Face (38 page)

Lydia knelt before him. Her skirt pulled tight, the slit falling open along her thigh. She took her husband’s heel in one
hand and grasped the toe with the other. He thrust his foot toward her face, and with a quick jerk and a stifled gasp she
fell back clutching the boot. Then she returned to a squat and did the other foot. The job done, Lydia fetched Nigel his slippers
from a closet in the corner and placed them on his feet.

“You can bring the tea now,” said Nigel, and Lydia, lowering her eyes to avoid my mother’s appalled expression, scurried from
the room.

By the time she returned, Halliday was telling stories about Dad. My father, he said, had stood up well to the ribbing he
got as a Chinese boy in an English school.

“It was you, wasn’t it, who coined the nickname Doughboy for that poor Italian slug in fourth form?”

“Manetti,” said Dad.

“If you say so. I only remember Doughboy. Doughy for short. Ha!”

“Please,” said Lydia. “Would you like some tea?”

“Or a Scotch?” said Halliday. “Darling, get me a real drink.”

Lydia handed my mother her tea, then stepped to the bar at the back of the room.

“Joe?” said Halliday.

“Why, all right. Scotch and water, please. Light on the Scotch.”

“Ah, yes. Chinese temperance. Does the booze make you go all rosy, too? If Lydia drinks a drop, she turns red as a bloody
fire engine. Damned unsightly. But amusing.”

My father didn’t answer. Lydia gave the men their drinks, then seated herself next to her husband and passed me a plate of
cookies. Her face was like a mask. A flawless white mask.

Halliday continued. “It was remarkable, really, the way you fit in, old
boy. Turned the other cheek even when the boys called your mother—what was it?—oh, yes, a Chinaman’s whore.”

My mother, whose enchanted smile had stiffened considerably by this point, gave a cry that sounded as if she were being strangled
underwater.

Halliday tut-tutted her. “Oh, don’t be shocked or think me a boor, my dear. There were so few white women in those days who
would even consider marrying yellow.” He rolled his arm around behind Lydia, who appeared engrossed in her tea. “Communist
to boot, wasn’t that true? Did you ever discover what became of the old boy?”

“It wasn’t the others.
You
called her that.” Dad was sitting as straight as a bayonet. He set his untouched drink on the table beside him.

“Yes, well. She didn’t survive the war, as I recall. The Japanese, wasn’t it?”

“She died in the
Idzumo
bombing.”

“Ach. Nasty business, that.”

Halliday sipped his drink and played with the ornament in Lydia’s hair. Lydia didn’t move a muscle.

“And what of the lover?” asked Halliday, not looking at Dad.

There was a long pause. My mother stared at my father. My father glared at Halliday, who continued to fiddle with Lydia.

“Well, really, old boy,” said Halliday. “It was common knowledge.”

Suddenly my father was on his feet. “We’ve imposed on you for too long.”

Halliday lifted his face and grinned. “So good of you to come, old man. We must do this again sometime.”

As we passed through the foyer Lydia stopped me. She put a finger to her lips, smiled, and passed me a small wrapped candy.
In the car I undid the paper and found a piece of crystallized melon, pale and round as a pearl.

A pearl as pale and round as the moon outside my father’s window. The night sky was clear, the incoming breeze edged with
a promise of fall. Then winter and snow. That bastard!

I breathed hard and deep, the memory of my mother’s unwitting
complicity angering me as much as Halliday’s torment. It was her social climbing that had driven them to accept his invitation.
The same grasping ambition that made her hoard Dad’s pictures, tell lies, keep secrets. She could excuse anything in the name
of money or Art!

The stink of Dad’s smoldering ashes was making my stomach cramp. He bent over his folded paper, not seeing the night, not
hearing my thoughts.

That cigarette. The tall blond man. I shut my eyes and tried to see them again. Halliday with his helmet and crop, dashing,
impervious, sneering. The man smirking in Dad’s photograph.

“You saw him in China! You photographed him.”

My father opened his finished box with a snap. “Who?”

“Halliday. Nigel Halliday. That creep in Connecticut. He was in one of your photographs.”

“What photographs?”

It was the puzzle. The sense that I had the invisible pieces in my clutches. I was close to the solution and had blurted it
out without thinking. What photographs?

“I saw some of your work.”

“Where?” He put down his paper construction. His glasses obscured any expression of his eyes. His voice could mean anything.

“One of my college teachers.” I wasn’t lying. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t lying. “She had copies from old magazines.
Life.”

He pulled his lips in until his mouth was just a thin flat line.

“It was him, wasn’t it? A picture of him in China with some people pushing a body on a wheelbarrow, and him looking as if
he could give a shit. That was Halliday.”

“What does it matter?”

“What matters is that you knew. You knew how cruel he was. Why did we go to his house? Why let him treat you like he did?”

He saw then where my thoughts had been for the past half hour. He saw what I remembered.

“Sometimes there are things you spend your whole life wanting to make right, Maibelle. Lies you tell yourself about people
to make the
things they do more bearable. To make yourself feel less responsible. But eventually the people die.”

It sounded as though he would go on, but he shook his head.

“What about Halliday?”

“He died. Finally.” His face changed. “Where did you really see that photograph?”

Halliday abruptly fell into place, and I searched for some glimmer of the rights and wrongs on either side of a far more immediate
challenge. All I could see was my mother’s deceit. And my father’s innocence.

“She’s been collecting your work, Dad. For years. Foucault doesn’t know anything about
it.
No one does. She’s got drawers full.”

“You knew.” He removed his glasses and wiped the lenses on his sleeve.

My hands began to shake. If I closed my mouth, my teeth would chatter. It was like talking into a freezer, but I kept going.
“I just found out the other week. She has this stupid idea about showing our work together. I got furious. She was going behind
your back. She lied to us both—”

The band stopped playing outside, which meant most of the guests had left or were leaving. Mum would find us soon.

My father put the glasses aside and lit a cigarette, still not looking at me.

“I debated telling you, but she said you’d try to destroy it all if you knew. I couldn’t risk that. Dad, those pictures—”

“Don’t say it.”

“But—”

My brother pounded on the door. “Maibelle. I know you’re holed up in there. Can we go?”

My father stood up. “It’s not her fault, Maibelle. Or yours.”

I
am running in the new dream through a maze of doors and wrong-way escalators, jumping barriers through an airport, one closed
gate after another. My parents are coming, and I have to meet them. I have to bring my child home or she’ll die.

Through the thick glass I watch a jet touch down, huge grasshopper landing, skidding, faces like small white eyes in the windows.
I am in the wrong place, my hands and feet heavy. Up another down escalator, dragging the weighted trunk behind me. Closer,
but now a mob surrounds me. Lights popping, reporters, a gala arrival. Hedda Hopper surges through, laughing, cigarette wand
flying, rhinestone sunglasses. She laughs my mother’s laugh and I dive past, toward the opening jet-way.

Through the long green tunnel I spot them, straining forward. The hole fills with the scent: Chanel No. 9. They are bundled
in tweeds, my mother taller, ahead of my father and talking at him, around and through him. I lift my arms, one longer than
the other, gloves black against the metallic luster. Sunlight glares through the tall exposed windows
and the new arrivals part like sheaves of grass as I fire. Once. Twice. We all fall down in a blaze of white explosive light.

“Murder?” I hear the reporters cry. “Murder, or suicide?”

My head, banging against the wall, woke me as I thrashed out the light. The television was on low. Al Greene crooned softly
from the other room. I flipped off the TV, gathered up some bedding, and entered the living room, where my brother lay in
his underwear, facedown, one arm dangling over the side of the couch. A lamp burned like an interrogator’s spotlight above
his head. I switched that off, too, leaving the room to the darkness, my brother’s soft, rhythmic breathing, and the steady
heartbeat of Al’s sweet voice. I kissed the fingertips of a hand I once thought I’d never forgive, and waited for the night
to end.

A few days after my mother’s party I called my father to apologize. Henry was out, and I knew my mother would be at the gallery.
I thought we might talk more easily on the phone; that what I really needed to say might come to me.

“I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Maibelle, I’m busy right now.”

“I was so sure you ought to know, she was wrong to hide it from you, I never thought to ask if you’d want to know. I feel
so stupid, Dad.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“Have you told her? Have you two talked about it?”

“Look, there’s some interest in the box patent—”

“She doesn’t know I told you, then?”

“No. Maibelle, I’m late for a meeting. It’s not that I don’t care—I just can’t think about all that now.”

We hung up. I spent ten minutes turning my father’s words in every conceivable direction, then called again. No answer.

I had no further word from either him or Mum for another week, during which I decided my guilt was misplaced. My mother had
overdramatized
that cache of pictures just as she had my artistic potential, the tragedy of my flying career, and now my refusal to let her
plug me into the Network—perhaps even the mystique of my father’s lost celebrity was more a function of Mum’s theatrics than
any reality.

He’d said it wasn’t her fault. I couldn’t buy that. I was the one who’d been lied to and used. She’d probably wanted me to
tell Dad, because she didn’t have the nerve to. The act of telling was the real treachery; the content of the story just another
buried fact of my parents’ life. I’d hold the guilt of betraying both my mother’s confidence and my father’s complicit ignorance
while, between them, nothing would change.

Nothing except a quarter of a million dollars. That’s what Dad’s magic box is worth to a Swiss candy company with factories
in New Jersey. The reclosable carton, it seems, is just what they need for a chewy mint that hardens if exposed too long to
the air, and the resemblance to a cigarette hard-pack will help persuade consumers that the candy is meant for adults. They’re
buying three years of nonexclusive use. Dad wants to spend the first installment on Henry’s software program; Mum wants to
buy into a loft co-op in SoHo where Henry could live and I could work. Henry’s encouraging either plan. Except for congratulating
Dad briefly, I’ve stayed out of the whole discussion.

“It’s Dad’s money,” I told Henry the night Mum weighed in with their spending proposals. “Why you’d want it hanging over your
head is beyond me.”

“Right. You’d rather be on the payroll of the Mott Street trigger-man.”

I burned my tongue on my tea. This was the first Henry had mentioned Tai since the party. I hadn’t been back to Chinatown
since then, either. With Henry moving in I decided it was best to stay on Harriet’s good side as much as possible. That meant
paying the rent on time. Which in turn meant halting my shoots in Chinatown and accepting the extra catalog work Noble was
offering. Really I was avoiding Tai. Henry surely knew that.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Am I?” Henry pulled on a blue argyle sock and slipped his foot into a loafer. He was getting ready to go out. He seemed to
be going out more and staying out later since the day he’d found me lying awake on the floor next to him.