the slung-back leather chair, every few seconds hitching the wanton hem back down over her aging knees. The outfit seemed art-dealer-worthy this morning, good for a couple hundred dollars more in any negotiation with a man. She thought it might compensate for the scar running down her face. Now it feels like amateur hour.
The pixie-cut assistant reappears, averting her eyes from Mimi’s gash, proffering more coffee, and promising that Mr. Siang will be with her almost right away. Mr. Siang is already seventeen minutes late. He’s had the scroll for weeks. He has put off this meeting twice. Something’s going on in the back room. Mimi’s being played, and she can’t tell how.
Other treasures clog the gallery. Lacquerware yachts. A cloud-swathed, floating mountain inked in the meticulous style. Thousand-figure ivory spheres, each intricate world nested inside another. A painting on the far wall catches her eye: a great black tree with rainbow branches against a blue sky. She stands, tugs at the hem, and drifts across the room. What seemed like a cornucopia of tiny leaves turns into hundreds of meditating figures. She reads the tag: The Field of Merit, also called The Refuge Tree. Tibet, circa mid-seventeenth century. In the spreading crown, the human leaves seem to wave in the wind.
A voice behind her calls, “Miss Ma?”
Mr. Siang, in pewter suit and blood-red spectacles, ushers her into the back room. He gazes at the gully in her face and doesn’t blink. With one peremptory hand he seats her at a conference table made of outlawed mahogany, the scroll box between them. Addressing the window, he says, “Your piece is very beautiful. Wonderful arhats, in a distinctive style. Sad you have no papers or provenance.”
“Yes. I . . . we never had any.”
“You say this scroll came to America with your father. It belonged to his family’s art collection in Shanghai?”
She fiddles with her dress beneath the table. “That’s right.”
Mr. Siang turns from the window and sits across from her, at attention. His left palm cups his right elbow, and his right hand holds out its first two fingers, gripping an imaginary cigarette. “We cannot date it as precisely as we’d like. And we aren’t certain about the artist.”
Her guard goes up. “What about the owners’ seals?”
“We’ve traced them back in chronological order. It isn’t clear how your father’s family actually came into possession.”
She knows now what she has suspected for weeks. Bringing the scroll in for appraisal was a mistake. She wants to grab it and run.
“The script of the inscriptions is also difficult. A form of Tang Dynasty calligraphy we call wild cursive. Specifically, Drunken Su. It may have been done later.”
“What does it say?”
He tilts his head back, the better to frame her impudence. “There is a poem, author unknown.” He rolls the scroll out between them. His finger flows down the column of words.
On this mountain, in such weather,
Why stay here any longer?
Three trees wave to me with urgent arms.
I lean in to hear, but their emergency
sounds just like the wind.
New buds test the branches, even in winter.
Her skin welts up before the poem ends. She’s in SFO, hearing her name get paged. She’s reading the poem her father left in lieu of a suicide note. How does a man rise or fall in this life? She’s setting urgent fires on the side of a mountain in the pitch-black cold. Fires that kill a woman.
“Three trees?”
Mr. Siang’s palms apologize. “It’s poetry.”
Her face flashes hot and cold. Her mind won’t work. Something is trying to get at her, from a long way away. Why stay here any longer? She sees her sister Amelia, twelve years old and packed in a snowsuit that doubles her size, waddle in the back door, crying. The breakfast tree is budding too early. The snow is going to kill it. And her father, just smiling. The new leaf always there. Even before winter. A fact that Mimi, in her sixteen winters, had somehow missed.
“Would that poem be readable . . . to an average person?”
“A scholar, maybe. A student of calligraphy.”
She has no idea what her father was a student of. Miniature electronics. Campsites. Talking to bears. “This ring.” She holds her fist out to the art dealer across the table. He tilts his head. His smile is embarrassed for them both.
“Yes? A jade tree, Ming style. Good workmanship. We could appraise it.”
She pulls it back. “Never mind. Tell me about the scroll.”
“The treatment of the arhats is very skilled. Simply on