Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

Why would I choose that? Why would I step out of the circle of belonging, where I’ve always been? The gilded prison house of whiteness, with its electric fences, its transparent walls? Being the most visible, therefore the most hated, of all? The one who can always condescend, not the one condescended to?

Reader, doesn’t the question answer itself?

I’m expected back at the office, I tell him. Conference call at five.

No more R&R, huh? Who’s the conference call with?

I give him a pitying look.

Enjoy the rest of your time in Bangkok, I say. Go get a massage at Wat Po. They’re only five bucks.

The massages I want are all in Patpong.

With that, I give him a wave, and walk easily out of the bar and down the alley, as if I’ve lived here all my life, and step into a hot pink taxi waiting at the corner. No one follows me.

I wake up with Wendy sleeping next to me.

Her hair spilling across the pillow, her fingers dug into the crook of my elbow. Long white curtains blowing away from an open window, a French door, actually, on her side of the bed. Birds twittering and the hump and sizzle of the surf.

We’re on vacation. Meimei is with my parents in New Paltz. I know these things immediately, automatically, when I open my eyes. This is the vacation we promised each other we would take for our eighth wedding anniversary. Vieques. My supervisor at BUR, Kathleen, insisted we borrow her condo.

How is it that things sometimes fall into place so easily?

That was what Wendy asked me at dinner last night. We were picking through the remains of a grilled yellow snapper, eating the last tostones with our fingers.

I mean, when we came to the United States, she said, the first thing I promised myself is we would take vacations . She switched to Chinese. My parents never took one. Where would they have gone? All their family was in Wudeng, and it’s not as if they could have afforded to go back to Shanghai. Or Beijing.

We’ll take them, next time we go.

It’s expensive now. Not like when we lived there. Even a three-star hotel in Beijing now costs a hundred bucks a night. It’s like New York. I looked it up. The real question is, when can we afford to go, period?

We’ll work it out.

You always say that.

When I stand up my gaze crosses the room to a small mirror, an antique, propped on the dresser, in a blue frame crudely painted with doves. My chin, my eyebrows, my neck. My eyes.

Remember when I first met you, she’s murmuring, how funny I thought it was that you came from a town called Athens? Curtis, I’m so glad we came here. It’s a place we won’t have to explain to each other. But next time we have to bring Meimei.

Don’t make me feel guilty about that.

I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I said next time.

We are in the midst of ordinary life, I’m thinking to myself, as I cross the room and pull on a loose cotton shirt, one I’ve kept crumpled in the back of my closet since the last time I went to the beach. A good life. I close my eyes. I don’t have to think about it at all.

—

I’m being pulled up through a warm ocean, thick, silky, amniotic, toward the surface’s blue light. A throbbing, murmuring voice: no one knew she had the gun. Where’d she get it? Korea? You know what the prison sentence is for owning an unregistered firearm in Korea?

—

When I come back from the 7-Eleven, with three slices of pizza stacked up in a box, two Dr Peppers and a Sprite and a bag of crab chips in a plastic bag, Alan and Martin have pulled themselves out of the water and are lying stretched out, facedown on the pool deck. No towels. Skin on concrete, hands by their sides. They look like they’ve been executed where they lie. The lifeguard ignores them.

What the fuck are you doing?

Sunbathing, Alan says. Vitamin D.

You’ll turn into a crispy Chicken McNugget. It’s about 105 out here, Loco Blanco.

That’s Blanco Loco, Martin says.

From the back, from an angle I never see, two slabs of human tissue, two specimens: one white as Crisco, white as Sherwin-Williams Bright White, white so that he reflects the sun, an oblong moon; one turned dark, coal-dark, much darker than his usual medium-toned, maple-syrup color. I stand there for a moment, fascinated. It’s not usually this stark. Pink, brown, and yellow, Martin says. We’re the twenty-first-century Neapolitan trio.

You know something? Alan’s voice is muffled by the concrete. This is it. I could live like this.

And if the sun were a little hotter, we could just turn right back into pure carbon.

Shut up. I mean it. Freeze time. So I can just lie here in the sun, smelling that pizza Wang brought back, watching Katie Cryer over there practice her synchronized swimming or whatever it is.

It’s so unlike him, a positive statement of any kind, let alone a declaration of happiness, that Martin lifts his head and turns it to the other side, so that he faces the back of Alan’s head. And I think, this isn’t my story. This is a dream I’m going to wake up from and never remember.

Write a song about it, why don’t you?

Maybe I will.

—

— Hell, it was a cheap Saturday Night Special she bought in Woonsocket when she was going to Brown. Trust me on that. I can tell you the store; I’ve been there myself. Only place to get a retail handgun between New Haven and Boston. Maybe she thought it was cool, like Charlie’s Angels. How are you supposed to predict these things? She’s in Bangkok for eight months, a week for the surgery, six weeks in recovery, and then the rest of the time working in the goddamned kitchen or on the computer. I think we got her out of the house three times. Didn’t want to sightsee. Didn’t want the goddamned pad kee mao.

—

Daddy, Meimei says, when I lift her out of bed, Daddydaddydaddydaddy. Stringing together the words with great satisfaction. Her legs wrap halfway around my waist, little pincers, little monkey limbs. She went to bed in one of Wendy’s old T-shirts and a pull-up diaper, now heavy with urine, pressed against my stomach. Do we have to get up already? It’s still dark .

It’s December, I tell her, flipping on her closet light, her little body still cemented to me, pulling a plum sweater-dress off its hanger. Let’s let Mama sleep, okay? Don’t talk too loud. Her heels thump on the carpet.

Can you make me oatmeal?

Yeah.

After you make yourself coffee.

Priorities, little girl, I say, switching to English. Priorities.

With bananas and raisins?

I think we’re out of raisins.

Then you should get more, silly.

I have to go by the store on the way home this afternoon. Will you remind me?

Can I draw a note on your hand?

No. No more drawing on people’s hands. Miss Lewis warned you about that, right?

Her face, as it cranes up to look at me in pretend puzzlement — is it the murky light from her tiny tableside Dora lamp, or has she gotten darker? Has the brown in her eyes crushed the blue?

Stay, Daddy, she says. Stay with us. Stay here. In this story.

I can’t. I have to go to work.

—

— Yeah, she walked into the office and just popped him. Just like that.

We’re working on tracing his lists of suppliers. At this point the maintenance drugs are the crucial thing. Problem is, he kept way too much of it in his head. And as far as a replacement surgeon goes, we’re absolutely screwed. I mean absolutely. This was an irreplaceable asset. He would have been training ten assistants after the announcement, after we were out in the open. But not now. Too dangerous. Yeah, you know, our coverage with the Chens gets us up to five million. But believe me, Sasha, this isn’t a money thing. You have to know people at these pharmacies. All this stuff is hand-prepared.