Picking Bones from Ash (20 page)

“And here you are, ready to harvest their riches.”

The waitress returned with a glass of pear juice, and all of a sudden the men were again conscious of my presence.

François said to me, “You must not become a silly creature like Mrs. Mack, relying on other people to tell you what is valuable and what is not.”

“Yes, François.”

“Remember, the most important thing in life,” François continued feverishly, “is to be able to see things as they really are.”

“Why, François,” Snowden-roshi all but purred. “Aren’t we both basically saying the same thing?”

François and Snowden-roshi drank and drank and leaned back in their chairs, as though trying to escape a magnetic force pinning them to the table. My father became sick. Snowden-roshi took a cab with us to the hotel, then hoisted François over his shoulders and, as he walked brazenly
into the lobby, said to the night clerk, “Nothing to worry about. Just a little too much fun.”

In the hotel room, Snowden-roshi helped my father onto the bed. “In a way, it’s good this has happened. Gives us a minute alone together. So to speak,” he added, as François gurgled. “It’s a shame. Your father could be a great art dealer with his eye for beauty.” He parted the venetian blinds and winced at the restricted view. “How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“Still a girl then.” He frowned. “Never mind. Your father will owe me a favor for this sale. This won’t be the last time we meet.” He put his hand on my cheek, and I trembled. “I wouldn’t hurt you.” He spoke sharply.

“No.” I hoped this was true.

“Is François kind to you? Do you like to study all these art objects?”

“Yes.” I was too nervous to say otherwise.

“Your mother loved them too. She was very talented.”

I couldn’t contain myself. “Was she pretty?”

His eyes softened. “Very. Very pretty. As you are.” He sighed. “I loved your mother very much. I always meant to find her eventually. I never really expected I might be too late. When we are young, we don’t know that we eventually run out of time.” Then the look in his eyes sharpened again. “At least there is you.”

About a dozen labs in the United States perform carbon 14 dating for a fee. Most are affiliated with universities, which Mrs. Mack distrusted after having flunked out of Yale Law School. We wrapped approximately five milligrams of Charlie’s base in aluminum foil and sent it to be read by an accelerator mass spectrometer at Chrono Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Because Mrs. Mack refused to pay for expedited service—as did François—we would return to California to wait out the dating verdict, with the promise to ship Charlie overnight and insured if the test came back favorable.

“Why does it matter if something is old?” I said to François. “If it’s pretty and you like it, shouldn’t that be enough?”

“Some people say that as long as you like something, that’s enough reason to buy. Those people who believe in the power of positive thinking, for example.” He patted his head, still stung by a hangover.

“What if you are wrong? What if Charlie wasn’t made in the Kamakura period?”

“I’m not wrong. I can see the age in his face.”

“Would you still like Charlie if he turned out to be fake?”

“He’s not.”

“But if he were?”

“I would be very disappointed. In myself and in him.” François paused. “Do you know who Charlie is in the Buddhist canon?”

“He looks like a demon.”

“Yes. That’s a very Western interpretation.” He sighed. “Charlie, or Fudō, looks angry because he hates illusions. He gets mad at all the little demons running around the world who make us sick and stupid. That’s the wonderful thing about Asia. So much angry art. People like to think that Buddhism is about inner calm. The truth is, sometimes it is necessary to be angry. Intolerant.”

The day before we returned to California, François took me to a small store in Chinatown, where we bought a large white scarf with a print of bougainvilleas. Then we took the subway to Saks Fifth Avenue, where François spent a long time selecting a box of chocolates. At the gift-wrapping counter he said, “I’m sending this to a client in Japan. You know how they are over there.”

The girl behind the counter smiled and wrapped the chocolates in a gift box. Later, at the hotel, François carefully unpacked the chocolates, folded the scarf, and placed it inside the box from Saks.

When we got back to California, we presented the gifts to Sondra, who gushed over our generosity, immediately ate a chocolate, and wrapped up her hair with the scarf. “Was it wonderful? New York?”

I looked at François. “I had oysters for breakfast. Every day.”

“And the hotel?” she asked. “The man who answered the phone when I called had an accent.”

“There was a doorman,” I said, thinking of the man who had stood outside the restaurant when we had eaten with Snowden-roshi. “He wore white gloves. And someone ironed our clothes each morning.”

“What do you call him?” François prompted.

“A valet,” I replied.

Mrs. Mack told my father on the phone that she had always known Charlie to be a Kamakura piece. She was glad that the carbon 14 dating and the lab in Massachusetts had agreed with her. The check was in the mail, and
she would expect Charlie at her apartment as soon as my father had deposited the funds.

I made a small and completely ineffectual attempt to keep Charlie in our house.

I said, “What if Mrs. Mack notices that one of Charlie’s feet is different from the other?”

“If she couldn’t tell that Charlie was Kamakura just by looking, then she doesn’t have the proper faculties to see him clearly for what he is. If she can’t really see, then how on earth can she tell where the repairs are?”

“Aren’t we lying?” I asked bluntly.

“
You
helped fix him, too. We’re in this together, you know.” He shrugged. “Anyway,
if
she ever notices that Charlie has been repaired, which I highly doubt, I can always claim that
I
had nothing to do with it.”

Things were chilly between us until the check came a few days later. Then we packed Charlie in a wooden crate, with plenty of soft padding—Styrofoam and paper—to protect him on his journey as he scowled his way across the United States. When I came home from school, he was gone, and François insisted on taking me out for a steak to celebrate.

For a while, I liked to look at the picture of Charlie on the cover of our catalog and glower at him. He would always grimace back. I liked the fact that our true natures were known to each other, that our ferocious exteriors concealed a hope that all true things could be known in time.

People can live their lives with a tiny bit of hidden truth tucked away in a corner of the brain. It can trip up behavior over and over again, only to be revealed in full when an accident forces it out, like a splinter in your toe that has kept you limping for years and only exposes itself when you fall.

Before my visit to New York, I expected people to tell me the truth and I expected objects to tell me the truth too. If a painting looked like it was done in the seventeenth century, I assumed that it was. After New York, François began to teach me that recognizing the truth was a far trickier endeavor than I had thought.

“Don’t you see,” my father said to me, “how the ink is too black? The faces too flat? The lines not dynamic?” When he talked to me like this, my eyes and my brain connected more tightly, and the world was suddenly in sharper focus. It was an awesome power he had, the ability to stand on the other side of a secret and powerful lens. I longed to be on the other side of that lens with him.

My wish came true around my thirteenth birthday. Only it didn’t come to me as I expected it would.

“I got a tip that several retired generals are holding garage sales today,” François explained to me on a drive south from San Francisco to the wealthy community of Pebble Beach. “High-ranking military people are always a good source for antiques since they get to live in conquered countries long before we civilians are able to visit.”

There was nothing truly valuable at the first two houses. The third was
an enormous Spanish-style mansion with white stucco, chocolate trim, and a garden of ferns. In the distance, I heard the whack of men hitting golf balls, while cypress trees drooped under the weight of a porous blanket of moss.

“Rumi. Come here,” François said. He had found a collection of gongs mixed in with several sets of weights and a dusty exercise bike. “One of these belonged to the Ch’ing emperor,” he whispered. I tested gong after gong. Waves of sound overlapped each other. Finally I struck one of the last remaining gongs. Shimmering silver flooded the garage, colliding with windows and the electrical wiring. The walls buzzed. When the tight, higher waves of the sound died down, the cavernous lower register continued on, pinning my ankles to the floor.

“That’s it,” I said, and to this day, when I look at a fake, it strikes me as if it were a wrong note in a song.

It isn’t just musical instruments that have a voice. This is what most people don’t understand. They look at a vase or a statue and see something static. I hear the way the robes of a Japanese wooden warrior god cut through the air, and the sound tells me if the statue was crafted during the dramatic Kamakura period, or later. I watch porcelain bowls open their mouths, like a school of fish in a pond, and hear them sing in clear or cloudy notes.

I learned to hear how different objects speak with the same voice if they were crafted around the same time. By the time I was twenty, I understood that the squabbling of the Warring States era carried over from a chaotic frieze of warriors and chariots decorating a metal flagpole to a clay half-dragon-half-lion, the kind of fanciful creature that can only come to life when a country is in chaos. An Edo print of a town scene, sharp with detail and color, came from the same period as a Buddha carved in haste, his allure forgotten as people turned their attention away from the temples to the streets.

“Now you can see clearly,” my father said to me.

“Actually,” I said, “the objects talk to me.”

He thought I was joking. “Objects don’t talk.”

“They do to me.”

“Whatever you have to believe.” He shrugged. “Whatever it takes for you to realize your potential.”

My relationship with objects developed in secret. Over time, I became almost as good at identifying art as my father. He was proud and liked to place piece after piece before me as a test. Secretly, I would wait until the object opened up its heart and told me its story. Out loud I would justify my discovery using the language and terms of which my father approved.

I was just a teenager when he brought me out from the back of the store where I was shyly researching and cataloging our inventory, to demonstrate my abilities to some dealer acquaintances, in town for the San Francisco Arts of Pacific Asia show.

“Pull out your treasures, gentlemen,” he said, “and let’s see how she does.”

Peter Brockman from Chicago put on a pair of white gloves he’d kept tucked in his pocket. He untied twin strings wrapped around a cylindrical scroll and unfurled the paper on the glass countertop. I went over to inspect the sheet.

It was quiet, with only the sound of men breathing. I put on my own pair of white gloves and held the scroll open myself, running my eyes across its lines and shading. I could feel my father beside me, all anticipation and nerves. If I succeeded, his standing would be enhanced in the eyes of these men.

I waited for the painting to speak to me. It was a standard composition of a little hut on a sparsely wooded island in the foreground, separated from distant hills by a large body of water. I focused on the trees, on the way their roots gripped the earth. The roots should have been full of tension, like claws gripping a shoulder. But these roots were flat and almost floating against the dirt. There was no sound at all. Then my eyes slid over the slick, frictionless surface of the paper.

“Mid-twentieth-century copy of Ni Tsan,” I said. “The paper is all wrong and the brushstrokes too timid.”

“Aha!” François exclaimed.

“And this?” Another man I didn’t recognize held out a small metal object.

“Archaistic door handle. The lines are too stylized to really be Han. There’s no … life.”

“You see,” my father smiled. “She’s quite bright.”

At dinner that evening, which I cooked, I basked in not only his attention but also that of his colleagues. When my classmates at school picked
on me the next day for failing to understand the punch line of a joke concerning a pencil sharpener, I comforted myself with the knowledge that at home there was someone much smarter and stronger than they were, someone who understood me and who would always render their criticisms unnecessary.

So it went, François and I living and working together in the dark-green Victorian house, whose goggled windows were bordered with chiseled lattices and scrolls. I graduated early from college, UC Berkeley, and became his partner. We divided business duties. I spent time at the university library doing research; he met with clients and went on buying trips to augment our stock.

I always spent the evening with my father. I loved walking home from the bus stop in the fog and looking at our house and marveling how it loomed over Pine Street in Pacific Heights like a majestically carved ship anchored in the fog. François had had the good fortune to buy our house in the seventies, when housing prices were low and the goodness of California still something of a secret. Over the years, the building had increased exponentially in value, and François swore we could never move. Around us, old Victorians were one by one converted by youthful couples into monuments to yuppie glory: pink and purple palaces, red and coral estates. Our house remained as it always had been, slightly disheveled, enigmatic, a creaking reminder of a time when California was synonymous with restless beatniks in search of poetry and truth.

I turned and looked inside the window of the first floor, which housed our shop, Silk Road Antiques. How I loved its ramshackle, exotic beauty! Just one peek through the doors revealed a jumble of contents—here an edge of a painting, there a chair, and there again a glimpse of the corner of a blood-red porcelain bowl. It all reminded me of a glass greenhouse swollen with tropical flowers.