Face

by Aimee Liu

  I must be starting to see. Harriet hasn’t called the police on me in months, and my recurrent nightmares have stopped. These new dreams about Johnny and Marge are disturbing, but I wake up quickly, before the terror builds. No screaming or crying, just a quietly pounding heart. Once or twice I’ve actually tried sleeping with the lights out and made it through to morning.

  The why is harder to figure. I’m at last allowing myself to accept—even embrace—these memories of Li and Johnny, Johnny’s death; could that be the miracle cure? Or is it that I’ve finally disproven my falling dream and made peace with the White Witch? I have to accept the possibility that I may never know.

  Anna’s curious letter remains another mystery. Given my sister’s fits and starts, anything is possible, but I persist in believing Henry must somehow have let my secret slip and she read into it more than was warranted.

  Aside from my father’s refusal to look at my work, the rest of the family front has been quiet. With Foucault—and now Coralie—back in Europe, my mother is channeling her energy into motivating Henry toward an apartment and job. She’s giving me the silent treatment, for which I am truly grateful. If she knew of my work with Tai, she’d be all over me. She’d demand to view the contacts, recommend cropping, which to enlarge, which negatives to burn and which to print as Delong-sized monoliths. She’d go on about how she “sees” the exhibit. Or else she’d lay them all quietly aside and say with that restrained quaver in her voice that it’s good I’ve finally started working again, and I’d spend the rest of the month in a funk. Because as disgusting as I consider my mother’s betrayal of Dad, as willing as I am to go behind her back to seek his reviews, I still dread Mum’s criticism. Especially now, when I genuinely believe my work is strong and getting better.

  I can say that with some assurance, because I’m finally developing the reams of film I’ve collected over these weeks. Of course, I’ve been in the darkroom all along printing up my Noble work, but I kept putting off the Chinatown footage. Not wanting to face the potential ghosts, I suppose. Not wanting to break Tai’s faith. Or my parents’.

  But now I’ve developed it all, from those first shots of the bus protest to the footage I took this morning of gong xi fang, tenement rooms divided by sheets into cubbyholes where as many as fifteen men sleep like caged mice in apartments smaller than mine. The contacts hang from clothespins, still glistening from the bath, and even in this miniature format some frames—the pinch-faced men and women with downcast eyes—make me want to burn the lot. But others, in which the subjects have held on to their dignity, grant me a reprieve. The mahjongg queen in the Mets sweatshirt flashing her mountainous winnings. Two skinny young men with their pants rolled up, feet clad in farmer’s sandals, like eager novitiates at the Division Street Off-Track Betting Parlor. Lin Cheng’s round, demonic laugh (it would make a wonderful cookbook cover) and Tai, with his handsome face halved into shadow and light. The others I’ve sneaked of him, squatting beside a cluster of girls playing a game with chalk and pebbles, or trading jokes with sidewalk vendors amid cymbal-clapping pandas and stuffed pink dogs.

  I’m experienced enough to know that Tai’s photogenic features are not the only reason his pictures are turning out right. It’s been almost three months since Jed Moffitt claimed the honor of being my last affair.

  I slide a negative of Tai taking his stage bow into the carrier and turn on the enlarger. I adjust knobs until his image fills the easel. A strong-featured face even in normal light, its contours leap upward in the glow of the stage lanterns. I fiddle with the focus, softening the lines of his chin and jaw. His eyes seem to widen, his mouth to move. The silk banners stretch sideways behind him in a blur. His hair slips into his eyes, disturbed by the removal of his old man’s mask, which he holds like a shield in front of his chest.

  I was a child when I posed Tai and Johnny Madison as adversaries and gave Johnny the winning hand. That must be why it’s so hard to accept what I feel for Tai as desire, but I think of him. I linger on him.

  I remember things about him that I can’t account for: the smile that seems to flicker on his lips; the way he rubs the tips of his thumbs together when he’s thinking, or casually tosses one leg over the other when sitting to hear a story. That he works best at five in the morning and would be a Quaker if he chose any religion, because the Quakers really do practice nonviolence. I think of the low, gentle wash of his voice as he told me these things. I’ve spent more time with Tai than I have with any lover, and yet the moments of intimacy have been only tentative and fleeting.

  I snap off the light, place a sheet of paper on the easel. His face reappears and I make my decision.

  When I invited him to my apartment to view the test prints, I half expected him to make some lewd remark: “Is that like coming up to see your etchings?” He didn’t. He never would have, anyway. But that was my projection.

  We had spent the last two hours at a day-care center on Henry Street listening to children’s tales of harrowing border crossings and impoverished refugee camps. “Let’s walk,” was all Tai said.

  So we walked, although the sky had the color and texture of an ocean storm. Gusts of wind sent awnings rippling in waves, and as we reached Houston Street the pent-up rain let loose a downpour. We had no rain gear, not even jackets, as it had been hot and muggy earlier. All around us people were retreating into doorways for shelter, but without giving the matter any real thought I reached over and tagged Tai’s hand.

  “You’re on!” I shouted, running.

  It was a lunatic move. We were each carrying a heavy burden of equipment. At every corner cars and buses lurched with spastic imprecision, and the downpour intermittently gave way to hailstones that rolled like marbles. But once possessed by the competitive impulse, I was its captive. I heard the horns and screeching tires from underwater. I felt the rain thick in my eyes, my clothes plastered against my body, but I felt more strongly Tai’s presence behind me closing in tighter, harder, threatening to overtake and tackle me. What had started as a game acquired an edge of panic.

  I ran head down, arms stroking the air like mad fish fins for block after block, never looking back. By the time I finally turned the last corner I was deafened by the roar of my own breath.

  He touched my shoulder before I could get the key into the lock. I jumped as if he’d stabbed me.

  “You won, Maibelle.”

  I was panting too hard to talk. He didn’t even sound winded. I forced the key and pushed the door, but he held me from moving forward.

  “Someday,” he said to the back of my neck, “I’d like to know what that was all about.”

  There was a rushing sound above us, rhythmic thumps of feet bounding down the stairs. Larraine Moseley burst into the light. Her pink jersey catsuit showed, skintight, through a transparent slicker.

  “Oh, gee. Hi!” She came to an abrupt halt at the sight of Tai and flashed me a wide-eyed grin. “God, dontcha just love this weather!” And with that, she bounced down the steps to the street and a waiting cab.

  I reached up and removed Tai’s hand from my shoulder. Moments later we stood laughing in front of the mirror in my apartment.

  “We look like drowned muskrats.”

  “Not drowned. Just soggy.” He stared at me in the mirror for a long moment. In the reflection we were touching. “Your teeth are chattering, Mei-bi. Better get into some dry clothes.”

  Instead I went searching for towels and a pair of pants and T-shirt that Henry had left behind. I expected to find Tai snooping among my things when I returned (in his place, I’d have wanted to spy), but he was staring out the window.

  “Look.”

  I followed his gaze through the streaming glass to Greenwich Avenue. In the downpour the beams of headlights quivered like shafts of silver, and the storefronts had the watery glow of aquariums. Between these pockets of light the darkness was bleak and sinister with the trees in the old lady’s garden rising like giant toadstools.

  I handed Ta
i the towels. “Weather does strange things, doesn’t it? In college I took a series of photographs of a children’s jungle gym after a blizzard. First thick and soft, all padded with snow. Then draped with icicles. After it rained and froze again, it looked like glass tubing. The thing was solid steel but it was as if the weather kept trying to turn it into something else.”

  Tai was silent a moment rubbing his hair until it stood in soft points all over his head. The movement was so abrupt and vigorous that I regretted everything I’d just said. How pretentious I must sound! From her perch on the mantel the White Witch caught my eye and frowned.

  Tai dropped the towel and combed his hair with his fingers. He spoke quietly, speculatively. “I’d like to see those pictures sometime.”

  “They’re gone,” I lied. “That’s probably the only reason I think they were any good. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all.”

  He accepted my brother’s clothes and moved toward the bathroom, but when he reached the threshold he turned. “It’s not losing something you value that causes heartbreak, Maibelle, but refusing to let anything take its place.”

  For the next hour Tai pored over my pictures for his book. I made tea and drank it. He turned up all the lights and spread the prints out on the floor. He made piles. He squinted and pursed his lips, compared two, three, four prints at a time, then reshuffled them like cards. He squatted and bounced on the balls of his bare feet in my brother’s too-short pants. He sipped his tea without saying a word, shook his head, and moved his lips. Reached, regrouped the pictures and stared.

  Looking over his shoulder, I kept seeing my father’s images overshadowing mine, like Delong Dupriest transparencies. I looked up and caught the White Witch’s gaze. Marge. My father pursing his mouth around the word “No.”

  It was crowded. Far too crowded in here.

  “Well?”

  Tai looked up as if he’d forgotten I was there. He braced his elbows on his knees and clasped his fingers beneath his chin. He smiled.

  The phantom onlookers abruptly retreated.

  “Well?” I said again.

  He shook his head so the still-damp threads of hair fell forward. “I’m sorry. You just sounded so combative—so defensive and tough. Like you used to.” Still smiling, he unfolded his hands and touched his fingers to his lips. His nails grew wide and strong from perfect, circular moons and ended square with his fingertips. I couldn’t take my eyes off them, or think of anything else.

  “Mei-bi.” He unfolded himself until he was looking, just slightly, down at me. “You’ve caught their dignity—their face. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to get past their fear.”

  “That’s the point of your book, isn’t it? To get past that.”

  “Yes. But stories can be told in secret, names changed. Photographs can’t be disguised.”

  I thought of my postgraduate wandering shots. Transmogrifications, Roxy used to call them. It was the longest word she’d ever found a use for, she told me. I said to call them disguises.

  “Besides,” I said, “I’m an outsider.”

  “Maibelle, stop it!” The touch of his hands on my arms rattled me. I couldn’t look at his face. “Outsider. Insider. Those are roles. Positions you take in your own life, not in the world around you. Don’t you see? The real dividing line has nothing to do with the shape of your eyes or face, what language you speak. It’s inside you—are you living your life or just hiding behind that camera of yours!” He pulled away.

  He had long, thin, almost bony feet with the same strong squared-off nails. They squeezed the floor as they moved across it, the bare wood sighing in return.

  “That sounds dumb,” he said. “But it’s the way I feel about my writing—a way to establish my own position, to find where I fit. Sometimes the only way to find out where you truly belong is to try out different voices. I think photography—the kind you’re doing now—is your voice.”

  He had his back to me, was standing in front of the shelves of gadgets where I’d left the cutout picture of Marge Gramercy’s weeping shepherd. At some point while he was talking, the rain had stopped.

  I’d asked Tai once how he got his subjects to reveal their stories. He said the secret to trust is to ease in slowly, the way the matchmaker in Li’s story about the pearl-sewn shirt had eased himself into the young wife’s life, first winning her friendship, then her confidence, and only gradually her complete trust. I pointed out that she’d then betrayed that trust by sneaking the silver trader in to rape the young wife, but Tai refused to accept that reading. He insisted the wife had been starved for sex and luckier to love two men than never to love at all. The discussion quickly escalated to a verbal brawl as I became convinced that the old woman’s meddling had destroyed the young wife’s life and Tai argued for Li’s view of passion’s dark side. No pleasure without pain, or true love without risk.

  “Only fools and the very brave love with all their hearts,” he’d said. “Most people prefer the safety of faking it.”

  “So you persuade all these people to love you and then lay bare the most painful moments of their lives.”

  “To trust me. Trust is only a prelude to love.”

  I thought of my mother’s cynical analysis. “A prelude to love? Or to deception?”

  I’d never trusted any of my lovers enough to let them view my work. But Tai, I reminded myself now as I felt for hard edges at the back of my closet, was not my lover.

  Before I granted myself time to reconsider, we were sitting on Marge Gramercy’s couch with my portfolio between us.

  They were all there, like strands of hair or torn ticket stubs or dried blood on the upholstery—evidence. The fractured obsessiveness of the single, wall-sized eye. The insistence on turning objects into symbols, landscapes into some indecipherable code. Even those high school yearbook shots, like probes that somehow managed to dig beyond the surface of my subjects to expose my own anxiety.

  I stopped Tai’s hand. He hadn’t said a word and didn’t now, but looked up with a noncommittal frown.

  “Mistake. I can’t stand to look at this stuff. I should burn it, you know? My father was the family genius. I was always trying to prove how artistic I was so people would say I was as good as him, but that sort of thinking makes you so pretentious—” I was babbling, pulling the book from his grip, stuffing loose prints inside and zipping.

  He slid one hand under the black leather binder, placed the other on top, and lifted it out of my arms.

  “Please. I’d like to see the rest.” He looked into me as he spoke with a quiet deliberation that was as reassuring as warm milk. He turned to the place we’d left off, an abrupt shift from the vacant freeze of mid-western nature to the shots I’d taken in the first weeks after returning to Manhattan.

  For a time I’d haunted the abandoned lower West Side Drive shooting ice-encrusted litter, lunchtime joggers breathing steam at the World Trade Center, weird cloud formations hanging over the Palisades. The backs of a couple embracing in the middle of an otherwise empty six-lane highway. I was imitating a photographer, trying to get my hand back in, and each frame was technically admirable, composition correct, light exactingly balanced. But the images had a numbing oppressiveness to them, as if a great slab of granite hovered just above frame.

  I shuddered. This was only seven months ago. I could still smell and taste the bitter winds that had swirled up off the river, still feel the wet sting of cold on my fingers as I fumbled for these shots. But not the desolation. I remembered it. I no longer felt it.

  The last photographs—test prints and contacts—were not in sleeves but loose, stuck into the back of the binder. They’d all been shot with my father’s Leica.

  An old lady wept in the ground-floor window of a Greenwich Village brownstone. The same old lady laughing from a distance, arm curved upward, a blur of feathers and flapping wings. The young Chinese face of a woman screaming. A boy with the deadened stare of a killer. White-painted masks floating like moths above a fie
ld of black and green silk.

  From the expression on Tai’s face as he closed the book I could tell he knew this was tricky. Had he praised this work—even as he’d praised the other—I’d have hurled the portfolio out the window. If he’d dismissed it, even jokingly, I’d have thrown him out.

  Instead, he said, “You have a beautiful voice, Mei-bi.”

  “Thank you.” I said it without apology. Without evasion. I took the work from him but left it in plain view.

  “What happened to all that stuff your family used to keep in the basement?” Tai asked after we’d spent a few minutes dodging each other’s gaze.

  “What stuff?”

  “Things of your grandparents from China. Henry showed me once.”

  The question took me by surprise, the more so since I thought Anna and I were the only ones who’d ever looked into that box.

  “Why?”

  “Your photographs reminded me, for some reason… Everything handed down through my family burned in the fire.”

  He was looking across the room at the White Witch.

  “What fire?”

  “A few years after you left. It gutted the downstairs—and the basement. It’s not important, I was just curious.”

  He picked up his wet clothes from the back of the chair where he’d laid them after changing.

  “Wait,” I said. “Show-and-tell night. Why not?”

  I’d kept that old pasteboard box with me all through college, through my wonderings and back. Like a totem or heirloom. Yet, I’d rarely looked inside since the day I salvaged it, just before my family left Chinatown.

  “I was terrified of that basement,” I said as Tai removed the disintegrating twine and tape. “Those bare dangling lightbulbs, the rickety stairs, wire storage cages. Your chickens squawking. But the worst was that hole to the second basement—Henry had me convinced a bogeyman lived there.”

  “Good old Henry.”