The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  He stared at the road. “Thank you, Beth. I’m a keen driver, as you might imagine.”

  At his request, we lowered the windows a crack. “I like to feel something of the road,” he said. “Otherwise I might as well be riding in a lift.”

  A low roar filled the cabin, and I sank comfortably into the privacy of my own thoughts. During my last phone call to update Emerson, he’d expressed my orders for Monterey succinctly: “Be ruthless.” I’d told him about the mechanic’s convincing talk of a Mr. Howard Russell, who appeared to be the owner of the car, along with his wife, Sissy. “I’m not sure what you’re dealing with anymore,” Emerson said. “This could go a lot of ways. Anyway, I don’t care who you’re bidding against.” I could hear him lunging forward in his bed. “You’re an attack dog. Do you understand?”

  My nervousness receded the farther north I traveled with Miguel. Once again, his presence put me at ease. I had the feeling that I belonged where I was, doing what I was doing. This alone was acutely abnormal, but then again, I was on the opposite coast, where the abnormal might be normal, and the more I was with him, the less outrageous my fantasy of being with him seemed. He had not left me to fend for myself with the engine, after all, for some reason that wasn’t clear. Was it too much to hope there was some mutual attraction? It could not be a coincidence that my time with Miguel was increasing as Emerson’s was growing shorter. The reality of Emerson’s condition was never far from my mind. I did not know what his death was going to be like—how it would unfold or how I would handle it—but it was advancing on me like a widening fault line. There was a chasm cracking open at my feet, and I had no concrete to fill it with. I would have to build another foundation for myself after he was gone, and I was beginning to imagine one I wanted to build.

  My thoughts were interrupted somewhere on Highway 1, almost to Monterey, when the car clipped an oncoming butterfly. It was a tiny death, one that might have slipped from my notice if not for the geographic coordinates of the windshield, which left the point of impact beyond the arching jets of cleaning fluid. Mushroomy chunks of body and wings were still flaking off when we went through a wide turn north of Big Sur. The coast took a deep breath. The earth’s belly dropped. Then the hills came into view again and everything felt more sunken: the road, the ranch houses, the brown hills and the Pacific extending endlessly on stretches with no haze, the palm trees slightly lower than the power lines, the streetlights slightly higher than the endless sprawl of red tile roofs.

  We passed through Carmel, a town with no streetlights and, remarkably, no mailboxes, and continued out onto the peninsula, where the properties were more hidden, just glints of water and clay chimneys between slivers of green. The road twisted amid pine and scrub and cypress, and as we drove deeper into the forest, the odors of pine and wood smoke mingled with Miguel’s green-cinnamon scent. I touched my hand to the stream of air coming in the window. Was this how Hélène had felt, driving in the Beacon with Alto? As if the past had not hurt and the future was going to be different? I was more content being on the road with Miguel than anything I could remember doing in the previous thirty years, except for those few hours earlier in the week, when I had seen Emerson standing at the glass in the Case Study House, caught up in his private reverie.

  “So, tomorrow’s the big day,” Miguel said.

  “It was today—for that butterfly,” I joked, pointing to what was left of it on the windshield.

  “The milky mark it’s left there on the glass is interesting,” he said. “A bit like an abstract painting.”

  I laughed. “You sound like a Futurist.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve been reading about these artists in Italy at the turn of the century. I’m doing a little research.”

  “I’m familiar with the Futurist movement,” he said. “But—they killed butterflies?”

  “No. Well, conceptually. They glorified violence as art. They glorified war, too, as the world’s hygiene. They were militant. And misogynistic.”

  Miguel paused to consider this catalogue, then added gamely, “Weren’t they ageist, too?”

  I nodded, appreciating once again how easy it was to talk to him. Like talking to Emerson. “Right from the start, they imagined their own end,” I said. “Within ten years they thought they would be obsolete. And they welcomed this, because they would grow old, they said. It was natural to them that they should be overthrown themselves.”

  He shot me a wry look. “Well, I wish they’d been right. But I doubt they really wanted to be forgotten. They wrote enough manifestoes.”

  We were having a conversation, I recognized, about something I was interested in. As people did. As couples did. On road trips together. I hated to think it might not continue past Sunday afternoon.

  “They wanted to tear down museums—and libraries and art academies. They compared them to cemeteries!” I fumed, insulted by the implied denigration of large swaths of my profession.

  “Well, we ruin them anyway, don’t we?” said Miguel. “Through disregard, through policies of neglect. Or through conquest—when we bomb the treasures of some country, or claim them and divide them up . . . But the thrust of their program, as I understand it, was to create while looking ahead—not to worship the past. That was the essence, anyway.” He concluded with a dismissive wave. “The anarchy, the politics, that’s something else entirely.”

  Until then, I had avoided going into detail with him about the possible showdown I faced with Hélène, but now I sensed I could confide in him, and he was the only ally I had.

  “Do you remember the artist I asked you about the night we met, at the party?”

  He shook his head. “I spoke with a lot of people that evening. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Her name is Hélène Moreau. She had ties to Futurism, according to someone at her gallery.”

  “I’ve heard of her. She did a lot with cars, if I remember.”

  “Yes, and we think she has something to do with the engine we want. Until I came out here on Monday, I was trying to find out if this was true. I’ve met her, actually. But—it’s complicated. I don’t want to speak to her now.”

  “I’m told by—” He paused. “I’m sure I’ve mentioned this, Beth. The car we’re going to see is owned by a married couple, in Beverly Hills.”

  “Except you haven’t met them. And we haven’t seen the engine number. We still don’t know if this is the right car.”

  He nodded as we turned into the grounds of the hotel, an upscale lodge and outbuildings bordering the golf course where the car show would be held. I was surprised when he said then that we were not guests of AG. Our hotel rooms and entry passes for the auto event were courtesy of a Swiss watch manufacturer, whose CEO, Miguel explained, was a friend from school. On hearing this, I was touched by his efforts, since he’d sounded so annoyed at first by the turn of events. The rich notes of a new perfume crept in from the gardens around the hotel. I watched with a twinge of longing as Miguel unloaded our suitcases, and I reminded myself there was nothing between us except his faultless courtesy and a promised errand for my failing employer. Emerson had already left a message for me with the front desk. I opened the envelope in the privacy of my room. His instructions for me remained succinct:

  Certain victory.

  I wondered if putting the car and the engine back together was all he felt he had to hold on to: an artificial race that he could run until the end, one last competition to distract himself from the nothingness he believed awaited him. Was it the engine or the chase itself that meant so much to him? I doubted I would ever know.

  After a dinner spent talking over the schedule for the Concours the next day, Miguel and I walked the garden paths around the hotel. The night air sank and spread around us as it cooled, funneling thick wood smoke across the peninsula.

  “Did you know,” Miguel asked, recovering from a coughing fit, “that the carbon from basic household cooking fires is responsible for nearly twenty perc
ent of global warming?”

  “Do they teach you those statistics to divert the blame?”

  He stopped abruptly. “What blame? Beth, we haven’t made a new Beacon in thirty years.” He shook his head with disappointment. “Don’t you see? That’s the problem.”

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “All I’m saying is, this enormous amount of carbon pollution could be avoided if people could be helped to obtain better, more modern cooking equipment. We still need to cook.”

  “Sure. There’s nothing wrong with cooking.”

  “It’s down to the execution. It’s the same with transportation. We have to look at everything.”

  “Is this what you do when you’re joyriding around L.A. on your motorcycle, burning gasoline?”

  I cringed at the rustiness of the flirting levers in my brain. Sparring with Emerson was not good training for a would-be coquette.

  He cocked his head. “I’m not alone as often as I was when we met.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “Being in L.A., of course,” I suggested.

  He nodded.

  I shivered.

  “It’s mild tonight,” he said. “Why are you cold?”

  “Because I’m a ghost,” I said with a shrug. “An obvious sign of this is when you can’t retain heat.”

  Without warning, he took my hands to test them in the warmth of his own, a grip that was pleasantly rough, less pampered than I would have expected. I closed my eyes and imagined his touch continuing over the rest of my body.

  “I see what you mean,” he joked, moving to sniff around my hair and neck. “What’s strange is that you don’t have any smell, either.”

  I leaned in until my cheek was nearly on his chest. “You do. It’s nice. What is that scent?”

  “It’s from England. It reminds me of—”

  He stopped. Until then he had seemed delighted by my presence, but now he looked either confused or upset that our walking path had led to my room. We stood together a few feet from the door. He shuffled his feet. “So, Beth, why are you researching Futurism? You mentioned it in the car.”

  “Because of that artist I mentioned, Hélène Moreau. I’ve been reading about the whole movement in a book I brought with me. I have it inside . . .”

  I didn’t tell him how I had confided in her, and how I had begun to feel close to her, as I did to him. He was glancing around at the other bungalows as I pushed the card key into the lock. I left the door open behind me, and he followed me into the room.

  “From what I recall, the Futurists had strong opinions on lust,” he said, nodding agreeably as I lifted the book out of my suitcase.

  “Yes. But they didn’t define it very progressively. They used it to justify rape and all kinds of violence after military conquest. A lot of it is disgusting, really.”

  I sat beside him with the book, making an effort to counteract the disorientation I felt by continuing to speak in complete sentences. “But they did want to transform lust into works of art.”

  His long, muscular leg was pressed against mine on the sofa, his arm available to lean against. I settled back with him, lifted the book and began reading from one of the bookmarked passages.

  “‘Lust is a force.’”

  “That’s it,” he said. A wide smile wrinkled his eyes closed. “Who said that?”

  “This was the manifesto of Valentine de Saint-Point, writing in 1913. A female Futurist. One of the few.”

  “Go on,” he said, nudging me with his leg.

  “‘Lust is for the body what an ideal is for the spirit—the magnificent Chimera, that one ever clutches at but never captures, and which the young and the avid, intoxicated with the vision, pursue without rest.’”

  I stopped reading, wondering if I was succumbing to such an idealized force. Then Miguel’s lips came to rest on mine, with a pressure somehow both delighted and perplexed.

  15

  A PALE CRESCENT OF beach spread before a low retaining wall off the fairway where the Concours d’Elegance was already under way in a light morning fog. Fifty yards offshore, in one of nature’s quiet dramas, a lone tree leaned crookedly to one side on an outcropping of rock. Isolated, motionless but for the light breeze on its leaves, the tree stretched its branches past the rock where its roots were bound, reaching for a passing sea bird, for sunlight—for anything that might rescue it from its solitude.

  “That tree is copyrighted,” Miguel informed me as he sat down across the table at the terrace restaurant for breakfast.

  I sensed immediately from those few impersonal words that he was back in his formal mode, the way he had been that first evening in the zeppelin.

  “I recognize that tree,” I told him. “There’s a silhouette of it printed on the shampoo bottle in my room.”

  I hoped the mention of my hotel room would encourage him to comment on the fact that we had spent part of the previous evening there together. Even so, I wasn’t entirely surprised when he said nothing.

  We sat staring in silence at the futile, copyrighted tree, as if nothing more than a goodnight had passed between us in the hours since. It was not much more than that anyway, I reminded myself: His stubble was damp when our faces came together, his eyes closed in pleasure. His hand reached for me and I was brought closer to the muscular contours of his arms and chest. I settled into his warmth, encircled by his arm, learning the lines of his body through the fabric of his shirt and suit. I was sinking into that magical realm of escape, as fogged and private as the night air outside, when I opened my eyes for a moment and was met with an expression of mild panic. I can only attribute what happened next to that look in his eyes, for with an abrupt, robotic apology about the hour and the long day ahead of us—repeated unnecessarily several times—he’d pushed his shirttail roughly into the waistband of his pants and made for the door.

  I omitted all this from the phone conversation I’d had with Emerson before breakfast. Now Miguel seemed intent on devoting the breakfast hour to an explanation of copyright from the legal perspective of the tree. It was a disappointing step back in our acquaintance, but nothing could suppress the rush of adrenaline I felt when we walked together out onto the fairway. By then, the early-morning fog had burned off, and the sky was brilliant with sun. Before us on the golf course stretched a larger-than-life version of my brother Garrett’s Matchbox collection, a precision lineup on wall-to-wall emerald shag. Along the fairway, the crowd split and remixed itself around an array of white tents crowned with pennants flapping in the breeze.

  “I feel like we’re in a medieval tournament,” I said, dropping my sun hat to my hip like a shield.

  Miguel, dressed in a dark suit and a linen shirt, was busy reading the show program, holding the booklet at arm’s length before him as he walked. A crash of static split the air, and then a male announcer’s voice erupted from the chain of loudspeakers running the length of the fairway: “Ladies and gentlemen, the owners and exhibitors have spent countless hours preparing their cars for today’s Concours. They want you to enjoy them, but the rule is ‘Look, don’t touch.’”

  A tangle of blue blazers, summery dresses and sun hats moved through the automotive sculpture park as groups of spectators alighted like flies before one antique car or another. One of the first models to attract my attention was a 1954 Rolls-Royce Phantom IV, identified, like many of the cars, by a special license plate on the front. In the back seat, a woman in vintage costume was smiling wickedly, paging through a gossip magazine in her lap.

  “This car was once owned by Princess Margaret,” Miguel informed me, pointing to a royal shield affixed to the hood.

  “I love the names of those cars,” I said as we walked on, recalling a documentary on Rolls-Royce that Emerson had made me watch with him one lethargic winter afternoon. The model names drifted like vapor across my mind. “Silver Ghost. Silver Wraith . . .”

  “Phantom,” added Miguel.

  “Silver Cloud.”

  “My
grandfather worked at Rolls-Royce during the Second World War,” Miguel said. “He was an engineer, one of the professions the government exempted from service at the front, because they were needed at home. But he fought on the back end, in the aero division, where they built Merlins. That’s a kind of—”

  “Engine.”

  “You’ve heard of them?”

  “Yes.” I regretted that I hadn’t paid more attention to my father’s air-battle narrations over the years. “Those engines were the heroes of the war. My father always talks about the Spitfires, the Lancasters.”

  Miguel nodded, but instead of finishing his story, he gestured with his program to the scene unfolding in front of us. A seagull had landed on a rock at the edge of the coastline, where a photographer was taking beauty shots of an elegant coupe, its paint and metalwork glinting in the sunshine. The hood ornament was a finely executed miniature of a stork in flight—one of the countless permutations of wings mounted on the cars and wildlife around us. As the photographer snapped away, the metal figurine and the live bird appeared to lock eyes in the precursor to some avian duel.

  “There are two Beacon 135 roadsters here today,” Miguel said, folding back the program. “I suggest we take a look at both of them.” He flashed me an unexpected smile. “You never know.”

  The car we had missed seeing in Los Angeles was parked at the far end of the fairway, about a ten-minute walk from where we stood. The one we came to first was the bonus car: a green roadster with a tan leather interior.

  A heavyset man dressed in a morning coat and a beret came forward and greeted us with an inquiring smile.

  “Just admiring your ride here,” said Miguel.

  “Ever driven one of these?” the man asked.

  “Oh, yes,” said Miguel. “In fact, I’m in the market for one now. And I’m curious to know, does yours by any chance have a replacement engine?”

  The man smiled with a trace of arrogance. “No. It’s the original.”

  “Still running well, then?”