She put her hands on the vase, wrapped her fingers in a loving net around it, closed her eyes to take it in. It was her fingers that finally understood a pot. It was through her tracing skin that she truly knew the softness of a sweet-white glaze.
The more she had learned to touch pots, the less she had wanted to touch other things. It was too much. And her touch sense had too many memories of men in there too, men who had held her and had their hands on her and now were gone from her life. Each had left his imprint behind, snowflake-specific. Every man had had his own way of showing love, and not-love-removal, disdain, distractedness, impermeability, all the things that hurt-through the touch or the stroke or the supportive cupping of his hands. It was not easy to live with touch memory. So she reserved her hands and fingers. She wore clothes with pockets and used them.
She’d been selective with men; at least there was that. She was glad now, but when she was younger she’d felt diminished by the fact that she hadn’t had so many lovers. She often waited a long time before meeting someone. She had learned not to look, not to wait, to focus on her work. Then she met a man she came within an inch of marrying.
Evan was an heir to a newspaper family, fifteen years older and more confident. He had left the Midwest and come to New York to prove himself-he wanted to make money, lots of it, enough to show his family theirs didn’t matter. So he developed real estate. By the time she met him he was forty, and wealthy in his own right. Now he was ready for a new challenge-he confided this in her as soon as they became lovers-he wanted to collect art. He was like so many men who collect after earning their fortunes: impatient, omnivorous, wanting all the knowledge right away; wanting exactly what money cannot buy-taste, connoisseurship.
Only much, much later was Lia able to understand how good she must have looked to him at first; how perfect an opening she represented. He saw how she would be, standing next to him, and this he loved, but the essential Lia, the heart still waiting, went unseen. He loved what she brought and not what she was.
She always remembered a certain moment after they were engaged. He was on the phone and she in the next room, on the other side of a glass window. He held up his palm in greeting to her, his tan, comfortably lined face split in a grin of affectionate embarrassment that let her know he was talking about her. She smiled back, but tuned in. He never remembered her proficiency in reading lips. He never edited himself. And with the insecure curiosity of the younger woman, she wanted to know everything he said, especially about her.
That’s right, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Evan was grinning into the phone. Lia knew he was talking about buying art. She watched as he spoke again.
Of course she’s going to help me! She’s going to make me a pile of money.
He listened, and laughed.
Naturally. Why do you think I’m marrying her?
He laughed and raised his hand to her again from the other side of the glass, smiling, that sly, contrite look. She turned away, churning, until he got off the phone. When she confronted him he said: Oh, Lia, grow up. Of course that’s one of the reasons I’m marrying you. It’s not the only reason. I can’t believe you’re complaining about this! He treated the whole thing as if it were silly.
But it was not silly to her, not at all, and that was the true problem beneath the false problem-that even her honest admission of this did not move him. This was the beginning of her backing away. It hurt, breaking it off. But she’d never regretted it.
And now she was past thirty, more realistic. Somewhere there would be someone with whom she could feel at ease. Someone she could help, who could help her. It shouldn’t be so impossible. As for that jolt of what she used to think was love, that seemingly perfect mirror that puts the inner self up in ecstasy, for judgment by another human soul-at least she knew by now that that was not love at all but a forgery of the most insidious kind. She didn’t believe it anymore, she didn’t want it, and she didn’t wait for it.
Now, the Yongle vase in front of her, she finished typing and pressed a button that would send the vase to her own private computer archive at the same time it went into the inventory. Everything in her memory world was in computerized files too. Naturally she wouldn’t take a chance on losing things. But it was a point of honor with her not to retrieve information from the computer, only to store it there. She made herself rely on memory.
She took the sweet-white vase back in her fingers, wrapped the whole surface of her palm around the swelling glazed body, the magic, mathematically perfect swirls of the design against her skin. She cradled it back into its soft little white manger and closed it up.
4
That night, walking across the lamplit entry court, she noticed a far gate opening into another set of courtyards. It was arrestingly irregular. Up close, she saw it was built of jagged ornamental rocks. She ducked her head and slipped through it. A court cut by rose-lined paths opened out in front of her. Thin steles of rock, shaped by nature, stood up punctuating the grass. Four rooms looked inward. Three of them had windows that were jammed: blue-and-white porcelain, severed stone Buddha heads, cups with fanned arrangements of brushes, knockoff ceramic san-cai camels and horses after the manner of the Tang Dynasty.
She saw at once that foreigners lived here, long-term residents. They used arty fakes to evince their personas, to specify and declare themselves. She did the same; she knew she did. She liked to think she did it with greater deliberation.
At home, in New York, the rooms of her apartment overflowed. In this she was like her mother, who had similarly packed the little Virginia place in which she’d grown up. She remembered easily the ripe tang of humidity on a day twenty-five years before, as they stood in the summer flea market together, rifling a bin of old buttons. Those were the times she remembered her mother happy, walking home, laden with finds, eyes alight with new things; she remembered herself basking in this reflection.
Though Lia’s apartment was full, her objects were fakes-great fakes. She had phony Russian icons and da Vinci drawings, a heaped-up altar of Buddhist statuary, and a Fabergé egg. And she had her pots, of course, the few copies she’d found that were good enough to live with. She was very demanding when it came to the pots in her home. And then her books; she kept her best, most transporting porcelain books stacked in squat columns, around the floor. She knew where everything was. The place mirrored her mind. She could put her hands on a book, on an image, in an instant. Now, her apartment was interesting, she thought with a vain thrill as she cast an appraising eye around the lit-up windows.
She saw a movement on the path and stopped. A thin cat with butterscotch stripes and high, skulking hindquarters walked in front of her.
She called to it. It froze.
She sank close to the ground, called it again. The animal lifted its amber eyes and looked at her, tail straight up and cocking steadily.
“Be that way,” she said to it. Then she stood and looked at the room at the end of the court. Vermilion support columns framed the door; its glass panel was etched in a repeating wood-scroll pattern. But the windows were empty. They were hung with plain white cloth at half-height, for privacy. Nothing else.