The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  In the dank room with water-stained wallpaper, Lake kept the curtains drawn, and in the faint orange light he appeared like a mirage. Her father leaned forward with his arms on knobby knees. His suit cuffs rode up and she noticed thin slivers of scars on his wrists.

  She said, “I wrote letters.” She waited for that miracle breakthrough where Lake would spark at the sound of her voice. Her earnestness would melt him, and they could begin a new relationship with his teary apology.

  His dreary voice sounded like dribbling rain. “If you want to hate me, I deserve it.”

  With that, he confirmed every rumor she’d heard about him. The truth that smeared the Novis family name. The crime that made everyone in Abenaki treat Katie like guano. The reason she would run off to New York and change her name. He confirmed it all, with no visible contrition. Lake didn’t want a second chance with his daughter. He wished to be forgotten, with the hope that whatever pain he’d caused would die with him.

  Father and daughter didn’t look at each other. Instead, both kept their eyes on Gilda, and Katie hoped that she would say something that would reach her father. Instead, Gilda detached herself from the conversation, presiding over the ceremony like a totem.

  Katie hesitantly asked, “What are you going to do for work?”

  “The prison has a program. They’re setting me up with the parks department. I’m going to pick up litter.”

  “Do you miss Mom?”

  Every person in the room fidgeted, including Katie. She’d never known her mother, and had never referred to her as Mom—it was a term far too intimate for a woman who only existed in images. Lake had gone to prison too soon for him to be comfortable with being a father, and had possibly never referred to his wife as a mother. Gilda shifted in her seat and scratched at her nude nylons.

  He rubbed his eyes as if he were going to cry, but he seemed so weak, Katie thought the meeting might just be exhausting him. “Of course,” he said. “Every day.”

  “Are you sick? You look sick.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “You’re skinny enough to be sick.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “It would be weird if you were sick like Mom. I mean, what would the odds be?”

  “What?” Now they both sensed more tension from Gilda, who hiked up her shoulders and kept her eyes somewhere below the coffee table.

  “You know, the leukemia.”

  Gilda looked queasy. Prison seemed to have dulled Lake’s mind, but he looked at Gilda and Katie understood the unspoken communication between them, some secret they shared but would keep from her. Lake directed the next question to his daughter while reading Gilda’s expression. “How much do you know about your mother?”

  “Not much.”

  Even in his beaten voice, his passion for Cissy was evident. It was perhaps the only lingering passion in his life, and he grew more animated when he talked about her. “Then you should know your mother was the perfect woman. She honestly was. If you think nothing else about either one of us, think that. She should be the one here. I should be the one that died.” She noticed his crooked teeth, the front two folding over each other. They had yellowed with age and tobacco, and seemed symptomatic of a failing body.

  She didn’t even know why she asked, but in her burgeoning teen rebellion, it just came out. “Then why didn’t you?”

  His response might have come from the cumulative frustration of the past thirteen years, and leaked out like a surrender. “Because there is no justice.”

  • • •

  Melinda jogged Paire out of the memory. “How did it make you feel?”

  “Like I wanted to be stronger, so I wouldn’t turn out like him.”

  She smiled. “I like that you gave yourself a name.” Melinda placed one of her heels on the table and rolled up her hem. “I gave myself this.” She pointed to her ankle, and Paire saw a square tattoo the size of a postage stamp. Her vision dulled by the wine, the design looked all squiggles from across the table. She found herself looking at the glossy skin on Melinda’s taut calf. Then Melinda smiled by raising a single corner of her mouth.

  “That’s pretty,” said Paire, not knowing what else to say. “What does it mean?”

  “It means me. I made it. It’s an artist seal.” Paire remembered Mayer mentioning this, but Melinda explained, “The same way Western artists sign their work, Chinese artists create a seal, or a chop, to make their work unique. It’s a little archaic, but I like the idea because instead of a scrawl, I can make my own name seem prettier.”

  Paire looked closer. What at first glance appeared to be Chinese characters were interlaced letters: M, Q, and I, or M. Qi. Melinda said, “A version of this gets pressed into the clay before I fire it.”

  “You use a chop like your dad.”

  “I was bound to pick up some of his habits,” Melinda said.

  Paire stared at her bare foot. The clean toes nestled into each other, satin skin on each of them. Paire wanted to touch them, to feel the feet that she looked at every day on the rear wall.

  Melinda watched the way she looked at her. Dropping her foot, she leaned into the table and turned her hands so the palms faced the ceiling, offering them to Paire. She smelled like lavender. Paire wasn’t sure what to do with her own hands, and folded them around the stem of the empty wine glass. Melinda reached over and unlaced Paire’s hand from the glass. The younger woman breathed in a loud lungful of air.

  “Why did you invite me here?” Paire asked. She understood the answer when the woman’s hands enfolded hers.

  Melinda rose from her chair to lean toward her. Paire froze. Her fingers pressed down into the walnut, cold and stiff. As the woman’s mouth drew toward hers, she knew she had the option to say something, to excuse herself and fumble through a polite apology. She supposed she didn’t want to hurt Melinda Qi’s feelings by rebuffing her. But she also wanted to know how those lips felt. As her face drifted closer, Melinda’s teeth nibbled at her lower lip, and Paire wondered why she herself had come. Even if this woman wasn’t the empress on display on the Fern’s rear wall, she was the daughter of a legend. That was some kind of royalty. Then Paire understood that she was here not so much to see the empress, but to be seen by the empress. To be recognized by this woman.

  Melinda’s fingers, soft and narrow, burrowed through her hair. The back of Paire’s scalp tingled. Her lips involuntarily stiffened into a pucker, but she willed herself to relax. Melinda’s mouth lacked the sharp bristles that boys grew. She didn’t find the sensation unpleasant, but she didn’t fully enjoy it either. This was a strange, new sensation, and she found that she allowed it to happen more than participated.

  Melinda sensed Paire’s hesitation. She lingered, her mouth brushing against Paire’s lips, then drew back to look at her quizzically. “That was a new thing for you, wasn’t it?”

  Paire nodded. She wondered what her expression conveyed to Melinda, whether she seemed scared, shocked, or hesitantly aroused.

  Chapter 11

  Paire stood looking at a couple of cavemen. More accurately, a caveman couple, replicas of a male and female Australopithecus. The man slung his apelike arm over the woman. Given their nonchalant slouches and vacant expressions, she considered that the pair might be a nude, ancient version of a couple strolling down Bedford Street in Williamsburg.

  She stood at the entrance of the Hall of Human Origins, a large round room in the American Museum of Natural History. Paire had never been to this museum, mainly because it didn’t feature art, and because she had seen her share of dusty taxidermy dioramas at the Dorr Museum in Bar Harbor. Today was Saturday. Tourist day. People flowed past her like spawning salmon navigating round a rock in the riverbed. She wore another neutering uniform, black pants and a white short-sleeve button-down shirt that billowed out under her breasts, pillowing her figure. A chestnut-brown wig, bunched in a ponytail, hid her red hair. No makeup. The badge sewed onto her chest labeled her as museum staff. She wasn’t used
to being invisible, not since she’d moved to New York, and while the point of this exercise was to blend in, it made her uncomfortable to see so many people amble by her without so much as a momentary ogle.

  Paire waited for a voice to come through the two-way radio clipped to her belt.

  While the patrons passed by her at the Hall of Human Origins, Paire looked at the display of glass cases, and wondered if Melinda Qi’s ceramic flowers were taller. A baby stroller rolled into her ankle, and the mother hastily apologized. Paire thought that she looked at her funny, as if wondering whether a woman that young and that slight had any business being a security guard.

  At any moment, Paire would hear a voice on her radio, and she would have to spring into action. At any point until then, she had the option to walk away. They would have broken no laws. But this was a delusion. At any moment, one of the regular security guards might waltz by and spot her as an imposter. She’d slipped on the uniform just minutes ago in the women’s room, and despite what she’d been told about the patterns of the guards, she wasn’t certain whether she could trust what she’d been told. A small miscalculation in timing, and someone would haul her off the floor.

  Rosewood had assured her that this stunt would be safer than the last. The crowds would make it safer. “It’s worse when it’s quiet, because you stand out. The more you stand out, the more likely someone’s going to spot you. Here, we’ll lose ourselves in the masses.” Rosewood had also promised that this installation would take less than a minute to complete. “It’ll be over in a blink.” Paire didn’t know if she believed him.

  While she waited, she thought about her drink with Melinda Qi, and how much could happen in a blink.

  Paire’s belt radio buzzed, and brought her out of her reverie. She couldn’t tell how long she had been standing there in her uniform.

  “Close off the room,” Rosewood said through the speaker.

  She snapped to attention. “Closing the room.”

  Across the Hall of Human Origins, at the other entrance, she recognized Lazaro in a matching uniform. He wore glasses and a dreadlock wig that hung down to the middle of his back. He’d removed his eyebrow piercing, but his hat looked ridiculous, ready to topple off his fake hair. Amid the quiet buzz of the people, he’d already started to steer people away, and asked those at his end of the room to exit.

  Paire stretched out her arms to maximize her size. “Excuse me, folks, we’re going to have to ask you to clear the room for a few minutes.”

  A few heads turned. A chubby family kept waddling toward the Australopithecus case.

  Paire felt emboldened, even imperious. “Excuse me. Excuse me.” The authority she projected surprised her. “It’ll just be a few minutes. We need to clear the room. Clear the room, everyone!”

  If they were clearing the room, that meant that elsewhere in the museum, specifically under the blue whale exhibit, Charlie had forced himself to vomit in the hallway and collapse on the floor. Diversion. Rosewood would have stayed long enough to ensure that guards had been drawn to help him. If need be, he had alerted guards in adjoining rooms so they’d come running. Hopefully, this would give them enough time.

  People shuffled out slowly, some glaring. They were confused, but couldn’t ignore the authority of the uniform. Maybe some out-of-towners who associated New York with terrorism suspected a bomb scare, and those were the ones who hustled out without question.

  Paire’s voice hardened to shoo out the stragglers, who did eventually turn and stroll out of the room. Savoring her command over the crowd, she understood the wild thrill of transgressing the law.

  “There we go,” she said. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Not everyone went quietly. A man with a crew cut in a Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt said, “We paid good money for these tickets.”

  “It’ll just be for a few minutes, sir. Thank you for your assistance.”

  Now that someone had spoken up, another woman in bright pink found her voice. “We came a long way for this.” This woman was closer to Paire’s age, and with her tone tried to convey that despite one of them being a guard and the other a ticketholder, they were connected by the bond of womanhood.

  “You’ll be back inside before you know it. The museum thanks you.” Imbued by her own audacity, Paire felt more confident with every patron she bossed around.

  She avoided eye contact with these people, so none of them would realize there was a human being somewhere behind the robotic monotone. To usher them out faster, she began a mock conversation on her radio. “Yes, sir, they’re headed out now. I know it’s urgent, sir. I’m doing my best.”

  Other than a stray protest, the room cleared with a soft trample of feet, sounding like the faint, low vibration of drum skin.

  By the time she looked behind her, Rosewood had already crept in past Lazaro and knelt by the Australopithecus display. He hadn’t dressed in uniform like them, but wore a costume that obscured his features: a trucker’s baseball hat advertising Prize Pig Ale, aviator sunglasses, and fake beard, almost Amish. All of them wore some kind of disguise, something to fool the cameras when they played back the footage. Paire hoped it would work.

  When she turned back toward the great exodus, someone was standing his ground on the other side of the threshold, looking past Paire as Rosewood worked. He was a local. From her short time in Manhattan, Paire had learned how to spot a local from an out-of-towner. The locals, like this one, were the ones that looked completely unimpressed. A trim, college-aged kid with thick black glasses and a groomed beard, he wore flannels that opened to a frayed T-shirt.

  “So he gets to stay and we don’t,” he said, acting like he was entitled to know whatever she knew.

  Rosewood had once said that after the World Trade Center attacks, New Yorkers felt they had an implied duty to investigate unusual activity themselves.

  “What’s he doing in there?” he asked.

  “Sir, we’ll open the room in a few minutes. Please.” Calling someone her age sir. She felt ridiculous, and he smirked at her. Paire gestured down the hall, in the direction the rest of the patrons had shambled.

  “Seriously, what’s going on?”

  “You know I can’t tell you,” she said.

  “Do you not know?”

  Shit, she thought. He was challenging her just for the sport of it.

  Paire allowed herself a quick glance behind her. In seconds, Rosewood had unfolded a piece of white plastic and laid it on the floor. Across the room, Lazaro gesticulated to his own strays who insisted on staying in the doorway. As if they really cared that the room was closed. As if the Human Origins exhibit were a real draw, she thought. She’d never been here, but even she knew that people came for the dinosaurs and the space stuff. No one cared about the caveman mannequins. She felt the only reason that this punk was hassling her was that she had taken away his privilege of roaming free among the halls. Rosewood might have been right—freedom was everything to some people.

  “How much are they paying you?”

  Fuck. She wished she had her spring baton. If she didn’t have on her costume, she wondered if he would be more or less likely to talk to her, or if it would just change the tone of their awkward engagement.

  He asked, “Seriously, you really don’t know why you just cleared out a room?”

  Paire stared at him without speaking, which she didn’t want to do, because she felt as if he looked into her eyes he might have a better chance of identifying her in a lineup. “Is there something in here that’s dangerous? Too dangerous for me but not for you?”

  Christ, she thought. She knew assholes like this in high school, who had to start shit just to see how far it could escalate. Now she was stuck with one of them. She had never been good at facing them head-on.

  All she had to do was mention a suspicious package—probably a prank, but the moment someone cried bomb scare in a crowded museum, the severity of the crime would dramatically increase.

  The kid asked
, “Maybe I should ask another guard?”

  She sighed, trying to threaten him without raising her voice, to make it seem like causing him harm would be a matter of tedious routine. “Not a bad idea. If we need to detain you, other guards would help.”

  “Did you just threaten me?”

  “In fact, I did.” Paire scowled at him, now looking into his eyes so he could understand the depths of her disinterest in him. “It’s my job to clear the room. If you get in the way of that job, I can and will detain you. We keep a room in the basement, and you can call a lawyer and sort it out. We don’t normally have to resort to that, so I can’t say how long you’ll be in there. But you could just leave now and save us the trouble.”

  “Bitch,” he said, and walked away.

  Behind her, Rosewood moved fluidly, rolling out the white sheet of plastic onto the front of the glass case with the caveman couple. Somewhere, this might have tripped a silent alarm. To the right of the Australopithecines, he unrolled a six-foot illustration of a biped, humanoid figure. A moment later, he affixed a small, rectangular placard that matched the others at the museum.

  Rosewood used a six-inch ruler to smooth out the bubbles, and was finished. Without stopping to admire the work, he crossed the room back toward Lazaro, and the two disappeared around a corner.

  For a fraction of a second, Paire admired what Rosewood had installed. Similar to the style of stenciling he’d used back at Wall Street station, this was a preprinted decal in black and white, printed on thin, white plastic. A mild adhesive held the plastic to the glass, but it would peel off easily, without leaving any residue. Only a handful would see it before the real museum guards pulled it down, but Rosewood had captured a camera phone shot of it himself. The image would later be posted and shared among a larger audience.

  Rosewood had illustrated a bearded man in rags. The man’s cheekbones protruded with the same inelegance as the hominids in the cases. His chin tucked down toward his clavicle, and his downcast eyes evoked the same sense of shame that all of these depictions of early man shared, as if they all knew they weren’t the final step in evolution. The difference was that Rosewood’s man was modern, possibly nomadic, definitely undomiciled. An overcoat hung off him and made Paire think about Russian peasantry. The placard text closely matched the font that the museum used for their signage, naming the subject with the same scientific detachment as the other exhibits: Homeless Erectus.