The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  There was the telegram. And there was Miguel’s account of a friendship. Otherwise, I had not heard anything from or about Lynford Webster since the summer Emerson died. I hated confrontation, but I could not ignore the remaining duties I understood to be mine. There were some personal items of Emerson’s, including his watches, that needed to be returned to the only family member I knew of. And there was the most personal item of all—Emerson’s remains—which I had been instructed to dispense with according to his wishes, though, in his refusal to accept what was happening to his body, he had not spelled them out. I thought my questions about the Beacon might be answered in the course of carrying out these duties, if I could summon the nerve to ask them.

  The morning after Hélène’s opening, I reinstated myself in Emerson’s office and dug out my old research into the classic-car restorers. Now that I had the clarity of mind to shift my focus to Connecticut, it took only two phone calls to identify the missing link as Martin McVane, the owner of a respected garage in Norwalk. The morning I planned to drop in on McVane, I reread one of the faxes in Emerson’s file, from the Beacon Heritage Trust.

  Accession Number: BC 1998.2

  20 June 1996

  Mr. Tang,

  Thank you for your latest inquiry. I am happy to reply.

  If the engine has been changed over time, well, that happens.

  If it was raced hard or crashed, the engine and gearbox might go one way, the doors fly off the other way, etc. Certain models were always raced, but it does not make any difference really.

  To your question: “What is the vehicle? The chassis or the engine?” The chassis is deemed to be the vehicle.

  Respectfully yours,

  Manfred Zeffler

  Brand Steward

  I smiled to myself. One of Emerson’s urgent faxes that summer. He couldn’t help himself from splitting hairs about what defined the actual car. Knowing Emerson, he’d asked in case we had failed to get the engine, leaving open the question of whether he, or, presumably Hélène, was the true victor. But I recognized that Zeffler’s clarification meant something else: By design, the engine was intentionally separate. From the beginning, it was always meant to be changed or replaced. I digested this as I walked down Perry Street to meet Hélène at the garage. She arrived not long after me, by taxi, wearing a souvenir baseball cap from a Broadway show, her breath smelling strongly of coffee. Together with her aviator glasses and the bewildered expression on her face, she looked like nothing so much as a lost tourist.

  Inside the garage, the manager, Nate, escorted us to a part of the building I had never seen. From across a polished cement floor, we approached a private bay at street level, filled floor-to-ceiling with a reflective car cover—a voluminous golden cocoon. In the shadowy garage, the shiny fabric looked like a cross between a carnival tent and a UFO.

  “You keep the car under that?” I asked Nate.

  Hélène turned to me. “When was the last time you saw it?”

  “I haven’t.”

  She stared at me in disbelief.

  “At first I couldn’t face it,” I explained feebly. “And then I was traveling.”

  She walked ahead, huffing her disapproval.

  Nate knelt down on the cement and began disconnecting several thick black wires snaking out from the enclosure.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Triple battery chargers.”

  “Sounds redundant,” sniffed Hélène.

  He rolled up the garage door leading onto Perry Street, and the sides of the tent shifted with the inrush of air. The great golden cocoon seemed to breathe. It frightened me to watch it. Then Nate detached a hose from the side and it began to deflate. There was a flash as he pulled the cover off the high fenders. A rustle of fabric unveiled the body: the sweeps, the curves, long and low, all of it painted the thick, creamy color of a vanilla milkshake.

  Inside the open-top car, two narrow blood-red seats touched casually, shoulder to shoulder. A skinny metal gearshift reached up from the carpeted floor. Something beside it caught my attention: a heap of fabric. I didn’t get more than a few inches closer before I cried out.

  “What is it?” asked Hélène.

  “That’s his.”

  I was afraid to touch it, to pull it out. The two of them stared expectantly at me as I leaned over the car door and closed my hand around Emerson’s cashmere blanket.

  I half expected it to feel warm from his body, but it was cool, the soft fibers suffused with a dark, medicinal smell. Beneath the blanket I found an unpleasant collection of objects. Lurking there on the carpet were crumpled paper towels, wads of Kleenex and a glass jar. The jar contained traces of a burgundy-black substance that I knew without any further investigation had once been Emerson’s urine.

  “My God.”

  Nate brought over a trash can and took everything from my hands.

  “He was camping in the car?” Hélène asked.

  Nate shrugged. “One night.”

  I turned to him. “You knew he was here?”

  He held up his hands in surrender. “It was his car, right? He was free to come and go.”

  “When I asked, you said this car was being worked on by mechanics somewhere.”

  “It was—inside this bay.”

  “Nate, he was dying.”

  “All the more reason he should have access, right? He owned the car. He was paid up . . .”

  I wanted to keep arguing with him, not because I thought he was wrong, only to vent the stress, however belatedly, of those long hours of Emerson’s disappearance. Until I spotted something else on the carpet: the paintbrush Emerson had stolen from Hélène. It was lying askew by the gas pedal, like a twig fallen from an overhanging tree.

  Now—of all times—when the woman herself was standing a few feet away. There was no question I would cover for him.

  “I hope the floorboard’s not stained with urine or anything,” I said. On the pretext of examining the carpet, I bent over and flicked the paintbrush out of sight, under the seats.

  At the back of the car, two thin exhaust pipes shot out from the body, flanked by a pair of woefully inadequate-looking strips of chrome bumper. I backed away from the pipes and joined Hélène at the front. She was examining the grille’s thick, intricate metalwork: a series of elegantly squashed hexagons crossed with shining bars. Affixed to the hood was an enameled lighthouse badge—a flat, stylized obelisk inside a diamond, half white and half emerald green. It was hard to reconcile those clean, bright geometries with the mess of Emerson lingering in the car on his last night alive.

  “It’s all set to drive?” I asked Nate.

  “Yeah, yeah. Good to see it getting out and doing some miles.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” gushed Hélène. “Though I do remember wishing the seats were more comfortable.”

  Her proprietary tone irritated me. The idea of Emerson being there alone on his last night, perhaps in great physical pain, continued to haunt me, but another thought had been burning through me like acid since the morning he was found: He had spent his final moments with Hélène, not me.

  I turned to Nate. “Does this car have an engine in it?”

  He laughed.

  “Does it?”

  He laughed again. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Can you open the hood, please?”

  “You can just start it up. You don’t haveta go through that.”

  “I’d like to see it. Is it the new—sorry—the original one?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Nate wiped his hand on his jeans, then reached under the dashboard for the release. “When it came back from California, we got them together in time for him to go . . . camping.”

  Even before he had finished lifting the hood, I saw the lumps of metal. An engine. As foreign to me as a comet.

  Hélène, mi ricordo.

  Hélène moved closer, transfixed by the sight of the words engraved there.

  “Thank you,” I said to Nate, newly
embarrassed.

  He lowered the hood.

  “Hélène will be driving it this afternoon,” I informed him.

  “It used to overheat in traffic,” she recalled, holding her hand to her throat.

  “You won’t have any trouble,” Nate said. “It’s sweet. You need help starting it?”

  “I’ll be fine.” She wrapped her fingers around the thin wooden steering wheel. She spent some time finding a comfortable driving position, wriggling her body on the seat until she seemed satisfied.

  “You don’t take a nap while you’re driving these postwar cars,” she told me. “They’re a bit of work. It’s not the friendliest to use—what’s the expression?”

  “User-friendly.”

  “Not at first, anyway.”

  “That’s why I needed you.”

  She leaned back and smiled. “I’d forgotten how close this seat is. It was easier for Alto behind the wheel. He was shorter than me.”

  She came into softer focus for me then, as the glow of anticipated delight overtook her features. Then her tone grew serious.

  “Beth, well, I did try to bid on the engine . . . in the moment. And I do regret this, considering the situation your employer was in. You’re kind to give me this chance to drive it.”

  Her words moved me to silence. She knew exactly why I had asked her there: I needed her to chauffeur me and, in a sense, Emerson. I’d pulled all the prescription bottles full of his remains off the shelves in his bedroom and brought them, along with the rest in his backpack. She’d agreed to drive so I could scatter them, and then to accompany me afterward on an ambush of sorts, to try to get some information from the restorer, Martin McVane. I had kept the car from her for years, and now her humbleness made me see her again as the vulnerable woman I had first met. The thought of her stolen paintbrush there in the car, abandoned carelessly by Emerson, reminded me of her vulnerability all the more.

  I reached down to place my bags by my feet and, while Hélène was speaking to Nate, I felt around under her seat until my fingers found the paintbrush. “Can I try the radio?” I asked, after I dropped the brush into my purse.

  “We’ll be happier listening to the engine.”

  I wasn’t sure.

  She moved her feet purposefully and the car’s breath erupted around us.

  “Oh—it’s glorious!” she shouted.

  I was glad I’d brought my Walkman.

  She pressed the throttle again and the engine sputtered, then roared.

  “Octane’s a little high in the gas,” Nate said, kicking the edges of the metallic cover clear of the wheels. “Nothing we can do about that.”

  “There’s no seat belt,” I said, looking to Nate.

  “Nope!” He laughed, waving us off as Hélène, working the clutch, inched the car out of the garage.

  She turned the wheel, the car curtsied to the left, and then we were rolling down Perry Street like a parade float. I wondered when she would floor it, but we were still on cobblestones and she seemed content to take her time, barely blipping the throttle, driving cautiously, as if she were ferrying a child to school.

  I directed her around the corner onto Greenwich Street. The cobblestones turned to smooth asphalt, and we were floating. It was like being on a magic carpet, but the smells were warm, strange, mechanical. On the narrow streets of the Village the flower boxes in the windows were fringed with the first fallen leaves. The air felt close, caught behind the little glass windscreen, the odor of leather and dust mixed with a rubbery smell I assumed was the set of Dunlop tires Emerson had bought the first summer. The Beacon’s engine was humming, and the morning was loud with the sounds of exhausts popping on West Street. I didn’t watch the road that morning as much as I watched Hélène. Her paint-stained hands on the wheel. That smell, a feeling. Something mournful—of what? The car felt like old times. But Hélène’s movements were alive with concentration and grace.

  We cleared the city, the grass unrolling like spools of film along the sides of the road as Hélène systematically overtook the cars around us, connecting from one parkway to the next, heading north and then east. I’d already warned her that after we crossed into Connecticut, I was going to release Emerson’s ashes. It was she who had given me the idea, when I’d recalled her invitation to go driving together two years earlier.

  The eulogy I’d composed for him the night before sounded like a movie review, so I’d ripped it up and stuck a yellowing cassette tape into my old Walkman. It was one of the handful I’d found among the upgraded piles of CDs in his “Merritt Parkway Driving Music” stack.

  Accession Number: ETW 1988.? and BC 1998.3

  The object is a cassette tape:

  Cocteau Twins—Blue Bell Knoll

  October 1988

  4AD Records; Capitol Records (USA)

  35 minutes, 20 seconds

  NOTES:

  British legend holds that the bluebell’s knoll (or “knell”) is audible only to those who are approaching death.

  “One journalist, in reviewing Blue Bell Knoll, went so far as to say, ‘When you die, and then open your eyes, if there isn’t music something like this playing in the distance, you’re probably on your way to the wrong place.’”

  Ref: Cocteau Twins, “Heaven or Las Vegas” press release, 1990

  www.cocteautwins.com/html/history/history14.html

  When we crossed onto the Merritt, I squeezed the Play button on my Walkman and the morning filled with the scratchy, tape-recorded roar of angels and the singing of the engine, and the glory of it drowned out everything in my head. I twisted off the top of the first prescription bottle—Ativan—and leaned back to catch the airflow. On contact, Emerson’s remains leapt out from the little plastic cylinder. The light dust flew up and away from the next bottle, and the next, and the next. For miles the delicate nets of powdery grit flung themselves like confetti over the grass and trees, sailing off into the woods or tumbling past bridges and roadside stretches of wildflowers, where I hoped they would fertilize something.

  I had taken a long ride with him, and now that his human dust was falling away, I let the sensation of speed fill me up again. I was happy it was too noisy to speak, happy to feel the vibrations of the car through my body as I had once done with Emerson. As Hélène had done with Alto. When I looked over at her, she was radiant.

  In Norwalk, we cut through a series of residential neighborhoods to reach the garage of Martin McVane. When the car was moving slowly enough for us to hear the birdsong in the turning foliage, Hélène began to recount a driving holiday she had taken in the Beacon with Alto Bianco in the summer of 1954. She rolled her shoulders back and forth as she recalled that they had run through the Italian Alps and then on to Geneva, to a hotel on the lake.

  “His hair was wild,” she said, “as if a great wind had blown him into your presence. Later, we didn’t treat each other well. But when we were on the road, we never fought.”

  My own reaction to the man had been so negative, I decided not to mention that I had met him in Germany two years earlier. Instead, I asked, “What attracted you to him?”

  I was surprised by the forcefulness of her reply.

  “We just wanted to go like hell!” she said with a sharp laugh. “Because we could! Because the war was over and we were alive.” She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “I was very young. I’d had only a brief life before we met, and anyway, that was destroyed by the war. So much was . . . I didn’t feel anything when we were driving—it was bliss. On the nights afterward, the echoes would come into my eardrums. I could feel the acceleration building. It was erotic. It was a revelation to me.”

  “Like when you step off a boat and you’re still rocking.”

  She nodded. “The experience imprints itself on the body. But the sensation soon disappeared. I wanted to continue feeling it.” She considered this for a moment. “I was maybe addicted.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  “I think maybe he didn’t need l
ove. Or, he would not allow himself to receive a great deal of it. He was a man like a camel.” She pinched her fingers in the air. “He could survive on a thimbleful.”

  It occurred to me that Alto’s account of his many personalizations might have been an empty boast, nothing more than a macho show of bravado. His message to her might be the only one.

  “What happened?” I dared to ask, as we reached Martin McVane’s garage.

  “It doesn’t matter. Well, it does. But we’re here now.”

  McVane must have spotted the car pulling up. We were still parking it when he approached. He was a solidly built man in his sixties with a shiny alabaster complexion that reminded me of raw cod flesh. His voice, or rather the way he spoke, was relaxed enough when he said hello, but as he circled the Beacon he studied its every curve without uttering another word.

  I introduced myself and Hélène.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, finally turning to us.

  As we walked with him into the garage, I attempted to disarm him by appealing to his ego. I’d come into possession of the car recently, I explained, and I’d been told he was the best restorer in the area.

  “Don’t you do work for Lynford Webster, in Burring Port?” I asked.

  “Sure. Used to. Years ago.”

  He’d almost taken the bait. I only had to make it a little easier for him.

  “What about my Beacon roadster out there? Remember it from his collection?”

  “Course. It’s an unforgettable car.”

  I exchanged glances with Hélène. At various times I had imagined all kinds of histories for the car, especially related to Emerson’s college years, but at the party after her opening, Hélène’s yearning had made me consider the landscape of Emerson’s own youth. My heart was pounding.