He’s dead.
Dead in a garden of cardiac arrest, basic coronary thrombosis, easy peasy, act fast, Kweku Sai, prodigal prodigy, a phenom, a failure.
A doctor who failed to prevent his own death.
How is the shame Olu holds in his stomach, bent over, while Ling in her sleep turns away. How can he wake up this woman and tell her the father he’s told of died this kind of death? How, when he’s promised for years, fourteen years now, that one day he’ll take her to meet him at last and she’ll love him, he knows it, a doctor like they are, a mind such as they have, for everything else. Ling, whom he’s loved since they touched pouring punch at the Asian American Cultural Center Open House at Yale. (“I’m sorry,” said the greeter, embarrassed, to Olu. “We thought Sai was Asian. You’re welcome to stay.”) Ling who, not looking, reached out for the ladle the moment that he did, soft skin finding skin. Ling, whom he’s loved since, still touching, now flushing, she frowned. “You’re not Asian. Wait. Why are you here? Do you play a stringed instrument? Excel in mathematics? Attend a kind of cult-like Korean-American Christian church?”
Laughing, still touching, “Piano. And science. A Catholic church, no, but the priest is from Laos.”
“Then what am I saying? Stupid me. You are Asian.”
“I’m Olu.”
“I’m Ling.”
And the rest on from there: making flash cards and kissing in CCL cubicles, eating ramen over o-chem, then Harvard, four years, they both matching in Boston (he ortho, she obstetrics), the “golden couple,” nicknamed, wherever they went. Ling-and-Olu, tall, tiny, a study in contrasts, their photos like print ads for Benetton clothes: Ling-and-Olu in Guam building homes for the homeless, Ling-and-Olu in Kenya digging wells for the waterless, Ling-and-Olu in Rio giving vaccinations to vagrants, Ling-and-Olu at Pepe’s, enlarged, black-and-whites. “The love of his life,” though he finds the term cloying, “the independent variable” rather more to the point, across time and place always held constant, his confidante, the only to whom he tells all.
But not this.
How, when he sat there and looked at her father and said in despair and defense of his own, “He’s a surgeon like I am, the best in his field,” with Ling listening from the bathroom the day he proposed?
• • •
October: a little congress, a glass box apartment, Dr. Wei on the slipper chair, Ling on the couch, holding Olu by the elbow, via vise grip, an announcement, the ring-bearing hand on her self-bouncing knee. Dr. Wei sipped his tea, looking calmly at Olu, who looked him right back as he’d learned at Beth Israel. (“Always look a patient in the eye,” said Dr. Soto. “No matter what you have to tell him. Look your patient in the eye.”) What Olu had to tell him was he’d come to ask to marry Ling, but all the patient Dr. Wei replied was, “Well. I see.”
• • •
They’d met once before, at the medical school commencement, both smiling politely as if at a child. Mrs. Wei was there, healthy, with Ling’s older sister, who goes by Lee-Ann, née Lìhúa, and her husband. Olu brought Fola to meet them at last (he had skipped Yale commencement). “Fola Savage. My mother.”
“Mrs. Savage. Pleased to meet you.” Mrs. Wei nodded, smiling.
“Likewise,” said Fola. “Ms. Savage is fine.”
“Ms. Savage?” Dr. Wei said. “Did I hear you correctly?”
“Rather unfortunate,” laughed Fola. “But what can you do?”
The husband, whose name Olu can never remember (standard-issue Caucasian, like Brian or Tim, a Californian, beige hair and beige skin and beige trousers), erupted in laughter. “Of what provenance?” he asked.
“Empire,” said Fola, still chuckling. “The British.”
Brian/Tim laughed, as did Ling and Lee-Ann. Mrs. and Dr. Wei tensed, as did Olu. He peered at the sky. Early June. “Sure is warm.”
• • •
Twice all these years he’d met both of Ling’s parents, though they’d raised her in Newton, a T ride away. Dr. Wei lived in Cambridge now, facing the river, in faculty housing (engineering, MIT). He was slender like Ling, with the same narrow frame, less so fragile than streamlined. From concentrate. Compact. Sixty years old with the same slick-black hair streaked with silver, worn long, to his ears. Rimless frames. At regular intervals he smoothed down his hair with his hand, without need, on the right, near his neck, one calm movement so slow that the casual observer might not recognize it as a nervous tic. In repose he wore trousers, a button-down shirt, and a blue V-neck sweater with slippers, Olu saw. Olu wore socks, there being a shortage of slippers, there being a shortage of guests since “the Loss,” Ling explained. A photo of the Lost hung behind her thin widower, the only thing mounted on the one nonglass wall, the other three making a fish tank of the living room, the river view heightening the piscine effect.
A huge Ru ware vase standing guard in one corner, a piano in the other as upright and stern, yellow books at its feet familiar instantly to Olu, Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics, in piles.
Jingdezhen tea set.
Mozart playing softly. “Lacrimosa” from Requiem.
Ling gripped his arm.
• • •
“
,” she said finally in Mandarin.
“Speak English, my dear. There’s a guest in our house.”
“Our house,” said Ling, “is on Huntington Avenue.”
“Well,” said her father, and said nothing else.
Olu shifted positions, wishing Ling would let go, feeling incarcerated rather than claimed by her grip. “Ling was against it,” he spoke up politely. “But I thought it only right that we ask, that I ask.”
“For my ‘daughter’s hand in marriage,’” Dr. Wei said bemusedly. “Which one?”
“Of your daughters?” Olu frowned.
“Of her hands. The one with the ring would appear to be taken—”
“I knew you would do this! I knew it,” Ling seethed. “And it’s not your decision! I’ve already said yes. I told you.” She turned to face Olu. Let go.
Olu, ungripped, felt his stomach turn over. Dr. Wei smoothed his hair down and said, “Well. I see.” Ling stood abruptly and left the room, crying, her small shoulders shaking. A door slammed somewhere.
Then Dr. Wei laughed — rather shockingly, warmly, a rich and deep sound in the space Ling had left. He took off his glasses and wiped them off, tearing. More rumbles of laughter then, smiling, he spoke. “I’m laughing at myself. I should have known this was coming. Ling’s mother always said you were friends. ‘They’re just friends.’ For fifteen years? No, I didn’t think so.” Another rumble. “So often one knows, without seeing, the truth.” He put on his glasses, looking closely at Olu. Smoothed down his hair again. “Olu, yes?”
“Yes.”
“I knew an Olu. Oluwalekun Abayomi.” He pronounced the name perfectly. “Nigerian. As you’d know. Top of our class at UPitt by a long shot. It’s not that I’m racist. Far from it.”
“Sir—”
“Please.” He nodded, as if agreeing with himself to continue and crossed his legs, crossing his hands on his knees. “It is true that you don’t have my blessing. And won’t have. But not for the reasons that you may suspect. Certainly not the reasons that she does. That Ling does.” He glanced at the hallway down which she had stormed. Olu shifted, too, but to settle in, listening, lulled by the cadence, the professorial tone. Odd how this happened, even now in his thirties, this defaulting to Student at the first sign of Teacher. “When I was in grad school in Pittsburgh — fine city — I befriended a fair number of Africans. Men. All of them men, unsurprisingly. Engineering. Just grown-up boys playing with toys.” Sipped his tea. “They’d come from all over, some wealthy, some destitute, but all of them brilliant, pure genius, those five. The hardest-working men in our cohort, I tell you. All bafflingly good at the math.” Smoothed his hair. “Americans call Asians the ‘model minority.’ At one point this may have been true. Recent past. But now it’s the Africans. I see it in the classroom. Asians are through. We got fat — no, don’t laugh. You never saw overweight Asians, not young ones, not back when we came, when the girls were still young. I see them all over now, Koreans, Chinese, on the train, on the campus. It’s the beginning of the end. A fat Asian child can win a spelling bee maybe, but a science fair? No. It’s the Africans now. I’m serious. You’re laughing.”