Face (4 page)

Then three days ago he warned me he was going to be unavailable. The girlfriend was coming. After a few days they would leave
to spend the summer in Maine with his parents.

I stared at Jed’s hair, memorizing the precise color. Sand on a blazing hot day. White sand.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

“Why?”

“In the fall. She’ll go back to school.”

The fabric was pilling on Marge Gramercy’s sofa. I tore at the soft nappy tufts and rolled them between my fingertips until
they hardened into a ball.

Jed ran his fingers over his left eyebrow, wiping invisible perspiration. “I told you going in, Maibelle, this was the deal.”

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

After he was gone I realized he’d left a bottle of beer in my refrigerator. I wanted to pour it down the drain, but I didn’t.
It’s still there.

And yesterday I spotted the two of them strolling up Charles Street, laughing and bumping into each other. Hand in hand. I
watched them until they turned the corner, and they never let go. Like paper dolls cut out of a chain, they stayed connected.

About two this morning I woke, thrashing and sweating, to the crack of billy clubs at my door. I pulled free of my knotted
sheets, slowed my breathing to a pinched roar, and stumbled to the peephole. Outside, two overstuffed patrolmen hovered with
my neighbors arrayed behind them like a geek-show audience. When I opened the door, the police backed away, but Harriet just
kept coming. She wore a pink hair net and her lips curled down tight over her teeth. Her eyes squeezed against the light flooding
through my doorway.

“I’ve had it! You either get a grip on yourself or get out. Next time you scream like that, I’m calling Bellevue. Hear me?”

Bellevue. That was a new addition. Usually it was just the threat of the street. One more chance, she’d give me. Maybe two.
But now it was Bellevue: straitjacket time.

The policemen were staring past Harriet into my apartment. Sandra looked as if she was trying to decide whether I had recently
ingested monstrous quantities of prescription pharmaceuticals. Larraine was sizing up the taller policeman’s backside.

I apologized, assured the police that I was alone, in no danger, it wouldn’t happen again. I closed the door and threw a towel
across the crack underneath to make them think I’d turned out the lights. Though I sometimes dream the lamps have caught fire
and my sleeping eyes open to flames just inches away, it’s a risk worth taking against the alternative: darkness.

But this time I knew I couldn’t return to sleep, no matter what tricks I used. I spent the remaining hours before dawn peering
at the six-inch Sony at the foot of my mattress, trying to substitute whirling images of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire for
my usual dream. The dream, of course, won. Kept playing over and over like a negative superimposed on those elegant, gleaming
dance numbers. A subway chase, photographers exploding flashbulbs.

An unlit tunnel leads to stairs. I climb. And climb. When I emerge atop the statue’s crown, I am up against the sky. Below,
the Hudson River runs red. Bodies lie thick in the streets. I mount the howl of sirens, hard as a gale wind, and spiral over
the ruined city above vacant penthouse gardens and skyscrapers shorn in half. Fifth Avenue writhes with human heads and limbs,
expensive jewelry. Discarded party hats and bleeding babies. A handsome blond man frowns at the sky.

When I was little, the nightmare would abruptly change at this point and, just as the horror began to sink in, a second surge
of siren sound would carry me safely home. I’d land on a red and green balcony surrounded by musical bells.

In the version of recent years there is no rescue. I spin my arms like one of those weather-vane ducks to stay aloft and only
think I know where I’m going. “Home!” I scream. “Let me go!” But it’s as if a cloud
of white silk has eaten lower Manhattan. I cannot see beyond Canal Street, nor can I turn back. I enter the cloud and drop
without warning, spin like an insect caught in a whirlpool. Down I fall, down, bracing to hit concrete, but though I feel
a pain like razors being sharpened against my skin, though I open my eyes wide enough to take in all Mott Street, I see nothing.
The white becomes snow as thick as ink. I plunge faster, faster. Invisible hands claw my eyes and mouth. Smoke chokes my throat
but I cannot cough. Strangled voices jeer and whisper. Another minute, they tell me, another second and I will never breathe
again.

The lamps have come on over the playground, and the crowd of skaters is growing. The center is given to experts who glide
backward and two-step as if they were born on wheels. The shadows are filled with less ambitious couples who flirt and fight,
killing time.

Nights like this in Chinatown I used to sit out on our balcony and listen to the washing of mah-jongg tiles from the terrace
upstairs mix with the laughter of boys playing craps on the sidewalk directly below. I’d watch the slow procession of traffic,
a pageant of shadow and mirrored light. That balcony was like a box seat at the theater with all of Mott Street the stage.

My father, who would drive an hour to save a dime on a carton of Kents, used to say our third-floor walk-up on Mott Street
was the biggest bargain in Manhattan. Where else in 1960, he said, could we find a four-bedroom for under two hundred a month?
Given our address and my father’s Chinese birthright, you might think that apartment would have been splashed with Oriental
touches, at the very least some bean curd, lotus root, or winter melon tucked into the refrigerator—but it was as though a
fine dotted line traced the perimeter of my childhood home. To cross it was like stepping from Hong Kong into Geneva.

Outside, whether in the hallway or the street beyond the terrace, the air danced with fragrances of sandalwood, water chestnuts,
dried
shrimp, and garlic. Doors were hung with good-luck banners and appeals for protection from the gods. The reigning colors were
scarlet and gold.

My mother chose to arrange our home in black and white, with an occasional accent of lemon yellow or hot pink to “punch it
up.” The apartment coordinated well with her wardrobe, which in the sixties was stylishly eye-popping. The kitchen was done
in stainless steel, and though the native language was English, the cuisine was aggressively French. A monstrous air conditioner,
which my father purchased at a factory sale in New Rochelle, was installed in the kitchen window and ran year-round to keep
the smell of the neighbors’ cooking from contaminating Mum’s. Out on the balcony, where the locals might grow peonies or chrysanthemums,
she established a garden of pots containing Alpine wildflowers.

She lived there for nearly twenty years but I never once heard my mother call Chinatown home, and after we moved away she
would unfailingly correct the rest of us: “It’s not our home anymore. We’re up towners now.”

Perhaps that’s why I so automatically rejected Tommy Wah’s invitation to return. That and the fact that for years, because
of my recurring nightmares, I’ve tried to block out all thought of the old neighborhood. But ever since Tommy’s letter the
memories have been creeping back, and I no longer know whether to battle or embrace them.

Now, in a corner of the schoolyard I can only dimly see, a girl has fallen, is crying. A boy stands over her shaking his fist.
She twists away.

I suddenly realize I’m sweating, holding my breath. Blood flows where I’ve bitten my lip. The music throbs and jumps to top
volume, and the boy yanks the girl to her feet. Their shadowed figures collide, then merge.

I make myself breathe in. And out. They are kissing. I have film to develop. I need to go in and work. But even in the darkroom
with the door shut, the music penetrates. Pumping. Pounding. “Emotional Rescue.”

* * *

My plan failed on both counts. I did not learn to fly freely or fearlessly. I clung instead to one anonymous man after another.
And my nightmares clung to me.

I could say it was Tommy’s letter that prompted my return. Or the incident in Pensacola. Or Marge. But the truth is, my nightmares
have been driving me back for years, as relentlessly as they once pushed me away. I came to New York more determined than
ever to find the source of these nightly terrors, face it down and conquer it.

But determination can be a very fickle bedfellow, and it, too, threatens to fail me now. Mystical signs and coincidences aside,
unless I make some progress against my dream life soon, I will lose this apartment and even the minimal safety net I’ve managed
to establish here.

No more men. And no more running away.

M
y mother began teaching me practically from birth to watch the world through an imaginary viewfinder. Using the magic of the
camera, she said, I could stop time cold, yet keep it alive. Through the alchemy of the darkroom, I could float the ghosts
of moments I’d lived through back into shadow and light, and when I finally mastered the magic, I would feel in every photograph
as though I were watching myself watch the world—and seeing the world look back. Then I would know I’d made Art.

She had such high hopes when I set off on my cross-country jaunt after college. Her plan was for me to venture, experiment,
and gradually narrow my sights to a particular, salable vision. When I told her I’d settled for the view from thirty thousand
feet, she made a noise at her end of the phone as if I’d spat on her.

“You can’t be serious. Not you, too. You’re giving up before you’ve begun, and to do
what}
To be a flying waitress!”

“You’ve always wanted to go to Europe. I can get you free airline passes.”

“Not on your life. You actually think you can bribe me to approve of your squandering your talent?”

“I’ll have plenty of time off. I can work then.”

“Ah, yes, but will you?”

The operator interrupted. I was calling from a pay phone at Staples International. And I was out of change.

“You’re quitting, Maibelle.”

She didn’t need to say the rest: I was quitting just like my father.

That was the last we spoke until this week.

“Darling!” she shouted when I called. “Where on earth are you? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mum. I’m in New York.”

“My God, Maibelle.” She seemed to be catching her breath. “I thought something dreadful— Well, you know how I am about planes.
I can’t bear to think of you thirty thousand miles above ground all the time. Do. You. Realize. It’s been three
years.”

“Feet, Mum, not miles. I realize. If you’re going to be around over the weekend, I’ll come uptown. We can talk then.”

“I don’t know if I can stand it.”

“What?”

“Both daughters here at once.”

“Anna’s coming home?”

“Just for a few hours. Maibelle, how long are you going to be here? Why aren’t you staying with us?”

“I’ve moved back, Mum. I have an apartment.”

I pictured her gray eyes closing, the two upright worry lines plowing deeper. The impatient, manicured hand brushing a frosted
wisp from her cheek.

“Excuse me?”

“Please. Let’s not do this over the phone.”

“There’s a man. Is there a man? You haven’t gone and gotten married, Maibelle!”

The receiver throbbed as if it were a direct line from her speeding heart to mine.

“There is no man, Mother. I can assure you. But I’d really prefer to discuss this in person. Is she coming Saturday or Sunday?”

My mother’s voice, when she finally answered, made me think of a plate-glass window through which I was about to be thrown.
“Saturday. For lunch she’s coming. Around noon. If the stars are in alignment, Henry will join us, too.”

Her mouth twitched when the elevator doors opened. She was standing in the hallway with two unopened bottles of champagne,
and I could recount every minute of her morning just by looking at her. An hour bathing and putting on that black velveteen
pantsuit and ruffled white blouse, another half hour doing her makeup and hair, then a spell in her apron making some watercress
or quail salad she’d seen in
Gourmet
and shopped for at Zabar’s.