What made Zal feel downright ill was the very plausible possibility that the only two people he had in the world would not get along. There would be no choosing — though their contributions to his life were not, of course, equal in any way — because the Zal he was today depended on the pieces they each had installed in him, and without one or the other, he would be nothing all over again, back to just a boy in a birdcage, back to just a boy out of a birdcage.
They settled on tea at a teahouse Hendricks liked. He had sensed Zal’s stress and decided that a simple tea hour would be the least committal, the lowest-impact, the very least obtrusive way to deal with the young couple in their season of hurdles he could only guess at.
T Is for Tea was a quaint little café, all deep rose walls with mahogany floors and chairs that probably, at best, sat twenty. They were the only patrons there, Zal noted upon entering, somehow feeling more alarmed at their aloneness, as if the three of them were the sole human survivors of the end of the world — everyone knew how that story ended. Hendricks, always early, was already there, and when Zal finally saw him face-to-face, after some weeks, he immediately felt panicked. To see his father, someone he had made a near stranger, for an occasion of monumental strangeness and strange monumentalness — he was sure he wouldn’t be able to endure it. His father was in his best suit, a dapper yellow tweed, the one he wore for special occasions only. Zal knew he knew he knew that, and it filled him with guilt. Perhaps he should have warned him. Perhaps he should have explained that Asiya was no normal girl. Perhaps he should have made it sound like she was just a phase.
Zal quickly glanced at Asiya and tried to see her as if he was seeing her for the first time. Her most notable feature was her extreme boniness and her pallor — as thin and as white as human beings could get, he wagered. All of her features were dark and resolute in their bold plainness: eyes that were impenetrably black and appeared unblinking, hair in the austere black bowl worn by certain little boys. She had worn a blazer and a skirt for the occasion, a simple black pencil skirt, which just made her stick-legs look all the more stick-figured. She looked as if she were going to a funeral or a job interview. She looked utterly negligible and yet unlike anyone in the world at the same time.
He supposed he looked the same way, though, and maybe Hendricks would note that, see that as a plus. Hendricks couldn’t have expected a Barbie doll, an old movie ingenue, a porn actress, just any normal perfect girl on the street, could he have?
“Hello, hello!” It was the usual Hendricks boom, the usual Hendricks-bolting-up-with-an-outstretched-hand. Zal noticed happiness in his father’s eyes, true joy, and felt relieved that the first hurdle — the sheer visual one — appeared to have been at least somewhat cleared.
Asiya, with the tiniest-biggest smile she could muster for a stranger, took his hand gingerly, as if it could be a trick hand. “Asiya McDonald. Nice to meet you.”
“Asiya!” he pronounced perfectly. “Yes! An absolute joy to meet you. I’ve heard so much.”
“Same with me, so much,” she muttered back.
For a moment, they just stood there suspended in natural discomfort, Hendricks still frozen in a monster smile, Asiya deeply immersed in floor-tile evaluating and lip biting.
Eventually they sat down and small-talked about the city, the subway, the weather, and all that usual stuff even Zal sometimes found himself entangled in with Hendricks. Everything was fine until the waitress came to take their order, turning to Asiya first.
“Do you have anything with liquor?” she asked quietly.
Zal immediately stiffened. That was bad. Hendricks did not know about his drinking.
“Uh, this a teahouse,” said the waitress. “Just tea.”
“We could get a drink somewhere else, if that’s what you want, Asiya,” Hendricks offered, looking only barely thrown off.
Asiya turned to Zal. “What do you—”
Zal shook his head, furiously. “I love tea! I’d like a calming one — do you have one of those?”
“Lavender Lilypad — an organic lavender-rose-chamomile blend — is a favorite,” the waitress offered.
“Perfect!” Zal cried.
“I’ll second that,” Hendricks said.
“I’ll. .” Asiya paused, red in the face still. “I’ll have your blackest black tea.”
“The Calamitea Jane?”
“Perfect,” Asiya said.
Zal noticed he was sweating. She had picked the right tea for her but, of course, the wrong tea for this. He looked to Hendricks, who was back to unfazed, still smiling at her.
Once the tea came — and a tray of little cakes Hendricks requested — things got better. Their small talk continued, and Asiya started to sound more impressive as she went on about photography and art.
And then she said the wrong thing again:
“And Zal, well, he’s my new muse, my living bird boy!”
Hendricks’s eyebrows had knotted a bit.
Zal sighed. “Father, she knows.”
“Oh? Oh, okay. That’s fine. What do you mean, your muse? You shoot, er, photograph him now?”
“I had a whole show of him!” she said. “Zal, you didn’t tell your father?”
Zal shook his head. “It was nothing.”
“It was nothing?” Asiya snapped, glaring at him.
“I mean, Father, it was really, really, really nice,” Zal quickly said, gulping at the scalding tea, gasping at the burn. “I was an angel.”
“An angel,” Asiya echoed, “not a bird.”
“I see,” Hendricks said. “You must have. . enjoyed that, Zal?”
Zal nodded, swallowing hard.
More drinking, more nibbling, some calm, and then came the next big problem point, again Asiya’s.
“I’m sorry to ask this, but do you feel like the room is getting hot?” she suddenly whispered, during a conversation about the mayor. “Those men in the corner, with the big samovar: do you feel like they are up to something?”
For a second, Zal thought she was hallucinating the men altogether, not noticing anyone had come in, but there they were, just a group of New York businessmen, chatting unsuspiciously.
Hendricks turned around and raised his eyebrows at her. “Excuse me? The men right there?”
She nodded, tugging at her blazer collar. “It’s so hot in here.”
Hendricks looked concerned. “The air is on; I feel it. Maybe you’re ill? Would you like to step outside? I think those men are fine.”
“Father, she’ll be fine,” Zal interjected. “Asiya, you know you will be okay. She gets like this sometimes.”
“Zal!” she cried. At what, he didn’t know.
“I’m sorry,” he said, for what, he also didn’t know.
“I’ll be fine,” she echoed, saying it to no one in particular.
Silence.
Zal looked at his watch — only thirty-five minutes had gone by and they had planned at least an hour. But it already felt like an eternity, and things were going badly, worse than he had thought. He thought Asiya had nowhere to go but even further down. He faked a double take at his watch.
“Actually, Father, we have to get to a movie,” he said.
“We do?” Asiya looked at him, unconvinced. “Really? Which?”
“We have tickets,” he said, trying to sound calm and, he thought, frenzied, “to Casablanca.”
“They’re showing Casablanca?” Hendricks asked. “Really? Where?”
“In the. . Hell. . Hell’s Kitchen Cinema,” Zal sputtered. “The, um, new one.”