Harmless Like You

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  Celeste swished her tail, looked up and blinked at me three times. This, according to science, is how cats blow kisses.

  I flew regularly to Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, and Taipei to buy art and scout talent. I had a sideline working as a go-between for an East Side gallerist who dealt European schmaltz: a lot of cows, farm girls and dead pheasants. I’d meet her Asian clients. I’d bring a new brochure: first-class spam. But Josephine—that was the gallerist’s name—claimed that nothing beat the personal touch.

  Lately, Josephine’s clients were showing an interest in Asian American artists. I wasn’t sure what started it. Curiosity, a what if? Or a sense of triumph? They hadn’t left, they’d trusted Asia, backed the home team and look: they were winning. All of Fifth Avenue would fit into one of Singapore’s malls.

  I didn’t need Celeste on these trips, but I preferred her there. It wasn’t the planes, or Shanghai’s swerving taxis, or the thick, sickly air of Beijing. It was the way Josephine’s clients looked at me and asked what I was. The artists from whom I bought saw me as the alchemical process by which sketches turned to dollars. At home, most white East Coasters and certainly Brooklynites had had that question beaten out of them. They just examined my face too long. I’d take the opportunity to ask, could I interest them in ceramics?

  In Asia the clients came out and asked, “What are you?” Sometimes their translator did the asking but I always understood the question. If I answered, “American,” they asked, “Where is your family from?”

  My Chinese and Korean clients, on both sides of the Pacific, felt at best ambivalent about the Japanese. It didn’t seem fair that I was smeared by a woman who hadn’t stuck around. So, I’d say, “I’m adopted.” They’d assume I was a whore’s by-product. A Shanghainese client was sure that my mother was from her father’s province.

  “In the cheekbones,” she said. “Very high and flat. High forehead, too.”

  She’d been to Wellesley, but was now professionally married to a real-estate mogul. Her degree was in art history, and she’d keep me talking for hours, glad to refresh her English.

  I told her I was raised by Canadian Americans.

  “Only in America,” she said with the kind of admiration that Americans express when they talk about how spiritual the Indians are. I wasn’t sure if she was surprised that in America white people would choose to adopt a murky-blooded child. Or whether it was simply the notion of a Canadian American.

  All of this made me twitch. I checked my face in the front of the Burberry store, in the silver elevator doors and in the face of my own watch. I didn’t know what I expected. Would my face somehow flex out of shape from its desire to fit in? Or would it be my mother’s, fighting its way through my bones to reveal the lie? It was good to have Celeste waiting in the hotel room. I’d fall on the bed and scoop her over my belly, where the warm weight of her soothed us both into a nap.

  I opened up the in-flight magazine to decide which movies I would watch. The captain announced that the airline had hired a celebrity chef to redo their menu. For an additional cost of thirty dollars, there would be prosciutto pizza, featuring truffle-misted arugula. When did we start putting truffle oil on everything, and who knew a mushroom could be so greasy?

  In my bag was a 100ml pot of moisturiser. The cabin air was arid and Celeste’s skin was sensitive. Cold chapped her, sun seared, humidity itched, sea breeze gave her sores. I dabbed cold cream on a finger and spiraled it into her side, and she pressed close to the bars, letting me do it. Mimi blamed the inbreeding, but I was a mongrel and atmosphere affected me just as badly. I worked the same cream into my jaw and inhaled the whiff of thyme.

  Yuki

  1970, Dragon’s Blood

  Derived from plant resin, but sold as the congealed blood of battling dragons and elephants. It faded rapidly, but was still popular, perhaps due to its supposedly violent origins.

  “I just want to be an artist, you know?” she said. “I guess it was dumb to think I could just learn how.” Edison had waited for her at the end of their third art class. He pulled his eyebrows together.

  “You make art.”

  “No, I meant like be an artist, the sort of artist where people ask you what you do and you can say I’m an artist. Like how you can say, I’m an architect.”

  “Architecture student,” he said, “actually you know when I was a kid I wanted to be an artist.”

  Was he calling her a child? She felt like a child with her bunny eraser and Lou’s old shirt as a smock.

  “But, hey, it didn’t happen.”

  The model came out from behind the curtain, wearing a purple muumuu. They avoided her eyes, as if this dress was the true indecency.

  With his eyes still looking at their feet, he said, “Some people have it. Some people don’t. I don’t.” He shook his head. “But it’s fun to pretend.”

  “How do you know?” If the goddess Kannon could come down and tell her, Hey, you’ll never be an artist, then there’d be room in her brain for something else. Maybe she could write to her father and ask him to forgive her.

  “I think I want too much to make people happy. I want people to like me. Art isn’t about happiness.”

  “Is architecture? About happiness?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” He smiled.

  “I didn’t realize we needed to buy so many supplies,” Yuki said. The teacher wanted different weights of paper, different numbers of pencil, thicknesses of charcoal, putty erasers. And they hadn’t even started talking about color.

  And she found herself explaining her budget, what she allowed for rolls of golden challah and what for coffee. That she snuck her own sandwiches into the Met, so she didn’t have to pay for the cafeteria. How Lou never asked her for rent money, but she felt that she owed him.

  “You can use my pastels, and I have some extra heavyweight cartridge.”

  “But you’ll be short.”

  “It’s okay, the folks send me money for school supplies.”

  “Let me pay you,” she said. But relief was already spreading through her like creamer through coffee. She wouldn’t have to ask Lou to borrow money.

  “Get a beer with me.”

  “I don’t drink,” she said. She didn’t, not since Odile left. It made her feel out of control. Every day, she woke up in a second-hand life, one cut and measured for somebody with sturdier bones. That was enough disorientation.

  “Coffee, then.”

  “At this time? I won’t sleep.”

  “Don’t sleep then. New York at night’s great, like Christmas and Halloween at once.”

  Yuki couldn’t remember not living in New York, and so she rarely thought of the city as anything other than the place she happened to be.

  “Seriously, get coffee with me. It’s not a date. Nothing to upset you and this Lou.” He said Lou like it was a word in a language he didn’t quite recognize. “I could use a friend in the city.”

  So she nodded. Outside, the sky was wrapped snugly in pink and orange clouds. She wondered if Lou had waited for her to eat.

  “A quick coffee. Super-quick,” she said.

  “An espresso.”

  “And I want to see your sketches.”

  They went to a nearby diner; it was almost empty. They sat next to the potted plants. The leaves were dusty. It was odd that dust could settle on a living thing. Yuki imagined herself veiled in dust. She gave a tiny shoulder-rolling shudder. She requested a hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows. He ordered a piece of cherry pie.

  “They have the best pie here, real, dark cherries, no maraschino bullshit.”

  She nodded.

  “You don’t speak much, do you?”

  She didn’t remember him speaking that much before. He’d been awkward, nervous, without the teasing swagger in his voice. She had preferred him then.

  “Yuki, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Eddie.” He smiled.

  “Didn’t you say your name was Edison?”
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br />   “That too.”

  “Can I call you Edison?” she asked. “Life is too easy for people with ordinary names.”

  “I’m not sure life is easy for anyone. But okay.”

  She didn’t think Edison was as attractive as Lou. It still felt embarrassing to say that Lou was attractive; but he was, to her. It was the way Lou looked at her with half-open eyes and the cool feel of the backs of his knuckles as he stroked her face. Even the way Lou acted as if he owned her. It felt good to belong to someone. Edison was merely pretty. He had pink lips for a boy. He was so thin. His skin was the white of icing sugar and she imagined if she blew on him, he’d scatter into sweet dust.

  “You were going to show me your sketch,” she said.

  He took out the sketchbook. It was larger than hers and bent at the corner. He hadn’t made the model thinner or prettier than she was. But he’d given her a grace and delicacy that Yuki hadn’t seen on the mole-spattered middle-aged lady with the bad henna.

  “These are amazing.” She didn’t say it to be polite. If anything the surprise in her voice was rude.

  “I try. Now let’s see yours.”

  She shook her head so hard that her hair slapped her face. But he insisted, pulling the sketchbook out of her hands.

  “You have a good line,” he said. “It has certainty, but it isn’t rigid. That’s almost impossible to teach.”

  She glared. She was not a good dog to be patted. “The proportions are all off.”

  “Well, the eyes should be lower. Your eyes are in the middle of your face. The brain takes up more space.” He touched her forehead with his thumb.

  She pulled a pencil from her bag and made two hard marks. “Here?”

  “No, expand the head, like this.” He pulled the pencil from her hand. The hot chocolate came.

  Edison moved the pencil with assurance. “Of course, there’s only so much you can do without the model.”

  The chocolate got cold and the marshmallows melted into a sugary scum. The woman shrank and stretched. His lines weaved around hers. She stared down at it; it was better, but also it didn’t belong to her. The woman was Edison’s now.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Hey, cheer up. I meant it. You have a great line and look at what you’ve done with the space.”

  “Great, you like the bits I didn’t draw on.”

  “No, the figure has this real emotion to her.” He moved his hands over the page, leaning forward, smiling, and for a moment she almost believed him. Believed there was something special there in the space.

  “I should go,” she said. “My boyfriend will be waiting.”

  He walked her to the subway that would take her downtown and then east to Queens, but he stopped at the top of the stairs.

  “I’m walking up, it’s only twenty blocks or so.”

  She felt a pang for Manhattan, for a world she could walk through and never needed to go underground if she didn’t want to.

  In the apartment, there were three pieces of cold brown toast on the table, and the butter was sticky from lying out in the warm night. The crusts were burnt, but she ate them anyway, savoring the ashen gesture of affection.

  Lou lay in their bed, asleep. She stood over him. His face was squished into the sheets, a cobweb of drool hanging between his lips. His sleeping body unnerved her. He was so near, but all his thoughts were walled off. She wanted to shake him awake, to force him to look at her. Here I am. You chose me. I chose you. You are my one. The person who loves me.

  He looked smaller sleeping. She’d read somewhere that dead bodies looked smaller too. Slowly, slowly she lifted a finger, inching it into his open mouth. His breath was sleep-warm. She snapped the thread of drool. He sighed a deep dream sigh.

  She whispered, “I. Love. You.”

  She pressed her lips to his, a perfect match. No one on the whole continent was thinking of her. If Lou died, she could dissolve and the lone reason anyone would realize would be that the waiting room at The Paper would overflow.

  A hand reached up, grabbing her wrist and pulling her down. Her knees cracked against the floor and her right arm smacked the metal bed frame.

  “Lou.”

  “Get into bed already.”

  And she did.

  A week later, she waited at the end of class for Edison.

  “Do you think you could tell me what to fix?”

  It became a routine. He ate seven orders of cherry pie, and each time he told her she was improving. He lent her a book on anatomy. He divided his putty eraser in two. Every week, until the seven weeks were over.

  “Will you sign up for the next session?” Yuki touched the edge of her teacup with her finger.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’d miss the first three classes. I’m going back to Canada to visit my girlfriend.”

  “Your girlfriend?”

  He pulled a photograph from his wallet. A girl standing in front of a lake holding a tremendous fish in her white hands. Both the girl and the fish, with its one yellowed eye, held the camera’s gaze. A light leak on the film melted the girl’s feet so she seemed to be spilling out into sunlight.

  “She’s pretty,” Yuki said. Under the table she wrapped one hand around the lavender band of bruise that circled her wrist. She didn’t need to look down to know that the darkest bead of purple was where the ridge of bone stood closest to the skin.

  He nodded and put the photograph back in his wallet. “But you should take one.”

  She had been planning to and had saved up the money. “I don’t know. It’s just more of the same. Naked fat lady. Naked thin lady. Naked fat lady with nose-ring.”

  There was no space in their apartment for a hundred charcoal grotesques. Every time The Guys came over she had to hide them in their bedroom, and last time she’d gotten charcoal all over his mother’s sheets. Her shoulder still hurt where he’d yanked it.

  “So if you’re tired of nudes, try something else. Landscapes, or fruit? Personally, I’ll never get tired of nudes.” His laugh was that of an innocent boy pretending to shave with his father’s comb.

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m tired of drawing things for the sake of drawing things.” The classes were all just observation, copying, and copying from life. But, when had her life looked like a naked white woman on a stool or a bowl of pears hanging out next to a plaster skull?

  “So paint.”

  “I have to make something that says something.”

  “Do it.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “No, it matters to you, and if it matters to you you’ll figure it out.”

  “What if I don’t have It.”

  “You have It. I promise.”

  If she had It, she would have come up with a picture to show The Guys already. Her great act of defiance, her request to be heard, was pointless beside her complete failure to make anything worthwhile.

  It had taken them four weeks just to settle on Emily as a title—not after Simon and Garfunkel’s Emily, but after Dickinson. Yuki supposed if ships were women, so might magazines be. Just more vessels in which men make their names. Still, however gradually, Yuki’s time was running out. She wanted something in the magazine. An image, a single image of hers in glossy print. Something that she’d made and which would be seen by others; her name would be listed under the contents page and the word ART would hover above it.

  “Edisoooon.” She dragged out the last syllable, knowing she sounded like a whiny child. “Why does it all feel so stupid?”

  “Start with something that means something to you? Find something in you that sings or aches. Or I don’t know.” He pushed a fry into the bubble of ketchup. “You’re the artist.”

  A song or an ache. It would be easy to roll up her sleeves and display the purple petals Lou left there. But even if she did, what difference would it make? She only had one home to go back to.

/>   She stole a curly fry from Edison’s plate. It was nice to have a friend again. She didn’t even know how to reach Odile, who might at that moment be refusing to eat French fries that were actually French. Would her ex-friend imagine Yuki out on her own with this guy they’d met together? But no, Yuki doubted Odile ever thought of her at all. Odile had left and she had not packed the Nothing. In fact, Yuki wondered if the Nothing had followed her to Lou’s apartment to lurk in dark corners, and now Edison too would leave and it would just be Lou, Yuki and the Nothing.

  “You’re coming back right?”

  “When I get back,” Edison said, “I want to see what you’ve been working on.”

  How had she forgotten to keep a photograph of her father or mother? Photographs were for the altar and dead people. Her parents were alive. She tried to draw them from memory.

  She failed. It was not that the faces did not look proportional. The art class had helped her with the organization of faces. But they looked unspecific. Somehow she had forgotten the layout of her parents’ faces. A child should know her parents’ anatomies the way salmon are born knowing how to leap. She should know the measure of her father’s cheeks, the depth of the dip in her mother’s lips. Yuki remembered them in segments, in impressions, but the whole of them was lost to her.

  Lou asked what she was drawing.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Shall I make more coffee?”

  In the end, she worked from the one photograph she had: the rooftop picture of herself and Odile standing side by side, caught by the snow and cold. The camera had captured the slight shadow where the white socks had dug into her knees, the rubber curl of the trigger release, and Yuki and Odile’s hair knotting. Later, numb-fingered, they’d untangled the threads.

  The camera had missed the sharp in- and out-take of Yuki’s breath. The feeling that being in Odile’s presence had been like being a cat lying in the sun; why would the cat care if the sun felt the same way?

  Cameras and photographs were supposed to seal the best times in their chemical canisters; so that a person could look back and say, that day we were still in love, that was before he learned to walk, that was before he learned to screw, that was the day he graduated and we were suddenly afraid he would never need us again. The camera had let Yuki down. She remembered whispering into the mirror: this is me, this is my new home. But she couldn’t recall the actual shape and texture of the feeling.