The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  “Arthur—the notice—yes, very good. But the photo—I can’t look at it.”

  She pulled a page from the newspaper and held it at arm’s length.

  “Again. Unbelievable, to run it again! They always want this one. That car. As if no one has made another photo of me in forty years. Oh, that I even tried to smile. What you do at twenty-one . . .”

  She hung up, murmuring, “The rest of the paper will be useful, anyway, for cleaning brushes.”

  She ripped the offending sheet in half and then tore at the newsprint until it was reduced to a cheerless pile of gray confetti.

  Emerson returned Hélène’s phone call from his bed the next morning, but the line to Penthouse B was busy, obliging him to dictate the message slip I now possess. He tried again after lunch and succeeded in reaching her: a conversation so brief I had barely gotten down the hall before he was yelling for me to come back. On the way, I stopped to pull some art books from the library of Easter Island.

  “We’re meeting her tomorrow,” he announced.

  “Oh?”

  “Four o’clock.”

  “What does she want?”

  “I don’t know.” He dropped the phone onto his blanket. “I can’t concentrate on the phone anymore. Can you help me roll down my pajama legs, Beth? I’m cold.”

  I rested the books on his bedside table and bent to reach them. “She’s coming here?”

  “No, her hotel.”

  “You’re going to wear your food pack up to 44th Street?”

  He stared at me, his eyes narrowing behind the silver frames of his glasses. “And can you make us an appointment for tomorrow at Golden Hands? We haven’t been in a week.”

  Hands—always hands on him. His doctors prescribed a bookcaseful of well-calibrated meds for pain, but beyond administering them, there was little the home healthcare workers and I could do to soothe him except to rub his arms and back as gently as we could. In the tiny, immaculate confines of the Golden Hands nail salon, at least he could get a proper massage.

  I admit there were times when it might have been natural for me to hug him, but this was difficult to accomplish. Not because he was my employer, but because he couldn’t manage it. I chalked this up to his natural guardedness, a reserve he exhibited when it came to anything personal. I’d been shocked when he’d tried to kiss me on the cheek earlier that summer, by way of appreciation, but the most he could do was to rub his cheek lightly against mine. And I suspect even that made him uncomfortable because, at age thirty-three, he still had some lingering acne.

  When Zandra finished bathing him the next morning, she dressed him in a soft, stretched-out T-shirt and a pair of British walking shorts he had special-ordered from a men’s shop on lower Fifth Avenue.

  “I’m going to walk off my hangover on the way to Golden Hands,” he announced.

  I rolled my eyes for his benefit. The only walking we would be doing was in and out of a taxicab, and he knew it. By that spring, his body had grown incapable of absorbing regular food. The fuel that kept him running was a prescribed liquid-nutrition pack, a miraculous milky elixir sealed in plastic. Each day, a one-gallon bag of protein and other nutrients flowed with the assistance of a mechanical pump into a port surgically inserted in his gut. The manufacturer provided a refrigerated backpack to dispense the fluid into him over the course of eight hours, accompanied by little more than a low-pitched whir. Mobility proved to be liberation: It prevented mealtimes from being new stretches of nothingness for him to fill.

  According to Dr. Albas, his digestive tract now functioned more or less like a plastic baby doll’s: Feed it a bottle of tap water and almost immediately a stream of liquid would pour out the other end. But while he could no longer digest regular food, she said there was no reason he couldn’t taste it—a policy that preserved his sole remaining physical pleasure. The tiniest leftovers became feasts for him: two bites of a hamburger, half a lemon donut . . . The day we were due to meet Hélène Moreau, Zandra had put together a special lunchtime collection of his Greatest Hits: a single cold shrimp, some mushroom soup and a few forkfuls of reheated SpaghettiOs.

  “The Chef outdid himself on that can,” Emerson said, wiping his lips with satisfaction.

  “No, the Chef does the ravioli you like,” said Zandra, attempting to clear his fogged mental windshield. “This is Campbell’s.”

  After Zandra replaced his plastic underwear with a fresh pair, I escorted him into a taxi for the brief ride down Bleecker Street to Golden Hands. Our patronage of the salon was an accident of the previous autumn. I needed to find a masseuse after he complained about the way the physical therapists touched him, and I recalled that when I had gotten a manicure once, for my college graduation, there had been some massage involved. At the first shop we’d tried, the Nail Palace on Sixth Avenue, the matron did not appear to be listening to a word I said. She was staring at Emerson’s bulging knees. Then I turned and saw a line of faces staring along with her, a row of young women collapsed over their tables like wilted lettuce. An air conditioner whispered hopelessly over the doorway. Something unpleasant bit my nostrils.

  “I feel cold,” Emerson said.

  “Excuse us,” I told the matron. “Another time, maybe.”

  “Tell me, what the hell was that?” he demanded when we got outside.

  “I think it’s the chemicals and stuff they use to sculpt fake nails.”

  “They breathe that in all day? And Beth, why do they all perm and dye their hair?”

  “I don’t know. Different reasons, probably.”

  “They have pretty hair and they fry it!”

  A few blocks away, on Cornelia Street, the front room of Golden Hands was bathed in the sweet, sharp fragrance of fresh-cut limes. A thin stream of sunlight filtered through the ground-floor windows. There, on a bench covered in silk, I’d gotten the second manicure of my life, from a young woman named Mei, who at the time had seemed as uncertain as me. Nine months later, as she confidently led me to her little worktable, I could see I was the one who had lost ground.

  “Mani-cure?” a voice sang out as a middle-aged woman named Li, Emerson’s favorite, offered him her arm. Li was not a tall woman, but she was elongated anyhow and there was an athletic grace to her elongated form. Emerson lowered his eyes as she placed his hands in a bowl of warm water.

  “You work today?” Mei asked me.

  It occurred to me that Mei and I both worked about fourteen hours a day, that we were both working at that moment.

  “Yes.” I smiled politely. “You too, I see.”

  Over at the next station, Emerson’s nutrition pump whirred through its cycles in the silver bag on his lap, just audible over the chattering of birds in their cages. He reminded me of an astronaut getting oxygen. His face in profile communicated exactly nothing.

  I usually took him to Golden Hands once or twice a week, more if he wanted. He wouldn’t let them paint anything or cut his nails or cuticles, only wash his hands elaborately in a deep clay bowl, then rub thick white lotion into his elbows and arms. If Li was available, she helped him to the massage area behind a bamboo screen.

  Mei took my fingers between hers, smiling the distracted smile of a young woman who anticipated a life outside of work that I could not begin to imagine.

  “You go to party tonight?” she asked.

  It was the question she asked me most frequently, probably every time I sat with her. I supposed this was why most of her customers came to get their nails done—a thought that seemed especially absurd when I pictured the night ahead: Dr. Albas had warned me that Emerson was likely to lose most of the blood from his last transfusion. The hands Mai was manicuring would spend the night dipping in and out of surgical gloves, helping to discard plastic underpants heavy with black metallic slush. Tisa, one of the night workers, had already stocked up on supplies. I didn’t need to explain any of this, but I felt lying was disrespectful.

  “I’m working tonight.”

  This seemed to di
sappoint her.

  I didn’t want to go to parties anyway, couldn’t think what I would say to anyone.

  “Who’s your boyfriend this week?” I teased her.

  Mei’s cheeks bloomed bright pink. “You still short nails.”

  “I use my hands a lot.”

  She frowned. “Polish don’t stay good short nails.”

  “Just clear, please, like yours. Yours look pretty.”

  We were due to meet Hélène Moreau at her hotel in an hour. At the next table, Li unfurled her arms with gymnastic precision and indulged in a brief stretch before returning to buffing Emerson’s nails. On our first visit to Golden Hands, her hair had been permed and dyed an unnatural shade of eggplant. Now it hung smoothly to her chin, the inky black of a grand piano. At the crown, her part revealed a keyboard of thick, graying roots. The ends swung lightly before Emerson’s nose as she moved the buffer back and forth. He raised his eyebrows, and I wondered if he was inhaling the scent of her shampoo. His ears twitched. Then Li put the buffer down and his eyebrows relaxed.

  Some days, if I was falling asleep from a lack of caffeine, I would turn my neck to ease the muscles, and study the manicurists’ faces. They were stylish, not wilted. Some of them were learning English, and they left their books and magazines in the restroom. If any of them were married, they had no gold or diamond rings to show it. They wore shell necklaces, hoop earrings, thin rubber bracelets. All except Li, who recently, I noticed, had begun wearing a chunky metal cuff—an amassment of gold thick enough to knock someone’s teeth out, and expensive enough (if it was real) to finance a good portion of the small salon we were sitting in. I wondered if Emerson had given it to her.

  Mei held out a hand to me, bandaged across the soft place between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Need some massage?”

  It was pretty the way she said it: Massage-uh.

  The hands slapped at my shoulders and arms, out of control—a windmill of frustrated swipes so fierce it took my mother leaning over the back seat to fend them off.

  “He said he’d trade me!” my brother cried.

  “That’s not your sister’s fault, Garrett. Don’t take it out on her.”

  Nothing could console him, falling away from me into the back seat of my parents’ car, a Chevy that my father had nicknamed the Green Goose after a model warplane he was building at the time—it must have been the early 1970s. At a birthday party for a boy named Nathan Stirling, my brother had been determined to trade a scratched-up car from his Matchbox collection—a Triumph Spitfire—for one of Emerson’s scale models: a golden Maserati Ghibli, as Garrett would continue to remind us bitterly for years. It was to be their second trade, at Emerson’s insistence, after my brother complained to anyone who would listen that he’d been fleeced of a Hot Wheels “Classic Cord” on the first round of trading. Yet, in place of vengeance or satisfaction of any kind, Garrett was fastening the tiny hood of his Triumph closed with an orthodontic rubber band and crying because Emerson never showed up.

  When school started in the fall, we found out Emerson’s father had moved him to a private school in Greenwich—an offense for which Garrett never forgave him. Stories about Emerson drifted back to us now and then: How the house on Gray Hill was visited by a world-class pianist following his performances at Carnegie Hall, not to give Emerson lessons, but to play private concerts to foster the boy’s appreciation of the musical arts. Or how, when Emerson turned thirteen, Mr. Webster sponsored a school field trip to the Museum of Modern Art. The class was taken afterward to an art gallery on 57th Street, where each student was invited to choose a lithograph to take home, courtesy of Mr. Webster. (According to a copy of the Burring Port Standard from 1975, the businessman had hoped to start the youngsters off as art collectors—or at least appreciators—in his son’s name.)

  I was a teenager by the time I saw Emerson again, inside a pizza place in Burring Port Village. I recognized him immediately, distracted as I was trying to pick out songs on a jukebox that had all the song titles written indecipherably in ballpoint pen. He pivoted in just long enough to pick up his food order, long enough for me to register his ripped jeans and sweatshirt, his black hair arranged in a Mohawk, except for a shaggy waterfall over his eyes where the tips were bleached orange. By then he’d started driving an old sports car around the course on his father’s property—my brother called it a Speedster. Garrett and his friends were jealous to the point of violence, not so much because the car was a Porsche, but because Emerson had a private track to practice on, a full year before any of them qualified for a learner’s permit.

  Emerson passed me in the car one afternoon that winter, though I didn’t see him so much as hear him. I was by myself, as usual, on my way home from the library for dinner, loitering along the Sound with my parka hood pulled up, when a muffled buzz came vibrating through the fabric. All at once the noise cut off. I pulled off my hood to listen, and for a few moments the air was filled with nothing but seagull cries, as loud and raucous as the engine had been.

  There was no sound of a crash, and I hesitated before I left the beach road and stepped onto the Websters’ property, peering through the trees for a glimpse of Emerson or the car as I climbed farther into the woods. What I came upon not long after was a sight I cannot forget. At first I had trouble making out the driver, as I was still at some distance. There was no road leading to the place where he was parked. The car had been driven straight through the woods to the top of a rise, cutting deep ruts around the trees and through the carpet of rotted leaves. There was nothing around but bare trees, melting snow and parts of some stone walls once erected as boundary markers—no people, no buildings—but it was empty in an expectant way, like the stage of an outdoor amphitheater that had yet to be populated with sets and costumes, only an audience of crows cawing in their mournful way overhead, waiting for the show to begin.

  When I looked back at Emerson, I could see it had already begun. He was the actor in a private scene that I sensed I should have turned away from, but couldn’t. I was riveted by the strangeness of what I saw. He was seated alone in the open-topped car, stopped alongside a pile of rocks, his hair covered by a knitted cap and his neck hinged back at an angle so extreme that, until that day, I had seen the gesture only in paintings of carnage. His eyes were closed and his mouth was stretched open, but there was no sound coming out. I thought he was laughing to himself, so overcome by a hilarious thought that he’d had to stop the car. Then I thought he was in a state of ecstasy, about to reach the climax of some motorized jerk-off session. I started to turn away when all at once his shoulders heaved, and I recognized that his posture had nothing to do with pleasure. He was wailing, silently, his face to the sky, running with tears. His body began to shake. He raised his hands, fitted with racing gloves, but instead of wiping his face he reached out and gripped the windscreen. He arms shook as if he were trying to tear it off the car. All at once his body sagged. With his arms hanging there, he bowed his head in surrender to some unknown misery.

  An odd sensation came over me: It was as if I could feel the force of his suffering. His pain was unknowable to me, though I seemed to taste it then. I feared that he was physically hurt, that he’d hit something after all—what were all those loose stones around the car? He could have a wound or injury I couldn’t see. Without thinking, I hurtled up the hill, kicking through the frozen leaves, but within seconds the engine started up and, abruptly, he was in retreat. I stood listening until I couldn’t hear the sound anymore, a roaring mechanical chord that rose and fell like a wave through the woods and out to the graffiti-scarred lighthouse at the end of the Point.

  When he left for prep school in Lakeville that year, it went around that he had picked the school for its proximity to Lime Rock Park, a racetrack tucked between colonial houses and acres of farm fields in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains. Of course, everyone said, Emerson wanted a new place to drive. He had grown bored of the private course on Gray Hill.

>   I reasoned the opposite. He probably never got bored, but that didn’t mean he was happy, either. For a while I wondered what had taken him into the woods that day. I’d felt something through him, as if he’d held a match to an emotion that had been shielded inside me. As far as I knew, his life wasn’t anything like mine, yet I had been out there by myself, too, and I had felt less alone watching him cry. Even then, I had a sense of myself as a kind of ghost, a feeling of being separated from others in a way I never tried to explain. You can be surrounded by people, a loving family, and still feel alone. It was a subtle but impassable barrier, like coming upon an artifact in a glass vault and expecting that you can reach out and touch it, except I felt that barrier around myself. The sensation only grew worse in my teens. To avoid the discomfort, I chose to sleep, and there was little anyone could do to keep me out of bed beyond my required waking hours. I was unconscious so frequently that the days when I was wide awake stand apart in vivid relief. For instance, the morning when a whole orchard of apple trees rose from the exhaust vapor of a police car, parked with its lights flashing. Someone was taking pictures of a truck jackknifed off the road. It was a cold morning, full of frost and the sickly sweet smell that fallen apples give off when they’re crushed underfoot. Our school bus passed some sparkly patches on the road, glass and ice scattered like birdseed, and when the bus inched forward again I saw—we all saw—the station wagon pinned under the trailer. The tingly taste of fresh-picked apples, the cold of such mornings, the question of anyone being alive or not alive entirely overpowered by the abrupt sensation of being very awake.

  It was summertime, 1979, when another one of those very awake days happened, courtesy of Emerson. That morning—a Saturday after what must have been his final year at prep school—my neighbor Beckett appeared at my bedroom door with news that Garrett didn’t know: Emerson Tang had hired out the track near his school in Lakeville to race. Beckett’s family lived on the opposite side of the electrical supply company, but we weren’t exactly friends. As with the few kids I spoke to or sat with at school, our acquaintance revolved around the expediencies of carpooling: we were pushed together into back seats so regularly that we shared a kind of resigned familiarity. Beckett had never stepped inside my bedroom before, and I caught on pretty fast that her invitation was motivated by desperation. Her parents wouldn’t let her take the car unless she could find someone to ride with her. I agreed when she said her brother Tom was one of the kids racing that day. I had never kissed anyone (though I understood from the other carpool girls that I should have, by then), and I was not opposed to Tom.