Face (3 page)

I’d been here less than a week, was applying for work as a commercial photographer’s assistant, and was just beginning to
doubt the wisdom of quitting my job in the sky when a box arrived, addressed without name to my apartment. Postmarked in Pensacola,
it
contained a set of plastic coasters with interchangeable pictures of game birds, a combination sifter, grater, and dicer,
five patterns of personalized embossers, and a spec sheet with the size and quantity of negatives and prints the catalogue
required for each product. According to these numbers, the Hans Noble Company had paid Marge Gramercy about half the going
commercial rate.

Four days later I sent the requested photographs to Pensacola along with the merchandise and an invoice informing Mr. Noble
that I, Maibelle Chung, had taken over Ms. Gramercy’s studio upon her death. The following week my payment arrived with a
new set of merchandise and instructions on which someone had scrawled: “We pay by the job, no contracts. Fee is nonnegotiable,
but you can have that photo credit you asked for. Sorry to hear about Marge.”

That night was the first time my screams woke Harriet.

“It’s a man, isn’t it?” she demanded, wedging one foot in the doorway.

“There’s no one else here.”

Under her blue satin robe Harriet wore a flannel nightgown printed with elves. Her face was puffy and her hair looked as if
someone had sat on it. I could hear her mother faintly whining downstairs. But Harriet was still more or less on my side back
then and she didn’t insist on searching my apartment.

“Men are shits, kid. They’d rather screw you than look at you. Never forget that.”

I thanked her for this piece of advice and shut the door quickly before she could offer any more. There was no man that night,
but there would be. I knew, inevitably there would be.

I used to think I could escape my nightmares by going away. The day I graduated from college, I was packing my car to drive
across country, and my brother, Henry, said I’d never find what I was looking for that way. I told him whatever I found would
be more than what I was looking for. He said no, anything would be less. Philosophy and insight not being two of my brother’s
strong points, I chose to laugh at him, but it turned out he was right.

Instead of driving off into oblivion that summer, I met a rich, fiftyish man in a Howard Johnson’s in Nappanee, Indiana. He
owned a shopping mall in Muncie where there was a consignment gallery run by an acerbic bleached blonde named Roxy who liked
to talk about men who’d abused her. Though we would never claim each other as friends, I enjoyed listening to Roxy. I admired
her certainty and her candor. She knew what she felt, what she thought, and why. Whatever men did to me was not something
I could discuss.

The rich mall-owner lost interest when I refused to sleep with him, but Roxy said she could use more of what I had, which
at that point was my student portfolio—photographs of fire hydrants lit to resemble cathedrals, and steeples that looked like
knives cutting ornate cloud formations. I progressed to vintage cars, using strobes to turn their
headlights to eyes, and shot landscapes in which the tops of trees became oceans and sandbars.

For half a year I traveled the Midwest, camping in Motel Sixes and photographing nature in ways that made it seem like something
else. People who saw my work in the gallery called it “neat,” and bought the prints as puzzles to see if their friends and
neighbors could figure out what was what.

When I wasn’t using tricks of light and angle to subvert the universal order, I grazed crops of men in truck stops and watched
families loading and unloading cars in motel parking lots. In Menominee Falls, Wisconsin, I slept with a park ranger who fit
the description of all my men—boiled gold hair, deep freckles, and eyes that seemed to have dropped from the sky. We spent
twelve hours together, no hope, no expectations, and hardly more than a physical longing in common, then he went home to his
wife and four children. A month later I came back to New York and my parents, but before I worked up the nerve to tell them
my news, much less decide what to do about it, nature replaced my choice with an outpouring of blood, cramps, and unexpected
sorrow.

Henry, the only member of the family who knew, said I probably wasn’t pregnant at all.

“Wishful thinking. You know how that goes.”

I told him he didn’t know shit.

When I got back to my nomadic life, the fields were buried under two feet of snow. I stood on a hilltop in Illinois and stared
through my circle of glass at endless miles of skeletal plants, hardened waterways, wildlife preparing to hide from the great
thermal plunge into winter. Before my pregnancy I’d turned the cold into collages of lace or candy or intricately blown glass
patterns. (More trick shots, most of them sold. Roxy said they’d make great postcards. She threatened to send them to art
magazines and, if Tommy Wah told the truth, she eventually must have done just that because I certainly never submitted my
work for publication.) But that first day back, on that bleak, frozen hill,
the seasonal death defied me. I had no more tricks. I’d lost them racing toward some kind of freedom I didn’t begin to understand.

I lowered the Pentax and took another look at the world unframed, let it pull itself over and around me like a vast gray paper
bag. Only a fool would try to capture such immensity through a mechanical eye. Or believe the cure for terror lay in photographic
alchemy. I weighed the camera briefly in one hand—metal, plastic, glass cold as ice surrounding a compartment of darkness.
I let the weight of that darkness pull me to my feet, lift my arm high and wide. I felt the power, the ease of release, watched
my instrument cut an arc through the frozen air and drop, clattering to the gorge below. Though I could no longer see it,
I knew it was lying in shards and bent pieces all over the granite’s smooth face.

That Pentax was my first camera. My mother had given it to me for my fourteenth birthday. After cracking it up I checked out
of my motel room, sent what prints I had to Roxy, and traveled to Chicago. I’d heard from a coffee shop waitress that United
was hiring flight attendants for openings out of Los Angeles. If I proved I could fly without falling, I thought, my nightmares
would have to release me.

It’s nearly the end of May now, and warm enough for kids to roller-skate in the schoolyard. From my fire escape I watch them
doing backward twirls and scissor steps to boom-box rock and roll. Behind and above, the sky is the incandescent blue of a
stage flat, roofs against it black. Up and down Greenwich Avenue shoppers scurry on pre-dinner errands past the dry cleaner
where I take my sweaters, the grocery where I buy coffee, the record store that supplies me with the Motown greats brother
Henry taught me to love. Past the photo lab where I take my color work and buy film when I don’t have time to get it at discount
uptown.

My upstairs neighbors, Betty and Sandra, are running a bath—probably for their new baby, Hope. Above the rush of pipes Larraine
Moseley is practicing her electric guitar, and through this mesh of sounds
come the smells of sautéing onions, butter, roasting meat. These sensations comfort me with their normalcy.

So does the elderly woman who lives on the ground floor of the brownstone next door. Since the weather turned warm she’s come
out every evening to sit in her garden with her roses and daffodils and trees shaped like lollipops. Unlike Harriet’s mother,
whose persistent invisibility has convinced me her daughter keeps her housebound and bedridden, my neighbor rolls herself
out in her wheelchair and writes in a notebook or leafs through photo albums. I’ve never seen a visitor. She sits for an hour,
then a large wisecracking woman in a white uniform comes to push her inside, and I tell myself the old lady is lucky, she
must own the building, has the wealth to stay there and choose her own routine. She enjoyed a good enough life that she keeps
poring over it, wanting to remember. Of course, for all I know, she’s working out her taxes in that notebook and the albums
contain shots of prospective real estate investments and she’s only lived here for a few months, but I like to think she’s
stocking up on her past. I imagine the Village is her home, as it was Marge Gramercy’s.

Product shipments now come twice a week. I’ve resurrected Marge’s studio, leased the necessary equipment, and filled in around
the couch with some folding chairs, a foam mattress in the bedroom, stacked orange crates for shelves. At the moment the crates
are filled with such indispensable items as a pottery water recycler, a spring-loaded toilet seat, collapsible shoe trees,
and several digital timers. Some of these products I shot back in February. I’m keeping them to show my father before I return
them to Pensacola. I remember him saying once, “An inventor should always be on the lookout for concepts to improve.”

One of these days I really will invite Dad to come down and visit. I’ll show him the work that’s paying my bills, make the
necessary excuses, and admit that although it’s not much to be proud of, it gives me the freedom to do my own projects. I
won’t lie to him. I just won’t tell him what I’m making of all this freedom.

Harriet’s admonishments aside, there have been men. An actor. A
carpenter. A podiatrist. A hat salesman. Few lasted the whole night, none more than two weeks.

I met the last one standing in line at Ray’s Pizza. He had pale Scandinavian hair and a square back, wore an embroidered denim
work shirt and steel-tipped lizard boots. He ordered a single slice of the vegetarian Sicilian, then turned and, as if we’d
been talking for hours, explained himself.

“Used to be fat, but I had my stomach stapled. Now I can’t eat more ’n a slice.

Steady at one-sixty and five feet eleven inches tall, he had skin as smooth as a boy’s and eyes the color of water in a country
swimming hole.

“I’m Jed Moffitt.” He claimed his pizza and offered me his free hand. Clammy.

“Maibelle Chung.”

He waited, watching as I placed my order. We ate side by side at the counter looking out onto Sixth Avenue, and he told me
he was a sculptor. I said I was a photographer and got up to leave.

“Two artists.” He snaked his arm through mine. “Why the hell not?”

I knew perfectly well why not, but I followed Jed, anyway. By the time we reached Sheridan Square he was humming the melody
from “Wichita Lineman” out the side of his mouth. He had a good, low voice and I closed my eyes to reach for the promised
images of cold, clear, country nights and effortless space. But the humming stopped abruptly and we emerged from the elevator
on the twelfth floor.

His sculptures were aquariums shaped like antique bottles filled with colored water, dyed oil, and floating baubles. Upgraded
Lava lamps. I told him they were “neat,” as if I’d never seen such creations before. He turned off the overhead lights, and
the reflected greens and golds swam across our skin. I touched him first.

In short order I had my tongue in his ear, my hands pawing his back, under, on top, flattened skin-to-skin. The aggressor,
I granted him neither
choice nor comment. I had demanded this entry, forced my way in, and now took him by surprise.

“Wait!” He was gasping. I unrolled the condom for him, as much to preclude conversation as to protect either of us. There
was no protection for what I was doing.

I nevertheless hoped for a different result.

This time, I thought as the new man straddled me, this time I will push through. I will feel him with me, beside me, in me.
Somewhere. I will feel him love me.

But the closer our bodies moved together, the farther I drifted into that other familiar sensation, my own personal Doppler
effect. A perversion of intimacy like a sexual narcotic, at once numbing and arousing, which heightened the sounds and smells,
the darkness of moving shapes, yet erased all sensation of touch. I heard and watched as a child removed, and wondered how
this could be happening.

A child wouldn’t do such things. Not a child whose nakedness is a crime. A child would be plowed under by acts that make no
sense. I had not been plowed under, therefore my body must belong to someone else. To prove this I went with Jed Moffitt as
I had gone with so many men. I would not, would never, be plowed under.

We slept together on a mattress he’d slid into a closet in lieu of a proper bedroom. I was used to such arrangements. Nor
did it surprise me the next morning when he produced a snapshot of his girl. A high school sweetheart, product of a broken
home, she looked like a mouse. A twelve-year-old mouse.

“She comes up to here,” he said, indicating his chest. He spoke sheepishly: she needed him; he was helping to put her through
med school in Baltimore. Then he asked when he could see me again.

We slept together eight times, the last at my apartment. I never had bad dreams the nights I stayed with Jed. I wasn’t fool
enough to think there was anything more to it than comfort, but there was that. I admired his scar, the courage to take drastic
action to salve his soul. He drank Schlitz and manufactured Lava lamps and picked up women like
me, but he no longer felt ugly. If I could just identify what I needed to cut out or staple shut or transform, I might draw
on Jed Moffitt’s example.