Chapter V. Plus Ça Change.
V.
PLUS ?A CHANGE.
NEW YORK.
I had deliberately avoided New York for eighteen years.
There’d been a handful of trips: a wedding here, a new baby there, a high school reunion.
But always it was fleeting, a passing through en route to somewhere else.
I had little desire to bump up against my past. To be reminded of who—or more specifically what—led me to flee to France in the first place.
Nor was I inclined to subject myself to my family’s scrutiny for an extended period.
My parents had retired to Florida shortly after our exodus—mine, and my brother Andrew’s, who’d shipped off to London for an advanced law degree and never moved back.
And with my father’s sisters becoming snowbirds, dividing their time between Westchester and Broward counties, our holiday gatherings were now mostly in Florida.
And mostly brief, which suited me fine. My family and their expectation of exceptionalism was better in small doses.
But that March, my French gallery had landed a booth at the New York Armory Show and was exhibiting, among other pieces, works from one of my recent series.
And so New York it was. That my parents happened to be in town for an old friend’s funeral was a convenient coincidence.
One brief home-cooked Jamaican meal courtesy of my Aunt Lolo, with all of us en masse, was certainly doable.
Furthermore, my life at the moment, at least on the surface, looked good.
The Chens could be a welcome distraction.
I’d planned the New York jaunt months in advance as part of a longer business trip.
Check out some new artists, show my face at the Khalil Mansour booth, and meet with a few dealers before heading to Paris for a week to shoot actress Victoire de Fleury for French Vogue.
Their editor had requested something different, “not typical portraiture; something unexpected, revealing,” and Victoire had not only starred in but been nominated for a César for Salut, Bordeaux!
So I was the inspired choice. And as hard as I’d worked to escape fashion photography, I’d be remiss to decline this opportunity.
Thus, that first Friday in March, after a late breakfast with the two owners of Cherry and Martin, an LA-based art gallery that I was considering for representation, I found myself strolling through Pier 94, imbibing art and culture on a scale that I had not been able to in Los Angeles.
Not with things so spread out. And it was there that I encountered Après.
There, wedged into the back of Khalil’s booth, past the colorful Japanese-kite installation and the collection of glass tableaus, was a series of black and whites I’d taken in the weeks following Francois’s reveal.
They were somber, heavily shadowed, obscure.
My husband: unidentifiable, asleep in our matrimonial bed.
Shot with a wide lens. His face turned away from the camera.
His back a silver whisper in the distance.
The sheets gathered and inky at his waist. And the space between us vague and vast. Four frames taken over the course of a night.
Focus shifting. Streetlights giving way to the gray of daybreak.
The slump in his shoulders varying, the angle of his hips, the fold of the sheets.
But the distance remains: cold, uncharted.
It stops me in my tracks. Every emotion flooding back in this very public space.
When I first showed Francois the prints, he knew. Almost immediately. He knew. He knew that I had not been sleeping. He knew why.
“They are beautiful,” he’d said. And that was all.
When I broke the news in the fall that Khalil had chosen them to show in New York, and that the series title was After, he was livid.
“You put it out there like the shit!” he’d said, fuming in our living room one afternoon, when the kids were still in school.
“The shit?”
“Like the garbage, you leave on the street for everyone out there to see!”
“Our dirty laundry, you mean?”
“Laundry. Merde. Oui, c’est ca! You put it out there for the world to see, to know our business.”
Leelou jumped down then from where she’d been coiled on the couch, crossed the room, and left.
For a moment I stared at my husband. How amusing he thought “the world” would see it. Figure it out. Care. “I think your guilt is showing.”
“Merde!” he cursed again, and then disappeared down the hall. I pictured him sulking in our bedroom. Wanting to destroy things, but knowing it was not in his character. Not inanimate things, anyway.
He returned moments later, his eyes red. “I’m sorry. You know. I said I was sorry.”
“I know you did. But you’ve had over two years to wrestle with this in your head. I’ve had ten months. I’m still processing. And this is my way of doing it.”
That was September.
“Voilà! La belle Jama?caine!!”
That voice, smooth, distinctive, sails through the booth. I smile, turning in its direction. Khalil Mansour, art dealer extraordinaire, tall, dark, strikingly handsome, impeccably dressed. Always.
“Le beau Algérien,” I greet him with the traditional French bise. Air-kisses on both sides.
“It’s nice to see your face,” he says in his native tongue. “America treating you well?”
“So far, no complaints.”
“And LA?”
I shrug. “It’s … different.”
At that, he laughs. “Mais, bien s?r.”
“It’s big,” I continue. “Very segregated. There are white neighborhoods and Black neighborhoods. Mexican, Korean…”
“Arab neighborhoods?”
“Persian?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Not the same thing.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry, I haven’t found the Arab ones yet.”
“Ha! Good luck!” He laughs. “Have you done anything very Hollywood?”
“We went to a couple of Golden Globes parties. But we knew no one and no one really knew us. So we just walked around in circles trying to pretend we fit in.” I chuckle at the memory. “Hollywood types really like to celebrate themselves.”
“Have you not made any friends?”
“Mmm … not exactly. Although I did almost kill Anouk Ferrand with my big American car.”
“No!!”
“Yes. It wasn’t pretty. But I went to her house to apologize, and she was very nice.”
Khalil cocks his head, removes his rimless glasses, and cleans them delicately with a silk handkerchief from his suit pocket.
The light catching his cuff link just so.
A lesson in elegance. I think about how growing up Black and female I was reminded time and time again that I had two strikes against me and so had to be twice as good at everything I did.
I imagine succeeding as Muslim and Arab in France is the same.
Particularly in the art world. The pressure to be exceptional.
“Pay attention to that one,” he says before replacing his glasses. “She’s … peculiar.”
“How so?”
He pauses for an instant, choosing his words.
“She runs hot and cold,” he says, eventually, and before I can get him to elaborate, Khalil has turned toward the far wall and is surveying my prints. “So what do you think? It’s not bad, no?”
“No. Not bad.”
The French do this. They say “not bad” when they mean very good.
“There is a real sadness to it, I think. But at the same time, hope.”
I nod. I have not told Khalil about Francois’s infidelity. I have not told anyone besides my therapist. But sometimes I think he can see right through me, through my art. My insecurities, my dreams, my fears.
We met when I was new to Paris, and he was just starting out.
When we each had fewer responsibilities and more time to linger over cafés crème and wax philosophical about race and ethnicity in the art world, and its lack of darker faces.
In fifteen years, he’d ascended in status, opened two additional Parisian galleries, and was looking to open a fourth abroad.
He’d outgrown photography as a medium, but he’d held on to me.
Finding an LA-based dealer who was similarly discriminating and loyal was not going to be easy.
“How is the new project going?”
“Slow.”
He turns to look at me, catches something in my eyes. “You can’t rush art, you know,” he says.
“Tell that to my husband.”
At that, he smiles. “That’s not art. That’s commerce.”
“Cecilia! Come, let me get a good look at you. A little rounder in the face, but still pretty.” My mother embraces me later that evening in Westchester.
It is how Olive June Chen (née McPherson) has always greeted me.
A brief, often biting observation of the physical, accompanied by some sort of loving remark.
She couldn’t stop herself. It had taken years of therapy to realize this was a reflection of her and not me. But by then the damage was done.
“Leave mi likkle daughter alone. She’s perfect just the way she is,” my father chimes in.
“Thank you, Daddy.”
The two of them stood in the entryway of my Auntie Lolo’s home in Armonk.
Matching Cheshire cat smiles on their faces.
My mother in a conservative A-line dress and pearls, her once-long hair held back with a demure headband.
My father in a dark suit and tie, jacket removed.
His hair silky, silver. Any roundness in my face came from him.
My mother’s was the perfect oval. But my father’s face was still impish, wide, open, the face of a young boy.
A brownish Chinese boy who’d run barefoot through the dirt roads of Annotto Bay with his brother and sisters in his youth.
A boy who would go on to perform well at school in Kingston, travel to London to study finance, return to his native island to work for its largest bank, marry his high school sweetheart–cum–beauty queen, have two kids, and then take a huge risk in leaving a familiar life behind to migrate to the States.
Things had turned out well for him. Expat children notwithstanding.
“Come in, come in. Don’t let the air out. Lo and Warren aren’t paying to heat the whole neighborhood.
“How was the ride?”
“Same as always. Loud businessmen drinking Michelob and playing card games,” I say, referencing a certain subset of Metro-North commuters.
“They don’t do that in France?”