The Painter of Shanghai Read online

  The Painter of Shanghai

  JENNIFER CODY EPSTEIN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offi ces: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the USA as The Painter From Shanghai by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  First published in Great Britain in Penguin Books 2008

  1

  Copyright © Jennifer Cody Epstein, 2008

  The permissions on pp. 486-7 constitute an extension of this copyright page

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  978-0-14-191749-8

  For Michael.

  For everything.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While this novel is based on the life and works of Pan Yuliang, it is a work of the imagination. It attempts to stay true to the broad strokes of Madame Pan’s life as depicted in the few sources available. For the most part, however, the characters, events, and places depicted here are – like the paintings that inspired them – impressionistic portraits.

  Here is a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. I enter this sketch

  and I see him at work and in trouble and I meet him there.

  Robert Henri

  The Art Spirit

  PART ONE

  The Atelier

  Though a living cannot be made at art, art makes life worth living.

  It makes starving, living. It makes worry, it makes trouble, it

  makes a life that would be barren of everything – living. It brings

  life to life.

  John Sloan

  Montparnasse, 1957

  When the session is over, Yuliang retreats to the chipped sink in the atelier’s corner. Of her two models, one leaves immediately. The other, Leanne, lingers a little, straightening her slip and shimmying her garters back into place high on her thighs. As she hooks the straps to her stockings, she leans over Yuliang’s painting and the still-damp fruits of the past five hours: a tree, a lake. Herself kneeling by another nude.

  Wiping her spattered palms on her painting smock, Yuliang observes Leanne observing the girl she has just been made into. She did well today, Yuliang decides. New models often need extra time to undress, to settle into their nudity before strangers. But Leanne surprised her, stepping out of her Orlon shift and underwear as blithely as though she’d undressed publicly all her life. She didn’t fuss over her flesh; didn’t apologize for or try to hide the pimple on her left thigh. But at each break in the five-hour session she crossed the room and, still unabashedly naked, silently inspected Yuliang’s progress.

  Yuliang, who usually works through her model’s rest times, found these attentions disconcerting. She didn’t stop working. But she worked differently than she’d planned, reluctant to retouch the girl’s painted flesh under her real-life gaze. She worked on other things – her willow tree, the rumpled blanket – all the while inhaling her observer’s scent: her cheap perfume, her old smokes, a sour-sweet hint of sweat. Something clean and cloverlike too, like sun-dried sheets. Leanne has said that her father runs a laundry shop near the Gare de Lyon.

  Water rushes from the faucet, rust-flecked. Yuliang waits, fingertips pressing the soap-filmed chill of the tap. When the stream runs pure, she pushes her brushes beneath it. Colors wash into their neutralizing counterparts: ultramarine into cadmium into blue into yellow ocher, the brilliant shades blending into a mud-toned flow that disappears down the drain.

  She is starting on her hands when Leanne sneezes, a breathy explosion so high-pitched it’s almost sweet.

  ‘Pardon,’ Leanne says.

  ‘Non, non,’ says Yuliang. ‘I’m sorry it’s so cold in here.’ She says it in French; Leanne’s Chinese is, she’s found, limited.

  ‘The cat, perhaps. Sometimes they make my nose itch.’ The girl presses a handkerchief against her upper lip.

  ‘Ah.’ Yuliang turns back to her brushes, the cloth momentarily etched in her mind’s eye: the starry whiteness, the sheen endowed by hot iron and starch. Leanne’s family, from Guangxi originally, ran one of Hanoi’s Chinese banks until ’54. Leanne hasn’t offered more than this; Yuliang assumes the Communists took the bank when they took the rest of the north. Does she miss it? she wonders.

  For she herself certainly misses China – despite everything. ‘Do you consider going home?’ a reporter asked her at her last exhibition. ‘Naturellement, parfois,’ she replied, although in truth she ‘considers’ it all the time. The truth is, ‘home’ feels less like a place now than an inner part of her, an organ cancerously riddled with longing. The hurt recedes when she’s painting. But the ache of it, of all she’s lost – that never leaves. Places and people still appear in an eyeblink, so tremblingly real she could touch them. The Parisian grace of Fouzhou Road, its elm-lined streets and Tudor mansions. A Shanghai marketplace, its air saturated with dialects and the fierce smell of seared meat. Women washing food and dishes on a riverbank, nursing their howling red babies. The damp clatter of Yangtze commerce, its endlessly inventive curses.

  She shuts her eyes. In an instant she is back on the steamship landing, Zanhua’s arms stiff and desperate around her, that ridiculous cane poking right into her shoulder blade. It seemed so clear to her then – back in 1937 – that Chiang Kai-shek’s so-called New Life was already half dead. Chaipei lay in charred ruins. Hirohito’s soldiers roamed Shanghai like wolves circling before another attack. But the true danger came from Yuliang’s own countrymen, Chiang’s Blue Shirts and Green Gang thugs – the Generalissimo’s own oppressive little palette. Everyone knew at that point that Yuliang was a marked target – if not her body, then certainly her work. And yet Zanhua still begged her to reconsider. You can stay, he’d insisted. It’s not too late. Things here are on the verge of change. I feel it. Even now – is it really twenty full years later? – Yuliang all but hears his voice. And for just an instant, doubt wells. Should she have stayed?

  Don’t be ridiculous. Opening her eyes, Yuliang shuts off the emotion as ruthlessly as she twists shut the tap. Her work is her life. She is lonely here, yes. But she has her painting, her cats. Her clients and admirers. Her small circle of intimates. Each one would confirm that her decision was the right one. Her friend Junbi said as much the other day, studying Yuliang’s latest self-portrait: ‘There’s something new in this one.’

&nb
sp; ‘You mean the fact that I’ve shown myself smoking, gambling, and drinking?’ Yuliang didn’t mention the nudity. Of course, that’s not new.

  ‘That’s not it.’ Junbi thought for a moment, her soft brow furrowed. ‘Ah! I see it now. You are smiling. You actually look happy.’

  ‘Oh, really.’ But staring at herself – the flushed face, the round contours, the unusually relaxed stance, Yuliang had to admit she saw it too: she looked, at last, like a woman enjoying her life.

  Her reverie is interrupted by the bells of Chapelle des Auxiliatrices. She looks at her watch, then up at Leanne, still standing in stocking feet by the table. Has the girl really been here for an entire half-hour?

  As though hearing Yuliang’s unspoken groan, Leanne steps back from the painting. She is chewing her lower lip.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Yuliang asks her.

  ‘My legs. You’ve made them – how do I put it? Rather… fat.’

  Ah-ha. So that’s what she’s been mooning around for. ‘I apologize,’ Yuliang says curtly. And yet even as she says it, she sees in the girl’s face that it isn’t that, isn’t vanity after all. It is simply a question. Why? Why did you do it this way?

  It is not Yuliang’s habit to explain her art. Not to critics. Certainly not to models. Nevertheless, she finds herself stepping to the girl’s side. ‘Alors,’ she says, and with her brush handle traces over the painting’s surface. Three lines: from Leanne’s thigh to the tip of her head; from her head to Xiahe’s buttocks; finally, along Xiahe’s outstretched leg to the toe that nestles against Leanne’s bare knee. ‘They are not your legs alone. They’re legs for the compositional structure. A triangle. See? If I make them too thin, it throws off the balance. Even the lines are thick. You know some calligraphy?’ And when the girl shakes her head: ‘Well, if you did, you’d recognize the stroke. It’s very similar to those used in scrolls.’

  Leanne drops her gaze to the floor. She twists a foot into a patent-leather pump. Yuliang follows the movement musingly. Then she does the one thing she absolutely should not do at this instant: she looks back at her picture.

  What she sees sinks her spirits: a hundred flaws bloom. Brushstrokes that seemed precise a half-hour ago shapeshift into gaping mistakes. The willow tree is flaccid. Leanne’s hair – painted, she had thought, so as to create a sense of translucence – now simply appears to be stringy. And, yes, no doubt about it – the girl’s legs are too thick.

  Defeated, she leans against the table. I’m a farce, she thinks. Even after all these years…

  ‘Madame. Are you all right?’

  With her shoes on, Leanne stands a good seven centimeters above her. For a moment there’s an urge to throw her arms around the white neck, to confess. To weep. But then Leanne touches her arm, and Yuliang stiffens as she always does when touched without permission. ‘We said five francs, correct?’ She picks up her purse, snaps it open, and offers the bills stiffly. Leanne blinks.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, and takes the fee. There’s an uncomfortable pause. ‘I like your purse,’ she adds.

  Yuliang smiles coolly. The girl turns to pick up her salmon swing coat. ‘Tomorrow at eleven again?’

  ‘Tomorrow we rest.’ Yuliang says, although in fact she’s only just made this decision. She will take a day alone. To repair the damage. ‘Come Friday at four.’ And when Leanne hesitates, ‘Friday is no good?’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I finish with my father at three.’

  ‘Good.’ Yuliang reseats herself. It is late. What she wants is to smoke, to lose herself in the soothing, circular work of ink-grinding. But she has a student coming at six, one of the boys from the Beaux Arts. A baby, but very handsome: a liquid-eyed Italian. He indulges her by letting her attempt to instruct him in his native language – although these days Yuliang’s Italian surely isn’t much better than his Chinese.

  She fumbles for her Gitanes, awaiting the woolly rustle of Leanne’s coat, the calm click of the door closing. When neither comes she glances at the small mirror she’s hung opposite the door (less to deflect spirits than to detect their more annoying mortal counterparts). The mirror reveals Leanne, still at the threshold, one gloved hand on the knob.

  ‘My dear,’ Yuliang says, ‘I have work.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just…’ The girl’s voice is deferential but assured. She seems to know Yuliang will hear her out. Sighing, Yuliang sits back and waits, her eyes on the building across the street.

  ‘Since we met last week,’ Leanne begins quietly, ‘I’ve been feeling like it was more than… coincidence. The way you found me.’

  ‘You mean destiny.’

  Yuliang says it wryly enough that the girl looks at her quickly. ‘Perhaps. Yes.’

  You have much to learn, Yuliang thinks to herself. But what she says is, ‘I didn’t find you, my dear. I simply saw a pretty face.’ Though what had stopped her, as Leanne emerged from a Quai de Bercy cake shop, her egg tart in hand and warm sweet smells uncoiling in her path, wasn’t so much the girl’s classic features – the wide red mouth, the sweeping brow. It was a sense that something elusive and yet brittle underscored them – an emotional veneer, left by sorrow or hardship.

  ‘At the girls’ school back home,’ Leanne is continuing (so Hanoi is still home), ‘we studied art. I loved it.’ She takes a breath. ‘I suppose that part of me had always hoped that someday –’

  ‘You want to paint,’ Yuliang interjects.

  Leanne colors. ‘I’ve wanted to. I just haven’t known where to start.’ She plays with her jade bracelet, the one accessory she hasn’t removed today. ‘I can’t pay much. But I’ll model for free. I can help with washing, too.’

  Her hope is raw enough to make Yuliang blanch. Tightening her lips, she turns back to the window. The tenement is a brick glow in evening lamplight. She watches a window brighten as a light within is switched on. A small silhouette – child? dog? – darkens the pane. Then vanishes.

  It must seem so easy, just to shift positions. Cross the studio, pick up a brush. And voilà, another Valadon. Unsurprisingly, Leanne is not the first model to ask this of her. They have no idea, these girls, of the pain – real pain – involved. The truth is that Yuliang’s purse may be in vogue but her work certainly isn’t. People don’t want girls and flowers right now. They want splashes and gashes. Inkblot tests. Fingerpaints… What was it that dealer from the avenue Montaigne said? ‘Our clients want work that goes beyond the figurative. They want’ – and this with a straight face – ‘metaphorical multivalence. Humor. Puns on form. You understand?’

  In fact, Yuliang did not. In fact, she still doesn’t. The very thought of that term (she couldn’t find it in any of her six dictionaries) makes her want to laugh. But she understands one thing: If multivalence de metaphor is what is selling, she certainly can’t afford to offer lessons at a discount. Especially not to a beginner.

  What she hears herself say as Leanne shrugs on her coat is, ‘You have drawings? Bring them next time.’

  The girl’s eyes widen. ‘Thank you, madame.’

  ‘I haven’t said yes yet,’ Yuliang lies crisply, and turns away a second time. ‘Please don’t let the cat out,’ she adds to the mirror. ‘He’s something of a Houdini.’

  A muffled thunk as the cat is tossed to a chair. Then – at last! – the door shuts. The high heels tap away down the stairs.

  Still unsettled for some reason, Yuliang pours herself a glass of Bordeaux. She pulls out a cigarette, lights it. I’m still too soft, she thinks, exhaling haze over her lake. It’s why I’m where I am: barely covering the cat food. Lifting her enameled cup, she studies the painted phoenix that glowers (faded now, but still proud) from its side. Then she studies her own hand. The gold band on her heart finger is scratched and tarnished. A mesh of blue veins and wrinkles stretches from cuticles to wrist: age is tightening its net. When the cat lands in her lap and begins kneading her leg, small needles of discomfort prickle through her thin skirt. The pain, like a winter draft, brings her back
to herself. She drinks some more, strokes the cat’s white back. ‘You’re spoiled,’ she reprimands it, in Chinese. ‘You have had a very easy life. Do you know that? Do you, Master Cat?’

  He slits his eyes sleepily. She follows his slow gaze to the picture. ‘I really should just start over,’ she tells him.

  But strangely – and perhaps it is only the wine’s impact – her painting seems more redeemable. The sky at least works. Leanne’s apple-plump breasts are nice, too. And that sad, small smile that says nothing. Little Mona Lisa in Heibei. Yuliang thinks of the burnlike wound she saw on the girl’s back. A rash? A tryst? A battle with a masked attacker? She’s curious about this French Chinese girl from Indochina. Perhaps that’s why she agreed. If Leanne does end up joining her students (and she will, why deny it?), they’ll have a session. They’ll drink cheap vin de table, discuss what brought them here. Yuliang does it with all her new recruits. It seems only fair, since most come as much for the story as for the skill. What they want is a lusty fable: bordellos, brutish men, and, at the end, the magic brush that painted her escape, the way Liang’s did in the old story. Yuliang doesn’t give them that, of course. She paints around the dangerous parts of her past, ending up with a dozen versions that tell only what is most important. She’s wise enough by now to know that history – especially her history – sells. And she needs the publicity. Having sworn off the dealers.

  Outside, bells chime again. Just once: six-fifteen. A door slams; she hears the tread of Italian shoes on the stairwell. Yuliang looks longingly at her inkstone. Then she sighs. I need the money, she reminds herself.

  Heaving herself to her feet, she checks her hair in the mirror, wipes an ultramarine paint fleck from her otherwise unpainted cheek. She thinks ahead to tomorrow, a day alone with her ladies and her lake. A light rain on the shutters further lifts her spirits. Yuliang loves painting in rain, loves how the rain makes the world feel close and safe. She’ll grind new ink to thicken Leanne’s hair, make grasstrokes glisten with the dawn. When it is done, she’ll triumphantly place her name. In Chinese: