Face

by Aimee Liu

  He’s come out of round one, minus the fallen lung. He may have weeks or months, the doctors tell us. But the cancer has spread too far for further surgery or chemo.

  The first of those weeks passes in a haze of exhaustion and dread. He looks like a high school science experiment with all the tubes and bottles and computers hooked up to him. His skin has yellowed, his hair leaves grease stains on his pillow. He can’t speak, but my mother does—about the coming elections, the latest teachers’ strike, a Van Gogh that sold for two million. My brother hoards the TV controller and channel-surfs. I hold Dad’s hand.

  Only if we are alone do I talk to him. I don’t bring up the pictures since I have no proof that they hastened his sickness and, whether they did or not, he is in no position to discuss them. Or much of anything else, for that matter. So I tell him stories. Li’s stories, though I don’t mention Li. The Fairy’s Rescue. The Pearl-sewn Shirt. I tell him Chinese versions of Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella. Sometimes he falls asleep before I finish. Sometimes he stares at the ceiling with that faraway look. Sometimes I feel his eyes roaming my face as if drinking my image. He gives no sign of protest. I like to think the stories carry him to another place where he can be young and make new, different choices. The only one I hold back from him is the one he once told me himself. The Man Who Chopped Trees on the Moon.

  My father’s known for weeks about the cancer. He went to the doctor a few days after Mum’s party. After I betrayed her secret. A connection? That eternal clucking in the back of his throat was not disapproval but disease.

  He knew and told none of us that he had been condemned.

  We took turns, as families will, standing watch at the hospital. From one day to the next I slept too little to dream, worried too much for my father to feel my own ineffable terror. I recognized the piercing irony, that it took my father’s devastation to ward off my own, but there was no relief, either way.

  * * *

  I went back to my apartment just once that first week, to pack a suitcase to bring uptown. This note was in my mailbox.

  I’m sorry, Maibelle. I never meant to push you, never would have if I’d had any idea. If you’d let me know that much more.

  I once wrote that silence is a prison and stories a form of refuge. I knew this was true from my own experience, and yet knowing was not enough. My story held me hostage for twelve years until you gave me the courage to break the silence. I could not do it alone, could not even have imagined how it would feel. Like coming up out of a well into the light, out of water into air. Please. Finish telling me your story, so I can try to help you as you have me.

  I love you, Maibelle. Believe that.

  Tai

  When I got back to the hospital, I called David Ling at the seniors’ center and left a message for Tai about my father’s illness. I wasn’t sure what I was saying. I didn’t answer Tai’s note. “Indefinitely.” I used that word. Several times, I used it.

  Otherwise, I didn’t dare think about Tai. I didn’t know if or when I ever would again.

  Five days after my father enters the hospital, just when it seems he is out of immediate danger and we can try to formulate some semblance of a routine, my mother is summoned to the phone at the nurse’s station. She is gone for about ten minutes, and when she returns, her left eye is twitching. She bends to kiss my father’s cheek.

  “Maibelle and I have to go out for a little while, Joe. Henry, you stay here till we get back?” She grabs my elbow. I hardly have time to scoop up our coats, which we put on haphazardly while racing down the corridor. The elevator is packed, overheated, no place to ask questions.

  “What’s going on?” I yell as she sails into the grim autumn bluster outside.

  She puts two fingers into her mouth and whistles for a cab. I didn’t know she could do that. I never could. I thought only Henry could. Two taxis vie to claim her. She picks the first, which is not the Checker but a crummy yellow Chevy, something she would never ordinarily do. She gives the driver the gallery’s address, and he grumbles; it’s only a two-dollar fare.

  I slide the inside window shut. “So, what is this?”

  Her hair is all over the place. Her coat is buttoned out of order, and her eyes, fixed on the driver’s photograph up front, look like animal traps.

  “Foucault died.”

  My initial impulse is to laugh. I stifle it. “That’s what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”

  “Not like this.”

  We lurch, skipping through a red light. I’m not sure what she means, and the way her lower lip is trembling, I’m afraid to ask. The metallic surface, the glint of sharpened teeth, are just cover. My mother’s tenacious bluff. She reaches for my hand and squeezes hard. Something about it reminds me of when I was very small, when sometimes she’d wear white gloves and take me shopping, the feel of her hand through the kidskin gripping mine as we crossed the street. Only this time it feels as if she’s the one who needs to be shepherded across.

  The gallery looks dead now, too. She left it closed, pictures hastily removed from the walls when Dad got sick. The only sign of occupation is the security light in the back. She stares for a moment while I pay for the cab, and sighs as if she’s relieved, as if she expected maybe to see the whole thing blown away. Then it’s all business and she hurries up the steps. Her key is in her hand.

  I picture Foucault’s beaked face emblazoned on the building’s white granite front, like one of those great proletarian banners of Lenin or Mao in holograph nodding, blinking, warning us away. “Mine!” he mouths.

  I’ve been without sleep for too long. This is all right. Mum’s finally got what she wants. Her hidden cache at the very least. After everything she’s been through she’s entitled. When Dad dies, what will it matter?

  She is at the lock, worrying the key.

  “Come here,” she calls over her shoulder. “Help me with this.”

  But it won’t turn. The brass of the tumbler is brighter than the plate, unscratched. And then we hear steps inside. A light comes on in the foyer. My mother’s nails bite my skin.

  A man’s voice from inside calls, “Pull out the key.” A British accent. Young.

  I withdraw the key, her hand still clutching my wrist, pushing against me.

  We step backward, almost over the step. I catch the belt of her coat to keep her from falling and note again the missed buttonhole. But there’s no time to change it.

  “How d’ye do? You must be Madam Chung. Coralie said you’d be popping ’round.”

  He looks like a club bouncer. Large square head with hair too far back, massive shoulders busting out of that houndstooth suit. A single furrow, an exclamation mark, down between his eyebrows. He’s smiling, extending an open fist. I think of my grandfather’s flyswatter.

  “Who the hell are you!” My mother’s voice booms as she pushes forward. He catches her across the shoulders and shakes his head, smiling, but not apologizing. The way a parent would stop a child. He’s easily half her age.

  “Executors say I’m not to let you in, I’m afraid. ’At’s why we changed the locks, you notice. You’re a sort of persona non grata, according to the old man’s will.”

  She stomps on his foot, twists her body around, reaches for me to move forward. Two against one. I glance at the stairs. I could slip by and make it up there, but then what? I don’t care about the rest of her trove, and my father’s work is in the safe.

  She wrestles out of his grip and stands glaring up at this hulking obstacle who no doubt is much quicker than he looks. “You’re out of your mind! I own this gallery!”

  “Not the way I read it, mum.”

  “Don’t you dare call me that!” Her eyes now belong to the cornered beast caught in her own trap.

  “Miss Coralie—”

  “How do I know you’re not a burglar? I’ll call the police and have you arrested!”

  Never in my life have I seen my mother like this. I pity her, yet she mesmerizes me. I wonder if this is an act
. If not, she’s got even more guts than I realized. This man could kill us both with a single blow, and she’s treating him like a schoolyard bully.

  I lay my hand on her arm. Her whole body is quivering. “You must have some authorization.”

  He raises an eyebrow, as if suddenly I’m his coconspirator, and slides a hand inside his jacket. A pellet, dry and frozen, rattles briefly in my chest, but he pulls out only papers. Papers sealed by a London court and signed, in a shaky scrawl, by Gerard Foucault. A second order for the guard service is signed by the executors of the estate and undersigned by Coralie Moutiers, the new president and owner of Galleries Foucault International.

  “They seem to be in order, Mum.”

  “Let me see those.” Her voice is clammy. She takes the documents and steadily rips them to shreds.

  “It’s all right, miss,” the guard says to me as I scramble, hissing, to retrieve the pieces.

  My mother kicks me in the ribs. I push her foot back firmly on the floor, and she doesn’t strike again.

  “These are only copies. I’ve another set in the back. The originals are in a vault in London. But I think you’d better take her away, ’fore she does any more damage to herself.”

  “At least let me get my personal belongings.”

  I half expect her to wink at me, she must have a plan. Doesn’t she always? But she’s sagging. She won’t look at either of us.

  “I can let you into the office, but I have to escort you and make a note of everything you take.”

  So we march, ahead of him. I wonder if this is how prisoners felt on the way to the guillotine. There’s nothing she wants or needs in the office.

  She sits in Foucault’s chair at Foucault’s desk and pulls the top drawer.

  “My cosmetic bag, with my initials on it.” She holds it for him to see. “My address book, also with my initials.”

  “I don’t know about that, mum.”

  “This is mine. Here’s the Rolodex. I wouldn’t dream of taking that. But these are my personal friends.” She rolls her eyes up at him, the expression of a silent-movie queen in distress. “My husband is in the hospital dying of cancer. I would like to be able to notify my friends when he passes on.”

  “That’s true,” I say. He shrugs and flutters his giant paw.

  Some bills, still in their envelopes, addressed to Mum at home.

  “Maybe you’d like to take care of these for me?”

  “Go on with you. Finish up.”

  From the next drawer a box of diet bars, Kleenex, a silver pen also engraved with her initials that my father bought for her on sale at Tiffany’s, and from the bottom drawer a framed photograph of Henry and Anna and me, must have been that last year at the farm. I recognize us, smiling together, but I have no recollection of the picture being taken. Mum’s kept it here for fifteen years.

  The guard looms over the desk, making notes. “Nice-lookin’ family.”

  “Yeah. Well, I guess they’re all I’ve got left, aren’t they?”

  I pick up as many of the belongings as I can hold. We don’t have a bag. We would never have gotten out with what we really came for.

  I draw a bead on the back of my mother’s blue velvet collar, still marginally askew but straightening rapidly, and follow her out and away from the gallery. For the final time.

  * * *

  Later, standing in the kitchen with a tumbler of Scotch, she tells me the salient details. He drowned in the South of France while swimming in a mineral pool reputed to prolong life. Coralie was with him.

  We stare at each other while the words sink in. I start to laugh. Mum watches, wide-eyed with surprise or anger, I can’t tell which, but it doesn’t stop me and soon she, too, is bubbling over, helpless chortles branching into raucous guffaws. We wipe our noses on paper towels. The laughter fills the cold white room like helium in a dental office. We refill our glasses with the Dewar’s we’ve been drinking for over an hour. It almost feels as if we’re having fun. We keep it up until our faces are slick with tears, and stop abruptly.

  The Bauhaus clock reads six. Outside, the sky is ashen, city lights reflecting intermittently off of low clouds.

  She has her arms twisted around each other tight against her chest. Suddenly she whirls to the sink, grabs a scrub brush, and attacks the tile grout.

  “You could fight in probate,” I say. “You could get your customers and artists to testify that Foucault only succeeded in New York because of you. There must be some precedent for this, like commercial palimony? Mum, that gallery was your life, you can’t just let it go without fighting.”

  Her body slowly stops working. She lets go of the brush. When she turns back to me, she is biting her lip. The rims of her eyes are red and glossy, and I expect her to say something about the hidden pictures, the part of the gallery that is most hers, which she can never claim.

  Instead she says, “That’s really what you think?”

  I stare at her shoes. Black round-toed Ferragamos with small pleated bows. She’s had them for years, but they look brand-new. “Well, Art was, anyway.”

  She tears a Kleenex from the heap of retrieved goods piled on the counter and blows her nose. Hard. “Your father was my life, Maibelle. Everything I’ve ever done has been for him. That’s the only thing I regret about the gallery. The only thing.”

  She gasps. Her eyes roll wide, thick with tears that have no part of laughter. She gulps air. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. What am I going to do now?”

  I come toward her. She stands sobbing, pulling tissues. She won’t look at me. Her hair falls loose, dull and wispy as an old feather. I want to hold her, to hug her, be small in her arms again. To feel warmth and the certain squeeze of her love. But her body is closed and smaller than mine now.

  “It was my fault, don’t you see? Coming back. Settling in. Babies. None of it—”

  I picture her clawing at a locked door. A pink satin pillow. Sobbing. My father leading her to safety.

  “He never would have quit if it hadn’t been for me.”

  “That’s not true, Mum.”

  “It is.” She takes my head between her hands and squeezes until I can feel the contours of my own skull. Her eyes dig into mine. “You don’t know. None of you. The way he just disintegrated.”

  Suddenly she straightens as if someone’s put a prod up her back. She releases me and shakes her head, smooths a final tissue below her eyes.

  “Look at me. Who has time for this! It’s all right, Maibelle. As soon as the word is out, as soon as Joe’s better and I can put my mind to this again, people will call.”

  “Delong. And Scott?”

  “Absolutely.”

  After that one brief lapse, Foucault’s death seemed to engineer my mother’s grief over Dad, gave it the sharp, crisp edges of an executive career. The day we brought him home from the hospital she filled the apartment with balloons and loaded his bedside with the best of his gadgets for invalids. Rotating cup holders, folding trays, side bags containing magazines, newspapers, cards, and notepaper within easy reach. Considering the disdain with which she’s treated most of his inventions, this was a sweet and meaningful gesture.

  Sweet and meaningful does not describe her dealings with me and Henry. The contrast, after the first days at the hospital when every word between us throbbed like a stab wound, was both a relief and a serious annoyance.

  After the shock of Foucault’s betrayal subsided, she didn’t mention the gallery or her future plans again. Instead, Dad became her consuming passion—and a macabre Pollyanna passion it was. In complete and unilateral command, she reported every development as if Henry and I had just dropped in from Outer Mongolia. Told us over and over how marvelously sensitive the radiologist was, how humane the treatment (which, because of the extent of the cancer, consists of little more than painkillers), and how open-minded the oncologist (because he gave Mum the number of an “alternative” medicine man whose coffee enemas and herbal infusions Dad won’t touch). She s
tudied homeopathic textbooks, restorative cookbooks, became an overnight expert on resuscitation techniques. The kitchen became a laboratory for Dad’s new whole-grain, raw-vegetable immuno-boost diet. Once again, her entire existence served a master plan.

  When I suggested that the best treatment might be simply to cherish the short time Dad had left, Mum repeated a phrase I’d heard so often. “You don’t really believe that,” she said, then more softly, “We can’t quit.”

  While I told myself she was more than entitled to whatever defenses she could muster, at that moment I began to fantasize about scrawling “Death Kills!” in blood red across her living room chevrons.

  Henry finally bailed out. He’d visit Dad every day like a dutiful son, but he just couldn’t handle round-the-clock exposure to Mum’s Florence Nightingale routine. So we’ve traded places, in effect, with me helping Mum uptown, he braving Harriet and the other white witches of Eleventh Street.

  And then the weekend after Dad came home, Anna arrived.

  From the living room I could see the foyer as my mother went to unlock the elevator door. I watched it roll back, saw the duffel bag and backpack and, beyond, a thin figure with cropped brown hair. She was wearing blue jeans, a turquoise-green pullover, dark glasses. She gave us all hugs, no cheek pecks. She smelled like a Big Mac and handed Mum a bottle of Oregon wine for a homecoming present.

  As Anna hurried down the hall to see Dad, Henry voiced what we were all thinking. “Ding dong, the guru’s dead!”

  Later in my father’s room, Anna (she was, again, Anna even unto herself) told us the story. The Dhawon, it seems, had objected to her leaving the ashram. He told her she had taken a vow to serve him as daughter and wife, that her spiritual family consisted solely of other devotees. The outside realm was of no consequence. Not even if her “biological” father was terminally ill. By leaving without permission she would forfeit her place of favor in the Inner Circle.

  “In other words, I’d go from being his mistress to his janitor. Somehow, I felt I had a right to my own father. Besides, I always hated the way I look in red, and I had a terrible craving for beef.”