The table is rectangular. Its surface is black lacquer, or something made to resemble black lacquer. It reflects, in a band of distortion running lengthwise down its center, the two cylindrical paper lanterns suspended from the ceiling. Between these reflected shapes—not quite ellipses—a smaller, brighter point of light, whose source is not immediately apparent. The wall opposite is paneled in pale wood, and set into it, at a height of roughly one hundred twenty centimeters, are two rectangular niches, evenly spaced, each containing an object: a teapot without a lid, and a small white bowl with clouds painted around the rim in blue glaze.
Between the two niches there is a painting. It hangs at a height of approximately one hundred forty centimeters, measured from the floor to the lower edge of the frame. The frame is thin, dark wood—nearly the same color as the lacquer of the table—and encloses a rectangular image, wider than it is tall, perhaps fifty centimeters by thirty-five. The image depicts an interior of a teahouse. The room is rendered in muted tones—ochre of pale wood, gray-green, the dull brown of unglazed ceramic. In the center of the composition, a low table. On the table, a teapot. On either side of the table, a figure: a man on the left, a woman on the right.
The man’s right hand rests on the table near the teapot, the fingers rendered in three short strokes of darker pigment, slightly curled, though whether this represents a hand at rest or a hand that has just released the handle is ambiguous. The teapot occupies the exact center of the table. It is rendered with more precision than either figure—the curvature of the spout, the slight unevenness of the handle, the glaze pooling darker at the base where the brush has applied heavier pigment. Steam rises from the spout in a single stroke of thinned white paint, curving to the right, already fading into the background, which is a wall of vertical lines—the slats of a screen, or wood paneling, or simply the texture of the paper showing through where the wash has been applied too lightly.
A man is sitting at the rectangular table, his reflection inverted in the black lacquer. A woman enters. There is a brief intrusion of street noise—a bus, or something with the weight of a bus—before the door closes. She is standing at the near side of the rectangular table. She says something. She is sitting down, her bag already on the bench beside her. The man has just poured tea for the woman. His right hand rests on the table near the teapot.
The woman is sitting with the slight forward inclination of the head, as though attending to something the man has said, or as though examining the teapot between them. Her hands are in her lap, or at her sides, the brushwork in that area too imprecise to determine their exact position. The ochre of her garment blends into the ochre of the mat on which she sits, so that the boundary between figure and ground is, in that region, almost entirely dissolved. Only the teapot, with its precise curvature and its stroke of white steam, fully separates itself from the surface.
The walls are paneled in strips of pale wood, each approximately ten centimeters across, separated by grooves of one or two millimeters. These vertical grooves, combined with the two rows of tables running the length of the room, give the impression of a corridor, though no one has described it as such. Behind the glass partition, in the adjacent row of tables, a man is tipping a white bowl toward his mouth, the bowl’s blue pattern near the rim—waves or clouds—not entirely legible through the glass.
The man is drinking from his cup. The wet ring it leaves on the lacquer is not a perfect circle but an interrupted arc. He sets it down after a quarter rotation, producing a complete ring that overlaps the previous ring. A teapot sits between the man and the woman, brown stoneware, unglazed, with a bamboo handle arching over its top. In the first niche, the teapot has no lid. The teapot on the table has a lid. The lid is a dark disc resting in the circular opening, with a small knob at its center, applied in a single dot of ink.
Two cups without handles sit on either side of the teapot—two lighter shapes against the ochre ground, not distinctly rendered, that might be cups or might be folds in a cloth or shadows cast by the teapot under a light that enters from the upper left at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees, consistent with a window that is not depicted but whose presence is established by the pattern of illumination on the teapot’s curved surface.
Near the base of the teapot is a small dark mark—a drop of spilled tea, or a flaw in the glaze, or a shadow that has always been there. The man’s fingers are curled near the handle, the knuckles pale at their highest points. In the glass partition, a reflection: the teapot, the curled fingers, the dark mark at the base—all of it reversed, slightly displaced to the left, slightly less distinct. Between this gesture and its reflection there is no interval, or the interval is the thickness of the glass, or the interval does not exist because they are the same gesture observed from two distances.
The woman is holding her cup. She holds it with both hands, the fingers curving around the form. Her shoulders are slightly raised. A wisp of steam rises between her fingers and her mouth, or a stroke of thinned white paint curves upward from the rim, narrowing as it ascends, already fading into the ground. On the outer surface of the cup, near the base, a thin vertical line—a drip of tea, or a mark left by the brush where it touched the paper a moment too long.
A small dark mark is near the base of the teapot—a drop of spilled tea, or a flaw in the paper, or a deliberate element of the composition meant to anchor the pot to the surface on which it rests. The man’s fingers are curled near the handle, the knuckles suggested by four small points of highlight where the wash has been left thin. Between this gesture and the act of pouring there is no interval, or the interval is the width of the brush that laid the pigment, or the interval does not exist because they are the same gesture observed in different frames of mind.
The woman is holding her cup. It is a cup without a handle, glazed in a mottled gray-green, and she holds it with both hands, the fingers curving around the ceramic so that only the tips are visible from this side. The cup is approximately three-quarters full. The tea inside is a pale yellow with a greenish cast. Steam no longer rises from its surface, or the steam is too fine to be seen at this distance, which is the distance from the cup to the glass partition in which it is reflected—approximately one hundred twenty centimeters.
Outside the street continues. A siren rises and falls in its two-note pattern. Something metallic taps in a staccato rhythm. A voice, amplified and distorted, compresses its words into rhythm without content.
None of this penetrates. The room exists in silence, or in whatever sound is supplied: the pour of liquid, the rustle of fabric, the creak of wood, the nothing that is the sound of two people sitting across from one another at a table where nothing will happen because everything has already happened and been fixed in pigment.