“There are things I’m still sensitive about,” said Erin.
Paul said he had felt most upset by her sarcasm when she said she was stinky and how she left suddenly and sort of slammed the door. Erin said she had been joking, in an effort to downplay the situation, and hadn’t meant to slam the door. Paul said he hadn’t felt — or suspected, at all — that she was joking. Erin slept on her side facing away.
In the morning Paul read an email from his mother, whose bedroom shared a wall with his, asking him to please try to be nicer to Erin, who remained on her side facing away, though she seemed awake. Paul showered for around forty-five minutes, continuing to mentally prepare to be single, and was unaware of the time until, after putting on clothes, his father said the taxi he’d called to drive them to the café hosting Paul’s reading — his mother was already there — was downstairs. Paul expected no response — or a begrudging one, maybe — as he explained to Erin, who was still facing away, in a voice he controlled to sound neutral that a taxi was waiting and that she didn’t have to go to his reading but it would be awkward if she didn’t because reservations had been made for dinner immediately after, in a nice restaurant, with many relatives, to celebrate their marriage. Paul felt emotional and surprised when, after a few seconds, during which her body visibly relaxed, easing a tension Paul hadn’t discerned, Erin stood and softly said she didn’t know the reading was today and, prioritizing the situation, over her feelings, became accommodating and goal oriented, quickly and gracefully getting dressed and preparing to leave.
In the taxi’s backseat, between Erin and his father, Paul pointed at a bright red, metal, pointy roof outside his father’s side’s window. “Look at that roof,” he said in Mandarin, and pushed a blue ecstasy into Erin’s mouth — against teeth, then inside, touching her tongue a little — while his father talked about slanted versus flat roofs. Paul, grinning convolutedly, pointed again and asked how to say “corrugated” in Mandarin and put their last ecstasy in his own mouth.
Dinner, after the reading — with Paul’s parents, uncle, uncle’s girlfriend, uncle-in-law, great-uncle, two aunts, five cousins — was in a restaurant whose interior lighting, circuited into pillars and walls and the ceiling and bathrooms, though probably not in the kitchen, had been coordinated to undulate fluidly and cyclically, as one, yellow to red to purple to blue to green, seeming egregiously LSD themed.
Paul’s father talked the most, by far, usually to no one specific, during the hour-long dinner. When he spoke people became attentive to him, but passively, at their leisure, with neutral expressions, as if watching an infomercial, neither annoyed nor entertained, feeling no obligation to respond or engage. Whenever he finished with a topic, sometimes to the accompaniment of his own laughter, people seemed to uniformly and inhumanly return, like foam mattresses, to how they were before, profoundly unfazed. At one point, in what seemed like a major faux pas, in part because Paul’s cousin’s father, Paul’s uncle, was present and seemed depressed, Paul’s father tried — for maybe five minutes, with no external feedback except two or three grunting noises from his target — to recruit Paul’s cousin, a few years older than Paul, to work for him selling lasers on commission. He’d tried the same, at previous dinners, with both Paul and Erin — and, at dinners last year, just Paul, who suspected his father felt as amused by his behavior, in this regard, as Paul and Erin, who’d said “your dad tried to recruit me to work for him” four or five times the past week.
Paul’s relatives, though somewhat withdrawn and/or alienated from one another, seemed peaceful as a group, maybe because there didn’t appear to be any pressure for anyone to do anything they didn’t want to do, such as talk or smile. Paul’s mother and her older sister, best friends for decades, now seemed like polite, recent acquaintances who secretly disliked each other for admittedly irrational and/or superficial reasons.
After dinner Paul and Erin followed Paul’s uncle and Paul’s uncle’s girlfriend to their car, to be driven, at Paul’s mother’s suggestion, to where young people went to buy clothes. Failing to operate a refrigerator-size parking meter, which Paul had never seen before, Paul’s uncle grinned and said something in Mandarin conveying idle bemusement regarding his decreasing ability to comprehend and maneuver himself through an increasingly surreal environment. In the BMW’s backseat Paul remembered, with embarrassment, when as a child, on the way to Ponderosa, in this car, his uncle suggested to Paul’s mother, his little sister, a restaurant that was the same as Ponderosa but used “fresher ingredients.” Paul’s mother had asked Paul, who had responded with a noise, causing six to ten relatives to eat at Ponderosa.
Paul didn’t notice his uncle had turned around in his seat, and was grinning slightly, until he heard him say “you’re getting out here also” in Mandarin. The car was parked on the side of a street and Paul’s uncle’s girlfriend had gotten out. Paul’s uncle, who spoke English fluently, congratulated Erin then carefully said two sentences to her and maybe Paul, who was remembering how he’d been surprised — and complicatedly moved — once when his uncle talked about buying and liking Michael Jackson’s music, in this car, after asking if Paul, who doesn’t remember what he answered, or how old he’d been, maybe 10 or 11, liked Michael Jackson.
At the airport, after a silent taxi ride, around 7:30 a.m., Paul’s mother stood with Paul and Erin in line to check in luggage. Paul peripherally noticed his mother facing away, a little, with only her neck slightly turned. He looked at her and she turned her neck farther, so that he was looking at her looking elsewhere, then she turned, openly crying, toward him and said in a child-like but controlled voice that she was leaving before she started crying harder. She reflexively opened her mouth in a similar manner as when Paul had “caught” her, last year, putting sugar in her coffee, but the effect now was of further embarrassment, past helplessness, to disengagement, then withdrawal.
Paul, whose eyes had become instantly watery, hadn’t seen her like this before. He thought of her mother, who had died before Paul was born — and was aware, with momentary clarity, which did not elucidate or console, but seemed to pointlessly reiterate, of how, in the entrance-less caves of themselves, everyone was already, always orphaned — and they briefly hugged and she hugged Erin and uncharacteristically left.
6
Paul was in Bobst Library’s first basement floor, seated at a computer, becoming increasingly, “neurotically,” he knew, fixated on his aversion toward Erin’s red backpack, on the possibility that she would have it with her when he went upstairs, in fifteen minutes, to meet her and that, in its presence, he would feel upset. He hadn’t seen her in three weeks, since a few days after returning from Taiwan, when she returned to Baltimore, where a drunk driver had repeatedly rammed her mother’s car, breaking her mother’s hip and badly injuring Erin’s face, which the hospital had said would heal, without scarring, in four months. Erin was wearing large, black-rimmed glasses — to block her face, she said, and they hugged.
“Sorry,” said Erin with a blank expression.
“About what?” said Paul, aware he’d felt only self-conscious when he noticed the red backpack, in his vision like a dot on a screen during an optometrist’s exam.
“Face,” said Erin. “My face.”
“You look good, don’t worry.”
They walked holding hands toward Union Square, ten blocks north. Paul sometimes looked away, so Erin wouldn’t see his depressed expression. He’d begun to worry, some days, for hours at a time, that he was permanently losing interest in Erin, despite earnestly wanting, he felt, the opposite, if that were possible. “You have the red backpack,” he said grinning slightly, with some confusion.