The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  “She’s an acquaintance,” I managed to say.

  I had to act fast.

  I turned to Miguel and widened my eyes for emphasis. “That’s the woman I mentioned to you in the car.”

  He was busy draining his champagne flute, unaware of the pressure I was under.

  I turned abruptly toward Howard and Sissy. “I’m sorry I can’t be more formal about this, or tell you as much as I would like to.” I glanced around nervously for Hélène, relieved to see that she was still forty feet off, her shoulders shaking, Miguel’s handkerchief pressed under her aviator glasses.

  “Time is short,” I said. “Shorter than I can explain.”

  Howard and Sissy were regarding me with curiosity.

  “I’m here—I represent someone—a collector. Who wants nothing more in life than for me to purchase this car from you. Right now. Please believe me when I say it’s very urgent. I have to ask for your answer now. As you said yourself, the car has already won. Why not sell it? Mr. and Mrs. Russell—” I glanced from one face to the other. “Please. Name your price.”

  I knew it was a fool’s bargaining technique—Emerson would never have approved—but there was no time for finesse. I had to trust my instincts.

  Howard carefully lowered the hood of the Beacon back into place and bent to examine the grille, as if he were conferring with it on my offer.

  “Fierce, isn’t it? Strong,” he noted, dragging a finger across the metal bars. “It looks like it could devour you.”

  “What do you mean?” Miguel objected, squatting next to him. He pointed with his empty champagne glass. “It’s nearly heart-shaped, but a bit like a honeycomb—purposeful. It’s a symbol of industry, not hunger.”

  “Miguel!” I pleaded.

  Emerson had sent me as his attack dog, and I would spare no one. I sensed that Hélène would be back as soon as she could wipe the mascara smears off her pink lenses.

  At the panic in my voice, Miguel stood. Howard followed.

  In desperation, I took everything I had learned in my years of watching Emerson negotiate deals and boiled it down to the single most effective tactic I had ever witnessed.

  “I’m paying cash.”

  “Well, I should expect so,” said Howard with a chuckle.

  “Name your price,” I repeated.

  Sissy put down her champagne glass.

  Howard named his price. (As I bragged to Emerson later, it was even somewhat fair.)

  “Done!” I cried ecstatically.

  “This model is ageless, don’t you think?” said Howard, shaking my hand on the deal.

  Miguel was trying to explain to him the cultural impossibility of this when Hélène reappeared beside the car, and the jubilant grin on my face shrank back to nothing.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I just—I want to say why I had such a strong reaction a few minutes ago.” She gratefully accepted a glass of champagne from Sissy. She avoided my eyes as she went on: “You see, I used to drive the Beacon roadster that first housed this engine.”

  Miguel winced, finally understanding my plight. I mentally calculated the premium that her chosen bargaining technique would have cost her in a negotiation—except there weren’t going to be any negotiations. She was the only one who was still unaware of that, but her presence unsettled me nonetheless. Who knew what she was capable of? It pricked my conscience knowing that the message on the engine held some devastating sentimental power—that was obvious from her reaction. But she had seen it. Even if she couldn’t have the engine, she had won that much, and with this thought I hardened my heart against her. She had conned me with her feigned friendship. Now I only wished she would leave so I could celebrate Emerson’s victory.

  “Ah,” said Howard, clicking his plastic glass dully against Hélène’s. “The car you’re talking about ran the Mille Miglia.”

  “Yes, in 1954. Alto Bianco drove—”

  “He ran it with his wife,” Howard informed Sissy.

  “No, he ran it with me,” said Hélène, breaking into a girlish grin. She tilted her champagne in the direction of the Beacon and introduced herself.

  “Oh, hello,” said Sissy. “You ran that race? We’ve always wanted to.”

  Miguel, in turn, offered his hand to Hélène. As he introduced himself and his connection to the Beacon Motor Company, my mind flooded with the memory of Alto’s accented voice at the party in Germany, bragging to me of his many “personalizations.”

  Now Howard and Sissy were grilling Hélène about something to do with Italy.

  “What are they talking about?” I asked Miguel.

  “A road race. It’s named for the one thousand miles it covers. It started in the late 1920s, but they stopped it a couple of times over the years.”

  “Why?”

  “Accidents.” He grimaced. “It’s been revived again, though—same route, but different rules.”

  “I was in that Beacon for thousands of miles in 1954,” Hélène was telling Howard and Sissy. “So you can understand why I was so delighted to see this engine. And why I am interested in purchasing it from you.”

  “Ah, I’m afraid it’s just been sold, along with the rest of the car,” Howard said good-naturedly. I silently thanked him for discreetly refraining from identifying me as the buyer. “And even if it weren’t”—he faced Hélène and clapped his hand to his chest in mock horror—“I am hurt, deeply hurt, that you would want to chop up my Beacon for parts. After all the sweat and tears Sissy and I put into it.”

  “Sold?” Hélène put her champagne glass down on Sissy’s tray, eyeing me suspiciously. Still, Howard confirmed nothing.

  Sissy pulled off her tennis visor and fluffed her hair before turning sympathetically to Hélène. “You’re the third person who’s offered to buy it this week.”

  “The third?” I exclaimed.

  “Yeah, a guy called about it yesterday,” Howard said.

  At this news, I turned to Miguel. “Was it you?”

  “No,” he said, smiling strangely. “Though I would have.”

  “I can think of who it might be—can you, Beth?” Hélène said softly. Behind her pink glasses, her eyes were swollen from weeping. They fell on me accusingly. “Do you recall the bidder’s name?” she asked Howard.

  “Some collector from the East Coast, wasn’t it?” he asked Sissy.

  “It was that television host,” she said. “One of his Ferraris beat one of ours in the Greenwich Concours a few years ago.”

  “I wish you’d told me that sooner,” Howard moaned to his wife. “If I’d known that, I would’ve quoted a higher price.” He smiled at me mischievously, obviously just as pleased with the deal we had struck. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now, does it? We’ve been thinking about moving into the sixties anyway. Sissy wants a Ghibli.”

  “A Maserati Ghibli?” I asked. My mind raced back to the model car of Emerson’s that my brother had so desperately wanted to possess.

  “If someone has already made you an offer for this car, I would like to counter it,” Hélène insisted, looking from Howard’s face to Sissy’s, leaving no doubt as to the seriousness of her intentions. She gestured with her champagne glass to the hood of the car. “As you can see, the engine has a great deal of sentimental value to me.”

  Clearly, she was doing a number on Howard, and I sensed he was starting to weaken. It was anyone’s guess how the couple would respond to Hélène’s tug at their heartstrings. But then again, she had tried a similar bid with Emerson and failed.

  “You’ll have to work it out with the new owner,” Howard said, gesturing sheepishly to me. “As I say, it’s just been sold.”

  “Just now?”

  Howard nodded.

  Hélène’s knees buckled a little. I could not meet her eyes.

  “I see,” she said. “Oh. What a shame.”

  I prayed she would walk off—I could not even look in her direction—but she stayed put, and with a supreme effort of grace, she began speaking with Miguel.<
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  “I was at the Beacon museum in Germany earlier this summer,” she told him. “I saw some pictures of your grandfather. And I believe I saw a photograph of you with him, as a child. Yes? I’m sure it was you.”

  “We were very close,” Miguel said.

  “Do you have dinner plans?” she asked him.

  “Oh, he can’t—we can’t,” I interrupted, waving my arm in an effort to include not only Miguel, but Howard and Sissy and their grandson—now approaching down the lawn—in the gesture.

  “Of course,” Hélène said, glancing at Miguel.

  Beth, you are an attack dog!

  “I’m sorry,” I said. My face was hot with shame and victory when I turned from her and, without lowering my voice, began to extract from Howard the details I needed to wire money to his bank account. I could hear her trying to make small talk with Sissy, but by the time Howard and I had agreed on when to meet for a celebratory dinner, she’d wandered off.

  A late-afternoon wind had come up from the Pacific. The sea air smelled fresh and sweet. Miguel and I headed back to the lodge on foot. Crowds streamed around us to the exits, while a swarm of staffers proceeded to dismantle the hospitality tents with impressive speed. I paraded in triumph ahead of Miguel, kicking my feet through the snakes of long golden streamers in the grass around the winner’s circle, silently rehearsing my victory announcement to Emerson—until I looked back and saw Hélène wandering down the fairway, half bent to the ground, her head in her hands. I told myself there was nothing I could do. She knew Emerson’s situation; a dying man’s wish spoke for itself. The situation she didn’t recognize was her own. I could turn back and approach her. I could take her hand and tell her as sensitively as I could muster what Alto had admitted—bragged about: how he had been more or less tattooing the engines of women all over Europe. His form of conceptual art might then seem extraordinarily depressing. It was true, she had lost the engine. But she believed she was special to him—and wasn’t that something? Wouldn’t the truth about Alto’s many “personalizations” make her defeat even worse?

  Miguel turned to see what I was looking at and said, “That had to be a little rough on her, what happened back there.”

  Now it was my turn to be robotic. “I came to get the engine.”

  “I know,” he said gently.

  “I got it.”

  “It’s just . . . a human connection.”

  “It’s a machine.”

  “She ran a big race in that car. Someone memorialized it—her lover, obviously . . .”

  “Isn’t this the same nostalgia you were so ready to kill off a few nights ago?” I reminded him. “A little hypocritical, no?”

  He pursed his lips.

  Why was I insulting him?

  “What’s wrong, Beth? You seem a bit cross for someone who’s just found her holy grail.”

  I stared at him mutely. Then the sunshine and the bottomless glasses of champagne swamped me, and I excused myself to make a phone call.

  “Yes! We did it!”

  Emerson’s jubilant voice on the line was the antidote I needed. For a short time, hearing him revel in the happiness I’d brought him, I forgot about Hélène and Miguel.

  Emerson called out the news to Brian, who was on duty, subbing that day for Tisa. “We got it!”

  The evident pride in his voice more than repaid me for the victory celebration that my teenage self had been denied at the track so many years before.

  “Can you hear this?” he asked. “This is Brian opening the champagne.”

  I heard a soft popping noise in the background and smiled at the commotion of his bed-bound celebration. I explained that Hélène Moreau had not been the owner after all, but he had been right to suspect her, because she had indeed been in Monterey and had openly made a bid for the engine. As Emerson presumably sipped his champagne—it couldn’t have been more than a thimbleful—he put the phone on speaker mode and demanded that I recount to him and Brian in gory detail the slaying of the dragon Hélène. He was so happy with what he judged to be the satisfactory conclusion of her story that I didn’t have the heart to tell him about the personal message to her that had been inscribed on the engine. What did it matter now?

  “Congratulations,” I said finally.

  “I was wrong,” he said. “I thought she had it.”

  “Well, you were right in a way—she did want that engine.”

  “But we won,” he insisted.

  “Yes. We did.”

  I would have preferred to dine alone with Miguel, but I didn’t dare skip the prearranged date with the Russells. I had to babysit them in case Hélène reappeared and tried to scotch the deal. I approached the evening warily, conscious that Howard and Sissy might try to find out more about the bidder I was representing—I couldn’t risk Emerson’s anonymity. Since his father was a fairly public person, it helped that Emerson used his mother’s maiden name, but I reasoned that people like the Russells probably collected art as well, and a few ill-considered hints on my part could unintentionally give away his identity. Fortunately, they had something else on their minds as our dinner turned into a late-night celebration around one of the fire pits at their hotel. The two of them were in high spirits, eager to toast the latest addition to their collection—a 1967 Maserati Ghibli—now that they’d sold the Beacon to me.

  “They’re delivering it in two weeks,” Sissy said, embracing her husband and the full-scale dream that Garrett had been denied, even in model form. “I’m going to have to work out with a trainer to get the muscles it takes to drive it,” she joked with Howard.

  “You found the car you wanted in the past four hours?” I asked in astonishment, mentally tallying the combined weeks, months, perhaps years that Emerson and Hélène had devoted to the same task.

  “Sure. Hell of a gas guzzler, difficult to drive, but it’s a beauty,” said Howard serenely. “Did you see the cars out there today?”

  Despite the festive mood, my thoughts stubbornly refused to settle. In this respect I was grateful for the cover of their chitchat, which eventually led to speculation about how much I could charge Hélène Moreau for the Beacon if I wanted to resell it to her.

  Sissy suggested: “Ask for six of her paintings.”

  “No, three,” Miguel said, claiming to have a reasonable idea of the market value of her work.

  “One quarter of her bank account,” countered Howard, apparently reveling in my earlier invitation to him to name any price.

  “That sounds like a lot—probably too much,” said Sissy.

  “Okay, one-fifth.”

  They went on steadily lowering the price, a ridiculous imaginary bargaining session that could not have been any more antithetical to Hélène’s first meeting with Emerson. But I was only half listening, distracted by the overwhelming awareness that there was no real satisfaction in winning when I would soon lose Emerson. There was to be no satisfaction with Miguel either. He excused himself while I was saying goodnight to Howard and Sissy. This time there was no note under my door.

  16

  A SOFT GRAY SKY hung over the Pacific the next morning, merciful on my hangover. In deference to the pain I didn’t talk much on the drive back to Los Angeles, and Miguel again said very little as he drove. I fell asleep, and by the time I woke up we were approaching the hotel on Sunset.

  After I checked myself back in, I found Miguel out in the driveway in the idling sedan. I didn’t want to say goodbye. And I was conscious that we hadn’t really spoken privately since my irritated exchange with him on the fairway. I drew closer, wondering how to stall for time before he pulled away. He’d started something in my room in Monterey—the attraction wasn’t mine alone—but at the same time, I could not dismiss his brotherly coolness. I hoped, despite my fears to the contrary, that he would suggest we meet again.

  He was behind the wheel, staring down at the driveway.

  “I enjoyed this, Beth,” he said politely.

  “Thank you for your help.�
� I bent tentatively to give him a kiss through the open window.

  He tilted his cheek to meet my lips, like a favorite aunt, and returned to his surveillance of the asphalt. “It’s not expected, maybe, for me to say something like this, Beth, but . . . I’ve been thinking about it, and I think you and I—or our hearts, maybe—are quite similar. Do you trust me?”

  “Yes.” I was encouraged to hear him speaking so personally.

  “I don’t know if it’s possible to trust another human being until you trust yourself. Which is hard enough to do.”

  “What do you mean when you say we’re similar?”

  He cut the engine and rested his hands in his lap. “I mean, why are you in California right now, Beth?”

  “To find something.”

  “Yes, and in doing that, you’re helping someone else. From what you said, your employer. Your friend? In any case, this engine seems to be someone else’s quest, and you’ve adopted it. I do the same. I devote my life to something that you could argue ruined my family. You and I get some satisfaction out of this dedication, but is it really ours?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  One of the valets called to Miguel to make room for another car pulling in. I walked alongside as he let the sedan roll a few feet down the driveway.

  “I’m making sure my grandfather’s company continues on,” he said. “I tell myself it’s so that Britain can retain a proud part of its history. And—I hope, anyway, in the near future—to manufacture something that could be enormously positive.”

  “You’re doing something with your life.”

  He hunched over the wheel. “I like to think so. Most of AG’s management doesn’t, though a few others do. Or so my friend Lynford tells me.”

  He looked up, his eyes darting between me and the wheel like a hunted man. “That’s me, anyway. And I think you’re being driven by something else, too.”

  “I did get a feeling of accomplishment finding that engine. But what was written on it has to do with that woman Hélène. It doesn’t answer some questions I have.”