The Wangs vs. the World (38 page)

She eyed them, skeptical. “Well, you must be so tired. Here, let’s leave the bags, Leo and I will get them later.”

As she shuffled them into the living room, Grace went back outside and returned with a flat cardboard envelope. “This was on the porch. Is it important?” Saina took it and, her attention on the meeting to come, peeled off the scored strip that zipped the whole thing shut. As soon as she lifted the flap, she realized what it was.

Coming in from the kitchen, Leo set down a tray with wineglasses and a bottle of bubbly rosé, then crossed the room with his hand extended, as if he’d met her father a thousand times before.

Still, she cringed. There was something about introducing a new boyfriend to her family that always felt rude, like she was putting her sex life on display. Greetings safely executed, Leo passed out glasses and poured them each a gorgeous, generous pink swig of wine, delighting Grace by not even hesitating over her glass.

“To you guys making it here,” Saina said, and waited until everyone had clinked glasses with everyone else—twenty clinks, she calculated nervously—and taken a sip before she let herself pull out the magazine.

It wasn’t a cover. It was never going to be a cover story; Billy must have written it on the train back to New York for him to turn it around so quickly. In the end, it was one in a portfolio of failures—Eliot Spitzer was the cover, and she was one of four other profiles, two thousand words running alongside the more flamboyant failure—something else that Billy probably knew before he smoked her out. She felt a faint, arrogant bit of disappointment at that before flipping to the paper-clipped page. A folded piece of notepaper was attached.

Grace crowded in, reading the headline over her shoulder. “Oh my god, what? Is this about you? ‘The Search for Saina Wang.’ Whoa, that is so cool!”

“Who need to search? I find you. You are right here!” Her father grabbed her arm and then patted her on the head.

“Are you going to read it?” asked Barbra.

For a moment, she considered putting the magazine back in the envelope and tossing it in the recycling bin.

Impossible. Who were those people who insisted that they never read any reviews? It seemed preposterous. “Here, Grace. You read it to us.”

“Wait, aren’t you excited about this?”

“I guess we’ll see.”

Grace nodded back, not looking at her. “Okay, if you’re sure.” She started to read.

THE SEARCH FOR SAINA WANG

Schadenfreude? Gesundheit! Billy Al-Alani on the psychology behind a New York ‘It’ girl’s fall from grace.

It is sometime around April when I first realize that Saina Wang is gone. I try her cell and get sent straight to voicemail.

“It’s Saina. Leave a message.”

She sounds warm, but distant. Trademark Saina. I leave a message, but she never calls back.

I go to Dan Colen and Dash Snow’s Deitch Projects show, sure that she’ll be there with Minni Mung or Peonia Vazquez-D’Amico, part of the tight group of artists and fashion folk that she has surrounded herself with since arriving in New York City to earn a BFA at Columbia. There are plenty of girls with dark hair and long legs crowding the gallery, circulating under the wine-and-pee spitballs, but Saina is not among them.

Saina stared at a bruise on her knee, listening as Billy described in detail his strange, obsessive quest. He made her into some sort of Great Hipster Mystery, hitting up any party or opening where she might be, asking her friends to reveal her whereabouts, staking out her studio, finding out, somehow, that she’d taken a $400,000 hit when she sold her loft, stalking her gallerist until, of course, Billy found Grayson and got him drunk.

Her sister looked up from the magazine. “Do you really want me to keep reading this? It’s terrible! Do you think this is how Jennifer Aniston feels?”

They all laughed painfully. Even Barbra. Leo squeezed her hand.

“Yeah,” said Saina. “Keep going.” The next part was less of a surprise. A dramatized overview of the controversy surrounding her last show, complete with a snarky rereading of the catalog copy, where he called her show “a posthumous beauty contest for victims of war.” He wasn’t entirely wrong, but she still didn’t understand why she’d had to bear the collective anger when it was the photojournalists and the editors who had created those images in the first place.

Grace read on.

We love artists because of the lives they lead. They give us raw id, captured in a frame. In many ways, the art world is best at celebrating the controlled, masterful hand or the wild, impetuous heart. Saina’s work, though, is the cynical, observant head, calculating and precise.

“Wait,” said Saina, “do you all think that?” They all looked at one another, her family, and she suddenly realized that they probably wanted to rest after their long drive. They had to be tired and hungry and in no mood to hear a takedown of her, of the first failure that led to every other failure. “Never mind, you don’t have to answer that. Gracie, let’s just finish it. There’s not a lot more left, is there?”

Grace looked up at her, worried. “Well . . . it’s that old Page Six item. I’m just going to skip it, okay?”

Saina nodded, but it didn’t really matter. She could still recite it word for word, down to the pun that stabbed her in the heart each time she thought about it.
Just asking . . . Which socialite artist might find that the uproar over her latest show is nothing compared to the uproar that her fiancé is causing between the sheets with a rival heiress whose name must “ring” a bell?

“Okay, I’ll read this part instead,” said Grace.

Perhaps now is the time to say that every successful artist is the product of mythmaking, and that I, more than anyone else, may have been guilty of constructing the myth of Saina Wang.

Leo wrapped an arm around her. “Who
is
this guy?”

I made my own myth,
thought Saina.
I did.
She could see her sister’s eyes scanning ahead. Grace looked up at her, worried, and put down the magazine. “Well, um, that’s about it,” she said.

Leo wrapped his fingers around her wrist lightly. “Is it me, or did that article just say a whole lot of nothing?”

“
Dwei le! Luo shuo!
Why that reporter not mind his own business?”

“Yeah, Mr. Wang!”

Barbra laughed, and it was a genuine laugh. Sitting here around Saina’s Bertoia table, surrounded by the glistening white walls of her dining room, they felt like a family, Leo included. She’d been selfish, hadn’t she? Returning one out of every five of Grace’s phone calls, leaving her father, never allowing Barbra to be anything approaching a mother. She owed them these things. In the end, all we had were the people to whom we were beholden.

Later, as Barbra napped upstairs and Leo and Grace brought in the rest of their luggage, Saina found her father looking at the titles on her bookshelf.

“Ni yao bu yao xian shuei yi ge jiao?”
she asked.

“Bu lei.”

But he did look tired. He hadn’t even said anything about Leo being black. She was relieved, but it also worried her—he seemed less present in the world somehow.

It had been more than six months since she’d seen him, and so much had changed. When he’d left New York, she’d been engaged, and her gallerist was playing potential collectors off one another, trying to land her pieces in the right hands so that her future work would rise in value. And now who was she? The subject of one public drubbing after another, and at the hands of someone like Billy Al-Alani, who wasn’t even a real critic, who was just a gossip.

“Baba . . .” But she couldn’t formulate the sentence in Chinese. Her knowledge of the language only extended to daily necessities and small affections. She realized suddenly that this was the first time she’d been alone with her father in more than a year. He picked up a small horned skull resting on her bookshelf.

“Your pet?”

“It’s just for decoration.”

“Why?”

“I liked it.”

He shrugged and put it back on its side, the horns listing over the edge of the shelf. “Have you talk to Didi?”

“Not since
ni men
left New Orleans.
Ta jen de yao
live there
ma?
Grace
gen wo shuo.
”

“Ta fa fong le.”

“Maybe he’s really in love with her.”

“Daddy just want everyone to be all together.”

“Oh yeah, I know.” Instead of meeting her gaze, he stared at the titles on the shelf then took a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe a nonexistent layer of dust from their spines.

“Baba . . . I’m sorry.”

He looked startled.
“Wei she me?”

“Because of the article. And the other article. You . . . you must be embarrassed. I didn’t know that was going to happen. And then Grayson and, Baba, he had a baby with that other girl, and even that was in a stupid newspaper.”

He tucked the handkerchief back in his pocket, deliberately. “What is there to be embarrassed about? I have a daughter who makes a very interesting life, so interesting that everybody want to know what she is doing. Embarrassing for them, that their lives are so boring! Not for you. Not for me.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. Mucho really!
Zwei
really
de.
”

“Okay, then.”

“Dou
shi
okay
de.”

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

“But . . . really?”

He looked at her, nodding.

“Thank you, Baba.”

“Bu yao xie.”

That night in bed, Saina picked up the magazine. She pictured her friends—and worse, all those people who thought that knowing her work meant knowing her—reading this article and felt an unsettling hatred towards Billy. She didn’t want to let that in with her family here, with the three travelers so strangely buoyant and solicitous of one another. Better to let them think that she was unaffected by it. And maybe she was. Maybe she was even pleased. Now that the dreaded thing had happened, it turned out that it was only one of many dreaded things, and perhaps not even that. She unfolded the note that came with the magazine, knowing it was from Billy.

On it, he’d written
Call it a comeback?

Without thinking about it much, Saina took out her phone and texted a response.
I’ve been gone for years.

四十
Helios, NY

CLOUDS. FAT AND PUFFY. A roller-coaster highway that looped through the air. She and Charles, in the backseat of a driverless car, speeding from side to side as she yelled and tried to climb into the front seat, reaching for the brakes with her foot. Every time she got close, she’d look down and realize that her foot was a tiny, bound hoof stuffed inside a beautiful embroidered slipper, royal blue, just a toe’s length too short to stop the car. Charles wasn’t helping because he was on the phone, a big, bright-yellow cordless phone, talking in a language she couldn’t understand. Barbra knew that if she could just reach the brake Charles would put the phone down and take her in his arms. Even now he had one hand on her bottom, cupping it, making sure that she didn’t fall out the window.

Barbra woke up, eyes still closed, and Charles
was
on the phone, whispering in Mandarin.

“How can that be?
How can that be? 
”

She lay very still, listening.

“But why would they let him?”

Sensing that he was sitting in the far corner of the room, facing away from her, Barbra opened her eyes.

“So he is there now? Right now?”

Charles sat in a shaft of light, like a nightmare in a children’s book.

“No, don’t contact him. Don’t give him time to run away. I will go. Have you found a number? Does he live in the old house still?”

He took a small notebook out of his pocket and wrote something in it, then stopped abruptly.

“He did? That fool!” A brief pause, and then he said, “It is not your place to tell me what I should do,” almost spitting in the receiver. After putting the phone down on his lap, he sat, suspended. Barbra didn’t move either; she wasn’t yet ready to invest in the reality of this moment. If only she could go back to the dream and find her way to the brake, bound foot or not.

Charles stood up and unzipped one of his suitcases, digging in the side pocket. He pulled out some things she couldn’t see and zippered them into a pouch that she’d gotten for him at Louis Vuitton for his birthday four years ago. There was no indication that he knew she was awake. Barbra was about to whisper to him when he picked up a clean pair of boxers and headed to the shower.

A photograph of Charles’s mother. A plastic Ziploc bag, with ten stacks of twenty-dollar bills. His father’s factory identification card. A sheaf of thin, crinkled papers, handwritten, imprinted all over with fading red marks from official chops. A white jade chop, one of the biggest ones she’d ever seen, in the shape of a mountain with just Charles’s surname carved into the base. A piece of something that looked like bone. A worn leather wallet with Charles’s National Taiwan University identification card and, hiding behind it, her own fresh-faced high school identification card, which she hadn’t seen since she’d lost it in the university cafeteria where her father worked, where she’d first laid eyes on Wang Da Qian more than thirty years ago.

Just then, the blow dryer in the hall bathroom switched off, and a moment later Charles walked in to see the contents of his valise spread out over their bed. Barbra held up her young face.

“How much land do you think you can claim with this?” she asked, teasing.

He laughed, too, and sat down next to her. “All of it.”

“Hmm.”

Charles folded her into his arms, leaning the still-warms tufts of his hair—baby soft now and snowier every day—against her forehead. She inhaled his clean-laundry and fresh-earth smells, so familiar and good. Inside, Barbra felt loose, liquid. She leaned back and his arms locked, supporting her. As you grew older, there were fewer thrills in life but, despite everything that was happening all around, discovering that her lost ID had been in Charles’s possession all these decades was undoubtedly one of them.