Face (7 page)

Anna’s wrong. Memories matter. And not just for tracking time or holding an album in your hands when everyone who ever loved
you is gone. Memories contain our secrets. They answer our questions. They tell us who we are and sometimes what we need.
They give Anna’s “timeless, eternal present” a reason to exist by making history.

Too bloody relevant.

I can only guess what my father meant by that. Childhood in Shanghai. College in New York. Active duty as a photojournalist
working the Pacific theater during World War II. Except for that one box of robes and brushes, his past lives were buried
by the time I made my entrance. The dad who watched me growing up was a tinkerer, a maker of laborsaving devices. He never
touched a camera, never discussed his memories. And my mother said he’d destroyed the photographs that once had made him famous.

I was a freshman in college before I saw any of those pictures. One of my teachers, eager to find out if I knew why Dad had
withdrawn into obscurity, showed me some clippings she’d collected during the thirties and forties. Strange, anomalous shots.
War pictures, only instead of showing the military side, they showed ordinary people in places that didn’t make sense. Children
running, screaming down streets strewn with shards of glass, bomb craters, and outrageous feathered and flowered hats. A white
man in spats and tails cradling a bloodied black infant. A woman with a gold stud in her nose clutching a pig in the front
of an army jeep. A tall blond man intently lighting a cigarette as a group of ragged Chinese rush past with a headless body
in a wheelbarrow.

As I stared at the images my father had captured all those years ago I had the feeling my skin was lifting from my body, my
mind was being rearranged. I recognized these pictures. I knew them. They were my dreams. My nightmares. Not exactly, of course.
But so close.

My teacher fired her theories at me. Because the scenes my father had witnessed were too horrifying? Or had he gotten too
close to his subjects? Maybe he felt his work was misinterpreted when it appeared in print? Or he somehow felt he’d failed
to capture what he was striving for?

Her words blurred together. I must have seen these pictures before. I’d felt the exact helplessness and outrage, the same
grief and love that seemed to engrave each frame. These were the terrors that, night after night, roused me screaming and
weeping from sleep.

The next day I called my mother at the gallery and described the shots to her. She was very excited to hear that my teacher
knew of Joe, that she had these pictures, even if they were just tear sheets. But, no, she insisted. I couldn’t possibly have
seen them before. Not without extensive research on my part.

“Probably just déjà vu, Maibelle. You are your father’s daughter, after all. In a way, those pictures are in your blood. If
you can tap into them, even intuitively, it will be to your advantage. God only knows why he quit, but in his time Joe was
a master. You must never forget that. His talent—those images—are your legacy.”

T
ommy Wah was Henry’s best friend and his partner in crime. The high point, which I believe may also have launched the slow
death of their friendship, came when they were in sixth grade.

They’d worked it out with Jimmy Yang, whose father was an herbalist. He supplied a powdered aphrodisiac used in chicken breeding.
Tommy and Henry sneaked into the teachers’ lounge and dumped the drug into the coffee urn, and when Mrs. Dixie returned from
lunch, a large rooster stood on her desk to receive the effects of the powder.

The experiment was a dud. Mrs. Dixie promptly sent for the janitor, Mr. Liberty, and told him to return the bird to Mr. Wah.
Then, rather than look for the individual pranksters, Mrs. Dixie punished the whole class. The reward for mischief of this
sort, she told them, was a very special medicine. And with that, she escorted Henry and Tommy down to the teachers’ lounge,
instructed them to carry the coffee urn back to the classroom.

“It usually tastes like the sludge of death.” She motioned the boys to lift the urn straight, not to spill. “But today it’s
got a special flavor— tastes just like the syrup of reason.”

The class grudgingly drank the brew without naming the bad boys (Henry and Tommys popularity saved their skins) and, incredibly,
not one person developed a sudden, uncontrollable urge to mate with a chicken. No one told on Mrs. Dixie, either, because
to tell that this teacher made her students drink poison would beg the question “Why?” which, in turn, would lead to lost
face. Since Mrs. Dixie had elected not to entangle parents or the authorities, her students accepted her justice—and the mild
runs induced by the coffee elixir.

Henry was just glad he hadn’t had to deal with the two-step of Mum’s rage and Dad’s resignation. After all, it was only a
joke.

“What if old Dixie-belle had really gotten the hots for that rooster?” he said. “That would’ve been worth getting caught!”

He and Tommy sprawled on Henry’s bed, sorting baseball cards. I was allowed to sit and watch because, as long as I kept quiet,
my presence didn’t count.

“Better it didn’t work,” said Tommy, whose father had been so astounded to see his prize bantam in the arms of the school’s
black janitor that that night he lectured Tommy about thieving and ordered him to spend the next week memorizing Dr. Sun Yat
Sen’s
First Steps in Democracy.

“Aw, c’mon. It would’ve been a pisser. Gimme Roger Maris.”

Tommy tossed him the card. “I mean it. Jimmy thought it was a joke, too, but if the stuff had really worked, his dad would
have lost too much face.”

“But if it worked, it should be great for business!”

“It’s not supposed to work on people, you jerk. It’s meant for chickens. And it’s Jimmy’s dad’s job to see his medicines are
used right. If his own kid fools around with the powder, it doesn’t make him look too good.”

“So?” Henry said.

“So people stop talking to him. The tongs tell everybody stay away from his shop. He’s got to give them big money to get his
face back. And Jimmy’s got to pay, too.”

“Yeah? How?”

“You know. Going to Chinese school. Helping in the store instead of hanging out at the arcade. Being a dutiful son.”

“Sounds pretty dumb to me. There.” Henry patted one last card into the box before him. “American League, 1961. A full set
of Topps. Bet you can’t beat that.”

“Bet you don’t have a single card with a Chinese ballplayer.”

“There aren’t any.”

“So why d’you think I’d even want a full set of Topps American League 1961?”

“Because in a couple of years it’ll be worth a lot of money, you dodo.”

Tommy got up and crossed the room. When he reached the door, he turned and said, “Why you don’t understand about face is because
you have no face to lose.”

I’ve been spotting him ever since I moved back. A wide, dark head bobbing up behind the peaches in the Bedford Street fruit
stand. The chiseled face with Ray-Bans in a parked Cadillac on Broadway, or that Asian couple leaning close over engagement
rings in a midtown diamond store. A man in a kung fu studio, eyes fixed with such complete concentration that I was absolutely
positive. But people change between age fifteen and twenty-nine. I held my distance because I knew I wouldn’t be sure of Tommy
Wah if he tapped me on the shoulder.

When I called this morning, though, I knew his voice at once. Smooth and cautious, like waves against long grass.

“Maibelle. Where are you?”

“New York.”

“When you didn’t answer my letter, I thought—”

“You thought correctly. I guess you haven’t found anyone yet.”

“I’ve only just signed the publishing contract.” The waves rippled into whitecaps. “I was hoping you’d turn up.”

“I’ve moved back.”

“Oh.” He sounded confused. Possibly disappointed. “Your address sounded so perfect. Sunridge Street. Playa del Rey. It sounded
rich. Happy.”

“It sounded like planes taking off and landing. And used condoms washed up on the beach. I moved from there years ago.”

“I see.” He clearly didn’t at all.

“Look, I don’t know what pictures of mine you saw—”

“Landscapes. Snow.”

“I thought so. No people. You want people, don’t you? I don’t do people.”

“I have a feeling about this, Maibelle. Or I wouldn’t have written you.”

“Those snowflakes were an eternity ago, and I never wrote you back. Why’d you call again?”

“I saw you from a bus. You were with some blond guy in the Village.”

I glanced out the window, half expecting to catch the glint of a distant telescope. I yanked the curtain.

“Then you knew I was here.”

“I figured you were visiting—I wanted to catch you before you left.”

I was going to be firm about this. Turn him down flat. I’d go back. I’d have to, it was all of a part, like a search-and-destroy
mission. But not this way. Not with a witness. Or an escort. Certainly not someone who him self might have been part of the
problem. But what he was saying now threw me. Random coincidence? I didn’t believe in random coincidence.

“No,” I said.

He didn’t answer right away. From outside my curtain came the shouts of children, car horns, the rumble of the BMT. The return
address on his letter had been Pearl Street. Chinatown. But the silence at his end of the phone was deafening. There was no
silence in Chinatown. Not that I remembered.

“Meet me,” he said. “Do me that favor.”

I closed my eyes but failed to conjure his face.

“This afternoon,” he said.

“I’m busy.

“Where you going to be?”

I had only the vaguest of plans to visit my Thirty-fourth Street discounter. “Midtown.”

“Empire State Building at two?”

“I’m afraid of heights. Besides, it’s for tourists.”

“One of my favorite places, too. And it’s a cloudy day. I’ll meet you
at the elevator, we can ride up together.”

I could have been more creative about my afternoon agenda, or said I don’t grant favors to men I don’t know. I could have
stood him up. Instead, I arrived early to meet this old neighbor turned stranger who’d invited me to the top of a skyscraper
on a day with zero visibility.

The lobby echoed with the shuffle of feet, the gossip of idle ticket takers. Plush ropes striped the empty space in front
of huge gleaming elevators. When I was six, my mother brought me here one morning on the way up to her gallery. The elevators
seemed as big as monsters then, and the wind on the observation platform made me cry.

Today I waited five minutes, then turned back through the revolving doors, out to the grim June murk—and a pair of dazzling,
platter blue eyes. He had a smile the width of the whole back forty. “Excuse me, ma’am.” A perfect summertime drawl.

He brushed my elbow in his haste to follow a barrel-chested Japanese woman wearing flip-up sunglasses. They disappeared into
the Greek deli across the street.

“I’m sorry, Maibelle.”

A shadow fell and the weight lifted from my arms.