Face

by Aimee Liu

  “Yes,” he said finally. “I believe I have talent. Not the same as a great painter, of course, but I have created something worthwhile, a kind of a world. With beauty and uncertainty, intelligence. Anxiety. Age and youth.”

  He turned to face me, and I noticed how his pants, impeccably tailored though they were, hung slack from his narrow waist to his shoes as if there were nothing inside.

  Suddenly all sympathy, all tolerance, evaporated in the recognition of this old, pathetic man as an enemy. I remembered the one and only other time I’d seen him, on a blazing hot day in Chinatown. Around the same time that my mother redecorated her bedroom.

  He’d had his driver pull up to the curb outside our apartment, and Henry and I watched from the doorway as Mum slid into the car—a silver Bentley with heavily tinted windows. She wore a white suit with a miniskirt that rode up her thigh as she sank back into the seat. She waved goodbye and, in that split second, I froze on her one naked reaching hand, her stockinged calf ending in a pale pink heel and, beyond, the dim outline of a man’s pant leg. I couldn’t see his face.

  Now, as I caught Foucault’s purple gaze, what I saw instead were those legs. His. Hers. Splitting like wishbones.

  The old man turned, stroking his chin. “Do you agree, Maibelle? Do you think it takes talent to develop one of the most important galleries in New York?”

  Far from arrogance, he was begging for precisely the approval and encouragement my mother had sent me to collect from him. He can make the kind of promises only the very rich are equipped to keep, she’d once told me. But she had never spelled out what he expected in return.

  “Yes, Mr. Foucault.” My voice sounded as if I were talking through a tin can. I’d ventured into my mother’s world here, crossed a forbidden line. He was a deal she’d made for herself. A bargain with the devil maybe, but not my enemy. I needed to cross back.

  “It does require talent,” I said. “Someone with talent.”

  I opened the door. People turned, looked, mouthed his name, and moved toward us. A wave of disgust swept over me. I let the chosen flood in and wash me out.

  When I reached the bottom of the long, curling staircase, I caught sight of Henry and Coralie in the open doorway to the street. My brother had the fingers of one hand wrapped decisively around her arm, the other spanning her narrow waist.

  I shivered, unable to get the image of those parting legs out of my mind. And yet, there was my mother, working the room with the quiet efficiency of an imperial courtesan. Gracious. Confident. Seemingly untouchable. She had plans for me. Always had.

  In high school, I took her promises of magic and enlightenment so to heart that I honestly believed I’d captured that feeling she described, of touching through a single image. As photographer for the yearbook I shot the basketball team doing the cancan, and the expression of astonished joy and need on Louis Havemeyer’s face was such that no one who looked carefully at that photograph was surprised when Louis became the first boy in our school to bring a male date to his senior prom. I took a photograph of Mario Versacci that was divided like a diptych, one side with him curled inside his locker, the other his open locker door wallpapered with Hustler and Penthouse covers. I read in the newspaper a few years later that Mario was arrested in a single-occupancy hotel with the body of a prostitute. Then there was the close-up of Romeo and Juliet after the senior play—backstage and crotch-to-crotch in full makeup. That shot circulated and the offending couple and I were suspended from school for a week, but they got married and moved to Atlanta, had two kids, and continued to appear in community theater productions, so there was a lot of truth to that frame, too. Truth but not yet Art, Mum warned me.

  Art, I learned from my college professors, combined Ideas with Intention into Images with Impact. I translated that to mean gimmickry, and steered carefully around the human form until my senior year. Then I spent months on a wall-sized mosaic of one hundred forty-four separate photographs of disconnected body parts. The bottom row consisted of lashes blown up so big they looked like wrought-iron prongs. I called the piece Oriental I.

  The entire photography department assumed my work somehow derived from Dad, that he was grooming me to be his successor. When he appeared for the opening of my graduation show, the faculty buzz turned up so fast that he only stayed ten minutes. It was ten minutes too long for us both, especially after Mum failed to realize that Oriental I, the centerpiece of my show, was a self-portrait. It’s never occurred to her that she doesn’t know everything worth knowing about my work. For that matter, about me.

  The storage cabinets in the third-floor office have multiplied since I played there as a child. It’s absurd to think she’d restore the secret compartments, but I don’t know how else to begin. I search two or three cabinets without luck. On the third I find a lever.

  The drawer pops just as I remember. I pull it slowly, cautiously, half expecting something to jump out. The drawer is packed tight with enveloped prints. I take them one after another and search, if not for exact images, then for a sense of time and place, my father’s irony or sorrow.

  But the hidden pictures are not my father’s. Some are famous. I recognize an Edward Weston nude and a Paul Strand photo of shadows. Most are experimental frames by Mum’s protégés Dupriest and Sazaroff. I close the drawer and search another three cabinets, find another secret cache. Still no sign of Dad’s work.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  My mother’s sudden intrusion makes me jump. My thoughts scramble to get into line. I stare at the prints spread out on the floor and the images fold into the picture of her standing, one hand on the knob, just as she did the last time.

  “You irritated him.” Her voice trembles with an emotion I take for anger. Then I find her eyes and realize it is disappointment. What she wants me to think is disappointment.

  “Where are they?”

  “Maibelle?” She steps into the room and quietly shuts the door. I am aware of both of us breathing in a small closed space.

  “Dad’s photographs.”

  “What photographs, darling?”

  “Dammit, Mum. I know! Stop lying to me. I know I saw them.”

  She clenches her arms across her chest and squints at the ceiling. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was going to cry. But I know better. I’m the one who’s holding back tears.

  “I’ve had nightmares about those pictures for years. You said I never saw them. I thought I was crazy. You’ve got to let me see them.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you think. Let me see them!”

  I sound like a child. A whining brat. That’s how she looks at me. She’s the mother who knows better. I am the child.

  I stand up. Now I look down on her.

  “All right, Maibelle.” Her arms float down by her sides. Her voice is so quiet, so reserved, I feel as if I’m coated in glass. If I move, I will shatter. This, too, will be a nightmare.

  But no, she flips open a wall cupboard, reaches inside, glances at me over her shoulder. There’s a panel at the back, a safe behind that. She spins the knob quickly, and it makes a sound like tumbling dice. She removes a single handful of papers and closes the safe, the panel, the cupboard.

  A packet of glassine envelopes. That’s what she hands me. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from speaking. She hangs on a second too long, so I feel as if I’m tugging them from her grasp, but finally she lets go.

  Now, in my mother’s gallery, which is not really my mother’s, I look down at my father’s photographs, which are not really my father’s. Dead bodies float like an armada down the center of a river. Homes split like doll houses after a bombing. Grossly fat dogs feast on human corpses. I think of the glass-eyed woman in Chinatown who was raped and widowed in Nanking. The terms of her survival. My vision starts to blur. And I begin to understand.

  My father saw too much.

  These images could turn you to stone. That’s the danger my fa
ther warned me about. Yet when I come to a one-legged baby trying to crawl to her mother’s crushed body, the tears flood my face so suddenly I have to turn away to protect the photograph.

  The next print is the portrait of a ghost. Just a spindly old scholar in a crowd of young men, but their arms outstretch as if to catch the elder’s dying breath. Their bodies strain with that reaching, and in each of their eyes, I see the reflection of my father’s dread. As he watches the world looking back at him.

  “They’re incredible, aren’t they?”

  I’d all but forgotten my mother, lurking over my shoulder. Now the muted ecstasy in her voice makes me shudder.

  “What do you mean, incredible?”

  “But you must see what a consummate artist he was.”

  I see an elderly black-jacketed Chinese woman bent from the waist before an iron fence. She is kissing a white toddler, impeccably dressed in a sailor’s suit, on the other side. They are turned sideways so you can see her lips meeting his cheek between the bars. Any second now his hat, with its pompon and trailing ribbon, will fly away. He will no doubt try to run after it, but he won’t run fast enough, and she won’t be there to help him. He will cry. Behind them, oblivious white couples in handsome Western fashions stroll along manicured lanes of a park. In the foreground a sign reads “No dogs or Chinese.”

  I think of my father bent over his bits of wire and plastic, his chicken-scratch sketches and patent bulletins. The scenes that must be playing in his mind, awake, asleep. That he can’t escape.

  Like this next photograph, one that was in my teacher’s collection. One I’d remembered. The tall blond man, hands cupped around a cigarette, his lips wound into a smirk, eyes as callused as fists not even seeming to notice that wailing band of mourners with their headless mortal cargo. It’s the tall blond man, much more than the body, that sends a thrill of pain up my spine.

  I turn it over. My father’s name. 1947. It’s the last picture in the packet.

  “Where are the rest? You have more of Dad’s work. I know. I remember.”

  She crouches beside me and the air swims with Chanel No. 9, the fragrance she adopted after my father’s killing in bottle tops. She said it smelled expensive. It affects me like smelling salts.

  “Somewhere safe.”

  “Safe.” I take in the secret drawers, the concealed wall safe. My mother’s war room.

  “You’ve sold out, haven’t you? You’ve sold Dad out.”

  My mother responds swiftly, with the same efficiency she applies to running the gallery. She slaps me. It is the first time she’s ever done this, and it hurts, but it doesn’t stop me.

  “What are you and Foucault planning, anyway?”

  As quickly as the anger flooded her it seems to ease away. She clasps her hands. Tight white patches appear where her knees press against her nylons.

  “Gerard has no idea this portfolio exists, Maibelle.”

  “You really expect me to believe you’ve hidden this from him all these years?”

  “He never checks inventory lists. He—well, he trusts me.”

  “That’s a cute way to put it. You’re using each other. You encourage me to use him. You call that trust?”

  “Everyone uses each other, Maibelle. Children use parents. Parents use children. Husbands use wives, believe you me. In business you take it for granted. Trust isn’t the same thing, but it’s a requirement. It’s hard to use people unless they trust you.”

  This is my mother, I remind myself. She gave birth to me. She let me slide into her bed when I was a little child. She gave me my first camera and encouraged me to strive for perfection. She lied to me. She cheated on my father.

  “I need to know something.”

  She stands, smooths her skirt. “What?”

  “How you met Foucault. How you got this job.”

  She doesn’t answer right away. I wonder if at last I’ve hit some nerve that may force her to tell me the truth. When she speaks, her voice is flat.

  “I didn’t get the job. Joe did. We’d just married and he was about to go off to China. One of the editors he worked with at Life had us to a party with Foucault. Joe hated him on sight, but when Gerard said he needed someone to help him launch his New York gallery, Joe saw it as something to keep me occupied while he was gone. The two of them worked out the terms, salary, benefits.”

  She brushes her hands together as if to clean them off.

  I focus on the eyes of the child in the sailor suit. Fine curved lines fringed with dark lashes. They are closed.

  “Come on,” she says. “None of this has to do with you.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “Because Gerard can help your career.”

  “Like he has yours?”

  She stiffens. “I’m not an artist, Maibelle. He’s been very decent to me.”

  She might be a poor widow talking about the town banker who doles out silver dollars at Christmas. She might still be lying through her teeth.

  “Then why these? Why do this to him—to Dad?”

  She smiles. “Let’s just say that Gerard’s idea of trust and mine are not exactly the same. The photographs settle the score. They make me happy and that makes him happy. Indirectly.”

  “You’ve had Dad’s pictures stashed in here for twenty years. Nobody sees them. Nobody buys them. Who are you fooling?”

  “One day—” Her voice catches sloppily. “I’ll have my own gallery. The opening show—you’ll see, when Joe Chung’s photographs reappear they won’t just be treated as art. They’ll be news. And can you imagine how the press will eat it up when they find out his daughter’s work is hanging alongside!”

  So. After all is said and done I can ride Dad’s ball and chain as he’s dragged back into the limelight. Twenty years she’s been plotting this. Maybe more. That little boy is never going to make it out between those iron bars.

  “A lot of time has passed, Maibelle. The world is changing, and so is Joe. One of these days he’ll want to be recognized for what he’s accomplished. I know that, and I intend to be ready.”

  “Why did you lie to me all those years?”

  Her breath comes in soft gasps. I realize she’s trying to laugh. I grab her by the shoulders and shake. Hard. The way I want someone to shake me.

  “Why!”

  She looks up at me with a sharp, crooked smile. “You were too little to trust. You’d have told him.”

  I let her go. “I still might.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “I want to see the rest of Dad’s pictures.”

  “No.”

  “What difference does it make now?”

  Her voice drops to a whisper. “I still can’t trust you.”

  It was a dare. She couldn’t stop me. She wouldn’t risk alerting everyone downstairs. Foucault. But I feel as if I’ve hit a dead end. I’ve exposed my mother’s secret, not mine. The pictures might appear in my dreams, but the nightmares aren’t about them.

  “He’ll never forgive you, you know.”

  She picks up the last photograph in the pile beside me. A young boy cradling a dove. His head is bent so you can’t see his face, just his tiny, emaciated body deep in a bombed-out crater.

  My mother sighs and looks at me. “All I’m waiting for now is you, Maibelle.”

  No dogs or Chinese.

  A fancy lady with a thick German accent had visited Li’s store. She wore a green velvet suit, diamonds in her ears, and though she must have been as old as my father, her skin had the smooth, tender look that comes with years of facials.

  “It is like a miracle to find you,” she said. “What will Mama say when she sees! All the way from Bubbling Well road…” She shook her head in amazement, staring at a brocaded love seat.

  “Please.” Lao Li lowered his eyes. “You say hello for me.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course.” The lady gave him a handful of bills.

  “Xie-xie ni,” he said. “Xie-xie.”

  “Xie-xie,” she r
eplied, delighted. “Yes. Xie-xie ni!”

  “You knew her in China?” I asked after she was gone.

  Lao Li raised his hands and dropped them. “She was a little girl. I knew her mother. Very beautiful lady. Very beautiful.”

  Then he winked at me in a way that said he had confided a naughty secret, and in this wink I saw that, before the cobwebs and lizard’s hands, when his hair was still shiny black, he must have been a terrible ladies’ man. Terrible not in the sense of evil, for, despite my first impression, I could not now imagine Lao Li as being at all bad or dangerous, but in the sense of a holy terror. My mother called such men Hairbreadth Harrys.

  A Chinese Hairbreadth Harry. The thought made me burst out laughing.

  “What is so funny?”

  “You’re funny.”

  “I am not funny. I am old.”

  “You really did like the ladies.”

  “Never too old to like ladies.” He winked again. “And never too young to like boys, I think.”

  I made a face at him and changed the subject. “Tell me about China. Not ancient stories, you know. Your life. You lived in Shanghai, right? Tell me about Shanghai.”

  “Ai ya, your papa can tell you about that.”

  “But he never says anything about it.”

  “I think it is young person’s duty to ask about old person’s life, and it is old person’s duty to tell about old times. You know. Otherwise, only ghosts know truth.”

  “So, tell me what Shanghai was like.”

  He thought for a moment. “That lady who is just here, you know? That lady live in big big house, many rooms, many servants. Her papa was officer in German navy. They had parties all night—ate whole cows, whole pigs. All around the sky light up with their dancing.” He wiggled his fingers high and wide.

  “Did you go to these parties?”

  “I?” Li snorted. “No. Foreigners only at these parties. Foreigners only in parks. In clubs. Swimming pool. Signs say, ‘No dogs or Chinese allowed.’”

  “But it was your country!”

  “You ask about Shanghai in my time. That Shanghai my time. American, English, French, Russian, Italian, German—and Japanese—own whole city. Chinese leaders take bribe money, give foreigners whatever they ask. Chinese people work for foreigners, not for China.”