Face (12 page)

“Toilet paper and Tupperware were ideas first,” he informed me one day when I was home sick and everyone else was gone. He
stood back to inspect a scramble of wire hangers on his workbench. “Clocks and crossbows, too. Chinese invented those, you
know.”

“And toothbrushes and spaghetti and pancakes,” I said. Henry had told me that. The Chinese were geniuses, according to my
brother, and that genius ran in our veins. I think Henry was the only one in the family who truly believed Dad one day would
make us rich.

“Toothbrushes. Spaghetti and pancakes.” My father stared at me. I nodded, smiled, but he didn’t smile back.

I looked down the street toward the Six Companies building and saw Don and Julie Hsu kissing again. That was because they
were ABCs— American-born Chinese. Mainlanders never kissed in public, and they thought it disgraceful if anyone did. But when
it came to making families, that was something else. After Don and Julie were married, the old folks would be all over them
to have babies, and if they were like most young couples—ABCs or not—they would soon comply. That would put a stop to the
kissing, but the babies would keep coming. At least in that respect, my parents fit in: three kids, and I
never
saw them kiss.

“Did you used to have Chinese friends?” I asked Dad. “When you still lived in China?”

“Hmm?” He twisted a strand of wire around a corkscrew.

“Did you play with neighborhood kids when you were little? Did you think you’d marry a Chinese lady and stay in China forever?”

He stood up and began to fumble through a box of tools. No answer.

“Daddy!”

“Mm?”

“Why don’t you ever tell us about China?”

He stood motionless for a second or two, his face gone flat and vacant. “Nothing worth telling about,” he said, and resumed
his fiddling.

Across the street, a couple of older boys were squatting on the pavement, a square box top and two tiny bamboo cages between
them. They flicked open the gates to the cages and shook the contents onto the cardboard. Two dark specks let out an unnatural
screech. The boys watched, motionless at first, then more animated. The specks came together, one boy shoved the other. They
stared at the box top, where one of the specks no longer moved.

“Ah, shee-it!” The first boy raised his hand to his head as if to tear out his hair.

Old Mr. Wen, who some of the neighborhood kids called the Hundred Year Old Man, came shuffling from his stoop down the block.
He
patted the irate boy’s shoulder. The boy reached into his pocket, handed his opponent a coin. Then Old Wen had the loser pick
up his cage and follow him back to his building. A few minutes later they emerged from Wen’s doorway. When the boy lifted
his cage, its new occupant let out a triumphal chirrup, and the boy grinned straight up at me.

I tried to lift the window, but it jammed. A second later the pigeon that had caught the smile flew off the rail of the fire
escape, and the boy turned back to his game.

“One good idea is all,” Dad mumbled as he worked. “Good enough to stop her jabbering, anyway. Jesus! The great connoisseur—should
have married goddamn Richard Avedon.” He looked at the wall. “One idea. That would get us out of here… maybe then she’d give
up the rest.”

“The rest of what?” The boy had long arms and a short neck. Like a spider. His cricket won this time.

My father picked up a pencil and sharpened it. The shavings spiraled down to his wastebasket. I wanted to believe he’d confide
in me, entrust me with secrets that no one else knew, but he acted as if he hadn’t heard, or maybe he didn’t want to confide
in me, after all.

I was trying to decide whether to repeat the question when he replied, “Your mother wants her brilliant, young artist back.
She doesn’t realize he was the fool.”

Mum, for her part, spent most days at the Foucault Gallery on East Sixty-third Street, two blocks from Central Park. It was
identified only by a polished brass plaque, and customers had to make an appointment to be admitted. Inside, plush vanilla-malt
carpeting absorbed noise so well that ordinary conversations were reduced to whispers. That was intentional, my mother said,
so the art would speak louder than the people who came to view it.

Those people had names like Vanderbilt and Amsterdam, but they couldn’t compete with the pictures, carpet or no carpet. There
were paintings of dogs with the bodies of women, men with apples for
heads, trees studded with babies erupting in flame, and clocks melting into the sea. Those filled the first floor. On the
second were drawings and prints of those same unsettling images in pieces or variation, all personally selected by Mr. Foucault,
the gallery’s owner, who spent most of his time and a small portion of his enormous wealth buying art in the same capitals
of Europe that filled my mother’s dreams. Mum said he looked exactly like the screech owl at the Central Park Zoo. I couldn’t
imagine a screech owl loose in a place like this, but my mother seemed right at home.

I got to watch her in action on our Ladies’ Days. That’s what she called the occasional preschool days when I accompanied
her to work because Dad was too busy to look after me.

She’d make me climb into one of those precious Florence Eiseman outfits that made me feel about two—like the dress with rabbits
eating cherries and the matching hat with an elastic band that cut underneath my chin. She’d say I looked adorable. I’d tell
her I felt stupid and beg to wear my blue jeans, but I never stood a chance. As she put it, she wasn’t about to let her customers
see a daughter of hers dressed like a little farm boy.

Those customers didn’t stand much more of a chance with her than I did. As soon as they entered the gallery she could tell
exactly how much they were worth and whether they’d part with a penny. She knew when to keep her distance and when to cozy
a sale, could sense which newcomers had to be taught and which would keep her on her toes. She informed me of these talents
on a regular basis, so although I was too little to know about business, I knew very well how proud Mum felt about her work.

She was especially proud of the “special collection” she’d started on the third floor. This trove of photographs was her idea,
her selection, and would become her great success. Even, as she often remarked, if it was bought with Foucault money.

When I was five years old, what impressed me about the photographs was not that my mother had picked them, but how weird they
were. She had work by Diane Arbus and Harry Callahan, W.Eugene
Smith, Bill Brandt and Robert Frank, but only the strangest frames, in which people looked not quite human. As strange as
the artwork downstairs, only more vivid and disturbing because they were real. Who could believe a liquid clock, but that
photograph of a woman with two heads really made me wonder. Those days in the gallery I’d set up my spot in the back room
on the third floor, and when I wasn’t coloring or playing paper dolls, I went through the drawers of prints, trying to decide
if I liked them.

Once I was old enough to handle art properly—clean hands on the edges only and no close breathing or sneezing—Mum encouraged
this exploration. She’d tried to interest Anna and Henry in the gallery when they were very young, but both had rebelled against
the hours of imposed quiet and the boredom of nothing but visual stimulation for entertainment, so the fact that I was never
bored by art relieved and delighted my mother.

Between customers and phone calls she would introduce me to her newest pieces. “You see, darling, now he’s playing with light
and color à la Monet?” The photograph looked to me like a picture of a Bowery bum stretched out on a park bench at dawn. “And
yet it also has that social relevance. A strong Lautrec influence. Mm, really quite painterly. The shadow contrast with the
warm colors and tones. Worth at least three hundred, since he’s printing a limited run. He’s young, but give him another ten
years and I’m willing to bet he’ll be one of the country’s top twenty.”

Then she’d heave a sigh. A meaningful look.

“Your father was at this stage when I met him. He was going to be the next Steichen.”

It happened dozens of times. Just like that. And it always took me by surprise.

My mother arrived at my apartment two weeks to the day after Anna’s visit. Miffed that I hadn’t formally invited her, she
gave me what
she considered due time, then took the initiative. Naturally she was horrified.

“You can’t really expect to do any decent work all cramped in like this. I wish you’d let me call Scott and see if he knows
of any lofts— you could still live here if you insist, but maybe you could share work space…”

Her mouth opened and shut, a bright gash of lipstick. The muscles in her neck stood out. She was still holding her briefcase,
a well-worn Italian calfskin tote that my father had given her before I was born. I pointed.

“You’ve got something to show me?”

“I thought you might like to see what all the fuss is about. Since you won’t come to the gallery, I’ve brought it to you.”

“A house call.”

“You could say that.”

All the fuss, as I’d read in
The New Yorker, New York,
and the
Times,
was Mum’s second ground-floor photo show, by a young black artist named Delong Dupriest. “Cultural Allegories,”
Artforum
dubbed his work.

Mum opened the binder to a reprint showing a fat white butcher surrounded by sides of dark, glistening beef. Laid in transparency
over this image was a Ku Klux Klan Dragon presiding at the lynching of six black men. The work was in black and white. Of
course.

“This piece is six feet square. I sold it on the first day, can you imagine? Twelve thousand dollars. Gerard was fit to be
tied. I sold out my first one-man, too, you know. Scott’s show?”

“Smashing.” I closed the book without looking further.

“Smashing.” She narrowed her eyes at me the way she used to when I said I
felt
too sick for school. “Well, then. Let’s see what you’ve been up to!”

She did not mean my eight-by-ten product shots of the grinders, scrapers, holders, and splicers that she was conspicuously
ignoring.

“I don’t have anything ready.”

“Oh, please. You can show me.”

“I’ve been too busy with the job to print.”

She stared at the empty mantelpiece for a moment as if she could see something hanging or leaning there that I could not.
Then she put away the binder and stood up brusquely, grabbed my hair and lifted it this way and that.

“You’d be happier
if
you got all this stuff off your shoulders. Lighter, bouncier, less time-consuming.” She pulled just this side of too tight.

For the first time I noticed the precise flecks of yellow and green that give her gray eyes their fire.

“You’re twenty-eight years old, Maibelle. This is your time, your chance. If you don’t pull yourself together in the next
couple of years, you’re going to lose it all.” She yanked tighter, hurting my scalp. “Just like your father did.”

“You despise Dad, don’t you?”

“Maibelle!” She released my hair.

The sensation was what I imagine a dandelion might feel when its white fluff blows away. I rose from my seat. She had come
uninvited. She’d insulted me and twisted the knife in my father’s back as she had my whole life, over and over.

“You can’t make us all blame him for disappointing you.”

She sat rigid on Marge Gramercy’s sofa and clenched both fists until the skin pulled white across her knuckles. She glowered
at my equipment across the room, then stood up quickly, haphazardly, banging her knee on the trunk I used for a coffee table.
It must have hurt, but she ignored the pain, collected her purse and hat. I was astonished to see shelves of tears in her
eyes when she looked at me again.

“You don’t know what’s it’s like to be married to a stranger for thirty years.”

“I know what it’s like to be his daughter. He’s not a stranger to me.”

The tears started to rise again. She squeezed her eyes shut and stepped into the entryway to hide them. I heard the clasp
of her purse snap open. She blew her nose. Her back straightened and she spoke over her shoulder.

“The current issue of
Interiors
is devoted to small apartments. I’ll send it to you.”

She was gone.

The next day I asked my father down. I called and made it official because I knew he’d never drop by on his own. Beyond that,
I’d been bluffing. My father was as much a stranger to me as to anyone. But when I’d said those words to my mother, something
seemed to flip inside me, and I decided he couldn’t stay that way.

“Mum wanted me to give you this,” were his first words on arrival. The festive magazine cover illuminated the dim hallway,
but it seemed to weigh on him. He was breathing hard from the climb up the stairs.

I took the
Interiors
and his umbrella. “Come on in. Sit down.”

He lit a cigarette, but did not sit. He stood before my orange crate shelves and picked up one object after another, turning
them between his square-tipped fingers, measured their quality with the care of an Italian matron testing plum tomatoes. I
could almost hear his thoughts turning as well, methodical and focused sternly on the assortment of plastic and metal and
Velcro components each item represented. Stainless-steel stovetop burner covers:
Came up with this three years ago, tossed it in the trash.
Automatic hands-free cheese grater:
Looks good, won’t work.
“Instant” wine opener:
Cheap copy of the one I sold to Hammacher Schlemmer ten years ago.
He lifted a sheet of peel-and-stick safety reflectors, shook his head, and put it down. How
could I have missed this one?