Face (14 page)

How, for example, can you photograph a dream?

If I could capture my nightmares, stop them, get them
down,
I might destroy them. Yet in all Dad’s pictures he never succeeded in stopping his schoolmates’ blows, never killed the hatred
in their voices.

My father accused me of feeling sorry for myself, and in the next breath shamed me because I lacked the same anguish that
he’d known in China. I never before realized the strain in our family arose from a contest of sorrows.

T
ommy called today. He promised not to mention his project if I’d see him again.

I asked why.

“For old times’ sake.”

“In old times you had no interest in me.”

“New times, then. I feel bad about the other day.”

I felt bad, too. I had stopped imagining him all over town, but I thought about Tommy—or Tai. What my brother had said. The
Emperor State Building. His Buddha’s bulge and those even, moon-shaped fingernails. It was not his fault that I was afraid
of heights, or that I wasn’t yet ready for Chinatown. He didn’t need to know about my nightmares.

“I still think you should look for another photographer.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“No tall buildings.”

“A walk, then. Solid ground.”

It was warm out, clear and not too muggy. I had no pressing assignments, no excuses. Moreover, I wasn’t looking for any.

“A walk would be good.”

* * *

We decided to pick up where we’d left off: the corner of Thirty-fourth and Fifth. I arrived ten minutes late, and there was
no sign of him. I waited five and then another five minutes and was just turning to escape the whole enterprise when I spotted
him weaving hurriedly through the crowd.

Square, professorial sunglasses and a yellow short-sleeve button-down shirt. His body struck me, in a word, as spare. Not
skinny or slender. Many Chinese men are so thin they look positively concave. Tommy is simply straight, up and down. No extraneous
curves or bulges. No hiding places. No wonder he wears down his shoes flat across the back.

I imagined what we would look like together, the clean, straight Chinese man in his squared-off clothes and the redhead with
flyaway hair. The picture made me wince.

As he reached me he started to apologize.

“I know.” I turned uptown. “Fire in the tunnel.”

“No, I was doing an interview that took longer than expected. I tried to call, but you’d already left.”

My immediate thought was that this was a setup. Courtesy dictated a follow-up question: Oh? And what was your interview about?
Right back to the forbidden subject.

I walked faster, said nothing. He kept up and didn’t try to stop me, but I could feel his eyes pinching the back of my head,
through that darkened glass. When we stopped for a light, I shifted from foot to foot, automatically idling as I do when jogging,
grateful for the press of bodies and other people’s conversation. He squeezed in beside me.

“How have you been?”

“Fine.” I pulled forward before the green without looking. I wasn’t really annoyed. I could let myself feel manipulated if
I wanted to, but my real problem was I didn’t have the faintest idea what to say. If
it
wasn’t about work or, by extension, Chinatown, then what did we have to discuss?

His hand on my shoulder pulled without yanking. The crowd
thinned and I slowed. We walked side by side. He asked the questions he hadn’t asked before. How long I’d lived in California.
What I was doing there. When I’d come back. I kept my eyes on the teased hair of a woman in front of us and answered in monosyllables.

He didn’t say anything for about half a block. And then the inevitable. “How could you fly if you were afraid of heights?”

His voice rose at an odd pitch. His brow was furrowed, mouth slightly pursed. The earnest concern made me smile.

“Now you don’t need to ask why I quit.”

His puzzled expression remained, but he stopped the questions for a few more blocks. I pretended to look at the window dressings.

Tommy stopped between the stone lions of the New York Public Library. “Come. I want to show you something.”

Inside the huge, hushed reading room he called up a small pictureless volume entitled
Friends of Freedom,
published by an obscure academic press. The cover blurb described it as a history of a community of Quakers that flourished
in Greenwich Village in the 1800s as a station on the underground railway. The author was T. T. Wah.

Speaking in a practiced library whisper, he said it had evolved out of class assignments for one of his graduate professors
whose brother needed some gratis manuscripts to launch his new publishing company.

I flipped through the pages, more to avoid looking at Tommy than to assess his book. What a peculiar thing for him to write
about. Chinatown’s Malcolm X cum Studs Terkel. Like me taking pictures of Iowan snow. I stopped turning the pages and pretended
to read. My eye caught on a line.

“Silence was their prison. Stories their refuge. Action their salvation.

I read the passage again. He was writing about the Quakers, but that didn’t matter. I read it again and tried to sink it in.
Refuge and salvation.

Tommy talked. “The professor’s brother was using the nonprofit press as a tax shelter. It folded within a year. I guess I
should be grateful
just to be published, only this is probably the first time anyone’s checked it out. You know?” But the way his fingers hovered,
grasping the spine and giving the pages an almost imperceptible shake before returning the book to the desk, belied what he
was saying.

“There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your work,” I said. “Now I want to show you something.”

I scribbled some dates on a slip of paper and handed it to the librarian.

I had before me copies of
Life
magazine from 1947 and 1948. The years, my mother said, when my father enjoyed his greatest success. That’s actually how
she put it: enjoyment. Though she was the only one, far as I could tell, who’d taken the slightest pleasure in it. Compared
to Dad’s attitude about his lost career, Tommy was positively gloating over his accomplishment.

“There should be cover shots by him,” I said. But the pages refused to open all the way because of the heavy binders, and
it was difficult to tell the heavier cover paper from the glossy pages.

Tommy stopped my hands and closed the book to take it away. I glanced up, prepared for anger, but he was examining the compressed
page edges as if conducting an experiment. He held them for me to see, and pointed to bands of white separated by almost indistinguishable
stripes of cover color.

“Look how wide the white is here. And here. And here. A lot of the covers are missing. Out of a bound volume, can you imagine?
Some people disgust me.”

A thickness settled in the back of my throat. Without looking at Tommy’s face I withdrew the volume from his hands, measured
the space between the stripes, and opened to the place where a cover ought to be. Only by bending the spine nearly double
could you see it, but deep in the valley between the pages a surgical slice had been made, so long ago that the edge had yellowed.
I flipped to the contents page. “Cover photo of Manchurian refugees by Joe Chung.” Three pages of photographs and text had
also been excised from that magazine. Scores more from the rest of that and the other volume.

“Quite a methodical operation,” Tommy said. His tone was cautious, and I detected a slight retreat from his earlier condemnation.
“Why would anyone do this?”

“Anyone didn’t.”

Tommy tried to make eye contact as we left the library. I could feel the white heat of his stare boring into the side of my
face. I wanted to tell him to watch where he was going. I wanted him to forget what I’d started. For the first time I felt
ashamed of my father, saw his denial of the past in the context of a crime. And I—not my mother, not my professors or his
former editors and audience—I was his primary victim.

I wasn’t conscious of my speed, except to notice Tommy trotting to keep up. The lunchtime mob at Forty-second Street parted
like water. I didn’t slow down until I reached Grand Central, down past the benches of waiting room bag people, past the white
travelers’ clock, down to the center of the stars. There I stopped.

“You can see the whole universe from here.” I pointed to the astrological map on the ceiling.

“You think I’ve never been in here before?”

Not only did I think it. I knew, though I was not sure how or why. Maybe because the whole time I lived in Chinatown I never
came here, either. Except once. I must have been six years old.

If Tommy believed in stories, I thought, then I should tell him that story. Maybe it would make up for the magazines. Maybe,
in some small way, help explain them.

So we sat at the bottom of the Vanderbilt Avenue staircase and I told him about the winter’s day when my father, left in charge
of Henry and me, decided for the first and last time ever to take us to the beach.

“Of course, I’d never seen a room as large as Grand Central. In those days there were no homeless to speak of. You could appreciate
the distance between the floor and the stars. I remember thinking the brass on the information kiosk was gold. But Dad pulled
us along so fast I seemed to be seeing in snapshots.”

We’d run to catch the train—an antiquated car with ceiling fans and
hard rattan seats and dull navy-green paint. I thought we would make the whole trip underground, like in a subway, but eventually
we came out of the tunnel, crossed water. We kept on. Snow fell and stopped, and still we traveled, passing one commuter station
after another and a world of shingled houses and trees, brown factories spurting smoke against an indifferent gray sky. From
time to time I saw slices of ocean, but Dad wouldn’t say where we were going or how far away from home. The fans weren’t working,
but the floor heaters were. Dry, dusty heat. Henry had brought along a maze book. His head nodded with the motion of the train.
I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until a blast of cold hit my face.

My father hadn’t spoken a word the whole way, and he wasn’t about to start now. We walked the length of a seaside village
from the train to the beach and stood watching waves crash into huge rocks until my feet began to freeze. It was only Long
Island Sound, and through the gray I could see shadowland across the water, but from the way Dad gazed out beneath his cupped
hands, you’d think the whitecaps marked a trail all the way to China. Henry and I had to shout over the wind to get him moving,
and even then he wasn’t really reacting to us.

He picked up a stone long and thin as a shell. He worked his way down between the boulders to a place where the waves touched
his toes, then lifted his arm way up over his head, and with a single flick of his fingers sent the rock gliding out over
the swollen sea, so far I lost sight of it before it fell.

That was it. Just one stone. His eyes were watering. He turned, took my brother’s hand and mine, and guided us back to the
village, where we stopped for hot chocolate. He bought Henry a Casper the Ghost comic book and we read it together the whole
way back while my father stared out the train window.

When we got home, the police were there. My mother acted as if she wanted them to arrest my father, but they wouldn’t. Anna
grabbed me as I walked through the door, and hugged me as if she loved me.

“It was months before Mum trusted us to my father’s care again. Didn’t Henry ever tell you this story?”

“No.” Tommy eyed Orion. “Were you afraid?”

“Not until later that night, when I heard my mother crying. She wept like she was in pain, as if something had been cut out
of her. Something she’d never get back.”

He nodded. “She go on feeling that way?”

“Yes.” I turned so he couldn’t see my face. “But she fights it.”

Lunchtime had passed, the throngs outside gradually eased. We went into a sandwich shop on Lexington that advertised itself
as “The Home of the $2 Munch.” In some places two dollars for a thimbleful of soup and a slice each of American cheese and
Wonder bread would be considered extortion, but in Manhattan it was tantamount to a gift. Grateful that Tommy made no gesture
to buy, I paid for this gift and selected a table in the corner. I sat with my back to the wall.

“Mind changing?”

I shrugged, traded places. He methodically removed everything from his tray before claiming the seat he’d requested. His meal
now took up half as much space as my tray. I debated whether to follow his lead, but was worried he’d notice I was following
his lead.

He looked at me, and though he seemed amused, his eyes made me think of lasers. He could turn them up so they bore down hard,
or soften them until they seemed almost diffuse, but always the beam remained strong and steady. I sensed that he’d burn right
through to the back of my skull
if
I let him hold my gaze. So we ended up playing visual tag. Looking and being seen. He was ahead, but he hadn’t won yet.