Face (34 page)

“Only fools and the very brave love with all their hearts,” he’d said. “Most people prefer the safety of faking it.”

“So you persuade all these people to love you and then lay bare the most painful moments of their lives.”

“To trust me. Trust is only a prelude to love.”

I thought of my mother’s cynical analysis. “A prelude to love? Or to deception?”

I’d never trusted any of my lovers enough to let them view my work. But Tai, I reminded myself now as I felt for hard edges
at the back of my closet, was not my lover.

Before I granted myself time to reconsider, we were sitting on Marge Gramercy’s couch with my portfolio between us.

They were all there, like strands of hair or torn ticket stubs or dried blood on the upholstery—evidence. The fractured obsessiveness
of the single, wall-sized eye. The insistence on turning objects into symbols, landscapes into some indecipherable code. Even
those high school yearbook shots, like probes that somehow managed to dig beyond the surface of my subjects to expose my own
anxiety.

I stopped Tai’s hand. He hadn’t said a word and didn’t now, but looked up with a noncommittal frown.

“Mistake. I can’t stand to look at this stuff. I should burn it, you know? My father was the family genius. I was always trying
to prove how artistic I was so people would say I was as good as him, but that sort of thinking makes you so pretentious—”
I was babbling, pulling the book from his grip, stuffing loose prints inside and zipping.

He slid one hand under the black leather binder, placed the other on top, and lifted it out of my arms.

“Please. I’d like to see the rest.” He looked into me as he spoke with a quiet deliberation that was as reassuring as warm
milk. He turned to the place we’d left off, an abrupt shift from the vacant freeze of mid-western nature to the shots I’d
taken in the first weeks after returning to Manhattan.

For a time I’d haunted the abandoned lower West Side Drive shooting ice-encrusted litter, lunchtime joggers breathing steam
at the World Trade Center, weird cloud formations hanging over the Palisades. The backs of a couple embracing in the middle
of an otherwise empty six-lane highway. I was imitating a photographer, trying to get my hand back in, and each frame was
technically admirable, composition correct, light exactingly balanced. But the images had a numbing oppressiveness to them,
as if a great slab of granite hovered just above frame.

I shuddered. This was only seven months ago. I could still smell and taste the bitter winds that had swirled up off the river,
still feel the wet sting of cold on my fingers as I fumbled for these shots. But not the desolation. I remembered it. I no
longer felt it.

The last photographs—test prints and contacts—were not in sleeves but loose, stuck into the back of the binder. They’d all
been shot with my father’s Leica.

An old lady wept in the ground-floor window of a Greenwich Village brownstone. The same old lady laughing from a distance,
arm curved upward, a blur of feathers and flapping wings. The young Chinese face of a woman screaming. A boy with the deadened
stare of a
killer. White-painted masks floating like moths above a field of black and green silk.

From the expression on Tai’s face as he closed the book I could tell he knew this was tricky. Had he praised this work—even
as he’d praised the other—I’d have hurled the portfolio out the window. If he’d dismissed it, even jokingly, I’d have thrown
him
out.

Instead, he said, “You have a beautiful voice, Mei-bi.”

“Thank you.” I said it without apology. Without evasion. I took the work from him but left it in plain view.

“What happened to all that stuff your family used to keep in the basement?” Tai asked after we’d spent a few minutes dodging
each other’s gaze.

“What stuff?”

“Things of your grandparents from China. Henry showed me once.”

The question took me by surprise, the more so since I thought Anna and I were the only ones who’d ever looked into that box.

“Why?”

“Your photographs reminded me, for some reason… Everything handed down through my family burned in the fire.”

He was looking across the room at the White Witch.

“What fire?”

“A few years after you left. It gutted the downstairs—and the basement. It’s not important, I was just curious.”

He picked up his wet clothes from the back of the chair where he’d laid them after changing.

“Wait,” I said. “Show-and-tell night. Why not?”

I’d kept that old pasteboard box with me all through college, through my wonderings and back. Like a totem or heirloom. Yet,
I’d rarely looked inside since the day I salvaged it, just before my family left Chinatown.

“I was terrified of that basement,” I said as Tai removed the disintegrating twine and tape. “Those bare dangling lightbulbs,
the rickety stairs, wire storage cages. Your chickens squawking. But the worst was
that hole to the second basement—Henry had me convinced a bogeyman lived there.”

“Good old Henry.”

“I had this idea my parents would throw the box out—or leave it behind when we moved. I don’t know why but that really upset
me.”

“So you decided to save it.” The box remained closed, Tai’s hands quiet on the flaps. “Even though you were scared to go alone.”

“I stomped my feet, turned on every light. But there was this scuffling sound from the stairwell. Like a big rat, maybe two.
Then nothing. I got the box and started to walk, but slowly, no sudden moves, you know?”

Tai nodded.

“I kept staring at the stairway to the second basement, but finally, when nothing more happened, I convinced myself I was
being a fool. I laughed out loud.”

And then, as if on cue, up out of that pit had risen a disembodied head, yellow hair, a dragon face with vivid blue eyes and
flaming cheeks, swaying above a tattered black gown. It leaned on a long cane, like a beggar’s staff, and held in one hand
a rounded lamp from which smoke spiraled into the darkness. The whole thing seemed to glow in reverse, devouring light instead
of releasing it, and I was sure it would devour me, too, if I came within range. I couldn’t move. But then it began to screech,
like chalk on blackboard. And it said my name.

“‘Maibelle’?” Tai asked.

“No, ‘Mei-bi’! It said, ‘Mei-bi you.’”

And suddenly I was moving, all right—fast and hard—churning the specter into an eddy of air that receded back into the hole
as I charged past and up the stairs. And out.

“You tell anyone?” Tai asked.

“Only Li.”

“He believed you?”

“Yes.”

“I think maybe Li T’ieh-kuai,” Li had said. “In life he know magic. In death his body is stolen so he take beggar’s. Could
be the spirits in
your house are angry. Li T’ieh-kuai come warn you, you know? I think you better stay away, it will be all right.”

“I’ll stay away,” I told Li that day. “We’re moving.”

He’d just nodded, which irritated me even more than his reacting to my bogeyman as if it were a ghoul on a routine house call.
I hadn’t told Li before that we were moving because I thought it would be hard on him. I
wanted
it to be hard on him. But he’d known all along.

Li smiled. “Go. Obey your parents. That your duty. You will come back when it is time.”

“Aren’t you even sorry I’m going?”

“Sorry? Why I should be sorry? It is not my fault you go.”

“Sad, then.”

“Sad, yes. But Mei-bi, life is full of sadness. You know. Your friend Johnny give you sadness. All pleasure, all love is pain.
Like balance of good and evil. You feel most good when evil is near. Most evil when good is not far away.”

He took a bite of walnut cookie. His gold teeth winked at me.

“I’ll come back every weekend. I’ll practice my calligraphy. Nothing will change.”

“No, Mei-bi, no,” Li said in that infuriating Chinese way of saying no when he meant yes. Yes, everything would change, and
there was nothing I could do to stop it. “You come back. That good. You practice your calligraphy. But remember, time is long.
Most important is do not forget. You know. Lao Li is your friend. This your home. You have learned here.”

He took my hand between his aged palms and pressed. Squeeze, squeeze, release. Squeeze, squeeze, release. Squeeze, release,
squeeze.

Then he placed in my hand a peachwood amulet. It was as smooth as glass, its lines curling so fluidly that it seemed to pour
itself across my skin. An invisible hinge had been carved into the single piece of wood and, with a slight pull, the two halves
opened. Pressed inside was a lock of silver-white hair.

Li’s, I thought, glancing up at the familiar cobweb shag, but no.
“Keep it close,” he said. “Inside is hair of child-stealing witch. It can make you safe from her.”

“I believe you,” I said, and I did. “I believe you.”

But I did not keep my promise. Because Mum forbade me to ride the subways alone, I depended on Henry to accompany me back,
and for the first month or two we visited every weekend. But after his final fight with Tai, Henry switched to an arcade uptown.
I began taking photographs, and after a while the need to return didn’t seem so strong.

I had not seen Li in nearly two years when my father showed me the notice in the paper about the auctioning of his shop. Dad
said he might go, there were bound to be some terrific bargains. I thought of that rickshaw and dragon throne, those tiny
lotus shoes. Treasures abandoned and silent. Even if Mum had not concocted a project to keep Dad home that day, I knew I could
not go back.

Instead I turned our apartment upside down looking for the amulet. I found the lacquer calligraphy basket buried in my closet.
I found the clay puppets, their paper backings unglued and the pink-cheeked maiden cracked in half. Old Cap Billings’s letters
and the silk embroidered garments for which I’d braved the basement phantom. And I found the tiny heart locket Johnny Madison
had given me.

“The flying fiance from Wisconsin.” Tai touched the gold that I’d been wearing ever since.

“You remember that?”

“Of course I remember.”

“He died.”

“I know.”

“Henry told you?”

“No, Li.” He knelt beside me on the floor. “He said now you’d be free to marry me.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. I couldn’t tell if he was making an apology or an inverted proposition, but that wasn’t why
his statement grabbed at my heart.

“I loved Johnny. Li knew that.”

“Sure, but Li loved you.”

“I don’t know.”

“Maibelle.” Tai’s voice caught. He moved his lips but seemed to change his mind before more sound came out. He looked down
at the wads of pink tissue paper, the box’s contents scattered across the floor. “There’s no amulet.”

“No.” I began repacking. “For a while after I knew it was lost I saw the White Witch everywhere I went. In the back of the
crosstown bus, in the mirrors on the Central Park carousel. Peeking around the mannequins in Bendel’s windows. You know? Once
I saw her under the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. But after a few months she stopped stalking me and eventually I forgot
about her.”

“But?” said Tai.

“But?”

“Doesn’t sound like that was the end.”

“No.” Lullaby music started playing upstairs. “I’m not sure. I mean, it’s just occurred to me that maybe by forgetting I enabled
her to catch me.”

Tai’s feet whispered against the bare wood. His hand folded around the back of my head, drew me toward him. I felt the brief,
unfailing smoothness of his skin against my cheek.

“I think maybe you’re right,” he said softly, and stood to leave. “But now you’ve got to decide what to do about it.”

The old lady is out in the garden with her parrot. A few minutes ago she looked at me drying my hair up here on the fire escape,
and called hello. Over the past weeks we’ve established a distant familiarity. She shows off the bird. I compliment her. After
I finally developed the film of the two of them, I dropped a couple of prints in her mail slot, and the next day I received
a thank-you note on rose-scented paper with a coupon for a free bottle of toilet water at the drugstore on Greenwich Avenue.
Her name is Emma Madson, and her writing is as delicate as a spider’s web. Now whenever she sees me she waves and calls my
name
with a profoundly southern lilt. She tells me it’s good to see me relaxing; she must envision me as some frantic workaholic.
I’ve considered a more formal visit, but I suspect she’s the sort of person who operates by invitation. She’d never make it
up the stairs to come here, and since she hasn’t invited me, I’ve let the matter slide.

“I love this old bird,” she calls. “You watch this, Maibelle.”

“Shut the goddamn door, Lila!” the parrot shrieks. The sun gives its green and blue feathers an iridescent gleam.

“Oh, pooh, you.” Emma swivels in her wheelchair. She unlatches the door of the cage and crooks one finger over the sill. The
parrot duly hop-bobbs onto her hand and up her arm. Some weeks ago they did away with the leash.

“Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” she prompts.