Harmless Like You

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  I stepped up to the desk. The boy sitting there looked just like the boy I’d left at the desk in my own gallery; all lank limbs, overflowing hair, and pristine workman’s boots. My boy interned for me a few years back and had agreed to temporarily take the place of the one just fired. These days, he split his hours writing folk songs and temping. I told him to answer the phone, email me any pressing business, and not burn anything down. When I told him where I was going, he said I should check out Berghain, a club in a disused power station with two absinthe counters and one ice cream bar. They turned away half their would-be patrons. I was flattered until he said that the pleasure was waiting in line to see if you’d make it. Feeling brusque and elderly, I told him I wouldn’t.

  The German boy pushed back his hair and nodded, in what I took to be acknowledgment. I hoped he hadn’t noticed the wet patch on the side of my black jeans. When I’d called the gallery from New York, they wouldn’t give me Yukiko Oyama’s details but said they’d let her know I called. I never heard back. So here I was, firmly applying Josephine’s personal touch.

  “Guten Tag. Sprechen Sie English?”

  “How may I be of help?” His accent was perfect, but he had a second-language speaker’s habit of giving each word perfectly equal emphasis, smooth as brushed steel.

  “I need the contact details for Ms. Oyama.”

  “We do not release our clients’ personal information.”

  I took out my wallet and passed him a business card. It listed the name of my gallery and our company email address. Usually I’d scribble my own name and phone number for a client on the front. The calculated combination of the professional and the personal made them feel special. Each plywood card had its own unique wood grain. They cost $1.05 each but were worth it, for reactions like the one unfolding. The boy turned it over, flexed it, lifted it right up under his nose. He ran a thumb over the print.

  “Nice.”

  “I’m in the industry. She’d want to hear from me.”

  He turned the card over again.

  “I cannot. It is policy.” Then, pocketing my card, he said, “But I can call her for you.”

  I thanked him and waited as he rooted around inside the filing cabinet. I could see bent folders and torn plastic pockets. Galleries, like people, are rarely as clean as they look from the outside. From the bottom drawer, he retrieved a white binder.

  “Who should I say is calling?” he asked.

  “It concerns a Mr. Edison. And it is urgent.” If she assumed I was a lawyer, I could correct that impression when I saw her.

  He flipped quickly through plastic dividers until he found the page he wanted and dialed. German sounds like English in code, and I always felt that if I just strained enough it would make sense. No luck.

  “Ms. Oyama says she is not feeling well.”

  “Tell her I must see her, that it is important.”

  More German.

  “Will you be in the city long?”

  “A week.”

  “Eine Woche.”

  Some noises of assent.

  “She says, you may come by her studio tomorrow. I will give you the address.”

  Yuki

  1975, Caput Mortum

  A purple-brown. Literally: dead head. Named for the color of dried blood, but it does well for the painting of old fruit and fading bruises. The name may also refer to worthless remains.

  “The Paper, how can I help you?” Yuki wished people would stop giving out this number. There were girls whose job it was to put calls through to the correct desk, and yet they kept coming to her.

  “Please speak to Oyama Yuki.” The accent was scalloped with the extra u’s that indicated a Japanese speaker.

  “Oyama-desu.”

  “Yuki-chan.” The voice sped into elegant Japanese. “This is your Aunt Reiko.”

  Yuki tried to put a photograph to the voice; which gray smudge had this woman been? Her mother’s sister, shorter, taller? Yuki tried to squeeze out the woman’s features.

  “Your father is in hospital.”

  “Dad is . . .” She tried to remember the word for sick but it had skittered away to some far corner of her brain. “Tired?”

  “He was in an accident.” The sunlight roared in through the window so bright it was deafening, Aunt Reiko’s voice seemed very far away. Yuki squeezed the pen in her hand so hard that it slipped out and bounced across the desk.

  “Mom?”

  “She’s taking care of him.”

  “Accident?”

  “Bad driver.” What car had smashed her father? Worse if it was one of the ones he sold or one of the competition’s? Did it matter?

  The sun had not stopped screeching. When Yuki remembered March it was one long bright noise. Though by the end of April her ears were so battered that, although she knew it was there, she barely heard a thing.

  “Strawberry?” Amy repeated, one of the new girls in Typing. The berries were bruised. They were tipping over the edge of ripeness, hickeying the brown cardboard carton. Yuki took one and the weight of it almost pinned her hand to the table. Objects these days seemed to carry extra mass. Amy had a rolled magazine under her arm. On the cover was a woman’s face. The eyes cast sideways staring at Yuki. Yuki thought, I must be a New Yorker—I’m a mental case. Amy smiled blandly at her. The girls didn’t resent Yuki any more or they were too new to know she was worth resenting. The coral lipstick in her desk drawer had been at The Paper longer than many of them.

  “Can I see that?” Yuki asked.

  “My mom signed me up for a subscription.” The girl wrinkled her petite nose. Everything about Amy was petite. Each year the new girls were thinner—their bones whittling down. “She’s worried I don’t know how to dress for the big city. As if I could afford anything in here.”

  Yuki smoothed the magazine cover. It was her. Not any narrow-nostriled, green-eyed girl, but Odile herself. Someone had brushed her eyes with silver and wrapped her hair in a blue silk scarf.

  Yuki felt flattened, as if she were the two-dimensional one. She’d stopped loitering outside Lillian’s apartment. The romance books still came out. Yuki had bought one, keeping it in her desk at work. If Lillian was bitter, she’d edited it out. Did Odile still smoke using the corner of her mouth? Did she still sleep spine arched, posing even in her sleep?

  Odile. Odile, looking smug and beautiful as ever. “I knew her,” Yuki said to the girl.

  “Neat.” Amy said, “You can keep it if you want.”

  Yuki sensed she was being sucked up to. She was twenty-three and a member of the old guard. She still felt new, but that newness was a splinter that had burrowed deep under her skin where it festered invisibly. She hid the sharp pangs of unfamiliarity from journalists and Copy girls alike. But the rot was spreading.

  “Thanks.”

  Lou clattered in through the double doors. And Yuki slid the magazine onto her lap. It hissed. She turned over to the back page, pressing Odile’s face into her lap.

  “I’m going out with The Guys for dinner.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  “I’ll be home late.” A night alone in the apartment, with only Odile’s green eyes for company.

  “What you got there?”

  “Nothing.” She hadn’t noticed that her hands had pressed flat down on the pages. Yuki didn’t want to remind Lou of the time when she’d been invisible to him. She needed the weight of him. She needed his reading voice, slow and oaky. She needed the jump in her ribs at the sound of his beer-softened voice. Most of all, she’d needed the intertwining of their lives. So she would not remind him of Odile.

  Lou riffled his fingers in her hair, and walked into the main office. Another night without him. Okay. She’d be okay. It didn’t matter that the Nothing was pressing its cheeks against the window.

  She called Edison at work. He’d gotten a secretary a few months before. His position at the firm was unclear to her, a junior-junior partner. The secretary said Mister Eaves wasn’t in his office. How
could he be a mister? He put molasses in his coffee and had wrists skinny enough to slip through her bracelets. She requested that Edison meet her when she got off work.

  At seven, Edison stepped into reception wearing a slim black suit, silver mechanical pencils tucked into his shirt pocket. He’d been dressing better. Yuki wondered, was it the promotion or was there someone in his life? He hadn’t mentioned a woman, so maybe a man. That would explain the secrecy.

  “Did something happen?” He bent over her desk in concern. The waiting room was empty. The workday was officially over, although Yuki was not sure the editors knew that. She heard the muffled yelling of journalists behind the doors. Edison raised an eyebrow at the strawberry that still lay lopsided by the telephone. It had a thin hole near the stalk, and one side had flattened into a matt bruise. A fruit fly, as if noticing his gaze, lifted off.

  “I’m fine.” She slipped the stiff black pumps back on. Her feet were invisible under the table, and so all day she aired the bare soles of her feet.

  “You’re worried about the exhibit?” Edison tossed the fruit into the trash.

  This time, Lou had promised her, it’d go better. It was a café, not a diner. The crowd would be gentler. The owner was yet another friend of Lou’s. People loitered in diners, but lingered in cafés, and that was the greatest difference in the world, he’d argued. Yuki wasn’t sure. She wasn’t a poet and didn’t put her trust in the verbs’ two-letter difference. Anyway, her father had died a whole forty-seven days before. It was too late to prove anything to him.

  “No, not the show. This.”

  She showed him the magazine. The photograph’s eyes were angular and the mouth stiffer than Yuki remembered. She was unsure if her friend or her memory had changed.

  “So, she’s doing well then,” Edison said.

  Edison had met Odile that once in the park and later on the arm of his “friend.” The long-ago “friend” had been an acquaintance of his older sister’s. They had not stayed in touch. It turned out the trench-coated photographer had too strong a taste for whiskey and young girls, of which Odile had been only one.

  Edison’s face was level with hers. She’d tried painting Edison before, but she couldn’t catch his smoothness. He had skin like sea-glass. He touched her chin. His hand glided up along her jawline.

  “Hey, you’re doing well too.” He tweaked her earlobe. She smiled, but the expression didn’t adhere. She felt her mouth drop, pulling her mood down with it.

  “Am I?” She’d given up the idea of going to a real art school long ago. She’d never have enough money, and what did she expect Lou to do? He wasn’t going to follow her.

  “You’ve been in a magazine too.”

  “Emily doesn’t count.” Lou and The Guys had published some of her photographs. She’d visited the few sad Japanese restaurants that her father had always despised. In the low light, she’d struggled to focus her camera on sauce-saturated teriyaki lying in moist chunks on dry rice. Her father would’ve walked away. She found one sashimi place and ordered maguro. Long ago her father had told her that the Waldorf Astoria flew in fresh fish from Japan every day. His company had taken him to celebrate his promotion. He’d come home happier than she’d seen him ever before, describing tuna softer than butter. “But we’ll have tuna like this all the time in Japan,” he said, though of course, they hadn’t. The piece she photographed was pallid and stringy.

  “People wrote in asking for the restaurants’ addresses.” Yuki had torn these letters into fingernail-thin strips. “It wasn’t a review!”

  “Yes, but you also got that letter.” It had been from a college student at NYU whose family was from Osaka. He’d written in beautiful characters that he thought the photographs had samishii kimochi—lonely feeling. But in the construction it was hard to tell if he meant that she had made him lonely, she seemed lonely, or that the photographs themselves somehow possessed the quality of loneliness. She’d been too humiliated by her wonky child’s script to write back.

  “Also they were probably too weak, too obvious, too, too . . . easy.” Lou’s word had slid in between her ribs and lodged there, making it difficult to breathe. It seemed the whole life that she found so hard looked weak and easy. Why couldn’t she communicate even one ridge of pain?

  “Show me what you have.”

  “They’re at home.”

  Well most of them were. She had one in her desk drawer. Reluctantly, she pulled it out. The thick paper curled from excessive watering.

  “Thought I’d try making something with my hands again.”

  Edison looked down at the watercolor. Yuki’s mother had sent a funeral portrait. She couldn’t really expect Yuki to set up her own altar. How would Lou explain it to his friends? Her father was sitting straight in his blue wool suit. The photograph must’ve been taken in winter. She painted him from this photograph. Yuki remembered that he’d always smelled of wool. He was a warm and itchy man. He looked smaller than she remembered. He wasn’t smiling. His face was thinner, but his earlobes were plump and long, pink as ripe peaches. Or maybe he had always looked this way, and she’d forgotten.

  “It’s lovely.” He didn’t touch it but bent down. “This is your father? You miss him.”

  “How do you . . . ?

  “I can see it. I can see it in the line.”

  “It’s overworked.” Overworked and easy. It was contradictory, but that didn’t make it untrue.

  “No, it’s not. The way you’ve layered colors.”

  “We used to have this altar with photographs. We’d feed them. I thought I could do a series of people. Not all dead. Just, you know missing people, and what I’d give them, if I could.”

  Her father, her mother, girls from that long-ago Japanese class, Odile, their features distorted by memory. And with each piece, a painting of the meal she’d like to feed them: eel, a coffee ice cream float, animal crackers, a cigarette. The idea had seemed hopeful, but now it hurt to look at the paintings. She kept this one in her drawer, because perhaps if she could do her father right in time for the show it would mean something. Though what she couldn’t say. What else could she do? When she’d called the travel agent and learned the price of the ticket, she’d known that she would never be able to say goodbye to him that way. They were a child’s scribbles, and only a stupid child would hold them up and expect a gold star? She wanted that star. A single, bright thing to paste to this life.

  “This is perfect. Show me the rest.”

  She shook her head.

  “No, really. There’s so much you in it. It’s so . . .” He paused. “Tender. It’s so tender.” He grabbed her hand, and then just as swiftly let go, running it through his hair. Yuki did not think of herself as a tender person. Was it a tender picture? She tried to imagine what she’d ever felt tender toward, what she’d ever cared for. “I’m taking you to dinner to celebrate,” he said. No the tenderness was his.

  She tried to think: what had she been trying to say about her father’s face? One of the girls from Copy swished past, raising one plucked eyebrow, at Yuki and Edison. No it’s not like that, she wanted to call out.

  She hid the portrait back in the drawer. Somehow, her father did not belong with Lou.

  “Okay, fine, dinner.”

  Two blocks from The Paper’s offices, their way was blocked by a blond woman in a floral dress. She was tall and wide, and at first Yuki thought she was middle-aged, but as they looked into her weeping face it became clear she was no older than Yuki. Her tears were bedazzled by eye glitter. She stared into a bank of televisions. Piled in a display window, neon stickers offered LOW LOW PRICES and UP TO 50% OFF. On the screens, helicopters dipped and rose.

  “Ma’am, are you okay?” Edison was ever the gentleman.

  “My husband’s there, you know.” She pointed as if they couldn’t tell where. “Saigon. They’re evacuating the embassy.”

  For all the celebrations of peace two years ago, the war had dragged on. But now, the Americans were givi
ng up and coming home.

  “He’ll get out safe.” Edison pulled a folded gray handkerchief from his pocket. Yuki stared at the televisions. Figures scrabbled against the walls. The sky was mucus yellow. In the corner of the screen, an American soldier pulled up a white man in a blue shirt. If there was a voiceover, it was muted. The camera looked down on shiny black hair, short hair, long hair. So many skulls trying to escape. The American soldier did not lift a single one.

  Her parents had hated talking about their war.

  The world felt mute and bright and close. She hadn’t felt this way since the Whitney. This wasn’t art. Lou wasn’t here. Edison and the woman in the floral dress wavered in her vision. The flowers pulsed as the woman’s breath heaved. It was a hot day, but the heat was coming from inside her, radiating outward. It would burn Edison, scorch this woman, fry the televisions, melt the pavement. She thought of the fat woman’s husband. Was he also fat? Could she feel him inside her when they fucked? What Vietnamese girl had he been fucking? What happened to her? Was she pressed underneath all those feet, or simply dead in the street, in a field, on a tile floor? If Yuki bit this blonde, would the woman know why? Yuki clicked her teeth together, and the sound reverberated inside her temples.

  The blonde dropped Edison’s handkerchief. It was the same shade as the pavement. Edison didn’t pick it up. He wasn’t looking at the woman. He was looking at Yuki. His face was so close to hers. On the television, gray shapes were moving. She wished he would move away because her lungs felt clogged. She needed air. The helicopters on the TV were rising. She wished she could rise upwards and upward and upward out of her body. The woman loomed toward Yuki. Sweat glinted through her thick foundation. Edison seemed suddenly foreign. Yuki wanted to reach out and push these two strangers away. But her hands ached and seared from an inner heat. Edison pulled her to him, and his silver pens stabbed her. The woman, too, was touching her. The fat hand dabbed at her shoulder.