The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  I thought Emerson was wrong about her when he said she knew nothing about speed. I wondered if she could help me understand its power over him.

  “What is it about speed?”

  She closed her eyes. “It was new once. It isn’t new anymore. It’s not modern—in the best sense.”

  I could see she didn’t understand my question, but I hoped the turn of our discussion would yield some information about her interest in the Beacon. This, I reminded myself, was my only excuse for being there. At the same time, I wondered about her badly disguised vulnerability. She had made a place for herself in the world—a place in art history that few women of her generation could claim—yet as I’d sensed the first time we met, there seemed to be a struggle taking place in her.

  “Did you drive the cars yourself when you made the Speed Paintings?”

  She cast a glance at a manhandled copy of a French newspaper by her side, then took a gulp of coffee. “At first, yes, I drove them. But as soon as I could, I worked with the race drivers. They understood that we needed to paint them at maximum speed. The truth was creation, yes, but some amount of destruction at the same time. This tension was meaningful to me.”

  The infusion of caffeine and the recollection of her early artistic aims seemed to reestablish some of her equilibrium. She went on: “When I was young, I was fascinated by the power and the beauty of those machines. Also by the filth—the grease and noise. The canvases put another physical form in place of the car body. Even to your eyes as a car is passing by, the wheels are ghosted by the force of their own speed. What do you see of a speeding car? What do you feel driving it? Speed is the only thing that exists then. But it doesn’t exist. I wanted it to exist. To remain in existence.”

  “Do you still own any of them?”

  “Only some of the later paintings.” She cleared her throat. “I had quite a few of the early canvases. One day I couldn’t look at them—I nearly destroyed them. Instead, I sent them to a museum outside of Copenhagen, where I lived many years ago.”

  I sensed my moment.

  “Did you use the Beacon to make your paintings?”

  At my question, her face contracted in a look of horror. She sat paralyzed for what seemed a full minute. Only her eyes moved—racing between my face and the newspaper by her side. Then her expression softened, and instead of answering, she stood: “Beth, would you like a drink?”

  I could not say no. We made small talk in the elevator down to the lobby, where she led me behind a curved wall into a hidden bar—a round room with walls upholstered in pale blue velvet. It was an elegantly padded cell, filled with what could have been the amusements for a mythical seaside resort: Under our feet, black and white floor tiles formed a bull’s-eye target for a giant’s game of darts, and perched delicately on the tiles, as if waiting for a child to climb on for a ride, was a row of silver bar stools shaped like seahorses. Hélène leaned across them to collect two glasses from the bartender.

  “This will taste fresh,” she promised, passing one to me.

  We took a seat at one of the glass tables along the curved banquette and Hélène lit a cigarette.

  “I hope my question upstairs about the car didn’t upset you,” I said. “It seemed like a reasonable assumption.”

  She pushed her drink aside and leaned across the table. Lowering her voice, she asked, “Beth, is he going to sell me that car?”

  Her directness caught me off-guard. I was as thrown by the bluntness of her question as she had appeared to be by mine. But even if I had wanted to answer, I was relieved to discover that I was saved by my own ignorance: Emerson had given me no sign of his intentions.

  “He hasn’t talked about it since we came to see you that day. Do you collect cars?” I asked, attempting to change the subject.

  “Does he?”

  “Not as far as I know. I mean, he keeps an everyday car garaged in the Village. That and the Beacon are the only cars he pays storage on.”

  “He can’t drive it, from what I saw.”

  “He buys and sells things—I just organize them.”

  “Yes, and I understand you’ve had a great deal of success finding recipients for the objects in his collections.”

  So this was the expertise she’d referred to in her first phone message. “Those were all photographs,” I explained. I tried to enjoin her with a smile. “Do you mind if I ask why you want the car?”

  “It’s normal that you would want to know this, I realize,” she said, meeting my eyes evenly through the shield of pinkish-purple glass. “I would have liked to explain it to him myself, but I’m not comfortable discussing it.”

  “Is there something illegal about that car? Because I should tell him if there is.”

  “Not as far as my interests are concerned.”

  Her answer sounded too qualified to be reassuring.

  “Beth, would you take me to look at it? Perhaps I might just see it one day, when it’s . . . appropriate?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered uneasily. “It would depend on the way his insurance policy is written.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said gloomily. When she spoke again, her voice was full of forced lightness. “Never mind. We are here enjoying a drink! Tell me about yourself, Beth. I know you work with his collections, et cetera, but what do you do with your friends? Or”—she glanced at the bare fingers of my left hand—“a boyfriend?”

  It was the kind of silly question I usually asked Mei. I could have excused myself to go back to work then, but other than Emerson, I had no one to talk with but medical workers, and most of the time we discussed his care. At least she was pretending to be interested in me.

  “The last guy I was with was Oliver,” I answered, draining my drink. “I ended it a while ago. It didn’t mean anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  I shook my head.

  “How often do you see your friends?”

  “Oh. Not very often. I’m busy with work. And they’re busy themselves, working, having babies . . .”

  “Maybe you need some balance, Beth.”

  “What we’re doing requires concentration.”

  “Your shoulders look very pinched.”

  It was true. The many months of light massages from Mei had failed to help me in this regard. “Sometimes they won’t go down,” I said. “I have a lot going on with Emerson. He isn’t going to need me forever, but he does right now.”

  Intentionally or not, I had given her an opening.

  “Is he dying?”

  The nakedness of her question took me by surprise, but I could not lie, when half the art world might have given her the correct answer. I nodded.

  “Cancer?”

  “Does it matter?”

  I regretted the words when I saw how embarrassed she looked. Then I found myself nervously laughing, and this caused her to look even more uncomfortable.

  “Is something funny?” she asked, wrinkling her flat nose.

  “It’s not funny,” I said. “Really.” I dropped my gaze to the floor.

  I suppose I’d imagined us to be accomplices in our secret meeting. Or rather, I had cast her as a subtle operative, trying to woo me into helping her pry the car from Emerson. But I was alone in my deceit.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so tired . . . It’s just that we were at a newsstand a few weeks ago and a girl was staring at him. Really rude, just gawking. He stared back at her, straight-faced, and said, ‘It’s a Polynesian disease that affects the hips.’”

  Hélène raised her glass in a toast and struggled to smile.

  “It’s not—it’s something related to his mother,” I said. “Something genetic.”

  She stared at me, blinking rapidly behind her pink shield.

  “To be honest, I don’t feel comfortable talking to you about him,” I said. “He’s my employer. We’ve always had a formal arrangement. I only moved in with him a few months ago so that, as you saw, I can escort him to his appointments and things.”
/>   She bowed her head.

  “I don’t know what he’s planning to do with that car. He won’t tell me. That’s why you asked me here, isn’t it?”

  The game was up. I doubted I would get anything else out of her now.

  “I’m sorry he’s so sick,” she said. “I was sick for almost ten years, when I was younger. Heartsick, really, but it had a physical effect. I lived here in New York for some of that time, and being here reminds me of it.”

  She asked the bartender for another round of drinks, blinking her eyes at a speed approaching that of hummingbird wings. I had seen some pictures of her in Emerson’s art books, and as she fluttered her eyelids, her face morphed in front of me, flickering into the Kodachrome images of a young woman walking along the lakes in Copenhagen, surveying the swans in the distance. In every photo, the same disturbing flat smile, the same unconscious air of melancholy.

  Now she aimed the disturbing smile at me. “Are you all right?”

  “I get unbelievably tired, but then sometimes I get bursts of energy, like I imagine it is when you’re taking care of a baby.”

  “Beth, are you stopping your own life?”

  I laughed to myself at her question.

  “No?” she asked.

  “No. I’m not stopping my own life. Believe me.”

  “I respect the enormity of what he’s going through,” she said. “Though in my own belief system, death is not negative.”

  “Being dead isn’t negative to me, either,” I assured her. “But the process of dying is extremely negative to him right now. I have no problem with being dead, but that’s different from dying—that series of events, whether they’re violent or peaceful—”

  “You sound so certain of this.”

  “My father likes to tell me that living is something you can manage, but if you’re looking at it every day, you see that dying is also something you can manage and learn, if it isn’t imposed on you violently or suddenly. If you’re given the opportunity—Emerson, though, he’s doing everything he can to avoid it. He’s one of the most open-minded people I know, but not on this subject.”

  “Does he talk about it?”

  “Sometimes. But mainly it’s to convince himself that there’s nothing he can believe in beyond this life.”

  “Others have made this observation before,” she said, “but we have lost a healthy familiarity with death. You have to die of something.”

  Maybe it was because I had not let myself tell Emerson in the first place, or because we were now speaking so matter-of-factly about what he was going through. In any case, something made me answer her as abruptly as I did.

  “I know that. I’ve already been dead.”

  Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. I died. Briefly. When I was little.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of something, as you say.”

  She stared at me, waiting.

  “Pneumonia. My lungs filled up. A priest at the hospital gave me last rites. Then someone named Dr. Forza—a resident—he resuscitated me.”

  “You were very lucky.”

  I felt bile running like lava in my throat. “No, I wasn’t.”

  She looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “He had no right to do it.”

  “Who?”

  “The doctor.”

  “Do what?”

  “Resuscitate me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The couple at the next table looked over and I lowered my voice. “I’m saying—I died. My story was done, and he changed the ending.”

  “You’re joking, yes?”

  “No.”

  She looked at me incredulously.

  Probably because I had never been able to articulate the feeling, I was as unsure as she appeared to be about my words as they came out. “I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t have a plot. Like you. Like other people.” I paused to take a sip of my drink. “I’ve been squeezed in here . . . like someone with a broken nail who gets squeezed into a manicurist’s appointment book. So it looks like I have a slot when I really don’t. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here for a long time, waiting.”

  “But this is an absurd comparison—”

  “To you.”

  She leaned forward and spoke more gently. “With Mr. Tang, you were maybe a little bit attracted to—well, I can see why you might be drawn to his situation. But at the same time, it must be very difficult for you to witness.”

  “No,” I said, wanting to make myself clear. “Getting there is precious. It’s an accomplishment, like graduating from school or getting married or having children. It’s the ultimate accomplishment, but everyone loathes it.”

  “Of course, because of our survival instinct. It’s only human.”

  The naturalness of her comment only reminded me of my own strangeness.

  “Do you remember being dead?” she asked.

  “A little.”

  “What was it like?”

  “It was very different than this.”

  She said nothing for a few moments. She was staring at my forehead, her eyes lingering on the place where I had a birthmark of sorts: a path of purplish veins roughly in the shape of an M. The mark had begun to show by the time I was in kindergarten. It darkened when I got drunk, and disappeared under strenuous exercise. Most of the time I forgot it was there, except in college, when I cut my hair to cover it after my tutor Praveen started calling it my Scarlet M, an affection for high Modernism—and melancholy—being something that needed to be defended in the 1980s on a campus with a booming business school. I felt around self-consciously for the soft ridge of veins and pulled some strands of hair across to cover it.

  “What if your story, in so many words, included being resuscitated? I think this is part of your plot.”

  “Maybe,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound too dismissive of her theory.

  “Beth, you are an archivist. You save things. I would think you of all people would understand a doctor’s impulse to save something extremely valuable. A child’s life—anyone’s, there, in front of you.”

  “Yes, I save things. I collect all kinds of souvenirs because they add up to a kind of story about myself. It’s ballast. Like sandbags.”

  There were other things I could have said, but didn’t. As committed as I was to my current profession, I knew storing wasn’t living. Nor was I deceived about my temporary place in Manhattan’s archival and collections-management community. Emerson’s was a relatively contained (if jewel-quality) repository, and soon it would be emptied. But Emerson himself was another matter. He was even more fragile material.

  “Have you told Mr. Tang about what happened to you?” she asked.

  “No. Something stopped me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Why would my story give him comfort? He keeps saying he doesn’t believe anything survives beyond this lifetime.”

  “But wouldn’t your experience help him to see that?”

  “Maybe. Except I’m here.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Anyway, he’s not in a position where a resuscitation could give him the happy ending you think I got. His doctor told him that if he insists on being resuscitated now, he’d most likely be prolonging his life in an even more degraded state. As a vegetable, basically.”

  I realized too late that she had gotten me talking about Emerson again. But before I could change the subject, she did it for me.

  “Beth, you seem shamefully ungrateful about being alive.”

  “Shamefully?” I asked, puzzled.

  Rather than feeling cowed, as I had before in tentative attempts to talk about it with my parents or anyone else, I was emboldened.

  “I got home. You don’t know what it was like.”

  “No.”

  “I got pulled back here so a doctor could convince himself that he was stronger than something that was his enemy, not mine.”

  “Would you rather be dead?”r />
  I took a gulp of my drink. Was this the second vodka tonic or the third? “For most of the past twenty-five years, yes—the answer would have been yes.”

  She leaned closer over the table. “Since all these years? But this is depression. This is serious, Beth.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You have a wish to die.”

  “A death wish? No. Not since I was a teenager. Look—I’m not killing myself. I’m here. I’m trying to make myself useful. Death was just—”

  I stopped myself from saying better. To assign that value to death was to be perceived as devaluing life. It required a different mindset to see that this was not the case. How could I tell her otherwise? To have known something so complete and then to be expelled from it—it was like being forced out of a restricted archive that was heavily guarded, when you already knew it contained everything you needed. I couldn’t access it—I had lost my privileges. I sensed this was why we weren’t meant to remember it.

  “I’m saying, what I feel inside is more like the death you’re imagining.”

  She sighed and said something about young people and alienation.

  I fell silent, and she must have sensed that I would not be drawn further. I panicked briefly, thinking I had failed to convince her. But then she shook her head and gave me a sympathetic smile. At last, I had gotten through.

  “I can’t question your experience. If you say this is how you feel . . .”

  “I do. Or I did.”

  I glanced at my watch. I had stayed much later than planned. I was sweating with exertion and triumph as I gathered my things.

  Hélène stood with me. “Beth, I have use of a car here in the city. Why don’t we go for a drive up the Hudson one afternoon? Some fresh air?”

  My heart sank as I became suspicious of her motives again. I didn’t know how to answer her. I had not had so much to drink in a long time, and I was dangerously nearing my limit of clear judgment. The black-and-white-checkered floor was waving in front of me like a racing flag. “That sounds nice,” I managed to say. “I don’t know. Let me check my schedule with Emerson.”