Calla Lilies

Patsy worked at the American Embassy in Beijing and was famous for having filled up several warehouses with antiques from her global postings. A tall and aristocratic woman, she was lucky to be thusly gifted in the apparent absence of a nervous system. There was talk of opening an antique shop in San Francisco; yet I always sensed that if her itinerant and compulsive buying were to stop, oblivion would await her. I would occasionally tag along on her sprees, watching the merchants light up as she neared them—mind you, the haunts were few in the Beijing of the early eighties.

My own favorite was the Theater Shop in Dongdan, a store packed with treasures and presided over by elderly gentlemen who had all owned substantial curio establishments prior to the coming of Mao Zedong. Off to the side of the main floor in a windowless niche of a room, there was a small rug emporium; and on my very last day in Beijing in 1985, when I went to say my farewells, the man in charge of that area nearly tackled me, gleeful that I had shown up because he had something right up my street. When I told him that my shipment had already gone, he would hear none of it, instantly producing the supplest of threadbare carpets, one sporting a golden dragon whose patina was enchanting. At its very top, there was a row of indecipherable characters, long blurred by much foot traffic. In a flash, it was folded into nothing and handed over to my friend, Claire, who had come with me. Luckily, her return to London from a Beijing posting at the British Embassy was not quite in the offing, and she kindly volunteered to send it on with her own things. That rug, by the way, turned out to have been made in Samarkand for the Palace and actually used in the Qing imperial library, identified as such by the dim calligraphy in the weave.

It was a treat to be invited to Patsy’s house for supper. Since I lived in a hotel room with no kitchen, eating in a real home was a much-appreciated novelty. Although I did my level best to transform room 455 into an apartment, it just wasn’t the same thing. Patsy’s was an Aladdin’s cave of treasures, every inch festooned with the spoils of her shopping excursions. There were textiles strewn across the furniture, ceramics obtained from under the counters at the Sunday bird market, and bird cages everywhere. For such a hostess, there was no way I was going to show up with some garish box of imported chocolates, the provenance of which could only have been too obvious: the lobby shop of my joint venture hotel.