Face

by Aimee Liu

  “She did her darkroom stuff in here, if you can imagine.” Harriet swung open the door to the bathroom, a windowless cube only slightly larger than the kitchen: more maximized spatial efficiency. The sink was originally freestanding, but a sheet of plywood had been cut to fit around it as a counter extending over the tub. Crammed into the corner between the bath and toilet was a sky-blue shower with plastic walls.

  “I’ll take it—” I turned back to Harriet. “I’m a photographer, too.”

  “Oh, I see.” She peered at me as if this new detail made a difference. “Hobby, huh?”

  A faint odor, minty camphor or liniment, hung over the bathroom. I fingered the locket at my throat. I looked old and tired in the mirror in here, but the overhead light caught the gold heart just right and made it shine like new. Another sign?

  Harriet shook her head. “Y’ don’t want to end up like her.”

  “Like how?”

  “Poor Marge, broke her hip when she was seventy-eight. Slipped on the fire escape one day when she was out watchin’ them kids.” She jerked her head toward the closed window and the children who, despite the cold, were playing in the schoolyard. “After that, her traveling days was over. It’s no fun getting old, but I guess you know, your parents and all—”

  “What did she do then?”

  Harriet folded her arms, tight across her chest. “Oh, Marge had chutzpah. Got some catalog company to hire her. They sent their little gadgets by UPS and she took the pictures right here.”

  I turned on the water. It ran rusty, but gradually cleared, dissolving my portraits of Himalayan peaks into eight-by-ten product shots.

  “Gadgets.”

  “Yeah, like those slice ‘n’ dice gizmos you see on TV She hardly had to leave the building. Real lucky stroke for old Marge.”

  “Real lucky.”

  I surveyed the main room again. Not hard to imagine how she’d done it. Some backdrop paper against the far wall, strobe, reflectors, a few stands for the little inventions. Gadgets like my father’s, no doubt. All simple tripod work. And no traveling. No flying.

  “Where was this company she worked for?”

  “Florida, I think. Return address in Pensacola, that sound right?”

  I stubbed my toe on the couch. “Pensacola?”

  But she nodded. “You know Pensacola?”

  I stepped on the toe to stop its throbbing and steadied myself by fixing on Harriet’s opaque brown eyes. “I’ll take the apartment.”

  Harriet squinted and pursed her lips, and I sensed her searching for my imbalance. Incredibly, she must not have found it because we shook on the deal. Her grip was firm, efficient. When she released my hand, it stayed in midair as if waiting for further instructions.

  “Harriet?” I asked as she moved out into the hallway. “Was there a memorial service for Marge?”

  “Not that I know. Most her relatives live in Detroit.” An eerie wail lifted up the stairwell. “Never mind that,” Harriet said quickly. “That’s Mother. Prob’ly needs her channel changed. You move in anytime.”

  Anytime was the following day. I brought a bunch of lilies and daisies and spoke on Marge’s behalf a made-up blessing that was a combination thank-you, memorial, and housewarming. I considered it a necessary gesture, like leaving the lights on at night, and for the first few days I actually felt safe and welcome in my new home.

  I’d been here less than a week, was applying for work as a commercial photographer’s assistant, and was just beginning to doubt the wisdom of quitting my job in the sky when a box arrived, addressed without name to my apartment. Postmarked in Pensacola, it contained a set of plastic coasters with interchangeable pictures of game birds, a combination sifter, grater, and dicer, five patterns of personalized embossers, and a spec sheet with the size and quantity of negatives and prints the catalogue required for each product. According to these numbers, the Hans Noble Company had paid Marge Gramercy about half the going commercial rate.

  Four days later I sent the requested photographs to Pensacola along with the merchandise and an invoice informing Mr. Noble that I, Maibelle Chung, had taken over Ms. Gramercy’s studio upon her death. The following week my payment arrived with a new set of merchandise and instructions on which someone had scrawled: “We pay by the job, no contracts. Fee is nonnegotiable, but you can have that photo credit you asked for. Sorry to hear about Marge.”

  That night was the first time my screams woke Harriet.

  “It’s a man, isn’t it?” she demanded, wedging one foot in the doorway.

  “There’s no one else here.”

  Under her blue satin robe Harriet wore a flannel nightgown printed with elves. Her face was puffy and her hair looked as if someone had sat on it. I could hear her mother faintly whining downstairs. But Harriet was still more or less on my side back then and she didn’t insist on searching my apartment.

  “Men are shits, kid. They’d rather screw you than look at you. Never forget that.”

  I thanked her for this piece of advice and shut the door quickly before she could offer any more. There was no man that night, but there would be. I knew, inevitably there would be.

  I used to think I could escape my nightmares by going away. The day I graduated from college, I was packing my car to drive across country, and my brother, Henry, said I’d never find what I was looking for that way. I told him whatever I found would be more than what I was looking for. He said no, anything would be less. Philosophy and insight not being two of my brother’s strong points, I chose to laugh at him, but it turned out he was right.

  Instead of driving off into oblivion that summer, I met a rich, fiftyish man in a Howard Johnson’s in Nappanee, Indiana. He owned a shopping mall in Muncie where there was a consignment gallery run by an acerbic bleached blonde named Roxy who liked to talk about men who’d abused her. Though we would never claim each other as friends, I enjoyed listening to Roxy. I admired her certainty and her candor. She knew what she felt, what she thought, and why. Whatever men did to me was not something I could discuss.

  The rich mall-owner lost interest when I refused to sleep with him, but Roxy said she could use more of what I had, which at that point was my student portfolio—photographs of fire hydrants lit to resemble cathedrals, and steeples that looked like knives cutting ornate cloud formations. I progressed to vintage cars, using strobes to turn their headlights to eyes, and shot landscapes in which the tops of trees became oceans and sandbars.

  For half a year I traveled the Midwest, camping in Motel Sixes and photographing nature in ways that made it seem like something else. People who saw my work in the gallery called it “neat,” and bought the prints as puzzles to see if their friends and neighbors could figure out what was what.

  When I wasn’t using tricks of light and angle to subvert the universal order, I grazed crops of men in truck stops and watched families loading and unloading cars in motel parking lots. In Menominee Falls, Wisconsin, I slept with a park ranger who fit the description of all my men—boiled gold hair, deep freckles, and eyes that seemed to have dropped from the sky. We spent twelve hours together, no hope, no expectations, and hardly more than a physical longing in common, then he went home to his wife and four children. A month later I came back to New York and my parents, but before I worked up the nerve to tell them my news, much less decide what to do about it, nature replaced my choice with an outpouring of blood, cramps, and unexpected sorrow.

  Henry, the only member of the family who knew, said I probably wasn’t pregnant at all.

  “Wishful thinking. You know how that goes.”

  I told him he didn’t know shit.

  When I got back to my nomadic life, the fields were buried under two feet of snow. I stood on a hilltop in Illinois and stared through my circle of glass at endless miles of skeletal plants, hardened waterways, wildlife preparing to hide from the great thermal plunge into winter. Before my pregnancy I’d turned the cold into collages of lace or candy or intricately blown glass patte
rns. (More trick shots, most of them sold. Roxy said they’d make great postcards. She threatened to send them to art magazines and, if Tommy Wah told the truth, she eventually must have done just that because I certainly never submitted my work for publication.) But that first day back, on that bleak, frozen hill, the seasonal death defied me. I had no more tricks. I’d lost them racing toward some kind of freedom I didn’t begin to understand.

  I lowered the Pentax and took another look at the world unframed, let it pull itself over and around me like a vast gray paper bag. Only a fool would try to capture such immensity through a mechanical eye. Or believe the cure for terror lay in photographic alchemy. I weighed the camera briefly in one hand—metal, plastic, glass cold as ice surrounding a compartment of darkness. I let the weight of that darkness pull me to my feet, lift my arm high and wide. I felt the power, the ease of release, watched my instrument cut an arc through the frozen air and drop, clattering to the gorge below. Though I could no longer see it, I knew it was lying in shards and bent pieces all over the granite’s smooth face.

  That Pentax was my first camera. My mother had given it to me for my fourteenth birthday. After cracking it up I checked out of my motel room, sent what prints I had to Roxy, and traveled to Chicago. I’d heard from a coffee shop waitress that United was hiring flight attendants for openings out of Los Angeles. If I proved I could fly without falling, I thought, my nightmares would have to release me.

  It’s nearly the end of May now, and warm enough for kids to roller-skate in the schoolyard. From my fire escape I watch them doing backward twirls and scissor steps to boom-box rock and roll. Behind and above, the sky is the incandescent blue of a stage flat, roofs against it black. Up and down Greenwich Avenue shoppers scurry on pre-dinner errands past the dry cleaner where I take my sweaters, the grocery where I buy coffee, the record store that supplies me with the Motown greats brother Henry taught me to love. Past the photo lab where I take my color work and buy film when I don’t have time to get it at discount uptown.

  My upstairs neighbors, Betty and Sandra, are running a bath—probably for their new baby, Hope. Above the rush of pipes Larraine Moseley is practicing her electric guitar, and through this mesh of sounds come the smells of sautéing onions, butter, roasting meat. These sensations comfort me with their normalcy.

  So does the elderly woman who lives on the ground floor of the brownstone next door. Since the weather turned warm she’s come out every evening to sit in her garden with her roses and daffodils and trees shaped like lollipops. Unlike Harriet’s mother, whose persistent invisibility has convinced me her daughter keeps her housebound and bedridden, my neighbor rolls herself out in her wheelchair and writes in a notebook or leafs through photo albums. I’ve never seen a visitor. She sits for an hour, then a large wisecracking woman in a white uniform comes to push her inside, and I tell myself the old lady is lucky, she must own the building, has the wealth to stay there and choose her own routine. She enjoyed a good enough life that she keeps poring over it, wanting to remember. Of course, for all I know, she’s working out her taxes in that notebook and the albums contain shots of prospective real estate investments and she’s only lived here for a few months, but I like to think she’s stocking up on her past. I imagine the Village is her home, as it was Marge Gramercy’s.

  Product shipments now come twice a week. I’ve resurrected Marge’s studio, leased the necessary equipment, and filled in around the couch with some folding chairs, a foam mattress in the bedroom, stacked orange crates for shelves. At the moment the crates are filled with such indispensable items as a pottery water recycler, a spring-loaded toilet seat, collapsible shoe trees, and several digital timers. Some of these products I shot back in February. I’m keeping them to show my father before I return them to Pensacola. I remember him saying once, “An inventor should always be on the lookout for concepts to improve.”

  One of these days I really will invite Dad to come down and visit. I’ll show him the work that’s paying my bills, make the necessary excuses, and admit that although it’s not much to be proud of, it gives me the freedom to do my own projects. I won’t lie to him. I just won’t tell him what I’m making of all this freedom.

  Harriet’s admonishments aside, there have been men. An actor. A carpenter. A podiatrist. A hat salesman. Few lasted the whole night, none more than two weeks.

  I met the last one standing in line at Ray’s Pizza. He had pale Scandinavian hair and a square back, wore an embroidered denim work shirt and steel-tipped lizard boots. He ordered a single slice of the vegetarian Sicilian, then turned and, as if we’d been talking for hours, explained himself.

  “Used to be fat, but I had my stomach stapled. Now I can’t eat more ’n a slice.

  Steady at one-sixty and five feet eleven inches tall, he had skin as smooth as a boy’s and eyes the color of water in a country swimming hole.

  “I’m Jed Moffitt.” He claimed his pizza and offered me his free hand. Clammy.

  “Maibelle Chung.”

  He waited, watching as I placed my order. We ate side by side at the counter looking out onto Sixth Avenue, and he told me he was a sculptor. I said I was a photographer and got up to leave.

  “Two artists.” He snaked his arm through mine. “Why the hell not?”

  I knew perfectly well why not, but I followed Jed, anyway. By the time we reached Sheridan Square he was humming the melody from “Wichita Lineman” out the side of his mouth. He had a good, low voice and I closed my eyes to reach for the promised images of cold, clear, country nights and effortless space. But the humming stopped abruptly and we emerged from the elevator on the twelfth floor.

  His sculptures were aquariums shaped like antique bottles filled with colored water, dyed oil, and floating baubles. Upgraded Lava lamps. I told him they were “neat,” as if I’d never seen such creations before. He turned off the overhead lights, and the reflected greens and golds swam across our skin. I touched him first.

  In short order I had my tongue in his ear, my hands pawing his back, under, on top, flattened skin-to-skin. The aggressor, I granted him neither choice nor comment. I had demanded this entry, forced my way in, and now took him by surprise.

  “Wait!” He was gasping. I unrolled the condom for him, as much to preclude conversation as to protect either of us. There was no protection for what I was doing.

  I nevertheless hoped for a different result.

  This time, I thought as the new man straddled me, this time I will push through. I will feel him with me, beside me, in me. Somewhere. I will feel him love me.

  But the closer our bodies moved together, the farther I drifted into that other familiar sensation, my own personal Doppler effect. A perversion of intimacy like a sexual narcotic, at once numbing and arousing, which heightened the sounds and smells, the darkness of moving shapes, yet erased all sensation of touch. I heard and watched as a child removed, and wondered how this could be happening.

  A child wouldn’t do such things. Not a child whose nakedness is a crime. A child would be plowed under by acts that make no sense. I had not been plowed under, therefore my body must belong to someone else. To prove this I went with Jed Moffitt as I had gone with so many men. I would not, would never, be plowed under.

  We slept together on a mattress he’d slid into a closet in lieu of a proper bedroom. I was used to such arrangements. Nor did it surprise me the next morning when he produced a snapshot of his girl. A high school sweetheart, product of a broken home, she looked like a mouse. A twelve-year-old mouse.

  “She comes up to here,” he said, indicating his chest. He spoke sheepishly: she needed him; he was helping to put her through med school in Baltimore. Then he asked when he could see me again.

  We slept together eight times, the last at my apartment. I never had bad dreams the nights I stayed with Jed. I wasn’t fool enough to think there was anything more to it than comfort, but there was that. I admired his scar, the courage to take drastic action to salve his soul. He drank Schli
tz and manufactured Lava lamps and picked up women like me, but he no longer felt ugly. If I could just identify what I needed to cut out or staple shut or transform, I might draw on Jed Moffitt’s example.

  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?”