Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven
The union was finalizing plans for the big rally. There had been a last-minute change of location from Boston to Philly, and getting all the right permits in time had been difficult, but now there was a laid-out route, and people who worked at Bonaventure-owned hotels all across the East Coast were going to attend. The national president of the union was going to make a speech, as well as hotel workers who were on strike, and maybe even the mayor. When I arrived at the office I asked if Mariama was around, but Chris said she was at work. I had a box of longjing tea I’d promised to bring her.
“I’ll get it to her,” Chris said. He opened the lid of the tin. “Smells like grass.”
“Nice, right?”
“I guess,” he said, looking dubious. “Hey, since you’re here, you wanna help me with something?”
“Flyering?”
“No, not flyering. You seen the Inquirer today?”
He showed it to me. He actually had a physical copy of the newspaper. Taking up a third of the front page was a story about Bonaventure, something about a credit union. I took the paper to read it properly.
“You can study up later,” Chris said. “We gotta stock some shelves.”
He told me, as he drove us somewhere in his car, the backseat of which was filled with newspapers still trussed in their pre-dispersal twine, that the Inquirer had just published an investigative report on Bonaventure’s “predatory lending practices.” For the past two years, the article said, the company had aggressively flogged a credit union to its employees, telling them they would save money and gain access to better mortgage interest rates and car payment plans. Many workers had signed up, only to be charged an alarming number of fees: monthly fees, transaction fees, penalty fees for a low-balance account or an inactive account or overdrafted account. Overdraft protection fees, to avoid the overdraft penalty fees. The credit union also offered loans, and many people had taken them, including many at the Rivebelle, because after Bonaventure bought the hotel, the new managers were erratic about scheduling shifts, which meant people ended up making less money than they had before and needed extra cash. The loans had pretty steep application fees—$50 for a $400 loan, for instance—but not everyone felt they had much of a choice.
“They say the credit union is independent, but every single person on the board is a Bonaventure executive,” said Chris. The Inquirer article laid all of this out, comparing the Bonaventure credit union fees to those of credit unions all over the country, showing that they were substantially higher, even compared to other hotel groups. It listed those in Bonaventure’s upper management who had gotten multi-million-dollar mortgages from the credit union, and used that to illustrate the informal two-tiered structure that existed, where wealthier executives benefited from favorable policies while poorer employees were bogged down by charges and penalties and driven further into debts they could not pay. The journalists had spoken to Rivebelle employees who, under condition of anonymity, because they feared reprisal at work (“You know some of them,” Chris stage-whispered in the car), had described feeling trapped by the lending program they’d hoped would pull them out of dire financial straits; worst of all (from the perspective of hotel management), the article ended with a quote from one anonymous employee who compared the system Bonaventure had established with the credit union to the practice of sharecropping.
“They’re mad as fuck over that line,” said Chris. He was pulling into a parking space about fifty yards from the entrance of the Rivebelle.
“Wait, why are we here?” I said.
“This morning I had a hunch. An inkling. So I checked. And I was right.”
“About what?”
“They emptied out every 7-Eleven, every Wawa, every newsstand in a five-block radius. They must have known it was coming and sent people out at the crack of dawn to buy the papers up or something. So I started restocking. When I got hold of all these, I was walking into stores like I’m on a paper route and dropping them off. Easy. Except,” he crouched low in his seat, “then I learn from everybody that’s on shift today that all the daily papers for the hotel arrived as usual, New York Times , Wall Street Journal , and what have you. Except no Inquirer . Not in the lobby, or the lounge, or the rooms. And that is where you come in, Napoleon. I need you to go in there and plant these truth bombs.”
“Me? Alone? Why can’t you come with me?”
“I’m a suspicious character,” Chris said. He pointed at his face to indicate his skin color, and then, which also seemed pertinent, at his bright red T-shirt, emblazoned with the name of the union and a cartoon fist raised in the air above the word: strike !
“And I’m not?”
“No. You’re incognito.”
“I am?”
“You are. And now it’s time to go behind enemy lines.”
I allowed myself a couple extra spins in the revolving doors before walking into the hotel. It was afternoon, and check-in time was over, so the lobby was quiet. I carried two plastic bags, a bundle of newspapers in each one, and more papers in my backpack. The handles of the plastic bags were slipping back and forth in my hands because I was sweating so much from the stress. I felt like I was trying to rob a bank, with Chris waiting outside, engine ready, and me inside, about to have a panic attack.
The lobby was easy. I spotted the newspaper rack right away, tucked between empty sofas, far from the reception desk. I slipped a bunch of Inquirers into the empty shelf where they were supposed to be and then stuffed some more behind the other papers and magazines. But Chris had said the lobby wouldn’t cut it. He wanted me to go to the executive lounge, which was on the thirtieth floor of the hotel. To postpone the terrifying task I went to the bar, where I knew Gus would be on shift, getting ready to open for the evening.
“Lychee martini?” he said when he saw me. I was tempted, but I shook my head. I explained the situation to him, and his eyes lit up. He told me to put one newspaper on every table, and asked for some extra to keep behind the bar, “just in case.”
“Chris is a legend,” he said.
“Do you think I still need to go to the lounge then, since you’re gonna have them here?” I said. “Probably not, right?”
“Oh, definitely. That’s important. That’s where all the VIP motherfuckers hang out.”
As the elevator doors dinged open on the thirtieth floor, I received a text from Chris:
u need a key card to get in the lounge chill for a sec n crystal will come get u
Waiting for Crystal was torturous. I tried to reassure myself that there was no way I could go to jail for this. But couldn’t I?
Finally Crystal arrived. She cackled when she saw me.
“I knew there must be something hot in that paper!” she shrieked.
She said she was the one who normally stocked the executive lounge, and when she’d asked her manager where the Inquirer was that morning, because some guests said their deliveries hadn’t come, he’d told her he didn’t know what she was talking about and then ran away, “like a dog.”
“After you, madam,” she giggled as she pressed her key card in. “Good luck!”
The lounge had floor-to-ceiling windows and a sweeping view of downtown Philadelphia. There was no one inside. I flung newspapers onto tables and bar tops, stuffed them into Taschen shelf fillers, slipped them between copies of the Economist , Town it was Annalisa, sitting alone at the table behind me. We made eye contact, which meant that it was too late to go back to my bagel and pretend I had not noticed her. I asked if she was okay.
“Louise and I broke up.”
“Who’s Louise?”
“Luis, Luis! My Uruguayan boyfriend!”
I told her I was sorry. Our conversation at the base of the sphinx came back to me: the dirty frat house, his mother’s perfume, the sense that it was meant to be.
“Wait, are you crying?” Annalisa said in a tear-muffled yet still disdainful tone.
“Am I?” I rubbed my eyes. “Sorry. It’s just sad. What happened?”
She told me they had gotten into an argument about whether or not Luis was white (she said he wasn’t, he said he was, or maybe the other way around), which then spiraled into a bigger argu ment about their compatibility and their future together. He said some hurtful things about her inability to speak Spanish and she stormed out of his luxury student housing. It was a difficult story to follow. I didn’t really understand why they had been arguing about whether he was white, or how this had led to their breakup. Mostly I was glad that I was no longer in college. By the end of her story, it transpired that they were probably going to get back together, and had been sending each other semi-detente texts throughout the day.
“I thought I was going to have to get back on fucking Tinder,” Annalisa said. “Can you imagine?”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” I said.
“Yeah.” Annalisa narrowed her eyes. “Are you?”
“Me? Of course.”
“You’re acting weird.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. I finished my bagel and went back to the basement to catalog some more shoes.
After work, I finished reading Sentimental Education on the fire escape of the apartment, because the third roommate, who seemed to have returned for good, was eating McDonald’s again. At the end of the book, the protagonist, Frédéric, after spending his whole life chasing a married woman and half-assing various jobs, is sitting with his childhood friend Deslauriers, and they are recounting their shared past. They linger on one incident from their adolescence, when they try going to a brothel for the first time. Frédéric is nervous, and the girls in the brothel laugh, and he runs away. He and Deslauriers agree that the best time they ever had, their fondest shared memory, was this: one in which they had not even achieved what they had set out to do. It was the scene Paul had started to describe the day I met him in New York. I wondered what he had wanted to say about it, but not enough to reach out and ask. I went back inside and placed the book on my shelf, next to the Frank O’Hara anthology and the concise guide to North American trees. I picked up the poetry volume and opened it to the random page in which I’d slipped Hoang’s most recent postcard. Could he be in that tent in Colorado with the girl who was in his house? Would he have written such a message if he was? The poem under the postcard was To the Harbormaster. I began to read it.
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
It continued. When I came to the last lines, I flung the book across the room. Seconds later, there was a knock on my door. It was the third roommate.
“Hello?” he asked me, as if I had called him.
“Hello,” I said.
“I heard a noise.”
“And?”
“I’ve never told you this, but sometimes you can be quite disruptive.”
“Sorry?”
“When that loud friend of yours comes over and tells her stories on the fire escape, I can hear—”
I slammed the door without saying anything. I retrieved the book and returned it to the shelf, patting its cover by way of apology. A moment later, my phone buzzed. A new text from an unknown number:
clark park at 9?
The trolley exited the underground station into a world of darkness and snow. I got off at the corner of the park and found Hoang on a bench, reading a book under a large leafless elm, squinting to make out the words in the dim light of the streetlamp and the moon. The snow had quickened its pace, and close to an inch of it laminated the ground.
“Forest!”
He dog-eared his book, and I saw that it was Great Expectations.
“You have a phone now?”
“I had to, it was getting impossible to schedule my shifts. My manager would always be texting Gus or Danny, and they were all getting really annoyed at me.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I kind of liked the thing we were doing.”
He took the phone out of his pocket so I could see. It was an old Nokia he had found in a drawer in his grandmother’s house in North Philly.
“I think I used to play Snake on one of those,” I said.
“I got Snake!”
He let me play for a little bit, but I kept eating my own tail or smashing into the wall.
“I swear I used to be good at this.”
“You’ve been living like a prince with your touchscreen. No calluses.”
We started to walk farther into the park.
“Wait, but how did you get my number?”
Hoang laughed. “I asked Gus if he had it after a union meeting and like five people offered to send it to me. I’m like the only person at work who didn’t have your number. Mariama loves you, by the way.”
I asked him why he was reading Great Expectations , and he said he had made a promise to an old man he met on a mountain in Colorado.
“He was talking about Dickens and I told him I’ve never read any Dickens, and he made me take this, he told me it was his only copy and he was expecting it back. He wrote his address inside so I could mail it to him with a review of what I thought, because then that way he said he’d know I actually read it.”
He showed me the address. It was for a Bernard who lived in Penzance. Hoang said they started talking because he saw Bernard wandering the hiking trail, looking lost, and asked if he needed help. Bernard said he was an amateur geologist and was searching for a specific type of rock that he’d never seen before. Hoang spent a few hours helping him look for the rock, and when they found it, Bernard embraced him and shook his hand.
“He didn’t take the rock—I mean you’re not supposed to—but he didn’t even take a picture of it or anything. He just looked at it, and it made him so happy. And then he went home. Isn’t that great?”
We reached the edge of the bowl. The bowl had once been a pond. Now it was a shallow crater in the middle of the park, grassy in the summer and snowy now. From a certain distance away, in the daytime, its curves had a distorting effect, akin to an optical illusion, or, from what I gathered through my father’s exhaustive accounts, like taking a low dose of a psychedelic drug, just enough for things to shimmer and move.
“I wish we had a sled,” said Hoang.
“Me too.”
“You know this is where I used to release all the mice.”
“I remember,” I said. I began to walk down the slope, using small steps so I wouldn’t lose my footing, and Hoang followed. We stopped when we reached the center.
“When I lived here I liked coming to the park and lying down in this exact spot, because you can’t see any buildings from that angle, just the sky and the trees. And if you tried really hard you could pretend you were in a field in the middle of nowhere.”
I hadn’t planned on telling him that, because it was something I used to do with Paul, but once I said it, I realized I didn’t care. I kicked the ground. Snow spurted and fell.
“We should do it,” Hoang said. So we lay on our backs and looked up at the ceiling of the sky, watching our breath condense into fog in the air above us. The tree trunks were dark against the clouds, which were suffused with the light of the city, but all of their branches, from the boughs to the tiniest twigs, were white with snow. They looked like icicles, like glass crystals you could take a bat to and smash in one swing. With some of the thicker branches, the wood was still visible, pencil-thin, veinlike. I thought of the embroidery on the bound-feet socks in the museum, the ones that looked so immaculate and so heartbreakingly homemade, that so arrested me because I thought I sensed the presence of their maker.
I told Hoang that Philadelphia was the first place in the country to build a pneumatic tube system for sending mail, and the object they chose to test out the tube was a Bible wrapped in an American flag. The mail traveled so fast it was almost like instant messaging, and that was more than a hundred years ago. The network of tubes was still underground today, but nobody used it anymore. Hoang said if they brought it back he would throw away the Nokia phone, and I said I’d throw my phone away too.
“You do love throwing your phone,” he said.
“Yes. So. Why did you go to Colorado?”
“I’ve never seen the desert.”
“You went alone?”
“I went alone.”
“Why so suddenly, though?”
“I told you how I’m trying to go to Antarctica, right? It’s because I want to see the ice and the southern lights, you know, the aurora, down there it’s called aurora australis. But I’ve also always wanted to see the desert, and I thought I should see it before I went to Antarctica. I got worried if I didn’t then I wouldn’t appreciate all the ice as much because I’d still have this older wish to see the sand. I don’t know. Does that make sense?”
“I guess,” I said. “Actually, not really.”
“I just didn’t want to leave it unfulfilled.”
“Don’t you think some desires are better left unfulfilled?”
“No, definitely not. Do you think that?”
“Kind of, yeah. Like, maybe it gives you some forward momentum? And sometimes things are better in your head than they turn out to be in real life?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But real life is pretty great.”
I told Hoang I wanted to quit my job, and he asked me what I wanted to do instead. I said I didn’t know, but I wasn’t worrying about it, and he said he thought that was a good way to look at it. I was too shy to admit I wanted to work for the union, too self-conscious of his “truer” connection to it than mine. We lapsed into silence. I was enjoying the snowflakes arriving and dissolving on my nose and forehead and cheeks. Again I had the feeling I’d had many times before with him: an urge to share more, or a wish that he already knew more. I wanted him to know about my narcissistic father and my invisible mother and my distant friends, and I wanted him to tell me about his feud with Mohd and his grandmother in North Philly and his childhood grief. I wanted to know what he did with all the hours of the day he wasn’t bartending at the Rivebelle or camping in the wild in Colorado or talking to me.
“Look,” Hoang said. He pointed to a ragged cloud floating above us. “Five fingers. Like a hand. And look.” He gestured to a bright dot in a gap between two of the cloud fingers. “Do you see that? It’s moving. Maybe it’s a shooting star.”
“I think it’s a plane.”
“Let’s just say it’s a shooting star.”
I looked for the plane and saw it in the same spot as a moment before, and realized I was wrong and he was right. It was a star, though not a shooting star. It was the cloud that was moving. We watched it slip across the sky, watched as it dimmed the moon, obscured it, then revealed it again, slowly, the light spilling out bit by bit until it returned.
“Eclipse,” I said. We were so close that the fabric of his coat rustled against mine as he breathed. Turning to look at him felt like something that required a gargantuan will. My arms and legs felt jittery and weak. I sat up quickly.
Hoang raised himself on his elbows, watching me. I felt overcharged with energy. I looked away.
“Hey, I forgot,” he said, after a moment. “I brought you something.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. Bread.”
“Bread?”
“From the restaurant. Danny gives me the extra after service sometimes. It’s really good.”
He sat up and reached for his bag. There was snow on his back, and I leaned forward to brush it off. “Thanks,” he said, smiling over his shoulder. He held a small baton of bread in his hands. He tore it in half and handed me the larger piece. I took a bite, but my mouth was so dry that it was hard to chew.
“Let’s walk around,” I said, barely getting the words out.
I felt weak, almost dizzy. We walked back up the slope. I saw a lamppost and moved toward it, mesmerized. The cone of illumination made by the light was alive with motes of snow, falling diagonally in the air, appearing out of nowhere and then vanishing as they passed the boundary into darkness. I leaned against the post and looked at Hoang. He had a new look on his face, a look I liked. He moved closer to me, into the warm ring of light, his brown eyes incandescent in the tungsten.
“You’re like, looming,” I blurted out.
He stopped, moved back.
“I’m looming?”
“Not looming. Sorry, I didn’t mean, like,” I swallowed. “Looming. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
I wanted to kick myself. The tension had become unbearable, but now it was gone, all the energy was gone.
Finally he said, “You confuse me.”
“I confuse you?”
“You’re confusing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright.”
I felt trapped. We had established, over the course of our interactions, a way of communicating that seemed to preclude other, more conventional, perhaps more direct ways, and now that we had established it, I didn’t know how to revert to convention. And I couldn’t get the image of the girl at his house out of my head.
“We should probably head back,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, even though hearing him say it made me feel, ridiculously, like crying. I warded off the impulse. I almost never cried, but recently it felt like that was all I was doing.
I looked out into the street, in the homeward direction, east. It wasn’t that late, but the weather had kept people indoors, and Baltimore Avenue was quiet, the trees weighted with snow, the trolley tracks wet and glinting on the dark road. A squirrel sat on a fence, holding its hands to its chest, watching us through its huge blank eyes.
“You don’t want to keep hanging out?” I ventured.
“I don’t know.” Hoang said. “Penelope, do you?”
“Of course I do. I love hanging out with you.”
He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it. He gave me a look that could have been described as beseeching, or exasperated. He walked in a tight circle around me, taking big strides. He walked to the lamppost and put his hand on it. I followed him. I put my hand on the lamppost as well, just below his. He looked at my hand and then looked at me, and then he removed his hand from the lamppost, and I removed mine too.
“Okay,” he said. “Can I say something that’s true, but that might be weird to say? Sorry, that’s a weird way to start. Okay, okay. There have been moments when we’re together where I felt—where I felt like I should kiss you. Like just now. And, I don’t know, it seemed like you wanted me to kiss you too, but then it seemed like you didn’t, so, yeah. I don’t know. And you, like, show up at my house really late at night, asking if I want to hang out. Normally that means—I mean, you know what it means. I’m not annoyed, I’m not. I’m really glad we’re friends. I’m not saying, like, yeah. It’s just been getting kind of confusing, you know?”
“Hoang,” I said, “I—”
“What? What is it?”
I had stopped speaking, and I was staring beyond him. I shushed him and pointed. “Can you see that? Am I imagining it?”
Peeking out from the bushes, its black eyes twinkling, was a very small mouse. There was something attached to its ear.
“Holy shit, that’s my boy,” Hoang said. He started to laugh, and I did too. I realized that some small cynical part of me had reserved judgment on the mouse story, had wondered whether it could really be true. Because it seemed too good to be true. When we looked again, the mouse was gone, scared off by our noise. But we had seen it. It was true.
We walked down Baltimore Avenue. I recognized that it was now my turn to speak, that I had not yet responded to him, that every second of delay might be damaging. But I could not think of what to say. Of course he had been about to kiss me; I had known it up to the moment I ruined it. It was like my brain had short-circuited and made me think there was no way it could really be happening, no way that Hoang of all people would want to kiss me. But I was also almost afraid of it happening—afraid it would break the spell, that the lead-up would always be better, that there would be a feeling of deflation. I’d felt that before with other people, even with Paul, and I didn’t want to feel it with Hoang.
I remembered the night he told me about his family, and weighed this fact against the Hoang I knew, or at least the one I’d observed; his warmth and humor and lightness, his unforced optimism. I wondered if it was something he often talked about, if it was something that preoccupied him when he was alone. I began to understand Apple’s frustration whenever I declined to talk about my mother. Maybe he tortured himself about what had happened; maybe he was at peace with it, and never thought about it; maybe, like me, he was somewhere in between. Was there a way to ask? Now wasn’t the right moment; if I continued my silence, there wouldn’t be one again.
We walked past the museum, and then started over the South Street Bridge. At its middle point, I stopped walking, and said, “I didn’t mean to be confusing.”
He didn’t say anything, so I continued to talk.
“I just finished this book where this guy is remembering how when he was younger he went to a brothel with his friend, but then he feels like all the prostitutes are laughing at him, so he chickens out and runs away. But then at the end of his life, think ing back, he says it’s like, his happiest memory. Even though the only thing that happened is that he didn’t do the thing he wanted to do. I guess because he was scared.”
Hoang ran a hand through his hair and gave me an incredulous look.
“Am I the prostitutes in this story?”
“No! Kind of? Honestly I don’t even know if I understood the book correctly, it’s pretty dense, and it was an old translation . . .”
“Penelope,” he said again, instead of Forest. “Why do I feel like I’m torturing you? I just—like I said, I’m glad we’re friends. I don’t know if I understand what you want from me, but I don’t want to feel like I’m torturing you. I really don’t like how that feels. I’ll see you at the rally, okay?”
I looked over the side of the bridge. Snow was falling into the river and disappearing into its eddies.
“Yeah,” I said. “See you there.”