by Aimee Liu
It sounded as though he would go on, but he shook his head.
“What about Halliday?”
“He died. Finally.” His face changed. “Where did you really see that photograph?”
Halliday abruptly fell into place, and I searched for some glimmer of the rights and wrongs on either side of a far more immediate challenge. All I could see was my mother’s deceit. And my father’s innocence.
“She’s been collecting your work, Dad. For years. Foucault doesn’t know anything about it. No one does. She’s got drawers full.”
“You knew.” He removed his glasses and wiped the lenses on his sleeve.
My hands began to shake. If I closed my mouth, my teeth would chatter. It was like talking into a freezer, but I kept going. “I just found out the other week. She has this stupid idea about showing our work together. I got furious. She was going behind your back. She lied to us both—”
The band stopped playing outside, which meant most of the guests had left or were leaving. Mum would find us soon.
My father put the glasses aside and lit a cigarette, still not looking at me.
“I debated telling you, but she said you’d try to destroy it all if you knew. I couldn’t risk that. Dad, those pictures—”
“Don’t say it.”
“But—”
My brother pounded on the door. “Maibelle. I know you’re holed up in there. Can we go?”
My father stood up. “It’s not her fault, Maibelle. Or yours.”
16
I am running in the new dream through a maze of doors and wrong-way escalators, jumping barriers through an airport, one closed gate after another. My parents are coming, and I have to meet them. I have to bring my child home or she’ll die.
Through the thick glass I watch a jet touch down, huge grasshopper landing, skidding, faces like small white eyes in the windows. I am in the wrong place, my hands and feet heavy. Up another down escalator, dragging the weighted trunk behind me. Closer, but now a mob surrounds me. Lights popping, reporters, a gala arrival. Hedda Hopper surges through, laughing, cigarette wand flying, rhinestone sunglasses. She laughs my mother’s laugh and I dive past, toward the opening jet-way.
Through the long green tunnel I spot them, straining forward. The hole fills with the scent: Chanel No. 9. They are bundled in tweeds, my mother taller, ahead of my father and talking at him, around and through him. I lift my arms, one longer than the other, gloves black against the metallic luster. Sunlight glares through the tall exposed windows and the new arrivals part like sheaves of grass as I fire. Once. Twice. We all fall down in a blaze of white explosive light.
“Murder?” I hear the reporters cry. “Murder, or suicide?”
My head, banging against the wall, woke me as I thrashed out the light. The television was on low. Al Greene crooned softly from the other room. I flipped off the TV, gathered up some bedding, and entered the living room, where my brother lay in his underwear, facedown, one arm dangling over the side of the couch. A lamp burned like an interrogator’s spotlight above his head. I switched that off, too, leaving the room to the darkness, my brother’s soft, rhythmic breathing, and the steady heartbeat of Al’s sweet voice. I kissed the fingertips of a hand I once thought I’d never forgive, and waited for the night to end.
A few days after my mother’s party I called my father to apologize. Henry was out, and I knew my mother would be at the gallery. I thought we might talk more easily on the phone; that what I really needed to say might come to me.
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Maibelle, I’m busy right now.”
“I was so sure you ought to know, she was wrong to hide it from you, I never thought to ask if you’d want to know. I feel so stupid, Dad.”
“You’re not stupid.”
“Have you told her? Have you two talked about it?”
“Look, there’s some interest in the box patent—”
“She doesn’t know I told you, then?”
“No. Maibelle, I’m late for a meeting. It’s not that I don’t care—I just can’t think about all that now.”
We hung up. I spent ten minutes turning my father’s words in every conceivable direction, then called again. No answer.
I had no further word from either him or Mum for another week, during which I decided my guilt was misplaced. My mother had overdramatized that cache of pictures just as she had my artistic potential, the tragedy of my flying career, and now my refusal to let her plug me into the Network—perhaps even the mystique of my father’s lost celebrity was more a function of Mum’s theatrics than any reality.
He’d said it wasn’t her fault. I couldn’t buy that. I was the one who’d been lied to and used. She’d probably wanted me to tell Dad, because she didn’t have the nerve to. The act of telling was the real treachery; the content of the story just another buried fact of my parents’ life. I’d hold the guilt of betraying both my mother’s confidence and my father’s complicit ignorance while, between them, nothing would change.
Nothing except a quarter of a million dollars. That’s what Dad’s magic box is worth to a Swiss candy company with factories in New Jersey. The reclosable carton, it seems, is just what they need for a chewy mint that hardens if exposed too long to the air, and the resemblance to a cigarette hard-pack will help persuade consumers that the candy is meant for adults. They’re buying three years of nonexclusive use. Dad wants to spend the first installment on Henry’s software program; Mum wants to buy into a loft co-op in SoHo where Henry could live and I could work. Henry’s encouraging either plan. Except for congratulating Dad briefly, I’ve stayed out of the whole discussion.
“It’s Dad’s money,” I told Henry the night Mum weighed in with their spending proposals. “Why you’d want it hanging over your head is beyond me.”
“Right. You’d rather be on the payroll of the Mott Street trigger-man.”
I burned my tongue on my tea. This was the first Henry had mentioned Tai since the party. I hadn’t been back to Chinatown since then, either. With Henry moving in I decided it was best to stay on Harriet’s good side as much as possible. That meant paying the rent on time. Which in turn meant halting my shoots in Chinatown and accepting the extra catalog work Noble was offering. Really I was avoiding Tai. Henry surely knew that.
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Am I?” Henry pulled on a blue argyle sock and slipped his foot into a loafer. He was getting ready to go out. He seemed to be going out more and staying out later since the day he’d found me lying awake on the floor next to him.
“He wasn’t paying me.”
“You said he was.”
“Only expenses.” I began putting away the lights around the set. Quality of company notwithstanding, it was a squeeze with Henry living in the middle of my studio.
“So I was right. You are seeing him.”
“Not now, I’m not. What’s this got to do with you taking Dad’s money?”
“Why can’t you think of it as investment? You’re making an investment in Tommy, and as part of that investment you ignore things about him that might turn other people off.”
“I wasn’t doing it for him.”
Henry shrugged on his jacket and surveyed himself in my bedroom mirror, turning up his cuffs, adjusting his collar. He talked to my reflection. “Well, maybe this thing with Mum and Dad works the same way. Maybe they’re investing in me, maybe they’re doing it for other reasons. Either way, we can ignore certain things about the arrangement that you apparently can’t. Frankly I don’t see why you’re so determined to shove Mum out of your life when you let scum like Tommy walk right in.”
The cord in my hand moved like a snake. I imagined it coiling, swaying, rising to strike.
“You held a gun on someone once.”
“Not knowingly.”
“You knew you were holding a lethal weapon. You knew the damage it could do, and you liked that.”
“I never touched one ag
ain, Maibelle.”
“He never pulled the trigger.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Neither do you.”
“Intent makes all the difference in the world.”
I felt as if I’d just swallowed a chunk of dry ice. “I’m not defending him, Henry.”
“Aren’t you?” He slid his wallet into his pocket, kissed my cheek, and left.
When I opened my hand, I found that the cord had left deep white indentations across my palm.
Henry didn’t come back that night or the next, and then he only returned to pack. I gave him a key, told him he was welcome to come and stay anytime. He said he appreciated how much I valued my privacy and independence, but he accepted the key and thanked me. A few hours later when Harriet banged on the door and demanded to inspect my apartment because she was sure she’d seen a man coming and going, there was no trace of him.
He left me out of respect, I tell myself as the spaces he briefly occupied fill up with wooden Easter eggs and personalized angel tea cozies. I tell myself it was also respect that kept him from letting the argument about Tai go any further.
But in his absence I’ve slowly, steadily pushed the burden of blame onto his shoulders. Henry was wrong. Tai never meant to use the gun. It probably wasn’t even loaded. Of course it wasn’t loaded. Remember Henry’s face as he dialed the phone after shooting Johnny? People make mistakes, accidents happen. Tai’s crime was nothing compared to Henry’s, which is naturally why Henry took such offense.
Maybe it would be different if Henry had stayed, if there were anyone else. But there isn’t. Not even Miss Madson. Her bird never returned, but my nightmares have. Ever since I stopped working in Chinatown, and full blast since Henry left. Including the old one. Falling into blind pain, the images from Dad’s photographs, the impenetrable cloud of white silk.
Last week I saw Jed Moffitt sitting alone in the window of Ray’s. He noticed me across the street and beckoned, and I almost went to him. He saw me hesitate, and he smiled. I ran to keep from caving in.
Then two nights ago the police came for the first time in four months. I refused to open the door. Harriet was suspiciously silent, delivered no threats or warnings. Last night I gagged myself at bedtime to make sure I wouldn’t wake up screaming.
Tai’s committed no crime against me.
And so on this cold metallic Monday in October, with the most recent of my catalog assignments shipped, a rent check in Harriet’s mailbox, and a sense of anxiety out of proportion even to the oppressive weather, I ride the subway with Tai and David Ling to a graveyard in Queens. We are meeting David’s sister and mother, visiting from Phoenix, to pay respects at his father’s grave. Death is important to the people of Chinatown and so a necessary component of Tai’s book. He says he’s been avoiding it, but the time has come at least to get some pictures.
Tai and I are back to visual tag. He has not challenged me about my month’s absence. He understands the demands of economic duress, and his book will require months of writing before there is any pressing need for completion of photography. Having seen that my pictures are going to work, he has no basis for complaint. And now that my bills are paid, I’ve returned, and it should be as simple as that. The same thing could well have happened—I tell myself it would have—even if Henry had kept his mouth shut and refused to answer my repeated questions. Even if he’d done me the favor of lying.
But I still can’t meet Tai’s eyes.
Instead, as the train dives into the long, blank tunnel below the East River, I concentrate on David’s description—background preparation for our day’s mission—of his father’s funeral. The family had moved to America only the year before and his mother blamed their new home for the death, hence insisted on a large, traditional Chinese funeral with plenty of ritual sacrifice to endure Mr. Ling’s safe passage out of American spirit hell and back to China’s ancestral paradise. She borrowed heavily from the Ling fong to pay for musicians and official mourners dressed in sack cloth. White paper lanterns on bamboo poles, gongs and incense. Silver and gold joss money, paper clothes, all burned at the grave site. Fruits and cake, roast pork to sustain David’s father through his journey. And an uncle, chief mourner, unwashed since the death, who wailed and keened, bent double with the pageant of grief.
David’s description inflates to fill the half-empty subway car, carries us up and out of the tunnel, colors the dreary day outside. It distracts and bothers me.
“I was only seven,” he remembers. “My job was to carry flowers to the casket. It was open. My father looked like a wax figure. My mother, aunts, all kept staring, waiting for me to cry. But I couldn’t feel anything. He’d never talked to me except to say be quiet, get better grades, work harder. You have to love someone to cry for them. My father never let me love him.”
David’s voice folds back on itself, pitiless. He turns his still-dry eyes to the window. Tai studies the backs of his hands.
We are passing Shea Stadium, Flushing Meadows. The Unisphere looms, a globe full of holes above browning lawns. Remnant of the World’s Fair. I struggle to remember. I know that, but I don’t remember the details. The only image that comes back to me is the Pietà, a dead man, stone, sunken into a woman’s lap, both of them drenched in a nightclub-blue light, my mother’s voice arching beyond a whisper, condemning Vatican taste. That blue light. “Peace through Understanding” was the theme of the fair, the concept behind the Unisphere. I remember standing beneath it and looking up, the great, crushing ball a web of black metal against a blinding hot sky.
“I was nearly frozen by the time they put him in the ground,” David says. “The kind of wind that feels like a whip. I started crying only because I was so cold. I got furious when my aunt put her arms around me, told me what a good boy I was to weep for my father. I curled up into a ball. They had to pick me up like that, carry me. I didn’t straighten out until I was in the backseat of the car and we’d started driving home.”
A chill runs up my back as I imagine my own father lying in an open casket, a stone man like old Mr. Ling. I begin to sweat and wonder, distractedly, if I’m getting a fever. I have the sense of pulling away, being torn. The park behind us, we enter another tunnel and the lights go out, the noise is deafening and a crushing pressure builds behind my left eye. My hand twitches with the impulse to reach up and yank the emergency cord above my head.
Suddenly the overpass is behind us, the lights are back on. Tai and David are talking above the train’s noise. We occupy a booth, two seats facing each other. Tai must feel my eyes, because he looks over, half smiling. Then he stops, pulls a handkerchief from his pocket. White with a monogram. I stare at it coming toward me.
But Tai has no patience. He reaches over and presses the cloth around my thumb. I look down for the first time and see the blood seeping through. I have ripped the entire nail away. And felt nothing.
Neither of them says anything about it. I push the damage, clenched tight, into my coat pocket. By the time we reach Flushing the bleeding has stopped and with it the headache. A short bus ride and we reach the cemetery, where Mrs. Ling and David’s sister Jenny are waiting for us. They are two of a kind, compactly rounded and stuffed into woolen bundles topped with complementary tam-o’-shanters, pink for Jenny and vivid green for her mother. They smile, mostly with their eyes. David said she was pleased to have us come along to photograph the family ceremony, but as Mrs. Ling bustles us through the gate I think she would rather I were not here.
The sun glows cold, pale as a mushroom against the pewter sky, and the rows of headstones seem to stretch for miles in every direction. I see them briefly as short white hairs standing up from an old giant’s scalp. I resist the urge to photograph them that way, disguising the bones below, and hurry to catch up with the others.
Mrs. Ling has brought a shopping bag full of gifts, plus a picnic hamper. Her husband’s grave is in a distant corner, with a view through the fence of intersecting roads and, across, a pink
and yellow mini-mart. We are the only people in the cemetery, but traffic is busy outside, and the deli at the mini-mart appears to be doing brisk lunchtime business. The iron bars that separate these two worlds make me feel as if I’m in prison.
“This is a lucky plot.” Tai calls me back. “Close to the road. Easy to get out if Lao Ling ever wants to.”
“Then I’m sure he’s long gone. They’re wasting their time.”
“This isn’t for him. It’s for them.” He taps the Leica beneath my mutilated thumb. “And us.”
Under their mother’s strict supervision, David has swept the grave with a long whisk broom and spread a red cloth in front of the headstone. His sister is laying cups and plates and chopsticks, three of each. To either side of the cloth they slide incense sticks into the earth and use rocks to anchor piles of joss money made of tissue glued with silver and gold foil. Jenny fills the plates with chicken and bao, the cups with wine and tea from a thermos. Steam twists off the surface of the tea. The food is still warm, too, but no one here will eat it. It will stay even after the dishes are retrieved, a gift for the dead to be consumed by insects, stray cats or dogs.
This is all supposed to assuage the grief of survivors, I suppose. To build a bridge between the living and the dead, to con those left behind into believing that mortality runs in two directions. It doesn’t. The man who lies beneath my feet will never touch this food.
I don’t know how David’s father died, don’t want to know. I am working hard to restrain these thoughts and keep my attention on the surface. The spell on the subway was enough for one day.
Across the graveyard a man Tai’s size and build, but older, stooped and ragged, picks his way between the stones. He curls his head toward the ground and hugs his arms tightly into his chest. There is an unearthly quality about him, so that I half expect him to vanish when I blink, but he remains, progressing by inches, neither toward us nor away. He will not raise his face.
