The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  To tell the truth, I had experience with death because I had been dead. For a short time, as a child. The resuscitation of my body in a hospital after some acceptable number of minutes was deemed a success, superficially. The problem I couldn’t explain was that my brief communion with death seemed to have come with an uncomfortable side effect: For as long as I could remember, I felt something like a woman trapped in a man’s body, except the issue wasn’t my gender. Some part of my being was in the wrong place. I was maybe transexistential.

  Beth—rhymes with death. Why was I here? As I grew older, I kept running across the idea that everyone’s life had a purpose, or more than one. Things you were meant to be accomplishing. By that way of thinking, if you were forcibly brought back to life, wasn’t the expectation that much more emphatic? But I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. I felt no shape to my life, regardless of how much I busied myself with studies and tasks. The blankness was there even then, I admit. Must a life be long to have value? By the time I was in my twenties, I suspected that whatever my purpose was, however small, I had obediently fulfilled it long ago, before that night in the hospital. I was meant to have gone off duty then, as scheduled, at the age of four. But through the power of some other force or will, I found myself on a very long overtime shift without an assignment.

  Until Emerson’s request that day, sleep and solitude had helped me escape the discomfort I felt, but they could only approximate the absolute peace I’d known so briefly. Even more seductive than sleep was what had lured me into the car with Emerson that day in my teens: the possibility of a crash—something that would end my life for me—a flirtation with death that had only left me burned and scarred. After that, I bowed to the tension in my being, the inescapable conclusion that I was simply out of place. I lived in the city with the illusion of closeness that came from being surrounded by people. I dated so-called boyfriends, made almost-friends whom I rarely saw and celebrated their significant events—showers, weddings, births—with the feeling of witnessing it through glass. I tried to imagine myself in the ribbony hat that Beckett wore so excitedly at her bridal shower, a bright helmet marking her official entry onto the marriage and parenthood track, but I did not see myself joining that race. I had experience with death. On instinct, I decided not to tell Emerson about it.

  He emphasized his intention to function normally for as long as he could, and then our food arrived, and my own sense of privacy prevented me from asking too many questions about his situation. I admit it took some time for what he asked of me to settle in. I don’t recall any formal change taking place. I continued going to work every day for weeks and months, and my duties segued gradually, just as he had described, and it never seemed very different until we were far down the road. It was paradoxical in the extreme to enter into an arrangement to help someone guard against death, and at the same time to be the caregiver who, in whatever small way, eases that death. I didn’t know anything about birth, but being a midwife for death was a matter of utmost open-mindedness.

  I told almost no one my job had changed. Maybe I felt protective of him after the years of public speculation he’d endured. And ironically, as he must have assumed, it wasn’t necessary to announce or explain anything when we were arranging bequests all day on his behalf. He was hiding in plain sight. I confided in my parents and the home healthcare workers. The only other person who might have tempted me was my brother in London, but because he had no idea how sick Emerson was to begin with, Garrett rarely expressed any interest in my employer. He’d long ago grown bored of the Emperor’s vicissitudes.

  I considered Li and the other manicurists at Golden Hands to be part of Emerson’s nursing team, but I didn’t think there was anything I could tell them that they didn’t already know from observing him week after week.

  “I like their sounds,” I confided to Emerson one afternoon on the short cab ride home from Golden Hands. “I like listening to Mei. She talks at all strange angles, like guitar strings popping.”

  “I have no clue what they’re saying, but sometimes I feel like they’re talking about me,” he said.

  “That would be natural. I mean, for them to talk about their customers.”

  “I guess.”

  “I have to ask—do they make you think of your mother? Or is that presumptive and racist of me?”

  “Yeah, no—a little bit.” He stared at the filthy plexiglass divider separating us from the taxi driver. “I stopped imagining her, I don’t know when. When I was little, she was a fantasy. Then, at Lakeville, I had friends with families, and she was always this thing about China. To everyone else. Not to me. I think she must have put it behind her—because she left . . .”

  “I like Li.”

  “I think she would have liked Li. I have no idea why. I didn’t know her, you know? I don’t even remember hearing her voice. I have the idea—my father must have told me this—I have the idea we spent some time by a stream before she died. I turned four that year . . .”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “My father had a portrait of her, done by one of her friends before he met her. Some girly afternoon, I like to think.”

  “Girly?”

  “You know, a picnic beside a river, eating, laughing . . . In the picture, her face was marked on one side by a smudge of paint—or some dirt, maybe, from the muddy riverbank. I tried to lick it off once, and the paper tasted like dust.”

  6

  EVERYONE’S IDEA OF home is accompanied by its own environmental expression of loneliness. Mine is the view from trains in the Northeast. From my window seat on Metro-North, moving east and away from New York City, another summer went by on the other side of the glass. Past Harlem, the silver cars hooked right and the city gave way to steel bridges and glinting water, then the jigsaw sprawl of Westchester, a fortress of stone retaining walls and chain-link fences holding back the encroaching suburbs. The landscape sharpened along the coast, like the cut of the passengers’ suits. Everything was painted in primary colors: blue sky, white clouds, green grass and channels of deeper blue bleeding into Long Island Sound. In the long, narrow back yards behind the train tracks, rusted aluminum sheds stood guard over abandoned swing sets.

  Emerson was asleep in the next seat.

  A familiar melancholy descended on me with the motion of the railcars. During college I’d made the same run on Amtrak more times than I could count, with a cassette tape in my Walkman and my backpack jammed with textbooks and dirty laundry. It was a game for me to pick out figures on the beaches, people walking dogs in the middle of the day or taking a boat out after work. I liked to watch from the window seat, leaning my head against the glass.

  Somewhere around Stamford walls of concrete rose up and chattered with graffiti. Emerson was awake and pointing out the window to the edge of an embankment, where the front half of a plastic Big Wheel trike was suspended in midair.

  “Some kid’s car!” he exclaimed. “How does it just get left there—to tip over like that?”

  He hadn’t said anything more about the vintage car he owned since our trip to the Royalton the previous week, but I’d been thinking about it, especially after I’d found a message on the answering machine in the office a few days later:

  Yes, hello, this is Hélène Moreau. I am trying to reach Beth. I am hoping we might speak again.

  There was a long pause, so long that I thought the message was over, until her voice came through again, hesitantly:

  I would like to . . . well, it would mean a great deal to me if you would return my call.

  The tape was still running.

  I have heard you are very skilled in your area of expertise . . . I wondered if you might be able to help me . . .

  Then she seemed to lose her nerve—

  Thank you.

  As flattering as it was that an artist of her reputation knew anything about my professional skills, I doubted this was what she really wanted to talk to me about. Instead of calling her, I calle
d her gallery.

  “I spoke to Hélène Moreau’s art dealer, Arthur Quint,” I informed Emerson on the train, puzzling over the conversation I’d had with Quint and the gallery assistant.

  “Yeah?” Emerson asked, perking up at the prospect of some gossip.

  “I was curious . . . you know, to see what I could find out.”

  I’d worked for him long enough to know that he’d never object to any intelligence about a rival. He settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, waiting for me to continue.

  “I talked to the assistant, Katya, first, and she said that when Arthur Quint was organizing a Pollock show he wanted some of Moreau’s Speed Paintings for context, and they found out she was still represented by her old dealer in Paris. Well, he was dead, but his gallery . . .”

  The pump in Emerson’s backpack whirred along to the rattling of the train.

  “In the sixties, she lived in Copenhagen,” I went on. “And she did make photographs, it turns out, but they’re not well known. A series of ‘obelisk’ portraits—highly collectible, apparently. She shot them as if they were people.”

  “Obelisks?”

  I nodded. “Like the one erected at Karnak for Queen Hatshepsut, plus all the ‘wandering obelisks’ from Egypt that are all over Rome now, and the one that was stolen from Ethiopia by Mussolini’s army. A lot of time in cemeteries, you would think. But she found them all over the place—on a beach in Sardinia, on the Thames—”

  “What about lighthouses?”

  “There might have been a few of those. Katya said some of the photos were blurry. She got Arthur Quint on the speaker—I used your name, I hope you don’t mind.”

  Emerson allowed me a small grin, confirming my hunch that he’d be flattered.

  “I was trying to warm up to the subject of that car she wants from you, not to be obvious. I started by asking if there were similarities to Lucio Fontana in her Speed Paintings, but Quint said no, Fontana mainly was forcing a three-dimensional space on the viewer.” I made a tent with my fingers. “He wanted them to see paint outside its accepted flatness. The scale, the intent—Quint said Fontana’s work had nothing in common with Hélène’s, except the gesture of slashing.”

  Emerson considered this. “Didn’t she attach brushes to the wheels of cars?”

  “No, well . . . they call them brushes. But he confirmed there was no paint. They were sharp poles, really, welded to what he called ‘knockoff spinners’ on the wheels—these enormous lances. She had them fabricated from steel, to withstand the speeds.”

  “Drive-by stabbings,” Emerson said, looking amused at the thought.

  “She had cages built to support the lengths of canvas, to keep them taut as the cars raced past. He said some of the canvases were practically shredded.”

  Arthur Quint had said more than that. Moreau was uncontainable, he’d said. Those paintings are rapturous. Powerful and mechanical and brutal . . .

  “The woman Katya said they were very Futurismo. Arthur took it up and said the Futurist movement has had an influence on countless artists—how Moreau wanted to express power and sweeping change, and yes, she wanted violence in the paintings, but Fascism as a political program was never her milieu.”

  I could see Emerson was enjoying my impression of Arthur Quint.

  “I finally asked if she was using those old cars again in her work. But he said, ‘No, no, she has always been on a forward trajectory.’ After the Speed Paintings, she did some related canvases—the Pleasure Drive series.”

  “I’ve seen those,” Emerson said derisively. “They’re a bunch of mud tracks glazed with puddles of wine.”

  “I asked, ‘Wasn’t there a particular car she used? A Beacon? Weren’t Beacons very popular then?’ and he said, ‘There were countless cars. And now, in her maturity, she is again working with movement through fabric. It’s a gentler and more ecological expression of motion. Earlier in her artistic career it was speed—’”

  “Speed!” Emerson shouted, erupting from his seat in protest. “She doesn’t know anything about speed.”

  “She didn’t know anything about it then,” I agreed, amazed at how automatically his competitive reflex kicked in. “She wasn’t from some aristocratic family with fast cars, or flying around in jets after the war. Speed was foreign to her, as it was then to most people, according to Arthur Quint. Unless they were rich.”

  At this, Emerson turned sheepish.

  I didn’t say it to him, but I thought I could understand something about how Hélène might have felt.

  “Did he tell you why she wants my car?” Emerson asked impatiently.

  I shook my head.

  A door slammed open and shut behind us, and I heard the click of a metal punch as the ticket taker moved down the aisle. “Darien.”

  We watched from our seats as commuters stepped in and out of the cars to their practiced choreography, then we were in motion once again.

  “Why did you buy it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I know I’ll never drive a car again. I might as well be dead. I’m waiting for the arm of the toll booth to rise, and there’s nothing on the other side.”

  “We’re on a train.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically.”

  He shut down after that.

  “What is it about that car?” I persisted.

  He dismissed my question with a grimace. “I’m freezing.”

  I pulled off my sweater and draped it like a scarf around his leather jacket until the doors opened in Burring Port.

  “I’m not looking forward to this,” he said, limping out onto the platform.

  “What are you not looking forward to?”

  “Telling him.”

  “Telling him?”

  In typical form, Emerson had never said why I was escorting him to visit his father. It hadn’t occurred to me that Lynford Webster might be unaware of his son’s condition.

  “Phone conversations are always really short with us,” he said, surveying the tiny Burring Port train station as if for the first time.

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” I asked.

  “No idea.”

  The air on the platform hit me like a wall, strangely thick and dry. “God, it’s like breathing in powder,” I said, waving to one of the idling taxicabs.

  “I like it,” Emerson protested, shrugging off my sweater. He insisted on riding in the front seat of the taxi, where he turned his baseball cap backward and slumped against the window.

  “I called him a while ago,” he announced when we were a mile or so from Gray Hill, thawing, perhaps, in the powdery summer air. “When he got on the phone I thought: If I tell him, he’s going to ask me if I want one of his friends to write me a recommendation letter into heaven.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “I don’t know.” He glanced at the taxi driver, who was staring ahead impassively.

  A muted sky flickered through the green trees overhead. Emerson’s voice drifted back to me over the seats. “More ask him, I guess. I want to ask him some things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Personal.”

  The taxi turned off the country road and passed under a plain stone arch into the Webster estate. The drive turned sharply to the east and continued through a tall allée of trees that I’d never known was there. About a quarter of a mile along, the road branched into a wide trident.

  “To the left here, please,” Emerson directed the driver.

  A noticeable change came over him as we turned on to the secondary roadway. Abruptly, he pulled himself up in the seat and addressed a challenge to the driver, his face lit with boyish amusement: “Okay—let’s see what you can do!”

  The local drivers all knew the private course was there, to the south, past the empty stables and down toward the Sound. The route continued along the coast briefly before it looped back over some hills to intersect with the main drive. (For all the hospitals, libraries and civic projects fu
nded by Lynford Webster over the years, it was the blind eye he turned to the locals’ use of the racing course that remained his most beloved civic gesture.)

  The taxi driver was a man of about fifty, with the easygoing air of someone who had nothing to prove. He was ignoring Emerson and driving sensibly, treating me and his obviously fragile passenger to a leisurely tour. We continued inland, where the estate was thick with pines and stone walls. The taxi cruised past flowering bushes and a knoll with a stream running on either side. I was enjoying the sightseeing tour until Emerson complained: “We’re not going fast enough.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I want to feel it!”

  I shot a look at the back of his head in response, but now the driver was rising to the bait. He was already accelerating when Emerson leaned in.

  “Come on, you can select a few gears there. You’ve got a V-8 in this, don’t you?”

  The driver nodded.

  “So let’s use it.”

  I was instantly thrown back against my headrest. I reached for the grab handle above the door to steady myself as we raced ahead furiously, with Emerson behaving like a co-driver in one of the auto rallies he made me watch with him on TV.

  “Okay—you’ve got a sharp right coming up here,” he coached. “Second gear. Yes! Yes! Come on! Don’t brake!”

  We approached the curving road out to Long Island Sound, and Emerson turned to me with a look of bliss that made me reach protectively for the old wound on my leg. Then, as if suddenly remembering the driver, he resumed his coaching efforts: “Come on—nail it! Nail it! Full throttle!”

  I managed to roll down my window an inch when we reached the beach road, letting the dry wind slip in through a crack, enjoying myself a little more now that I wasn’t being thrown around the curves. The taxi rattled along the shoreline like a plane preparing for takeoff. Out on the Sound, only a handful of sailboats were tempted by the strange afternoon weather, with its powdery heat and shifting winds. Then we turned from the coast on to a road that climbed back through the woods, running down an unpleasant series of twists and turns that brought Emerson to delighted attention in his seat.