We walk arm in arm toward the photographer, Liz and I in the center of a line of people. Whoever held Liz’s camera must have been walking backward, away from us. We turn our heads inward toward each other, ignoring him.
Eight of us cram on a couch in someone’s too-small living room, sitting on top of each other to all fit in the frame. We hold our beer bottles carefully so as not to obscure anyone else’s face.
There’s an artful one of five shots of Jäger lined up on the bar. The second one is empty.
There are students posing with Liz in selfies, all of them giving the peace sign.
Liz’s students standing in two rows she arranged in front of the whiteboard. It was the last day of school and they vibrated with joy.
There’s a line of yellow school busses.
Liz and I stand beside each other in my office, smiling like co-workers, my shoulder touching her arm. The picture is blurry, taken by a second-grader who needed cheering up.
Sam takes a picture of Liz smiling with a Starbucks mug—a ceramic one, the kind they only give you in China—next to her cheek. Then he hands her the camera and takes up his own mug, mirroring her pose for the picture to set beside hers.
Liz takes a picture of a tea presentation. Liz takes a picture of her soup dumplings. Liz takes a picture of a Teppanyaki chef, his mouth open in controlled astonishment as he looks up at the shrimp flying into his hat. In the foreground of the shot I can make out our drinks: cold beer, hot sake, sweet plum wine. Teppanyaki is all you can drink. We had no reason to choose.
There are Dorian and Frank at Zapata’s. There are Liz and Dorian at Blue Frog.
We are dancing at Park 97, our faces practically neon in the camera flash reflected in the strobes.
We are asleep on a tour bus.
I am in the thick of a crowd at Xiangyang Market, a row of white tents in the background just over my head. The picture is too quiet to really be Shanghai.
Liz takes pictures of me; I take pictures of Liz.
We take a picture of the sculpture. She is free, leaping into the air with nothing but the wind to catch her, and she is tethered to the ground.
On the days when Liz fell asleep with her head against the bus window, I nudged her awake as we approached.
“Here she comes,” I’d whisper and Liz would straighten, fasten her gaze. If I was the one sleeping, she’d do the same for me. We hated when we missed her.
The picture I want to see is of the two of us the day we found her: I’m kissing Liz’s cheek while she stretches her arm out and points the camera back at us. Her smile is broad and she looks at the lens head-on. My eyes are closed. The curved silhouette of the sculpture rises in the background behind our heads, like a hook we are both hanging off.
She didn’t post it, though, and I wonder if it still exists. I wonder if it ever did.
There’s one of Liz and Bryan embracing at the airport, a bouquet of lilies in the hand she has wrapped around his neck, the flowers hanging upside down across his back as though they are being dried to keep forever.
A photo album has a way of making everything seem a foregone conclusion.
1.
I didn’t tell Liz she’d been fired. Saying things aloud made them true.
Putting the question of her work visa out of mind, I focused on finding a lease for Liz and me to sign, thinking I could substitute one official looking paper for another. I convinced myself that if we only found the right place, she’d stay.
The apartment hunt was new to Liz, and tedious. When she’d moved to New York, she’d found a roommate, not an apartment, just like here. That time it had been a friend of a friend, a girl named Tracy, a few years older than Liz and about to start grad school at NYU. Liz couldn’t even remember what she was studying—English literature, perhaps, or archaeology—something useless and heavy with books. They barely saw each other, and even after a year of living together were still uncomfortable on the rare evenings when they were both in the apartment. Tracy spent her days in the library and slept many nights at her boyfriend’s apartment. Liz kept waiting for them to bond over something, but they had nothing in common, and Liz had no idea how to fake it.
She’d looked at the apartment, of course. Hers was the larger of the two rooms, with windows facing the alley behind the three-story building. It was fine.
We walked away from apartment number five, which I’d determined had “bad flow.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” Liz asked as we sat down at a café.
I didn’t answer at first, and then after a few moments of silence I merely shook my head and laughed quietly. Liz raised her eyebrows, though, pushing for more, and so I whispered, “I want a place that feels like a home.”
Liz nodded. For once she seemed to actually understand what I was saying to her, which is perhaps why she didn’t—couldn’t—allow me to continue to search hopelessly. “No empty apartment is going to feel like that.”
I took it as a generosity, a suggestion that anywhere we lived together would be home. But that’s not how she meant it.
We sipped our drinks and looked across the table at each other and I nodded almost imperceptibly. I should have clapped my hands together and declared my intention to rent the last place we looked at, or the first. I didn’t, though.
Love is not a builder and she cannot be built.
We walked back to our apartment in silence. Halfway home, past the convenience store where we paid our bills, the McDonald’s we had never once entered, I reached out and took Liz’s hand.
We could’ve had our ending that day. Liz could’ve gone back to the apartment and pulled out her suitcases, any explanation unnecessary. I would’ve nodded and silently began helping her load her clothes into the two bags.
“I’ve seen a lot of listings for one bedrooms,” I would say finally. “Places you could afford.”
Liz would smile.
“You can stay here, you know, back in your old room, until you find a new place.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Right. So where will you go?”
Liz would shrug just one shoulder, only slightly, would smile. “I’ll be okay,” she would answer, handing me her keys on the way out.
But that wasn’t our ending.
We got back to our apartment and I collapsed on the couch. Liz sat in the chair opposite me, not speaking any of the things she might have made true.
“This is exhausting, I know,” I groaned.
Liz did feel exhausted.
“We’ve got three more to look at tomorrow. I promise, promise-promise that we’ll just take one. The best one of the three. I know you’re right. Wherever we live, we’ll turn it into a home.”
“I’m meeting with Sam tomorrow,” Liz blurted, as though this were the same thing as telling me she no longer wanted to live with me at all.
“Oh.” And then, “Do you trust my judgment? I could go look at them first.”
Liz didn’t respond, and I rushed to continue. “I wouldn’t sign anything without you, obviously. But I could narrow it down. I’ll look at all three, choose the best. We can go back together and look at it, and if you like it then we’ll take it.”
“Okay,” Liz answered, because she didn’t know how to say anything else.
When Bryan asked her to marry him, did she just say “okay?” Did she show up at the altar because she hadn’t worked out an escape? I hope not.
2.
My last night with Liz, I lay in bed beside her, unable to sleep though my eyes ached for it. I was searching my memory for the moment things had fallen apart between us. It wasn’t just one moment, but rather a series of them, a kind of slow crumbling away, like beach erosion. It was always like that. One or two grains of sand were carried away each day, and you either sat and watched not fathoming what you were losing, or, like me, you worked frantically, carrying new buckets of sand, to keep yourself standing on dry land. But where did all the new sand come from
?
In the dark, my hand found her waist. “You’re awake,” I whispered.
She nodded in the dark.
My hand gripped her hip and pulled her closer, and then mouth found mouth and I kissed her, softly at first, and then more forcefully, wrapping my hand around her back as I did, pulling her even closer.
Another bucket of sand. Liz allowed herself to be pulled toward me, allowed her t-shirt and shorts to be removed, clumsily but with no laughter, because it was dark and late and because we both seemed to want to believe that this was something we could do without any effort at all.
I stayed in my pajamas because Liz made no move to remove them. Instead she lay mostly still. My lips grazed her breast, almost incidentally, my fingers searched between her legs and found their way up inside her. I realized then, in the moment when I was working my finger in and out, that if I were a man this would all be different. I thought of Bryan, pushing his way inside of her, and then because it was dark and late, just holding himself still, his weight on top of her, pressing her into the bed, keeping her from floating away.
I waited for her to tell me to stop, to say “I’m sorry and this is all wrong after all,” but instead, a soft moan rose from her throat. She moaned once then twice then a third time and then stopped and gasped for breath, once then twice, another moan and a hand gripped on my waist, and then my wrist, and a soft shudder and a muscle contraction and her hand pushed mine away and a soft sigh. I waited for her to thank me but she must’ve known that would be overdoing it. She closed her eyes and smiled just in case I could see her face.
“Good night,” I whispered.
I imagined sand between my toes, more and more sand, covering my feet and then my legs. More and more sand, until someone finally just blew up the beach.
3.
Though she wasn’t really meeting Sam, Liz walked to the Starbucks anyway. Where else would she go? She could’ve ducked down one of the side streets she passed, losing herself in the city. She could from here walk to Xiangyang Market, allow herself to be swallowed by the crowds of tourists, weaving their way up and down narrow rows between the open-air vendors. She could spend 20 minutes haggling via calculator for a knock-off purse that she didn’t need, wouldn’t buy no matter the price and then move on, waving and shrugging her shoulders to the baffled seller: good practice in disappointing people.
She never did turn off the main road, staying instead on the busy thoroughfare where car exhaust is a form of weather and the bodies pressing onward pull like the tides.
She wasn’t meeting Sam but she was thinking of him, and ordered a Mocha Frappuccino in his honor. It was too cold a drink for the over-air-conditioned café, but she sat down with it anyway. She was wishing for a comforter to pull around her shoulders. She was wishing for home. She told herself that she wasn’t avoiding me or our future; was instead avoiding her quicksand confusion. She would sit until she felt firm ground, and then she would come back.
In the meantime, she sorted through her mail, pulling out the messy pile I’d returned to her purse the night before. Three weeks’ worth of staff meeting agendas; a stack of summer reading recommendations, organized by grade level, that should’ve been handed out to students; flyers advertising summer trips to Bali and Thailand and Tokyo, the distribution of which was paid for by various travel agents and tour groups. All over the city there were teachers at international schools looking through the trips with the same mild interest Liz showed them. In her mind there briefly existed a version of Liz touring Angkor Wat, snapping pictures of the monks in their saffron robes.
There was only one piece of paper with her name on it. Had Liz found the official termination document first, as I had, she might have been too distracted to notice the follow-up protocols for leaving her position, as I was. If I’d seen it, I would’ve taken it too.
Liz studied the list of dates, learning when her keys were due back to the office, when her work visa would expire. Thanks to the enigmatic green envelopes she’d been receiving all year, she wasn’t surprised to be fired in such an oblique way. She exhaled deeply, seeing things as they really were.
Starbucks was overpriced and overcrowded, a place where people paid for the illusion of international sophistication, where they called their frothy, sweet drinks coffee, as though the word any longer held meaning. It was no different than any other place: everywhere people paid for their illusions, for the opportunity to name and rename the meaningless world around them. She needed to get out.
Sometimes a lie becomes the truth. On her way out of the Starbucks, Liz ran into Sam. They both saw each other and only one of them thought about pretending otherwise. Sometimes I think it was Liz. Other times Sam.
The one who wasn’t pretending said hello, the other nodded in return, eyes cast down to the floor. There was a moment that would’ve been silence had they been standing anywhere but where they were.
“I owe you an apology.”
Acknowledging a debt is not the same as paying it.
“I wasn’t thinking about how that must have looked to your friends, and to you. I wasn’t thinking about your feelings.”
It wasn’t a real apology, but Sam thanked her anyway because it was easier. “How are you?” he asked.
“I’m okay,” she lied. “Do you want to sit down? Do you have time?” The repulsion she’d felt to the Starbucks disappeared as quickly as it had hit her.
She should’ve asked him to help her find a new job. After Sam nodded and ordered his coffee, after they’d found a spot in the corner to sit, Liz asked instead his advice on the problem he was least equipped to solve.
“If you don’t love her, you should just tell her. You should just leave.” He sounded confused that this was even a question. “You’re free to do whatever you want.” He sounded like he held it against her.
She saw the levels on which that was true. But still. How did she know what she wanted? Sam wouldn’t be able to tell her. She asked him instead about his job, realizing that she knew so little about his life that it was the only thing she could think to talk about.
The conversation felt as awkward as their first session, except without any of the hope.
“Remember when you tried to teach me tones, and I just kept asking about spelling?” She laughed because once you’ve turned someone into a memory you can do that.
“I owe you an apology, too.” Sam’s answer that wasn’t an answer.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think I ever really wanted a language partner.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged in a way he’d learned from Liz. “I just wanted a different kind of life.”
“I know. We both did.”
4.
Some stories get resolved.
Liz walked in the general direction of our apartment, imagining me at that moment assessing the closet space in a new master bedroom, mentally filling it with my clothes and hers. Then she hailed a cab and provided an address she’d heard me supply countless times before. Leaning back in her seat, she stared out the partially open window, then closed her eyes to the rush of air that greeted her as the car careened away from the curb. Her phone buzzed, a text from me:
The first two places were pretty good. I liked the second one best, but I have high hopes for the third place. I’ll keep you posted!
Liz stared at the exclamation point, as though it were a clue to something. Then she put the phone back in her bag, empty now but for her wallet. She let out a sigh, loud enough that her cab driver turned around to stare at her. She scowled at him until he turned back toward the wheel.
“Just drive,” she whispered.
Love shivers when the sun goes behind a cloud, and in the darkening evening, even in the month of May, she has goose flesh and a bone-chill that cannot be shaken. She cowers, looking for warmth.
She went to Blue Frog. During the day, the bar served just enough food to create the semblance of propriety for the people who cam
e to drink. The glass doors that ran the length of the entrance were all folded open, allowing the early summer heat to creep in and creating the vague idea of a patio or beach, though the concrete that extended from the bar all the way out to the street in a seemingly unbroken line fought that notion. They needed bamboo floors, or a beach. Liz closed her eyes for a moment and imagined burying her toes in piles of cool sand.
She ordered a Bloody Mary, and then a second. They softened her edges, just as she’d hoped. She didn’t care about the job right now—it was just a thing that she’d been given once, a thing that’d been taken away. It floated through her fingertips. The vodka so far was not enough to drown out the buzz of her phone, which lit up every few minutes with another message from me.
Apartment #3 is amazing! I’d written.
And then, I really think we should take it.
When can you be here to come look? I don’t want to sign without you.
Okay, I’m assuming you’re still chatting with Sam. Just text me as soon as you’re on your way.
There’s someone else coming in a couple of hours, so if we don’t sign before then, we’ll lose it.
She hadn’t been keeping track of how much time elapsed between each text, and she pretended that she couldn’t read the increasing panic in each message. If it were really an emergency, I’d call, she told herself as she ordered her third drink, even as she knew this depended on me having minutes on my phone, which was unlikely.
She shrugged, as though this were a debate she was having with someone else. I wouldn’t answer anyway, she mumbled to no one. Her phone lit up again as if in response.
On my way.
This was the message Liz had been waiting for, so she turned off her phone, slurped her drink, and waited for Dorian to arrive.
After Liz left Shanghai, I didn’t see anyone out for a while. If I left my new apartment at all, it was only under duress, albeit the only one forcing me was me. I went to Chinese places that never made it into the text invites. I didn’t go where the other expats went. I didn’t see Dorian for months.
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