Besotted

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Besotted Page 6

by Melissa Duclos


  My fingers had only grazed my inner thigh when I saw the spider out of the corner of my eye. For a moment I thought it was a cartoon. It was too large, anyway, to be a real spider: hovering on thin legs at least two inches off the ground, it might as well have been wearing ballet shoes. Its abdomen was the size of a ping pong ball. My stomach turned, turns still, whenever I think of that tiptoeing monstrosity, so out of place in a suburban house outside New York City. Leaving my shorts where they’d pooled beside the couch, I got a spray can of Raid out of the garage, crept as close to the thing as I was able, and emptied the bottle. As the white foam slowly coated its body, it lurched and tipped on its legs, but continued moving toward me. I was sure I heard it gasp. I panicked then, found an aluminum mixing bowl to set down on top of it, trapping it and leaving it to die slowly, like everything else in Westchester County.

  I ran halfway up the stairs before putting my shorts back on.

  Four days later, when I finally had the courage to return to the basement, the bowl and the spider were gone.

  But it will never leave me. I see now the gaping holes I was expecting Liz to fill: my loneliness and depression, my anxiety. But I didn’t know what else to do with them.

  Our bus pulled into the driveway of the school.

  “I hope it stops raining.”

  “I don’t mind it, actually,” Liz answered.

  “Are you kidding? It’s like acid falling from the sky. Don’t let it touch you.” We filed off the bus and hurried inside, where Liz followed me into the main office.

  “Did you need something?” I asked, sounding hopeful.

  “Oh, I, uh…I need to talk to the principal.”

  “You’re not quitting, are you?” I spoke out of fear but wanted to swallow the syllables as soon as they’d left my mouth. It was the last idea I wanted Liz to get.

  She was quiet for too long, then laughed. “No, nothing like that.”

  I stood there for a moment then, waiting for her to tell me what the meeting was about, but Liz stayed silent, unable to admit her failures.

  “I’ll see if he’s free,” I said finally. A moment later I waved her back.

  “I am glad you are here,” the principal said when she stepped into his office. “I need to talk to you.”

  “You do?” It must have occurred to Liz that she would be fired. She sat heavily, already resigned to her fate.

  “You have found a new address?”

  “A new address…” her voice trailed off. “Oh, yes, I, uh, gave it to the, uh, housing person right after I moved.” She couldn’t remember Serena’s name. “I know I was a couple days late, but I had some trouble finding—”

  “Late. Yes. So I imagine you are here about the fee.”

  “The fee?”

  “You stayed beyond your scheduled departure date. I can give you credit for one of the days. The rest will be taken out of your pay next week.”

  “How much is it?” It seemed like the thing to ask, though the numbers were virtually meaningless to her. She made more than she needed for basic living expenses; if the fee was coming out of next week’s pay, then it was less than a week’s pay, and therefore not of any concern.

  The principal shuffled some papers around on his desk, as though he perhaps had the number written down somewhere already. “You will be informed of the amount,” he answered finally. “It is for the hotel room.”

  “Okay.”

  “Excellent.” He stood abruptly and gestured toward the door. “Thank you for coming to see me about this.”

  He ushered Liz out of the office before she had a chance to tell him that it wasn’t at all what she’d come to see him about.

  Later that afternoon, a green envelope appeared in her mailbox in the staffroom. She carried it back to her desk to open, checking first to see if anyone was watching.

  The cat who chases two mice catches neither.

  She sighed and opened the card without attempting to interpret the quote. On the inside she read: ¥600. That was all. It was just a bill for the extra days she spent in the hotel room. The principal had told me to inform Liz what she’d be charged; he didn’t specify how.

  Surprising herself, Liz tore the note in half then, momentarily stunned by her power to do so. Ripping it into four more pieces, she smiled and dropped the confetti in her trash bin. She looked at the rest of the envelopes still stacked in her desk, and for a moment thought about just tearing them up too. But what would that solve? There was no fee she could pay for being bad at her job. She knew she’d have to do something about the lesson plans, soon. For now, she had a class to teach, and so she headed out of the staffroom, listing as she walked the words that rhymed with cake.

  The next morning my alarm went off at six, as always. First, I thought about hitting the snooze button—once or twice or three times—until I’d be forced to fly out of bed, shower quickly if at all, run out the door to make the bus. Then I thought, for the first time since Liz had arrived, about turning it off entirely, staying in bed for the rest of the day, turning off my phone. The fact that I didn’t do this was a good sign, of course, but also deeply troubling to me. Sometimes I wished I could have made more of a commitment to my depressive instincts, but I seemed unable to play the role correctly.

  I forced myself out of bed and into the kitchen, thinking not of the demands of my job, but of Liz. That was the whole point of a roommate, after all. She was, without knowing it, a life raft that I had stepped into; I didn’t yet have a comfortable place to sit, but that was no reason to step off the boat, allow myself to sink.

  Fixated on this Liz-as-raft image, I floundered around, wishing for a pillow and maybe a book to read, and so was startled to enter the kitchen to find Liz-as-real-person-in-bathrobe standing there, pondering the tin of Jasmine tea.

  “You just dump it into the cup?” she asked in lieu of a greeting.

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking about tea, that she had, in fact, gotten up early for this, just as she’d said she would. “I like to watch them bloom,” I answered finally.

  If she thought the response strange, Liz didn’t show it. She simply pushed the tin toward me, and leaned against the wall opposite the stove, waiting for me to take over.

  “I’ll bring it to you,” I told her. It was the least I could do.

  The kitchen was a narrow alcove, separated from the open living room and dining area. Liz backed out, leaving me with the tea. She went to sit at the table in the other room and I moved slowly through the tea-making process, wanting time to consider the implications of this new development. On one hand, we were just roommates, having tea in the morning before work. On the other…But no, there was no other hand. We were just roommates, and it was just tea: a normal beverage, a typical morning activity. Yet I felt a fluttering in my gut. I thought again about the spider.

  I poured the water. In my head I listed all the things I would never say aloud to Liz. The jasmine flowers bloomed and I named them: Agitation, Timidity, Dread. I thought about the hopes I’d had before Liz arrived—that my depression would disappear if I had someone else relying on me. To a certain extent I’d been right, but I was left with the realization that I could lose everything at any moment. It was a feeling I recognized.

  You must be in love with her.

  I stared down at my cup, as though the rogue thought had emanated straight from the blossoms. Three weeks and they had finally spoken.

  I carried the hot cups of tea into the other room, trying also to carry the equally hot and fragile thought, unsure where or when I’d be able to put it down.

  11.

  Love didn’t run around at night, searching the faces reflected in plate glass for someone she used to know. Love didn’t get her feet dusty, couldn’t tolerate the creep of grime up her shins, the slick of puddles on her soles. When Love stood quite still, as she so often did, she could feel the pull of mountains and rivers and half-constructed skyscrapers and eight-lane highways and movie theaters and the
quiet parks with their untouched grass circling around her bowed head.

  Was I scared of Love? Of course. In my experience she was overly forward and easily frightened, the cause of both self-doubt and delusions of grandeur. But maybe this time things would turn out differently. Isn’t that what people always believe?

  I believed it, anyway, so I sat with Love in our living room. Welcome to my heart and would you like some tea? Liz paid our new roommate no mind. For two weeks Liz and I shared the jasmine tea—Love didn’t drink, but she watched, very intently, waiting for something to happen. I wondered how to get Liz to notice her. Loneliness was nowhere to be found.

  Love came to work with us every morning. I worried about the chill in the air and wondered if I should loan Love a coat, naked as she was, her skin nearly translucent, almost bluing, the color of skim milk spilled onto a grey Formica countertop. We arrived at school and while Liz went to teach her classes, Love curled up under my desk. I covered her with a blanket and fretted over the noise in the office, played soothing music from my tiny computer speakers, told Principal Wu the melodies had a proven effect on worker morale.

  I knew that left unrequited, Love could never be happy. But there were limits to what I could do to satisfy her. Love spoke softly, and so I tried to quiet the world around us. I stopped making plans to go out. No more drinks at O’Malley’s or Zapatas, Blue Frog, or M on the Bund when we were feeling fancy. No more dancing at Park 97 or Guandii. No more house parties with costume requirements. Fall edged closer to winter and I promised Love we would hibernate.

  Forsaking all you can eat hibachi and late-night dumplings, I decided to fatten us at home. I went to the grocery store every day after school, dragging Liz along with me, offering half-sentence explanations about saving money as I perused the produce aisle. To affect the fearlessness I believed Love required, I bought long beans and bitter melon, bamboo shoots and taro root.

  All things are difficult before they are easy. I wrote the Chinese proverb down because I believed it. I tucked it away in my wooden box and taught myself to cook. Most nights we ate late.

  “Why don’t we go out?” Liz suggested more than once, but I usually refused. Love was too fragile to entrust to a crowd of expats, and though Western women were rarely the focus of anyone’s attention, I still felt as though I had to protect Liz if I had any hope of keeping her. She didn’t go without me. I believed that meant something. There were the afternoons when she walked to her sessions with Sam, and others when she brought a book to Starbucks to unwind by herself. But she always came home for dinner.

  Until one night she didn’t. I set the table for two, but the plate across from me remained empty. Love sat beside me, tapping a long fingernail against the oak table.

  “I think I’ve finally mastered the texture of the Chinese eggplant,” I said.

  Love rolled her eyes.

  “And the chicken tonight is particularly moist.”

  Love pursed her lips and stamped her feet. She sighed loudly.

  “Okay!” I shouted. And then more softly, “Okay. I know.” I started to cry because I knew I had failed Love. She patted my shoulder and cleared away the dishes anyway.

  While I sat in front of our chicken dinner that night, Liz stared out the window of her cab, trying to put our lonely apartment out of her mind. Traffic lurched past the open green lawn she didn’t realize was People’s Square, which she didn’t know was the center of the city. She only saw the grass, and the trees edging the paved walkways, curiously lit up from their bases with green and blue lights. She was reminded suddenly of the trip to Disney World she’d taken with her parents when she was in fourth grade, of the Polynesian Village where they’d stayed.

  And so she found herself passing slowly by the circular Shanghai Museum, devoted to the ancient art and culture of the country, and thinking only of a child’s token, a fake coin used to buy an imaginary treasure. There were more clouds that night, thick and heavy, low in the sky and refracting the neon from the city just below, seeming to glow from within. Liz wished for a rumbling thunder, a change in the wind, but there was nothing. She thought of me again, as her car rolled past the park and picked up speed. Me, cooking. Me, searching for something Liz could perhaps help me find. It was a generous thought, and it was gone in an instant.

  She turned her mind then to Dorian, wondering what he thought of her. For instance, was this a date? She’d searched my phone one morning earlier in the week while I was in the shower, copied down Dorian’s number, sent him a text: Want to grab some dinner? This is Liz. Texting was perfect for Liz—how lucky for her to have stumbled into a culture where it was the only means of communication. But it meant she had no idea whether Dorian was surprised to hear from her or not, whether he paused and stared at the phone, struggling to place her name, whether he smiled and answered quickly, having imagined the invitation in the weeks leading up to it. He texted back: Sure. And then: Hong Chang Xing, North Gaungxi Rd, famous hotpot. Liz didn’t know what that meant. She only knew she and I had never been.

  The idea of trying to get to the restaurant on her own terrified her, but she wasn’t about to ask me to write down the address for her. She had the pinyin and remembered the lessons Sam had given her in pronunciation. So far in their sessions Liz had been staving off any actual grammar or language instruction by filling their time with practical questions: “How do I take the subway? How do I pronounce these streets?” She was working toward independence rather than fluency.

  She watched nervously out the window as the cab continued through the evening traffic, wondering how long it would be before she could glance out at the Shanghai sidewalk without feeling overwhelmed. Just glance and turn away, to look at her phone or think about what she would order to drink that night. The key, she thought, was perhaps more understanding: Tell me why they post the newspapers in glass cases along the sidewalk, and I will stop having to notice them. All of the noticing was exhausting. Liz wanted to get to the point where she stopped having to see every detail, where she could just live her life.

  This is what her language lessons should focus on. After only a few sessions, she’d already decided that she would never actually learn to speak Chinese. She hadn’t told Sam, but she assumed that he knew. But she didn’t want to stop going.

  Sam, just make this normal for me, she wanted to say. Just tell me why. Why do the Chinese squat on the edges of the sidewalks? What are they waiting for, and why doesn’t the posture hurt their knees? Why do they walk backward through the parks? Why do cabdrivers have one long fingernail? Why do teenagers stop her on the street to ask—in English—for directions to nearby and obvious places, and then giggle when she answers? Why are there decibel meters—huge signs—posted along the streets if no one seems to do anything about noise levels? Why is there always the crackle of firecrackers in the air?

  Listing all of the things she didn’t know about her new home exhausted her. She probably wouldn’t end up asking Sam any of these questions, though, or me or Dorian, either. There are books and books and books of words that Liz and I never spoke to each other; our insecurities differed only in their coloring.

  Had she asked me I would have told her that there were no answers, that it’s impossible to explain away an entire culture. This wasn’t an archeology project. This was just life. So no, it wasn’t about understanding, but rather just acceptance. Just get used to it, Liz. Just live here, and soon you will stop seeing so much.

  The cab stopped in front of a building that was possibly a restaurant, perhaps even the right restaurant: the Chinese characters glowing neon above the door made it impossible to tell. But Liz paid the fare and got out, hoping for the best. Thirty minutes later, she was pleasantly buzzed on warm sake and not-quite-cold beer and plunging thinly shaved beef and mushrooms into the vat of boiling water between her and Dorian, having forgotten all about me.

  “So what’s with the tattoo?”

  Dorian pushed up his sleeve, smiled like someone just ask
ed him to tell his favorite joke.

  “You like it?”

  Liz cocked her head to one side, a whisper of brown strands skimming her cheek.

  “Was a giant penis on your forearm too obvious?” She could say things like that and no one ever got mad.

  “Yes, yes, skyscrapers are phallic symbols. Very original.”

  “Don’t worry. I have a Georgia O’Keefe replica around my belly button, so we’re even.”

  Dorian laughed. And because she made him laugh, he told her the truth:

  Taipei 101 wasn’t the most amazing building in the world, and it wasn’t the only skyscraper Dorian knew would end up tattooed on his body. At one point, he told Liz, one of those tattoos, those buildings, would be Dorian’s design. He didn’t want his own building, though, to be his first tattoo, or his last. So he had to choose some others. Dorian was a planner.

  Liz also knew when not to make a joke. She took a well-timed bite of sizzling Chinese cabbage, dipped in the peanut soy mixture Dorian had concocted in one of the small white bowls between them. Imagine creating an entire meal by dripping messily from one pot of sauce to another, flavoring your next bite with the remnants of this one, and you understand hot pot.

  “That’s either endearing, or the most narcissistic thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Couldn’t it be both?”

  They got along well, mostly because Liz was content to let Dorian talk.

  “It’s interesting, I think, to choose to live in a place where you’ll always be an outsider.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll always be a lăowài, no matter how long I live here.” Lăo can mean always, he explained to her, wài foreign. “A lăowài is always a foreigner. It’s actually kind of a derogatory term, but I like it.” Dorian loved Shanghai for its capacity to accept foreign influence—in its architecture especially—without being conquered by it. Shanghai took what it wanted and made it its own.

 

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