Besotted

by Melissa Duclos

  They set up an appointment for later that day—no time like the present—after Dorian confirmed that it was not necessary (nor even possible) to contact his investor. The man’s name would simply be added to Dorian’s application, along with the official seal from the investment office. He would own a small stake in Dorian’s new condo, as though those freshly painted walls, the tile and hardwood floors, the granite countertops that Dorian envisioned in his mind were a company that had just gone public. Dorian would pay the man a monthly fee, through the Office of Foreign Investment, a dividend for owning stock in his life.

  Still staring at the paper, he forgot for the moment that this man—Deng Yongrui—had been randomly assigned to him by a bureaucrat in some poorly lit, smoke-filled office. He imagined instead that Deng Yongrui had sought him out, had chosen Dorian’s apartment, Dorian’s life, to buy into. Dorian was, Deng Yongrui believed, a safe investment. He took some confidence from this and shook off the months of doubt that had been clinging to him like a thin layer of dust. He would buy an apartment, for himself and for Deng Yongrui.

  The same week that Dorian got his apartment, Liz finally made a plan that Sam didn’t cancel. It was obvious to me that he was avoiding her, but she refused to think anything of it, made excuses about his workload or his mother, surely the same excuses Sam peddled to her every time he texted to say he couldn’t make it after all. Too polite to either ignore or confront her, he was simply hoping she would go away.

  I knew what would happen when she finally forced Sam to see her. His lines ran in my head like a script. I could’ve recited them to her before she left, but I imagined too many scenarios in which she heard jealousy in my caution. So I said nothing.

  She beat him to the Starbucks and contemplated buying him a Mocha Frappuccino. He hadn’t done that for her again after that first meeting, but she was sure he’d remember. She didn’t have time to execute, realizing for the first time how early Sam must’ve been that afternoon to have had her drink on the table when she arrived. After 10 minutes of waiting that morning, Liz was still four patrons away from the register when Sam stepped in line just beside her. She ordered an iced latte, and unable to surprise him with a drink, asked him what he’d like.

  He shook his head. “Nothing. I’m okay.”

  When she asked him where he wanted to sit, he shrugged.

  Remembering what he’d said once about helping her find a better job if she ever needed one, she was eager to talk to him about her second observation. It hadn’t gone terribly—or at least it could have been worse—but she wanted to know what her options might be. She hated the job, so even if she did get asked back, maybe she’d want to do something else. Wrapped up as she was in her own issues, she barely noticed Sam’s detachment.

  “I’m so glad we finally found a time to get together. You’ve been so busy!”

  He looked down at the table Liz had chosen. “I haven’t been busy,” he admitted. “I was waiting for you to apologize.”

  “Apologize? For what?”

  “For what you did at Li Qin’s birthday party.”

  Even then Liz didn’t understand. She blinked. “I’m sorry. I know we left in a hurry. I think Dorian felt sick or something. I don’t know. They just ran out of there. But I should’ve said good night.”

  “Saying good night would’ve made things even worse.”

  “Sam, what are you talking about?”

  “You were supposed to be my date.” He looked up at her for the first time, then. “You embarrassed me. You and Sasha.”

  “I—I’m…” She sighed. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Sam glared at her. The thing to say was obvious.

  She got there, but the awkward silence that came first made everything worse. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know Sasha was going to come to the party. I told her not to, actually! But honestly, I think she was jealous. Or worried something was going to happen, which is ridiculous. I told her it was a pretend date, but I don’t know. I don’t know what she was thinking. I really didn’t have any idea she was going to come.”

  Her explanation came out in a rush, none of it any interest to Sam. It was all he was going to get from her though. Life happened to Liz: Bryan had happened and the job in Shanghai had happened and then I had happened, over and over again I happened. Sam happened to her, too, but he was a secondary character: what she did to him was of no concern.

  “And I’m sorry I have failed you as a language partner.” He stood up. Liz still had three-quarters of an iced latte in a glass tumbler to finish. She didn’t know where Sam was going.

  “What do you mean? You haven’t failed.”

  “You haven’t learned any Chinese.”

  “I know, but…the sessions are still really helpful.” She felt like a child looking up at him from her seat at the table. If she stood she would’ve been able to make eye contact with him, but she wasn’t sure she wanted that.

  “I’m not so worried about learning Chinese,” she continued. “I just thought we were friends.”

  “You’re not a very good friend,” he answered. And that was it. He turned and left the Starbucks, shoving his hands in his pockets as he walked away.

  Liz blinked her eyes and watched him go. She finished her latte, though it tasted metallic to her now, bitter. First, she blamed me. She’d told me not to come and I hadn’t listened. She’d told me she wanted to be a good friend to Sam and I had sabotaged her.

  As she fumed, though, she also remembered—the way it felt when I’d kissed her in front of everyone, the greed with which she’d soaked up my attention, the ease with which she’d forgotten all about Sam and the favor she’d promised him. She remembered, too, the warning I’d given over brunch, when I’d gently suggested that Sam might have been upset. The anger toward me she balanced against her own shame; she could fight with me, sure, but then she’d have to admit that Sam was right: she hadn’t been a good friend to him.

  I wish she trusted me enough to share that shame. If I could change anything that happened between us, it would’ve been this: I know how he looked at you, I would have told her.

  She said nothing to me, though, collecting secrets like beads on a necklace.

  5.

  Love mourned the loss of stars. She’d danced giddily in the neon for too many nights. She dreamt of beaches in the moonlight, yes, with the rain clouds swelling. She wanted romance and muffled sweaty sex beneath the blankets at the hostel and cold gritty sex on the mostly deserted beach, and to escape the sooty humidity of Shanghai which made Love feel grimy and old.

  Love made some convincing arguments. A vacation would have done Liz and me some good, but I couldn’t muster the energy to plan anything. The spring had taken its emotional toll; recalling the cozy winter Liz and I had spent burrowed into our apartment, I was feeling the urge to nest. Liz, like Love, was looking for an escape.

  It might have turned into a fight, but as the school year neared its end, we weren’t having the kinds of conversations that led anywhere, either good or bad. Four martinis into a night at Blue Frog—where no real conversation between two people has ever occurred—I decided to give it a try.

  “Are you okay? You’ve seemed kind of unhappy lately.”

  Liz shrugged. “What does happiness even look like?” she mumbled, expecting the question to slip unnoticed into the air between us, drowned out by the bar’s early ‘90s juke box.

  I heard her, though. I was listening.

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  Liz turned away from me and drained her martini. “When I was in the fourth grade, we had to write these books: ‘Happiness Is…’ they were called. Each page we wrote something that made us happy. Mine was the longest.” As though that proved something indelible about her character.

  “What did you write about?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Well, there you have it.” I looked down at the shoes that brought me eye level with her, or would have, wer
e we making any eye contact. I thought briefly about driving my right high-heel down into my own left toe. But what would that solve?

  Blue Frog was narrow, with a long black bar stretching across one end of the place and a row of tall black tables against the opposite wall. There were never enough barstools. I leaned with my elbows propped on the table behind us, scanning the room rather than looking at Liz.

  “Have you thought at all about what we should do this summer?”

  She shrugged, again, as I knew she would. The open-ended question was a ruse, an opening to a monologue I’d already planned.

  “I was thinking maybe we could look for a new apartment.” I said it slowly, into my empty martini glass.

  “What’s wrong with the apartment?”

  Our apartment, I wanted to correct her. But that was part of the problem; it had remained mine.

  “Nothing, I guess. But I’ve been there a few years, and a change would be nice. I want a place that feels like ours, that we can furnish on our own, with things we choose. Together.”

  Blue Frog’s oversized martinis were slightly ridiculous, like something the Flintstones would drink when they were feeling fancy. They made me brave. Our table was in the corner, close to the door. Love counted the steps, had not ruled out the possibility that she would have to make a quick exit.

  “What if I lose my job?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s possible, Sasha. They might not ask me back. What would I do if I signed a new lease and then had to move home?”

  Home, I heard. I. I wanted to correct her: What would we do if you had to find a new job. She was flubbing her lines.

  “I need another drink,” I said instead.

  “Definitely.”

  We made our way up to the bar, then back to our corner table, the two of us safe again behind freshly chilled glasses.

  “Is this what you want?”

  Liz nodded. “It’s really good. Do you want a sip?” She held her pink cocktail out to me.

  “Not the drink, Liz,” I snapped. “This. Us. Are you done with us? Was it a fun experiment for you? Did you just need a guide to show you around Shanghai?”

  Liz must have understood that I was looking for only one answer, though I realize now the three questions were very different. She didn’t parse. “No. No, I’m not done.”

  “Okay,” I said. I believed her, I think. But Love sighed and rolled her eyes. She wandered out into the night.

  “It will be fun to decorate a new place,” I said after we were silent for a few minutes, settling in to the promise I’d chosen to hear.

  “It will,” she agreed.

  I finished my martini and set the glass down on the table behind us with purpose, as though I were planning to begin immediately looking for a new place to live. Liz followed me out the door.

  6.

  Expats throw parties. It’s part of the point of being in Shanghai. The new ones—recently out of college, intoxicated by the idea of seeing relative strangers half-naked—favor theme parties: anything but clothes, ‘50s pajamas. After a year or two most of them learn that the beer still works no matter what they’re wearing, and that jeans and a tank top are easier to shed than a crepe paper costume designed to look like a bouquet of flowers. Easier to put back on, too.

  Expats throw parties in the apartments furnished by our Chinese landlords. We offer tours of whatever oddities our homes happen to contain: the stand-up steam shower or the convection oven or the door into the bedroom that is only four feet high. We stock our bars with Great Wall red wine and Tsingtao and ask our friends to smoke only in the hallway outside the apartment, or in the elevator, like all the neighbors do.

  We didn’t often throw surprise parties, though; we didn’t often know anyone well enough to bother surprising. But I was planning one for Liz.

  It wasn’t an entirely generous notion.

  I wanted to celebrate—we’d made it through the school year, were planning to look at new apartments—but I wasn’t sure Liz, in her recent sour mood, would’ve let me.

  So I planned it without telling her and called it a surprise.

  I sent the invitation the same way they always went out: to the group text saved in my phone, on everyone’s phones. More than half the numbers I didn’t recognize, but if they were on the group text they got the invite. I didn’t have to make sure to take Liz out of the group because I had never put her in. She still didn’t understand how we all always knew which bar to end up at.

  Expats threw parties, and yet Dorian had gone eight months without attending one, two years at least without hosting his own. That was back when he had roommates: Jeff and what’s-his-name, the quiet one who always got too drunk too quickly and passed out, ending up with Sharpie on his face more times than anyone could remember. Karl! Jeff and Karl. Their apartment was the dream of a rich guy frat house for people who, back in the States, weren’t rich and wouldn’t have been let in to any frats. Dorian stayed for a little over a year before he found his own place.

  At the time, it had seemed like a step backward. He didn’t throw parties, didn’t even want to invite friends over, picturing them spinning in circles in the small lobby of his building, desperate to believe that somewhere—maybe behind the plastic plant in the corner, or through the random broom closet—there was an elevator that would carry them up to the seventh floor. You have to walk up, and oh, there are no lights in the stairwell: these were words that Dorian couldn’t imagine saying to any of his friends. Which perhaps suggested he didn’t really have any friends after all.

  Drunk women, the ones with uptight roommates, or the ones so new to Shanghai that they were still crashing on someone’s couch, had seen his apartment, but they didn’t spend much time looking around. In the morning they were hung over and either embarrassed or regretful or freaking out about some boyfriend somewhere; they didn’t linger.

  Which is to say, Dorian was in the mood to go to a party, and certainly wouldn’t be throwing one himself.

  He’d closed on a new condo; he had something worth celebrating. The invitation I hadn’t intended to send him came at just the right time.

  The last day of school finally arrived. Together Liz and I watched the chaos of children taking leave.

  “You made it,” I said to her. We were leaning against my desk, looking out into the hallway. It was still the middle of the day, but students had been given time to clear their lockers; the teachers were mainly in the staff room, organizing their desks. Students finished their work quickly and then ran up and down the halls, in and out of classrooms.

  Soon they would file out the door into the suffocating humidity, kicking up the dust from the driveway as they went, shouting their goodbyes to each other. Mostly they went back to their home countries for the summer, which made the goodbyes more difficult, though they all seemed excited to be reunited with long-lost neighborhood friends. The school year was a lifetime for them, the summertime yet another. They could unfold and unfold, born all over again every week if they wanted. I remembered what it was like.

  “Just barely,” Liz answered.

  I laughed, though I knew she wasn’t kidding.

  “I should clean my desk.”

  “Stay.” I’d never had someone to watch the melee with. “Leave it for next year. It’ll give you something to do your first day back.”

  Liz shifted her weight. “Oh, God, I don’t want to have to deal with it then. Come with me. It won’t take long. I’m just going to throw everything away.”

  Convinced the teachers saw me as a spy, I didn’t go often to the staffroom. They’d stop their conversations, suddenly searching through a drawer or opening up a textbook whenever I passed, as though I might have been instructed to compile reports about how they spent their free time. As though anyone cared.

  The last day would be different, though. There were teachers at almost every desk, most of them sitting with stacks of paper in their laps and trash cans at their f
eet.

  “Keep the lesson plans,” I hissed, trying to keep my voice down as I saw Liz reach for a trash can. “Keep the ones I made for you. You’ll need those.”

  She shrugged and headed toward her desk. I didn’t understand what that meant. There were no free chairs, so I paced the perimeter of the room, trying not to look at anyone in particular, hoping not to appear nosy about what they were throwing away.

  I passed the staff mailboxes and looked in, just glancing with no purpose, though I realized it looked even more like I was snooping. I stopped and looked around; no one was watching me anyway. No one cared.

  Liz’s mailbox was full, certainly containing more than one day’s worth of mail. I sighed, wondering how often she bothered to check. Next year would be different, I told myself. Liz would have a year of experience, would understand the school and its politics and would have the lesson plans all ready to go.

  I reached for the mail, noticing as I did that the memos on the bottom of the stack were at least a week old. I furrowed my brow, wondering if there was any point in talking to her about it. She needed to understand that the people who filled the mailboxes noticed such things, but then, what good would it do that day? I should’ve checked on this long before.

  Likely there was nothing important in the stack of memos, but I wanted to know for sure.

  “Are you stealing my mail?”

  I jumped. “No, of course not.” I thrust the pile of unread paper to her, hoping she intended to look through them rather than throwing them away.

  “Thanks.” Liz smiled and shoved the pile into her bag. “Want to head back downstairs? This place is depressing. At least the kids are happy about the end of school.”

  I looked around, noticing for the first time the dour expressions on all the teachers’ faces. It was nothing new; they always looked that way.