The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  The air felt damp, despite the heat outside. One of the windows was cracked open an inch. I pulled it up and surveyed the room. It was well proportioned, arranged with a fireplace at one end and, along the other, rows of bookcases and a writing desk, where no one appeared to have written much lately, if ever. I stood at the window listening to the rumble of thunder outside, followed by the tinkling of bells—or was it Laurel putting away the crystal with a heavy hand? I thought I heard weeping in the hallway, then I was sure it was the sound of wind chimes in the yard.

  From what I could tell, the storm wasn’t coming from the Sound, but inland, from the north. I guessed that I might have time to stretch my legs, as Emerson suggested, before the grounds flooded with rain. At the front door, Laurel walked past carrying a vacuum cleaner. I waved hesitantly.

  “Where are you going?” she inquired.

  “I’m not sure, actually. Which way would you go for a short walk?”

  She stood beside me at the open door and swung her weathervane arm to indicate a route through the woods in the general direction of the Sound. I tied my sweater around my waist and set out, following the driving course past the stables, then cutting inland through a grove of pines, where there appeared to be a roughly made hiking trail.

  The narrow path nearly disappeared at some points—the work of some careworn Pilgrims maybe, whose buckled shoes had once scraped the earth as heavily as my sneakers did now. As I walked, I imagined the conversation that had been going on between Emerson and his father, in parallel to my own. A wave of anxiety swelled in my gut when I considered what I had been trying not to think about since Emerson limped down the corridor a few hours earlier: Was everything about to change?

  I climbed a gently sloping hill, like an Indian burial mound, wondering as I went if all of our daily routines would be disrupted by whatever was being discussed or decided between Emerson and his father. I conceded that I had become protective, too. Not only of Emerson, but of all the intricately calibrated details of his care.

  At the top of the knoll I found that I couldn’t walk any farther on my path. The way was blocked by a pile of rocks from some crumbling walls that, on closer inspection, looked almost artfully arranged. The sensory flavor of the place was familiar, and I looked around, possessed suddenly by the idea that the rubble at my feet was the remains of the same stone wall I had seen Emerson standing on when we were children, sipping his drink through a straw. But that wall had been near Camel Rock, much farther down on the road.

  Disoriented, I sat on a piece of wall that was still standing. The rain was suspended in visible sheets a few miles off. Above me, a gust tipped the highest branches of the trees. An ash-gray wave hung over it all like a question: Would he replace me? The question trickled into a gathering stream of other, more troubling questions: Would Mr. Webster move into Emerson’s guest room? Would I be asked to move back to London Terrace, relieved of my duties, while someone else took over?

  I hurried down the hill and back to the house, unable to outrun the truth that my father had pointed out: I had no plan. The thought of being replaced consumed my vigil in the study, until Emerson shuffled in to tell me he was ready to leave. I looked past him, expecting to see Mr. Webster entering behind him, but Emerson was alone. He stood by the windows and watched the storm hang over the woods, his eyes now partially shaded by his baseball cap.

  “It’s going to be impressive,” he said quietly.

  Heat lightning popped in soft explosions behind the trees, but still there was no rain.

  “How are you doing?”

  “He’s traveling all summer, first to someplace called Hainan Island. Then to Taipei, I forget why.”

  It took a moment for me to absorb the meaning of his words.

  “Did you ask him about postponing it?”

  “Actually, I don’t think the storm’s coming any closer. It’s going straight east. Let’s get out of here.”

  “What about the window?”

  “Leave it.”

  I gathered my things. On the way out, I thought I heard someone whistling in the yard.

  Beth, hello, it’s Hélène Moreau. I’ve extended my stay in New York to take care of some business. I would love to see you again. To meet for lunch . . . if you’re available . . . Thank you.

  I found her second message on the answering machine in Emerson’s office later that evening, after he had gone to sleep. This time she sounded much more composed. It was the last thing I expected: an invitation from her. And one that sounded vaguely social.

  I lay awake that night with fireworks in my stomach, folding and unfolding a prescription for ulcer medication between my fingers. The pain in my gut was always there, sometimes dull, never less than dull, alternating on a daily basis between bruised and burning. You’re having sympathy pains in your stomach, my mother diagnosed at lunch that afternoon. My doctor was confident it was an ulcer. You’re under stress. Your ulcer is mimicking his condition.

  My place at Emerson’s side seemed assured after the visit to Connecticut, but while my body may have been struggling to cope with the stresses of the situation, until then I hadn’t fully acknowledged the reality of the decisions and unknowns I would be facing with him as his health continued to decline. Awake in the dark, I thought of Hélène Moreau on 44th Street, high above the nightly party in the lobby and the steam funneling out from the underground vents of Times Square. I imagined a life like hers—living in hotels, where there was no reason to pretend you were there for any more than a temporary stay. She was outside the world of nurses and blood transfusions, just as I’d been on the nights I’d spent at the Royalton myself a few years earlier. From the archive in my mind I retrieved one, when I’d ended up in the lobby with a Swiss man who’d invited me to play chess with him at one of the gaming tables, and who’d accomplished each move with the aid of improbably large biceps. It was one night, but in a way it was all the nights I spent with men, even the ones I halfheartedly went on to see for any length of time: secret adventures and their attendant artifacts—matchbooks, cocktail stirrers, complimentary pencils—all filed away in boxes. At one point the chess player had made the inevitable move to the elevator. The door of his room clicked shut and the cool air filled with the wonderland smell of white musk . . .

  Uncluttered now of Emerson’s recent affairs, my mind roamed with pleasure over the memory of the smudged pale shapes of the man’s body reflected next to mine in the polished wooden frame around the bed—the warmth of his skin and the illusion of our togetherness there among the Surrealist postcards, the horns, holes and headless cones . . . a night of blissful escape as curious as the hotel itself.

  And now Hélène Moreau had stationed herself there in that curious wonderland, offering a different sort of escape. When I returned her call the next morning, I made sure to do it while Emerson was asleep. I told myself I could use a few hours away while I still had the chance to take them, and I would find out for Emerson why she wanted the old car.

  He had said nothing more about it. But even in silence there is a contract, an agreement between parties. And I understood that such contracts were mine to record and keep. I was in danger of violating my duty to him simply by letting Hélène Moreau think I didn’t recognize her barefaced attempt to take me into her confidence. She was interested in acquiring something that belonged to my employer, and he’d told her he did not want to sell it. Still, when she repeated her invitation to lunch, I accepted without hesitation.

  7

  IT WAS A WARM AFTERNOON in early July when I met Hélène in Bryant Park, behind the Public Library, a few blocks south of her hotel. I tried to remember when I had last gone out for any length of time without Emerson, but I could not think of one. Putting on my clothes I felt self-conscious, as if I were heading out for a date with fish on my breath.

  Whether Emerson sensed that I was up to something, or perhaps because of some less complicated fear, he was reluctant for me to leave. Fortunately, Zandra was schedu
led that day, and she amused him. I found her in his room with her dreadlocks pushed over one shoulder, hooking up his nutrition pack.

  “Just meeting someone for a late lunch,” I told her, enjoying the casualness of the phrase, the impression it might have given her that I had a life beyond the walls of our minimalist sick bay. I knew Emerson would never ask me where I was going because he loathed being asked such questions himself. I hoped this simple explanation would put him at ease. “I’ll be back in a few hours. I don’t want to have too much fun without you.”

  “Go ahead,” he urged defiantly. “I have fun without you all the time. I’m going to drink and smoke with Zandra while you’re gone.”

  “You do that with Brian, not with me,” Zandra countered in mock protest.

  “I feel like I’ve always got an IV going into me,” he complained as she zipped up his backpack. “Eight hours for this nutrition bag, forty-five minutes a day for the antibiotic, one hour twice a day for something I can’t remember . . .”

  “I remember for you,” she assured him. “You’re covered.”

  He stared at me in the doorway.

  “It may be hard for you to believe, Zandra, but I used to be a very active person.”

  At Bryant Park, I was the first to arrive at the statue of Gertrude Stein, where Hélène had suggested we meet. I had walked as far as my own apartment in Chelsea to pick up my mail, then hailed a taxi to get to 40th Street on time. Hélène had no more than four blocks to walk, but apparently she was less concerned about punctuality. I sat on the bench next to Gertrude’s plinth to wait.

  My head felt heavy. Had I nodded off during the short taxi ride? A microsleep? Maybe. For weeks I had been sleeping in two-hour increments. The night nurses were supposed to make that unnecessary, but I couldn’t forget that there were essentially strangers in the loft with us every night. Like a new mother, I always heard Emerson when he woke up, and I usually checked to see if there was anything I could do. I was surprised at how often there was. In the months of our growing intimacy, there was no time to think, only to plunge in where a hand was needed. The home healthcare workers taught me how to bolus his morphine pump (Emerson called it a turbo-boost) and prep the syringes to administer meds into the single port in his arm; they showed me which cleaning solutions to use on the floor or the rug when he overshot his portable urinal. From Tisa, who was as small as Emerson and me, I learned a technique for changing his soiled sheets without moving him out of the bed. In between, I dozed off in the guest room only if I had taken a self-prescribed antihistamine, which induced something that felt like sleep at first but turned out to be thick and unnatural by the middle of the night.

  On the gravel by my feet was a squashed packet of ketchup, its comet tail of red ooze blackening like blood in the sun. I raised my eyes to study the face of the writer instead. The likeness of Stein was mounted on a marble pedestal with the dates 1874–1946 etched into its shiny surface in the manner of a tombstone. In bronze, as reportedly in life, she was a small mountain of a woman; the narrow belt at her waist barely contained her mass of flesh. She sat like a hunchback Buddha, except her hands were not open. Her gaze was downcast, contemplative. Resigned. Not joyful. The face of a thug or a statesman: a doughty, formidable face. At the base of the statue, a thin layer of water had pooled around her dress. Gertrude Stein had wet herself.

  I looked up to see Hélène making her way toward me on the slate pathway. A caftan floated around her ankles, where the laces of her Roman-soldier style sandals were tied. The most curious thing: She was walking between the beds of ivy not with a sword, but with a tree branch balanced on her index finger, the thin end resting on her fingertip, the heavier end four feet in the air.

  She was concentrating, keeping the leafy branch upright as she walked. With a flick of her finger, she sent it up into the air and landed it again, still upright, a moment later.

  “You try,” she said, pushing the branch toward me.

  “Oh, no. I have no coordination.”

  “It does the coordination for you.”

  She wagged her finger. The branch swayed a few degrees, then balanced again like a butterfly on a leaf.

  Reluctantly, I took the branch from her and let the thin tip find a resting place on my index finger. As substantial as the other end was, high in the air, I could barely feel any weight as I set off gingerly over the paving stones. A light pressure rolled around on my fingertip, but the branch remained vertical.

  “What’s the trick?” I called over my shoulder.

  “None! Nature.”

  I tried running. The branch remained upright with even less effort. Then I took a corner too fast, and it flew off onto the paving stones.

  When I bent to pick it up I found myself laughing. I felt light. I felt nothing. No glass walls. No thoughts. A strange sensation then—when I remembered Emerson and everything else.

  I walked back to where Hélène was sitting, cross-legged, mimicking Stein’s posture. She looked insulted when I offered her the stick back. “It’s for you!”

  I leaned it against the plinth and sat down next to her. A patch of sunshine was burnishing Gertrude’s shoulder, making it glow.

  “To me, it’s a sad face,” Hélène said.

  I nodded. “Or it goes sad, anyway, when you stare at it.”

  “I hate that her eyes are empty,” Hélène said. “The sculptor has made her like a blind person, of all things. I do enjoy sitting with this statue, though. In the flesh, I don’t know if I would have enjoyed the woman’s company.”

  I tried to picture her together with Stein, an artist whose experiments with words had been an attempt to express a continuous present. From what I recalled, the effect she sought was outside of time and sense, outside of the causal relationships between words—or even between moments. It was ironic: The woman for whom the memorial was erected had no need for memory. Perhaps that was why she looked so sad.

  When there is no sense, no causality, there is only the present, only presence. It was how I had experienced death. It was how I had experienced speed. There were no memories and no need for them. There was only the moment, the balancing of the stick. But I didn’t suppose that memory was something Hélène was willing to forsake—not when she had traveled halfway around the world to find an old car.

  “Why don’t we have lunch at the hotel?” she suggested.

  I stood behind her in the dark hallway as she worked to fit an odd metal key into the door of Penthouse B. Inside, the space was filled with a perfume I thought I recognized; a heavy, old-fashioned scent. I tried to identify the amber note, but I was distracted by the unsettling feeling that I was smelling someone specific. My elementary school art teacher?

  “Would you like some coffee with lunch?” Hélène asked with a junkie’s glow as she prepared to call room service.

  “Maybe some herbal tea. I have an ulcer.”

  Hélène Moreau was a person who consumed coffee continuously—a substance I had to avoid for the sake of my stomach lining. This put me at a disadvantage in following her patter through the meal as she praised the state of New York and the naked beauty of the George Washington Bridge, going on to recount her aesthetic conversion to the work of Thomas Cole and his fellow painters of the Hudson River School.

  “I see that the pyramid in The Architect’s Dream foreshadows Cole’s own death,” she observed. “The man is alone there, gazing at the glories of the past. He made that painting for a patron, but compositionally, the pyramid resembles more and more a mountain to me. He died in his own home, did you know this? Overlooking the Catskill Mountains.”

  I knew the painting she meant, and it reminded me of one of Emerson’s photographs of a Case Study House in Los Angeles: a wistful, solitary man surveying an idealized world that stretched past the horizon. I almost mentioned this, but if she was trying to get me onto the subject of Emerson’s collections, or death, or dying at home, it would not work. I surveyed the airy landscape of Penthouse B more closel
y. A slate fireplace occupied one wall, but in place of wood smoke the room was filled with that musky, familiar smell—turpentine? Draped across the curved metal back of a chaise longue was a chambray shirt splattered with paint, its arms twisted into tiny pleats. A row of canvases had accumulated outside on the covered balcony, but it was difficult to tell much about them from a distance.

  “Are those paintings of the Italian countryside?” I asked, recalling the one I’d seen on her easel the last time.

  Her face brightened. “Just one of them is Italy. But they do have something in common. They all depict clotheslines, as you say in America. Some people do not understand this . . .”

  Her voice grew frail and then trailed off. I could see she was sensitive about them.

  “My career is not what it once was,” she admitted. “The critics like to remind me: My time in the spotlight was prolific, but it was brief.”

  She stood and picked through a pink suitcase, open like a clamshell on the floor. When she straightened again she was holding an armful of small leather-covered books. Her right hip swung higher than her left as she carried them back, I noticed, now that I wasn’t distracted by the stick. The spine will show it if you have carried a heavy weight for a long time. Her gait reminded me of Emerson’s, who sometimes gave the impression of a cowboy slinging a gun.

  “I could show you some little drawings I did?” she offered. “I was maybe not more than nine or ten years old.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  She sat beside me with the sketchbooks and turned the pages, each one bruised with purplish lines of fading India ink, lines that swooped and curved—crude renderings of sheets blowing in the wind.

  “These were 1941, ’42,” she explained, opening another sketchbook to reveal pencil drawings of shirts hanging upside down, aprons dangling by their strings. “For me, the laundry was maybe a stand-in for people who were absent, the wind animating the empty forms. The sensation of movement already had something to do with my imagination. But at that time, the air was moving past—not me. That changed, being in a car.”