The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  The woman laughed again—harder than she had at her own joke.

  “Can I grow them back?”

  She shook her head apologetically.

  “Do you use a lot of cleaning products?” she asked with some seriousness. “Do you handle a lot of paper?”

  I could not begin to tally the forests’ worth of paper I had filed in my years on earth, or the oceans of cleaning products and bleach we had gone through in Emerson’s final months.

  Reluctantly, I accepted this as my explanation, as did the U.S. government.

  That night, I fought a solid mass of heaviness, like a roof fallen in. Before my visit to the Central Processing Center, if I had felt blank, it was only me who felt it. And so the shock of the technician’s pronouncement was severe. Now there was evidence: I did not possess the markings of a unique human being. Inside the Chinese box she’d opened, down at the bottom of the silk lining, was a worm I had never routed, a worm curled like a question mark, calling me to account for my own existence.

  The second anniversary of Emerson’s death was approaching, and I could feel the extra grief leaking out. Once more I found myself wondering what he would have done with his life. I had walked and even slept in his shoes (we wore the same size). He was constantly on my mind, and I talked out loud to him more and more frequently. I’d carried him to see the houses he admired, but I could not say whether I was living up to my responsibilities to him, or to anyone.

  I lived like an earthworm, taking the days in like dirt, turning them over and passing them out again. It was as if Emerson’s death had just happened. I did not understand how grief could work on such a time delay. The tap behind my eyes would not shut off. Some days, the tears began as I showered in the morning and did not subside until I passed out at night. Later, I would make myself scrambled eggs or sit at a bar with Anne-Mette and Helle. I told them nothing.

  Accession Number: BC 1998.1

  Postmark: 16 September 1998

  Received: 30 September 1998

  The object is a notecard from Hélène Moreau, handwritten in black ink on cream-colored stock (the initials HM engraved in navy blue), forwarded from New York City.

  Dear Beth, The first small exhibition of my new work will be held at Arthur Quint’s gallery, opening on October 8th. I hope to see you there. Are you still enjoying New York? —H.

  The arrival of this simple communication from Hélène had a complex effect. Maybe I shouldn’t have wondered at this. After all, I had kept her in my thoughts. It was my lingering curiosity about her, some affinity I felt for her, that had given me the idea to stay in Copenhagen, where she had once lived. I mulled over the polite nonchalance of her invitation, in contrast with the distinct charge emitting from between the lines. Like the flashing light on a hotline, it rang with the news: She was working again.

  The next day, I got out of bed when it was still morning and took the train an hour north, to Humlebæk, to the modern art museum called Louisiana, where there was a wing dedicated to Hélène’s work. I had meant to go earlier. The morning was overcast but warm, and before I went inside I walked the grounds, my spirits lifting with the breeze running up from the blue basin of the Øresund, a busy sea lane between Denmark and Sweden.

  Inside the museum, a guard directed me to the two formal halls devoted to the Speed Paintings. The first room was startlingly long, more like a light-filled chute, with row after row of the narrow canvases unfurled in great lengths along the walls. Hélène’s paintings had appeared sterile to me in textbooks, despite their intellectual drama. But when I saw them in person, stretching through the tunnel, they came alive along the slashes—thick sheets of scarred canvas skin, smeared with mud and black grease.

  I sat with them the way Hélène had sat with Gertrude Stein: not trying to make sense of them. The tongues of butchered canvas riffed in the climate-controlled breeze, saying something I desperately wanted to understand. These were not the simple cuts they appeared to be in reproductions. They were not clean. Everywhere, there were jagged flaps and rips, the suggestion of torn flesh, hair—the wooden stretchers of the canvases showing through like bones. All at once the violence overwhelmed me. The light-filled silence echoed with a breathtaking sense of disruption, of something whole ripping apart. There was no doubt as to the intensity of the force that created them.

  I escaped the long gallery at the opposite end and found an upholstered bench in the next hall—technically an extension of the main room, except this second group of Speed Paintings was larger both in physical dimensions and in number. The canvases here were unmistakably different. The wall text explained that they were derived from the European racing circuit. There was a docent at one end of the hall leading a small group through the exhibit. I moved closer to listen in, but he was speaking Danish. As they cleared out, a second group filed in, led by a woman in a smart black suit addressing her group in English. Her arm swept the room.

  “What you’re seeing here is something very special,” she said. “It’s a re-creation of the finishes of the Grand Prix races in 1954, done after the season.” She clasped her hands together and brought them to her chest. “These are considered to be the height of Moreau’s achievement in speed painting. She persuaded top drivers like Ascari and Fangio to send their cars ripping past her canvases.” The docent smiled. “Though the works appear to be abstract, most art historians consider them to be portraits. And this is all the more poignant when you consider many of the drivers in this period died prematurely.” She indicated one canvas: “The champion Ascari, the driver here, died the next year, testing a car, just days after crashing at Monaco. There were other crashes during this time, and many other deaths, not only among the drivers: A crash at Le Mans left eighty-two spectators dead.” The docent pursed her lips. “Some of the teams withdrew from racing for years. What’s incredible, in retrospect, is that Moreau was so prescient. She wasn’t yet twenty-one when she conceived the Speed Paintings. What you see here is a record of what it was to be young and fearless—she had that in common with the drivers.”

  As I studied the canvas surfaces filling the cavernous space, I further upgraded the docent’s assessment of Hélène’s accomplishment, for, compared to the paintings in the first hall, these struck me as a new set of works entirely. Brighter. Less torn and stained. The suggestion of speed was like a sword defiantly slicing past from present. The curled strips of canvas moved under the air vents, flayed—but still alive.

  The drivers raced past: Hélène had made them painters. Soldiers had already painted the fields with their blood, the world had been devastated by years of brutal wars, and now the racers became painters of pure velocity, hurtling toward a future that promised something better. The torn canvases were war bandages. They were laundry on the line, at home, far from the horrors of the battlefield. And they were speed.

  I made my way out of the room dizzily, rushing to get away from the authoritative voice trailing after me: “. . . This last painting marks the beginning of a long period of silence in Moreau’s work. Except for a few follow-up canvases in the next decade, this artist, who showed such great promise—who was so closely associated with speed—became, in effect, creatively paralyzed . . .”

  I sprinted through the first room to the exit, charging past the guard who had given me directions on the way in.

  “You’re leaving already?”

  Anne-Mette said the same thing when I went by her gallery to offer her my houseplants.

  Helle joined in her sister’s teasing. “What are you going to do, look at more buildings?”

  There was no way I could explain myself to them. I had failed before, and now my grief was only more complicated. When a lover was filling some lack, a day would come when you were forced to face the truth: He left. Or you left. Either way, there was an end. But if you are filling the hole with a person who is already dead, there is no one to stop you. Once again, I sensed Emerson asserting himself through me: In a city where all I did was walk or bicy
cle, I suddenly wanted to be in a car going insanely fast. For two years, I had been paying to keep the Beacon stored at the garage on Perry Street, and I had never once gone to see it.

  22

  THE LOFT ON Charles Street smelled clean—too clean; instead of fading, the chemical and medicinal fumes had only expanded their dominion during the time the rooms had been closed up. Before I’d left, the odors were a comforting reminder of Emerson, but now they made me anxious. Certain objects, too, found cunning ways to remind me of the medical interventions that had gone on there. I picked up an enameled pen from a tray in Emerson’s bedroom, and with one twist the pen came apart in two pieces. I pulled the cap off a fresh refill, dropped it into the barrel of the pen and retwisted it. The action was eerily familiar, though it was something I had not done in years. Being in Emerson’s bedroom again had activated some muscle memory. I could not think what, until I was signing a little card to put in a bouquet for Hélène’s opening and I realized: Refilling the pen was very similar to prepping a syringe to clean Emerson’s nutrition lines. I had done it dozens of times, except now I wasn’t wearing rubber gloves and there wasn’t a nurse standing next to me.

  I opened the windows to air the place out and ate dinner with the Village Voice as my placemat, scanning the advance notice of Hélène’s show, though to me it read more like an advertisement for Arthur Quint’s gallery. The article was accompanied by a striking photo of Hélène: a black-and-white shot from the 1950s that I had come across several times in books, and again, at a greatly enlarged size, at the museum in Denmark. Even with road goggles in place of her aviator glasses, there was no mistaking the flatness of her face. She was driving an elaborate black car of Italian manufacture—what looked like a prewar model. Its grille was composed of a hundred shining arrows. Long steel needles shot out from the center of the wheels like the scythes on a Persian chariot. Hélène’s younger body was frozen there in the speeding car as it approached the unfurled length of canvas, stretched and bound like a virginal sacrifice—her smile a fascinating collision of misery and elation.

  I wanted to believe that the news of her having moved past her paralysis held some promise for me, like having a lucky bird coasting off the bow of my boat. But when I arrived at the opening that evening, I saw that I was horribly mistaken. Behind the pink lenses floated the eyes of a drowning victim.

  Hélène was huddled on one side of the crowded gallery, in conversation with Arthur Quint and another man I recognized as an art critic for the Voice.

  “What’s the problem?” the critic asked her. “It’s your own promotional photograph.”

  “Forty years ago,” she protested. “And once again, it has been used for something unrelated.”

  “Everyone does it to her,” Arthur Quint complained.

  “I’m trying to get a new photo taken,” Hélène said. “With a Beacon.”

  “But that picture is sincere,” the critic argued. He threw his hands up. “No one knows what to do with sincerity anymore! It’s become completely awkward.”

  When Hélène saw that I was standing beside her, she moved mechanically to kiss me on both cheeks, then pulled me into the crowd and, without another word of greeting or explanation, introduced me to a Mrs. G-C, from Lake Como in Italy.

  “I visited some modern houses there last year,” I informed the woman, shaking her jeweled hand as Hélène moved off with my bouquet to greet another guest. I stood self-consciously beside the Italian woman, surveying Hélène’s new paintings: nominally seascapes, views off the coast of Morocco painted from high ground. Once again, as with her Speed Paintings, the vehicles themselves were absent. The canvases included only the suggestion of speedboats, all but invisible except for the churn of a wake—hundreds of wakes—blurring across the Mediterranean toward the southern coast of Spain. As I had read during my dinner, the Voice critic applauded the paintings for being “ironically traditional,” with “a sixties color quality, like Pucci prints.” He did not, however, consider them to be on a par with her early work. To me, the paintings stood in direct contrast to the color quality of the artist herself. It was as if the bright canvases had drained all the life out of her.

  Still hoping to get a chance to speak with her, I accepted Arthur Quint’s invitation to a gathering afterward at a bar downtown called Sybarite, a dark space filled with candles and Latin music, where I observed Hélène making spiritless attempts to entertain her guests. She looked, as my father would say, like the fight had gone out of her.

  “Thank you for inviting me tonight,” I said when I saw an opportunity to intercept her near the bar.

  Without asking, she ordered me a vodka tonic from the bartender—the same drink she had once fed to me in the padded bar at her hotel.

  “How are you, Beth? You’ve cut your hair.”

  “Yes.”

  She squinted, assessing the short layers. “Très gamine. It suits you.”

  “You seem different too,” I said cautiously. “Thinner?” I didn’t know how to phrase it politely.

  “It’s this suit,” she said, brushing the sleeves with annoyance. “It’s closely tailored. I had it made in Morocco for the opening.”

  The smell of her turpentine perfume and the taste of the cold vodka tonic transported me back to that springtime with Emerson. I handed the glass back without another sip.

  She was studying my face, silently negotiating the terms of our détente. “What have you been doing all this time? Are you continuing to work in Mr. Tang’s office?”

  “I’ve got some obligations related to his estate,” I answered, not untruthfully. In an effort to bridge the awkwardness, I told her about my tour of Emerson’s houses during the previous years—an adventure she declared to be super. I chose not to mention the co-headlining Obelisk Tour, or the fact that I had shadowed her to Copenhagen and fallen into an existential coma there.

  “I’ve been having a tough time without Emerson,” I said. “And I’m not happy about everything that’s happened between us, Hélène. It’s hard to explain, but . . . I hope you understand: I’m not giving up that car.”

  She studied my face. “I have a theory that if you grieve once, fully, it’s never so difficult again. I learned this many years ago, after my mother died. One death will take you so deep in yourself—” She gave me a watery smile. “Can you believe that what you feel is possibly . . . useful? It’s the same with stretching a muscle. At some point it transforms. There can be strength in it.”

  I didn’t know how to respond without offending her. From what I could see, she was grieving something heavily herself.

  “What about you?” I asked. “How are things with you?”

  “I’ve had more energy,” she said. “I don’t get a lot of sleep. I find myself thinking about Alto . . . When we were together, I created my best work.” She shook her head. “I’ve tried to understand this . . .”

  The ambivalence in her face was painful to witness, especially after a period of forty years. Something had obviously gone very wrong.

  “You said you fought a lot.”

  “Searching for the Beacon was my therapy, Beth. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But when I saw the engine by chance that day in California—”

  “What?” The musical elisions of her accent were no longer familiar to me, and I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “Did you say ‘by chance’?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean? How was it chance?”

  “I was invited there by an old friend from when I worked with the professional drivers. I was trying to fall in love with him. Well, I didn’t.” She let out a small laugh. “I saw you running down the lawn. We had not spoken in a few weeks and so I walked over to say hello, and then—”

  “You saw the engine,” I said, voicing the one thought that had eased my conscience. “And now you’re making new paintings.”

  She cleared her throat with a pained expression. “Except it’s like a W
ildean trick. My doctor says I’ve been choking myself in my sleep.”

  “What, you mean like sleep apnea?”

  “No, apparently it’s some . . .” She frowned. “I can’t explain it. The medical terms confuse me. When I found that message from Alto on the engine—”

  “You didn’t know it was there?”

  She shook her head.

  “You weren’t looking for it?”

  “Oh, no!” she said with a surprised laugh.

  “You bid on it.”

  “Of course. I was excited—” She stopped, troubled by some thought. She took a sip of her drink and then her eyes met mine. “When I saw what he’d written . . . You know, for a long time I tried very hard to forget him. People say you have to move on, and probably many people do manage to, because they’re realistic. You may not believe that after so long you can still feel the intensity of—well, when I saw the message there . . .” She lifted her glass again. “I can’t stop thinking we could have been happy together.”

  I understood that, far from helping her, the sight of the old engine had only dragged her more forcefully back into the realm of nostalgia. A romantic memory was strangling her and had been for a long time. She’d said it herself: She was trying to put something back together, something from her youth, something pure that had given her the greatest happiness. I wondered if it hadn’t been the same for Emerson.

  I wish it had been generosity that caused me to do what I did then—and maybe it was, partly, because I sensed that I could offer her something. But I needed her to assist me just as much. She looked confused as I tried to explain this.

  “You want my help?” she asked.

  “Yes, well, I thought, while you’re here in the city—later this week—would you like to go for a drive?”