Yukiko’s building was plaster stucco, painted pink, with wooden shutters and plants in ceramic pots. From the second floor up, it could’ve been a travel brochure photograph. But the bottom half of the building was covered in graffiti: lazily sprayed names and scrawled Sharpie. Even the door was a scratch pad for bored children: squiggles, hearts, and who loved who. Her name on the buzzer was partially obscured by the spike of a star. I lowered Celeste to the floor and pressed the ceramic nub next to “yama.”
There was a long pause. It seemed as if no one was coming. I pressed the side of my head to the scarred door. No noise. I leaned there, wondering what to do next. The boy had said she’d be in all day. I was tired, and the cold light hurt my eyes. All of Germany seemed determined to resist me. At the door of my mother’s actual apartment, I could sense nothing of her presence.
In college, I took Art Humanities—this was when I was still an East Asian Studies major—because we had to. Our class hadn’t wanted to like Pollock. The cry came from the back row, “Any pigeon could shit that.”
Our instructor said that the paint was the trail of the painter; you could feel him floating above the canvas. She waved her own hands as she explained, throwing fistfuls of air across the room. “Each splatter was evidence of his personhood. The energy he felt in his muscles and bones. Remember the bloody prints on cave walls. They’re saying WE ARE HERE. You see it on toilet walls, and you see it in Pollock. The difference is that Pollock knows that he is a verb, a moving thing and that’s what he’s recording.”
While she gesticulated, I was trying to hold in Red Bull- inspired hiccups. The effort stopped me doodling. I had to look straight ahead, chin tucked down, and so I took in every word. Later, taking a girl to MoMA, I tried to see it, his living hands, his body arching as paint spun from his brushes. And I did. I saw it. I saw how the splashes were an extension of him, down to his breath and the flexing arches of his feet. It was movement held in paint. After that each Sargent, Klimt, and Da Vinci painting seemed a reliquary.
Yet, my mother’s show had not helped me know who to expect. The building provided no further help. I couldn’t see her hands ghosting the brass door handle. I slumped against the graffiti and without warning, the door swung open. I stumbled, and looked down to see a woman, and made a fumbling gesture of greeting with my cat-free hand. The woman had a scarf-smothered neck, a small face. She stood a pace back from the door. “Guten Morgen.”
“Yukiko Oyama? You’re expecting me. I’ve come about your husband’s estate.”
Her apartment had a low ceiling. It was decorated minimally—nakedly. It was the sort of space art students live in, but my mother was in her sixties. The only break in the grubby white walls was the large window, through which gusted northern light. Northern light is the unflattering light painters call true. No double glazing here—the sharp draught flew in. Somehow, it was colder inside than it had been on the street.
“Tea—would you like some tea?”
“As I said before, I’m here about Mr. Eaves’s estate.” No reaction. “You were married to him. Yes? He recently passed away. He left you the house you lived in together. I just need you to sign for the deeds. Do you have a pen? Of course, there’ll be property taxes. But you will probably want to sell the house. I’d be happy to put you in touch with an agent. So you’ll have to sign here, and here.”
I looked in the small face for grief, for something, at all. She coughed into her elbow. She sniffled, but it just seemed like snot.
As she bent down to write her name on the papers, her thin pine-colored neck stuck out from the scarves, and I saw tiny fingers of bone through the skin. Part of me wanted to pull the scarves up over the neck to wrap her up, and keep those bones safe from the draught. Another part of me wanted to strangle her with the woollen snakes.
“My son?”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
“Where is he?”
I’d assumed she would recognize me. I have a memorable face. Everyone said so. There just aren’t many other people who look like me; but she didn’t appear interested in my face. She hadn’t even seemed to register the cage that hung heavy at my side. She hadn’t read the yellow stickers slapped to the plastic, or peered down at my cat. Artists are supposed to be observant.
I thought of my own child. Eliot’s had been a slow birth, although I suppose all parents find it too long. Giving birth, Mimi had snarled, lips curling like a sick animal, torturing my left palm in her grip. By the time the labor was over, I was delirious, sleep-deprived, and my hand was bleeding. So when they gave me my baby, she was just a weight. A warm lump of towel. Then, I looked down at her. Eliot was not the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Wet black hair stuck to her forehead. She had wrinkled, pickled-plum-pink skin. The nurse must’ve cleaned her, but there was goop in her ear. Placenta? Shit? Not even the tenth most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. But I could never forget her face.
I ran my fingers along the fine scars my wife had left on the palm of my left hand. Yukiko didn’t recognize me? I suppose I thought she would at least have been Googling me for all these years, as I’d been stalking her. But she just looked at me with those sleep-sticky eyes, and I considered lying. Jay was run over by a truck. He committed suicide at fifteen when he just felt too lonesome to stick around. He started taking heroin in college because it eased his anxiety that every fucking person was going to turn around and leave, and now everyone in his life has given up on him.
I didn’t say that. I said, “Here.”
17.
Berlin, October 2016
After three rigid beats, it was clear that no one would cry. There would be no embracing. We just sat there, two people at a table. Celeste, as if sensing the total inappropriateness of the moment, began to cough inside her cage. I stood. I didn’t feel dizzy. In fact, the painter’s light threw every tone into such clear relief that it gave me a headache.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
The awful biology of it was that I did. My groin was hot and aching. Perhaps it was the beer for breakfast; perhaps it was fight or flight. She gestured toward a door. The bathroom was small and windowless. On a shelf above the toilet, bottles of pills flanked an ashtray. One butt still sputtered out a stream of smoke. My dad hated cigarettes. The one time he caught me smoking, he wouldn’t speak to me for two weeks. The first day was a relief; I was fifteen and couldn’t think of anything better than my dad shutting the fuck up about my life. The next thirteen days were creepy. He even stopped reading the newspaper, to avoid giving me the satisfaction of rustling.
I lifted the stub from the tray and rested it between my fingers. A runaway, a thief, and a smoker. Then I remembered I needed to piss. So I did.
There was a second door by the toilet, and with the instincts of a child raised on secrets, I opened it. I hadn’t thought there could be a worse room than the one I’d just been in, but here it was. The floor was barely bigger than the mattress flopped onto it. The sheets were yellowed, and two dirty mugs stood by the head of the mattress. A red yarn monkey with only one eye lay tucked into the grubby sheets. Loose tissues ringed this still life. The whole room smelled of wet bread. Of course she was sick, who wouldn’t be?
Could she really be so poor? I’d read about her in ARTFORUM. It was a brief piece but positive. I thought again of the other articles I’d seen. I tried to think as a dealer, not a son, especially not an angry or abandoned son. Success, yes, but few saleable works. Shareable, linkable, forward-able works, but little you could actually mount on a wall in a lobby or private home. And while the success of oil painters can be shown in a pyramid, fewer and fewer making it to each level of fame, performance art is more like a line with a dot hovering above it. Most artists are in the line, and then a few names, e.g. Marina Abramović, leap into the dot of notoriety. My mother had not. At least the show at that gallery was frameable. Perhaps if it sold, she could buy a couch or some curtains for the bare glass. I reminded myself she was inheriting my well-hea
ted house.
In the main room, Yukiko sat wrapped in all her scarves. I took the chair in front of her. It was her turn to speak. She didn’t. I was tired of women holding out on me. The phone in my pocket bore not a single dropped call or even text from my wife, while a hundred useless apps racked up data charges. So I just sat in front of Yukiko, taking an inventory of her face. After all, I might not see her again for another thirty years. Eyes, largish with heavy bags of flesh around them. Nose small and flared. Mouth puckered like a rotten orange. Frame small. Her arms were splattered with brown and purple burn marks.
“Soldering.”
“What?”
“I got these soldering.”
Still in record-taking mode, I listened more to her syllables than her words. Though her cadences were clearly American, her s slid into the German z. I hadn’t known how I expected her to sound. This German-ness seemed so unlikely. But it made sense; she’d lived here almost all my life. She rolled up the sleeves of her smock to demonstrate how the burns ended at her elbow joints. I didn’t believe her. The marks looked purposeful, spiraling up her wrists.
My mother had hurt herself, it was obvious. Her veins were visible, bright green under her skin. They were an older woman’s arms, lined in places, the skin rough, and the elbows chapped white. Underneath the purple marks were fine white striations; scars. I’d seen these marks on college classmates and then my interns. Young people have a great desire to cut themselves up, and so I kept a tube of Neosporin in my office. I never told anyone to stop, but there was no need for infection.
I should have pitied Yukiko. She was so small, and her skin’s canvas was so stained. But I felt numb. The same numbness I felt when performance artists waved their dicks around; over-shocked, over-sad. Would Eliot one day turn her red hands against her own skin? Probably. When the time came, there would be nothing I could do to stop her. Or would I, like my mother, have fled by then? Perhaps the definition of a good parent is someone delusional enough to think they can stay the self-mutilating hand. But children tear themselves to pieces in the dark. The pink puckers glared up at me from my mother’s arms. I was furious. How dare she pass this sadness down to Eliot? Or me?
This was craziness, I knew. I wanted to hold Celeste and feel the fast beat of her heart. Even old hearts are speedy. Legs decelerate and arthritis wears out the joints, while the heart flickers forward. I pulled the cage closer.
I put my tea down. The table trembled.
“I could fix that for you, the table, if you have a piece of paper,” I said.
“No, you can’t.”
“I can’t?”
“It’s not that the legs are uneven—it’s the seam that wobbles.” She ran her finger along a line down the center of the table. I saw then that it could be expanded, but there was no space for it in the small room.
“If you need money, I can deal with the house myself, get the money moved into your account. Or if you need it faster, we could take out a mortgage on it, if that would help?”
She was quiet. Her nail dug into wood grain. “My father died in a car crash,” she said.
“Oh.” I’d seen Grandmère and Grandpère every summer growing up. The matching Japanese set, I’d barely thought of. Grandparents, unlike mothers, are expected to disappear. Had her father even been alive, when I was born? I tried to picture him, but all I saw was Tony Leung, the Hong Kong movie star. “I’m sorry,” I added. The edge of her nail buckled as she pressed it harder into the table.
“It was in Japan,” she said. “I never saw his body.”
“We buried Dad.”
She pulled at the long trails of wool on her scarf. “Was he happy? When he died?”
“It was a car crash. I don’t think people are happy in car crashes.”
“He loved you.”
“I know.” This was stupid, talking about Dad with a person who had not known him. Who had not known the care he took in lacing a baseball glove, or giving me just the right lamp for college, or the right crib for his granddaughter, or showing me how to arrange the gallery so that there was enough time to breathe between each image.
“Is the swing still there?” she asked.
“Dad cut it down when I was seven.”
I’d woken up one day to see the legs of rope dangling free and the seat lying beside the garbage bags. He never gave me a satisfactory explanation, but he started building a tree house that weekend. The house stood on four neat legs of its own and had a glass window that could be opened and closed. The magnolia tree in which it was ostensibly built grew to one side, more decorative than structural. My friends and I used the house for camping and later, I would skim my fingers over a girl’s nipple for the first time up in that house, petals falling through the window and turning brown all around us.
“I don’t need the house. You keep it,” she said, and it took me a minute to realize she wasn’t talking about the tree fort, but the actual house.
She took a long gulp of her tea. I did the same. Unfortunately, tea doesn’t have the narcotic effect of beer, so when we were done, we were soberly caffeinated. But I’d seen her bedroom. She did need it. She needed to sell the house, then buy a bed frame and hire an industrial cleaning crew. The half-signed documents lay on the table in front of us. Her fingers knotted and unknotted the fringe of her scarf. I took a chip at the silence.
“My wife and I—I have a wife—we live in the city now, well not in the city, in Brooklyn, near the water, there’s quite a scene, well of course you know that, everyone knows that, better schools too. We have a baby, a baby girl, Eliot. She’s heavy for her age, not fat though, the doctor says it’s all muscle.”
“The house isn’t mine,” she said. She put the palms of her hands together like she was praying. For the first time, her voice raised and it seemed to crack. “I lost it. I didn’t do what I was supposed to.”
Before I could reply, a gasping squeal came from the cat box. I got Celeste out and into my lap. She was unusually hot, even for her. I began to massage her sides, my knuckles rolling up and down her back. These days, she had trouble getting up an entire hairball and the vet had taught me a series of gestures. Cat massage. Celeste rolled her haunches left to right. In her old age, her skin had loosened and shifted over her muscles. I could feel how her underbelly had tensed. Her ears pulled back. She arched, became rigid. When cats pass out, they don’t land on their feet. Her narrow frame fell to the left, so suddenly that I didn’t catch her as she hit the floor. Celeste crashed onto her side. Her ribcage fluttered up and down.
“Call a vet please. Please.”
She made several calls, all in German. I realized there was no computer in the apartment. No Google. Such disregard for modernity seemed vastly irresponsible, like refusing to get your flu shots or shitting in a bucket rather than paying for running water. I tried the Internet on my phone, but was confronted by only one bar of signal and no 3G. Eventually, Yukiko grabbed a piece of paper and, phone jammed between shoulder and ear, sketched out a primitive map. She hung up. I tried to take the map from her, but she said, “I’m coming. The drivers, not all of them speak English. Most are from Albania. They’re still learning German.”
I carried Celeste to the cab, swaddled in one of Yukiko’s frayed towels. Where were the wise men to bless us? I laughed to myself in a high panic-stricken giggle. Insane-sounding, distinctly unmanly. Yukiko ignored this. Sitting down, I realized the towel itself was slightly damp. I didn’t care that it pressed against my pants, but it couldn’t have been good for Celeste so I unwrapped her. Gently, gently running my hands over her bird-like ribs to warm her.
Taxiing past an uglier part of town, I began to tell my mother all about Celeste in a great slobber of information. It wasn’t so much that I cared about her reaction, as that each word carried me through to the next second without panicking. Brutalist concrete towers squatted down on all sides. Occasionally, an old facade broke through, paint cracked and stained. As I talked, summing up my history wit
h the cat, my palms lay across Celeste’s side so I could feel her breath.
I hadn’t meant to talk about fucking Annika. I hadn’t told any of my friends back in New York. If Dad had been alive, I’d have been too ashamed to say anything. But I told Yukiko and she nodded. Had she cheated on my father, I wondered again. As if the solution could be found in bone structure, I examined her face looking for my own. I’d always known I had her eyes. White people just didn’t have eyes like mine. But I hadn’t realized that the high, flat cheekbones were also hers, or that the slight asymmetry of my eyebrows—the left had an up-tilt—was genetic. Inherited inconsistency.
18.
Berlin, October 2016 / New York 2007
The empty cage slid along my mother’s lap as the cab turned a sharp corner.
“And now Mimi isn’t picking up the phone.”
“So you will?”
“No. Well, yes. Maybe.” I explained that Celeste was my plumb line, that she told me where gravity was. “It’s not fair to ask me to murder her.”
She nodded. “It isn’t. But what do you choose? Wife or cat? Cat or baby?”
She pronounced cat, wife, or baby calmly, as if she were offering me tea or coffee.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Is it?” She was smiling.
“But I faint.”
“So you’ll faint.”
“Grown men don’t faint,” I said.
Harmless Like You Page 23
