by Paula Champa
He turned his spyglass on me. Rarely did I feel that I should correct his behavior, and I knew it was not my place to do it, but sitting there hearing the rising ache in Hélène’s voice as he went on silently studying me through the rolled-up magazine, I shook my head at him. We were in the process of giving away everything he owned, a meticulously assembled collection of photographs that he loved and looked at every day, and he was hesitating about parting with something he couldn’t use.
“With respect to your earlier answer,” Hélène ventured, “is there any other consideration you would give to the idea?”
“No.”
It was the same tone he had used to refuse the coffee.
“But—”
Emerson was struggling to his feet with his backpack. “Beth, I don’t want to be late for our next—”
“There must be some arrangement we can discuss. I have come a long way.”
Emerson lurched toward the door, his body dragging after his head like a dead weight.
Hélène turned to me. “I’ll be staying here in the city for a few weeks. No more than that, I shouldn’t think.”
The announced length of her stay agitated Emerson immensely.
“Staying for what?” he asked, swaying on his feet.
Hélène stepped forward.
He fought to regain his balance. “What are you staying for?”
“I’m arranging a show with my gallery.” She looked to me with a worried, uncertain smile. “Perhaps we will speak again?”
Emerson seized the doorknob and held on as if he were being sucked back into the room. He did not turn his head, but addressed his comment to the polished wood in front of him: “I don’t care if you have the engine. I’ll get it.”
“I’m offering to buy the car from you,” Hélène replied, arching her brow again, this time in confusion.
Emerson was curled over the doorknob, unable to pry back the leaden weight. I crowded myself in beside him and pulled the door open, a move that seemed to inspire calm in him. With a firmer footing, he gained the hallway. I followed him out, conscious of Hélène’s anxious presence in the doorway, but she said nothing more as Emerson and I retreated together to the elevator.
It was only after the elevator doors had closed behind us that I noticed the paintbrush in Emerson’s hand—a long, varnished wooden stick with a cracked tip. When he had stolen it, I couldn’t say. Had he slipped it into his backpack while Hélène was calling room service? Now he shamelessly played with it as we descended the floors, twirling it in his fingers like a majorette, stroking the back of his left hand with the stiff bristles. He knew that I saw. What was it that kept me from speaking? The frankness with which he flaunted his kleptomania? I couldn’t take my eyes off the bristles rising and falling over a hand that looked more dead than alive.
“What’s this about a car?” I asked, hoping the casualness of the question would assure him that I was willing to pretend what had just gone on between him and Hélène Moreau was not as uncomfortable as it had been. Nonetheless, my question got no response except for a variation in his handling of the brush. Whereas before he was painting his hand with the care of a Renaissance master, now he moved in bursts like a conductor, making great flying strokes and dabs and slashes with it in the air.
He was still waving it around as we exited the hotel—waving it at the sullen doorman, who stared at him without blinking, looking him up and down, step by step through the lobby. I don’t know what was running through the doorman’s mind as he moved aside for the regal and extremely thin man limping his way past with a whirring backpack, but his expression was not one of compassion.
The doorman jogged reluctantly over to Sixth Avenue to hail us a taxi, and Emerson and I stepped out into the confusing autumnal summer.
5
Accession Number: BC 1990.8241
Year acquired: 1990
Object: What Emerson Tang Webster handed me when I asked him for a job description:
SUBLIME—
In the event of an absolutely large object . . .—or one that is absolutely powerful . . . the faculty of presentation, the imagination, fails to provide a representation corresponding to this Idea. This failure of expression gives rise to a pain, a kind of cleavage within the subject between what can be conceived and what can be imagined or presented. But this pain in turn engenders a pleasure, in fact a double pleasure: the impotence of the imagination attests a contrario to an imagination striving to figure even that which cannot be figured. . . .
—JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” section III, page 250
This was hand-copied in blue ink on a page torn from a notebook, converted to scrap paper. At the bottom, in pencil, in the same hand, was a list of what I assumed were the qualifications for my job:
– some knowledge of architecture, art, design, history
– able to work independently (in silence)
– an interest in the preservation of artistic works and their related information
– engrossed in the pursuit of sublime organization
I took the position with Emerson not long after the satisfaction of the work I’d known as a college student devolved into an assortment of sensory data that merely signified work: the clicking sounds of the rolling library shelving in the Media Center of the ad agency in midtown where I was first employed after graduation; the slippery coated paper of the magazine articles I clipped and photocopied for forty hours a week plus overtime; the perpetual beeping and wheel-of-fortune smells emanating from the employee kitchen across the corridor . . .
At first the profession of a media archivist had promised some fulfilling and useful application of a native trait: my habit of holding on to things. For among the personal paradigms available to anyone’s life (Butcher, Baker, Beggarman, etc.), I self-identified, in part, as a Saver—someone for whom living essentially equaled the ongoing accumulation of souvenirs. And these mementos, in turn, represented the rough outlines of my existence. It was a circular compulsion, more than evidenced by the quantity and variety of objects filling the drawers and closets and storage boxes in my apartment in Chelsea (a one-bedroom in London Terrace), a collection that was always meticulously organized.
I reasoned that my liberal arts education had more than demonstrated the value of archival- and conservation-based work. How could my own studies have taken place if not for the legions of custodians over thousands of years who had gathered, organized and preserved the materials I fed from so hungrily? Not only books, but everything that kept me company: paintings, sculpture, music, countless forms of human creation. And though I created very little myself, I saw that at all points in history people had stepped forward to look after the output of other minds and hands (and just as importantly, to preserve the records of their destruction), for no reason other than that they believed it was a valuable activity.
It was in this frame of mind that I’d left college in Philadelphia and apprenticed myself at the agency in Manhattan under the direction of Louise Jarvil, a discreet coupon clipper with a graying pageboy and a preference for frosted coral lipstick, not only in summer but all year long. She commuted into the city with a brown bag lunch every morning by train from a town near Burring Port, where my parents still lived (though by then my brother Garrett was in London, working for an American bank).
Jarvil’s background was in library science, and the fluorescent-lit Media Center she oversaw on the twenty-eighth floor was much like any other library, archive or museum with its professional system of organizing and cross-referencing materials. The world was linked only tentatively by computers then, and we used primitive machines (glorified electric typewriters) to create our records and reports. Beyond a couple of databases, the highest form of technology in the agency was a roomful of Xerox machines, where my colleagues and I stood for hours packaging reference materials for the agency’s creative, research and account teams. From the start, I enjoyed the daily work of reading newspap
ers and magazines. I certainly didn’t mind logging and filing. The tasks weren’t the problem. The problem was that, despite a continued commitment to my higher calling, I found it difficult to summon any enthusiasm for the commercial products of our labors.
It was then, with nearly three years under Jarvil’s wing, that I was invited, along with every other girl from Burring Port, to the bridal shower of my old neighbor Beckett. It was the first shower I had been to, and as I described my job to Beckett, making small talk, I remember staring at her in confusion—she was wearing a bonnet someone had constructed from a paper plate, festooned with all the colored bows from her gifts. She blew some tendrils of curled ribbon away from her face. “Remember the guy you got into the car with? At the track that summer? He started a photo collection. Tom said he’s looking for someone to manage it.”
Meeting Emerson for the second time amounted to one phone call. I found him standing on the steps of the Public Library, on Fifth Avenue, dressed as he had described on the phone, in a leather jacket and jeans, with a crewcut. It was a look that suited him, and from what I had observed of him in the past, he dressed to suit himself. His appearances in my life were so infrequent and his style so changeable that his choices always intrigued me, but I can’t say I ever felt attracted to him in a physical or romantic sense. His was a more mysteriously compelling effect. Something about him made me pull myself up to my full height. I had come awake when I’d driven with him at the track. Unwittingly, even as a child, he’d expanded the narrow margins of my world, and as we stood toe-to-toe beside the stone lion he had chosen for our meeting point (the one nicknamed Fortitude, closest to 42nd Street), I believed that working for him could be a way to continue such experiences.
I detected the remains of his punk scowl as he took in my interview attire. For the occasion, I wore pants to cover the shiny rectangular scar on my right calf. I suspected he wouldn’t remember me from the track—my face had been under a helmet and a hood most of the time—but even so, something told me it was not to my advantage to call that particular incident to mind during a job interview.
He sat down and questioned me there on the front steps.
“Why do you want to manage my collection?”
“I’m inclined to organizational tasks,” I explained, adopting a formal tone in an effort to override the squealing brakes on Fifth. “Working in the Media Center, managing a collection, we’re caring for materials people might need at some future time they can’t predict. The way bees fill a hive with honey even though they won’t live to consume it.”
“And what do you find valuable about that activity?”
“For the bees?”
He nodded.
“A connected point of view, I guess—survival of the group over the individual. But in archiving, in conservation, there are individual benefits as well. The value is in whatever anyone will need to know or use in the future. It’s public, but it’s also private.”
He appeared to be waiting for me to continue.
“You can go back to records maintained by monks and courtiers, lawyers and merchants, documented acts of aggression, family records of births and marriages . . . But also objects, theories, philosophies—it’s a kind of collective memory. There are so many uses.”
He was watching people pass up and down the steps of the library, seemingly content to let me ramble. I glanced at the unusual job description and told him about the art history and design surveys I’d taken in college.
“Why do you want to leave the job you have now?”
“I’m not particularly social.”
I admitted to him that I found it exhausting to work at a big company. I was content—it was almost as peaceful as sleeping—when I was quietly filing, cleaning or polishing things. I didn’t know how it was related, but I acknowledged in myself a tendency to keep things ready for something, though I did not know what: the refrigerator stocked, the bed made. As if at any moment it would all be put to perfect use. Though I couldn’t say it ever had been.
Emerson demonstrated no memory of me during our interview. To test him, I mentioned that I had grown up in Burring Port and asked him if he knew my brother Garrett, so as not to risk reminding him of the track. He looked at me with an empty, apologetic expression. I was a stranger. But he called a few days later and hired me to create a basic documentation system for his photography collection—an order he expected me to maintain. I proposed to put together a documentation plan for his approval, but he told me not to bother.
“I don’t care how you set it up. You’re the one who has to use it.”
I was pleased to find that the storage areas in his loft were already impeccable. He’d renovated the space a few years earlier with the help of a conservator, Eric Dart. After all the light meters and hygrometers and thermometers passed through, they installed a collections storage area behind lockable panels in the office section of the loft, where I kept his permanent records in a fireproof metal cabinet.
For more than a year I busied myself doing the retrospective documentation on all the architectural photographs he’d acquired before I got there. During those months of logging acquisitions, it occurred to me that if you are an intensely private person, other private people were ideal employers, because the extent of your intimacy was cut and dried: I was hired to create and maintain a system, and to feed that system Emerson bought photographs. Some days he appeared in the office and we spoke. Many days I didn’t see him. Whatever dramas may have marked his personal life in those years were not mine to know. I let myself in through a door on the office side of the loft, a formality I appreciated, and he took himself where he needed to go. Among my duties, I paid his monthly bills for a travel agent on Sixth Avenue and a private garage on Perry Street, where he parked his car, an aging Audi Quattro.
It was during that time when I began sleeping with Oliver, who was a client of my former agency and lived nearly three hours away by plane. He’d said the magic phrase: “I won’t be in town for long.” I learned to rely on such cues, because they meant physical contact without involvement. By then, I’d found that my body was easier to share than my thoughts or emotions, and arrangements like the one I had with Oliver provided the illusion of companionship with the advantage of sounding convincing to parents, brother, co-workers. “Do you love him?” Beckett asked me at her wedding reception, a few months before I broke it off with Oliver. “In a way,” I said honestly, relieved to know that in less than twelve hours his airplane would again be ascending to cruising altitude.
It wasn’t until one afternoon in July of 1995, when Emerson invited me to join him for lunch at Florent, that I forgot about my easy misconceptions of companionship. I caught the odd tone in his voice as soon as I got into his car for what was, to me, a ridiculously unnecessary drive of five blocks, to Gansevoort Street. I knew Emerson well enough by then to be familiar with his occasional insolence. In his business dealings, he sometimes used aggressiveness to disguise other emotions that he was less eager to reveal. I had seen him behave horribly, sarcastically and spoiled when I sensed he felt vulnerable or uncertain. But until that lunch at Florent, I had never heard him speak so warmly.
“I’ve enjoyed working with you these past few years,” he told me when we were seated at the restaurant, not meeting my eyes but tracking some new arrivals in the mirror behind my head. “Working with someone—I didn’t think I would enjoy it, but I have. I wish we could keep things the way they are for a little longer.”
I was certain I was being fired. My eyes dropped to the table and traced the lines of a funny postcard—a schematic drawing of a stomach stuffed with French food—propped in the ashtray.
“I wish this wasn’t the case,” Emerson went on. “But I’m sick.”
“What?”
“Sick,” he repeated. “And my doctor says I can’t count on next year. Which is weird to think about.”
“What do you mean, next year?”
“I call it Omega, you know?” He
laughed oddly to himself.
“I don’t understand.”
“They say I’m going to need someone to help me take care of myself. Actually, it’ll be more like organizing . . . health things—hiring nurses for me and helping with stuff I can’t do.” He stared at his fork, then pushed it away abruptly. “Of course, you would be compensated differently.”
The changes he proposed to my terms of employment meant continuing publicly as his collections manager and privately assuming duties as his healthcare agent. As he saw it, the amount of time allotted to each of my jobs would shift as time went on, and eventually I would serve as the executor of his will and trusts. He was careful to emphasize that it was a business arrangement that suited him. He may have had no idea who I was when I started working for him, but by then I was familiar to him.
“This . . . event . . . ,” I began.
“Just Omega.”
I drained my water glass and started again. “In terms of Omega . . . Do you know what it will be like? What kind of things I’ll need to do?”
He shook his head. “Just, I’ll get sicker, there will be Omega. You’ll help me get there.”
I immediately fixated on the paperwork, the aspect that struck me as being the most manageable. I reasoned that I already handled so much of it for him—and there was a system. I had a sense of what being an executor involved: When my mother was executor for one of her brothers, she’d wrapped up the business with a morning’s worth of signatures.
“My lawyer will take you through that,” Emerson promised. “It’s all written down.”
When his eyes finally met mine I felt a cold egg crack open in my stomach. An icy liquid ran through me with the sickening coincidence: I had a related job qualification. A very specialized type of experience.