Face (39 page)

“He wasn’t paying me.”

“You said he was.”

“Only expenses.” I began putting away the lights around the set. Quality of company notwithstanding, it was a squeeze with
Henry living in the middle of my studio.

“So I was right. You are seeing him.”

“Not now, I’m not. What’s this got to do with you taking Dad’s money?”

“Why can’t you think of it as investment? You’re making an investment in Tommy, and as part of that investment you ignore
things about him that might turn other people off.”

“I wasn’t doing it for him.”

Henry shrugged on his jacket and surveyed himself in my bedroom mirror, turning up his cuffs, adjusting his collar. He talked
to my reflection. “Well, maybe this thing with Mum and Dad works the same way. Maybe they’re investing in me, maybe they’re
doing it for other reasons. Either way, we can ignore certain things about the arrangement that you apparently can’t. Frankly
I don’t see why you’re so determined to shove Mum out of your life when you let scum like Tommy walk right in.”

The cord in my hand moved like a snake. I imagined it coiling, swaying, rising to strike.

“You held a gun on someone once.”

“Not knowingly.”

“You knew you were holding a lethal weapon. You knew the damage it could do, and you liked that.”

“I never touched one again, Maibelle.”

“He never pulled the trigger.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you.”

“Intent makes all the difference in the world.”

I felt as if I’d just swallowed a chunk of dry ice. “I’m not defending him, Henry.”

“Aren’t you?” He slid his wallet into his pocket, kissed my cheek, and left.

When I opened my hand, I found that the cord had left deep white indentations across my palm.

Henry didn’t come back that night or the next, and then he only returned to pack. I gave him a key, told him he was welcome
to come and stay anytime. He said he appreciated how much I valued my privacy and independence, but he accepted the key and
thanked me. A few hours later when Harriet banged on the door and demanded to inspect my apartment because she was sure she’d
seen a man coming and going, there was no trace of him.

He left me out of respect, I tell myself as the spaces he briefly occupied fill up with wooden Easter eggs and personalized
angel tea cozies. I tell myself it was also respect that kept him from letting the argument about Tai go any further.

But in his absence I’ve slowly, steadily pushed the burden of blame onto his shoulders. Henry was wrong. Tai never meant to
use the gun. It probably wasn’t even loaded. Of course it wasn’t loaded. Remember Henry’s face as he dialed the phone after
shooting Johnny? People make mistakes, accidents happen. Tai’s crime was nothing compared to Henry’s, which is naturally why
Henry took such offense.

Maybe it would be different if Henry had stayed, if there were anyone else. But there isn’t. Not even Miss Madson. Her bird
never returned, but my nightmares have. Ever since I stopped working in Chinatown, and full blast since Henry left. Including
the old one. Falling into blind pain, the images from Dad’s photographs, the impenetrable cloud of white silk.

Last week I saw Jed Moffitt sitting alone in the window of Ray’s. He noticed me across the street and beckoned, and I almost
went to him. He saw me hesitate, and he smiled. I ran to keep from caving in.

Then two nights ago the police came for the first time in four months. I refused to open the door. Harriet was suspiciously
silent, delivered no threats or warnings. Last night I gagged myself at bedtime to make sure I wouldn’t wake up screaming.

Tai’s committed no crime against me.

And so on this cold metallic Monday in October, with the most recent of my catalog assignments shipped, a rent check in Harriet’s
mailbox, and a sense of anxiety out of proportion even to the oppressive weather, I ride the subway with Tai and David Ling
to a graveyard in Queens. We are meeting David’s sister and mother, visiting from Phoenix, to pay respects at his father’s
grave. Death is important to the people of Chinatown and so a necessary component of Tai’s book. He says he’s been avoiding
it, but the time has come at least to get some pictures.

Tai and I are back to visual tag. He has not challenged me about my month’s absence. He understands the demands of economic
duress, and his book will require months of writing before there is any pressing need for completion of photography. Having
seen that my pictures are going to work, he has no basis for complaint. And now that my bills are paid, I’ve returned, and
it should be as simple as that. The same thing could well have happened—I tell myself it would have—even if Henry had kept
his mouth shut and refused to answer my repeated questions. Even if he’d done me the favor of lying.

But I still can’t meet Tai’s eyes.

Instead, as the train dives into the long, blank tunnel below the East River, I concentrate on David’s description—background
preparation for our day’s mission—of his father’s funeral. The family had moved to America only the year before and his mother
blamed their new home for the death, hence insisted on a large, traditional Chinese funeral with plenty of ritual sacrifice
to endure Mr. Ling’s safe passage out of American spirit hell and back to China’s ancestral paradise. She borrowed heavily
from the Ling fong to pay for musicians and official mourners
dressed in sack cloth. White paper lanterns on bamboo poles, gongs and incense. Silver and gold joss money, paper clothes,
all burned at the grave site. Fruits and cake, roast pork to sustain David’s father through his journey. And an uncle, chief
mourner, unwashed since the death, who wailed and keened, bent double with the pageant of grief.

David’s description inflates to fill the half-empty subway car, carries us up and out of the tunnel, colors the dreary day
outside. It distracts and bothers me.

“I was only seven,” he remembers. “My job was to carry flowers to the casket. It was open. My father looked like a wax figure.
My mother, aunts, all kept staring, waiting for me to cry. But I couldn’t feel anything. He’d never talked to me except to
say be quiet, get better grades, work harder. You have to love someone to cry for them. My father never let me love him.”

David’s voice folds back on itself, pitiless. He turns his still-dry eyes to the window. Tai studies the backs of his hands.

We are passing Shea Stadium, Flushing Meadows. The Unisphere looms, a globe full of holes above browning lawns. Remnant of
the World’s Fair. I struggle to remember. I know that, but I don’t remember the details. The only image that comes back to
me is the
Pietà,
a dead man, stone, sunken into a woman’s lap, both of them drenched in a nightclub-blue light, my mother’s voice arching
beyond a whisper, condemning Vatican taste. That blue light. “Peace through Understanding” was the theme of the fair, the
concept behind the Unisphere. I remember standing beneath it and looking up, the great, crushing ball a web of black metal
against a blinding hot sky.

“I was nearly frozen by the time they put him in the ground,” David says. “The kind of wind that feels like a whip. I started
crying only because I was so cold. I got furious when my aunt put her arms around me, told me what a good boy I was to weep
for my father. I curled up into a ball. They had to pick me up like that, carry me. I didn’t straighten out until I was in
the backseat of the car and we’d started driving home.”

A chill runs up my back as I imagine my own father lying in an open
casket, a stone man like old Mr. Ling. I begin to sweat and wonder, distractedly, if I’m getting a fever. I have the sense
of pulling away, being torn. The park behind us, we enter another tunnel and the lights go out, the noise is deafening and
a crushing pressure builds behind my left eye. My hand twitches with the impulse to reach up and yank the emergency cord above
my head.

Suddenly the overpass is behind us, the lights are back on. Tai and David are talking above the train’s noise. We occupy a
booth, two seats facing each other. Tai must feel my eyes, because he looks over, half smiling. Then he stops, pulls a handkerchief
from his pocket. White with a monogram. I stare at it coming toward me.

But Tai has no patience. He reaches over and presses the cloth around my thumb. I look down for the first time and see the
blood seeping through. I have ripped the entire nail away. And felt nothing.

Neither of them says anything about it. I push the damage, clenched tight, into my coat pocket. By the time we reach Flushing
the bleeding has stopped and with it the headache. A short bus ride and we reach the cemetery, where Mrs. Ling and David’s
sister Jenny are waiting for us. They are two of a kind, compactly rounded and stuffed into woolen bundles topped with complementary
tam-o’-shanters, pink for Jenny and vivid green for her mother. They smile, mostly with their eyes. David said she was pleased
to have us come along to photograph the family ceremony, but as Mrs. Ling bustles us through the gate I think she would rather
I were not here.

The sun glows cold, pale as a mushroom against the pewter sky, and the rows of headstones seem to stretch for miles in every
direction. I see them briefly as short white hairs standing up from an old giant’s scalp. I resist the urge to photograph
them that way, disguising the bones below, and hurry to catch up with the others.

Mrs. Ling has brought a shopping bag full of gifts, plus a picnic hamper. Her husband’s grave is in a distant corner, with
a view through the fence of intersecting roads and, across, a pink and yellow mini-mart. We are the only people in the cemetery,
but traffic is busy outside, and the deli at the mini-mart appears to be doing brisk lunchtime
business. The iron bars that separate these two worlds make me feel as if I’m in prison.

“This is a lucky plot.” Tai calls me back. “Close to the road. Easy to get out if Lao Ling ever wants to.”

“Then I’m sure he’s long gone. They’re wasting their time.”

“This isn’t for him. It’s for them.” He taps the Leica beneath my mutilated thumb. “And us.”

Under their mother’s strict supervision, David has swept the grave with a long whisk broom and spread a red cloth in front
of the headstone. His sister is laying cups and plates and chopsticks, three of each. To either side of the cloth they slide
incense sticks into the earth and use rocks to anchor piles of joss money made of tissue glued with silver and gold foil.
Jenny fills the plates with chicken and bao, the cups with wine and tea from a thermos. Steam twists off the surface of the
tea. The food is still warm, too, but no one here will eat it. It will stay even after the dishes are retrieved, a gift for
the dead to be consumed by insects, stray cats or dogs.

This is all supposed to assuage the grief of survivors, I suppose. To build a bridge between the living and the dead, to con
those left behind into believing that mortality runs in two directions. It doesn’t. The man who lies beneath my feet will
never touch this food.

I don’t know how David’s father died, don’t want to know. I am working hard to restrain these thoughts and keep my attention
on the surface. The spell on the subway was enough for one day.

Across the graveyard a man Tai’s size and build, but older, stooped and ragged, picks his way between the stones. He curls
his head toward the ground and hugs his arms tightly into his chest. There is an unearthly quality about him, so that I half
expect him to vanish when I blink, but he remains, progressing by inches, neither toward us nor away. He will not raise his
face.

I jump when the real Tai touches my wrist. My camera is pointed the wrong way, my body turned back toward the intersection.
The traffic light blinks yellow.

“Party time.” He leaves his hand just long enough to steady me, then
takes his position behind Mrs. Ling. The man across the graveyard is gone.

I scramble up onto a nearby tombstone and position the lens at an angle that won’t read the language of eyes but only the
gestures of bodies: Jenny and her mother standing side by side in front of the grave; David lighting first the joss sticks,
then the stacks of money, and slowly returning to his mother’s empty side. The air fills with the lurid sandalwood incense
and a brief, minimal warmth from the flames. Everyone bows three times to the dead man’s spirit as the burning bits of silver
and gold tumble across the dirt, then flicker and rise on a wave of air, pulled by invisible strings.

Just as the ashes are disappearing through the iron bars to the crossroads, skeletal hands clamp my arms. The ghost turns
me.

Tai’s mouth. Tai’s jaw. Black hair bleached to the pallor of stone and white eyes from the dead.

I hold onto my camera and curl my tongue to keep from crying out that Lao Ling has not escaped. He is trapped. My film has
caught his entrapment. I have dishonored him and now must be punished by demons.

I hold onto my camera and shout without sound. What face can a ghost man have?

He turns me with fingers biting into my bones. A calm like ice pours through me as the wraith’s mouth opens. His face is crevassed
with lines. It is not Tai’s face.