by Aimee Liu
“Mm.” I remembered the other art parties Mum had held over the years. Dad hiding alone in his workshop while Mum played Pearl Mesta outside.
“You’ll come,” said my mother.
“I guess.” I would go, but not to pacify Mum and not to establish contacts. At least not the contacts she had in mind.
The penthouse terrace my father long ago advanced as one of the apartment’s most winning attributes lends itself beautifully to parties. Purely out of spite, I’m sure, my mother never did reestablish her pots of Alpine rock plants, but created a whole new motif of trellised wisteria and beds of imported dirt from which sprout six-foot fruit trees. Tonight more than one guest would comment that Diana had created a country estate in the middle of midtown Manhattan. Lest anyone fail to draw this conclusion, my mother had hired four uniformed servants and a low-key dance band. She’d laced tiny white lights through the trees and set up a bar and a half dozen crisply clothed tables under the trellises. The guests, who ranged from the torn-jeans and bustier crowd to the leather generation, seemed uniformly out of place. Nevertheless, the backcountry aura was unmistakable and, to me, vaguely disturbing. It reminded me of another place and time, but I couldn’t immediately think where.
“Maibelle!” My mother tangoed toward me in the arms of a tall bearded Neanderthal. She grasped my hand.
“This is Scott Sazaroff.”
A true photo-stallion. He bowed gracefully and excused himself before she could further detain him.
“We’ll talk later,” she called after him. “Don’t pay any attention, Maibelle. You’re only as good as your work in Scott’s eyes. Once he sees your portfolio he’ll do anything to help you. I’m really pleased you came, darling.” And for the first time she took a good look at me.
I was wearing a plain white button-down blouse, a seersucker skirt, black flats. Decidedly ordinary. Inconspicuous. Mediocre. Clothes I’d intended to hide in. But in this crowd the ordinariness stood out like a dead bloom in a fresh bouquet. She pursed her lips and straightened my collar.
My brother, across the terrace, had adopted a much more appropriate camouflage of hip olive drabs. He appeared to be having no difficulty impressing Deniece Williams, the rock-star portraitist often featured in Interview, whom my mother had long been courting.
“Why don’t you get Henry into photography?”
“God help me. Henry wouldn’t know a picture if it sliced him between the eyes.”
“But he’s so much better at networking than I’ll ever be.”
“Henry’s a hustler,” my mother said with a wistful quiver of pride. “But you’re my artist. Don’t ever forget it.”
“I am not your artist and never have been.”
“You could do with less sarcasm and more confidence, Maibelle.”
“I’m going to tell Dad about your plan.”
“No, you’re not.” It was a statement, not a command, not an invitation for follow-up. She put an arm out to stop a middle-aged man with a blue stripe through his hair.
“Lester! This is my daughter Maibelle. Maybe you remember her as a child—she used to just live at the gallery with me. Now she’s an artist herself.”
I wanted to bore a hole through the terrace. Whatever the people downstairs were into—S&M, war games, international terrorism—it had to be easier than this.
Lester thrust one pink-fleshed hand in my direction. He flicked his tongue like a snake and engaged my mother in a discussion about profit margins in performance art.
As I turned to make my escape a young woman with a high, southern twang butchered my father’s name. “I hear he’s still alive. Sumpin’ musta gone wrong, though. Like maybe he’s brain-dead, you think?”
“Maibee.” Henry blocked my path with a tumbler of wine.
I pulled his hand over and drank the whole glass, but the alcohol only squeezed my head tighter. “How can you stand this!”
“I live here, remember?”
“Like I said, how can you stand it?”
“Won’t be long now. I’m just about ready to put my program on the market. But since you brought it up, I was sort of wondering if you’d mind my crashing with you again.”
“It is getting to you.”
“Mum calls Dad and me the Two Putterers and leaves IBM executive trainee ads on my bed all the time. Dad waits up for me until three, four in the morning. He calls me Skipper. It gets old.”
“Poor you.” I pressed circles into my forehead to stop the throbbing. Henry put down his wine and massaged my shoulders.
“Any reason I shouldn’t come visit for a while?”
“Harriet.”
“I’ll cross-dress. Anything else?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You seeing anybody?”
“All right. Come tonight if you want. After this.”
“Tommy? Ah, see that? I can feel you tensing up.”
I shook him off me. “It’s ‘Tai.’ And not like that.”
“Then how?”
With my mother hovering like a hungry vulture, it seemed an inopportune moment for confidences.
“Work,” I said.
“He paying you?”
“Yes. Henry, why did you turn against him?”
“You ask him?”
“Yes.” A helicopter circled overhead. Red lights. Green lights. I pictured it landing in the middle of the party, everyone running for cover. “He said he couldn’t remember.”
My brother folded his arms across his chest.
“I told you. Pinball. I was playing this FOB guy who couldn’t even speak English. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but I was creaming him. Tommy got on my case. Hell, I would’ve quit, but the guy was like in a trance. He dug his own hole.”
“You were playing for money?”
My brother shot me a look of profound disbelief. “We’re talking Chinatown, Maibelle. What’d you think?”
“I—I just never thought about it.”
He shrugged. “Stakes got up to three hundred, and he pulled a gun on me.”
“The FOB?”
“No. Lover boy.” Henry let his arms flop to his sides and spat the next word as if it were a wad of old chewing tobacco. “Face!”
And it dawned on me that he was talking about Tai.
“A gun?”
“Bang-bang, best friends. Asshole.”
I couldn’t process what my brother was saying for the sudden pain behind my left eye. The glittering lights, the throb of music, my brother’s voice all darkened.
“I need some aspirin.”
“Hall bathroom. Hey, Maibelle—”
My mother blocked my way.
“Delong just told me he’s looking for an assistant.” She pulled my hand from my head and steered me into the crowd. “I’m not going to let you creep away this time.”
“Gotta trade on your skin, man.” The voice was husky and polished as sea glass. “Like a package, gotta be a come-odd-ity.” A long, skinny trombone of a man with a long, skinny cigarette in one hand and a long, skinny glass full of dark liquor in the other. Delong towered over a man twice his age who gazed up at him as if he were Moses. “Gotta be out there.”
“See,” Mum whispered from the corner of her mouth as she prepared to cut in. “Networking.”
And then there were hands pumping, fingers to palm, the clasp of bone beneath flesh. The throbbing climbed up my head.
“Hey, honey. Your beautiful mama says you’re lookin’ for a studio job.”
My mother has pale gray eyes, Delong feather black ones. I imagined a band between them—elastic—snapping the two faces together like a Marx Brothers or Three Stooges routine.
My partner carried a gun. He pulled it on his best friend. On my brother. The words ran circles inside my skull as my mother stood petting me like an imbecile.
“Excuse me.” I lurched away. “I’m not looking for anything.”
I found some aspirin in the powder room—Excedrin, extra strength, with a tr
iple dose of caffeine. The effect was like a dry eraser on chalkboard, quick relief but with a cloudy residue. The image staring back at me from the mirror looked normal, no deep creases between the eyes, no blotches discoloring cheeks or throat, no wild bloodshot stripes on the eyeballs. But I felt all those physical strains even if I couldn’t see them. I felt as if any moment a much larger eraser would sweep the mirror and take me out of the picture. I leaned forward until I was touching my reflection. If only I could see whose hand held that eraser, I would know how to force it back.
“Dad, it’s me. You in there?” I hugged the wood and whispered through the keyhole. A woman had just gone into the bathroom down the hall, and the kitchen was bustling with Mum’s caterers and a group of people playing cards at the counter. I imagined they’d give their nose rings for a glimpse of Joe Chung, the phantom Life photog.
The door opened a crack and I slipped through. My father shut it and spun the lock, without a word sat back down on his stool, and returned his attention to the sheet of cardboard before him. His wide, stubby fingers bent and pushed, scored and folded the cardboard into a box. He took an X-acto knife and sliced off wedges of paper from the sides, tucked and glued. It was several minutes before he held up the finished product.
“A cigarette pack?”
He nodded. “But look.” He flipped the lid down. It clicked. He pulled it up. A slender flap along the front lip popped out. “Freshness seal. And a stay-closed lock. Been working on this for weeks. What do you think?”
Music and party voices from outside jiggled the window glass, but my father was oblivious. His eyes were bright with the success of his invention. “No one’s come up with a new cigarette packaging idea in decades. They could use this for candy, too.”
He was sweet, my father. Sweet and innocent. I put my arms around him and buried my face in the soft, frayed collar of his shirt.
“Good for you, Dad.”
He worked on, plying his origami masterpieces. Smoke curled from the ashtray beside him. Only when working hard would he let his cigarettes lie. He drummed his fingers, but didn’t bite them. His eyes were focused, not glassy. It came to me suddenly. When he was working, he seemed whole and alive. Otherwise, when he was around my mother or the family, without the focus of his “puttering,” he twitched with some buried impulse for escape. Puttering was safe for him, as he thought catalog work was for me. He had said we weren’t alike, yet his advice presumed we were.
I thought of the furtive way Tai had bent over his plate when I asked why he had to leave Chinatown. He wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t answer. Through his work wasn’t he, too, looking for escape? Now I understood that guilt lay at the core of Tai’s secrecy. Was it the same for my father? Might as well have been pulling a trigger, he’d said. Had his subjects really been shot, killed? And if Dad and I were really so alike, where did that leave me?
I felt exhausted. The layers of shame and deceit seemed to run to the bone.
“Dad?”
“Mm?”
“There’s a question—well, there are lots of questions, but one I’ve wondered since I was little. About us in Chinatown. I mean, you and Mum had no friends there. So what were we doing living there?”
He rubbed his hands together as if they hurt. He took his time. “Someone must have told you.”
“No. Except you said it was the cheapest place in New York.”
His throat growled for a moment, but the growl quickly turned to that terrible clucking sound. “It was.”
Then gradually, while his cigarette burned itself out and the room filled with an acrid, deathly stink to which he seemed entirely oblivious, he told me the larger story.
At first after he came back from China, he said, they stayed in the one-room apartment on East Thirty-third Street that my mother had leased since she came to New York. Although he’d quit photography, my father was supposed to be completing his graduate degree in history. He had a handful of professional and college acquaintances who were friendly without being friends. Diana had the gallery.
“And Foucault, God knows, eating out of her hand,” my father said.
They were living on Diana’s salary and what was left of Dad’s. He spent his days sketching space-saving ideas for undersized apartments. Trundle beds, hideaway ironing boards, convertible stovetops, and pulldown cabinets.
“Graduate school didn’t work out. I stayed home. It wasn’t that I was afraid. But I’d been all over the world, seen what was worth seeing and plenty more that wasn’t. I’d seen enough.”
“And Mum wouldn’t understand that?”
He sucked on his cigarette. “She went to work, to her parties, museums, shopping. Pressured me to come with her. I said I had to work. She reminded me that she had married a very different man.”
“She’s never stopped reminding you, or any of the rest of us.”
He shook his head without looking at me. “She kept it up until finally I relented.”
“How?”
It was a summer Saturday, hot and airless. Not many people in town. They had no particular destination. Just out browsing, as my mother put it. Joe followed Diana through several East Side galleries, bookstores, and boutiques. There was no air-conditioning in those days. What my father was looking for was a working fan. They found one in a store that sold expensive bed linens and imported ceramics, the same useless accessories that had festooned Dad’s home in Shanghai.
“But Mama could never have afforded this store. Even Diana was stunned by the prices, and we steered away from the clerks. Still, it was cool. We passed a water fountain and I took a drink. Diana looked through a pile of satin pillowcases and, as casually as if she were telling me she planned to go to the park, she announced that she was pregnant.”
She wasn’t looking at him but at a small embroidered rectangle—a baby’s pillowcase.
“She had it all planned: now I was to shower her with delighted kisses, lift her off her feet, and fork over the ten dollars for that bloody pillowcase.”
Suddenly my father couldn’t breathe. He had to get out of that store, out from under those clerks’ frozen smiles. He left Diana fondling her satin and got as far as the front door, but the manager blocked his path.
An imposing figure, tall and brawny as a lumberjack inside his fancy suit, the man spoke in a southern drawl. It was closing time, he said, and my father would have to use the rear exit.
Dad didn’t argue, just turned and went back through the store down the short flight of stairs indicated. But the lumberjack got there ahead of him and barred my father’s way again.
This time he was openly sneering. “You yellow bastards. What’s it take to make you see the light?”
He jabbed his finger into my father’s chest. “Didn’t you get the message when we dropped the bomb? We don’t like you coming into our stores. And we sure as hell don’t want you spitting all over our water fountains and laying your filthy hands on our goods and women.”
Joe heard Diana’s heels clicking on the steps behind him. “Joe! What the…”
The man had backed my father up against the wall and was ramming his large, white thumb into Dad’s breastbone.
My father grabbed his fingers and pushed them backward until he winced. He still towered over Dad, but his size was his only advantage. My father didn’t even have to raise his voice.
“You dropped the bomb on the Japanese, you bloody idiot,” he said. “Now get the hell out of my way.”
The man looked as if someone had just pulled the seat out from under him. His brow squeezed with the effort of some serious mental gymnastics. My father dropped his hand and grabbed Diana, whose face had gone absolutely white. They pushed past.
“The door—the door’s locked.” Diana was hardly breathing.
“Open it,” my father ordered the man.
He stammered. He shuffled his feet. He turned the key and my parents passed through to the alley.
Finally the dimwit puzzled it out. “So you’r
e a chink,” he shouted after them. “One yellow slant-eyed bastard’s just like another. You keep yer commie ass out of here.”
Diana was sobbing by the time they reached the street. The heat and the traffic, relentless.
“We’ll have to find a bigger place to live,” Joe said. “A different neighborhood. For the baby’s sake.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Chinatown at that moment,” my father told me. “We could have moved to the suburbs. We could have moved to the country. But Diana would have none of that. Bad as the clerk had been, she kept insisting suburban and rural bigots were worse. That was why he upset her so—because he reminded her of the jackasses she’d moved to the city to escape. Her idea was to move to Paris or London because Europeans were more open-minded.”
I remembered what my father had told me about the British and French boys attacking him at school. “But you knew the Europeans were just as bigoted as Mum’s farm folks.”
“I had no desire to live in another international settlement, that’s true. Anyway, we had no money to travel, and since Diana seemed inclined to keep her job, we had to stay close to Manhattan. Chinatown was an afterthought.”
“But how did it even come up?”
“Diana announced one day that it might be ‘amusing’ to live closer to my roots. Whatever the hell she meant by that.”
Tai had told me about landlords “frying real estate” to make it hotter and hotter until only the rich Hong Kong and Taiwan tycoons could afford it. “Chinatown real estate’s no bargain now. Was it ever, really?”
“Yes and no.”
My father opened the window, letting in a flow of cold air and the dim strains of jazz from the party. If the terrace wrapped all the way around, he’d have nowhere to hide from Mum’s pals; fortunately Dad’s room faces the street.
He turned. “When Diana gets an idea in her head, she’s like a cat stalking a bird, you know? There wasn’t one Chinatown apartment advertised in the paper, but she insisted we go look for signs, ask around.”
“And that’s how you found our apartment?”
He scowled at me and waved his arm. “Wait. Just wait. We found nothing, she’d about given up when we passed a shop with this old inlaid chair in the window. Rosewood. It was identical to a chair that belonged to my grandmother in Hangchow. Christ, that miserable chair! Every year when we made the pilgrimage to the old bitch’s estate, my sisters and I had to sit in that chair and have our picture taken. I loathed those sittings. The little man beneath his drapes, decades behind the technology of the West…”
