Face (33 page)

But I also know I have to keep going. Marge tells me so. And the White Witch. She and her children fill the mantelpiece. Li
lied, she assures me. The white witches did not cast their children out to wander forever in the ether between the living
and the dead; they were good mothers, watchful mothers. The men simply misunderstood. China men. White men. Those were the
two worlds between which the women were forced to wander with their children. But the children bore the blood of both worlds,
and that gave them the right of safe passage.
The children are the lucky ones, their mother reassures me, if they could only see.

I must be starting to see. Harriet hasn’t called the police on me in months, and my recurrent nightmares have stopped. These
new dreams about Johnny and Marge are disturbing, but I wake up quickly, before the terror builds. No screaming or crying,
just a quietly pounding heart. Once or twice I’ve actually tried sleeping with the lights out and made it through to morning.

The why is harder to figure. I’m at last allowing myself to accept—even embrace—these memories of Li and Johnny, Johnny’s
death; could that be the miracle cure? Or is it that I’ve finally disproven my falling dream and made peace with the White
Witch? I have to accept the possibility that I may never know.

Anna’s curious letter remains another mystery. Given my sister’s fits and starts, anything is possible, but I persist in believing
Henry must somehow have let my secret slip and she read into it more than was warranted.

Aside from my father’s refusal to look at my work, the rest of the family front has been quiet. With Foucault—and now Coralie—back
in Europe, my mother is channeling her energy into motivating Henry toward an apartment and job. She’s giving me the silent
treatment, for which I am truly grateful. If she knew of my work with Tai, she’d be all over me. She’d demand to view the
contacts, recommend cropping, which to enlarge, which negatives to burn and which to print as Delong-sized monoliths. She’d
go on about how she “sees” the exhibit. Or else she’d lay them all quietly aside and say with that restrained quaver in her
voice that it’s good I’ve finally started working again, and I’d spend the rest of the month in a funk. Because as disgusting
as I consider my mother’s betrayal of Dad, as willing as I am to go behind her back to seek his reviews, I still dread Mum’s
criticism. Especially now, when I genuinely believe my work is strong and getting better.

I can say that with some assurance, because I’m finally developing the reams of film I’ve collected over these weeks. Of course,
I’ve been in the darkroom all along printing up my Noble work, but I kept putting
off the Chinatown footage. Not wanting to face the potential ghosts, I suppose. Not wanting to break Tai’s faith. Or my parents’.

But now I’ve developed it all, from those first shots of the bus protest to the footage I took this morning of
gong xi fang,
tenement rooms divided by sheets into cubbyholes where as many as fifteen men sleep like caged mice in apartments smaller
than mine. The contacts hang from clothespins, still glistening from the bath, and even in this miniature format some frames—the
pinch-faced men and women with downcast eyes—make me want to burn the lot. But others, in which the subjects have held on
to their dignity, grant me a reprieve. The mahjongg queen in the Mets sweatshirt flashing her mountainous winnings. Two skinny
young men with their pants rolled up, feet clad in farmer’s sandals, like eager novitiates at the Division Street Off-Track
Betting Parlor. Lin Cheng’s round, demonic laugh (it would make a
wonderful
cookbook cover) and Tai, with his handsome face halved into shadow and light. The others I’ve sneaked of him, squatting beside
a cluster of girls playing a game with chalk and pebbles, or trading jokes with sidewalk vendors amid cymbal-clapping pandas
and stuffed pink dogs.

I’m experienced enough to know that Tai’s photogenic features are not the only reason his pictures are turning out right.
It’s been almost three months since Jed Moffitt claimed the honor of being my last affair.

I slide a negative of Tai taking his stage bow into the carrier and turn on the enlarger. I adjust knobs until his image fills
the easel. A strong-featured face even in normal light, its contours leap upward in the glow of the stage lanterns. I fiddle
with the focus, softening the lines of his chin and jaw. His eyes seem to widen, his mouth to move. The silk banners stretch
sideways behind him in a blur. His hair slips into his eyes, disturbed by the removal of his old man’s mask, which he holds
like a shield in front of his chest.

I was a child when I posed Tai and Johnny Madison as adversaries and gave Johnny the winning hand. That must be why it’s so
hard to accept what I feel for Tai as desire, but I think of him. I linger on him.

I remember things about him that I can’t account for: the smile that
seems to flicker on his lips; the way he rubs the tips of his thumbs together when he’s thinking, or casually tosses one leg
over the other when sitting to hear a story. That he works best at five in the morning and would be a Quaker if he chose any
religion, because the Quakers really do practice nonviolence. I think of the low, gentle wash of his voice as he told me these
things. I’ve spent more time with Tai than I have with any lover, and yet the moments of intimacy have been only tentative
and fleeting.

I snap off the light, place a sheet of paper on the easel. His face reappears and I make my decision.

When I invited him to my apartment to view the test prints, I half expected him to make some lewd remark: “Is that like coming
up to see your etchings?” He didn’t. He never would have, anyway. But that was my projection.

We had spent the last two hours at a day-care center on Henry Street listening to children’s tales of harrowing border crossings
and impoverished refugee camps. “Let’s walk,” was all Tai said.

So we walked, although the sky had the color and texture of an ocean storm. Gusts of wind sent awnings rippling in waves,
and as we reached Houston Street the pent-up rain let loose a downpour. We had no rain gear, not even jackets, as it had been
hot and muggy earlier. All around us people were retreating into doorways for shelter, but without giving the matter any real
thought I reached over and tagged Tai’s hand.

“You’re on!” I shouted, running.

It was a lunatic move. We were each carrying a heavy burden of equipment. At every corner cars and buses lurched with spastic
imprecision, and the downpour intermittently gave way to hailstones that rolled like marbles. But once possessed by the competitive
impulse, I was its captive. I heard the horns and screeching tires from underwater. I felt the rain thick in my eyes, my clothes
plastered against my body, but I felt more strongly Tai’s presence behind me closing in tighter,
harder, threatening to overtake and tackle me. What had started as a game acquired an edge of panic.

I ran head down, arms stroking the air like mad fish fins for block after block, never looking back. By the time I finally
turned the last corner I was deafened by the roar of my own breath.

He touched my shoulder before I could get the key into the lock. I jumped as if he’d stabbed me.

“You won, Maibelle.”

I was panting too hard to talk. He didn’t even sound winded. I forced the key and pushed the door, but he held me from moving
forward.

“Someday,” he said to the back of my neck, “I’d like to know what that was all about.”

There was a rushing sound above us, rhythmic thumps of feet bounding down the stairs. Larraine Moseley burst into the light.
Her pink jersey catsuit showed, skintight, through a transparent slicker.

“Oh, gee. Hi!” She came to an abrupt halt at the sight of Tai and flashed me a wide-eyed grin. “God, dontcha just love this
weather!” And with that, she bounced down the steps to the street and a waiting cab.

I reached up and removed Tai’s hand from my shoulder. Moments later we stood laughing in front of the mirror in my apartment.

“We look like drowned muskrats.”

“Not drowned. Just soggy.” He stared at me in the mirror for a long moment. In the reflection we were touching. “Your teeth
are chattering, Mei-bi. Better get into some dry clothes.”

Instead I went searching for towels and a pair of pants and T-shirt that Henry had left behind. I expected to find Tai snooping
among my things when I returned (in his place, I’d have wanted to spy), but he was staring out the window.

“Look.”

I followed his gaze through the streaming glass to Greenwich Avenue. In the downpour the beams of headlights quivered like
shafts of silver, and the storefronts had the watery glow of aquariums. Between
these pockets of light the darkness was bleak and sinister with the trees in the old lady’s garden rising like giant toadstools.

I handed Tai the towels. “Weather does strange things, doesn’t it? In college I took a series of photographs of a children’s
jungle gym after a blizzard. First thick and soft, all padded with snow. Then draped with icicles. After it rained and froze
again, it looked like glass tubing. The thing was solid steel but it was as if the weather kept trying to turn it into something
else.”

Tai was silent a moment rubbing his hair until it stood in soft points all over his head. The movement was so abrupt and vigorous
that I regretted everything I’d just said. How pretentious I must sound! From her perch on the mantel the White Witch caught
my eye and frowned.

Tai dropped the towel and combed his hair with his fingers. He spoke quietly, speculatively. “I’d like to see those pictures
sometime.”

“They’re gone,” I lied. “That’s probably the only reason I think they were any good. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and
all.”

He accepted my brother’s clothes and moved toward the bathroom, but when he reached the threshold he turned. “It’s not losing
something you value that causes heartbreak, Maibelle, but refusing to let anything take its place.”

For the next hour Tai pored over my pictures for his book. I made tea and drank it. He turned up all the lights and spread
the prints out on the floor. He made piles. He squinted and pursed his lips, compared two, three, four prints at a time, then
reshuffled them like cards. He squatted and bounced on the balls of his bare feet in my brother’s too-short pants. He sipped
his tea without saying a word, shook his head, and moved his lips. Reached, regrouped the pictures and stared.

Looking over his shoulder, I kept seeing my father’s images overshadowing mine, like Delong Dupriest transparencies. I looked
up and caught the White Witch’s gaze. Marge. My father pursing his mouth around the word “No.”

It was crowded. Far too crowded in here.

“Well?”

Tai looked up as if he’d forgotten I was there. He braced his elbows on his knees and clasped his fingers beneath his chin.
He smiled.

The phantom onlookers abruptly retreated.

“Well?” I said again.

He shook his head so the still-damp threads of hair fell forward. “I’m sorry. You just sounded so combative—so defensive and
tough. Like you used to.” Still smiling, he unfolded his hands and touched his fingers to his lips. His nails grew wide and
strong from perfect, circular moons and ended square with his fingertips. I couldn’t take my eyes off them, or think of anything
else.

“Mei-bi.” He unfolded himself until he was looking, just slightly, down at me. “You’ve caught their dignity—their face. I
was afraid you wouldn’t be able to get past their fear.”

“That’s the point of your book, isn’t it? To get past that.”

“Yes. But stories can be told in secret, names changed. Photographs can’t be disguised.”

I thought of my postgraduate wandering shots. Transmogrifications, Roxy used to call them. It was the longest word she’d ever
found a use for, she told me. I said to call them disguises.

“Besides,” I said, “I’m an outsider.”

“Maibelle, stop it!” The touch of his hands on my arms rattled me. I couldn’t look at his face. “Outsider. Insider. Those
are roles. Positions you take in your own life, not in the world around you. Don’t you see? The real dividing line has nothing
to do with the shape of your eyes or face, what language you speak. It’s inside you—are you living your life or just hiding
behind that camera of yours!” He pulled away.

He had long, thin, almost bony feet with the same strong squared-off nails. They squeezed the floor as they moved across it,
the bare wood sighing in return.

“That sounds dumb,” he said. “But it’s the way I feel about my writing—a way to establish my own position, to find where I
fit. Sometimes the only way to find out where you truly belong is to try out different voices. I think photography—the kind
you’re doing now—is your voice.”

He had his back to me, was standing in front of the shelves of gadgets where I’d left the cutout picture of Marge Gramercy’s
weeping shepherd. At some point while he was talking, the rain had stopped.

I’d asked Tai once how he got his subjects to reveal their stories. He said the secret to trust is to ease in slowly, the
way the matchmaker in Li’s story about the pearl-sewn shirt had eased himself into the young wife’s life, first winning her
friendship, then her confidence, and only gradually her complete trust. I pointed out that she’d then betrayed that trust
by sneaking the silver trader in to rape the young wife, but Tai refused to accept that reading. He insisted the wife had
been starved for sex and luckier to love two men than never to love at all. The discussion quickly escalated to a verbal brawl
as I became convinced that the old woman’s meddling had destroyed the young wife’s life and Tai argued for Li’s view of passion’s
dark side. No pleasure without pain, or true love without risk.