Lessons in Essence Read online

  He places a hand over the welter of his stomach, as if to still it. His body is strange to him today, as yesterday, and especially the night before. After years of solitude in his body, he was briefly not alone. The companionship is over, he realizes, he knows, but it has left in its wake the feeling of compositional change arrested.

  He now feels he will lose everything and looks around to see what his everything is. He studies his neighborhood with the new eyes of the damned as he pads across the field, down a little lane, and another, past a hundred campaign posters, to the Big Avenue of Scholar’s Gulch. The road shakes under the weight of the traffic. “This might as well be China,” he thinks, as he blinks burning eyes against unsettled dust and exhaust. Some of the shops he passes have been here as long as he: the key stall, the chop engraver’s, the store that sells offerings and small kitchen appliances beside the temple. Other shops will fail in months. This place here on the corner has, in the past two years, been a women’s clothing shop, a café, a high-priced photography studio, and now someone has turned it into a store selling only children’s wooden furniture, all of it covered with scenes from Renaissance paintings. “All is not lost,” Teacher Li muses, passing the shop. He must stoke himself to face Hero, who will notice.

  Hero’s place, the High Tradition High Mountain Tea Shop, a few doors further on, has survived some fifteen years in the same location. It has never had to earn a profit (he owns the building) and serves mainly as Hero’s kingdom in exile (from his wife). Here, the retired policeman and tai chi master holds court, as streetwise as imperial, the strong or fading sun never reaching as far into the room as the fine patina of his stately wooden tea table. The front room is laid out in defiance of the principles of Chinese geomancy. No attempt has been made to divert dangerous elements from the teahouse: the door is not offset, and Hero sits in a direct line facing it. Geomancy rules are so widely observed in Taiwan that Hero’s splayed arrangement feels perilous to anyone who enters. But it suits Hero’s fighter temperament. Like Teacher Li’s bicycle, the exposed shop is an elitist symbol, the dare of the strong.

  Teacher Li leans his bicycle outside the shop and moves into the doorframe, confronting Hero head-on. Teacher raises his chin in greeting, his face earnestly casual. “You hear the news? The Nationalists finally take a real stab at corruption!”

  “Not funny,” says Hero, meaning the comment, and not the event. Teacher makes a little hum of concession as Hero places a teacup in front of Teacher’s stool. He then pours the remaining tea in the pot away and starts removing the leaves with bamboo tweezers. He will make fermented pu’er tea for Teacher Li, who has long been forbidden Taiwan’s famed oolong tea by his doctor, who says his stomach is too cold because of excessive thought.

  “Where is everyone?” asks Teacher Li.

  “Teacher Wu came by, so everyone left in a hurry.”

  “Hasn’t he moved to Shanghai yet?”

  “Now that’s funny,” says Hero, but he seems burdened, his normal barker’s persona absent. He pulls open a drawer in his tea chest, which emits a musty aroma reminiscent of a hermit’s house: old books and blankets, ink, and stone. This is the pu’er tea, and its smell of cloister adds to the descending gloom. Hero breaks leaves from the irregular remnants of a tea brick and places them in the pot, then pours on the hot water. A powerful fan churns in the middle of the room, its roar annoying. The two men remain in silence, absorbing it, Teacher Li with growing nervousness. This teahouse is the center of intelligence in Scholar’s Gulch, and if a single person has heard of Teacher’s crisis, it will be Hero.

  Teacher finds himself having to force conversation with his best friend. “What did Teacher Wu want?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps just keeping tabs for the communists.” Hero metes out one sentence at a time, and the pauses in between are deliberate and anticipatory. “He asked after you. He asked when your wife is coming back. When is Xue Mei coming back?”

  “Friday. Do you have cigarettes?”

  Hero reaches to a shelf and tosses him a pack. “The day after tomorrow.”

  Teacher nods once, staccato, lights a cigarette.

  Hero responds with another long pause, and its anticipation is so strong that it is nearly a demand. But Teacher Li only smokes, the condemned man. Hero says, “Maybe Teacher Wu came by because he smells a scandal. You smell a scandal?” Hero glares at his friend like a slighted mother, but Teacher does not see; his eyes are downcast, his body clumped. Hero spreads the fingers on both his hands and drops them to the table in summons. “You aren’t going to tell me, are you? All right, I’ll tell you. According to White Rose, you had a student guest at your apartment evening before last, and anyone in earshot knows how you passed the time.”

  Teacher looks up at Hero. Their eyes exchange a scurry of questions and answers, all aspects of the unwanted drama. Teacher Li says, “Trapped.” He leans back and looks up as a sensation like a reverse trickle of water travels from his solar plexus to his temples. He inhales with a watery side-glance like a crawling swimmer taking a breath. He settles his eyes in his teacup, scratches his lower lip, then begins kneading it. Teacher cannot believe his lips are still feeling desire in the face of his imminent humiliation. He takes another sip to placate his mouth.

  “So White Rose is telling everyone?”

  “She seems to have made it her cause. Of course, it’s jealousy—we all know that. She always liked you too much,” says Hero, the “always” representing the thirty years since they’d become neighbors. White Rose was a dilettante, and her husband had the soul of a bureaucrat. When Teacher Li and his family moved in, she found an object for her romanticism. Over time, she began to perceive the world around her by imagining how Teacher Li would see it through his artist eyes. Her infatuation had grown so outsized that it had long been a joke in the neighborhood. “Now people will wonder about you and White Rose, too.”

  “But I never!”

  “I know you never. And then you did.” Hero is not making an accusation; he just needs information to reconstruct the whole of his friend. Teacher Li, who is not a frivolous or idle man, had never had an affair. His wife is resolutely jealous, or was when they were younger and such concerns had relevance, and she has always equated disloyalty with divorce. When scandals surfaced of the extramarital affairs of the newsworthy, she would declare, “I’d leave him cold.” Hero is not considering moral questions about the affair, or emotional dilemmas either, only matters of prudence, and imprudence.

  Teacher sees that Hero wants an explanation, and perhaps details, which he cannot offer. An explanation would require bringing the images before his mind’s eye, and this he is laboring to avoid. It is impossible to discuss it without thinking of it, but there are Hero’s waiting eyes. Teacher has no why. The day itself seemed to have acted through him. “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he says. The downpour had created an intimacy. “It was—” a commanding intimacy. “It just happened.”

  This is no kind of explanation, but his manner is elucidating to Hero. Ah god, Hero blinks, he is still feeling for the girl. At least this is more in character than some popular image of a scurrilous old teacher acting on a self-made dare. Hero briefly imagines Teacher Li in a second marriage with a much younger woman, then mentally deletes the image, not knowing where to file it. Hero frets his mouth and speaks with just the empathetic tone Teacher Li needs to hear, “Who is the girl?”

  “She is not really a girl now. She’s well into her twenties.” Teacher musses and smoothes his hair, rubs his hands over his eyes and brows. He drags on his cigarette. He speaks more strongly. “She is not my student anymore either, really. She comes and helps out sometimes. Sometimes I listen to her play the qin.” So, a lute player, and one of the flock of hang-about students Teacher Li refers to as his slaves. These students serve at Teacher’s tea table, bring him art supplies from downtown, organize exhibitions or travel plans. So if she’s been around a long time, Hero must have seen her. He waits. Teacher L
i blows smoke with force and alters his position. “Didn’t White Rose tell you who she was? How did she tell you anyway?”

  “White Rose came to my house last night. She informed my wife and me. It was like she was lodging a complaint against you to us, as if we were your parents or were responsible for you. She’s out of her head. She did not name the student. She just kept saying, ‘That girl.’”

  Teacher Li shifts again, stubbing the cigarette. “You know her. Miss Cai.” He bounces his eye to a corner and back at his correct formality. “Cai Hong Mei,” he speaks her full name, feeling liquidity in his chest. Also, he is steeling himself for:

  “Miss Cai? The plain one?” Unfailingly, this is how Hong Mei, despite her name, which means “lively beauty,” is described. There is little else to say of her appearance. And worse, she is quiet, as is anyone described as “plain.” But she is not guileless. Teacher Li does not answer Hero’s question, and the defiance is hers.

  “Xue Mei will kill you.” Hong Mei is known to Hero; Hong Mei is also known to Teacher’s wife, and very well. For years, she has served almost the role of an unmarried daughter. She is so familiar in the house that she washes dishes or cleans when need be. Many afternoons, when Teacher Li’s apartment is crammed with private students studying lute, painting, or calligraphy in every corner of every room, Hong Mei oversees the tea table, as Teacher is civilized and always drinks with arriving students before beginning lessons. She buys the tea snacks, which are all traditional and, when possible, rare or otherwise special enough to elicit comment from Teacher Li. For these, she scavenges markets in all parts of the city. Teacher’s wife shelters the girl, trusts her, uses her. Together, they prepare the offerings of food, incense, and ghost money on holy days. They shop together. And when Xue Mei is abroad, she leaves her personal name chop not with her husband, who will not abide financial or official matters, but with Hong Mei.

  “Of course she will kill me,” says Teacher Li, finding appeal in the certainty of the statement. “She’ll kill me,” he nods, as if the whole thing is finally settled and can be dismissed. He rises to go.

  “Wait. What can be done? Listen. Do you want me to talk to White Rose?”

  “And say what?”

  “Or I could speak to White Rose’s son,” suggests Hero, in keeping with the Confucian creed that a woman must obey first her father, then her husband, and after his death, her son.

  “And say what?” Finally, Teacher Li’s desire and nervous exhaustion coalesce and explode in one of his great Dragonly displays. “You know as well as I that Xue Mei has to know! Should know! What, you will know, the whole neighborhood will know, but not Xue Mei? How could you think such a thing? Am I without virtue? Should I paint her in white that only she cannot see? Should I sever my hands and claim ignorance? Should I sleep beside her like a blank star? To live in dishonesty is to waste your life. Have I wasted her life? I will not! How dare you?” Teacher grabs a cigarette and throws the pack back on the table. He will enjoy this cigarette. He lights, inhales, stands there a full minute, and sits back down with no intention of staying, but in unspoken apology. There is also the undertone of a curtain call. After a time, he stands up again, takes the pack in hand with a glance at Hero, and bustles through the door. “I’ll go home and wait for her.”

  “I’ll come see you.” Hero watches his friend gather his bicycle and leave, feeling a weary relief. He removes Teacher Li’s empty teacup from the table, resisting an urge to look inside.

  two

  WHITE ROSE is immaculate sitting in her front room. The colors in the room are buoyant with sunlight as her eyes scan and rest, scan and rest on the mauve and turquoise on rice, the new green and pale yellow on bamboo. She sips milk coffee, mindful of its flavor and aroma, and replaces the cup on its scalloped saucer after each taste. She is wearing a Mandarin shirt in taupe silk, a jade bangle like the green sea on a winter day, and irregular black pearls at her earlobes. Her posture is portrait-perfect; all that is wanting is a frame. She is one of those odd people able to pass whole hours absent the diversion of work, literature, or other entertainment, as if fulfilled in the role of ornament.

  Opposite her, and central to the room, is a large horizontal scroll she was given on her sixtieth birthday by the artist, Teacher Li. It is a landscape painting, a “mountain-water” painting as termed in Chinese, and a roaming glance might find it as placid as the rest of the room. That’s the way White Rose normally views the scroll, with a superficial scan. If she examines the painting closely, she experiences an unease that seems at odds with the genre. Mountain-water paintings should depict the harmony of nature. Yin and yang elements, such as water and mountains, must be represented in balance. Any people in the paintings are their proper size, small in relation to the landscape, but untroubled, unthreatened. The vistas they inhabit are serene, consummately refined.

  Teacher Li’s early paintings have this placid quality. His bamboo, stones, mountains calm as stones, undulant rivers and even the wind-bowed trees all possess equanimity. Beyond that, they embody the detachment that might be the essence of the genre. Even the later Chinese landscape paintings that were more innovative, more suggestive, have a definite sense of dreamlike removal. But Teacher Li’s mature paintings transcend the dreamily suggestive and arrive at an imperative. His mountains represent toil. His voids are surrender. As Tantra veers from the renunciation of mainstream Buddhism, his later paintings give life to extreme emotions, which are nonetheless balanced within a work. A valley promises fertile abundance, yet the breadth of it, and the many hills, suggest a hard journey, a crossing as slow as that of the summer sun. His later mountains, especially, are lacking in tameness; their height is emphasized from a lower perspective, as if one paused breathless mid-climb, held the vertical face of the mountain, and leaned back to see the goal at the peak. The yin aspect is represented in a snaking void of foliage, which the eye instinctively follows, as would a climber’s picking out his path.

  The emotional change in Teacher Li’s paintings came about subconsciously. He was mystified the first time he saw it. The still-wet ink of a scrappy mountain shone up at him from the paper in challenge, in usurpation. The painting had deposed him as creator and would now create him in its image. Though this is nothing more nor less than the function of art, he nonetheless stepped back from it like he would a dog that had turned on him: not in fear, but in consternation. He stood away from the painting studying it. He sat down next to it and considered. He viewed it in stupor from countless perspectives until the day began to dim in the window. But he could not bring himself to lean over it, place his body in close proximity. The following days he spent reviewing his other paintings, then returning to his art room where the new painting lay still on the table. At night, he rose to be with it, because the painting had awakened in him a loneliness that only it could fill. His yearning had been made manifest. He sighed at the toil and grimaced at the surrender.

  That toil and surrender can be heard in his footfall as he returns from Hero’s. He pushes the street door open with the nose of his bike, leans the cycle against the wall, nudges the door with his foot, lets it slam shut. His every movement is made explicit to White Rose by its noise just outside her door. But she does not alter her visage. Only when she hears a silence on her threshold does she make a motion, though only with her eyes, which lift briefly, not even in the direction of the door, just slightly elevated in space. After a moment, she settles them back level.

  White Rose’s sole concern now is recollecting herself. The deliberation with which she groomed in front of her bathroom mirror this morning brought to mind the night when she was wakened by the sound of the death rattle in her husband’s throat. He is gone, she had thought, though she must yet call for an ambulance. But she could not make peace with the imagined scene of ambulance workers arriving to find grieving widow in her nightdress, old and unkempt, so symbolically disheveled. Still lying beside her dead husband, she considered whether or not to make herself u
p before summoning help. In the end, she showered and dressed, then rang the hospital. Just before dawn, she opened her door to two ambulance attendants. The one carrying the front end of the stretcher was a young man, new to the job and still embarrassed to encroach on such intimacy as a family death. He and White Rose confronted each other at the threshold of the door: he, stricken by her sunrise lipstick and floral perfume; she, noting his countenance, with an upsurge of dignity. She concentrated on that remembered dignity as she arranged herself this morning, and an image passed through her mind of Teacher Li lying lifeless at her side.

  Outside her door, Teacher Li is also picturing their relationship with scenes of finality. All feeling of aggression for her has left him, and he would like to settle the matter, which he has no intention of attempting. Instead, he stands looking at her doorbell, imagines ringing it, then taking her hand, so useless a hand, quite helpless, so long helpless it doesn’t even possess vulnerability as it lies in his grasp. In his mind, he takes her hand and a feeling of regret flows wordlessly from him; he kisses her solemnly and bids leave of her. In the dream, she is as unresponding as he is in her vision of him dead by her side.

  White Rose then hears him ascend and she is left there, little more than an image.

  The English phrase “One down, and two to go” runs through his mind, and this flippancy aids him. But when Teacher Li enters his apartment, his heart contracts. The sun has been folded in cloud and his flat is dim and cool. The room seems remote, untenable, as if many people and much noise would be required to relieve its alienation. Teacher hurries around turning on lamps. He then sets ajar the doors to all the rooms but one and lights some incense in an amber burner. He makes fists with his hands hanging at his sides and pulses his arms. He leaves the front room, returns with a broom, and sweeps the wood floor. When this is done, he holds his hands upturned over the floor as if seeking praise for his work, moves to the telephone, consults a list beside it with his finger, dials a number, and takes a breath. He then sits on a bench about a meter away. The telephone cord hangs across the distance, and the image disturbs him, though he cannot place why.