by Paula Champa
“Obviously.”
He’d told me more than once that the home he’d grown up in on Gray Hill was a copy of the Robie House in Chicago—an imposing brick edifice of dramatic horizontals and overhangs, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the first decade of the twentieth century.
“Do you want me to do something else with that photograph?”
He avoided my eyes. “No, it goes with the others.”
“All right. Just wanted to check.”
“Okay.”
“I got you something new to replace it,” I announced. “Eames and Saarinen’s Case Study House number 9.”
“Pacific Palisades, 1949.”
“Yes.”
“That’s one I was missing,” he confirmed, letting me know I had pleased him.
It was only a matter of time before I would have to give that photo to a museum with all the others, and it had cost me a month’s salary, but since I had moved into Emerson’s guest bedroom, he had been reimbursing me for the rent on my uninhabited apartment in Chelsea. The way I saw it, there was very little we could do anymore besides read or watch TV. At least we would have a new house to look at.
“I’ve never been interested in owning a house house,” Emerson said, testing the temperature of the waterfall in front of us with his outstretched fingertip. “I prefer to live in a multifamily dwelling. Though I always wanted to be on a higher floor.”
“Right now, we’re lucky you don’t have to climb more than one flight.”
We were back on Bleecker, running late for his meeting with Hélène Moreau, when he spoke again.
“I saw myself in that fountain, Beth. I was climbing the rock. There’s a cave at the top. That’s where I’m going after this: the cave on the Golden Happy Island.”
“I didn’t see a cave, Emerson. I’ve been staring at that thing since we started going to Golden Hands last year. There’s no cave.”
“You didn’t see it. But it’s there.”
4
I DON’T KNOW WHY I think of it as autumn when we walked into the Royalton lobby, because the avenues announced summer with a parade of tourists in shorts and sandals, and in any case, the hotel gave no indication of the season, no indication of the outside world.
Maybe it was the way the seasons didn’t seem to fit—or that time itself seemed out of joint—that inspired Emerson to insist we exit the taxi on Fifth Avenue (instead of Sixth, late as we were) so he could walk back along 44th Street past one of his favorite buildings, the New York Yacht Club, at number 37. Among the nondescript façades of brick and stone, it was a piece of architecture that never failed to astonish an unsuspecting passerby: a great galleon-shaped building sculpted in limestone, cutting through waves and dolphins and chalky seaweed.
“It’s a record,” Emerson said, stopping to take in the grandeur of the stone ship improbably floating in the middle of the block. “Every building is a record of some idea about how to live.”
“So what’s the idea of this one?”
“The whole building’s announcing it, Beth.” He frowned and pointed. “That’s the stern.”
I saw what he meant. No matter where you stood, the ship had already sailed past. As we continued down the street, I wondered if the turn-of-the-century craftsmen had sensed the tide of history changing even as the building took shape in their hands. Beneath the club’s stately rooms, the Beaux Arts currents were beginning to mingle with the municipal waters, while all around the world the ancient dominance of ships was giving way to ever-faster vessels: trains and zeppelins, automobiles and airplanes. The culmination of thousands of years of civilization—a whole age of adventure and exploration—was entombed there in the departing limestone ship, a monument to a previously unrivaled form of speed; celebratory and defiant, but frozen there just the same.
I was still contemplating the frozen ship when we reached Hélène’s hotel, a slender building framed by arching silver handrails and jewel-box windows swept with velvet curtains. At the top of the front steps, we were met by a doorman, his handsome face inexplicably sullen. I could not help thinking Emerson’s father would have approved of his uniform: a midnight-blue Nehru jacket and slim pants fitted over dark, square-toed shoes. Revived by Li’s massage, Emerson limped ahead of me through the polished wooden doors and into the narrow lobby, which had graciously assumed the public duties of the neighboring yacht club’s private rooms. A long wooden wall crowned with softly glowing horn lamps overlooked a ship deck’s worth of seating: loungers upholstered in rich velvets and white muslin, the fabric parting to expose silver horned legs. Between columns aligned like the funnels of an ocean liner, gleaming handrails snaked down to game boards set for chess and Chinese checkers. A row of glass fishbowls perched on a shelf behind the games like arcade prizes, sending little halos of reflected light swimming up the walls.
“I spoke to Alice at the Modern about Hélène Moreau,” I told Emerson, attempting to do some pre-meeting coaching as we waded deeper into the lobby. “She says the Speed Paintings bridged the dominant schools in New York and Europe at the time.”
“But I’m not sure she completed the bridge.”
He fell into step with me, our progress reflected in an angled wall-mirror hanging from a pair of oversized tassels, like the world’s largest pasties.
“I always want to label her as an Abstract Expressionist,” I said.
“I definitely wouldn’t go the other way, to Minimalism,” he said. “Think of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings from the late 1950s, when he was around her age—what, early twenties? The Speed Paintings are raw emotion. You can’t get any further from the cool, Minimalist rejection of emotion.”
“Apparently she’s making paintings of laundry now.”
He shrugged. “Stella once worked as a housepainter.”
In the tiny elevator up to Penthouse B, I was surprised to see that he was sweating. Even taking into account the afternoon’s physical exertion, he was normally so collected, so completely self-possessed. His quiet containment tended to cover for a certain amount of detachment, even snobbishness. But his silence that afternoon was different.
A wave of musk washed into the darkened corridor outside Penthouse B, where we were met by a silvery form silhouetted in daylight from the open doorway. When we crossed the threshold the apparition resolved into Hélène Moreau, a handsomely groomed woman in a silk tunic and capri pants. A crop of platinum hair framed her tiny jaw and wide face, its features blunted to the profile of a Persian cat. Protecting her flat face, like a giant windshield, was an oversized pair of gold-rimmed aviator glasses. The lenses had a purplish-pink tint, I noticed in the daylight of the room. In Emerson’s company I had met people with countless eccentricities, and I never ceased to be fascinated by their vanities. I supposed the colored lenses were meant to brighten the woman’s eyes, which nevertheless shone dully through the glass.
“Please,” she said, pointing us toward the sitting area. The hem of her tunic floated out behind her as she crossed the room to her desk, where she proceeded to rummage for the room service menu.
Across from me, Emerson was attempting to lower himself into a blue velvet chair tilted back precariously on a single metal spike. As he leaned down, the neck of his T-shirt hung open to reveal the deep hollow pockets around his collarbone. But if his wasted appearance unsettled Hélène in any way, her tinted gaze didn’t betray it as she offered me the menu.
“I’d love some herbal tea,” I said. “Chamomile, mint, anything like that.”
She turned to Emerson with the menu, and he waved vaguely. “Nothing.”
“The Kona coffee here is excellent,” she said. “From Hawaii. Very strong.”
“I said no.”
I tried to catch Emerson’s eyes while Hélène placed the order, but he was busy paging through her copy of New York magazine.
Hélène hung up the phone.
“Mr. Webster, I asked my lawyer to find out how I might contact you. On the title, the name is Eme
rson Webster. On the auction record it’s Tang. I wondered—”
“Webster is my legal name. I prefer my mother’s family name. It’s also the name I use for my business, which handled the bidding.”
She nodded. “Have you seen the Tang Dynasty polychrome Buddha uptown at the Met?”
“Can’t say I have,” Emerson replied.
She turned to me and I shook my head.
“Brush painting flourished in the Tang,” she said wistfully. “Also dancing, metalwork, poetry, music. Every form of high culture.”
Emerson yawned without bothering to cover his mouth. A fine line of saliva stretched from his top lip to the bottom, then vanished.
“It was the golden age of classical Chinese art and literature,” she went on, struggling to make conversation.
Emerson appeared to be ignoring her. Instead of replying, he blew me a stagy kiss.
I was too confused by their conversation to laugh at his absurdity, as I knew he wanted me to. What was she talking about? Some kind of auction. At least that was territory I knew Emerson could handle: buying and selling things. And this alone made me relax somewhat; I only wondered if there was a way to get her on track before my employer sagged with exhaustion.
“We’re familiar with your work,” I volunteered, hoping to get the ball rolling.
“And I am familiar with Mr. Tang’s photography collection,” she said. “Though not until recently, I confess. I’m not in favor of photography as a medium. I prefer to imagine a work of art rather than capture something I can already see.”
“How do you know?” Emerson asked with some annoyance.
“What?”
“What you’re capturing? What a photo can capture. What it holds in its emulsion, versus a painting?”
“I learned this.”
“Then you’ve made photographs.”
“Of course. I shoot them. I know how to develop them.”
It was pretty the way she pronounced it, devil-up, and pretty the way she tilted her head attentively toward Emerson as she chatted with us at her accentuated clip.
“I am very fond of photographs,” she continued. “But they are not my art.”
We were interrupted by the arrival of the tea tray on the unsteady arm of a room service waiter. He could have been the brother of the sullen doorman, but for the sincerity of his smile. The warmth of it made me think of Oliver, in Chicago. How long had it been since I’d ended it with him? I tried to count back as the waiter arranged my tea with the uncertainty of someone who had taken up his line of work only recently, in between casting calls.
Sheepishly, the waiter placed a silver carafe and a basket of miniature muffins on the desk in front of Hélène.
“That a Rolls?” he asked, presenting her with the check.
She picked up a little model car from the desk and dropped it into his palm. “No, it’s a Beacon. Also British. In its day it entirely eclipsed any Rolls.”
The waiter pushed the car back and forth on the desk as she signed the check.
“Cool,” he decided, parking it back in front of her.
“Most of the early Rolls-Royces still run,” Hélène told the waiter as she showed him out, conceding a point in some analysis she was carrying on in her head. “They run well. But then, so do Beacons—they don’t stop.”
“Rolls are quieter,” Emerson said. “But is that a plus?”
He slid open a box of Royalton matches to show me: a row of slender black sticks, like charred wood, frosted with bright blue tips. I gave him the thumbs-up. In apparent agreement with this verdict, he dropped the matchbox into the front pocket of his backpack. I was so surprised by his petty theft that I lost the thread of their conversation. Hélène was staring at me. I stared at Emerson, hoping he would say something, but he was dead still. What had she been talking about? Painting versus photography.
“You have a good imagination,” I blurted out.
Hélène frowned. “I trust my imagination.”
Emerson was studying his arms at his sides, poking his fingers at his biceps. “You still haven’t told me why I’m here,” he said.
In the silence, I could hear the low whir of the food pump cycling in his backpack.
He shivered.
Hélène flexed her hands and selected a paintbrush from a pile on the low table next to him. “It’s cold in here, non? This air conditioning you love so much in America. Maybe some fresh air . . .”
She pushed through a glass door at the far end of the room to a balcony outside. A narrow easel had been set up there under one of the stone arches, and she dropped the paintbrush onto a tray clipped to the front. The spiraling call of sirens followed her back into the room on a gust of warm air.
With one look at Emerson, I could tell that his patience was deteriorating along with his physical comfort. My best course of action was to try to wrap up the meeting as quickly as possible. And yet I sensed in Hélène Moreau a certain frailty of her own: some struggle she was going through that, by summoning us here, she was now at least partly entrusting to Emerson and me. Her eyes, shielded behind the pink glass, seemed to beg: Please give me a moment, one more gesture toward nothing before I have to say it.
And so I asked, “Are you painting the city?”
The lilt in her voice answered me with gratitude.
“Oh! No, I was attempting to find some light! It can be rather subdued in Manhattan. So many tall buildings.”
What I could see of the painting on her easel looked like a Tuscan countryside, a blue sky fringed with black cypress trees. Floating in the foreground were some large negative shapes, like bed sheets hung out to dry in the sun. I was about to ask her if she was going to fill them in when Emerson cleared his throat, a hooking sound that grated my conscience. I could see he was fighting to remain composed, but his eyes betrayed an irritation at the small but vital alliance I had just made with a woman who was wasting one of the remaining days of his life.
It fell to me to do my duty and get Hélène to the point.
“Are these paintings why you’ve invited us today?”
With an almost imperceptible flinch, her fingers came together around the model car on her desk, and she settled down to the business at hand.
“No, the matter involves something quite different from my paintings.” She fixed her pink gaze on Emerson. “I understand you purchased the R-135 last summer.”
I turned to him. I thought I knew every object in his collection. If she was referring to a house photograph, it wasn’t in my Accession Register. But I could see that he knew what she was talking about, and the knowledge didn’t comfort him. Rather, he seemed to shrivel, to lose focus. His head dipped down to study the pile of magazines in front of him. I had seen small boys act this way, boys whose mothers had ruined their fun by telling them “no.”
“It’s an M,” he said finally. “R-135-M. It was factory-modified for competition.”
“Yes,” said Hélène. “I was disappointed when the clerk at AG told me that it had been auctioned so recently. I’ve never had the best timing.”
She arched an eyebrow so high it shot up over the rim of her aviator glasses. It struck me as a well-practiced move. I was sorry Emerson didn’t look away from the magazines to see it.
“I’m interested in buying the car from you,” she said.
He glanced up. “It’s not for sale.”
Abruptly, she got to her feet. She had apparently been arranging flowers in a vase on the desk when we arrived, and she resumed now with a thick white lily. The heavy bloom tipped back, clinging tentatively to the stalk as she thrust it into the vase.
“That flower has a broken neck,” Emerson observed.
With a sigh, she ripped the hanging bud free and disappeared with it through one of the doorways, only to return a few seconds later looking more composed, with the stunted bloom sticking out of a water glass.
“Please forgive me,” she said, returning to her arranging. “It’s difficult for me to
sit still. I need to keep moving. Sometimes I think that’s why I make art, why I’m always working. My mother used to tell me I was lucky to be born poor, because it motivated me to work.”
Rearranging your own hotel flowers did not seem like work to me. And if she had been born poor, she certainly wasn’t now.
“The sale price of the car is in the auction record,” she informed Emerson, who was now flipping miserably through her copy of The New Yorker. “I can improve on it considerably.”
I didn’t know how much energy she had, but she seemed prepared to conduct a ceaseless arrangement of flowers, drawn somehow, as everyone seemed to be sooner or later, into Emerson’s extraordinary self-possession. Something in him was so solid, you felt as if you would come apart if you moved away from its magnetic pull. Even then, as diminished as he was physically, he still had that power.
“It may not be evident to you,” he said, “but I don’t have much use for your money.”
“There are other means of exchange,” Hélène said. “My paintings, for example.”
Emerson’s lips were hanging open again, crossed with a thick line of spittle. I wanted to walk over and wipe them off, but I knew he would be furious if I did. All I could do was watch the line of liquid quake as he tried to keep from shivering.
“Is the air conditioning still on?” I asked impatiently.
As soon as I spoke, I could tell it was not the right thing to have done by the way Emerson refused to look at me. No doubt my concern for his health was somehow undermining his present advantage with Hélène. I would have said I was sorry, but I knew I had said too much already.
Emerson rolled the magazine into a makeshift telescope and regarded Hélène through one end. “Why do you want to buy it?” he asked.
I was shocked to see her smirking at him over her coffee cup. “Why do you want to keep it?” she countered.
He remained silent, staring at her through his spyglass.
“I have come with a generous offer. You might at least consider it, Mr. Tang?”