Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
Paul and I arranged to meet in Tompkins Square Park, about half an hour’s walk from the Chinatown bus stop. Almost against my will I had bought the ticket to Manhattan, and I was enjoying the feeling of being once again borne on currents I could not control. It was a Sunday. I had written to Hoang, telling him I wouldn’t be able to meet him at the zoo, and hoped the postal system would come through in time. It was the only day Paul was free. I hadn’t told anyone I was meeting him: not Inno, who once gave me a copy of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia in an effort to fix the state in which the dissolution of the relationship had left me, nor Apple, who I had reason to believe would have physically restrained me from leaving Philadelphia if she found out where I was going. I knew she was wrong about Paul, but the evidence was stacked against me.
He and I had exchanged only a couple of brief messages since I’d agreed to see him, and in the most recent reply, he’d signed off with an old pet name. It augured well for the outcome of our reunion, which I had now begun to imagine I had expected since the day he waved me off at the Gare du Nord. He remained vague about the purpose and duration of his visit, which was characteristic, and therefore not discouraging. In the morning I woke up having dreamt of him the night before, a dream of the encounter we were about to have, and the memory of the dream patinated the city around me: trees recalled it, the pigeons in the air recalled it. I walked to the park, rehearsing the lines I would deliver if everything went the way I hoped it would.
I was early, which meant I could prepare myself for the meeting in the setting in which it would occur, but which also meant I would have to wait. In the park I observed the circumambulations of joggers, dog-walkers, retirees, tourists, and besuited men on phone calls, gesticulating like conductors: people who were not waiting, people unlike me.
I walked three times around the park, and at the end of the third loop, he was there, sitting on a bench with his legs stretched out in front of him, looking at his phone. He had not had his lobes pierced when I knew him, but now he wore a feather earring in one, a stud in the other. He had a canvas tote bag looped around his shoulder. His hair was different, and he was wearing unfamiliar shoes. He stood up when he saw me, and we hugged. His eyes were still blue.
“Hello,” said Paul. “You look very nice.”
“Shall we take a walk?” I said. Sitting still seemed to me impossible. I felt his hands on my shoulders like stones.
“Yes,” said Paul, “why don’t we.”
He began to talk about a book he was reading, Sentimental Education. He said the English translation of the title was flawed, but he didn’t have any idea how he would improve it. He was reading it in English, he said, because when he had studied the novel in school, his literature teacher had been so obnoxious that Paul had avoided Flaubert for years. Now he was trying again, but he could not bring himself to read the version of the text he had been taught. I remembered that his elementary school was named after Victor Hugo and his secondary school was named after Albert Camus, and how I had envied this. My schools had just been numbers: Beijing No. 9 Primary School, Beijing No. 55 Middle School. The trees in the park had no leaves, and their lonely branches cut into the blue of the sky. I was finding it irritating that even in this getup, he was attractive, as if he had tried and failed to spoil his good looks with a bad haircut. I tried to concentrate on what he was saying. He was describing a scene at the end of the novel, when the main character and his childhood friend, now old men, reminisce about the past.
“You shouldn’t be telling me this,” I broke in. “What if I decide to read it?”
“Will you?”
“Do you think I would like it?”
“I can’t answer that,” he said. We walked six paces in silence, and then he said, “Yes, you should read it.” He started telling me why I should read it. He said I would enjoy the descriptions of the revolution of 1848, which Flaubert based on his own observations. Of course, he added, the man was a reactionary, but anyway it’s not as if you—meaning me—would care about that. “Do you still have your Bonaparte fixation?” he said. I said yes, I did. We made a full circle around the park, and when we arrived back at the bench where he had been sitting, he was still talking. I felt a little bored, which was not an emotion I’d predicted I would have in the situation I was in. I wondered when the moment would arise for me to deliver my speech. Perhaps he was waiting to deliver one too—maybe to tell me that he was moving back to the U.S., that he was sorry, et cetera?
Paul said he had passed a bakery on the walk over, and suggested we go there, because the pastries in the window had looked enticing.
“The walk over from where?”
“From where I came,” he said, and left it at that.
I asked for a canelé and Paul ordered an entire loaf of sourdough bread. At the till, I couldn’t bear his scrabbling in the tote bag for loose change, so I handed over my card to pay for us both. The man at the cash register, who was around our age, made some joke about the new generation where women paid for things. We laughed politely. For the duration of that exchange I envisioned the scene through the eyes of the cashier, who thought we were a couple. We left the bakery, and the error stopped being true.
We sat at the same bench again to eat. Paul was ripping chunks of bread from the paper bag, chewing with vigor, enthusing about the quality of the crust and the crumb. He was making jokes and laughing at mine, he was speaking at what was for him a rapid clip. He was chipper; it was bewildering. He asked for a bite of the canelé, and raved about that too. I thought about asking to try the sourdough, but decided against it.
“You seem kind of different,” I said.
“Different?”
“Chattier? Happier?”
He laughed and touched my knee with one hand, very lightly and very briefly, and my body tensed up.
“Probably because I’m taking antidepressants,” he said. “Since earlier this year. Isn’t that funny? I really feel much better than I did.”
I told him I was happy for him, although I had no idea whether that was true. I wanted to ask more questions, about fifty more, but I didn’t know if I would be able to regulate my emotional responses. I suggested we leave the park and walk to the river, and we did, but as the water came into view the thought of it became oppressive, and I told Paul I’d changed my mind and wanted to return to the park. “Okay,” he said, and we began to walk. He always acquiesced, that was the danger of him. He tricked you into believing he was an easygoing person, and you forgot about the roiling sea underneath. But maybe that was gone now too. The park was cast in shadow, the winter sun already dipping away, abandoning the world, or rather the hemisphere. The yellow bulbs of the streetlamps suggested warmth, another ruse of light. I was remembering how Apple used to call Paul the worst kind of people pleaser, a covert one. There was the part of his personality that relished provocation, argument for argument’s sake. And then there was the part that slunk away from reckonings, that committed itself to lies to avoid having to deliver uncomfortable truths. Apple used to call it a pathology, by which she meant to warn me that he would never change.
It had been almost an hour, and it felt like we had said nothing to each other in that time. I realized that the ambivalence I felt about him taking antidepressants, and improving as a result, was rooted in a sense of proprietary claim. When we were together, it would have been something we went through together, and I would have observed every day of change. I could accustom myself to the idea that, in my absence, he would change, but not to its materiality. Paul wasn’t supposed to change, he was supposed to stay the same, and he was especially not supposed to change in ways that, had they occurred earlier, might have meant we had stayed together instead of breaking up. The sun was setting, and the reflected light in the windows of one building pocked the sanded stone sides of another with rhombuses of pale gold. I was still waiting to be overcome by emotion.
We found a bar in which to shelter as darkness encroached. I got a gin and tonic and Paul dillydallied in his familiar way, and eventually ordered a pastis. They served it to him already mixed with the water, and this time it was I who minded, not him, because I so used to enjoy seeing the color of the liquor change in the glass, going from transparent to opaque, and because I wanted to see him pour it, like I had seen him do so many times before. Once we had something to drink, we became jovial, we were bantering, we were enjoying ourselves, helped on by the artifice of “catching up,” while underneath lurked everything too painful to say. He was amused when I told him about volunteering with the union, and I became defensive and exaggerated my involvement in response.
“I’m sorry,” he said, when he saw that his reaction had irked me. “It’s just not something I’d expect you to be doing.”
“Inno said the same thing.”
“I miss that man. How is he?”
“He works for McKinsey now. He started this week. But he’ll quit when he can.”
Paul grimaced. “That’s what everybody says.”
“Well, he isn’t everybody. He said he would quit when he makes enough money to—”
“Ah, but they can never make enough money.”
“Forget it.”
I picked up my drink. I was too annoyed to explain about the deworming charities. Underneath my irritation was an unpleasant self-consciousness. I felt, or felt that Paul would feel, that I was fussier and more assertive than I had been when he knew me. I wanted to ask how he’d gotten the visa to come here, but I worried the answer might make me angry, or sad.
Paul said his parents were doing well, and his younger sister would soon graduate from university. I already knew this, because I still had her on Instagram, plus a couple of cousins. I didn’t have the heart to unfollow them. I told him that my mother was not dead as I had once speculated to him, but alive in New Jersey. I told him my father had called me while I was on the bus to New York, and I’d thought we were going to discuss my mother, but all he’d done was recount a long story about his most recent psychedelic experience. He never called me when he was high, because I had told him many times that it made me uncomfortable, but he sometimes phoned me the next day to tell me about his epiphanies. The enumeration of ideas and sensations may have felt revelatory to him, but listening to someone talk about their drug trip was like listening to someone explain the plot of a television show you haven’t watched and have no interest in watching. At the end of the phone call, I told Paul, he’d mentioned my mother, but only to say that she had stopped speaking to him again, and that he didn’t think I should try to contact her after all. Paul laughed and laughed at the story, joked that he wanted to take drugs with my dad. I looked at him laughing with his straight teeth and his five-o’clock shadow and his atrocious feather earring. I had not commented on the feather earring because I was afraid it might be some kind of lover’s token, and more than simple jealousy, I found the idea that he could be seeing someone with such bad taste an affront and a disappointment. If it was his own choice that was one thing, but if he was sporting it on behalf of his feelings for someone else, that was much worse.
“It’s not funny,” I said suddenly.
“Come on, it is.”
“Maybe it is, but I don’t like you laughing about it.”
“Your dad would be laughing about it, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” I said. I looked at the vesicles of lime at the bottom of my glass, which had separated from the green rind as they disintegrated. Paul’s parents were normal. “Let’s talk about something else.” I said something true but inane about how I didn’t understand how anyone could prefer New York to Philadelphia. Paul provided some arguments in favor of New York, even though he had proclaimed his distaste for it many times in the past. This was typical of him, for whom the temptation of contrarianism always outweighed the camaraderie of shared belief.
“I do miss it sometimes,” he said. “Philadelphia.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it’s the best.”
I had the suspicion that the languor I felt as I sat across from him in the dim and congested bar, which by now was filling up with men and women whose hair frizzled with static as they unwound their wool scarves and shrugged their coats off onto spidery leather booths, the languor as well as the minor agitation for something more to be happening, to be feeling something more, was temporary, and would vanish the moment we parted ways, to be succeeded by melancholy, and a painful desire to recover the happiness I had felt when I was with him. But I had not actually felt it when I was with him, so when had I felt it? I had come close in the bakery, but that had been predicated on a stranger’s misunderstanding, had only been effective in the brief window in which I could see myself from the point of view of someone who was not myself, and who had all the details wrong. I remembered my speech, the one where I was going to tell him that I had only broken up with him because he’d forced my hand, because I’d hoped it would shock him into action, that at the time it had seemed like the only way to guarantee we might end up together one day; but that none of it mattered now, because now we were older, and maybe we were ready to try again. Then Paul looked at his phone and said he was meeting a friend for dinner, and would have to go very soon.
“How soon?”
“In about fifteen minutes.”
“Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
“I didn’t realize how late it was. I wasn’t sure how long we would spend together.”
Fifteen minutes, that was nine hundred seconds. It was nothing, and much too long. It would have been better if he’d left immediately, rather than impose the absurd duration, the ticking clock.
“Paul,” I said. “Are you moving back, or are you just visiting?”
“Just visiting for now,” he said.
The server came by to see if we wanted more drinks, and I asked for the check. Outside it was dark, and very cold.
“So apparently my mother runs this pottery studio in Queens.”
“Yes, you told me earlier.”
“Do you want to come with me to check it out?”
“Now?”
“Yeah. We can take the train, I looked up the stops.”
“I’ll be late for dinner.”
“Just say you’ll be late then. Or cancel. You always cancel.”
He gave a big shrug, elbows out, hands in coat pockets.
“I’m trying not to these days.”
We kept walking. At one point, I stepped off the curb before the light changed, not seeing an approaching taxi, and Paul pulled me back. He kept his hand on my arm, and as we crossed the road, he ran his hand up my back and squeezed my shoulder, pulling me in. It was so comforting, and it made me feel so desolate. It was like the bakery again, and, like then, it was a lie, and it was ending. I pulled away.
“Who are you having dinner with?” I asked. I felt as if I were being held at gunpoint to say the words, and now I had said them. I knew before he spoke what the answer was going to be, and I remembered how, in the email, he had written, I miss you.
“My girlfriend.”
“You said friend just now.”
Paul sighed. “I know.”
After a short silence, he began to talk excitedly about the gilets jaunes, who had been protesting on the streets of Paris for about a month. Paul never gave a justification for anything he did or failed to do, and you’d only upset yourself if you expected one. We were two blocks from the subway. I was very conscious of the diminishing time. Paul said that he was going to have a cigarette before getting on the train, and offered me one.
“You think I’ve picked up smoking?”
“Sorry. It’s a habit.”
He took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and tapped it against his open palm.
“It’s made me very happy to see you today,” he said.
I nodded. I had nothing I could say to that. He embraced me, and instinctively I leaned into him, and for a while we held each other on the cold and busy street. Then we broke apart, and it was as if we were making eye contact for the first time all day. We looked at each other and saw each other. I recognized myself in his expression, and saw that he saw himself in mine; I felt certain I knew what he was thinking, and he knew what I was thinking, on and on infinitely knowing, like one mirror set against another, an endless reflection, an immanence. For a moment our separateness dissolved, and we were the same person; for a moment no one would ever know another so well. But he had an appointment to keep, and he didn’t want to be late. He descended the steps to the station, and his shoulders and the back of his head gave no indication of resistance to their departure; he did not turn around.
I headed to Queens. The carriage was quiet, and I studied the map of the five boroughs tacked to the opposite wall. I disembarked at Astoria Boulevard and walked to the address my father had sent. All the lights were off, and a sign on the door, which was secured with two bicycle U-locks, said closed on sundays , which I already knew, thanks to helpful Google. I pressed my head against the glass and cupped my hands around my eyes to create the darkness that would enable me to blot out the colorful lights of the LED hookah animation across the road and see inside. There were clay vases, mugs, ashtrays, and Willendorfian female figurines on shelves along the walls. There were rows of stools and pottery wheels on wooden tables. There were aprons slumped on hooks and stacks of plastic tubs. There was a framed poster showing different ceramic glazes: I could see jade, pear, plum, frosted turquoise, ancient copper, june bug, merlot. I had not thought I wanted to see her, but seeing the room where she allegedly spent her Tuesdays through Fridays, teaching other people’s children to sculpt clay, made me wonder if I did.
I walked back to the subway station. I was beginning to understand that there would never be a thing called closure when it came to Paul. Even now, when time and distance and antidepressants and a different haircut and a girlfriend and a feather earring had rendered him a stranger, he was still the person I loved. Of course I wanted him to be happy, even if I couldn’t manage to say it or feel it. All there was to do was live my life without the hope of reviving something that could not be revived in the way I had envisioned. And what the experience boiled down to, a conclusion that strengthened itself in my mind on the bus ride back to Philly later that night, was Hoang. I was sure of it now, as sure as I had been about Paul when I’d left that same morning. Even at the best times, my love for Paul had been a heaviness, an inward turn. I always believed that if I began to fall in love with someone new it would feel the same, perhaps different in its details but identical in its rhythm, its unfolding, its form. But when I thought of Hoang I felt expansive and light, and when I talked to him it cleared my head.
Paul would never tell me in words that it was over, and if I asked him outright he would equivocate, in order, perhaps unconsciously—though I also had to learn that a lack of intent did not absolve—not to extinguish my hope, even if he had no intention of fulfilling it. What had always kept me going was not a belief that he was serving a secret goal hidden in his heart, but the need to understand why he was doing it, and the belief that there even was a reason, perhaps one he hadn’t realized himself. Someone who appears to act without self-interest or self-abnegation can be harder to understand than someone who is obviously spurred by an excess of either. As for myself, I liked answers, I liked knowing why people did things, I believed I could figure these things out even if the people in question did not know themselves, and it was hard to accept that I was wrong, that there were things to which I would never be privy, things that concerned me that I would never know; and that even if I did know them, knowing might make no difference at all.
When I returned to the apartment, Raymond was back, and so was the sofa. He and Xinwei were watching a Cantonese drama on his iPad. I went straight out to the fire escape. The inside of the apartment felt too warm, too quiet, too serene. I was in a similar mood to the ones I would get into now and then as a teenager, when I purposely stood outside on the most polluted winter days in Beijing, tasting the acrid air in my nose and throat. If the pollution was bad enough I would actually get a headache after ten or fifteen minutes. In Philadelphia the air was clear and cool, and deep lungfuls of it felt like mint. I leaned against the railing and looked down into the darkness of the empty lot below. On one stair of the fire escape, about level with the monks’ upper floor, was a thin orange cushion, and on the cushion, which one of the monks must have placed there for it, was a possum, curled into a crescent, peacefully asleep.
A few days later, Apple and I sat on the floor of her apartment, chewing gummy bears soaked in vodka. They were slimy and turgid with the cheap alcohol, but the vodka itself was hugely improved by whatever chemical sweeteners the bears exuded as they decomposed. I added pineapple juice to mine, but Apple was still drinking it straight. It was one of her college-era concoctions, for when she wanted to save on mixers and get drunk with efficiency. Now she made good money, but the money had not gotten rid of her cost-effective depravity.
“I am for sure freezing my eggs,” she was saying. “And I’m not going to wait till I’m thirty-six to do it. That’s the mistake everyone makes. I’m gonna do it, like, next year. You should too.”
She explained the process to me. It was hugely invasive, time-consuming, and expensive, and it sounded painful. Apple kept using the word “harvesting.” I had always imagined, without stopping to interrogate the plausibility of this vision, that they gave you a pill or something and then you plopped the eggs out, like a platypus, into a tube or jar.
“Seriously?” Apple said. “A jar?”
“Not like a Mason jar. Like the ones you have to pee into when they need a pee sample. A hospital jar.”
“You need to be thinking about this way more seriously than you are right now. The conventional route takes years. Finding a partner. Cuffed. Engaged. Married. Pregnant. Think of the timeline.”
“I don’t want to think of the timeline,” I muttered. I reached for the bottle of gummy bear vodka. “What if you get to what ever age it is, and you’re still single, and you just have all these eggs in the fridge?”
“Sperm bank.”
“Alone?”
“You can babysit.”
“Maybe I’ll have kids by then.”
“Some cute little Dinh-Lins? Holy shit, do your names rhyme?”
“Do not start.”
I hadn’t told Apple about seeing Paul. Part of me wanted her to know, not because I would find comfort in discussing it, but because I felt guilty for keeping it from her. Another part of me saw it as a way to get even with her for not telling me about Gus and Mohd. Maybe it was childish, maybe I should have just told her. Then again, what was there to say? I hazarded an attempt.
“I’m going to tell Hoang how I feel about him.”
Apple peered at me over her glass of discolored vodka. “Which is how?”
“Good, I think. Good.”
“Still friendly?”
“Maybe more than friendly.”
“Wow.”
“I think,” I said, “I was still harboring some hope about Paul.”
Apple’s eyes bulged.
“I thought maybe there was still a chance that—yeah. I guess it was always something to look forward to. But I think it was holding me back. And I don’t want it to, anymore.”
Apple threw her head back and emitted a small scream. “I almost got a hernia when you said his name, holy shit. Take a shot! Take this! Cheers!”
She launched into a long metaphor about how relationships were like M now I was thinking, you fool.