The Price of Silence (19 page)

On the third Saturday I crossed the street right away. I had six doorbells to choose from.Three just numbers, three with names: 1. M. Keller, 2., 3., 4. S. DePero, 5., 6.T. Curtis. Mom had to live in number 2, 3 or 5.After doing a Dad calculation, I rang DePero. He—I decided S. stood for Steve— lived between 3 and 5 which meant the possibility of his knowing Mom was double that of Keller who lived below 2 or Curtis, who lived above 5. If DePero knew Mom, maybe I could convince him to let me in. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do after that.

When I got no answer from DePero I buzzed the others. Maybe artists are like musicians—stay up all night, sleep until the afternoon. I buzzed DePero again. For all I knew An-ling could have gone back to China and Mom was living alone or with another man: Keller, DePero, Curtis. An-ling could have just been an excuse. There were a hundred different ways it could go.

This time I kept my finger on the doorbell.That’s when I noticed there was no speaker, which meant there wasn’t a buzzer to let me in.That’s when I used my cell.

She hugged me at the door downstairs, asked me why it took me so long to come over. She smelled like smoke, paint and something sweet, and she had this smile on her face, the kind that’s easy to believe in because it was so wide that her cheeks bunched up like the tops of muffins.

I wondered if she expected me to kiss her on the muffins or something, but her being so glad, so unsurprised, threw me. I shuffled my feet or did something equally inane. I skipped the kissing. I was sure I’d miss and poke her in the eye or bump into her nose and she’d widen those great hooded eyes and tell me I was a complete jerk. I took my baseball cap off.

“How do you like living with Mom?”

“Do you want to talk about her?” She ruffled the hair on top of my head where the cap must have flattened it out. It was weird because that’s one of the things Mom does, that and straightening my jacket and lifting up my shirt collar.

“Is that why you’re here? To talk about your Mom?” She sounded surprised.

I put my cap back on.“No. I want to see your place.”

She folded the elevator gate to one side. “That’s a good reason.”

The elevator had grates for walls and was as big as my room. She offered to let me operate it, like I was a kid and needed a toy. I snapped my fingers.“Menswear on four and on the double.”That made her laugh and up we went.

The place was small, nothing like I’d imagined. A ratty sofa, a couple of wooden chairs, a small round table next to the kitchen sink, one long table with An-ling’s paint stuff on it. Lots of pictures on the wall with no frames. An-ling showed me where Mom slept, behind a screen, on a single mattress on the floor. An-ling slept in a futon on the other side of the room. I felt a little kick in my gut when I saw their sleeping arrangements. Part of me, the part that thinks like Dad, half expected a king-sized bed like Dad and Mom had at home.

She showed me this picture of a real ugly warrior—“The Roach Stomper,” she called it—and then these red strips of paper with slushy sayings on them. The smell of the place was intense—smoke and her flower smell and paint—like there were a thousand An-lings in that loft. The smell of smoke always turned my stomach, but she was flicking a cigarette in a coffee can, looking me over as she talked and I felt like I’d walked onto the set of some arty foreign film. Everything was different, exotic. It was a place where you could do anything and no one would get upset or yell at you. I thought, that’s why Mom stays here.

An-ling was wearing sweats big enough to fit Dad and I started to wonder what she looked like underneath, if she was wearing anything. “Thanks for the tour. I’ve got to go now.”

“Not so soon.” An-ling took the baseball cap off my head, held my chin in her hand. She said she wanted to paint me because I had good bones and a strong face while the models at her art school were either fat, old or blah. I went for the way she pressed her fingers down my face. Close up she looked warm and fuzzy, like she’d just got out of bed.

“I’m going to need you to sit for me, maybe three, four times. I’m going to sketch you now, but can you come back, Josh? Will you? I’m a perfectionist, which makes me real slow.”

I stuffed my hands in my pockets, shrugged.“Okay with me.” My heart slammed into my ribs.

“Don’t tell Emma.Your portrait is going to be a surprise.”

“Sure.”The slower the better and I wasn’t planning to tell Emma in the first place and I wasn’t going to tell Tom either. They’d both have a fit. But I’d turned fourteen a month before and it was time I followed some of my own rules. I knew I was supposed to dislike this girl, hate her maybe, but I didn’t. I thought it was okay, that nothing bad would come of my being there, wanting An-ling.

Subj: Fairytales and fantasies
Date: 04-11-05 02:19:01 EST
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

You’d already left for your school to teach the new classes. I was looking at a milky sky and wishing for snow. Josh was standing under the streetlamp on the corner, by the hardware store. I thought of opening the window, waving to him, telling him to come up. I remembered the Irish story you read to me about the sick boy who stands out in the snow because his girlfriend is leaving and he loves her so much he doesn’t want to live. Poor Josh. For a few minutes I felt like a thief for keeping you with me, but I knew you weren’t going to stay with me much longer. He’s your real child. He was going to get you back.

A-l

It is Fishkin’s turn to cross examine the witness.

“Miss Tanuki, from what you have said of Miss Huang, it seems to me that, not only were you her best friend, you were her only friend at the Art Students League. Am I wrong?”

“I guess I was.”

“To your knowledge, did she ever lie to you?”

Guzman half stands to object, then sits back down.

“Yes,” Tanuki says.

“Please tell the jury about this lie.”

“She said she was from Sun Valley. My folks have a place out there so I know Sun Valley. She thought Ketchum was ketchup and Warm Springs was in California. I don’t know why she lied about that. She changed her stories a lot. One time she tells me Mrs. Perotti’s husband wants to adopt her, then another time she tells me he’s jealous and can’t stand her. I don’t know if that’s lying or not.”

“Did you confront her about her lie regarding Sun Valley?”

“Last winter we went for a beer with a bunch of students I’d just introduced her to and she gave them her ‘I’m from Sun Valley, Idaho’ story. I had one too many beers and told her she was full of shit.”

“How did she react?”

“She cried a little, asked me to forgive her. Then she told me she was really from some small village in China, but she didn’t want anyone to know because she was here illegally and they’d send her back. That was another lie. I don’t know why she had to lie so much.”

“How do you know she was lying this time?”

“Foreigners can’t take classes at the League without showing them a visa of some kind.”

“You told the jury that you saw An-ling for the last time two weeks before she died. Did you speak on the phone or receive an e-mail from her after that time?”

“No.”

“Two weeks is a long time for friends of your age not to speak to each other. Had it happened before?”

Tanuki thinks for a moment. “No.”

“You didn’t try to reach her?”

“No. I was busy working on the end-of-year student show and I figured she was in one of her ‘leave me alone’ moods.” Tanuki blows her nose again.

FOURTEEN

Emma

AN-LING BEGAN PICKING on me for silly things.Where had I hidden her black slacks,why did I move her paints, why couldn’t I stop bugging her about her smoking? She wanted to know my schedule—when was I leaving, when was I coming back? When I asked her what was wrong, she laughed.“You’re a worry-mama.”

I tried to blame her testiness on the constant rain, on March madness, on her working too hard. I did not consider the effect my own growing unhappiness might have been having on her. I had lived with An-ling for five months, five months during which I was able to leave Amy’s death behind me for hours at a time, during which I felt like a happy young mother again, a friend, thinking I was needed by her, even loved. Five long months during which I had also ached for my son, longed for my husband and waited. When I had walked out of my home “for a few days” I had not fully understood that it was Tom’s intransigence, more than my desire to help and spend time with An-ling, that was sending me away. All this time I was waiting for him to call me home, to tell me that he understood my need to help An-ling, to reassure me that he loved me. Only then would I know that he’d finally forgiven me for Amy’s death.

“It’s time for me to leave,” I told An-ling one morning, as she was slipping into her jeans.

She looked up, surprise on her face.

“I need to go back home.”

“Not true.” She glowered at me, one leg poised in midair like a horse ready to prance. “Don’t go. Nothing’s changed.” Her leg slipped into the jeans.

“An-ling, I can’t stay forever. I must go.”

She buttoned up, took the raincoat and umbrella I held out to her.

“Remember to have fun,”I called out, as she shut the door. We’d talk about it that night, over dinner, over the weekend.

Maybe the rain would stop and we could talk during a long walk in Prospect Park. It was time to let An-ling fly on her own.Way past time to stop waiting for forgiveness.Time to go home to Josh, to Tom and what was left of our marriage. Time to face myself. Later I would call Tom and tell him I was coming home whether he wanted me to or not.

I looked down at the floor, streaked with dried mud. Now it was time to mop. I would start with An-ling’s corner. I folded the screen against the wall, pushed the futon to one side.

Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. The proof lay on the floor.

She left it for me to find.That was the thought that kept spinning in my head. She left it for me to find. She left it for me to find. She left it for me to find. I felt myself hollow out, as if someone had stuck a hose down my throat and was vacuuming my insides.

A 12 × 16 inch painting of a young naked man from the neck down to his knees. He was sitting with his back to the screen behind which An-ling slept. One hand clasped a knee with spread fingers, the other was raised against his neck. A chain dangled between his fingers on the end of which hung a St. Christopher medal.

I knew what was written on the back of that medal: Celestina Fenoli, 11-5-1901. Nonna’s maiden name and the date of her first communion. It was a gift from her mother, passed on to me by Nonna on my communion day, picked up by Josh from my jewelry box when he was five years old.

He’d worn it ever since.

Even without the medal I would have recognized my son by the short fingers of his hands with their flat broad nails, by the slender slant of his neck, by the sickle-shaped scar above his knee.What was new to my eyes was his half-erect penis.

“The sinner’s biggest desire is to be found out,” the priest used to tell me at confession.“He knows that expiation will bring him peace.”

“What is this?” I asked when An-ling came home. The painting was now hanging by itself on the back wall. I’d taken down all her other paintings, even the demon slayer and the duilan.There was nothing she could feast her eyes on except the headless portrait of Josh.

“My son is handsome.Why did you leave his head off?”

It was still raining hard and her hair streamed over her face in thin rivulets, hiding whatever expression she might have had. She threw her wet coat against the wall and sat on the floor to take off her shoes.

“Did you think I wouldn’t recognize him?”

She walked to the stove in stockinged feet and lit the gas under the tea kettle, her jeans dripping water, leaving a thin dark trail.

“Answer me, please. I deserve that much consideration.”

She turned to face me, dangling the tea bag like Josh dangled his chain in the painting. Josh bent over a notebook or lying back on the sofa with his headphones on, listening to music, swinging the St. Christopher medal. It was his typical gesture of absorption, which I had witnessed countless times. How many times had she witnessed it?

“This is my son you’ve painted. Naked, aroused, and I want to know why.”

The kettle started to whistle. She poured the water in a turquoise cup, dipped the tea bag in.“What exactly do you want to know? Why he had a hard-on? Why he was naked?

Why I painted him?”

“An-ling. Please.”

She walked up to me, pushed her hair back so I could see her face and kissed my cheek. “I’m sorry, but you’re so suspicious. He didn’t have a hard-on. I added that for fun. After painting trillions of naked men with drooping penises, it gets a little boring.” She curled her legs underneath her on the sofa.“He came over one morning, looking for you. You should have seen the look of relief on his face when he saw that we sleep behind different screens. Is that what Tom and Josh think, that we’re lovers? That the only reason you’re with me is sex? That’s pretty insulting.”

“That’s not what they think.Why didn’t you tell me Josh came over? You shouldn’t have let him in. I told you he must never come here.You shouldn’t have let him in.”My voice was shrill, petulant, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt betrayed.

“He was downstairs. It was freezing cold. I let him in.

Why are you so angry? Tom’s never going to find out.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep it a secret?” “He said you’d get mad if I told you. I believed him so I didn’t. In exchange for the favor I asked him to sit for me.

He’s got good bones and private models cost fifteen bucks an hour.”

“Did he have to be naked? He just turned fourteen.”

“I can only see the bones if he’s naked. He didn’t care.

And kids start to fuck at twelve, Lady Teacher.Time to get with the times.”

Not Josh, I thought. He’s too shy, too cautious. Not my boy.“How many times has he come over?”

“Twice. I work fast.”

“The first time, what day was that?”