“Sure.” I followed Liz out of the room, down the hallway, and then the stairs back to the office. I wanted to ask how she knew she still had a job next year if she hadn’t looked through her mail in a week, but then had the superstitious feeling that asking the question could somehow cause her firing. If the school needed to hire a new speech teacher, I told myself, I’d know about it already.
The day wore on and it was easy to distract myself. Students stopped into the office periodically to say goodbye. Mostly they were third, fourth, and fifth graders who visited me over the school year—the sensitive, homesick ones, old enough to know they couldn’t cry in their classrooms. They asked for passes to the bathroom and would come to my office instead. I’d give them water and let them sit on the couch for a moment, let them draw a picture or write in a journal or do whatever they needed to do. A few of them had cards for me. I smiled and gave them hugs, though touching the students was discouraged. Then they ran off.
At the end of the day we watched the students file out of the building and then went to our last staff meeting of the year. An hour and a half later, we were creeping through Shanghai’s early evening traffic. Our goodbyes all said, we were ready for something new.
7.
I wanted to ask Liz if she was going to look through her mail. The bag sat at her feet during the entire ride home. Traffic lurched, but the bag with the mail didn’t move. We could look at it together, I might have suggested. I could look at it for you. It wasn’t the worry that I was being invasive that kept me quiet. I would’ve sorted through the pile without telling her if I had the chance. But I didn’t want to speak my anxieties. Saying things aloud makes them true.
As we neared our intersection my worries found new perches on which to alight: the party waiting in our apartment, the celebration I hoped Liz would want. She liked attention, I knew; I hoped that translated into liking surprises.
It was impossible not to hear the noise from our apartment as we walked down the hall. Liz looked at me without turning her head and I pretended not to notice.
“What’s going on?” she asked as I unlocked the door that wasn’t locked. I said nothing.
No one was hiding. It wasn’t that kind of party. No one jumped out and yelled, “Surprise!” The people nearest to the door turned when we entered and said hello. Liz looked at me instead of at them.
“Surprise,” I said quietly. She looked nervous rather than happy.
“Is this for me?”
I nodded, but it didn’t seem to be the answer she wanted. “For us,” I corrected. “End of the school year, goodbye to the apartment. All that.”
“We haven’t even found a new place.”
We were still standing just inside the door. I edged us toward the kitchen where there was vodka and cranberry juice to make it pink. “It’s a party,” I told her, as though the what could replace the why. “Parties are fun.” I waved vaguely at the people in the other room, hoping their presence proved something.
“I guess I should change,” she said, taking the cocktail I’d made for her out of my hand, draining half of it in one sip before leaving the kitchen.
I laughed and offered her a refill before she went, knowing Drunk Liz would be more fun. She brought her bag, overstuffed with papers from work, with her.
I put the mail out of mind and sipped my drink. Parties are fun, I thought.
I don’t know whether Dorian arrived before Liz and me, or if he came in while Liz was changing. But there he was in the kitchen, opening my refrigerator to help himself to a beer.
I should’ve realized he got the invitation, but it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about it because it never occurred to me he would come.
“Wow.” It was all I could think to say.
“Hey! You’re here.”
“I live here.”
“I know that. But you weren’t here before.”
“Okay, yes. I’m here. We’re both here, apparently.”
“I bought a condo.” He sucked the foam off the top of his can, looking pleased with himself.
“That’s great.” I wanted to get past him, but he was blocking the door. I could have excused myself or asked him to get out of my way but I just stood there, waiting for him to notice the space he occupied.
He didn’t move, instead started telling me about his condo. I didn’t care about his balcony or his recessed lighting. I made myself another drink while he talked, not even bothering to nod politely because he wouldn’t have noticed if I had. He was talking about the bidding process when someone who cared about Dorian’s new life came in for a beer. I took the opportunity to escape.
Liz was sitting on the couch, somehow managing to make a sparkly tank top look sullen. Everyone around her was standing. I made a mental note that she didn’t like surprises. She needed another drink. Over my shoulder in the kitchen I heard Dorian mention his interest rate. She can have my drink, I thought, and I crossed the apartment to give it to her.
“Dorian’s here.” There was no point trying to hide it from her.
“Why would you invite him?” She spoke loudly, emphasizing each word more than the last. I expected her to ask why he would come, which is not such a different question, except that the one she asked I couldn’t answer by shrugging and calling him an asshole.
“I didn’t really mean to.”
She folded her arms across her chest and glared at me. “How do you accidentally invite someone to a party?” She was practically snarling.
“Is it really that big a deal? We don’t have to talk to him.”
“Oh, no. I can’t wait to talk to him. I’m going to spend all night talking to him.”
“You seem a lot more upset than is necessary.” Just because it was true didn’t make it the right thing to say.
She stood abruptly, leaving me sitting alone on the couch.
“I need a drink.” Handing me back the glass I’d brought for her, now empty, she stomped toward the kitchen like a child.
I wasn’t trying to be condescending or obtuse. I was genuinely confused by the sudden change in her mood. But I couldn’t make her talk to me.
Love liked a good party. She didn’t drink, but she enjoyed the false confidence that rose out of wine glasses like steam. It wasn’t really bravery, only Love knew, that propelled one person across a room toward another. It was fear.
Liz emerged from the kitchen with her drink—pale pink and with not enough ice to even make it palatable. I wanted to shake her a proper cocktail; providing a lesson on the comforts offered by tiny ice crystals floating in your drink would have made me feel like my father. The thought made me smile, which told me I had been drinking just the right amount myself: enough to soften the edges of my memories until they appeared blurry and romantic, not so much that they became stabbingly sharp.
I grew up watching my step-mother host. She fluttered like a hummingbird, alighting from one cluster of people to the next, pleasing everyone. I watched her parties like they were a soap opera in which nothing bad ever happened: it was just rich people making Manhattans. Everyone laughing at the same time.
That night I didn’t have the energy to play the role of hostess; I was back to my place against the wall, watching Liz. Her mood left invisible trails that I felt filling the apartment like smoke. She was doing a remarkable job keeping her distance from me, as though she and I were foosball players tethered to the same pole.
She had joined a small group of people surrounding Dorian, all of them laughing at the tale of the bureaucratic horrors he’d successfully navigated. I’d heard the story—each telling from a distance—three times already; he was sharpening it, I could tell, adjusting the timing of his punch lines, embellishing the difficulties he’d had to endure. He’d done nothing, really. Nothing but wait, and even that couldn’t be counted as patience since I knew he did it not out of virtue but because he lacked the creativity to choose any other course of action.
Liz was laughing, though I knew she’d heard
it already too. As I watched her toast Dorian with another subpar drink, I felt gripped by the need to tell my own story of triumph. Liz was not a new apartment, and there’d been no Chinese bureaucrat standing between us, but still I felt as though I’d won something. No: Dorian had won something, standing around as he had, waiting for a letter in the mail; I had made something, had created love and interdependency out of red wine and orgasms, half-truths and Chinese culture lessons, poetic license and a storyteller’s sense of delusion and grandeur. Where was my toast?
Love didn’t have an answer.
I might’ve learned from Dorian: it was all in the telling. After his third or fourth recitation, the fourth or fifth drink, Dorian started to sound like he expected the accolades, as though the party had been thrown in his honor. Sure, he’d merely followed the instructions laid out for him by his real estate agent; he’d filled out the right forms, showed up at the right buildings, stood in the interminable lines. Anyone could have done it. But so few people did.
“Most people would’ve just given up. Or really, I bet most people wouldn’t even attempt it in the first place,” Liz said.
“I really feel like it’s a mistake to see our lives here as temporary, simply because we’re strangers in a strange land. If we were in the states, no one would think twice about me buying a condo.”
“Well, maybe not. But 30 still seems pretty young to be able to do that.”
Dorian shrugged. “So I’m remarkable for putting my money in a savings account instead of spending it all on beer. That would hardly warrant congratulations back home.”
Liz nodded.
“What’s remarkable here is not that I’m able to do this. Look around this party.” He waved his hand in a sweeping gesture encompassing the living room and all the people in it. “I would bet that half the people in here have the money to do what I’m doing. And really, what I did was not so different than what you’d do in the States. Back home, you get your money together, you get mortgage preapproval, you go house hunting, you put down an offer on something, you hope the sale goes through. Here, you get your money together, you get your foreign investor, you put your bid down on something, and you hope it goes through. Exactly the same.”
“So we should all stop congratulating you then,” said Liz.
“No, but you should know what you’re congratulating. All these people—” again the sweeping arm, “—they’re in awe because I’m daring to declare permanence. I’m not just buying a condo; it’s a way for me to say that yes, I’ve chosen to stay in China. No, it’s not an experiment, and it’s not me refusing to grow up. It’s not me hiding from the real world. I’m not killing time here, building my résumé, or waiting for my company to move me somewhere else, like some piece in their multinational board game. All these people toast me because they can’t imagine making any kind of permanent decision about anything.”
Dorian took a long sip from his beer, that pause allowing him to hear what an asshole he sounded like.
“Now, hopefully you were recording all of that, and will be able to play it back for my mother when she calls.”
“Is she going to care?”
Dorian glared, as though she’d just asked if his mother loved him.
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, is she going to be upset that you’re staying?”
“I assume so? But then, who knows. Maybe she thinks it’s glamorous. My older brother lives in fucking Tucson. You can’t get worse than that.”
Liz nodded again.
“The new place has a guest room,” Dorian continued, “And I’m hoping to get her to come visit. I think she’d like it here.” Dorian had missed his chance for the family Christmas he’d hoped for, by almost half a year, but still he looked forward to a visit.
If they went to the markets he’d haggle for her, though she wouldn’t really want the knock-off sneakers or purse or whatever it was that caught her attention. If they saw a woman holding her baby out in front of her he’d usher his mother away before it peed on her shoes. At the crosswalks he’d steer her away from the mopeds and bikes, and on the sidewalks away from the raw fish water, the scum-coated puddles. She’d probably hate all of it, but she’d pretend to enjoy it, or at least talk about how much she was learning. She’d be suspicious of the food and appalled by people’s pushiness, by the noise and the traffic and the smog that was all so different from Portland. These were all part of the appeal of Shanghai to him: it might as well have been called Not-Portland. He knew, too, that while his mother wouldn’t enjoy the visit, she’d see the ways in which Dorian fit here—all the ways he’d never fit in back home—and it would make her happy.
“How about your parents?” Dorian asked. “Are they eager for you to come home?”
“I guess,” she answered. “Honestly I haven’t thought much about it. I think they know that even if I come back, I’m not going to move back home home. I think they see Shanghai as a pretty interesting place for me to live. At least, I hope they do.”
“You mean when.”
“Sorry?”
“You said if. If I come home. You mean when.”
“How do you know I mean when? What makes you think I won’t stay?”
Dorian cocked his head, studying Liz. “I just know,” he said.
Liz laughed, though Dorian hadn’t been joking. “I don’t really see Sasha going back to the States anytime soon.”
“I agree.”
She stared at him, as he first rolled up the sleeves of his plaid cotton shirt, and then brushed his straight brown hair out of his eyes. He needed a haircut, and new pants. The jeans he wore now sagged a bit and he was always tugging them back up.
“God, are you always such an asshole?”
“What?”
“You essentially just told me that my relationship was doomed to fail. You realize that, right?”
“What, you thought you were going to marry her or something?” He laughed.
“If she were a guy, or if I were, would you be asking that?”
“If she were a guy, she’d be the guy you were currently sleeping with. So, yeah, I would.”
“You don’t know us. And you don’t really know me.”
Dorian put up his hands, surrendering. “Okay, okay. She’s your one true love and you guys are going to live together forever, in China. You just don’t talk to each other at parties and always seem to be fighting about something.”
I used to imagine that she slapped him: loudly enough to silence the room, to turn all heads in their direction; that she let everyone imagine the worst they could about him while he stood there stunned, cheek flaming.
Now I think it’s more likely that she laughed: a chuckle at first, and then her head tossed back, mouth wide. White teeth gleaming like pearls.
I was in our bedroom at the time and so I don’t really know. I was looking at the remnants of Liz’s hasty attempt to get ready: two rejected shirts, a hairbrush fuzzy with use. Her purse was on the floor leaning against the leg of the bed, still overstuffed with the mail she’d brought home from school. I pulled out the stack, casually, as though it were mine. Much of it was junk, but in the middle of the pile was a paper that was thicker than the rest. I recognized Principal Wu’s signature on the bottom, the school’s logo on the top. In between: “The administration will not be renewing your contract next year.”
My first instinct was to shred the paper, as though by destroying the letter I could erase its intent. But I knew ripping it up would change nothing. After destruction I tended toward secrecy. Tucking the paper into the keepsake box in my closet would no more get Liz’s job back than destroying it would, but I opened the wooden lid anyway. Atop my passport near the bottom of the box I found the e-mail Liz had sent when she applied for the job, the cover letter I’d rewritten for her, wanting as soon as I read it for the job to be hers. She’d been besotted before she ever arrived, and so was I.
Eventually the party ended. After tucking Liz—too drunk to remember sh
e was angry—into bed, I cleaned up the mess of beer bottles and sticky cocktail glasses, the goblets stained with lipstick and containing the remnants of sweet Chinese wine. I couldn’t sleep.
Three-thirty in the morning is a neon twilight in Shanghai. There was no sun yet, and most of the bars and restaurants still had their signs lit, though few of them were open.
Three-thirty in the morning is the best time to walk around Shanghai. Breezes blow, cool at that time of year, though the asphalt is still hot to the touch. Cars still honk, tires squeal, somewhere a bus groans and firecrackers pop, but at 3:30 they register as individual noises, each shouting in its own voice up into the starless grey sky. And on the residential side streets, the city actually seems dark, and quiet for brief moments, and it’s possible to remember that you are alone. Maybe I already knew what was coming.
I ended up at a crowded all-night dumpling house, finding something wonderful in the harsh fluorescent light inside, the crowds of people—all Chinese—waiting in line for their dumplings, the flat-bottomed paper bowls, like boats floating atop the red plastic trays, the sauce bar with its ramekins and tiny ladles. I bought dumplings that I didn’t want to eat so I could sit in that space for just a little while.
When I got home, Liz was still asleep. I undressed quietly in the dark, removing the pearl necklace last. Without pausing, I put it inside the wooden box, alongside everything else I was hiding from Liz.
Saying Things Aloud
Makes Them True
家
Memory shapeshifts. That’s not a trick or a malfunction, but its very purpose: We make sense of things by rearranging them. And at the same time we take the photographs we imagine will hold things in place.
Liz’s Shanghai is barely recognizable to me, the show she stages one I’ve never seen.
We are in a crowd of people in front of Guandii, the group of us a mass of open-mouthed smiles and arms draped casually over shoulders. Our heads are tipped back to the sky.
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