She’d felt remorseful for so long, but seeing him there, chewing on a hot dog, she felt okay.
In the end, the police did smell the smoke, and Lina sent her people scattering before the cops had a chance to check IDs. She took responsibility for the trespassing and the party. Offering them lemonade and a few hot dogs, she kissed the cops’ asses as much as her dignity allowed. They ate the hot dogs while writing out a ticket for $2,150 in fines.
She came home relieved that nothing worse had happened. In this optimistic mood, Lina put away the leftovers, then sat down at the Dell monitor to check her email.
There were no new messages, the inbox empty except for that one email she’d received several months earlier. She had refused to open it, but she had not deleted it either.
She opened the email, then opened herself to its offering.
THE CHINS
After the undertakers of the Wah Wing Sang Funeral Corporation buried Koon Lai in the earth, Jason left Beloved House. He rented a studio in Inwood where he could read in peace—Hawthorne and Tu Fu, T. S. Eliot and Li Ch’ing Chao. He stocked the fridge with mustard and mayo as well as hoisin, oyster sauce, lap chiang, and every Asian vegetable he could find at the Korean market down the street: the gnome-like baby bok choy, the snakish Chinese eggplant, the rubbery tree-ear fungi.
Each day he thought of Koon Lai, who, he realized, had been only nineteen years old—three years younger than Jason—when he’d crossed the world. Watching himself stir bean curd in a pan, Jason wondered if his hands, squarish and clay red, looked like his yia yia’s hands in the Chinatown restaurant where he’d first labored.
Jason had always felt suffocated by the family memory of the old country, and his parents had wielded their sacrifice like some sort of blackmail, but now he felt mostly wonder and regret.
He continued to work at the bookstore on the Upper West Side. When they first met, Rachel Rabinovich was just the girl who frequently browsed in the fiction section without buying anything. She wore large glasses and oversize shirts in faded colors, along with jeans with big holes, the white threads strung across the knees likestrings spanning the sound hole of a guitar. Her bell-bottomed legs were somehow both gawky and graceful, like the rickety stilts of flamingos at the Brooklyn Zoo.
When she asked for a job, they became coworkers. They talked about favorite books and childhood pets. She’d grown up in Connecticut with two dogs and two cats, and she’d even owned a horse named Bronco for a couple of years. Her parents, she admitted apologetically, “have way too much money.”
He’d once had a turtle who lived in a plastic bin, but in two weeks it had starved itself to death. He’d never ridden a horse, but sometimes as a child he’d worn his Davy Crockett coonskin hat and jumped around with his mother’s broom. As he told her these things, he expected her to laugh, but instead she listened intently and pressed him for more details—did the broom-horse have a name?
They shared something in common: a reticence about the hard facts of their lives. They said little about their prior relationships, their families, their educations, or future ambitions. Fantasies, imaginary worlds sufficed. It was only on the second anniversary of Koon Lai’s suicide, when Jason broke down crying in the foreign language section and she held him, without even knowing what had broken him, and listened to him, without forcing her opinions on him, that he realized he was in love.
So the white-girl craze continues, he could imagine Macon joking. Macon had moved to the West Coast for medical school, and they had fallen out of touch. And Macon would have been right, of course, but there was also something different this time, something so wholesome, Jason could only compare it to the day he had met Macon, the moment his friend had poked a water gun through the fence of his backyard.
Eventually he decided to invite Rachel out for dinner, and not to the places he usually went—not the two-dollar burrito joint or the Chinese takeout place with the tiled walls that made him think of a public restroom. Someplace nice, like the Italian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, where men and women sat at small wooden tablesand spoke in whispers, by candlelight, drinking wine and eating crab cakes and arugula salad.
The day he finally asked her, it was pouring rain, and they were walking to the A train under his umbrella. She blushed and took off her glasses, wiping them with the sleeve of her coat. “Yeah. We can go Dutch.”
A takeout container floated by in the gutter. He could smell both the wetness of the tree and the firewood burning in somebody’s townhouse, and he wished he had a house with a hearth, so that he could take her inside to warm and dry her.
The day of their first date, he wore his best blazer, a collared button-down, and khakis. She arrived in her same torn jeans and wool sweater. A waiter showed them to a table, and Jason examined the menu, trying to recall the Italian words he had taught himself in preparation. They placed their order, but then a strange sculpture of shrimp and mushrooms appeared, something they hadn’t asked for. He nearly panicked, but Rachel explained that it was an “amuse-bouche,” compliments of the chef, no charge.
At dinner, Rachel told him that her family used to live in the Bronx, that her grandparents had run a clothing store on Grand Concourse, but that her parents had raised her in the suburbs. She’d always wanted to move back to the city that her family had abandoned—to reclaim her New York heritage. Then, at the end of high school, she’d met a musician ten years older than her, and she had followed him to New York, living with him for three years in an unheated Queens apartment until she realized that he hated her—lusted for her, needed her, for months refused to let her leave, but hated everything that made her who she was.
Jason told her about his family. How he had left home, how Beloved House had become a disappointment. Something about the earnestness, the attentiveness of her face, her intertwined hands, kept drawing out his most private thoughts. He could see her absorbing all of it into the wells of her deep-set eyes, as if she might takehis contemplations home, lay them between two paper towels like maple leaves, and preserve them for years—for a day when she was gray and wrinkled.
A few weeks later, they sawSplashat Cinema Village. She kissed him there, in the glow of the screen, while Daryl Hannah kissed Tom Hanks.
Everything had been rapture after that. When they were not together, he collected anecdotes to relate to her, poems to read to her, insights to share. The new impulse competed with his urge to write. He found that much of what used to make it onto the pages of his notebook he now relayed first to her, and he didn’t care as much about his writing as he cared about the continuation of their real, embodied counterpoint.
He felt the world watching and straining to understand. The man who sold the movie tickets at the cinema looked from face to face with interest, then winked; the bead-draped hippies blew them kisses; an old white lady on the A train frowned at them for three stops, but looked away when he returned her glare. When Rachel invited him up to her apartment for the first time, her roommate glanced sideways at Rachel, as if surprised thathewas the Jason of whom she’d “heard so much about.” It irked him.
It was not until the roommate had left and they’d made love in her narrow twin bed that they finally spoke of the subject. As if impelled by the same question, they held up their arms and considered their skin side by side. His arms were tan and hairless; hers, pale and hairy and lined with prominent veins that branched like ivy vines.
“Will your family be upset?” she whispered.
Madly in love, he wrapped his arms around her, pulled her against his chest.
After that, he found himself referring to his Chineseness with growing regularity. With most bak gui, he avoided the subject, not wanting to draw attention to what was already the first thing on their minds. It was different with Rachel. He explained that the Laughing Buddhawas not actually Buddha, but the Fat Guy, a different, happy deity who ate too much. He told her how Chinese people were obsessed with giving gifts, how if you give a gift to a Chinese person, it will spiral into a never-ending gift-giving war. Then he took her around Chinatown and introduced her to derng,sticky rice in bamboo leaves, and fu ga,bittermelon, which—with her love for black coffee and the darkest of chocolates—became her new favorite vegetable. He also warned her not to stick her chopsticks straight into a bowl of rice; he didn’t know why this was taboo, but it had been impressed upon him so many times that the sight of erect chopsticks still awoke in him genuine feelings of terror.
During the summer, they walked the city together: the natural woods of Inwood Park, the Ramble Stone Arch, the cobblestoned streets of Sutton Place. Then winter came again, and they huddled together in his room and read aloud Maxine Hong Kingston and Chaim Potok and Shakespeare, their bodies swaddled in down comforters. Or they partook in long conversations about the postmodernists punctuated by syncopated kisses, conversations that swirled across the room until they no longer felt the need for radiators, blankets, or clothes.
He felt it a kind of miracle that their two stories had converged so perfectly. After the endless running away that had been their lives up to that point, they’d each taken sanctuary in the other.
He wanted her for life. A future with Rachel, one they would construct carefully from scratch—that was all he needed. After two years in secrecy, he asked if he could take her home.
