Chapter Three
When I told Apple that Hoang was now working as a bartender after being fired from the lab for rescuing all the mice, she said he sounded “volatile” and asked to see his social media so she could vet him, believing, not incorrectly, that an intertextual reading of a person’s online presentation could yield information about who they were in private. I told her I didn’t think he had any social media.
“God, he’s one of those,” Apple said. “I bet he looks at sunsets and doesn’t take pictures and feels great about it.”
Finally, I offered up his full name so she could scour the Internet.
“He barely even has Google results.” Apple looked up from her phone, her face a mask of horror. “What if he’s some kind of Unabomber?”
“Not everyone without Instagram is a potential Unabomber.”
“But every potential Unabomber is someone without Instagram.”
Her next campaign was to get me to text him, and, when I told her I didn’t have his number, it morphed into a plan to return to the bar. Apple was in her element, harassing me into doing something I didn’t really want to do until I relented, though I was a bit pleased that my resistance had proven futile. It was sometimes fun to be carried along by the force of Apple’s personality into situations I wouldn’t have otherwise dared to enter.
It was golden hour when we got there, and sunlight flooded the room, making the terrifying floors normal. By that point I had tried to back out of the plan and leave, but Apple marched me out of the elevator. The bartender was not Hoang, but a white guy with a buzzcut and silver studs in his ears. He was polishing glasses with a dishcloth.
“Do you know where Hoang is?” Apple demanded.
“It’s his day off,” the bartender said. “You friends of his?”
“Yes,” Apple said, at the same time that I said, “Not really.” We all looked at each other and then Apple smiled and asked for two lychee martinis. The guy’s name turned out to be Gus, and he made very good lychee martinis. Apple gave him an abbreviated, slightly untrue version of the story—that Hoang and I had met here and meant to exchange numbers before he got called away by another customer—and asked if Gus could help me out.
“I don’t think he has a phone right now,” Gus said.
“How unusual,” Apple murmured, flashing me a triumphant look.
“I think he lost it, but he hasn’t gotten around to buying a new one. You know how he is,” Gus said, as if we did. “I can pass a message on from you guys if you want?”
“Perfect!” Apple said. “Can you give him her number? Instagram? Email? LinkedIn?”
Gus said email would probably be best, since Hoang couldn’t call anyone at the moment, and he didn’t have social media. Apple gave me another gloating smile, and then they made me write my email address on a bar napkin. I handed the napkin to Gus, feeling nauseous.
As we sipped our martinis, Gus launched into a convoluted story about a dispute between the management of the hotel and the housekeepers, who had to use some kind of electronic system to log the rooms they cleaned, and who had been having trouble with the program since the hotel introduced a new “sustainable stay” feature where guests could choose not to have their rooms cleaned until they checked out, which would save water since there would be no daily change of the towels and the sheets. But this created havoc for the housekeepers, who needed more time to clean the “sustainable stay” rooms—“You can’t imagine what a mess the average person makes,” Gus told us ominously—but weren’t able to request extra time, and so were racking up penalties in the points system that led to docked pay and other disincentives. Apple asked why they didn’t just tell their manager about it, and Gus said they had, but the manager didn’t want to relay the problem to her own boss, who had instituted the “sustainable stay” program, and so had done nothing. The new program made the hotel look good and it helped cut costs, and, Gus added, the housekeepers were afraid to kick up a bigger fuss because many of them were undocumented immigrants and feared, more than losing their jobs, the threat or actuality of deportation if they attracted too much attention. Then a pack of college girls deposited themselves at the other end of the bar and Gus left us to attend to them.
“Greenwashing is a huge issue these days,” Apple said as we watched Gus pluck leaves from a sprig of mint for the girls’ mojitos.
“What’s greenwashing?”
“The thing he was describing, where they want the customer to think they’re environmentally conscious, but it’s pretty much just for show. Like how my law firm makes a big deal about giving us free SEPTA passes but the partners all drive to work and almost everyone else just takes Ubers and expenses them. I’m sure the museum does stuff like that too.”
I told her I wasn’t sure, that I had never really paid attention to that kind of thing, and she said that I should start paying attention. I asked her why, and she said because it was important.
“But why?”
“You know why.”
“I really don’t. And I don’t think the greenwashing was even the point of his story. He seemed much more upset about how it was affecting the housekeepers.”
“But part of the reason he’s upset is because it’s greenwashing. Like, you hear about a hotel trying to save the planet and you think they’re great.”
“It’s crazy that not washing towels for a few days can be construed as ‘saving the planet.’ ”
“The water, Penelope.” Apple said “Penelope” instead of “Pee” when she wanted to jokingly signify that she was annoyed with me.
“But I thought greenwashing was bad because it was only for show. If not washing the towels actually does save the planet, then it’s not greenwashing, right?”
“I mean I don’t personally know how much of an impact it has, but I’m sure there’s some impact. I don’t know, ask Inno .”
“You seemed a lot more sure about the water a second ago.”
Apple told me I was being contrarian and our conversation was going nowhere, and then asked me if I thought Gus was hot.
Every time I questioned her snippets of received wisdom, she accused me of being contrarian and started talking about something else.
I think she perceived my questions as condemnations of her beliefs, when most of the time what sounded to her like rhetorical attacks were genuine inquiries.
She often forgot that I didn’t have the same frame of reference as she did.
This wasn’t a trait specific to her—I’d discovered in my years in America that Americans always assumed you understood what they were talking about, perhaps because their cultural and political hegemonies were so total that, most of the time, you did.
Apple saw that Gus was standing idle and waved him over again.
“Greenwashing,” she said, “that’s the big problem, right? With the hotel?”
“Hey,” I interrupted, “remember that piece of paper I gave you? Can I have it back?”
“Huh? The napkin?” Gus shrugged. “Sure. Greenwashing?”
Apple explained to him what she had told me.
“I guess so,” Gus said. “But I think it’s more of a labor issue. Here you go.”
“Thank you.” I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I flushed the paper napkin down the toilet, feeling, at the same time, relief and regret.
I woke up the next morning to a text from Apple:
Good news! Gus says there’s a party tonight and Hoang’s prob gonna be there, and wants to know if we wanna go. Do we?
when did you even get his number
:) I told him we’re coming!
I stayed late at work to help set up Mummy Night, where elementary school kids came in for an educational sleepover at the museum. It was the event whose posters I had been dropping off at the university the day I met Hoang. Annalisa and I arranged foam mattresses around the base of a ten-ton granite sphinx, the museum’s pride and joy. The sphinx had a featureless, eroded face, but the hieroglyphs inscribed on its chest were still visible, deep etchings in the three-thousand-year-old stone. I pointed at the hieroglyphs and turned to Annalisa.
“ ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,’ ” I said, in the deepest voice I could manage.
“That’s not what it says,” Annalisa said.
“You can read it?”
She looked at me with pity. “It’s on the plaque.”
I walked around to the back of the sphinx and pretended to rearrange some sleeping bags. I had recited the only poetry I knew, and it had not warmed Annalisa’s heart. I looked at the curved hind leg haunches, the clawed feet. How many people had chiseled away at this rock, and for how long, for it to assume the form it had now?
I decided to try making small talk.
“Annalisa?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever been in love?”
She didn’t respond, and I presumed she was ignoring me. But then she said, “I’m in love right now.”
“Really? With who?”
From the other side of the sphinx, she began to describe a party she had gone to just a few weeks before, a typical Thursday night frat gathering of the kind she preferred not to attend, except that one of her close friends had her sights set on one of the “brothers,” so Annalisa had accompanied her. Annalisa stood in a corner for most of it, nursing a tepid beer and watching people lob table tennis balls into plastic cups. Then her friend reappeared, distraught: she had been rebuffed by the brother. Annalisa set down her gross drink and prepared to leave. Then, she told me, at the threshold of the door, a guy with intense blue eyes grabbed her arm to stop her. He was arriving, she was departing. He looked into her eyes with his crazy blue ones, his expression imploring; then he collected himself, released her arm, and said, in a husky, sexy accent she later learned was Uruguayan, “I’m so sorry. You have my mother’s perfume.” The guy, whose name was Luis, walked Annalisa and her friend back to the dorm where her friend lived, and then Annalisa and Luis returned to the party, which no longer felt boring and contemptible to Annalisa, but at once familiar and profound. They sat on a damp brown couch and talked for hours, ignoring the people and sounds that fizzed around them, while Annalisa quietly filed the encounter away as the germination of their love story.
“We’ve spent every day together since,” Annalisa said.
“That’s really beautiful,” I said. Her story was so similar to the way I met Paul that I wanted to shout, I know! Me too! But I understood it would be uncouth. I walked around to the front of the sphinx to smile at her, feeling that I had finally broken through some layer, and now we would be friendly confidants. When she saw me, she glowered.
“I’m going to get more pillows,” she said, and left. I looked at the plaque to see what the hieroglyphs said, hoping for a mystical, anguished proclamation, like Shelley’s in “Ozymandias” or Luis’s to Annalisa, but all they recorded was the name of the king.
Philadelphia in late September was a lot like Beijing in late September. For the whole summer the weather was hot, muggy, inert; the noonday sun warmed the sidewalks and the top of one’s head, and on the hottest afternoons, just as in the middle of winter it was difficult to recall the heat, it was impossible to remember, in fact barely possible to believe, that the temperature in the city at any point of the year could have dipped below eighty degrees. But then one day near the end of the month—and the point at which this happened postponed itself every year—the air cooled and the trees soughed in the breeze. When I cycled to work that morning, it was the first of those days, and when I left the museum in the evening, dusk was settling over the city, the streetlights were coming on, and everything was charged with possibility. As usual I had my pick of bridges over which to cross the Schuylkill River. Four were especially close to the museum. There was the South Street Bridge, built in the 1920s and reconstructed ninety years later after a period of several years in which huge chunks of its concrete flank would dislodge themselves, now and then, from the main structure and plunge into the waters below. There was the Walnut Street Bridge, held up by steel prongs, V-shaped like slingshots, wide and open but in my opinion more suited to cars than pedestrians. There was the Chestnut Street Bridge, on which construction began in 1861, during the onset of the American Civil War. The first horses trotted across it in 1866, by which time the war was over, Lincoln was dead, and the grand, ill-fated project of Reconstruction was living out its brief life. The bridge once had cast-iron arches that looked like Gothic church windows, but they were demolished for the sake of an expressway. The Market Street Bridge was the oldest of the four. It began as a series of pontoons: a chain of American boats, destroyed as the Redcoats advanced; then British boats, after their forces invaded and occupied Philadelphia; then it was a procession of floating logs that kept getting washed away. Finally they built a wooden bridge, much admired until it burned down in 1875. In 1932 the current version was completed, and so far neither water nor fire had managed to destroy it. Perched on each corner were large stone eagles salvaged from the old Penn Station in New York City, which used to have a waiting room that made Grand Central look like a subway station, until it was torn down and replaced by a grim, low-ceilinged, subterranean chamber. Once, returning to Philadelphia from a trip to New York, I missed my train and had to wait several hours for the next one, at two in the morning on a Sunday night. I sat on the floor, my backpack a cushion, and tried to doze off. I saw at least three fist fights; I saw strangers spit on each other and wail and pull one another’s hair. I was convinced, at the time, that none of it would have happened if they hadn’t destroyed the beautiful old station and sent everybody underground.
I biked across the Market Street Bridge, my favorite.
The lampposts that I loved had switched on and the sky was a bioluminescent blue.
The wind picked up and I felt alive, and then it ebbed and I started to worry about the immediate future.
I was glad that Apple and I had agreed to meet before heading to the party.
I didn’t know what I would do when I saw Hoang, what I would say to him, or even what I wanted from him.
Apple kept bringing up that I had said I might be “in love,” and I regretted saying it.
At the time, it hadn’t mattered, but since seeing him again and now trying to insinuate myself into his life, the intensity of this early declaration seemed absurd.
And I worried because the hyperbole contained an element of truth—not that I was in love with him, but that I recognized in him the possibility of falling in love.
I had been in love once before, with Paul, and it did not seem like a state I could re-enter.
When I was in it, I had reveled in the fixation on one other person, in the particular greedy joy: thinking of him as mine, as so known, holding the cutout of him in my hands and looking back at the shape of the world with its empty outline where I had rescued him from the blank monotonous dough of everyone else.
When I stopped feeling like that, recalling the feeling scared me.
Now that I thought it might not be impossible to feel that way again, I was recalling, too, the obverse of love: abjection.
I braked at a stoplight and briefly, unaccountably, was awash with guilt—guilt that I was being disloyal to Paul by heading now to another party, hoping to talk to another guy.
I thought of Annalisa and Luis and shivered in the seasonable air.
The way her story echoed our first meeting had upset me, even though the details they shared were generic.
It was a reminder that the past never loosened its grip.
No matter everything that came afterward, no matter that we didn’t speak anymore, the memory of the night we met lay unblemished in my mind, like a boxed jewel.
I was the one who noticed him first.
All he was doing was standing in a corner, talking to somebody, and holding a drink, but his presence seemed to drain the vitality of everyone in the room, as if beauty were a zero-sum game.
He was one of those people you always notice first.
Apple had seen me staring and identified him as a French exchange student named Paul and “the least annoying person in my bioethics seminar, but low bar.” I said he looked like an actor who would play a heroic surgeon on a television show, and Apple made a face and said, “Natural blonds scare me,” and I said, “Is that blond?” and she said, “What would you call it?” and I said, “Tawny? Ochre? Dusky gold?” and Apple said, “Jesus Christ, fine, I’ll introduce you,” and dragged me over to him, and then Paul and I argued about Napoleon’s legal reforms until Apple got bored and strode off.
A few months later I was in Charles de Gaulle Airport at the end of a summer spent with Paul, watching my flight to Philadelphia turn red on the departure board as the final boarding call went out.
I hadn’t been able to walk up to the check-in counter and hand over my passport.
I let the flight take off, deciding that rather than be apart from him, I would drop out of college.
It was the first time I had missed a plane in my life.
Apple and I had dinner near where she lived in Center City, and then I left my bike in her apartment and we walked to the address Gus had given her, somewhere in Spring Garden.
On the way, I told her about the pontoons that the soldiers had used to cross the river at the site of the Market Street Bridge.
From there we reached the topic of the Civil War and slavery, and Apple told me that when she was in elementary school in the Pennsylvania suburbs, her teacher, in an effort to make the text they were studying more “interactive,” had organized a class activity where the students pretended to be slaves and slave owners.
The teacher made the white children play the slave owners and the black children play the slaves, and then joked that she didn’t know where to put Apple and the other Asians.
First she made some of them slaves to round out the numbers, because there were more Asian kids than black kids.
When there were an equal number of children in each group she turned to Apple, the last student standing in the odd-numbered class.
The teacher told Apple she could choose which role she wanted to play: the slave owner or the slave.
“I was obviously mortified, and I was pissed that I was standing there alone after everyone else had their teams—not teams, you know what I mean—which, by the way, never happened to me in gym. No offense, I know it probably happened to you. Do they do that in China? Anyway, in high school somebody brought it up again and we all agreed that it was weird and racist, which it was, but I do find my specific dilemma interesting now. Like, what if Mrs. Healy, recognizing me as, like, the smartest kid in the class—and I’m not just saying that, you know I was valedicto rian, Pee—what if she was, like, versed in Asian American studies and was implicating me in this radical commentary on what it means to be yellow in the black and white race politics of the US of A? Do you know what I mean? Obviously that wasn’t what she was doing, but isn’t it interesting to pretend that she was?”
I didn’t think it was interesting, but I didn’t want to hurt Apple’s feelings, so I just said, “Do you think there were any Chinese Americans in the Civil War?”
“On which side?”
“Either.”
“There were probably like five Chinese guys in the Union army. There had to have been. I don’t think there would have been any in the South. But who knows.”
“Wait, what did you end up choosing? Were you a slave owner or a slave?”
“I don’t remember,” Apple said, unconvincingly. “I wonder where Mrs. Healy is today. Still teaching? Maybe dead? She seemed so old, but it was probably just because we were kids, and she was actually, like, thirty.”