Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  Harry swivels his head around slowly, then motions toward the wall. “This is really cool.”

  There’s a white guy dressed all in black opening the door for people who I assume works here, and I lean toward him. “Excuse me,” I say. “Who’s the artist?”

  “Her name is Vivian Ho.” He points to the other side of the gallery. “She’s here today for the opening.”

  I shouldn’t have assumed it was a guy. And I definitely did not expect her to be Asian. I know most of the prominent Asian artists these days because I collect the knowledge of them, imagine myself among them, and I’ve never heard of her. She’s in her midthirties, probably, stocky, with spiky, blue-tipped hair and black plugs in her earlobes, attractive in a guyish kind of way, and she’s ducking her head toward a few women who are saying something about one of the projections.

  “You should go talk to her,” Regina says.

  “Nah, she looks pretty busy.”

  “No, you’re into this, right?” Harry says. “How often do you get to meet actual artists? Go say hi. Oh, look, she’s coming over by here.”

  “That’s all right. We should keep going.”

  “Excuse me, Vivian!” he calls. I elbow him and hiss, “What are you—”

  But Vivian Ho is coming over and saying, with a friendly smile, “What’s up?”

  “Hi,” Harry says, “my friend is an artist, too, and he wanted to tell you how much he likes your work.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I can feel my face turning red. “Ah—it’s really—”

  “He just got into RISD,” Regina adds. “On a scholarship.”

  I hate them both. “Your installation is incredible,” I say.

  She smiles and crosses her arms over her chest, then leans against the wall. “Hey, thanks for coming. What do you do?”

  “I like to draw.”

  “What do you draw?”

  “Ah—portraits, mostly.”

  “Yeah? The gallery’s doing this 30 Under 30 installation next month. You should apply.”

  “We’re going to go find a bathroom,” Harry announces. I glare at him. He smiles and waves.

  “Nah, I haven’t even been to art school yet,” I say to Vivian Ho. “Thanks, though.”

  “So? I never went to art school.”

  “No?”

  “No. I came up in street art.” She laughs. There’s a warmth and a generosity pulsing from her, which seems about right; I don’t believe you can put anything meaningful into the world without having a kind of innate generosity, something of yourself to give. “And I remember what it was like when everyone would preach you that life experience bullshit and I was like, fuck that, I have things to say now. You get a lot of that?”

  “People not taking me seriously because I’m still a kid, you mean?”

  “You know the story.”

  “Nah, I kind of have the opposite problem, honestly.”

  “You got tiger parents? Is that what this is?”

  It’s the reverse that’s true, really. When I was in first grade, the Cupertino Lions Club had a district-wide art contest for elementary school kids, and I won. The Cupertino Courier wrote up a little article about it with a photo of me holding my picture and my mom went up and down the street asking all the neighbors for their copies to give to her friends, and then they started researching lessons nearby, the best art programs I could go to after I graduated. On weekends we’d go to museums. My mom talked about how when she opened her hotel, she’d only have artwork in it by me.

  Believe me, I don’t take it for granted that my parents have always supported my dreams. I know you don’t always get that lucky; I know they could’ve blotted out the fuzzy outlines of my art ambitions with the sharp clarity of medical school or law school or business school, things that required much less faith in me and that offered a more concrete kind of hope, the kinds of things my friends’ parents push them into. And I’m also lucky, I know that, that what they want from me is what I want from myself, too—I’m just worried my talent doesn’t run deep enough. And I can’t fathom facing the world the rest of my life if it doesn’t.

  “No, they aren’t like that. It’s a big deal to them that I’m going next year,” I say. “It’s more—I’m worried I’m a fraud. Like maybe everyone thought I had all this promise but I’ll go through all four years of art school and bomb and my parents will be crushed.”

  “Well, it’s not like you go through four years of school and you’re made. You can’t just learn your way into it.” She pauses. “And you can’t do it because of your family, either. You do it in spite of your family.”

  “You think so? Do you wish you were doing something else?” How could you, though, when you stand in here and see what she made—how could you erase it from the world entirely, stick her behind some desk or podium somewhere instead?

  “No,” she says. “It’s what I chose. But it takes more from you than what it gives back. I wish I’d known that when I was younger. Like, my family all lives in SoCal, and they aren’t a part of my daily life. I just don’t have that room. And I know I’ll never have kids. Probably never get married.” She tugs at her earlobe. “You’re going to have to choose, too. You have to look at the world like—you get one shot in it, and at the end you’re going to have to look back and see whether you said all you needed to say and gave it back to the world to hear, or if you just let that shrivel up inside you to die with you. All of us have to make that choice.”

  We’re all exhausted by the time we get back to Cupertino. On the way back Regina’s mood seemed to deflate. I know she thinks Are you okay? is one of the most annoying things you can ask people, that it means you think they’re being sullen or overdramatic. So I don’t ask her. She seems subdued as she says goodbye.

  The air in the car feels different with her gone, when it’s just me and Harry again. Sometimes I think your truest self is the one that emerges after the day’s been scrubbed off you, the way it feels now.

  “You going to apply for that gallery thing?” Harry asks, easing around the turn onto my street. The seat belt catches against my shoulder as he taps the brakes. I will be eighty, I think, and still remember that particular sound the seat belt makes. “You should.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “How come?”

  Someday, maybe, I won’t see other art and feel threatened by it; I’ll feel in communion with it, part of the same ecosystem. “Eh, I just doubt my odds are any good.”

  He shrugs. He pulls into my driveway and turns off the engine. “That way it made you feel when you walked in—that really hit you, right? And you could give that to someone else.”

  Something crackles on my skin like a fire. He felt me in that moment; he understood what it was to me. “Maybe. I probably couldn’t.”

  “Well, not with that attitude.” He grins. It’s our inside joke—he’ll toss it out when Regina says something like You can’t put out a paper with four stories when everyone’s missed deadlines, when I say You can’t get to San Francisco in thirty minutes. I wonder who he feels the most himself around—if it’s times like this, or moments like earlier today with Regina when he has to make a case for who he is. Maybe that’s what they have together, that he finds himself more sharply defined around her. Is that what people really want, though?

  We sit there a few moments. I’m reluctant to get out of the car, but I can’t think of an excuse to give for why. Finally he says, “All those things Vivian Ho was telling you—you think that’s true? That you have to choose that way?”

  “I hope not.”

  “You think so, though?”

  There’s a kind of fear I associate with truth, and I felt it when she was talking. “Probably. She’d know, I guess. What would you do?”

  “If I thought I had to choose between my family and what I wanted to do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Probably my family. Then they wouldn’t guilt me about it.” He kind of smiles, not in a way that makes
him look happy. “Regina’s right about me, you know. I always like taking the easy way out.”

  It was the summer before middle school, right after the Fourth of July, that my dad first started to slip away to where no one else could follow. He’d stopped working on his experiment years back and I knew he missed it, but he was still working in the lab and as far as I could see, our lives were the same they’d been for years now. Something happened, though, inside him; it was like all the color bled out from the world around him and what was left over was muted and dull. For days every time you tried to talk to him he’d mutter back monosyllabic answers in this flat tone that shamed you for thinking you had anything worth telling him, and anytime you asked for anything you could feel the weight of the burden you were being. It’s a profoundly lonely feeling when someone who’s supposed to love you doesn’t have it in them to be around you. My mom cried sometimes in her room when she didn’t think either of us could hear.

  And then he’d come out of it again and he’d be sorry, I think, because he’d joke with me in this kind of desperate way or he’d bring home new plants for my mom’s garden. Or he’d help her weed, or he’d talk me into coming out there, too, and we’d eat microwaved dinners sitting on a blanket on the grass even the nights it was freezing cold, my dad chattering loudly like he was afraid of the silences, trying to pretend to each other everything was okay. And of course you couldn’t talk about all those times you had to spare him your presence, you couldn’t blame him for it in case it sent him spiraling again, and so those were almost worse than the times he was just withdrawn.

  I’d known about my sister a long time, but that year was the first time I really started to understand what it meant for my parents, and for me, too, that she’d been there and then she’d died. I worried that that was what my dad was reacting to, some kind of delayed grief catching up to him, and that it wasn’t something that could ever be fixed. All that summer I looked backward for clues, trying to remember any news stories I’d heard come on the TV that could’ve been what reminded him: a house fire in Los Altos Hills or a plane crash in Spain or a toddler in San Francisco falling out of a hotel window on a family vacation.

  He’s just weak, Mr. X would whisper to me. He’s never going to pull it back together. You’re not good enough for him, you and your mom. This is it. This is the rest of your life.

  It was the first time I understood what it was like to feel hopeless, for that space you hold inside yourself for good things to close up. I lost whole days to League of Legends, which I honestly don’t even really like, and had to watch Netflix to fall asleep. I hated nights, when everything felt amplified, and I got a stomachache each day at that hour when the sun went down but the leftover streaks of color were still hanging in the sky.

  But: that was also the year I met Harry.

  The first day of seventh grade, my backpack stuffed full of crisp notebooks and a new set of Micron pens, I was in the middle of the pavilion talking with Regina. I’d been telling her how bad things had been at home lately, and she’d put her hand on my forearm and said, “I’ll pray for you.”

  I looked around. “Uh, like, right now?”

  “No, no, not right now. I meant for your dad.” She looked flustered. “Unless you want me to?”

  Regina went to a Taiwanese church by school. Her parents were never religious, but when they first moved here her mom went just to meet other Taiwanese people, so Regina grew up going. A few times she’s invited me to go with her, but I never have.

  This, I knew, was why Regina believed in God: When she was ten years old her father had gone into his office and found one of his employees, a man named Robert, lying facedown on the floor. The hospital said he was in a stroke-induced coma, and told his family he wouldn’t likely survive the night. Regina found out and felt something—a voice in her head that wasn’t her own—tell her to pray. So she prayed and she kept praying, and she skipped dinner so she could pray for Robert to live. At nine she heard the same voice tell her she could stop now, and a few minutes later the phone rang. Robert had woken up. We’d never talked about religion all that much, although I knew it was important to her, and even though I wouldn’t have minded—I don’t think there was much I could’ve told Regina about myself then that she would’ve judged me for, and if you really believe in something, on some level it makes sense to want to convert everyone. My dad told me that once, closing the door after a Jehovah’s Witness he’d spoken politely with and then offered coffee. I’d thought back to that afternoon in his lab—my dad has always been an evangelist at heart.

  And I wished sometimes my parents believed in something that way. I wished they believed my sister was in heaven, somewhere they’d see her again and I’d meet her someday, instead of just dissipated into atoms circling back into the universe; I wished my dad had something to hope for and I wished my mom had less to fear.

  “That’s okay,” I’d told her, and then wondered if maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t in a position to be turning anything prayer-like down right now. “I’ll pass.”

  “Okay. I—” And then she stopped talking, and her face lit up, and then there was Harry, bounding in like an aggressive puppy and pulling her in for a hug.

  “Regina Chan!” he said. “Where were you all summer? You were supposed to hit me up in Taiwan, homegirl. I was there for like two months.”

  “I tried calling you when I was there,” she said. “You never answered your phone.”

  “Oh, whaaaaat, that’s a lie. It must not have gone through.” He was grinning in that almost manic way he has sometimes—I know it now, even if I didn’t recognize it then—when he’s going to change the subject and just talk at someone so fast all they can really do back is laugh and (nine times out of ten) feel hopelessly charmed. And in that moment, I believed I saw him perfectly.

  That was the thing, that back then I was always trying to see people for who they really were because it felt like if you were an artist, that’s what you were supposed to do. I wanted to draw people stripped of their outer layers, and so I was always looking underneath for truth. (Honestly, I was probably kind of insufferable.) At any rate, in that moment it felt clear that Harry’s trick to getting people to like him was to pretend he liked them: to wield his fake enthusiasm as a kind of currency. I would’ve bet my life savings that Regina did call him, probably more than once, and that he hadn’t given her call a second thought; I bet he hit IGNORE and forgot all about it until just this second, the same way he’d forget about his conversation with her he was having right now. And I would never come up to people having a serious conversation and present myself that way, like a gift. When he was gone I said, “Who’s that?”

  “That’s Harry Wong.” She said it like she was surprised I didn’t know him already, like it was my bad. Then she added, “It’s his birthday pretty soon.”

  Birthdays in Harry’s family, it turned out, were a bizarrely huge deal, and for the milestone ones, like thirteen, his parents went all out. They had (I would learn all this through social osmosis) rented out one of the private banquet rooms at Dynasty that people usually booked for weddings or red egg and ginger parties, and apparently a bunch of important people Harry’s dad knew from his years in politics and business were going to be there, and apparently Harry’s mother was determined to book a band with at least one radio hit, and apparently the invitations had been custom-printed and had cost eight dollars apiece. Sandra Chang referred to it as Harry’s wedding to himself.

  I was staying late at school as much as possible those days, stretching out the part of the afternoon where I could avoid going home for as long as I could, and we were sitting on the bleachers overlooking the blacktop. Sandra said, “I heard they’re blowing like ten thousand dollars on this party.”

  “That’s such bullshit.”

  “I heard it from—”

  “No, I believe you. I just think it’s bullshit anyone would spend that much money on a party. It’s gross.”

&
nbsp; “You think it’s gross? I would one hundred percent do the same thing if I had the money. You would, too. Admit it.”

  “I definitely would not.”

  She laughed; she didn’t believe me, probably. She leaned back so her elbows rested on the row behind us. She tossed her hair and then carefully smoothed it back into place, her nails glinting in the sunlight. She always had elaborately painted fingernails, tiny patterns or colorblocks or sometimes even scenes. One time I’d asked if she did them herself and where she got ideas from. She’d just looked at me in this way that felt condescending and also almost defensive somehow. Is this because you’re all into art? she’d said. And you think this counts, or something? And then she’d changed the subject.

  “Anyway,” Sandra said, “he invited Regina.”

  It is exactly how junior high works that whenever someone gets invited to a party, everyone else knows. Sandra and I had a running bet going on his unfolding guest list. I said, “Of course he did.”

  “I called it.” She held out her hand. “Pay up.”

  I took a dollar from my wallet and handed it over. “That means you’re next.”

  She laughed. “Is that an official bet? You’ll earn your dollar back.”

  “You would totally go if he invited you, wouldn’t you.”

  “Of course I would. You would, too.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Obviously I would have. “I don’t get why Regina likes him.”

  “It’s because Regina’s a nice person,” Sandra said. “She has no standards. She likes everyone.”

  It was true; Regina’s always been a nice person. In second grade—we still tease her about this—we had class pet bunnies. A couple months into the year, the one girl bunny got pregnant, and one day we came in for class and found out the mom had eaten all her babies. Regina cried so hard she literally got sent home. Sandra had been Regina’s very best friend since first grade, and if you were friends with Regina you understood that was part of the deal, that you’d always be in second place. They had this whole language built on inside jokes and do-you-remembers and vague references that meant nothing to anyone else. They had a way of talking about everything, endlessly dissecting even the smallest interactions, that made it seem like what they were talking about was something important.