The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  Philosophy of the Person (due 4/5/82)

  example: Sartre, War Diaries, notebook 3, page 51

  – to be “barricaded within stoicism” = positive

  – he is “cowardly,” “grumbling” but still a HERO

  – a hero who will die “screaming and begging for mercy” but without confessing*

  (an attractive idea, to which we can all relate)

  * “what they wanted him to confess”

  The bulk of the entries dropped off steeply after 1984, his last semester at NYU. It amused Emerson to see the notebook again, so I left it on one of the shelves, along with the battered jewel case of his On Fire CD by Galaxie 500 and everything else in his “Merritt Parkway Driving Music” stack.

  Not that he could drive anymore. By the time Hélène Moreau checked into the Royalton that summer, his thighs and calves had begun to show bone—all the more noticeable on days when edema caused his ankles and feet to blow up like balloon animals, the skin straining over them the color of ripe citrus. On lucid days, he would review whatever decisions he had left to make. He kept signing documents until the morphine ate his muscle coordination and the arcs and dips of his signature grew closer and closer, then shorter.

  That was how his identity disappeared from him that summer, like the stiff black hairs that would not stay attached to his head. His identity fell in clumps from him—his memories, but also his cares. If he went through denial, anger, bargaining and depression, there were days when he was in a kind of bliss, with one of the home healthcare workers, Brian or Zandra, rubbing his back, or me reading to him from the Times while his own blood and waste seeped out of him, dark and metallic-smelling from the meds.

  Emerson woke in time for the six o’clock news, refreshed but pin-eyed from the morphine. I gave him the phone message with his evening antacid.

  “Hélène Moreau called your office earlier. The artist.” I didn’t want to be condescending, but sometimes the meds confused him. “She phoned personally. She sounded tired.”

  His opiate slur was still wearing off. “What’d sesay?”

  “She’s here in the city.”

  He snapped his head around to face the doorway.

  “She wants to meet you for coffee,” I went on, watching him.

  “Dishe say when?”

  “Do you know her, Emerson?”

  His only response was to raise his arms in the air like a child waiting to be picked up. Then, with a kick of his feet, he propelled himself out of bed. He brought his hands down onto the rails of his portable toilet and balanced himself there as he tucked a cashmere lap blanket around his hipbones, sarong-style. I watched him move away from the handrails. Steady tonight. Relatively steady on his feet. Zandra was in the kitchen eating dinner before her shift ended, and Maria-Sylvana wasn’t due until 7:30 P.M. There was nothing to do but follow him, follow his deliberate pace through the loft, follow him and try not to step on his blanket as I bent to rescue his morphine pump from the floor. It was a small plastic cartridge, the size of my old cassette Walkman, attached to one of the medical ports in his chest by a length of silicone tubing. Left to its own devices, it trailed behind him like a dropped leash.

  “Where are you going?”

  The eternal question. One I asked whenever he went mobile without apparent direction. Not that I couldn’t understand why he preferred to drag himself to one of the bathrooms in the loft; pissing into Tupperware was unappealing at the best of times, and walking was one of the few forms of exercise he had left. His physician, Dr. Albas, encouraged it whenever she saw him. But that night he wanted to go to his office—even farther.

  I tended to his opiate train as we crossed the hardwood spanning his corner of Greenwich Village, a loft space stretched across the second floor of two abutting buildings. The brick façades, facing Charles Street on one side and Bleecker on the other, had been maintained in their original nineteenth-century aesthetic, but inside was a different story: Sometime in the 1980s, Emerson had gotten the maze of rooms on his floor demolished, along with some sections of the common walls. His office and a collections-storage area now took up most of one building, with two bedrooms in the other. A kitchen and living area occupied the canyon in the middle, where moveable screens displayed the custom-made enlargements from his photography collection. On permanent exhibit was a trophy wall of Modernist residential architecture—his fantasy neighborhood: stylish, radical, mechanized and clean.

  At the start of one curated streetscape hung a portrait of the architect Alvar Aalto’s modest home in Helsinki, along with a photo of a more elaborate villa he’d designed for friends elsewhere in Finland. The two residences faced one another agreeably across the polished hardwood. And from this gateway of sorts, the house photographs continued down the block alphabetically, by architect, in the minimalist frames Emerson used to surround every lot in his personal subdivision—each one fitted with a picture light sculpted from wire to resemble a miniature street lamp.

  He lingered over a Marcel Breuer house with a cantilevered wooden deck, then shuffled past a portrait of the travertine house that the architect Gordon Bunshaft had built for himself and his wife in East Hampton—the architect’s only residential design. As it is logged in the Accession Register, the photo was taken by the great Ezra Stoller in 1963, one year after the home was completed. (This structure now exists only in photographic form; it was razed some years after Emerson’s death.) We continued down the hallway, with Emerson mumbling to himself.

  “Had photosofaces. Once . . .”

  Until the meds wore off, it always sounded as if his lips were stuck together with peanut butter. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

  “Faces? Not houses?”

  His narrow back and shoulders convulsed in a shrug.

  “Sonlyone. Now.”

  “One—photo?”

  “No! Nophotosofaces! Faces uhavtaleave. Only—afacesis . . . gone . . .”

  “Who’s gone?” I asked, convinced he was hallucinating when he answered:

  “Whichouse dishegoin?”

  “She—who?”

  He stopped suddenly.

  “Whyermy books outere?”

  “That’s Maria-Sylvana. She’s been stacking them.”

  I hoped a general answer would satisfy him. If he hadn’t noticed the latest surge of medical supplies on his bedroom shelves, I didn’t want to be the one to point it out to him.

  “Isse readinem?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Teller to movem out.”

  “What?”

  “Theydon matter.”

  “They matter hugely! We just used them yesterday to look up that Alfred Parker house in Miami, with the snaky indoor pool.”

  “Umaybe attachtoem Beth.”

  “I am not!”

  Outside, the days were growing longer with the unfurling greens of summer. But inside, with all the shades pulled down at Emerson’s insistence, the progress of the new season was barely perceptible. His speech cleared as we worked our way along the hall. He was in a contentious mood.

  “Homes aren’t machines,” he fumed at a villa by Le Corbusier. “Not castles for defense either,” he added, shuffling ahead. “Or symbols of prestige. Ask Schindler—” He pointed down the hallway, in the direction of the S’s. “Homes should be capable of flowing with your life—encouraging better living.” His pace slowed. “Until your life ends. Then you have to stop. Then you have to pull over to the side of the road.”

  The trees outside, thick with leaves, cast shadows over the shaded windows, giving the impression that dusk was falling, though the miniature streetlights had not yet come on for the evening.

  “This idea of life after death,” Emerson said, turning to me. “This legend. You want to believe it. But what if it’s a lie?”

  It was a conversation we had been having on and off for weeks. His lucidity on the subject was inversely related to the strength of his morphine doses.

  “I don’t believ
e it’s a lie,” I told him. “But who can blame you for not wanting to find out? Your life is your story. Of course you don’t want it to end.”

  He nodded vigorously. “And when you die, do you even know how it ends?”

  In the office, he slipped down so far into his desk chair that I had to prop him up with sofa pillows. He got himself settled at the fax machine, positioning his legs on either side as if he were going to drive it, before commencing an agitated transmission.

  I watched from my desk behind him. “Can I do that for you?”

  Silence.

  My head felt heavy. For a moment I mistook the morphine pump beside him for a pack of cigarettes. My eyes were closing.

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Busy!” Emerson bellowed. “In the middle of the night.”

  “It’s just past dinnertime now.”

  “No, in Europe.”

  “Who are you faxing?”

  It made me crazy to see his morphine tube tapping against the fax machine as he punched the buttons.

  “I took care of the Schindlers yesterday,” I reminded him.

  Tap, tap. Tap. Silence.

  “San Francisco took them.”

  “Oh?” he asked distractedly.

  “S.F. MOMA.”

  No response. He evidently had no recall of the bequest I had been working on for two months—one of the last groups we had left to finalize. Or maybe, like the books, he didn’t care about his photographs anymore either.

  “Who are you faxing, Emerson? Can I do it for you?”

  “Personal.”

  Tap, tap. Tap.

  “But thank you, Beth.”

  I pulled open the sturdy brown-board cover of the Accession Register and prepared to work on the Transfer of Title documents.

  Accession Number: ETW 1992.8.3

  Year acquired: 1992

  Object: B/W Print

  Photographer: Hartmut Zeit

  Title: Lovell Beach House

  Location: Newport Beach, California

  Date: 1926

  Subject: Residence designed by architect Rudolf Michael Schindler; commissioned by physician Dr. Philip Lovell

  Other subject: (see Notes)

  Original print held: Y

  Original neg held: N

  Acquisition method: Purchase

  Copyright: Hartmut Zeit

  Related photos: Y

  NOTES:

  – Print depicts the street façade (angle approx northwest). See also: beach façade (west), accession number 1992.8.2. See also: interiors, accession numbers 1991.102.5–1991.102.7.

  When Emerson got tired of the busy signal, when he had slumped so low that the fringes of his blanket were splayed out on the floor, he let me roll him back to bed in his desk chair.

  I knew Emerson for the same reason everyone in my hometown knew him: He was the first Asian boy we had seen in real life—the only child of Chinese ethnicity registered in the Burring Port, Connecticut, public school system in the 1960s. I was born two and a half years after him, in the same hospital, named for his family, and raised along the same few square miles of New England coastline. By the time we came face to face, my older brother Garrett had already shared a kindergarten classroom with him. Whatever my brother’s impressions were, they are lost to time. I only know that, for me, Emerson was the object of unparalleled fascination, the evidence of a wider universe beyond the one I knew, though I could not articulate it at the time. Was this how the ancients felt the first time they saw a comet?

  My family wasn’t part of the town’s social set. We lived in the outer planetary rings of Burring Port, in a wood-shingled, two-story house built on land that had been subdivided in the 1940s and, after a brief lapse in zoning restrictions, shared ever since with the low brick headquarters of an electrical supply company. At the far end of the property, passing trains shot through the green frame of our back yard, advertising a regularly scheduled temptation of escape in one of two directions, east or west.

  But even outside the Websters’ circle, some things about Emerson’s family were common knowledge. Not long after graduating from Yale in the late fifties, Emerson’s father, Lynford Webster, had gone traveling in the Far East and returned with a Chinese wife. The year he met his bride, in the midst of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the race to transform Communist China into an agricultural and industrial power had driven millions of citizens from their remote villages to cities. Emerson’s mother had gone farther. Along with a shipment of Chinese cotton, she’d made it to Hong Kong. Mr. Webster imported her to the United States, and Emerson was born in 1962.

  In my memory, Lynford Webster is filed as a curiosity at one of my brother’s school recitals: a slight man with black, bushy sideburns, and disappearing into them, a pair of eyeglasses with round rims and straight sides, so heavy and geometrically precise that they appeared to my amazed eyes to be fantastically large bubble-blowing wands.

  While his son, my brother and the other children did their worst with a collection of antique musical instruments, Mr. Webster sat in the front row of the audience in a child-sized chair like mine, concentrating on each tortured note of plucking and blowing as if enchanted by an exquisite melody. With closed eyes, in some solitary darkness, he traced the pitch and volume, the rising and falling, with the movements of his head.

  Mr. Webster wasn’t in the music business—his business was related to land development—but photos of him in local newspaper articles archived from that time reinforce my recollection that his wardrobe mimicked that of certain British musicians of the day: slim pants, bright stripes, elaborately embroidered shirts and suit jackets with little mandarin collars. Never a necktie.

  Lynford Webster was outstanding not only because he costumed himself so much more flamboyantly than the fathers of our New England town, but because he was a conspicuous civic benefactor in a part of the world that favored discretion and anonymity. At his insistence, the new Burring Port library, dedicated in 1970, bore the Webster family name (“showy,” decided my father when it was reported in the Burring Port Standard), as did the new regional hospital he had financed, in memory of his deceased parents, when he was still a student in New Haven. But there was another respect in which Lynford Webster was unlike his forebears—people who had sailed from Britain to the New World three centuries earlier and named everything after the place they left: Mr. Webster did not settle. He maintained the family estate on Gray Hill, but his business took him abroad for most of the year.

  Before Emerson started school, the primary curiosity in Burring Port had been Mr. Webster’s wife, the former Miss Tang. It was not unusual in the early 1960s for the young bride to be sighted on Water Street in the village, doing errands with her translator, enlisted from Great Britain. The inner planetary circles reported that she patronized the bakery and the pharmacy, and every Thursday drove with the translator into Manhattan to get her hair done and shop on Fifth Avenue.

  The woman did not occupy the town’s imagination for long. Before Garrett and Emerson started kindergarten, word went around that the former Miss Tang had succumbed to an undisclosed medical disorder. She was gone, but Emerson favored her so heavily that in her place he became our municipal symbol of diversity, christened by Garrett and his classmates circa 1968: the Chinky-Chinky-Chinaman.

  But the first time I saw Emerson, I knew nothing of these matters, nothing of his existence. My brother and I were riding in the car with our parents, waiting for the horses we always waited to see in the field after Camel Rock, a roadside boulder so closely resembling a dromedary that, in its honor, the early colonists had included a single-humped “ship of the desert” in the design of the town flag. If the horses were out that day I never noticed, because my eyes swerved to something else instead: On top of a stone wall, sipping a drink through a straw, stood a dark-haired boy squinting into the sun.

  No other figure of my youth made such an impression, in his white sneakers on the crest of that wall. It
was not the boyness of him, already hopelessly unexotic to a three-year-old girl with an older brother. And it was not what stands out to me now, in retrospect: the absolute domain over wall and field evident in his stance, his asymmetric haircut, or the fact that he was alone, unsupervised—as if he had taken himself, drink and straw, out into that field.

  What was there to describe? Nothing I could name. No, it was only my child’s mind, shaped by recognizing patterns, and then by recognizing when something is unlike the patterns it has already learned. And by this primitive system, I was alerted to some new information in his expression, something I had not encountered before.

  “That boy—”

  3

  HÉLÈNE MOREAU REACHED the bottom of her pot of Kona coffee. She was easing herself off an acid-green banquette in the Royalton lobby when she was reminded that hotels held more spirits than living occupants. For every traveler who passed through, there were ghosts, for every luncheon meeting and business trip, for every honeymoon and tryst . . .

  From all she would later tell me concerning her troubles that summer, Hélène was stalled there herself, suspended in a kind of limbo. And so she was charmed to find that her countryman Philippe Starck had made the phantoms visible in his renovation of the old hotel. A chorus line of ghosts danced along the carpeting underfoot: white shapes on deep blue, trailing the length of the lobby like a wake of Aegean foam and curling into an existential question mark at the end of the corridor outside Penthouse B, where a bellhop placed a copy of Le Monde into Hélène’s hand.

  I imagine myself among the other eavesdropping spirits as she locked the door and paged apprehensively through the newspaper, finally dropping onto the bed with a cry of misery.

  “Oh! Just as he said.”

  She punched at the telephone buttons until the line connected.