The Wangs vs. the World (19 page)

Other artists cared about their place in the canon, about color and brushwork, about pushing forward the lines of inquiry that obsessed and impressed their peers. Sometimes Saina pretended to care about all of those things, too, but really all she wanted to do, all she’d ever wanted to do, was to look very closely at the world in a way that resonated. And her show, her last, best show, had done that. She was sure of it. Saina kept the catalog from
Look/Look
on her desk, a punishment and a reminder, and too often she found herself rereading parts of the introduction that her gallerist had written.

In 2007, while war raged on in Iraq, Wang began to notice something about the photos of civilians and refugees published in mainstream newspapers. They were often composed so that the frame centered on a single, striking young woman. While researching this observation, Wang remembered a photo of the war in Bosnia that she first encountered as a child living in Los Angeles. “I’d been flipping through my mother’s back issues of
Vogue,
” she recalls, “and then I opened up the
L.A. Times
and was instantly struck by a beautiful girl in a really chic headscarf. It wasn’t until a moment later that I realized that she was on the back of a truck with a dozen other refugees.” Wang tracked down that older photo, and then spent months poring over published images of America’s wars, going back to Vietnam.

Then, in a daring move, she selected the loveliest of the women—women who might have already perished in the conflicts they were used to illustrate—and, with the aid of Photoshop, excised them from their place in history, transported them to a moody warehouse, and looked at them again through the Vaseline blur of desire. There, the women became all beauty, taking on new roles as the models they might have been, had they the fortune of being born in another place and time.

—New York City, February 2008

What was so bad about that? Her gallerist had issued an apology on her behalf of the “I’m sorry if anyone was offended” sort, but she still couldn’t understand how her show had become the flash point of so much anger. Lately, the only professional interest she’d received was from people who had heard of her fall: A gallerist in Germany who wanted to curate a show of modern-day failures, a filmmaker whose documentary on anti-Semitic fashion designer Jean Lugano’s bid to remake his career had just premiered to some success. The only offer that wasn’t outright insulting came from Xio, the persistent curator of the new Beijing Biennial, who wanted to include Chinese artists living abroad. She’d had a conversation or two with him and been dismayed to learn that gossip of her disgrace had spread all the way to China, though it didn’t seem to change his enthusiasm for her work.

In the end, though, none of it appealed to her. It would never work to try to make something mannered and safe. Pandering to your detractors was even worse than pandering to your collectors.

Saina closed her eyes. It was too much. For the first time in her life, she felt old, tired, like the effort that it took to fight for recognition was no longer worthwhile. It was true what they said—leaving New York made you soft.

二十
Phoenix, AZ

605 Miles

THERE WAS NOTHING grosser than a naked mattress, the quilted, satin surface of it all pilled and stained from more generations of Arizona State students than Andrew wanted to think about. He rubbed the palm of his hand against the rough little bumps raised all over the flowered beige surface and shivered. It tickled like riding a bike over a bumpy gravel road, but something about the sensation turned his body’s attention inward and he felt himself press up against the ridge of his pants.
Damn skinny jeans
. Andrew pulled down his zipper and wriggled them halfway down his legs as he looked around the room for a forgotten bottle of lotion, anything viscous,
anything,
but it had all been packed or given away.

He hated spit. The smell of his own saliva was never a turn-on. Why couldn’t he smell it when he was making out with someone?

He could feel himself getting hard and straining at the cotton confines of his briefs and put aside the unwanted urge to pee. Andrew reached a hand into his backpack. Laptop, cell phone, beanie, a few wrinkled envelopes, and the crumpled bag from yesterday’s egg sandwich.

Oh. That could work.

He thought of Emma, gorgeous Emma, who wanted nothing more than for him to let her have sex with him, Emma squirting ketchup on his dick like a hot dog and swallowing it down. He held that image in his mind as he rooted in the bag with one hand and tugged his briefs down with the other, closing his eyes and flicking over again to Emma, now jumping up on the volleyball court and arching her body back, back, back, one arm up, throat exposed, breasts pushed high, then pounding the ball across the net in an explosion of sweat and heat. With his teeth, he tore open a ketchup packet and emptied it into his palm, flicking again to Emma on her knees in front of him, reaching out for him as he reached down with his ketchup palm, sliding his hand around and up. He was lying down now and Emma was gone, replaced by a girl he saw once, Rollerblading across the Venice boardwalk, her dress billowing up with a gust of wind so that he caught just a glimpse of her naked bottom and the neat little strip of hair between her legs. He pushed himself into his hand, and for just a second, a half second, Professor Kalchefsky crept in, making him wonder whether
copula
and
copulate
had the same root, but Andrew banished him and brought in his most timeworn and reliable image, a flash of Cinemax he somehow saw as a kid, a few stolen minutes of a man and a woman spread out on the hood of a car, hips thrusting, boobs jiggling, the man angry with a bush of a mustache, the woman pleading for more, pleading for him to stop when, like a flicker on the screen, he saw his doorknob turn.

“Stop!” He choked on the word, tried shouting it again. “STOP!”

“Andrew?”

It was his dad. No, no, no, no, no. His heart stuttered and his lungs froze.

“Andrew?”

And his sister. And probably Barbra, too. Andrew stood up and staggered towards the door, throwing his weight against it.

“Just hold on,” he said. “Give me a minute.” He could hear them on the other side of the door, his dad asking what he’d said, Grace shushing him, Barbra saying nothing. He looked down. His right hand was a ketchupy mess. He closed his eyes, thinking of vomit, shit, his dead mother, until he hung limp, dark smears of condiment caught in the wrinkles of his shrunken penis. Still pressing his back to the door, Andrew pulled up his underwear and pants. Zip. Button.
Oh god
.

He wiped his hand on his jeans and opened the door, pretending to swallow.

“I was just . . . eating. But, I . . . I had to get dressed.”

“Why you don’t want us to see you eating? You were eating naked? You have girlfriend hiding in closet?” His father sounded hopeful.

Andrew half turned towards his closet, wishing that Emma really was in there, disheveled, beautiful. That would have been way less embarrassing. He’d always wanted the kind of father who would shoot hoops with him, but his dad was way more likely to introduce him to a couple of models than to buy him a baseball glove or attend a soccer match. He hated the wink that his father would give him whenever a woman’s name popped up on his cell phone. Once, late at night, he’d even seen his father waiting at a valet stand in downtown L.A., his arm around a surprisingly beautiful redhead who looked not much older than Saina. It was gross to think of the women who made themselves available, grosser to think of Barbra caring about sex at all, and grossest to know that if his dad cheated on Barbra, then it meant that he had probably done the same to Andrew’s beautiful mother. Maybe that was why Andrew was holding out for true love.
Who knew rebellion would be so boring?

“No, Dad, no one else is here.”

Oh.
He couldn’t hug them like this, hand still slick with ketchup and sweat, dick barely tucked back into his jeans.

“I have to go to the bathroom—it’ll just take a second.” He put a hand over his stomach. “Bad food.”

Backing into the hallway, he narrowly avoided bumping into the RA, spun around, and ran to the coed bathroom, praying that no one would be in there.

Coast clear.
Andrew splashed water on a stack of brown paper towels and ducked into a stall. The ketchup was starting to burn. Nervous, quick, he scrubbed at himself roughly until the damp wodge of barky smelling towel started to shred down his pants. He plunked it in the toilet and flushed, but the mass wouldn’t go down.
Whatever.
He was leaving. He’d never use this toilet again. Let it be someone else’s problem.

Slam. Soap. A blast of hot water, a blast of hot air, and he was back out the door, ready to be a son, a brother, a stepson, a middle child.

“Andrew!” Grace barreled down the hallway and threw her arms around him, squeezing him so tight that he felt sharply aware of how much he was loved. It was enough to make tears pool in his eyes, which he tried to flick away by picking her up and whirling her around.

“Gracie! How’s the road trip been going?”

“Terrible. Terrible! We dropped Ama off at her daughter’s weird place in the desert and the kids were cute but she fed us
hot dogs,
Andrew, and the whole place was so weird and creepy and I know you’re going to say that I have no sense of adventure but that’s just not the kind of adventure I want to have and I don’t care. Stop laughing at me!”

Andrew tugged on her ponytail. “It’ll be better now. I’ll be with you guys.”

Grace smirked at him. “So, what were you doing when we got here?”

“I told you! I was just eating! Anyways, listen. I have an idea—this is going to be my first comedy tour!”

“What do you mean?”

“I have a set. We’re going on the road. So I figured I could, you know, take my act on the road!”

“Did you book things?”

“No, I’m thinking open mics. I talked to Dad about the route that we were taking—”

“What? When?”

“A couple days ago.”

“But I didn’t even know that we were leaving until a couple of days ago! No one tells me anything.”

“It was all one conversation—we’re leaving, your car is being repossessed, I’m not paying your tuition, I’m going to get back all the land the Communists took, oh, and by the way, what’s the best way to get out of Tempe?”

“Well, I don’t understand why he tells you everything.”

Andrew’s father stepped out of the dorm room just then, carrying Andrew’s giant duffel bag.

“Okay, we ready? You say hello to auntie?”

Andrew leaned over and gave Babs a kiss, and then, at the last minute, he reached his arms around her in an embrace. It would have been nice to have a mom right now, if they were going to go somewhere as a whole family. But he didn’t. He had a dad and an auntie, a Baba and a Babs, and that was better than nothing.

The last time Andrew had ridden in this station wagon he’d been strapped to a car seat and his mom had been behind the steering wheel, wearing a giant pair of sunglasses, hands encased in white gloves. She’d hated the sun. She would have hated Tempe, where every sun-bleached building was the same dusty pueblo color and the city felt bright even after dark. Andrew had spent most of his college career in sunglasses, terra-cotta roofs and palm trees mirrored across his shielded eyes.

He had them on now, hiding another well of wholly unexpected tears. Andrew opened his lids wide, trying to will the tears back inside their ducts, but that just made his eyes sting so that he had to blink, sending a tiny salt waterfall spilling down his cheeks. He didn’t even really know why he was crying. He didn’t think that he felt all that sad to be leaving school. Maybe he was just a pussy. They were driving by Grady Gammage Auditorium now, its weird circle of curtained arches reflecting in the pond.
See ya later, Tempe.
Was there a GED for college that he could take? Or maybe it wouldn’t matter once he was on the road.

“Baba,” called Andrew up to the front.

“Hmm?”

“So, you know how I want to be a comedian?”

Andrew’s father glanced back at him in the rearview mirror and didn’t say anything. Sometimes Andrew felt like his father didn’t understand anything he said, like Charles Wang wished that he had a different son altogether.

Maybe if he said it in Chinese.
“Shuo xiao hua?”

His father nodded.

“So, I have to practice. A lot. With, like, different audiences.” Andrew pulled out his phone. “So we’re going to be in some cities with open mic nights. I thought I could sign up and, you know, do my set.”

“Are you funny?” asked Grace.

“You know I am! Remember I told you about the thing at school? We put on that show? People loved it.”

Charles shrugged. “You go to party school. They think everything funny funny, everything party party.”

“I’m not saying I’m like Steve Martin or, uh, Bob Newhart or anything yet,” said Andrew, trying to think of a comedian his father might respect, “but I can be good. You come watch me, you’ll see. So, can we do it? We can get to Austin by Sunday. I called a club there already, and they said that they’d let amateurs go on if I came in and signed up early enough. Okay?”

Andrew could see his father’s reflection pursing its mouth and glancing towards Barbra. She would never say anything. He tried again.

“I mean, if I’m not going to go to college, I have to do
something,
right?”

His father’s head jerked back.
“Ben dan ya? Ni yi ding yao huei xue.”

“I know, I will, but I’m not right now, right? So what’s wrong with comedy? You’re proud that Saina’s an artist, aren’t you?”

But that was different, Andrew knew. More right, somehow. Less embarrassing. The sort of thing a girl could do. Also, she was crazy successful pretty much immediately, so that made a difference, too. Well, he’d let it drop for now, but when they were near a club, he’d just go. They couldn’t stop him. Grace would help create a diversion, and they’d leave the parents at the hotel or motel or wherever they were going to start sleeping now that they were on the road.