. The steps pause there, and Yuliang holds her breath. But Zanhua doesn’t knock on his concubine’s door tonight. He stands in silence for a moment, then continues on to the doorway closest to the studio – his own.

  As Yuliang hears his door shut, her insides seem to contract. The sensation stays with her as she tiptoes down to her room, splashes her face in the basin, relieves herself in the tiny WC. It stays on, a cold coil in the center of her belly as she climbs into bed and begins reciting ‘The Double-Ninth Festival.’ Inevitably, though, she is sleepless again, beyond even the soothing reach of Li Qingzhao. Getting up at last, she crosses the room to her dresser and stares at herself in the mirror. She is greeted there not by Mirror Girl but by someone she barely recognizes: a middle-aged apparition, eyes lined by age. Her hair is tangled and lank. It seems pointless to pick up her hairbrush. Instead she turns and walks silently out the door.

  Creeping down the hallway, Yuliang reaches Zanhua’s door. She waits a moment, then enters. With each step across the polished floorboards she expects him to wake, to see her. But Zanhua remains sunk in sleep. He lies on his back, one hand flung toward the headboard, the other resting in its favorite spot, against his cheek. His face in the half-light appears far more serene than Yuliang can remember seeing it in past weeks. He also, she sees, needs a haircut – an unusually long lock of it sweeps from his hairline, an inky brushstroke against the pale span of his brow. Yuliang reaches down and pushes it back.

  When she climbs onto the bed, Zanhua murmurs but doesn’t move. Carefully, she frames her face against the pearl-toned square of the window: she wants to be the first thing he will see upon waking. She whispers his name: ‘Zanhua.’

  And again: ‘Zanhua.’

  His eyelids flutter. When he tries to sit up she presses him back again, gently pinning each of his limbs with her own. She travels down
his length slowly, still holding his hands, keeping him in compliance until she knows for sure he is ready. When she moves back up, she kisses him again, brushing with her lips the features she’s come to know almost better than her own: eyelids and curling lashes, nose, cheek, pulsing temple, the soft indent that marks the parting of his clavicle. As she starts her slow descent he lets loose a soft groan and wraps his arms around her. He pulls her back up, and his thin fingers fumble first to free himself, to find her. To find his way in.

  But Yuliang refuses on this night to follow their usual pattern of efficient and unthinking consummation. She tightens her legs against him and around him. And when she finally opens to him, she draws it out, second by second. Forcing him, with a murmur or a silent, pointed squeeze, to slow or even stop altogether. Until in the end they are barely moving at all.

  Gazing into his sleep-softened eyes, she tries to pour everything she feels into him – her discovery today, her fears. Her vast regrets. Her deceptions. Her unspeakable, unpayable debt. I didn’t choose to be this way, she wants to say. I’ve tried to change. I simply can’t. She searches his face for some sign of understanding as they slowly move together.

  In the beginning it is barely a movement at all – simply the rise and fall of their twinned breathing. Gradually, though, she guides them both into an almost frantic rush. And in the end, the sensation that sweeps her is more profound than anything she has ever felt before, and almost painful. It seems to sweep not just her body but her whole being, carrying her high above him crashing her back down like a kite.

  And yet, lying on him after, his chest damp and smooth beneath hers and her own body bruised and empty and aching, she still feels strangely alone. Almost as though – despite his warm and familiar breath, the steadfast press of his limbs – she is already miles away.

  PART NINE

  The Departure

  Another word for creativity is courage.

  Henri Matisse

  45

  A week into the Western new year of 1937, Madame Pan Yuliang stands with her husband on the Canadian Maritime steamship pier. A sampan has been selected, vetted, and bargained down to two thirds the man’s initial offering price. The weathered boatman, anxious to make the trip in time enough to come back for another late-arriving passenger, is busy loading Yuliang’s two trunks, one carpetbag, and two well-wrapped portfolios – all of her work that is left – into the square stern of his craft. Yuliang herself carries her paintbox and her purse.

  ‘You have your travel papers?’ Zanhua asks.

  ‘You’ve asked me four times.’

  ‘I suppose I keep hoping you’ve forgotten them.’ He smiles wanly.

  Yuliang smiles back, although for a moment it feels as though her heart has already cracked, just a little.

  Over the past week they’ve barely mentioned the looming specter of her departure. Instead, they’ve spent all the compensatory money from the disastrous exhibition. They’ve lived as though life starts and ends here in Shanghai; eating out virtually every meal, traversing the town’s offerings from English pubs to French haute cuisine to the famous Yangzhou-style restaurant on Nanjing Road.

  They’ve bought shoes and stockings at Wing On, hats at Grigorieff and Co., and undergarments at the China Tai Underwear Co. Yuliang has had four new dresses made at Madame Muriel’s on Avenue Joffre. They’ve had tea at the Cathay, wine at the Palais, and gin at the Vienna Ballroom. On a whim, they’ve even joined the well-heeled throng at the annual New Year’s Race Meeting at the posh Shanghai Race Club. Yuliang had never been to the races. But she found herself surprisingly swept up by them, as entranced by the sleek and thundering Mongolian ponies (on which a young Xu Beihong once honed his horse-sketching skills) as by the women sporting hats bedecked with moving still lifes: silk flowers and false fruits, birds and bows. They cheered and shouted themselves hoarse when the horse Zanhua called for second actually came in as predicted.

  Even their lovemaking has had an air of frantic abandonment; as though it’s just one more way they’ve deliberately put off this moment. On their last night they lay together, their bodies slick with sweat and one another, and there was no mention – not at all – of the dire event that was just hours away. Zanhua simply kissed her forehead, as he always does before sleep. Then he wrapped his arms around her and closed his eyes. Yuliang, for her part, stayed up nearly until dawn. But she didn’t move; she was very, very careful not to wake him.

  Standing here now, though, on the edge of their greatest divide yet, it suddenly strikes her as surreal that they could have existed in such a vacuum. Then again, she reminds herself, this is Shanghai. The entire city seems to live in a gay haze of denial, even as war grows more inevitable by the day. Nationalist planes screech through the skies, and Japanese soldiers swagger through Hongkou with impunity. They line China’s northern borders, skirmishing for now but plotting ‘incidents’ that will give them the excuse to invade in full force. Shanghainese, for their part, respond by shouting for another round. The drinks flow faster; the skirts grow shorter, the hours later, the dancehall dances longer and closer and more insinuating. Even now, recovering from what she senses will be the last hangover for at least a month, Yuliang sees among the scores of steamers, sampans, junks, and cargo ships the multirayed Hi no Maru flying from two destroyers against the horizon. The warships are well outside the League of Nations’ ‘no sail’ zone. But their presence is as sharply honed as two steel fangs.

  ‘We should go now, madame,’ the boatman says gruffly, readying his oar in the boat’s rear. The Duchess of York sits staunchly beyond him in the Huangpu. Its tiered decks are already lined with doll-sized figures waving and shouting, hefting cameras. Tossing food and dollars to the ever-present swarm of beggars below. The ship is scheduled to set sail in less than half an hour, and even now the huge horn on the upper deck lets loose its second-to-last warning blast. On the pier, other lastminute boarders hastily wrap up their own sampan negotiations and hug their loved ones one last time.

  ‘You must hurry, madame,’ prompts Yuliang’s ragged captain.

  ‘I’m coming,’ she tells him. But she doesn’t move.

  ‘You should hurry,’ Zanhua says. ‘Or those papers won’t even matter.’

  Shading his eyes he looks out at the ship, which will make port at Saigon, Singapore, and Colombo. It will round the great Horn of Africa, cover Djibouti’s cobalt waters and coral reefs, and inch up the Suez Canal to Port Said before reaching its final destination: Marseille. It’s Yuliang’s third trip along this route – she has sketched these port towns from the deck. Suddenly, though, she hasn’t the faintest recollection of what any of them look like. All she registers is the beloved, doomed city beyond the pier. That, and her husband’s drawn face.

  For an instant she’s almost tempted to renounce her decision. I have changed my mind, she imagines saying. Instead, she takes his hand.

  ‘I have a challenge,’ she says quietly.

  He smiles weakly. ‘Very well. What are my clues?’

  ‘Spring. Skiff. Heavy load.’

  His lips move in silence as he shuts his eyes. Then he opens them again.

  They say that at the Twin Brooks, spring is still fair

  I, too, wish to row a boat there.

  But I am afraid that the little skiff on the Twin Brooks

  Could not bear the heavy load of my grief…

  His voice breaks on the last word. Jaw tightening, he looks away.

  Lifting herself on tiptoe, Yuliang clasps her arms around his shoulders. ‘I am afraid,’ she whispers shakily. ‘I shouldn’t leave you like this. Not now.’

  ‘You speak as though there might be a time that you should leave.’ He wraps his arms around her. His ridiculous cane pokes into her shoulder blade.

  ‘It’s just – I don’t trust them to protect you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who.’ Her eyes are tearing – the wind, possibly. She dashes at the tears angrily. The last week has b
rought news of kidnappings and releases, of Japanese spies, contingency plans, backroom dealings. A new CCP-KMT alliance has been brokered – some say by Zhou Enlai himself, which might explain Zanhua’s sudden welcome back to work (although certainly word of his scandalous concubine’s departure didn’t hurt). But Yuliang still doesn’t trust them – not any of them. ‘I feel,’ she says, ‘like I’m leaving you to the tigers.’

  ‘Then stay. Protect me.’ Zanhua attempts another smile. ‘I don’t know anyone more qualified to bargain with tigers.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’ She wipes her eyes with her sleeves, laughing. ‘If I were brave I wouldn’t be leaving in the first place.’

  ‘Why not? One needs to take holidays from fighting tigers.’

  This isn’t just a holiday, she wants to say. But she doesn’t. She follows their old rule, leaving the most painful things unsaid.

  ‘Yuliang,’ Zanhua says. ‘Really. Perhaps you can still stay. Things here are on the verge of change. I feel it.’

  As she touches his cheek Yuliang knows this is the truth: that for all his bitterness, Pan Zanhua’s faith in China is as ardent as it’s ever been. Even if Guanyin and Weiyi weren’t part of his picture, he would never do what she’s doing: he wouldn’t just leave.

  ‘Then be part of the change,’ she tells him. ‘Find your friends. Hold fast to them. Don’t worry about how you will be seen by others.’

 

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