SANG LINH

NEW YORK, 1997

Taking down Why We Put Mirrors in Birdcages with Roya and Duy, I remember thinking that was it, the top of the mountain. My younger two boys were home with the babysitter—Mytoan, an acquaintance’s teenage daughter. This was before we could afford Marguerite, the kids’ favorite nanny—but only just before. Birdcages was Orkideh’s third exhibition in my gallery and her third sellout. I couldn’t raise prices enough.

I was stubbornly still working as my own courier, installing and uninstalling my shows with the help of my oldest son, Duy, who I paid fifty dollars a day to help. Fifty dollars a day felt to both of us like an outrageous fee—and his brothers complained bitterly—but I needed the help, and I liked having him around. Roya also insisted on helping set up and break down, more obsessiveness than kindness. Once she moved her paintings out of her old apartment in the meatpacking district and into her first studio, she never really trusted anyone, even me, to handle the work carefully enough.

She and I were listening to pop radio as we sanded down spackle to repaint a section of the wall for the next exhibition when Duy came over with one of the show’s larger paintings, Odi et Amo, wrapped in a cocoon of paper and bubble padding.

“Where does this one go?” he asked.

The painting he carried—a crucified hand curling to clutch the nail driven through its palm—was one of Roya’s favorites, though not one of mine. The hand gripped the nail almost tenderly, as one might hold a child’s finger while crossing the street. There was, in the meat of the palm, almost the insinuation of a face, a child face. The watery colors felt loose, searching. Sometimes at night my mother used to dump the leftover tea from her teapot into my bathwater, and the colors of Odi et Amo reminded me of that, the browns into grays. The correspondence was so uncanny that the first time I saw the painting, I got a whiff of pandan leaves. That shock of recall. It wasn’t entirely pleasant, and I was glad the painting was going somewhere where I’d be unlikely to see it again.

I pointed to the pallet of work going to David J. T. Swartzwelder, a health-care tycoon who’d purchased a third of the show himself. Roya eyed Duy suspiciously as he walked the painting over to the others. I could see her trying to restrain herself, but ultimately she couldn’t resist, shouting, “Careful with the corners! Please!”

Duy rolled his eyes theatrically. I touched Roya’s hand. She looked over at me, and, meeting her eyes, I felt overcome suddenly with an eclipsing gratitude. Like a panic attack, but flipped over the badness midline. This brilliant curious woman loved me and we were doing what we always dreamed. My boys were happy and safe. We had made a good life. Of course, for Roya and me, there would be higher planes of professional success, financial success, creative success. Money, prizes, travel. I knew that even then. But for us, our marriage, the us of us, it felt, even in the moment, like a kind of climax.

Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband’s abuse, I have held the certainty of the damned, that sense of “everything is going to be just this, this misery forever, till I die.” An irrepressible inescapable horror stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that way. That even in Roya’s and my impossibly good moments, I instinctively knew to hold them, to store them inside myself like pockets of fat for the lean seasons ahead.

“He knows what he’s doing,” I assured, nodding to Duy, and I saw Roya soften a little.

Roya set down her sheet of sandpaper. The boombox was playing a sexy ballad I hadn’t heard before. The lyrics went “If I could wear your clothes, I’d pretend I was you, And lose controooool.” As if on cue, Roya stepped over behind me, put her arms around my waist, and kissed my neck.

“You know what I’m going to buy first?” she asked.

“Hm?”

“With the money from the show,” she clarified.

“Ah,” I replied. “Some deodorant, perhaps?”

She slapped my arm playfully, then said: “It’s your fault I’ve had to be in here these past two days. If you weren’t so good at your job, we wouldn’t have to ship all these.”

I rolled my eyes. “These would have sold anywhere.”

She shrugged it off.

“Ask me what I’m going to buy!” she insisted, a little too loud, in my ear.

Duy called out from the pallets: “Was that the last painting for this guy?”

I shook my head and pointed to a small one in the hallway: A Murmur, it was called. The shadow of the shadow of a dove. White on white.

“That one too.”

Duy sighed. I added, “Thank you, dear!”

Turning back to Roya, I asked, “What will you buy, great puppy bear?”

“Wow, I’m so glad you asked!” she said, joking at being shocked. “I am going to buy the biggest Cadillac car door I can find.”

She was still behind me, her hands around my waist, and pulled me in a little closer, resting her chin on my shoulder. I craned my neck back to study her face. She was smiling her self-satisfied smile, which I loved, despite myself.

“Just the car door?” I asked.

“Yep.”

I sighed, playing along.

“Why would you just get the Cadillac door, love?”

She squeezed me hard, then whispered into my ear: “Because when the world ends and it’s just us left to fend for ourselves, I can roll down the window when it gets hot!”

At this she started laughing, booming thunderous laughter that I thought for a single irrational second might knock paintings off the wall, louder than I’d ever heard her do anything. I didn’t entirely understand the joke, didn’t understand who exactly was included in her “us” either. But it was so ridiculous, her laughing so hard at her own terrible joke, that soon I was laughing, laughing just as hard at her laughing just as hard as she was laughing. Duy looked over at us, shook his head, laughed a little too. He was a good boy, took care of his brothers, helped them get dressed when they were little and do their homework when they got older. He taught Truong how to use the stove.

Once when he was younger, Duy and I watched a homeless man trip in the street, spilling his two big garbage bags of cans everywhere. Duy laughed at the sight, at the sound, and when I scolded him for laughing, he said, in English, “Mom, I can’t help laughing!”

And I didn’t understand the idiom, it was new to me, so I yelled, “Laughing doesn’t need your help!”

Which made him laugh even harder. And for whatever reason I thought of that phrase laughing with Roya there in the gallery, laughing at her stupid joke, roll down the car door window when it gets hot, meaningless, delicious, I couldn’t help laughing. I couldn’t help laughing, but laughing didn’t need my help. It already was, holding us there, good and full, where nothing could splinter us into shards, nothing could smear us off the map. The three of us stayed there all night in my gallery working, singing along to radio songs we knew, dancing to the ones we didn’t, laughing at everything, all of it, the whole absurd production suddenly blossoming straight into our faces, on purpose.