The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  “I wish my grandfather could be here with us,” he announced cheerfully when he returned with the open bottle.

  “Did your grandfather visit Los Angeles often?”

  He let out a laugh as he poured the wine. “God, no. I don’t think he ever left the Midlands. He wouldn’t even visit us in Spain. He was an Englishman to his bones. He said he would smear like wax in the sun.” Miguel seemed to consider this. “Like his son did. But he would have been chuffed that someone cares so much about one of his engines.”

  I finally took a bite of my own dinner, and with a small shock I registered that Miguel had come to see me anyway, to have dinner, though he already knew we weren’t going to make it out to see the car. I grew calmer as we talked, with him there next to me, relaxing at the end of a long day, as couples did all the time without thinking about it, maybe not even appreciating it. I was conscious of Emerson, just steps away, being tended to by an employee as his health was failing, then I remembered that I was his employee as well. My time with him had obscured my sense of being alone; now my solitude was as palpable as if Miguel had pulled it from one of the take-out bags in a Styrofoam box. I couldn’t help wanting the dinner with Miguel to keep going, to happen night after night—not play-acting, as I knew I was doing, as it had always felt in the past, but in that real place on the other side of the glass. How long had it been since I had eaten dinner with anyone besides a home healthcare worker? A dinner that wasn’t heated in Emerson’s microwave.

  Miguel’s comment about his grandfather called to mind something he’d said to me at the Beacon party. “When we met in Germany, I told you that I wished someone was there with me,” I reminded him. “And you said, ‘Once someone is gone from your life, he might as well be dead.’”

  “I wasn’t in the best frame of mind that night,” he said, shrugging off the memory. “Anyway, he is dead.”

  “But your grandfather’s cars are still around,” I said. “And they mean a lot to some people. Those guests at the party, I talked to some of them . . .”

  “They’re nostalgic.” He looked uncomfortable with the thought. “Regardless of how much I respect my grandfather, my hope is that, before long, we can look forward to a different nostalgia.”

  I could not untangle the idea of looking forward to looking back differently. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, a lot of people—and I’m one of them—have all sorts of personal associations with cars.”

  “Their self-image?” I suggested, recalling Emerson’s damning assessment of our rental car.

  He nodded. “Or their youth. All kinds of memories, feelings of freedom and power . . . Those associations get attached to one model or another, and the models change from one decade to the next. But the car itself—the basic machine—hasn’t changed in a fundamental way since its invention. There are billions of people out there—every generation—with all these ideas attached to an outmoded template: what someone originally defined as ‘a car’ one hundred years ago. When you add it up, the nostalgia around this is immense. It’s a real problem. But it won’t always be.”

  I didn’t know if I was misunderstanding him or if he was looking forward to some future event of mass extinction.

  “Are you saying you want them all to die?”

  “No—just the opposite. I want them to live better. If people like me do our jobs, the day will come when that original nostalgia will fade. It will be replaced by other associations, other ways of getting around. Completely new systems. By then, cars like the ones my grandfather built will have literally become inoperable, too impractical and expensive for anyone to drive.” He tasted the wine with satisfaction, then seemed to reconsider. “The sad part—and I admit, it is sad—is that we’ll have to admire the old models in museums. People will never know what it felt like to drive them.” He stared into his wineglass, then met my eyes with a look of pained resignation. “Something always has to be sacrificed for progress.”

  I thought of Emerson, waiting in the next room for me to win him an engine that would eventually be as incapable of functioning as he was.

  “It sounds like there won’t be any gas to run them anyway,” I said. “If you can get away from the traffic jams.”

  He sat forward. “I know my inheritance has a limited life span. I want to develop ideas the way the early pioneers did, but there was demand for what they were making. If we can’t acknowledge certain problems, if people aren’t interested in the solutions, I’m hurling them into a void.”

  I thought of Alto Bianco, derisively kicking at the bisected car in Germany.

  Miguel stared at me intently. “This is my last chance to make a new Beacon, Beth. In any form.”

  In those hours at the table, as I listened to him talk about the potential for the future, the fragile shoots of many stray thoughts rose from my imagination and wove themselves into a fantasy of my own future. An intimate bond that was not familial and not forged out of duty, but a new plot, one I would tend to, and growing from it as solid as the trunk of a tree: a romance with Miguel. It was a reverie affixed, unreasonably perhaps, to nothing more than a polite gesture—a take-out meal offered in apology for a missed appointment—but one that took root that night nonetheless and began to grow in my heart as freely as a weed.

  Emerson regarded me warily the next morning as I broke the news to him.

  “You never went to see it?”

  Tisa had knocked on my door to summon me, at his insistence. Now she was trying to work around us in the tiny room, packing up his clothing and meds for the airport.

  “I waited and waited,” he moaned. “I can’t believe you didn’t see it!”

  “He fell asleep,” Tisa said softly to me. “About half an hour after that guy got here.”

  “I knew he would,” I said.

  “Tisa said he was in your room for a long time,” Emerson protested.

  “We were eating dinner,” I reminded him. “Anyway, everything got screwed up last night. It was already too late when he got here.”

  “So, when are you going to see it?”

  “I don’t know. I told him I wanted to check with my employer because I was planning to fly back to New York with you guys this morning.”

  “No! No way.” He picked up a hand towel next to him and threw it at me. “We are this close. You’ve got to stay, Beth. Cancel your plane ticket—change it again, whatever.”

  I’d intended to leave with him in solidarity. I did not want to be away from him for even forty-eight hours, despite the fact that he was going directly into Dr. Albas’s care on the other side. At the same time, I was anxious to see Miguel again.

  “If I go to see the engine,” I said, “he told me he’d pick me up at seven tonight.”

  “Good,” Emerson said with a nod. “You’re keeping that date.”

  “It’s not a date.”

  “No. It’s an appointment.”

  “I don’t think the owners will be there,” I said, secretly fearing that the owner would somehow turn out to be Hélène. “Miguel says it’s a married couple. But he hasn’t talked to them. He’s been dealing with the man who looks after their collection—the head mechanic, basically. The owners agreed to let him show us the car as a courtesy, because we’re affiliated with Beacon. Otherwise, they don’t know why we’re coming.”

  “Miguel’s doing us a favor by not telling them,” Emerson said. “Because if they know how much we want the engine, it could influence their asking price.”

  Apparently satisfied with this evidence of Miguel’s competence, he reached his arms up expectantly, and Tisa pulled him to his feet to get ready for his flight.

  “So, the car’s for sale?” he asked, anxious to confirm my bidding position.

  “Oh, no—not at all.”

  13

  A CHAIN-LINK FENCE.

  The sound of crickets.

  In a disused section of the Burbank airport, the setting sun cast a blue glow over an expanse of weeds and crumbling b
lacktop. Along an aging stretch of runway converted into a private dragway, a crew of shirtless men in jeans hunched in unison, burning old rubber patches off the strip to make it new again. Tendrils of acrid tar fumes filled my nose and throat. Thick smoke from the rows of small fires obscured the men’s legs. Their torsos floated on the burning stench, blown west across decades of fevered races, twisting in the evening wind with the light, cool scent of clover.

  At the end of the access road, a quarter mile or so past where the tarmen worked, Miguel parked his loaner sedan in front of a private airplane hangar. One of the doors had been rolled back, revealing a small office at the rear, where a radio was warring with a television for dominance. A middle-aged man in a baseball cap and a denim shirt and jeans emerged from the office to shake hands with Miguel.

  “Thought you were coming last night.”

  “I’d hoped to,” said Miguel. “But it got quite late. This is Beth Corvid.”

  In the semidarkness, we drifted among the dozens of vehicles parked in formation across the square footage of the hangar. The walls were decorated with racing posters even bigger than Emerson’s house portraits. The one in front of me announced a French race in 1947 with an illustration of snow-covered peaks done in bright, simple blocks of color. A red car—drawn like a cigar with crazily spinning wheels—was whipping around a sharp turn in a mountain pass, with a green cigar gaining from the rear.

  Despite the frantic activity on the walls, the air around us was still, suffused with a concentration of curious odors: leather and dust and gasoline. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, but the smell of a certain age.

  “I don’t see any Beacons here,” Miguel noted with some concern.

  I followed his gaze across the hangar. With so many motionless, hunched shapes before me, I had the sensation of being in a morgue.

  “Car’s been moved out,” said the mechanic, watching us in the dim light.

  “What do you mean?” Miguel asked.

  It was the first time I had heard him sound anything other than self-assured.

  “A friend of Mr. Russell’s had a trailer going up this afternoon with a few other cars. Had space—offered to take it.” The mechanic chuckled. “Saved us some mileage on the odometer.”

  “Bollocks.” Miguel pressed a hand to his forehead and shook his head apologetically. “That car was meant to be there for another two days.”

  He took a seat beside me at one of the wicker tables in my hotel lobby. As anxious as I was to phone New York and tell Emerson about the latest complication, I indulged my desire to talk with Miguel, as I had done the previous evening upstairs, until he’d finally said goodnight with a polite kiss on both cheeks.

  The fact that the car had already been moved up to the event, several hours’ drive north of Los Angeles, meant that I could not report a victory to Emerson, who was waiting by the phone. And when he learned what had happened, he would no doubt insist that I remain in California until I had secured the engine. With this thought came the hope of spending more time with Miguel.

  “It’s a setback,” I allowed, unsure of how much more assistance Miguel was willing to offer. “But at least we know where the car’s going to be.”

  The waiter passed Miguel a cup of coffee, followed by a bowl of brown sugar cubes.

  “Can we go back to plan A, so to speak?” I asked. “Approach the owners at the event this Sunday?”

  “You need an invitation,” he said. “Tickets.”

  I hadn’t considered this, but it did not seem like an insurmountable obstacle. “Can’t you hook us up with something through AG?”

  “Us?” he asked, dissolving a sugar cube in the coffee on his spoon.

  My cheeks went hot with embarrassment as I recalled, when we’d first spoken of it on the phone, that he’d mentioned he had plans for the weekend.

  “I was talking about my employer,” I lied, wondering how I was going to sort out whatever I needed to do to get myself there. “I don’t want to get into a lot of detail, but my employer is determined to get this engine, Miguel. I can’t go back without it.”

  “I’ll look into it in the morning,” he offered distractedly, before raising my hopes again. “At least we have a few days to work out the arrangements. Because by now every hotel on the Monterey Peninsula will have been booked for months. Unless we sleep outdoors—”

  “Camping?”

  Since I was a child—since those nights in the oxygen tent at the hospital—I hated tents. I hated the feeling of cold earth under my body.

  “What do you have against camping?” he asked, reading my face with evident amusement.

  I shook my head. “I tried it once in college . . .”

  “You say that like it’s a drug.”

  “No, I tried it, and it was . . .”

  Too late, I worried that I was endangering Emerson’s interests as well as my own. But to my delight, he shifted onto the sofa next to me and leaned in conspiratorially.

  “I just remembered something from school myself,” he said. “Something I saw—probably the most useful thing I learned at that place, now that I think about it.”

  “What did you see?”

  “It was a bird, a blackbird. It got into a hall where I was studying. Some students held the windows open, I opened one myself, but the thing couldn’t find its way out. It kept flying back and forth from one wall to the other.” He swung his hand like a metronome over the wicker table in front of us. “It couldn’t change its schema. We tried to coax it the other way, but it got more and more panicked. It thought it was trapped, when the whole time it was free.”

  “Did it escape?”

  “I’m afraid not, no.” He frowned at the memory. “Broke its neck, I think. I put it in my jacket and buried it on the way back to my room.” He reached into his jacket pocket, as if the broken body might still be found there. “That was at boarding school.” He seemed to be balling his fist tighter inside his pocket. “After my grandfather died, my father—well, my parents . . .”

  “You didn’t live with them?”

  “They were dead too.”

  “Oh—I didn’t understand.”

  “I didn’t either. They were like that blackbird, except they flitted between their drugs of choice.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “What I was telling you last night—what I’m trying to do with my grandfather’s company,” he went on. “It’s the same problem, not changing the way we do things. I don’t want that to happen to people.”

  I was moved by his earnestness. Except it was almost as if he wasn’t speaking to me, but to someone who wasn’t there—someone he cared about deeply but who he doubted cared for him. Someone who needed to be convinced.

  “Were you at school in England?” I asked, wondering where the blackbird was buried.

  “Other places too. Before that, home, as far as I was concerned, was at the factory with my grandfather. My parents were always off somewhere, with increasingly dodgy people. I preferred to be with my grandfather, taking things apart, learning how they were put together.”

  I thought about this. “The only way I ever found out how things were put together was after they broke.”

  “I miss him,” Miguel said. He extracted the hand from his pocket, and I saw that he was holding a wallet. He removed a small color photograph and held it out to me shyly: Framed within the white border was an older man gesturing enthusiastically behind the wheel of a vintage car. At his elbow was the younger, excited face of Miguel, hanging on to whatever the man was saying.

  “I keep him alive through his company. There’s no way I would reject it or do something else. To avoid my father’s fate, what I do is, I work all the time.”

  “How old were you?” I asked, pointing to the little boy.

  “About seven or eight.”

  He nodded self-consciously and put the photo back into his wallet.

  Our seating area in the lobby was lit by a floor lamp, circa 1930—a bouquet
of tiny round light bulbs under a fringed shade. The combined force of the diminutive bulbs produced a glow that was otherworldly, like the softness of a silent film. Remarkably, the light erased the worry lines on Miguel’s face. I wondered what it did to mine: I was tired, I knew. And nervous.

  Our legs were touching. I thought we might have kissed then, but he sat forward abruptly and pushed the wallet back into his jacket, saying he would have to make some calls about Monterey and would get in touch with me the next day. Our goodbye was a repeat of the night before: a polite kiss on both cheeks.

  I lingered on the sofa after he left, unwilling to admit the evening was over until my eyelids surrendered to exhaustion, my head muddled by jet lag and anxiety. Outside my room, flapping around in my bag for the key, a picture came to my mind of Miguel kneeling in the grass with the broken bird, its quietly instructive life brought to rest in some damp, anonymous plot.

  14

  A WATERY SENSATION WASHED through my dreams, pulling me up out of a sea of twisting forms and metal curves, a locking mechanism sliding open—and with every breath came the sensation of air filling me up, pushing against my frame. My ears flooded with waves of sound, the mechanical song of an engine . . .

  I woke to the melody of an old spiritual. It was nearly over by the time I got out of bed and traced the source to a car radio down on the access road, on the canyon side of the hotel.

  I pushed open the window.

  Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home . . .

  Miguel’s loaner sedan from AG was revving below, buffed and polished for a road trip. The echo of the spiritual ribboned through my head as we drove north that morning under the pastel sky, a blur of deep purple flowers spilling endlessly over the highway barriers.

  “I like the way you drive. You don’t confuse skill with frenzy,” I told Miguel, grateful not to have to reach for the grab handles overhead or brace my knees to steady myself. “Normally—I mean, when other people have driven me—everything is so rushed.”