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 conveniencee.
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.