by Aimee Liu
In sweatshops I photograph babies in baskets, their mothers zipping endless strips of denim through deafening sewing machines. In a shirt-press factory, men stripped to the waist become shadows in burning fog. In basement meat lockers pale, spindly torsos disappear beneath slabs of pork or beef twice their size, the butchers’ only visible complaint the curl of their breath in the bitter cold air.
The real complaint lies in their common plan. Twelve or more hours a day at a dollar or two an hour. They save. One day they, too, will have enough to follow their ABC cousins and buy a nice house out in Queens.
Only Tommy and I are fool enough to come back to Chinatown by choice. For the story. The pictures. Some bastardization of memory that helps keep the nightmares at bay. My dreams have stopped cold. I am getting warmer.
It’s the pictures. There are moments when I imagine my father’s camera pulsing with the images it’s recording, as if it’s happy to be back in action. As if there really is a connection between Dad’s work and mine. I try to think and not think about his photographs, let the fact of his accomplishment inform my choices without directing them, but his images and his choice to destroy them remain at the back of my thoughts. I can’t decide if they’re an invitation or a warning. I believe they are important.
I’ve always considered the gallery opening to be the art world’s own exquisite form of torture. I realized as a child, when Mum used to drag me along “for the exposure,” that hardly anyone at an opening bothers to look at the work on the walls. The reason people attend is to acquire, build, or flaunt social power. And social power within the rarefied world of artists and collectors is ultimately more important than talent in determining status and success. By the time I was fourteen I understood that social power was not something I was capable of developing, even if I wanted to. That was the year I threw up on Mr, Uelsmann’s photograph (a purely unintentional assault on one of my mother’s most revered photographic tricksters) and made Mum promise not to invite me to any more openings.
After breaking this promise last month she did not force me to think about it further. No phone calls. No invitations to lunch. No more coy requests for me to escort her through the badlands of Harlem. And, what with the trips back to Chinatown and the start of Christmas catalog work for Noble, I managed to put the whole matter out of my head, would perhaps have forgotten all about it if my brother hadn’t called.
“You know anything about Foucault’s new mistress?”
“Didn’t know he had one.”
“French. Early twenties. A brunette Deneuve.”
“So Mum says, I take it.”
“Well, then, you going to this opening next week?”
“Hadn’t planned to.”
He hummed the opening bar of the Twilight Zone theme. “There’s intrigue afoot.”
“I suppose you’re the linchpin?”
“You don’t need to sound so superior. She’s been trying to set you up ever since you got back to New York.”
“And I’ve been fending her off. Anyway, that’s about work.”
“I have a feeling this is, too. So. You coming?”
It was that fast. One second I was bantering with my brother, the next I was exposing a lie. A big one. About work.
The phrase stuck, repeated. My mother’s work. My father’s. A lie that spanned my entire life.
“Henry, have you ever seen any of Dad’s photographs?”
“Huh?”
“His work. You know? Photojournalism. Combat photog?”
“Course not. He destroyed it all before we were born, didn’t he?”
“Far as you know, Mum didn’t have any of his pictures?”
“Not that she ever told me. What’s this got to do with the opening?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. I’ll see you there.”
It was a Ladies’ Day over twenty-two years ago. I couldn’t have been much more than four. This was before Mum encouraged me to explore, said I could only look, not touch, when I came to the gallery. But this day I was up in the third-floor storage room alone and my crayon rolled under a chest, and as I reached for it my hand tripped a hidden latch. A secret drawer popped open.
I knew I shouldn’t. I should just close the drawer. Maybe if I asked about it, Mum would show me later. But it was too tempting. This was a secret drawer with hidden pictures. Something about them had to be special. And forbidden.
Ever so carefully, I lifted the layer of tissue that covered the stack and began to look through a set of black-and-white photographs my mother had never displayed. The white man with the bleeding black baby. The lady with the pig. The tall blond man looking as though he didn’t even notice that headless body and all those screaming Chinese men. Children dressed in rags on a street littered with party hats. A city turned into a war zone. The makings of a nightmare.
I was staring at a pagoda like the Chinatown phone booth, only much, much bigger. I had to look close to understand and when I did I cried out loud. From those pretty, ornate roofs dangled bodies. Men’s naked bodies.
My mother walked into the room.
I pulled in my hands and backed away from the pictures. But she wasn’t even angry.
“What do you think?”
I expected her to punish me. I couldn’t answer.
“Do you like them?”
I nodded.
“How much?”
“A lot?”
“More than that?” She pointed to a photograph on the wall, of two midgets emerging from a gorilla suit.
I nodded cautiously.
“Why?” she said.
“I just do.”
And then, faster than I could move away, she grabbed me. But she still didn’t shake or spank me. She hugged me. “It’s no wonder you like these pictures. Your father took them. They’re fabulous. And they’re just some of the shots that made him famous… But you mustn’t let him—or anyone—know I have these.”
“Why? What would he do?”
“Oh…” She made an ugly face and shook her head so her voice quivered. “Something low-down and mean, I’m sure. You know, he’s half magic, don’t you?”
“He is! Really, Mum?”
She sighed and let me go. “No, not really. But I mean it about not telling him. If he gets wind of these prints, he’ll destroy them, the way he did all the others.”
She checked to see that the photographs were lying straight and flat, pushed in the drawer so the lock snapped. Then she twisted around and took both my hands, flipped them over as if reading my palms. Her fingers were cold and long around mine. She squatted lower to look me straight in the eye. She had her serious face on.
“You just forget you ever saw these pictures, Maibee.”
“But what are you hiding them for?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out. But someday, not now. Not for a long time.”
She never mentioned those hidden pictures again and the next time I tried to find them there was no secret drawer. When I asked about it, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about, it must have been something I dreamed. After I started school our Ladies’ Days grew less and less frequent, finally ended altogether. By then I had forgotten.
Though it was barely six o’clock when I arrived, the gallery was already full, bodies three-deep by the bar that had been set up across from the staircase. From the center of the room came frequent, social shrieks, many in elaborate foreign accents. It was a typical New York gallery opening except, instead of the usual assortment of slouching artists and trendy middle-aged collectors, tonight’s crowd consisted of what Henry calls end users. Not the people who make art or broker sales, but the ones in whose homes the procured products hang.
They were, for the most part, over fifty, elaborately coiffed, perfectly manicured, and expensively (though not always tastefully) dressed in soft pastels. The women carried largish purses, the men small ones, and both favored a certain weight in both perfume and jewelry. I suspected that Elizabeth
and the Queen Mum would have felt right at home.
The guest list for tonight’s event was dictated by the paintings concealed behind the bodies. Over the past twenty years Mum has gradually shifted the New York gallery’s main emphasis from traditional surrealism to works by newer artists, including her photographers, whom she’s selected, cultivated, and persuaded Foucault to buy. For the past few years the balance sheet has left the old man no choice but to go along with Mum’s picks, but he insists on one annual show of the surrealist work that he continues to buy himself. To this opening only an elite group handpicked by Foucault—the end users—are invited. My mother prefers to call them the living dead. They turn out not because they are particularly fond of surrealism themselves, but because Foucault is a little like a geriatric Gatsby, a largely invisible presence who has managed, against all the art world’s conventional rules, to retain both great wealth and mystique. People come on the chance that he will make an appearance, which he does, at random and usually without notice, every few years.
Tonight as I entered I heard his name whispered, caught several women craning their heads in search of him. I hoped he’d pull one of his infamous no-shows. Then I could give my mother the satisfaction of my appearance without paying her price. Though that might make it more difficult for me to accomplish what I’d come to do.
I was standing in line by the bar when I spotted her across the room, next to a Redon portrait of a man with flowers for hair. She wore a black Dior cocktail dress that my father bought years ago at the St. Barnabas Church thrift shop. I remembered because she said it was the one bargain he’d ever found that really had never been used. He told her it made her look like Audrey Hepburn. Which was true, then and now.
She checked her watch, peered over my head, but didn’t see me. A tall, elegantly dressed man spoke to her, and for an instant I thought he might be Foucault, but since no one else paid him any attention, I decided he must be a customer. She smiled at him, tossed her head, and dipped her lashes.
Something in her expression made me think of the spring she redecorated her and my father’s bedroom. Draped striped chintz over the windows, laid a matching throw rug over the old black carpet, and hung two Tchelitchew lithographs of barren landscapes to “unify” the room. She pushed the twin beds together and covered them with a single king-size spread.
“I am sick to death of patterning my life after Rob and Laura Petrie,” she said. “Dick Van Dyke may worry about what umpteen million viewers think when he goes to sleep in the same room as Mary Tyler Moore, but your father and I don’t have that problem and it’s high time we stopped conducting our married life as if we did!”
Later that week I found a two-volume Marital Companion wedged, spine backward, on Mum’s bookshelf. Henry, who had already read it cover-to-cover, said Mum was trying to save her marriage through sex. Too embarrassed to actually read the book, I did leaf through it and was relieved it had no pictures. I preferred to think of Mum and Dad swirling around the dance floor at the Rainbow Room. What was wrong with separate beds?
Perhaps it was a credit to my mother’s plan that I walked in on them for the first and only time just a few days after she’d finished redecorating. On a Sunday morning. Not that early. I’d been watching TV, had seen a machine that sliced and diced and creamed and frappéed and looked exactly like one on my father’s drawing board. I thought maybe Dad had sold the idea and was about to make a million dollars (I’ assumed that any product advertised on TV must be worth millions of dollars to its inventor), or that someone had stolen his idea and he’d have to sue to get it back. In either case, I thought it worth waking him to see the commercial.
The door was open a crack. Silence within. The first thing I noticed was my father’s side of the bed—empty. The second was the mountain of sheets loaded up on my mother’s side. Nothing moved. No one made a sound. All I could see was my father’s hair, black on my mother’s white pillow.
I backed out and shut the door, soundless and tight, vowed never to enter that bedroom again when both of them were in there.
The advertised gizmo went clean out of my head until the next time I saw it on TV, nearly a month later, while Dad was sitting safely next to me. He said the device was neither a theft nor a bonanza but only the usual competition.
“Can I help you?” The bartender looked as if he’d been waiting awhile.
“Oh. Wine, I guess.” I glanced at my mother, still chatting with the elegant man. She lifted her glass possessively and sipped. Red liquid. Red stain from her lipstick on the edge. The bartender handed me my wine and looked to the person behind me.
The liquid in my glass was the color of bleach. I left it on the corner of the bar and moved against the wall. Tanguy on one side, Ernst on the other. New old art, as Mum once called it.
She turned her head and caught my eye, immediately broke off her conversation and came over.
“Why are you just standing here?”
“I was admiring the work. No one else is.”
“These people acquire art. They don’t look at it.”
She broke off to greet a mildly desiccated couple with a gracious-hostess smile. They reciprocated, appraised me in one querulous glance, and moved on.
“Is Henry here yet?”
She nodded through a break in the crowd. Across the room my brother was leaning over a life-sized Madame Alexander doll.
“Looks like true love.”
“I hope so. Then he can move in with her.”
“He’s back with you again?”
She rolled her eyes.
“I’ve heard some small towns are buying their homeless people oneway tickets to California. He could stake his claim in Silicon Valley.”
“I’m afraid he’s already staked his claim on West Ninetieth Street. But if he sticks to Coralie, he might expand his territory to France.”
“Henry told me Foucault has a new girl. That her?”
But more people were arriving, and she began to get the edgy, officious look that meant she was feeling compromised.
“Come,” she said. “Come meet Gerard.”
“That’s the other half of your plan, isn’t it?”
She scooped her tongue around the front of her teeth. “You didn’t come just to look at the paintings, did you?”
“No,” I said. “Not exactly.”
Gerard Foucault was hiding in the back office. Perched on the edge of Mum’s huge walnut desk (which was really, of course, his own), he did indeed look like a screech owl. The requisite hooked beak and protruding eyes, bushy white eyebrows, and colorless hair that sprouted in two wild tufts on either side of a pale scalp dome. But in spite of his ramrod posture and pin-striped suit, I was surprised to feel a stab of sympathy. The image of this old bird coupling with the little cover girl outside was as pathetic as it was grotesque.
My mother made the introductions and asked Foucault if there was anything he needed, to which he gave an ambiguous shrug. She smoothed her dress down over her hips, threw me an encouraging glance, and strode back outside.
“Please be seated.” Foucault indicated an overstuffed armchair opposite the desk.
I sat.
His gaze roamed the Delvaux, Roy, and De Chirico paintings that, at his insistence, adorned the office walls. It was the gaze of a jealous child checking to see that no one had played with his toys.
“Your mother tells me you have great talent.” He pronounced mother “moth-her.”
“Everyone has talent. The trick is to figure out how to use it.”
The great tufts lifted, and for the first time, he looked directly at me. His eyes were a queer purplish color, like eggplant.
“You are an optimist,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“To think that everyone has talent. That is the most sublime optimism I know.”
“I didn’t say genius. Talent is more like potential. We all have it, but most of us squander it. Or run from it.”
�
�That is you?”
“Running?”
“From your own potential.”
Potency-al. It was as if this conversation were a series of trapdoors, and every time I opened my mouth, another door shut behind me. I didn’t answer.
“De Chirico knew about terror,” he said. “All the surrealists did. They used it to focus their talent. You look at a Magritte, you enter another world full of ideas and emotions and humor. You look at some of these new paintings, what do you enter? Nothing! A white square. Drips. Dots. Pencil marks on a blank wall. Bah! They have taken art and reduced it to bullsheet.”
He eased himself off the desk, walked over to a Delvaux painting of multiple dead-eyed girls who reminded me of the Stepford Wives.
“Some people would say that painting pictures of nightmares is a form of bullshit.”
He spun around. “You know what is my favorite book in the world? Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, Through the Looking-Glass. Good art should be like a magic looking glass that pulls you inside, to a place where you will discover things you never could have guessed. A place beyond nightmares. No?”
“A place where it’s easy to lie.” What I remembered of my father’s work took me to the heart of his nightmares as well as my own. They were not representations. They did not interpret or try to tell more than the truth. That they did not go “beyond” was a testament to their accomplishment. They did not lie.
“People who have talent can create such worlds. You think everyone has talent? If you do, my dear, I would certainly consider you to be an optimist. Or a fool.”
Dad used to say he’d been a fool.
“What about you?” I asked. “Do you have that kind of talent, Gerard?”
Foucault ignored both the archness and the familiarity of my question. He casually strolled about the office picking up a paperweight here, straightening a painting there. When he arrived at the door to the gallery, he stopped and stared as if he could see through it.
