Chapter Two #2
He donated the money he saved to very specific charities, small organizations dedicated to solving one issue, like iodine deficiency or rickets.
He adjusted to the habits of austerity and giving, and the habits deepened.
He stopped buying books and began to torrent online versions instead.
He gave up meat—he was unsentimental about animals, but beans were cheaper than imported wagyu, and he was suspicious of American supermarket chicken.
Plus, the environment. He started bringing cans of bottom-shelf lager whenever we went for drinks. He hated beer and chose it specifically because it would take him a long time to finish. Most notoriously, he lobbied his parents to let him divert his trust fund to his pet charities; they refused, and instead purchased a one-bedroom for him to live in, worried that he would otherwise relocate somewhere ill-advised to save rent money for the rickets groups, and die of asbestos poisoning.
“Isn’t the point to calculate which actions will lead to maximally good outcomes?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Do you really believe that the world will be a better place if you stop eating tomatoes?”
“The evidence bears it out.”
“I think you might be indulging your ascetic impulses and losing sight of the bigger picture.”
He slurped his water and glared at me.
“If I stop eating these foods, maybe it won’t make much of a difference. But if you do, and the next person, then it might. And someone needs to make up for your dairy guzzling.”
“This is soy milk.”
“Please. I’ve seen what happens when a grilled cheese sandwich has the misfortune of meeting you.”
Inno and Apple were the only people from university I still saw on a regular basis.
I never spent time with them together, only separately.
They had never really gotten along, but their tenuous peace was completely demolished on the night of the U.S.
presidential election in 2016, when we were at a bar watching the results come in on TV, and, when it became clear that Donald Trump was going to win, Apple started to cry at almost the exact moment that Inno burst out laughing.
It might have been salvaged if Inno, when he saw that the prospect of a President Trump had brought Apple to tears, had not laughed even harder.
I met Inno during orientation week, when we were standing in line to register for American debit cards, sheltering from the sun under a series of blue marquees erected to form a temporary command center for international students who had flown in from their respective countries with foreign bank accounts and SIM cards.
Inno, I learned, had landed that morning on a redeye from Abu Dhabi, because there were no direct flights from Lagos to Philadelphia, and left his earbuds on the plane.
Just before I met him he was at the Apple store, perusing the phone cases and the chargers when he noticed, after a few minutes, that a polo-shirted employee was skulking in his peripheral.
He moved to the next shelf, and the polo shirt moved with him.
He crossed the store, experimentally now, and his shadow obeyed.
He stopped in front of an iPad and tapped on its screen, which prompted the polo to ask, in a tone that did not imply a real willingness to provide assistance, “Can I help you?”
“I’m just having a look,”
Inno said, at which point the stony face lit up.
“Oh!”
the man said, beaming. “You’re from Africa!”
He said the interaction reminded him of a story often told by one of his father’s friends, who was from India, of his family’s first and only holiday in America, in the sixties, when the friend was just a child.
They checked into their hotel at night and the next morning headed to the pool.
They chose some lounge chairs in the shade and set down their towels.
It was the biggest pool Inno’s father’s friend had ever seen.
He watched people wade and backstroke, their pale swimcapped heads bobbing like buoys.
He slipped into the water and kicked to the bottom, where he touched the seahorse mosaic tiled into the sun-dappled floor.
When he resurfaced, he was alone.
The other guests were crowded at the opposite end, clambering up the ladder.
He wondered if they’d seen a snake.
Later, the friend and his parents made their way to the hotel restaurant for dinner.
His mother wore a sari.
They were seated, and the friend recognized some of the swimmers at the adjacent table.
“Oh, look!”
a woman said, smiling at them in a way Inno now imagined must have been identical to the way the Apple store employee smiled at him, “It’s fine, they’re Indian !”
Inno described to me, as the line inched forward and we stepped out of the sweltering August heat and into the shade of a blue tent, under which were tables cluttered with brochures, laptops, and plastic cups of ballpoint pens, the peculiar sensation of déjà vu he had felt, and the tinge of unreality in the polo shirted employee’s words, which came across, to Inno, like a conscious reference to the story he had heard so many times.
Inno had looked at the floor, he said, expecting to find a seahorse spelled out in terra-cotta tiles.
“Now I can tell my father’s friend that the racism problem in this country against its own black citizens does not seem to have improved,”
Inno concluded just as we arrived at the front of the queue, startling the student volunteers at the booth.
We reached the beautified pier that jutted over the Delaware River in the shadow of the suspension bridge and chose a bench.
I sipped my latte through a plastic straw and Inno drank his lemon water.
He asked me if anything profound had happened to me at work that week, and I told him about the embroidered socks.
Inno liked to hear stories about people being overwhelmed by their emotions, as long as there was an intellectual bent, while I only felt comfortable discussing my emotions if I intellectualized them, so it worked well for us both.
He considered emotionally overwhelming experiences foreign and whimsical and claimed they never happened to him.
He often asked me about the museum because when I started my job there, I described to him what happened the first time I picked up one of the shoes in my latex-gloved hand.
Reading about bound feet, or looking at drawings and photographs, some of which are quite graphic, can give a vivid impression of what they are, and an effort to apply one’s imagination to the words and pictures can render that impression more vivid still.
But when you hold the shoe in your hands, everything else falls away.
It is so much smaller than you imagined, much smaller than you could possibly expect, even when you have read the measurements beforehand and know what the numbers signify.
Everything falls away: the three-inch golden lotus, the royal concubine and the besotted emperor, the feminist revisionist scholarship that rejects the word “mutilation”
and recasts the bound-foot shoe as kinship, as accessory; it all falls away when the shoe is in your hand and all you manage to think is, how can this be? My father’s mother ran away from home as a girl and joined the Communist Party to avoid getting her feet bound.
My mother, we think, had Hakka origins, so probably none of the women in her lineage ever had bound feet.
When I closed my eyes with the shoe in my open palm, it felt almost weightless.
There might have been nothing there at all.
“I’m afraid that I need to run home before this settles in my stomach,”
Inno said.
“The water?”
“It will disrupt my whole day if I don’t.”
He was already jogging in place, warming himself up for the thirty-block sprint back to his apartment.
He signaled apology as he receded, and texted me a few hours later, inviting me to join him for drinks that night at the bar of some swanky new hotel.
Things like this were why, before the election night rupture, Apple and Inno had never been close.
Each was uncompromising in their own way: Apple had a very low tolerance for people who flouted norms, and Inno, if he sensed that someone would not be amenable to his quirks, presented a cold and civil front that the lowest-EQ type could not fail to pick up on and that Apple, alert to the point of paranoia to the smallest ripples in social dynamic, detected the moment it occurred and reacted to in kind.
I knew that if I told her how he had just behaved she would be infuriated, somewhat on my behalf but more so because I did not mind.
The fruits of my friendship with Inno made up for such moments, so I accepted them without rancor; it also added richness to one’s life to have a friend who acted eccentrically, and did so out of compulsion rather than affectation.
I stayed on the bench while I finished my matcha latte, watching the cars cross the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, which I had once walked across with Inno to reach the Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, because he’d wanted to visit Walt Whitman’s grave.
The rate of violent crime in Camden was four times the national average, and twice that of Philadelphia; but Camden had an aquarium, and Philly did not.
I reconvened with Inno later that night, in the twenty-ninth-floor bar.
The hotel was called the Rivebelle, and it had replaced an older hotel that had occupied the same building.
The walls of the elevator were made of curved glass, and the floor of the bar was such a glossy black that I was scared to look at it for long.
In its reflection, the dimensions of the room, the chairs, the tables, my own legs appeared in photographic clarity, the false depth of the obsidian combining with the mirrored image to summon an abyss into which I feared I was about to plunge.
I found Inno stretched across a chaise longue, chatting with two of his friends, Louisa and Femi, whom he referred to as “Mother and Father,”
because Louisa was Filipina and Femi was Nigerian, like Inno’s parents.
There was a glass bowl of peanuts in the middle of the table, illuminated by a lamp with an oblong green shade, the kind you come across in libraries.
In the shadow of the lamp, a bottle of champagne rested in a silver ice bucket.
“This doesn’t look very frugal,”
I said as I sat down next to Inno. He kissed me on both cheeks and then flung an arm around my shoulders, squishing my face into his neck.
“Is that a jibe?”
Inno whispered.
“Mm-hmm.”
“In that case you can go get us another bottle, please. This one has been bled dry.”
He released me from his grip. “And Femi is treating us, I’ll have you know. I’ve tried and failed to awaken the dormant effective altruist in him, so I may as well imbibe the drink he so stubbornly provides.”
Again I crossed the glistening obsidian depths. The bar counter was studded with pinpricks of light, meant to resemble stars, and amber bottles of whiskey and rum glowed on the shelves, which stretched to the ceiling. The bartender had his back to me. Later I wasn’t sure if I had recognized him before he turned around, or if all I felt was a premonition of recognition, apprehension and joy mingling in my heart like balsamic and oil, swirling and failing to integrate. When he saw me he looked surprised, and he smiled.
“Forest!”
said Hoang.
“Hello!”
I almost shouted. I couldn’t believe it was him.
“Hi.”
“You’re here.”
“I am, I am.”
“You work here?”
He nodded. “Needed a job.”
“Because of the mice?”
“Because of the mice.”
Hoang told me, as he mixed whatever complicated drink I had ordered, not because I wanted it but because I wanted to prolong our interaction, that he had indeed been fired for freeing the mice, or tampering with biowaste, depending on your perspective, and had started this job earlier in the week.
He’d previously worked as a bartender for a couple of years, and someone from his old restaurant had let him know about an opening at the Rivebelle.
He did not seem particularly upset about losing his research position, which I presumed had not been easy to obtain, but I did not know if this was because he was stoic, or if he was actually not upset.
I wanted to ask if he had purposely sabotaged himself, and if he was happier now that he had left the lab, but I didn’t feel I knew him well enough to ask.
I watched him rattle ice and alcohol in the gleaming shaker and admired his hands and the sinews of his forearms.
His left shirtsleeve revealed the ends or beginnings of a tattoo, shaky black lines depicting something I could not discern.
Later, walking home from the bar, I thought about how Hoang’s time working in the lab would become a smaller and smaller fraction of the whole person he appeared to me to be, his past that I had not witnessed being equivalent, for me, to the oblivion that exists before one’s birth; whereas for him, the moment in which I had come into his awareness was characterized by this huge change—
the dishonorable discharge from one job and the start of a very different one, a rupture in the laid-out plan of his life, the beginning of a new, unplanned and uncertain path.
It was interesting to think of the arbitrary points at which one person collides with another, of the expanse of potential experience that is opened up to you when you meet someone to whom, for whatever reason, you are drawn.
Hoang finished making my drink and I returned to the table, cocktail in hand.
“I do not believe the sturgeon survives the operation, so I cannot see how it counts as vegetarian,”
Femi was saying.
“Then why do they call it eggs?”
Louisa said. I sat down.
“Are they bringing it over?”
Inno asked me.
“Bringing what over?”
“The champagne?”
“Oh,”
I said, and stood up again. In giddy spirits I returned to Hoang.
“Forest,”
he said, “you’re back. Did you like the drink?”
“Yeah,”
I said, although I had not tasted it yet. “I forgot I was supposed to get champagne.”
“I can get you champagne.”
“What do you usually drink?”
“Whatever’s around, I guess. I don’t really drink, though.”
“Really?”
“Not like as a rule, I just tend not to drink that much, I don’t know.”
“This job must be pretty boring then.”
“No, it’s fun. I like talking to people.”
This was incomprehensible to me, for whom the greatest pleasures of work were the paucity of human interaction, the long blissful days spent in quiet rooms alone, examining silent objects. My job at the museum would probably have been, for Hoang, a description of suffering.
“What do you like about it?” I asked.
“I just like hearing what people have to say, you know? People say all sorts of stuff, and it’s fun to listen. Also, I’ve been won dering, are you named after the Penelope from the Odyssey? Or another Penelope? Or are you just named after yourself?”
“Hm?”
I looked at him, too caught up in the wonderful implication that he had been thinking of me.
“Odysseus, his wife was Penelope, right?”
“Oh. Yeah. I don’t think I was. I think it was random.”
“Oh, okay. That’s good, right? ’Cause she was pretty unhappy.”
“I don’t think I’m unhappy.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be.”
From what seemed like a far-off distance, I could hear, “Penelope Lin!”
I turned around. Inno and Femi and Louisa were waving their empty flutes at me.
“I think they want this,”
Hoang smiled, and handed me the bottle.
When I returned to the table, Inno was telling a story about an ex-boyfriend of his, a concert pianist with a penchant for infidelity, the man for whom the cheese pizza guy had functioned as a rebound.
Enough time had elapsed that Inno could describe his old pain with some detached irony, but I remembered the recent past when that hadn’t been the case.
He filled each of our glasses almost to the brim with champagne as he described how he believed he had fallen in love with the pianist solely because of the way he played the piano, or more precisely the way the playing transformed the pianist.
He would take his seat at the piano bench, in a concert hall in a suit or naked in his living room (it did not matter to Inno, the effect was the same) and begin to play.
When he touched the keys, he shed his slouch and his loopy gait and his other human tics and became graceful, powerful, beautiful.
“I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’ve concluded that I was stupid—that we all are,”
Inno told us, shifting, for some reason, into the present tense to describe a man he no longer saw.
“I watch him play, I listen, and I fall in love.
I mistake the beauty drawn out by the mechanical movements of his hands, music written by another man, as an expression of his own inner beauty, as proof of it.
I am falling in love with how Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto makes me feel and mistaking it for love for this mediocre man, this cheat.
I misplace the feeling.
And physical beauty is the same thing. A signifier of virtue where no virtue is to be found.”
I did not look over at Hoang, but I imagined looking over at the bar and finding him there, making someone a drink or talking to a customer, enjoying himself, smiling his dimpled smile.
Was I like Inno, so easily waylaid by beauty, by appearances, by form? Beauty was something that Inno and I often discussed.
His pseudo-philosophical approach allowed him to bypass his usual reservations about emoting.
He might say things like “aesthetic”
and “ideal,”
and I might cover my face with my hands and say, “Oh my god, look at his arms,”
but really we were talking about the same thing.
Both of us appreciated and were sometimes awed by feminine beauty, which we responded to like art, but we were paper crumpled in the hand of masculine beauty, powerless to stop ourselves from being unformed by it.
Apple was indiscriminate when it came to attraction, whether it was gender or physicality, though she was something of a puritan about age.
But she found discussions of beauty sentimental.
She should have been in agreement with Inno on that, except that when it came to beauty, he lapsed into the romanticism, cloaked in analytical terms, that he was displaying so characteristically that night at the bar as he spoke about the unfaithful pianist.
It was another way in which they—Apple and Inno—were incompatible.