“The others are worried,” Zhou said.
“About Hu and Sun?” Bai had a bad feeling himself about the two of them trying to move that pair of huge famille-rose vases.
“They’ve not arrived.”
“Oh,” Bai said. Not good. Very not good. This was their third day out. Hu and Sun should be in Hong Kong by now.
“They’re not there. I’ve talked to Pak and Ling.”
Gentle knots formed in Bai’s midsection. “Call Old Lu,” he advised. “As soon as there’s word in Hong Kong, he’ll know.”
“All right,” Zhou said. “Keep your handphone.”
“It’s on,” Bai assured him. He was walking down the street, taking his wife out to an evening meal.
“I’ll call you later.”
Bai slipped the phone in his pocket and went on walking with Lili along the putting, honking, cement-and-asphalt streets with their open-mawed retail stores and stalls. Bins spilling out into the street were piled with baskets, metal goods, hardware, but most of all porcelain, because porcelain was the heart and bones of Jingdezhen. Bai bought his wife a length of plum velvet and he saw with satisfaction how the package made an acquiescent weight against her legs, and how she smiled at the feeling of it against her.
He felt good in his fine cotton shirt, open two buttons down, his woven leather shoes. Bai liked to dress as if he were a wealthy Italian stepping off a yacht. An art dealer, a learned man.
It had rained the night before, leaving the low concrete town in a state of fresh-washed June optimism. Bai and Lili turned off Jingyu and walked down a repeating, narrowing pattern of side streets, their road surfaces cracked and potted, sidewalks heaved up around the swelling, pulsing roots of trees. Here in the south, life multiplied almost before one’s eyes. It was one of the things that gave Jiangxi Province its red-soiled beauty. They stepped over the erupted, corrugated sidewalk and into the Hui Min, a tiny open-air restaurant.
Lili was the third wife he had taken. Each of the women knew, sketchily, about the others, but they preferred not to know much and also to forget what they did know, as it suited. Each of his wives was from someplace else, as he originally was, undocumented, part of China’s floating population. He kept each of them in simple comfort if not in style. They all knew he had more than one place to lay his head, and with all things considered they accepted this. He was like a lot of other ah chans this way. They added wives. It was a tacit return to an old pattern of concubinage, although this was the modern world and one had to keep up appearances. The wives had to be in different places. They couldn’t all live under one roof as was done in the past. The ah chans liked to joke to each other that their wives, of radically descending ages, would all meet only once-at the man’s funeral.
Neither of Bai’s other two wives lived in Jingdezhen. One lived in Houtai Township, a village in the hills forty kilometers northeast. The other-the original girl he had married near home, in his youth, under the naive impression he would remain tied to her forever-still lived outside of Changsha. He visited both of them when he could. He enjoyed seeing them. But Lili was his favorite. She was the love match. She was the newest and the youngest.
Still, here in Jingdezhen, he didn’t stay with Lili all the time. He spent many nights in his own simple cement-walled apartment, a place he had bought and with it finally obtained his hukou, his residency permit, in Jingdezhen. It had been an important thing to have at the time he bought it and still today had value in the largely privatized economy, for it still got a person certain medical care and benefits and an acknowledged geographic notch in society.
In his own place, Bai liked to stay alone. This was where he kept his books, his collections of auction catalogs, his museum publications, his files of photocopied articles from art magazines and academic journals. If he wanted to be a great dealer one day, he had to learn. He knew it was so.
And as long as he could afford it, as long as he could continue to prevail over his risks, he’d keep Lili in her tidy little room down in the warren of quickie dwellings below Jixing Street. She didn’t mind. It was better than the dirt village in which she grew up.
Lili was a good girl, round-faced and red-cheeked. She was completely open to him and he felt safe with her. She loved him without any adult reserve. It made him want to do anything for her. They had married quickly and informally at the county registry office. With her he had begun to think, for the first time, that he might be ready to have a son. Here in Jingdezhen, or-if he really got half a million ren min bi-maybe in Hong Kong.
When they married he had brought her to his apartment, just for a few days until he secured her a room down below the lake. The first night he had taken her on the bed. She had lain still with her arms and legs spread, as if nailed to the earth, but she had smiled up at him when he lay over her, her eyes round with surprise and pleasure, and he’d seen how she would learn. Late that night he awoke to see one light burning, on his desk, and to see her elegantly naked back to him, cut down the middle by her black braid, her face bent in wonder over the turned pages of an art book, porcelains, celestial perfections such as she, a village girl, had never seen. He lay perfectly still, watching her. For a moment he just wanted to watch her, her response to beauty, the glow of her pleasure over the rustling pages, while he let his imagination play over what he might do with her next.
And now they entered the restaurant by sidling past its two giant burners out on the root-buckled sidewalk, the powerful flames chuffing up around the woks. The owner let out a hoarse cry of greeting and they called back, loud and good-natured.
They sat in one of the two tables inside the stall, round, covered with white plastic. A tiny electric fan mounted on the wall rotated over them. “Have the eggplant with chiles and onions,” he told Lili solicitously. “Have the pork belly with potatoes.” Then he beckoned the owner in her sauce-splashed white apron. “Two Pepsis!”
Lili smiled at this unexpected pleasure, her polyester red-checkered sleeve touching his, her arm against him discreetly. He felt the warmth from her. The Pepsi came in big, cold plastic bottles. To him it was a slosh of too-sweet yin, it made his teeth hurt, but was it not what international people drank? And was that not what he was now?
His handphone rang. He fumbled and snapped it open.
“Ei,” said Zhou.
“You talk to Old Lu?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
Bai pushed away the clenching feeling. There was still time. “We have to wait for them to surface,” he said to Zhou.
“Aren’t you going to Hong Kong?”
“Yes, soon,” Bai answered. Nothing explicit needed saying. “I am trusting Hu and Sun will have arrived by the time I get there.”
“As am I,” answered Zhou.
They hung up and Bai looked back at his wife, her arm still next to his, her face tilted up to him; “Lili,” he told her gently. He poured Pepsi into her glass. “I’m going to be away for a while.”
Jack Yuan stood at the honed limestone counter in his kitchen, watching his wife make coffee. She had a small mouth. When she was concentrating, as she was now, measuring the beans, it hung slightly open to form an O.
“I got a few photos and descriptions in an e-mail this morning,” he said. “They’re incredible.”
He saw the corners of that plum-colored mouth lift: recognition. The opponent was back in the ring. She straightened and poured the water. “You know what I think.”
Yes, he knew. She had made herself very clear. Anna Sing, self-confident, daughter of a prominent cardiac surgeon, Jack’s match on all fronts, the original material girl. Anna did not want him to buy the porcelain. “Art should not be that much of our portfolio.”
He shrugged. She was right. But this was also the kind of opportunity that would never come again.