“I would never tell her anything.”
“I know you said you weren’t close.”
“I wouldn’t tell her because this isn’t real,” Linny said. “Also, she would freak. She’s married, remember. Not that you care about marriage.”
“Well, you and I are both good at keeping secrets,” Gary said. “Maybe that’s why we get along so well.”
Linny considered this as they crossed the street to the sushi place. Perhaps he thought they got along because they never fought. Linny was careful to avoid becoming the soap opera girlfriend. She and Gary joked about their relationship, used words like tryst and dalliance. He was remarkably easygoing about cheating on his wife, Linny had said to Sasha. They did not talk about the future, and only once did Linny slip up. It happened accidentally, a month into their scheduled meetings. Lying in bed, Linny had said, “I like the silver in your hair.”
“My dad had gone completely gray by the time he was my age. To think, thirty-eight used to sound ancient to me.”
“It’s not gray, it’s silver,” Linny said. “I wonder what it’ll look like next year.”
Gary patted her arm, saying nothing, and instantly Linny understood the mistake she had made.
Heading back home that day, Linny had blushed to herself. She had, as her mother had told her once, too much pride. It kept her playing a casual role, as if she could walk away from Gary at any time and never drop a word of bitterness. Linny had expected him to be a restless, nearing-middle-age man looking for some diversion. But he spoke fondly of his wife. While he liked that Pren’s consulting work took her out of town every week, he also admired her accomplishments. Pren had scored with a Rauschenberg piece for her job; Pren had bought smartly for someone at a Sotheby’s auction. At home, Pren designed their new sunroom. She had a closet devoted entirely to shoes, handbags, and scarves.
Linny tried not to react to such comments, though once she’d snapped, “How does Pren like my chicken piccata? I went straight from the hotel room to the kitchen.”
To Linny the very idea of the future had become dangerous, like leaning over a balcony on the twentieth floor.
At the sushi restaurant Linny and Gary kept celadon mugs of green tea between their hands. Gary studied the menu while Linny adjusted her coat on the back of her chair, wound her hair into a rope over one shoulder. Her cell phone rang again and this time Linny turned it off.
“Your dad again?”
“He doesn’t like to leave messages.”
“Why?”
“It’s just how he is. He and my mom fought a lot.” She thought about telling him how they had practically split the house into his-and-her spaces, but let the moment pass.
“Maybe they were just figuring things out. My parents were high school sweethearts. I don’t remember ever hearing them argue. But you know what I found on his computer the last time I went home? The biggest stash of Internet porn you can imagine.” He looked over the menu again before closing it. “I might try that sardine appetizer special.”
“How long have they been married?”
“Forty-five years. They’re very into celebrating it, so I’m dreading their fiftieth.”
“Do you feel a little weird,” Linny said, “celebrating that? Don’t you feel like a fraud or a hypocrite?”
“A fine question, miss.” He was always entertained by these kinds of remarks—spouting off at the mouth, he called it. “But to answer: no. We all have our own arrangements. My dad’s got his porn. I’ve got you.”
Linny didn’t laugh with him. Two Asian guys were sitting at a table nearby and she hoped they hadn’t overheard. She hoped they weren’t looking at her as the age-old stereotype, Asian mistress to a white guy. Typical, she imagined one whispering to the other. Fucking Twinkie.
She set down her mug of tea too hard, splashing her hand. Gary glanced at her, finally registering her tenseness, but then the waiter came by. Gary ordered edamame, miso soup, and three rolls. No sardines.
When Linny’s mother died, her parents had been married nineteen years. They had never done much to acknowledge their anniversary, instead speaking of their years together as if the numbers were battle scars. Linny knew she could never talk about these kinds of things with Gary. Their meetings were too temporary. She didn’t want to describe how her parents had scrambled onto a ship leaving Saigon in 1975; how her mother had given birth to Van in the refugee camp in California; how sponsors brought them to an apartment with stone-colored walls painted in a series of fan shapes that would become Linny’s first memory. That, and her parents arguing in Vietnamese, their voices raging in the hall between the bedrooms while she and Van sat on the sofa bed watching TV; outside, a new correctional facility rose up near the freeway. Then the move to the house in Wrightville and Linny and Van separating into their own bedrooms. And, years later, her father settling in the basement, and she and her mother realizing he planned to stay there. What happened? she’d wanted to ask him, her mother, and never did. Later she supplied her own answer: Work. Other people. America. It was the immigrant’s answer.
Linny watched Gary neaten the cuffs of his shirt as if preparing for a negotiating session.
“Think you’ll stay in Chicago forever?” she asked.
“Pren loves it.”
Linny had only met her a couple of times while dropping off dinners from You Did It, and found her just as Gary had described: tall, with ice-princess looks but a Southern charmer personality. She didn’t baby-talk to the kids, seven-year-old Alexis and five-year-old Charlie, who were generally cheerful and well behaved, absorbed in their own friendships, school projects, art classes. It was only when Linny saw them that she felt any guilt.
Pren, short for Prentice, her grandmother’s last name, was a traveling art consultant, a job she loved. She was often flying to some corporate city—Hartford, Atlanta, Denver—to help businesses and law firms choose art for their offices and lobbies. “Like Whitley on A Different World,” Linny had blurted out when Gary first explained the job, but he had just looked at her quizzically.
Gary, who’d grown up solidly middle-class in Cincinnati, met Pren during their senior year at Northwestern. They married as soon as they graduated, partly, Gary said, so they could share an apartment, which Pren wouldn’t do without the ring on her finger. For a while they lived downtown, where Gary worked in finance, and Pren drifted from one administrative assistantship to the next before finally landing the art consultant job. After Gary’s second promotion they bought the house in Lincoln Park, on a leaf-thick street walkable to the zoo and the Green City Market, and when Alexis was born Pren hired a nanny. She found that she didn’t, after all, want to be the stay-at-home mom she had always assumed she would be. It was the nanny who had driven Pren to seek out You Did It Dinners. “Anna’s great with the kids, but her cooking is a little too trashy,” Gary said. “Pren came home once and found us all eating Frito pie. She sort of lost it.”
“We have tamale pie at You Did It,” Linny said.
Pren was almost too nice, in the way some white women tended to be when they complimented Linny’s smooth skin or slim figure. Van probably would have called it patronizing. Linny had imagined what her sister would say if she knew about Gary. Maybe, You should be ashamed. Or even simpler: you’re immoral; a homewrecker. In high school, Van had told Linny she was on the verge of becoming a slut, the dreaded word that could ruin any girl’s reputation. Stung, Linny had lamely shot back that at least she wasn’t becoming a geek.
Van didn’t understand the power of holding a boy’s interest. She had never stolen someone’s boyfriend or flirted with guys at a party just to make another girl jealous, just to feel what she was capable of breaking. The first time Linny took her clothes off for Gary she realized: there was satisfaction in knowing he was married to a woman like Pren.
“Have you done this before?” Gary had asked her.
“No,” she said, though she had ended more than one relationship by starting a new one.
“Have you?”
“No.” His hands on her thighs. Did she even believe him?
Once in a while, as she prepared a family’s supply of mushroom chicken and smothered chicken and lemon chicken, Linny thought of Pren picking up the phone to call You Did It Dinners. How that one day led to the possible precipice of her own marriage, teetering further each time Linny opened a hotel room door to find Gary waiting for her.
After bowls of ginger ice cream, after Gary set his American Express card on the plastic tray that held the slip of the bill, he reached across the table and touched Linny’s hand.
“So,” he said. He paused, just long enough to make Linny worry. She watched as the Asian guys left the restaurant, letting in a burst of air.
“Go ahead.”
“So, Pren got fired. A stupid reason, a stupid mistake she made—it doesn’t matter. But she decided it was a sign. She’s coming home to stay.”
“Oh,” Linny said, though she was wondering if that meant they would no longer need meals from her. No more deliveries—the thin band of excuse holding her and Gary together unraveling.
“She wants another child.”
“And you?”
“It’s what she wants.”
Linny focused on the restaurant’s textured green wallpaper and the brass sconces that shifted their light upward. The smell of warm rice and masago, the steam curling out of teacups—all seemed sharpened by her growing anger. She thought of Pren’s big hazel eyes and beauty-pageant hair—never stringy, never frizzy. In that tall limestone house she surely hummed to herself, holding her wedding rings up to the glow of her Simon Pearce lamps.
“We’ll still see each other at lunch or after work, as often as I can get away during the week,” Gary said quickly. “Weekends are harder, but we’ll work something out.”
Then Linny did something she had never done before. She got up and left, heading past the green walls, the tables laden with plates of tuna rolls. She walked right out of the restaurant. Gary turned around to stop her but she moved fast, knowing he was stuck there until the waiter ran his credit card. She felt vaguely like she was on television. But she could not bear the sight of Gary’s face one more minute. She couldn’t bear to hear his plans, to feel herself pushed into a role she had never aimed to have.
Back in her apartment Linny sat in the dark, catching her breath. She counted how long it might take for Gary to pay the bill and walk back to her building. She measured the minutes, but he did not arrive. Outside, someone rummaged through one of the dumpsters in the alley. Linny had often watched people there, astonished at their findings: bags of bagels and hot dog buns; sweaters and baseball caps; once a toaster and a bonsai tree. She had seen a man carry away the blue floral tablecloth that had been her mother’s, stained with the half bottle of balsamic vinegar Linny had spilled on it.
Usually Linny liked this furtive view, but tonight she wished her apartment faced the street, gathering up all the noise of the cars, the El, the drunks who always had something to say. She wanted to see how Gary looked as he left the restaurant and walked toward his car. She wondered if he had a parking spot on the street, and if maybe he was standing in front of her building at that very moment, deciding whether or not to come up. If she were hiding in the back of his car, would she hear him singing out loud to himself? Would she feel a change in the atmosphere as he drove eastward, closer to his real life?
3
Van
The day after Miles left, Van opened the yellow pages to H. She went to her laptop and typed Ann Arbor hotels into a search engine, doubling and rechecking her research in the way she’d always done with work. She had ruled out the possibility of his staying with a friend; he wouldn’t relinquish the privacy of his story in order to gain a few days in a spare bedroom. He would have gone to a hotel. But they lived in a college town; there were no W Hotels or hipster boutiques here, the kinds of places Miles preferred whenever they traveled. The Bell Tower Inn was stuffy and brocaded, too conspicuous. She couldn’t picture him at the stodgy Campus Hotel either. Still, she called. No, each front desk clerk told her, no Miles Oh was registered. She dialed the Holiday Inn, the Embassy Suites, places he probably would never choose. She tried to think of what fake name he would use. Was he so afraid of her? What did he think she would do?
A certain fear kept Van from calling his cell phone. He had once told her a story he had heard, about a guy who had saved the dozen or so messages a desperate ex-girlfriend had left on his machine. The guy had played them over and over for all of his friends, laughing at her humiliation, at the quaver in her voice as she begged him to call her, to see her, to love her again.
It wasn’t the same, Van told herself, to get in the car and drive around Ann Arbor, circling the building where Miles worked. She was looking for his dark red Land Cruiser and the first three letters of his license plate: LSM. To her the letters seemed to spell lissome. Which described Miles exactly. He was lissome, lithe, a self-sustained vine.
Out on Saline Road, Van stopped at McDonald’s to get a coffee. It was late morning, just a few minutes before the switch from Egg McMuffins to Big Macs. At the pay window the smell of the grease made her both queasy and hungry, and she asked for an order of hotcakes. She parked facing the road and began to eat with her hands. The cakes were rubbery and soft, and when Van closed her eyes she thought of the slight pillow of flesh that had cupped her mother’s arms. Miles hated fast food. Once, coming back from work, she had stopped for a furtive order of fries, wolfing them down before she got home. But Miles had eyed her sharply, sniffed her hair. “Ugh,” he said. “What have you been doing?”
She stopped eating the hotcakes, and when she looked up she saw a dark red SUV waiting to exit a gas station across the street.
She threw the McDonald’s bag into the passenger seat and jerked the car into gear. The Land Cruiser was merging into traffic and she went after it, cutting off a Civic hatchback, not slowing down until she and the SUV were nearly side by side. Van thought she could stay in Miles’s blind spot, follow him right along to his destination. She was giddy, flushed with the kind of excitement she remembered from her first major court victory—a deportation case—three years ago, right after the New Year. She’d considered it an auspicious way to begin the millennium. Her client had wept with relief and later, in the darkness of her own bathroom, so had Van.
Up ahead a light turned red and the Land Cruiser braked. She slowed down, then suddenly decided she wanted him to look. She would show herself to him and see how he reacted.
Van pulled up next to the big car and faced Miles. The guy sitting in the driver’s seat was listening to a rap song, nodding along to the beat. The SUV was dirty, an older model. It wasn’t a Land Cruiser after all, but a Nissan Pathfinder. And here was a kid with dirty hair under a baseball cap, probably an undergrad at the university, driving a car his parents paid for. He didn’t even notice Van.
Van made a right, heading back home. Of course it wasn’t Miles. Not even close. He could have been anywhere in southeast Michigan. She pictured him sitting at a hotel restaurant, lingering over newspapers and coffee. Or maybe he was truly gone, on a plane, or already landed at his parents’ house in San Francisco. He was still sleeping in that carved wooden bed they always shared when they visited. Wherever he was, he was unreachable. She could hear his voice in the back of her mind. Did you really think you’d find me like that? Where’s the logic in that, Van?
There wasn’t any logic. Just the long stretch of road, and Van going solo from one end to the next. The winter sky had locked itself down on Ann Arbor; every year it refused to relent until May. Van skirted the university she had loved for its law school, for bringing her to Miles, to get to the house that had been built just for them. She had no context, no way to think of Ann Arbor without thinking of Miles.
All her life with him she had been eager to get home. Every party, every social gathering, every going out was just a working toward the close of the evening. Van lo
ved nothing more than the departure from a party, and Miles’s old-fashioned insistence on helping her with her jacket. It was satisfying to know how each night would end: just the two of them, Van ushered out in the crook of his arm.
At home, his steps were gentle on the hardwood floors. His suits were a slim gabardine. He walked to the kitchen and called out to her—did she want a glass of wine? In the living room Van would clasp her hands together, wanting the whole day or night to pour into their house, where no one else had ever lived. She liked reminding herself that it was hers. That the history of the house began with them. Van touched the eggshell walls and thought, what more could be wanted?
In law school all kinds of girls went after Miles. Fellow students, undergrads, glam girls, co-op vegetarian girls, girls of all races. Van watched them. They held their drinks just so at parties, tilting their heads when they laughed. They asked him for dates outright. Miles was sweet and boyish yet utterly self-possessed, the kind of person who was never seen at four in the morning cramming for exams.
Van thought of herself as the kind of girl guys either overlooked or talked to because they needed her study notes, or because she represented a break from the exertion of trying to get with the hot girls. The few guys she had dated in college had hailed from small towns like hers; they majored in classics, and were so earnest and quiet that the relationships faded away without argument. She would never have thought to throw her hat into the ring that surrounded Miles. But she hung on to the times they interacted—small talk after orientation, even just exchanging hellos in the hallway. He could make Van—probably everyone, she supposed—feel not just noticed but seen. When they walked by each other he would break into a smile as though he couldn’t help it. In their second year of school, he had taken to teasing her about her disciplined study habits, her perfect answers whenever she was called on in class. While most of their cohort, like Van, could spend hours going over tort reform, Miles took a blithe approach to classes, as if the entire enterprise of law school were something of an afterthought. He was also taller than most Asian guys she knew, a point that Van’s father, later, would often mention—with admiration or envy, she wasn’t sure.
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 3