“So…essentially, you have to buy a condo and bring along your own landlord?” Liz asked. I don’t know when she’d taken her shot, but her glass was empty. I’d been waiting for the right time to offer a toast, but obviously that moment had passed.
“Essentially. Yes.”
“Dude. Why the fuck are you doing this again?”
I wanted to know too.
Dorian shrugged. “The partner doesn’t get anything if I sell. Or, maybe he gets a very small percentage. It’s still my apartment. He has no rights or anything.” He looked at me as though for verification. I nodded noncommittally, and took my own shot, ignoring the lime sitting beside my glass. The tequila was all heat and smoke on the back of my throat. I wanted another.
I signaled the waitress while Frank groaned and pushed away from the table. As he left he wished Dorian luck and mumbled something about it being good to meet Liz. He was snubbing me, or he was drunker than he seemed. I didn’t really care.
We did another round of tequila, this time all together after a chorus of gan bei. Heat rose in my chest, and the bar seemed smaller.
Liz sounded annoyed as she asked where the bathroom was, as though she had to repeat the question, as though I’d kept her waiting. Maybe I had.
After I directed her to the back of the bar, she made more noise than necessary getting up and I both loved and feared her for her moodiness, her drama.
Dorian didn’t look up as she stood, and instead moved his chair closer to mine. I was hemmed in from either side. I leaned away from him, too imperceptibly for him to notice.
“When are we having dinner?”
“It sounds like you’re going to have your nights occupied by your search for a Chinese bride.” I meant it as a joke, but Dorian’s eyes narrowed. Rather than blushing his skin blanched.
“Frank is an asshole,” he said quietly. “You should know I would never even consider something like that.”
I laughed and waved my hands at him, treating the serious mood he’d fallen into like a cloud of cigarette smoke I could disperse without inhaling. I needed another drink, opted for a margarita—something to keep my hands and mouth busy for longer than just one shot. Liz was still in the bathroom, so I ordered one for her too.
“Let me take you out. I need your advice about the apartment.”
He reached forward and rested his pointer finger on my knee.
“I really don’t have any advice for you,” I told him, tensing up and leaning back even farther in my chair. He didn’t move his hand. I don’t know why I didn’t make him.
I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. I could list, if not by name then at least by sight, a large portion of the women Dorian had fucked over the years, or at least the women he went home with; I couldn’t say what happened once they left the bars where Dorian had plied them with martinis or margaritas or sake bombs.
He tended to favor tall, willowy types, usually blonde. Not quite models, but the kind of girls who’d been told by their various aunts and their more jealous friends that they could be models, girls who smiled and thought briefly about it, but who secretly feared they were too plain, too chubby, too short, too tall. These girls flocked to Shanghai, though they didn’t belong: they came on a semester abroad or were passing through on their way to Thailand or Laos or India. Maybe that’s what attracted him: their impermanence.
Three years earlier, had I been asked to look around my circle of expat acquaintances and choose the ones who would still be there so many happy hours later, I wouldn’t have picked Dorian. If his women were flighty, temporary, Dorian had always struck me as a bit too serious for China. And though he tried to appear confident, he always looked to me to be a bit unsure, confused, as though he’d been roped into playing a game whose rules he didn’t completely understand.
“Advice about what?” The question arrived at the table before Liz did.
“Condos,” I answered loudly, finally shifting enough in my seat that my leg was out of Dorian’s casual reach, though not before Liz’s gaze landed on his hand on my knee. “I ordered you a margarita,” I rushed. “I hope that’s okay.”
She looked sideways at the two of us as she sat. I had nothing to hide from her, but still I felt guilty.
Drinks with straws are a balm to my anxiety, the plastic providing the perfect level of resistance for the nervous workings of my jaw. Imagine chewing frantically on a bright red coffee stirrer while your girlfriend fights with your father. She yelled so loud I might have tufted out of there on a sound wave, had I been ready.
7.
I slid close to Liz in the back of the cab on the way home, but the space I’d created between us didn’t get any smaller.
“That was fun.” Liz said sarcastically.
“You’re upset.” As though she needed me to tell her.
“No, I loved spending the night watching a good-looking guy hit on my girlfriend while I’m being ignored.”
“I wasn’t ignoring you.”
She turned away from me to stare out the window. Looking back, I wonder if it was my attention she’d been missing. At the time I thought I was getting the silent treatment I deserved.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the back of Liz’s head. “I don’t know why this is so hard for me.” It would have been closer to the truth to say I didn’t know how to explain to her why it was hard, but even that seemed like saying too much. I willed the traffic to disperse and our cab to speed up, wanting the safety of our apartment.
“I know this is new for us, but really—I don’t understand why you are so secretive about it. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Histories and histories and histories.
“I know that. I’m not ashamed.”
“Then what is it? You can’t expect me to just accept that you don’t know.”
Our cab pulled into the semi-circular driveway in front of our building. I paid the fare—the least I could do—counting the bills slowly, buying time.
Alice had turned us into a spectacle. I was complicit—reliant on alcohol and dim party lights to push me through my inexperience, and to drown out the questions I didn’t know yet how to answer. But my feelings for her were real. The titillated onlookers were never the point.
Was Liz an Alice or a Heather? It scared me that I couldn’t tell.
“I just need some more time to feel settled, and less anxious. It’s only been a couple of months. I’m still trying to get used to this,” is what I said.
It was the right thing to say to earn her sympathy.
“Only that long? God, it feels like so much longer, don’t you think? I feel like we’ve been together forever.”
“Well, it has been longer since you moved in. Maybe that’s really when it all started.”
Liz laughed. “Like I was some mail-order-bride you sent for from America.”
I bit my lip. “Actually,” I answered slowly, “I did send for you.” A minor secret, something I thought I could give her.
“What do you mean?”
“I found you. I brought you here. I gave your résumé to the principal. He didn’t look at any other applicants. Actually,” I paused and chuckled at this, “I told him there were no other applicants.”
“What? Why?”
“I just had a sense, I guess. I don’t really know, exactly. It was the e-mail you sent, I think. I just knew you needed to be here.”
I liked to imagine Liz writing her cover letter. From the time stamp I knew it had been the middle of the night, and so I pictured her in a dark apartment, her hair in a messy bun, her eyes red—strained from too long in front of a glowing computer screen and maybe the desperate tears of someone who needed an escape.
As a job application, the materials she sent were terrible—and they weren’t the versions I eventually gave to the principal—but they were enough to win me over.
She stepped into the elevator ahead of me without answering and crossed her arms over her chest, keeping her gaze on the floor.
“Are you mad?” This time I was surprised.
“I don’t know.”
“It was fate, Liz. Fate.”
She didn’t answer, and the doors to the elevator slid closed in front of us.
“What did you see?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did you see in me? What made you want to bring me here?”
“You signed the letter ‘Besottedly.’” That wasn’t really it, or wasn’t all of it, but it was all I could give her.
Liz shrugged. “It means drunk.”
I shook my head. “It means in love.”
8.
“I have something to tell you.”
We were getting ready for bed, brushing our teeth beside each other, talking through the foam—the way roommates do rather than lovers. Not because of my hesitancy with her that evening, or even because she knew I’d manipulated her hiring. It was just how we were some nights. I didn’t mind that things between us weren’t always romantic, or that we didn’t have as much sex as we could’ve. There was comfort in it. It made me feel safe.
Though now she spoke without making eye contact in the mirror and my anxiety spiked.
“Madeline came to observe my class today.”
I exhaled loudly at the mention of work. Things with us were fine. We were fine.
“I think it went really badly.”
“Badly how?”
“Well, the lesson I taught didn’t match the plan she had.”
I closed my eyes and inhaled, kept them closed as I asked, “Why didn’t they match?” I spoke slowly in an attempt to convey calm, though I think it had the opposite effect, at least on me.
“I didn’t know she was coming.” She said it softly, but there was an indignant edge to her voice. She didn’t want to have to explain herself to me. But now that she understood the role I had in hiring, she realized she had to.
The fight we had next about one thing that couldn’t be changed was so much worse than the one we had in the cab about many things still left undone.
I didn’t know if I was more upset that she hadn’t been opening any of the green envelopes, or that she hadn’t been using any of the lesson plans I’d risked my job to give her.
I asked about the envelopes first, trying to remember as I did what other school announcements or requirements I’d opted to convey via proverb.
“You told me not to worry about them!”
“I told you not to worry about the ones with due dates for lesson plans. I didn’t say to stop opening them.”
“Why does it even matter? I just want to figure out what to do about this terrible observation. Can I get a do-over or something? Am I in trouble because my lesson didn’t match the plans?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, shaking my head and staring down at the bathroom floor.
I blamed myself, but I wasn’t about to tell Liz that. I’d gotten distracted, had assumed that Liz’s silence regarding the envelopes meant she had everything under control. I’ve learned since then not to make assumptions about silence.
I offered Liz none of this generosity. “I still don’t understand why you haven’t been using the lessons I’ve been handing in. It makes absolutely no sense.”
“I know.” She was working hard not to cry. “You never should’ve given me this job.”
“You can do this.”
Liz started to laugh. “Right. I can do it. I’m just the worst speech teacher in the history of this school.”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s fine. I know I’m terrible. But you know, you’re the one who brought me here. You’re the one who thought I could do it. Now I’m probably going to get fired. What do we do?” She was ready to hear the alternatives. I would help her find a new job, or I would tell her that maybe she could take some time off, just a little while.
“You’re not going to get fired. Not during the school year.”
Liz sighed. “How do you know?”
“Well, the principal hasn’t asked me to put out a new job listing, so there’s no one to replace you. At least not yet. You still have time to improve.”
I wanted her to nod, full of hope and the resolve to become a better teacher. The best she could do, though, was to blink her eyes slowly.
“We’ll figure it out,” I promised, reaching for her hand as I turned to leave the bathroom, pulling her along behind me. “Don’t worry.”
WE WISh for stars
氖
I wish I were a stronger person: the kind who packs away a wooden box containing the tokens of a failed relationship without opening it, or the kind who just throws it away; the kind who says goodbye without cutting open all the wounds that have only just begun to heal. The kind who closes the fucking computer.
In her wedding photos Liz looks older. It’s not just that she’s married—children do that all the time. There’s something in her eyes now: something more than the glisten of tears as she stands under a tree in her wedding gown, holding her husband’s two hands in her own. Am I surprised she married a man? I search the hollows of my heart, my gut.
In another photo Liz and her groom hold glasses of champagne, the edge of hers already smeared with cranberry lipstick. She’s smiling, looking off to the side at someone outside the frame.
So many of her albums are public. After the reception and the ceremony, I admire the French manicure, and the sassy grin peeking out from a curtain of half-done hair. She’s holding champagne in that one too, the manicure and the engagement ring framed for the camera by the fluted glass. More bubbly at brunch, the bride-to-be in a crisp white shirt-dress—button-down for easy removal.
I assume it’s her mother who buttons up the back of her wedding gown. An older man who loves Liz and loves the woman I assume is her mother stands in front of them both, tears in his eyes. A father full of pride.
She had an amazing photographer.
In another picture they stand in profile framed by a doorway. Standing behind her, Liz’s father is wearing a vest but no jacket, a pale pink tie. He fastens the clasp of her necklace. The single strand of pearls ripples over her collarbone like water.
Resting a hand on the strand still around my own neck, I look back at the pictures of the ceremony, wondering how I could’ve missed it.
1.
Shanghai is always rushing, or it doesn’t move at all. Cars careen through intersections and down narrow streets, barely missing pedestrians, bikes, and mopeds; or traffic creeps, forming millipedes of headlights stretching in all directions from the city’s center to its edges. Construction projects race toward completion, the steel skeletons of new skyscrapers welded by workers who sleep on site and work round-the-clock shifts, until one day the workers are gone, banished by bureaucrats. The hollow buildings they leave behind are the city’s broken promises.
Raised in Shanghai, Sam should have felt this push and pull in his blood. He couldn’t match the city’s rhythms though: hurried when he should have meandered, stood still when he should have leapt.
Or he got on the bus, sighing and pulling at his collar to make more room to breathe. The grime of the city mixed with the grime of the passengers and the weight of their days carried in heavy plastic bags; the air smelled of gasoline and sweat and fish. The floor vibrated beneath Sam’s feet as the bus lurched away from the curb.
He took a deep breath—through his mouth—and counted silently to ten. His phone buzzed. After several attempts at shifting his bag from one shoulder to the other, widening his stance to steady himself on the rocking bus, disrupting and in two cases elbowing the other passengers who crowded around him, he was able to remove the phone from his snug pocket.
He read the text from Li Qin: a knife-sharp reminder that Sam should bring a date to Li Qin’s birthday party, a repeated offer to bring a woman for Sam if he couldn’t find his own. Everyone Sam knew was looking for a wife, using bottles of vodka and tables in the dark corners of nightclubs, shined shoes and silver watches, cel
l phones and stereos, new cars and gold fixtures like bait—all of it different from the rest of the flashing lights in Shanghai, but the same.
The bus pulled up at his stop and Sam forced his way to the door, exhaling in relief as the wall of flesh crammed inside expelled him onto the sidewalk. He headed away from Jiujiang Road to the tea lounge he and Liz decided to try. He’d finally given in to her requests. But he wasn’t going in without her.
She was almost 20 minutes late. For the first time since they started meeting, Sam thought about giving up. That was his nerves, though, and he made himself stay still. Finally, he saw her turn the corner at the end of the road. It was relief he felt. Or it was dread.
She looked surprised to see him standing outside. “I’m so sorry! I had some trouble finding it. Are they closed?”
“No, no.” Sam shook his head and ushered her through the door. “Ni hao,” he mumbled to the staff as they entered. The tea house was, as he feared, completely empty. The waitresses tittered and rushed to bring them water and menus. Keeping with the Chinese custom, she placed the menus on the table and then stood immediately beside them, waiting for their order. A second server hovered just a few feet away, as though there might be a tea emergency that required her assistance.
Sam fought the urge to groan, speaking quickly to them instead, ordering for himself and Liz just to get them to go away.
“So…” he turned back to Liz.
“My first real tea house!” she cut him off. She looked around excitedly, at the rough wooden tables and chairs, the heavy drapes, the fake flowers carefully arranged in the corners. Seven months in China and she hadn’t yet been inside a tea house. Sam assumed she’d been waiting for him to take her.
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