by Paula Champa
A purpose could take surprising forms, I recognized, ones I’d never thought of. Maybe we weren’t supposed to know all our purposes. Maybe that’s why I’d felt so lost.
After a few minutes he straightened his shoulders. Then, as if surfacing from a deep dive, he said: “If they hadn’t revived you, that would have been it—for me. I would have followed you. Do you understand?”
I remembered then the question that Emerson had asked me once. When you die, do you even know how it ends? And now my father was telling me the plot: It would not have spared him either. And when he’d followed me, my mother’s plot would have changed irrevocably as well. And then? Without her husband and child, how would the plot have ended for her? Alone, with Garrett asleep in his bed . . . I imagined the suffering Mr. Webster had gone through after losing his wife and child, the grief that Miguel and Emerson had known following the deaths of their parents, and I did not want to know any more of that plot. My father had done the only thing he could: He’d put his hand against the plastic, reaching for mine. He had stayed by my side, night after night, and it had not come to be.
Now he sat before me, his face full of self-questioning. I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t explain, that the darkest stretch of the trail through grief obscured what more and better life may be beyond, for I was only just emerging from it myself. In the cave that afternoon, a birth into death and one into life had been accomplished. I had carried Emerson’s death to term, and, crawling into his mother’s tomb, I had undergone that difficult labor. I did not want to say goodbye to him, but I understood: The death cord had to be cut. Two engines could not fit into the same body.
25
WHEN I CLEANED OUT Emerson’s office and vacated his loft, I saw that the records and papers were like a warm blanket around me that had become full of moth holes over time. The archivist looks forward, looks backward, but there is so much the records cannot explain. Emerson’s afterlife was how my own came to be written. I traded a plot in the ground for one that continued after both our expiration dates had passed. Was it possible for me to leave him completely behind? No more than anyone could resist memory.
Though I’d deleted Miguel’s number from my phone years before, I could not completely dismiss him from my mind. One afternoon the following spring, when a crew of motorcyclists came joyriding down Bleecker Street, I took to heart the only piece of advice Hélène had given me and phoned the headquarters of AG in Germany. Miguel was traveling to a charity event at the New York International Auto Show later in the week, I was told. I realized that if I wanted to see him, all I had to do was purchase a ticket.
I was nervous that April afternoon, pushing through the door of Golden Hands. I almost walked back out again, but I was encouraged to continue inside by my conviction that getting a manicure for a party had always been Mei’s great hope for me. After seeing how much Webster had aged, it was less of a shock to find that Li’s hair had gone completely gray. Li showed no signs of remembering me. With a polite greeting, she left me in the care of a younger woman in an orange sweatshirt. I scanned the faces on the wall of framed licenses for Mei, but she was nowhere to be found.
The new woman rubbed the moisturizing lotion into my arms sloppily, let the cream stray onto my shirtsleeves. Silently, she buffed my nails with a vigor bordering on violent, finally mentioning that she was majoring in material sciences at Columbia. “Metallurgy,” she explained with evident pride, renewing her assault on my nails with the buffer. “I know the best angles and pressure for polishing.”
After questioning her for a few minutes, I understood that she was a beneficiary of one of Emerson’s trusts—one I was supposed to be evaluating, along with the trusts for the preservation of Modernist architecture and the technology company Auxiliant—all of which I’d neglected after Bruce Kingston arranged the annual payments. My nails did have a bright sheen, I noticed as the girl stuck her head back into a textbook.
The Javits Center that evening was hot and crowded, but even without the superior viewing platform of a zeppelin I found Miguel easily enough. He was dressed in a white dinner jacket and black tie, standing six feet above the floor of the main hall on a revolving display devoted to Beacon. Beside him stood the man with the headset who had been with him at the event in Germany—a PR person of some sort, I realized as he led Miguel over to speak with a group of guests sipping cocktails. I climbed onto the platform and made my way to the outer edge of their circle.
“The revived Beacon Company is going to be working with private and governmental partners to explore new systems for clean transportation,” Miguel was saying. I noticed that he’d dropped the word Motor from the company name. “The Chinese are building high-speed rail, investing heavily in clean technologies and beginning to secure the supply stream of key raw materials for producing green energy,” he went on. “The opportunity here is for us to . . .”
Parked on the turntable beside Miguel was a new Beacon prototype: a long, low vessel in silver, a refinement, apparently, of the earlier theme. I inspected it, keeping to the back of the crowd until it disbanded. Then I detected the spiced notes of Miguel’s after-shave, and I knew he was behind me.
“What are you doing here?” he asked with a confused, ruffled smile.
I handed him my camera. “Please, take my picture with it.”
He stepped back and took a shot, then greeted me with a polite kiss on both cheeks.
“How have you been, Beth?” He smiled again, examining my face. “You seem different.”
“Hair, maybe . . .” I wasn’t sure what to say. I gestured to the machine beside him. “What’s this one about? I heard someone say it doesn’t have a real engine.”
“It can roll,” he protested. “It’s here to demonstrate a concept. One vision of the near future, anyway. This car runs on electricity, and it can also be driven straight onto a high-speed electric train with charging points inside. The idea is that you would be able to plug in and recharge your vehicle while the train carries you a long distance. Then you’d have it for shorter drives at your destination—all with no emissions along the chain if the electricity comes from clean sources. It can even be charged by the sun. Look—there’s our tribute to the solar gods.”
He pointed up.
A reproduction of the lighthouse from the Beacon logo towered over the stage. I saw that it had been altered—remodeled at the top and painted to resemble a golden obelisk.
“It always amuses me what the marketing people come up with,” said Miguel. “Would you like to sit in the car?”
He helped me lower myself into the driver’s seat and then got himself settled on the passenger side. He pushed a button in front of me. “This is our future vision of the old ‘provisional cover,’” he explained as a transparent roof closed over us. “It’s fitted with next-generation solar cells.”
As the canopy closed, the sounds of the convention center went mute and we were on a turntable, spinning silently.
“Are you having a good time?” I asked him.
“I’m never having a bad time—as my father used to say.”
It was the first time I had heard him mention the man without sounding angry.
“I’m well.” He nodded confidently. “A bit more settled these days. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind when we met that summer, but I’m good now. Happy, actually.”
He leaned in.
“What about you, Beth? I’ve wondered how you were doing. I almost called you last month, when—well, but you banished me two years ago in L.A.” He turned to me with a chastising grin.
He was teasing me, I could see, but I couldn’t deny it was true.
“It’s happened to me before, you know,” he said.
“It has?”
His grin faded. “And I lost a pair of boxer shorts in the bargain.”
I laughed at the idea of this. “What?”
“I’m serious.”
“How did that happen?”
He shook his head di
smissively. “Have you ever met someone, and you realize, not until much later, how critical they were to your future? You can’t know it at the time, except that something about them strikes you. You remember where you stood when you met them, what you said.
“I did,” he went on. “I met someone like that. And I could see he had the ability to accomplish things. I had no family . . . I was lost. It woke me up, talking to him. It turned out he’d lost a parent, too. He encouraged me. Talking to him made me define who I wanted to be. Now I’m here—” He gestured with amazement to the convention center, the golden obelisk looming over the stage. “And I have no idea what happened to him. We had a plan together . . . for . . . this.”
Miguel looked out the window. The PR guy with the headset was hovering outside the car. I worried that he would interrupt us, as he had done at the dinner in Germany, and I prayed he wouldn’t, because I thought I was beginning to understand something.
Miguel’s arm was resting on the console between us. I tapped his sleeve. “Your dinner jacket reminds me of a guy in a photograph—inside a modern house in L.A.”
“Yes, I know the photo you mean. It’s a Case Study House.”
“It’s a cool place,” I said. “I went there once.”
“I did as well,” Miguel said. “The party I just mentioned. That’s where I met him.”
“Who?”
I could smell a dry, leathery nervousness on his breath.
“The guy I was talking about.”
There was an underwater roaring in my ears, momentarily deafening my other senses as a memory surfaced in my mind. When I’d rejoined Emerson inside the Case Study House that August evening, I had been ready to tease him, to ask him why he hadn’t worn his dinner jacket like the man in the picture—when I saw he was trembling.
“Just felt like standing there,” he’d said, attempting to sound casual.
“It’s a perfect night,” I’d replied, deciding not to give him a hard time.
“It is,” he’d agreed. “It’s the night that’s always happening, and is always going to keep happening.”
I faced Miguel. “I have to ask you something.”
“You want to marry me,” he joked. “What took you so long?”
“That’s not funny. I wish you would explain—” I wasn’t sure where to start, or what he knew. I sensed that I had to feel my way carefully, one mystery at a time. “I just wonder—what happened that weekend, in California?”
“What happened with you?” he countered in a tone of friendly debate. “We were saying goodbye, and then you were having a go at me about my friend Lynford Webster. A good man, as far as I can see.”
“I’m not upset about him anymore. I misunderstood something. I’m talking about before that. With us.”
“We found the engine.”
“No, in my hotel room.”
“I was conflicted.”
“About what?”
I could tell he was uncomfortable. I wanted to speak plainly, to let him know how much our brief association had helped me, like the friendship he’d described earlier. But I could feel the wet cement pouring into my mouth again, hardening there, as if to stop me from revealing how vulnerable I felt. I tried to talk through it, as difficult as it was. The words came slowly. And not as intended. “I know we’d just met. Maybe I shouldn’t have hoped that it . . . but . . . we spent part of a night together. You told me our hearts were similar and asked if I trusted you. And then you said you didn’t want to make our relationship more personal.”
He pulled at the points in his hair. “Beth, have you heard about that woman you bid against in Monterey? The artist?”
“Hélène Moreau? What about her?”
“She died last month. That was when I almost called you.”
“What?”
“When you didn’t say anything earlier, I had a feeling you might not know.”
I was too stunned to speak. I’d been occupied for months cleaning out Emerson’s loft and office. I’d heard from Hélène only once since she drove the Beacon away, when she’d mailed me a volume of Rilke poems as a gesture of thanks, with the Royalton message slip from Emerson inside. I had been considering getting in touch with Bruce Kingston and investing some of the funds from Emerson’s trust to start an archive for her. I thought I would try to track down the photographs in her obelisk series and collect them in Emerson’s name—Anonymous. Now she was dead. I understood immediately that I was not sad for her. The sadness of death was an affliction reserved for the living, not those who were already gone.
Miguel shifted in his seat. “She was in Italy with Howard and Sissy Russell, believe it or not. Practicing to rerun that race.”
“I know. In the end, I—well, my employer—let her have the car with the restored engine.”
“I heard that,” he said. “I saw Howard not long afterward, at a Beacon event.”
“Did she crash?”
“Oh, no. She died in her sleep, more or less—though from what Howard said, it was a bit more violent than that phrase normally suggests.”
Outside the car, people were milling around the stage, leaning down and peering at us through the glass.
He turned to me. “Do you want to hear something strange? Howard said that before they got to Italy, she had that bit of writing buffed off the engine.”
“After all that, she erased it?”
“All what?”
I tried to reconcile the Hélène I had known with the thick-headed man I had met in Germany, scornfully kicking the new Beacon with his brown leather toe.
“I’m glad she did that,” I said. “But I wish she’d gotten to run her race.”
“It may be just as well. It’s not the same now as in 1954. It’s very technical.”
I hoped that her erasure of the words meant that she’d come to terms with her memories and regrets. I wanted to keep talking about her, to help me wrap my mind around the news that she was gone, but I was aware that he had used Hélène to change the subject.
“A few minutes ago,” I said, “when we were talking, you said you were conflicted about me. Why?”
His jaw tensed. “It had never happened to me before.”
“What?”
He seemed to be working the answer around in his mouth with difficulty, as if he were battling an influx of wet cement himself. Then all at once his face softened. “Beth, I’m . . . I’m in a relationship. It was very new that summer. Completely new, in fact—for me. Because, I’d never had one. Not what most people would consider one, anyway. And that night, I came very close to cheating on her.”
All around me, faces were pressed against the transparent canopy, trying to get a look inside the car. I smiled back dumbly, glancing from eyes to teeth to hands as he began to explain.
“I felt close to you,” he confessed. “It’s strange. I went through a difficult time before I met you. Like I was saying earlier, when I was getting serious about reviving Beacon, I mapped out a plan with that friend I mentioned. I mean, where do you start, to start a company again? He was the one who got me thinking about the kinds of things I’m doing now, way beyond what my grandfather was doing. Not devoting effort and energy to what we already know can’t be sustained, when so much more is possible. I had some ideas of my own, but he had this way of drawing me into a bigger picture. I hadn’t spent that much time with anyone since my grandfather. At some point, he let me know that he had other feelings for me, that he was attracted. I couldn’t reciprocate. But I didn’t want any change in the plans we were working on. He was a brother to me. I told him this.”
“What did he say?”
He shook his head. “When he didn’t return my calls, I wrote to him—for quite a while, actually.”
“How long?”
He thought about this. “Four or five years.”
“Years?”
“I was shut out. That may have driven me more than anything. I had to get serious about the plan, sell the marque to AG to raise seed
money. Each step, I did it to prove to myself—to him—that I could do it, and I did. On my own. Because he vanished.”
“With your boxer shorts?”
He shrugged, and I had no doubt: another one of Emerson’s petty thefts.
“I still miss him. I’ve lost so many people I cared about . . . That summer, just before I went with you to Monterey, I met this woman in L.A. I was ready for something . . . I don’t know. I wanted to give it a chance. I didn’t say anything to you that night because—what would I say? We hardly knew each other.” He sighed. “I was sick of one-night stands.”
I kept my eyes averted. “I know what you mean.”
“That’s what I meant when I told you I couldn’t make it more personal, not then, anyway. I was drawn to you, Beth. Maybe we could have talked more, later. But you banished me.” He grinned again at the word. “It was frustrating, but it also made things easier.”
While he talked, I tried to navigate a scramble of emotions—about myself, about Emerson, about Miguel. I recalled the interview notes in Emerson’s notebook, the ones I’d read on the night he went missing, realizing now that it was his record of a conversation with Miguel, still very young and already intent on his comeback.
Emerson had risked his heart, but not fully.
“How long ago did this guy vanish?” I asked Miguel.
The time frame he gave was not long before Emerson hired me, years before he was noticeably sick. He’d retreated into photographs, other people’s concrete visions of the future, rather than test the limits of Miguel’s affection for him. I wondered if that was something else he’d inherited from his mother, by default, a kind of vicious cycle where one loss creates a fear of others until certain intimacies are no longer possible, even when they’re most needed. Like Hélène, he must have preferred the illusory perfection of memory. He must never have intended to keep the appointment to see the Beacon that night in Los Angeles, but he had drawn so close, traveling there for a last glimpse of Miguel from across the hall. He’d watched from a distance as their plan took shape and followed the progress in letters that went unanswered, asking Lynford Webster for advice on how to fund the venture—even, in a sense, bequeathing his own father to Miguel. He hadn’t abandoned Miguel. He had been looking after him the whole time.
