“I am. I got back a few hours ago.”
“I must have missed you.”
“I was in and out.”
“That plane crash.”
“Terrible, isn’t it? I landed in it-all the chaos, anyway.”
“Any problem?”
“No. Just delays. I should be worried about what it means, but now all I can think about is work. God.” She looked at her rows all around her. “I have so much to do.”
“I think I should make you take a break,” he said.
She realized her eyes were dry, almost burning. She closed them and touched the lids with her fingertips. “I can’t stop,” she said. “I have to finish.”
“Really?”
“Really. Although-” She hadn’t eaten all day.
“Give me your address. I’ll come and get you. Just take a little walk. Have a small something. Then you’ll go directly back to work.”
She shouldn’t. There were all these pots. But she wanted to, and that feeling was warmer and more sweetly suffusing than anything else. “Okay.”
“You’re on Houhai Lake, right?”
“Yes. East side. The road runs right along the lake. Number 1750. Michael, actually I’d love it if you came over here. I want you to. Please come. It’s just that I have to finish.”
“Don’t even ask me to keep you out. You’re going back to work.”
“Yes. All right.” She was smiling into the phone. “See you.” They hung up and she phoned out to the gatehouse to expect him.
Some time later she heard the door open and slam, far away, and heard the footsteps following the route she knew so well, the green damask rooms and the long corridor, the inner courtyard, the three steps up. She opened the door before he could knock on it.
“Hi,” he said, half-surprised, as if he had not quite expected to smile so at the sight of her. Then he registered the large room. He went still as an animal, eyes clocking down the rows of crates. “Look at all this. I had no idea there was so much.”
“You can’t tell anyone.” In a blink her voice was serious. “I mean it.”
“Who would I tell?”
“I’m sorry. But you must promise.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. His voice was soft. He really didn’t want her to worry. “Where’d all this come from?”
She laughed with the delight of the one whisking away the veil. “The front man is a wealthy developer, but it’s a government-sanctioned sale. As far as I can tell it’s a tiny part of the imperial collection, which was hidden in the countryside and rediscovered much later. Kind of a common story. After that it was either nationalized, or the government’s cooperating in the sale.”
“And the pots? Are they great?”
“Oh.” She closed her eyes in bliss at the thought. “I’m telling you, the stars in this room. There are things in here that would make you cry.”
“Show me. Make me cry.”
She looked at him and thought: But I don’t want to do that. “Let me think.” She turned her head, tapped through what she knew was in the crates. She paused in her mind on one she’d especially loved, a clair de lune dish.
“How about this.” She crossed to the thirty-fourth crate and dug out a box. She really wanted him to like it. “I don’t know if this is the right thing to show you. It’s a monochrome. Its rarity lies in qualities not easy to see at first.” She lifted out a dish of flower shape with gently raised sides and a faintly lobed, petaled rim, in a moonlight glaze of palest blue, almost white. “Can you see what I mean?” she asked. “Its beauty is different. Very distilled.”
He lowered himself in one fold to the floor, and again she was amazed at how lightly he moved around, for his size. And look, he was riveted by the dish. “Do you see it?”
“Yes,” he said, “I do.”
“This is nice.” She laid her hand on the inner flat of the dish as if taking its pulse. Then she drew her finger along the curves between the subtly incised, overlapping flower petals. “Here the glaze accumulates just a bit and darkens to make a suggestion of shadow.”
He looked at her hand.
“Do you want to touch it?” she said.
“Can I?”
“Of course.”
He looked up at her face.
“Come on.” She picked up his hand, which willingly came to hers, and guided it into the dish. She felt his strong fingers wrapping around hers, saying yes. But she disengaged and laid his hand in the dish-cool, soft, pearlized. He arched his palm back and rotated the flat of his hand softly in its bottom. Neither of them moved until he withdrew. “Thank you,” he said.
“You feel it?”
“I do.”
“Look.” She turned the dish over and pointed to the reign mark in underglaze blue. “Made in the Qing Dynasty, reign of Yongzheng.”
“When was that?”
“The 1720s.”
“It looks so perfect.”
“Ah!” She raised a pleased eyebrow. “That’s porcelain. It is immortal.” She placed the pale, glowing dish back in its silk cloud, in its dark box, and latched the cover down. “Good-bye,” he heard her say to the box before she pushed it to the side.
Before she could move to stand up, he leaned forward and kissed her, just her lips, softly. He did not enter her mouth. He stayed still and so did she and their mouths floated against each other until he reached out and gave her lower lip one touch. He pulled away. “I promised you, right back to work,” he said. But his smile had something different in it now.
“You did promise,” she said.
“Thanks for showing me that.”
“You’re welcome.”
“We going out?”
“Yes.” This time she stood and reburied the box in its crate. They left the lights on. She knew she’d be back. Following him out the door, walking in his wake, she felt she might have drifted into one of life’s brief and temporary harbors.
When she returned-they’d said good-bye in the taxi, talk radio still pounding; she’d apologized again and said she had to finish-she ran back in, barely skimming the ground, and went straight to her pots. So much light. She had never in her life seen anything like it in one place.
And now him. He wasn’t like men she’d been drawn to in the past. Most of them had had some kind of high-stakes, power-driven edge. He might have been like that once; if so he’d left it behind. He made her feel that nothing needed to be proven, for some reason. It felt great. And he wanted to touch her more, she could tell. That was probably just a matter of time. She walked over to the thirty-eighth crate.
From this she withdrew a Qianlong bowl in polychrome enamels, falang cai, painted with a view of rock-garden palace architecture. The inside of the bowl was an empty field of brilliant white with three centered peonies in famille-rose enamels. She circled her hands around it, over the piled-up pigment that made garden rocks, porches, harmoniously drawn palace buildings; worlds within worlds.
One of the hardest things about working with great art was letting it go. As she would let him go in a few days, she thought-no matter what happened. With one difference. This bowl in her hands was real, a perfect and supremely hoi moon object. This she could hold in memory forever, unmarked and unqualified.
She put it back in its box and looked around the room. Normally it was her expectation that an appraisal be perfect, that there be no mistakes. That every call be real. Unimpeachable.
She couldn’t guarantee this now. She had done her best and she had to let go of everything else. Let it be, she thought. Stand behind it as it is. And strangely enough, as her hopes and expectations of the ideal fell away from her, fear and all its grating tethers vanished too. She felt oddly strong, almost pure. She was ready. It was time to present to the buyer.
Lia sat on the bed, working late. The only light in the room was the silver light from her laptop, which changed and flickered as she ticked through the inventory. Alone with it, not even with the pots themselves but their images, their descriptions, their references to other works in collections and museums-just these echoes-she felt the elation of the deal about to be made. It was a right world that had this much beauty. She was a right woman to live in it. She clicked through the inventory, checking, correcting, polishing. She had been doing this for hours. She tried not to even look at the clock.