by Wendy Lee
“Very cute,” Emily allowed. “So you’ve been seeing each other for about a year? You must have known him when . . .”
“Your father passed away? Yes. Actually, I was with him when he found out.”
Emily shook her head, trying to recast her memory of telling Michael to involve another person in the same room. The scene was getting too crowded.
“I didn’t expect to go to the funeral or anything,” David said. “I knew we hadn’t known each other long enough for that. And I understood why he wouldn’t want me to meet his family.”
And still doesn’t, Emily thought. She tried to be charitable. “Well, it makes me feel better to know that he’s had someone this past year to help him deal with everything.”
The look on David’s face made her wish she hadn’t jumped to conclusions. “To be honest,” he said, “we haven’t been together the entire year. It’s been sort of off and on. I’ve been pushing for more commitment from him. Even asked him to move in with me.” He nodded at the walls around them. “As you might have noticed, this place isn’t the most comfortable. I have an apartment uptown, where we spend most of our time together—that is, when we are together. I’m away during the day, so he’d have the space all to himself.”
“And what is it that you do?” Emily asked politely.
“I’m a lawyer.”
“Huh,” Emily said, without volunteering more information. Her mother would love that.
“I’m afraid I pushed him too far about moving in, and we argued about it. Michael’s very independent. You probably know that.”
Emily nodded, not wanting to dispel his belief that they were close siblings. Not that David would have believed her, anyway, if she hadn’t even known that her own brother was gay. She wondered just how much Michael had told David about her or their parents.
“It just seemed like a good idea, since he was laid off last month,” David added.
“What? He never mentioned that he’d lost his job.”
“Guess he didn’t tell you a lot.”
Emily tried to ignore that jab. “Tell me more about your argument.”
“Months ago I made him give me a key to his place, though he never wanted one to mine.” David gave a short laugh. “Earlier this week I tried to give him a key, and we argued about it, and he left my place in a huff. I’ve tried calling him since then, don’t know how many messages I left. Then this morning when I called, the mailbox was—”
“Full,” Emily finished for him.
“So I came over here after work and got into his apartment with my key. There was this note.” David handed her a square of paper from his pocket, and she unfolded it. Her brother’s writing, which she hadn’t seen for a long time, possibly not even in an adult hand, wavered before her eyes. The paper had started soaking up droplets of water from the tabletop, blurring the ink.
Emily forced herself to concentrate and read out loud: “ ‘Gone away to take a break. Am fine.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t know. Whenever we fight, I tend to let him go off on his own. We don’t contact each other for a while, and I wait for him to call me. I don’t ask any questions.” David shrugged, as if acknowledging how one-sided it sounded. “That’s just the way it works. But he’s never left a note before.”
“It’s not a very disturbing note,” Emily said, somewhat relieved. It almost sounded like Michael had gone down the street to pick up something at the store.
“You think we should report him missing?” David asked.
“When did you last talk to him?”
“Tuesday night.”
Emily could feel herself going into work mode, the easiest way for her to handle the situation. “The police aren’t going to find it a very compelling argument. This note suggests that he walked of his own free will. Plus, I’m sorry to say, but the fact that you two had a fight indicates that he might not want to be found. At least by you.”
“We’ve got to do something,” David said.
“I’m not sure there’s anything we can do, except to wait for him to contact us. Where do you think he went?”
“No clue. He can’t have gone very far. He doesn’t have the money. He was going to have trouble making this month’s rent. I’ve offered to help him out before, but he wouldn’t take it.”
Emily glanced around the room. “I wonder if there’s anything else he left behind that could tell us where he’s gone.”
“Well . . .” Reluctantly, David handed her another scrap of paper. “I also found this.”
On it was written the name “Edison Ng,” a telephone number, and what appeared to be the name of a restaurant. Emily knew why David hadn’t shown this to her before. “You think he’s cheating on you?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“There’s only one way to find out.” Emily picked up her phone, and before David could do anything to stop her, dialed the number. “Voice mail,” she mouthed to David before saying, “Hi, this is Emily Tang. I’m looking for my brother, Michael Tang. He’s been missing for a few days, and no one knows where he is. Please give me a call back as soon as you get this—it doesn’t matter how late.”
Then, attempting positivity, she said to David, “I don’t think you have anything to worry about from this Edison Ng. From his voice, he sounded kind of like a high school kid. And ‘Edison’? The ultimate nerd name.”
She was rewarded with a half smile. “Thanks for doing that,” David said. “You’ll let me know if you hear anything?”
Emily promised she would, and they exchanged contact information. She slung her purse over her shoulder in preparation to leave, but David didn’t make a move.
“I’m staying in this apartment tonight,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow, too. I know it sounds silly, but it makes me feel closer to him somehow.” He paused. “I really care about your brother. No matter what he does, to me or our relationship, I’m going to see this through.”
“Good luck,” Emily said softly. If David wanted to stay in the fires of hell, or what felt like it, he was welcome to.
On the train, Emily called her mother to report that Michael wasn’t home, but she had talked to his roommate, who thought he had gone on some kind of trip. No, the roommate didn’t know where, but he didn’t seem to be that concerned.
The silence on the other end of the phone suggested to Emily that this had not alleviated her mother’s worry. However, her mother only said, “I didn’t know Michael had a roommate.”
“Neither did I,” Emily replied grimly before she hung up.
She supposed it shouldn’t come as a surprise that her brother was gay. She tried to think back to any indications when they were growing up, but she didn’t know what to look for. Insisting on carrying a doll around wherever he went? Wanting to dress up as a princess on Halloween? Trying on their mother’s dusky rose lipstick, which looked more Pepto-Bismol than pink? She hadn’t even done that as a child, and plus, all these things were stereotypes that meant nothing. True, Michael hadn’t ever had a girlfriend that she knew about. But even if he had, there was no reason why he would have told her. Her parents had not allowed Emily to date in high school, and she doubted they would have lessened their restrictions for a son. Michael had been twelve when she’d gone off to college, hardly formed yet, and by the time they were both adults in the city, he was almost unrecognizable to her. Even before she and Julian had moved away, they’d mostly only seen each other during the holidays back at their parents’ home.
She did understand why Michael hadn’t said anything to their parents. Their mother might be more accepting, but she always presented a united front with their father, and under no circumstances could Emily imagine their strict, unyielding father comprehending what it meant to have a child who was gay. It probably wasn’t even in his vocabulary. It was hard enough for her father to accept that Emily had married someone who wasn’t Chinese or even Asian, most evident during uncomfortable holiday dinners. For some reason,
her father’s English grew even worse around Julian, and when he asked Julian about his work, he made everything sound like an accusation. Her father didn’t understand why Julian wanted to make films that would never get shown at the local Cineplex. He didn’t understand why Julian never spoke to his parents or preferred to spend the holidays with the Tangs, who could never celebrate properly, anyway, basting their turkeys with soy sauce, using sticky rice and red dates for the stuffing. How unfilial, he’d probably thought.
Emily knew her husband would never be fully accepted into her family, but she wasn’t sure if it was the kind of family that anyone would want to be accepted into. Her parents were such immigrants—putting mothballs in their closets, keeping furniture covered in plastic, refusing to drink tap water unless it had been boiled, not trusting the dishwasher to get the dishes clean. This was true in every one of the client households she visited. Funny how what she couldn’t accept in her parents she accepted without comment or criticism in her job. But she worked with these people; she didn’t have to live with them.
Part of what had attracted her to Julian in the first place had been the differentness of his family background. He had grown up an only child in Los Angeles, in a multi-roomed ranch house appointed with expensive southwestern pottery and handloomed Mexican rugs. When he was eight, his parents had divorced. His father, a film company executive, had a string of girlfriends, all progressively younger and thinner and tinier, like nesting dolls. His mother was a former catalog model and spent most of her second husband’s money on preserving her looks. The one time Emily met her, at her and Julian’s wedding, she thought that the former Mrs. Yeager resembled an animated corpse.
After his parents’ divorce, Julian had been sent to boarding schools at which he acted out in various but, he assured Emily, creative ways—performing dirty spoofs of the school song, showing subversive films on various methods of corporal punishment. For a time, it seemed like he wouldn’t be able to get into any decent college, and he was thinking about taking the year off and traveling around Asia, but his father had pulled some connections, and here he was, all the way across the country from his parents, but still attempting to do everything he could to put as much ideological distance between the way they had brought him up and his present life.
The fact of it was that Julian was set to inherit a great deal of money, was already inheriting it, but it seemed to Emily that it weighed more heavily on him than if he had none. Sometimes she had thought he would be better off with someone who understood that particular problem of growing up with active, but lucrative, disinterest, rather than Emily, whose parents had achieved a comfortable middle-class existence but who had behaved every day as though a single wrong move would send them headfirst into the abyss shared by so many other immigrants.
When Julian asked Emily to marry him, the enormity of the ring overwhelmed her; not just the size of the diamond and how much it must have cost, but what it meant to make such a decision so early in her life. After all, her mother had gotten married at twenty-five, but look at what the following years had brought her: the suburbs, children, picking up her husband’s socks every night. She had never known her mother to have the kind of job that could be called a career. Everyone was afraid of being like their parents, Julian had told her—look at himself. But he promised her that things would be different. She could follow whatever career she wanted, for as long or as short as she wanted. They’d never move out of the city. And, most importantly, they would not have children.
Julian had made it clear from the beginning of their relationship that his own childhood had been so miserable that he wouldn’t wish it on anyone else. Not that he would lead the kind of life his parents had—of course not—but to him, it was too big of a chance to take. The last time they’d had a serious conversation about having kids, Emily had been studying for the bar, and she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to worry about another human being in addition to the trajectory of her own career. Besides, Julian himself required considerable taking care of; she had always been the one who assured him that he could do good work, that he was different from his parents.
Well, Emily thought, he’d certainly reneged on his promise about where they would live. Back then, there was no way for either of them to predict what would happen, that Julian’s filmmaking career wouldn’t take off, so that he would need some other project to keep himself busy; or that every year he’d allow himself to spend more and more of his parents’ money, until one day he surprised her by suggesting they move out of the city. We could have a garden and grow heirloom tomatoes, he’d said, with a gleam in his eye that was usually reserved in other men for high-end golf clubs or a luxury car (that, too, would come later).
This prospect had not frightened Emily as much as she once thought it would. By that time she was so firmly ensconced in her work that she didn’t see how where she commuted from would make much of a difference. She would always have Chinatown, to anchor herself to not only her previous life, but her parents’. But she could see that with their renovated eighteenth-century farmhouse, with its sentinel evergreens that framed the front door exactly, Julian was creating a kind of familial history that she, too, had craved in her youth. So she went along with it, leaving all of the furnishing and landscaping to Julian, and privately storing this little concession away in the back of her mind, like a get-out-of-jail card, to be used when she really needed it. What Emily didn’t expect was that she would need it sooner than expected, for she was beginning to suspect her husband had also changed his mind about having kids.
She could pinpoint this change as taking place shortly after her thirty-first birthday. Her actual birthday had been on a weekday, and since she had been working late on a case, it would have been impossible to plan anything. So instead Julian had made a reservation for the following Saturday night at a small Italian restaurant they had frequented when they had begun dating. It was located on the first floor of a brownstone in the West Village, so hidden by vines that you could walk by without knowing where it was, but even parents had discovered it by now.
The waiter had seated Emily and Julian next to a table with a couple who looked to be in their mid-thirties. They were extremely attractive; the man appeared to be Asian, and the woman, Scandinavian. Normally, Emily disliked being seated next to an interracial couple (out of the entire restaurant, she and Julian had to be seated next to them? It was like a practical joke). However, this couple was different, for they were with their infant daughter. She had fine hair the color of honey, but her eyes were undeniably Asian—small, dark, tipped up at the corners.
As if noticing her stare, the child smiled at her. Lest she come across as a curmudgeon, Emily smiled back. The child squealed with laughter, and Emily looked away, made uncomfortable by this miniature attention.
“Awfully late for kids to be up,” she muttered to Julian.
“Come on, she’s cute.”
“Sure, but do you really think it’s a good idea for her parents to take her out to a place like this?”
Julian shrugged. “Why not? The French do it.”
“The French let their dogs eat at the table.”
“A child isn’t a dog, Emily.”
“No, a dog’s more fun.”
Then Emily noticed a look of yearning, almost determination, on Julian’s face, something she hadn’t seen since they’d first met and he talked about the kind of films he wanted to make. A child isn’t a project, she thought. But she knew that when Julian saw that little girl—or any half-Asian child, of which there seemed to be more and more, whenever she looked—he was imagining what their own child would look like.
It was as if, in a cruel twist of fate, her biological clock had been transferred to her husband. Emily had never felt anything in her own stomach other than a churning ball of fire over a deposition, quickly soothed by an antacid. She did know she did not like children. If she was being honest with herself, she was scared of them. She avoided lines with moth
ers and their screaming kids at the grocery store, switched seats on the plane if she was sitting in front of a child who kicked, tried not to gag when a woman nursed in a public place. Whenever her friends foisted a newborn into her arms, she held it gingerly, as if holding a ticking bomb.
Perhaps what she was most scared of was what children represented: the lack of a dream. She had always maintained that people had children because they didn’t know what to with the rest of their lives. Even though she knew plenty of women had both careers and children, and that it was possible to get outside help, she also knew Julian disapproved of nannies, having basically been brought up by one. Even if he didn’t expect her to give up her job to take care of a baby, he’d probably want her to cut back to spend more time at home. He, on the other hand, would make an excellent stay-at-home dad since he was there almost all the time now, anyway.
Since the night of her birthday dinner, Emily had watched Julian carefully for further signs, wondering if they’d always been present. Was this what moving to the suburbs had been all about, not just the wish to be able to have a garden, as he’d assured her? Had all the care he’d taken in decorating the house been more than just a sign of good taste? Was this the real reason behind the uncharacteristic purchase of his latest car, a silver Bimmer? Then her father passed away, and she felt as if the question of having children was not only hanging over her head, it threatened to stifle her. This time the pressure was coming from her mother, although it had always been there in some form. Ever since she had gotten married, Emily knew her parents had wanted her and Julian to have a baby. Announcing that she and Julian were planning to buy a house had almost seemed cruel, a false hope. Emily knew that the promise of a grandchild would greatly assuage her mother’s grief.
If her mother were to know that Michael was gay, it would be even more important that Emily have a child. Her mother must be aware that plenty of gays and lesbians had children; they adopted, they used sperm donors, they hired surrogates. There was pretty much no excuse for anyone not to have a kid these days. But her mother was a traditionalist, and while it might not matter in the end, that she would love a grandchild no matter where it came from or how it had come into being, she would still depend on Emily to be the one who would do it properly, just as Emily had done everything else in her life. At some point, as skillful as she had been over the past few years at avoiding the subject of having children, Emily knew she would have to have an answer for both her husband and her mother.