Read Online A Cup of Light by Nicole Mones - Free Book Online Page A

Chinese toon tree. Her chopsticks roved around the table, and she thought about her eight hundred pots.
    She was an experienced appraiser. For nine years she had worked at Hastings. She remembered the job interview. She was given the on-the-spot test. It was the way Hastings always evaluated new hires.
    â€œDon’t be nervous,” Dr. Zheng had said as he laid objects out in front of her. “Just tell me what you think.”
    She knew to him she must have looked all wrong. She was tall. Her hair was pulled up in a tight braid, defiantly strict. And her clothes didn’t make sense.
    No, as Dr. Zheng often said to her in the years that followed, laughing about it: She didn’t look anything like most of the women he hired. They wore pearls and suits and had pert Anglo-Saxon hair. But that didn’t matter, as he always reminded her. What mattered was the test. “Just tell me what you think,” he had urged her that day. She remembered how he extended his dry fingers to the first pot on the left, a blue-and-white bottle-formed vase,
meiping
style. They were all blue-and-whites. But not all the same. Not at all.
    She remembered how she looked from one to another, comparing them. Then she lit on the first one. “It has a high-shouldered form in good proportion,” she said quietly. “Porcelain smooth, a good clear white—may I?” She moved to pick it up.
    â€œOf course.”
    She lifted the vase and rotated it. “No mark and period,” she said, and tilted the base, which was empty, in his direction.
    She returned it to the table. She came closer to study the painting, hibiscus blooms framed by ornate medallions of scrolling leaves. “Beautifully rendered, spacing just right. But the blue—the intensity of it—there is something about the heap-and-piling.” She moved right up next to it now, studying the infinitesimal mounding of cobalt grains that fooled the eye into seeing a field of blue.
    Yes, he thought. Keep going.
    Now she put her hands on it again. She closed her eyes and brushed her fingers over the little mounds of cobalt. She looked like a person reading braille. “It’s just too deliberate,” she said. “It feels contrived. It’s in the right style for the Ming prototype, but it’s troweled on too much. I’d say it was made in the Qing, maybe in the Qianlong reign. Though it wants you to think it’s a vase from the Yongle reign in the middle Ming. That’s what it wants you to think.” She shot him a glance, half questioning.
    He would only answer with an encouraging smile, and she turned to the second one, a Ming blue-and-white fruit bowl. “Sturdily made,” she began. “A little thick. The design is
lingzhi
fungus.” She turned it over and read the six characters,
da ming xuan de nian zi
. “Made in the Xuande reign, great Ming Dynasty,” she translated. “And this heap-and-piling . . .” She lifted it to the window, where the natural light was most revealing. “This one is deep, but free. It’s naturalistic.”
    â€œSo . . . ?”
    â€œIt has that artlessness.” She looked at him. “It might really be from the Ming.” The bowl had a faint filmy coating all over it. She angled her index finger to set the slightest ridge of nail against it and scraped a patch clean.
    She held the bowl up to the light. “I have seen more vivid blues,” she admitted. “It’s not quite the best of its type, is it?” She glanced at him for confirmation. “But I think it is from the Ming.”
    â€œDo you think it is real, then?” he said, pushing her. “Made in the Xuande reign?”
    She turned the bowl each way in her hands one more time, then replaced it on the table. “I believe so. Though as I said it is not so very fine. Still, I cannot prove its age. I have never seen it anywhere, in any catalog or any listing, no, I am sure