The Afterlife of Emerson Tang Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I — THE BODY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part II — THE ENGINE

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2013 by Paula Champa

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Champa, Paula.

  The afterlife of Emerson Tang : a novel / Paula Champa.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-79278-1

  1. Women archivists—Fiction. 2. Collectors and collecting—Automobiles—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6103.H3654A68 2013

  823'.92—dc23

  2012014030

  eISBN 978-0-547-79279-8

  v1.0313

  The author is grateful for permission to quote from the website CocteauTwins.com.

  To Mike

  We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A . . . roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

  —F. T. MARINETTI, The Futurist Manifesto, 1909

  Do you remember The Incredible Shrinking Man? He shrank and shrank, and went from world to world. Finally he’s shrunk through the grass and down into the atoms—you don’t know where. And on the sound track, you hear, “I still exist.”

  —MIKE NICHOLS

  Part I

  The Body

  1

  I AM A WOMAN WITH no fingerprints. No patterned ridges to leave a trace of myself in a waxy coating of furniture polish. Nothing to press into an inkpad or scan with a computer eye. I am undetectable, a model of discretion. And I am human. At least I was during the time in question, with a bellybutton attesting to my birth thirty years earlier, a first and last name (Bethany Corvid), and ten fingers that were otherwise so ordinary as to pass without notice.

  But—the ends. This was where the erosion of the self materialized. And if the ends of my fingers lacked the usual loops, whorls and arches, my other human qualities must have amounted to nearly as complete a blankness. That’s how it felt when the whole business started with the car. I didn’t know about my missing fingerprints then. I only sensed the blankness on the inside. Maybe you know what I mean: When someone you care for is dying, you can feel the emptiness of losing him even before he’s gone. I had no idea how many ways grief could rob you before it gave you something back. Sometimes I imagined myself a ghost, like the ghostly figures woven into the carpeting of the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan, where the artist Hélène Moreau established her provisional encampment that June of 1996.

  If I’d had the talent of ghosts to haunt lobbies and hallways, to drift freely across oceans and eavesdrop on lives more definite than my own, I could have spied Hélène a few days before I came to meet her at that hotel, when (as she would later recount to me in frank detail) she was still waiting on a sofa in the office of Manfred Zeffler in Schnell, Germany, world headquarters of the automaker AG, AG.

  Ghosts are close. They observe things: how glumly Hélène lifted the mug of coffee Zeffler had set in front of her . . .

  I can picture Zeffler’s manicured hands tapping his phone as he told Hélène he wished she had called his office first, how he could have saved her a flight from Paris.

  “These are what we have.” He stooped awkwardly at his desk to read to her from a few sheets of paper, as if those thin pages could have relieved Hélène’s obvious sadness. “The car purchased by a Mr. Alto Bianco in Rome was ordered on the ninth of October 1953. Chassis number 39212. Alto Bianco—”

  “And the color?” Hélène interrupted in German, ignoring Zeffler’s neutral choice of English in addressing her.

  He consulted the records and replied in his native tongue: “They called it Egg Cream Custard.”

  “What about the interior, was it red?”

  “Scarlet leather, yes.”

  He handed her the page to see for herself.

  “Do you . . .” Her lips were quivering. “I don’t think this helps me. I thought you might have something else.”

  “Of course.” With a sigh of futility, Zeffler consulted the second sheet of paper: “The car was one of the last left-hand-drive models manufactured in 1953, road-tested and approved for export to Italy on Wednesday, the twenty-third of December—”

  He glanced up. Hélène appeared to be lost in thought, resting the coffee mug against her cheek. Zeffler winced as she moved it to her lips: Emblazoned on her face was the lighthouse emblem of the Beacon Motor Company, the perfect reverse of the logo molded onto the side of the mug.

  Was she branding her cheek on purpose?

  He must have sensed she was not the type of collector who would be satisfied with anything as easy to locate as some substitute model. No, the drop-ins tended to be fixated on tracking down one particular vehicle, its chassis stamped with an identifying number as unique as a human fingerprint. Ambushed by Hélène’s pleading gaze, Zeffler was like a postman whose customer was begging him to open the mailbox so she could unmail an envelope. A love letter posted too hastily, perhaps. They always wanted something back. Something disguised in the shape of an automobile: a memory or a person they knew, a way of life they once had—or never had, and still coveted.

  He offered the remaining sheets of paper to Hélène for her inspection.

  “But where is the car now?” she asked, blinking wildly, turning over the pages.

  “That information is not in our current database.”

  Hélène’s chin sank to her chest.

  “When we acquired the Beacon trademark three years ago, we consolidated the production records and archives to form the Heritage Trust,” Zeffler explained. “You understand, with Beacon having been dormant since the factory closure in England in 1976, this was an act of corporate generosity on our part. We intend to register the current owners of the classic models as their identities become known to us. That will be phase two of the Heritage Project—”

  “But I’ve come all this way.”

  “I am afraid we have no ability to locate the current owner,” Zeffler said. “Are you aware that our new Beacon Heritage Museum has recently opened to the public? There are some fine examples of the type 135 roadster on display.” He reached for the employee map on his desk. “It’s just here.”

  Inside the tiny, well-ordered Beacon museum, proceeding from one wall text to the next like the Stations of the Cross, she encountered among the polished bits of chrome and glass the first motorcar to bear the lighthouse badge. On a wall nearby: a painted portrait of the company’s founder, the late George M. Beacon, in middle age. An earnest-looking man with the resolute stance of a wrestler.

  Like many of his fellow engineers who had been children in the First World War, George Beacon spent his second set of wartime years dreaming of what he would build when the fighting wa
s over.

  In 1947, at the age of 44, he formed his own company, with an uncompromising focus on the engine—what he considered the soul of the sports cars manufactured by his fledgling Beacon Motor Company . . .

  That boy—

  What was it about the child in the photograph? No more than seven or eight years old, he was seated with Mr. Beacon in one of the company’s models, not smiling, not posing in any way. At George Beacon’s side, the boy was concentrating with great intensity on what was being said. Even the ends of his hair appeared to be standing at attention. The boy wasn’t aware of the camera, only the direction in which the older man was pointing: forward, to some unseen splendor.

  It was the last image on display in the museum. Still meditating on the photograph, impressed by the bravery she detected in the boy’s face, Hélène heard her name and turned to find Manfred Zeffler striding through the exhibits, the panels of his suit jacket flapping like pinstriped wings. In his fingers he held another sheet of paper.

  “Well—I found something for you.”

  With a flurry of words—not in the database, had to search the files, take my own time to photocopy—he explained that someone in his office had corresponded with the current owner of Beacon chassis number 39212, purchased the previous June at auction, through Bonhams. He could offer her no further information, but he was pleased to provide her with a copy of the public auction record.

  It listed my employer, Emerson Tang Webster, who at that moment was drifting into a morphine dream in his loft in Greenwich Village—four blocks from the private garage on Perry Street where he stored the same magnificent machine.

  Hélène wept during a swim in her hotel pool that evening and on her flight to JFK the next morning. As the jet touched down, she reached into her handbag to cradle her souvenir from the Beacon gift shop—a 1:43-scale model car.

  And so it started, the race for a car and an engine that ended in a collision not of vehicles but of fates. Emerson’s, mine, Hélène Moreau’s, the boy’s in the photograph—our stories collided so forcefully that they cannot be pried apart. We’re like an Ambiguous Figure, a trick image with multiple parts. You might see, for example, the silhouette of a chalice in the center of the page, but when you shift your gaze to the edges of the frame, another image is revealed of a man and a woman facing one another. Their profiles form the outline of the cup, suspended between them, as if to seal a solemn pact they’ve made. Whether you notice the man and the woman, or the cup, they’re all part of the same picture—and more than that, the shape of one is determined by the others.

  I can illustrate with a second example, using a paintbrush of Hélène Moreau’s that ended up in my possession: Here is what appears to be an old woman. She is troubled by some memory or sorrow, her chin sunken to her chest. But look again and you may also detect the outline of a younger woman there, to one side. The girl is turned away, shy, unwilling to show herself fully. Both figures are present—they’re composed of the same lines. What you perceive is a matter of how you read them.

  It’s the same with the lines here, composed of letters and words, running along page after page connecting one event to the next. In the end, it’s impossible for them to reveal the shape of Emerson’s afterlife without revealing my own, or the fate of Hélène Moreau or the boy in the photograph, who was a grown man by the time she went off in search of the old car. Our stories cannot be separated, any more than they can be separated from one final image I must not neglect to share here, at the outset.

  Look, and you may detect, peeking through the lines, the disquieting face of an Asian woman. At first you can just make out the slight curves of her forehead and nose; her cheeks, smooth but for the scar on one side where she fell to the ground from exhaustion. Here are her eyes, fixed in a hopeful stare, eager to take in their share of wonders. And the red bow of her lips—sealed, like her fate, by famine. She is part of the picture as well. The car brought us together, but it was grief that joined us, really.

  2

  I HAVE NO RECORDS from the Royalton Hotel from 1996, no way to calculate how many days and nights Hélène Moreau passed in that midnight-blue cocoon before the turpentine fumes that trailed in her wake made their way through the corridors for a final time, alerting the housekeeping staff to a recently departed room. This lack of records is an embarrassing oversight, for during that summer—during the business with Hélène and the car—my life was consumed by record-keeping: I was employed as a professional archivist, contracted by Emerson Tang Webster to manage his photography collection. And by the time his collection was disbursed I had become the archivist for the man himself, the custodian and conservator of one small part of his life—namely, his death.

  Years later, as a souvenir, Hélène gave me a Royalton message slip, a crisp study in Helvetica folded once and tucked into a royal-blue envelope. It reads:

  MR. EMERSON TANG RETURNED YOUR CALL.

  From this artifact I can trace the start of things to the day before, Wednesday, the nineteenth of June, when Hélène phoned Emerson’s office from Penthouse B and reached me. I recognized her name, though not as anyone Emerson did business with. It was unusual for an artist of her reputation to contact our office personally, instead of having her gallery or an assistant do it. What was not unusual was for me to tell her that Emerson wasn’t available. For the most part, he’d lost interest in talking on the phone the previous autumn, and any gallery or museum people who needed to reach him spoke to me. I asked Hélène if she wanted to leave a message.

  “Of course.”

  “And that is?”

  “I just told you. I’m in New York.”

  It was hard to know if she was being rude or if she’d simply misunderstood.

  “To meet . . . ,” she continued. “When he’s available.”

  Coffee was mentioned. Her voice was French-accented, but I didn’t hear it that way. What I heard was weariness punctuated by a smoker’s staccato coughs, like an engine struggling to warm up in the cold.

  While Emerson slept on the other side of the loft, fed by a morphine drip, I picked through my mental file on Hélène Moreau. A painter. Postwar avant-garde. Her early canvases in the 1950s had received the most attention: the Speed Paintings, named not for how quickly they were painted, but because she’d used speeding cars to create them. From what I remembered, not a drop of paint had been involved in the transaction. They were gashed canvases, studies in motion—the pure violence of an automobile moving through a medium that could do nothing but record its presence. Large in scale. Primitive. Void of figuration, they presented the unpresentable in negative form.

  The Speed Paintings had been celebrated enough to warrant reproduction in art history texts forty years later. I wanted to group Hélène Moreau with the Abstract Expressionists, but I didn’t think she was catalogued as part of the school. She’d been young when she made the Speed Paintings. Then? Nothing. No strong impression of her later work. I had barely heard her name since my college art history classes.

  I wondered if she was still making art. The possibility made her phone call more curious, since it was known in art circles that Emerson had sold his important paintings eight years earlier, on his twenty-fifth birthday. All the proceeds had been used to fund his current collection, devoted to photographs of Modernist architecture. It was this collection he and I were preparing to dismantle via his Last Will and Testament.

  Of the many indicators of my employer’s decline (his doctor’s records show that by then he was 63 inches tall and weighed 90 pounds), I mark the point of no return by the condition of Emerson’s bookcases. Daily, more and more of the books on his bedroom shelves were transformed into a menagerie of medical supplies: boxes of Triad alcohol pads, basic-solution tubes, plastic fluid paths with regulating clamps . . .

  It began one night with volumes of Hemingway and Eliot and Woolf, catalogues on Brancusi and Duchamp, tomes on the great buildings of Europe—they all abandoned their former shapes in order to lie
down and become finger guards and disposable syringes, boxes of rubber gloves, Sani-Cloths soaked with a patented germicidal solution . . .

  What I mourned most was a bound monograph on the painter Edward Hopper, a volume I had not paged through, never even took down, but one I’d always admired for the simply embossed name on the spine in a font that, like the artist himself, had no pretensions. Now that too had disappeared, changed into a heparin flush kit for the Hickman port in Emerson’s chest.

  It was one of the night nurses, Maria-Sylvana, who led me out into the living area to show me that Emerson’s books had not wholly disappeared. Rather, they had journeyed from his bedroom to form a bibliographic Easter Island across the hardwood expanses of his loft.

  “I didn’t drop any,” Maria-Sylvana assured me on the way back to Emerson’s bedroom. “I’m making sculptures.”

  She pulled a thick volume from a shelf overcrowded with tubes and, with its weight distributed across her hands like a tray loaded with champagne flutes, glided out into the hallway, got down on one knee and laid the book in place with the same care she used in handling the wasting parcel of bones and tissue that comprised Emerson himself.

  Maria-Sylvana had unearthed a spiral-bound notebook amid the clutter on Emerson’s bookshelves. From what I could judge by the dates inside, it was the sum total of everything he had written down in college. In the same spidery hand I recognized from his to-do lists (and his things-done lists, in the manner of Caesar Augustus) were passages he’d copied down in preparation for assignments that he would have punched out later on a typewriter: