ASHORT 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…
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.”