The Wangs vs. the World(118)
These men wanted to consume everything. By the time they’d reached the fourteenth course, turtle soup, Saina wouldn’t have been shocked if they’d seasoned her with a dash of white pepper and eaten her. These men didn’t pluck politely from the small dishes set out before them—they picked up those dishes and shoveled the contents into their mouths, never able to get enough in a single bite. They gulped up each other’s talk in the same way, loud and eager, quick to rage and quicker to laugh. They wanted to dig into the ground and pull out all the roots, trawl the seas and scoop up anything formed of flesh, search the forests and the fields, and snatch creatures out of their burrows and knock birds down from their perches so that they could be plucked and skinned and seasoned and diced and trussed and steamed and broiled and roasted and stir-fried and served up at banquets designed to demonstrate the abundance of the land and their dominance over it.
Bizz-buzz. Bizz-buzz. Bizz-buzz. It took several rings before Saina realized that the odd noise breaking through the hum of Communist bonhomie was her own phone, which had somehow acquired a foreign accent. Heart slamming against her chest, she pulled it out, looked at the caller ID, and without letting herself think, stabbed at the green button.
“Hold on,” she said into the receiver, as she rose and walked double-time along the perimeter of the room, thankful that enough rounds of toasts had been drunk that her hosts were more focused on each other than on the Wangs. Dodging a waiter carrying yet another bottle of gao liang, she slipped out the door and leaned against a wall papered in a pink moiré.
“Hi.”
On the other side, Leo was silent.
“Um, hello?”
“Saina. Saina! I can’t believe you picked up. I rehearsed a message, but I didn’t really think about what to say if you actually picked up.”
“Well, you’d better say something.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Tell me about your dad first. Is he okay? Did he tell you what was going on?”
“Yeah—it’s too long to get into right now. He seems a little wrecked, but physically, at least, I think he’s okay. Or he’ll be okay.”
“Oh, that’s a relief. I’m glad. I’m really glad. Saina . . . ”
“Yes?”
“I want to make this right with you.”
“I . . . how?”
For a long minute, Leo was silent.
“You know, that first day we met, at Graham’s place, initially I thought you were just some pretty girl.”
She laughed. “This is a weird way to apologize to someone.”
“Listen, okay, and then we hung out there that whole afternoon, and after a while, you just, you started to feel so familiar to me. So often you meet people and they’re just cartoons. They might be entertaining or attractive, they might even be brilliant, but they don’t feel fully human. And that’s the only way I can explain it. From the very beginning, you just felt familiar. Like home.”
Waiters in colored vests whizzed past, balancing trays crowded with heavy white platters. A lobster, shell cracked open, meat chopped and sautéed, then reassembled so that it waved two crimson claws in the air; a mound of some fowl shingled with carrot slices carved like feathers; a parade of beasts she’d never dreamed of consuming. The whole menagerie of them now swam uneasily in her stomach.
She felt a soft, damp spot in her heart begin to open up. “Oh Leo. I know.”
“Like we were both people trying to figure out how to really be in the world.”
“Yeah. Yeah. We are that. We are people like that.”
“We’re the same kind of animal.”
They were quiet for a moment, and then Leo asked, “Do you think you’re going to come back to Helios?”
“Well, I kind of live there now.”
“Do you . . . well . . . what if we lived together?”
“Oh. What? No. I don’t know if that’s a very good idea.” Was Leo actually crazy?
“Look, I know what I did was a real betrayal, and I am really, deeply sorry. And I, Saina, I’m not just sorry to you, I’m also sorry to Kaya, you know. She deserves so much more than that. It was wrong of me not to hold her out as the most important thing. Look, I’m a beginner soul still. I get a lot of stuff wrong, but I care about getting it right. With you.”
Saina closed her eyes and knocked her head back against the wall. She could hear the sizzle and clang of the kitchen, the cooks shouting at each other as they sped through the dinner service, could smell the garlic and oil coming together.
A heat traveled through her hand from the back of her phone, probably irradiating her bones.
She sensed the desperation in his voice, and it scared her.
“Leo, I feel like I should break up with you, but I don’t want to.”
“Then don’t! Baby, that’s crazy. Don’t. Just come back, and I’ll show you how much I mean it, okay? I can . . . oh, I want to. I’ll show you.” They were quiet for a moment. “Is it . . . are you offended that I said that we should live together instead of asking you to marry me?”
“No! No. No, no, no. That’s not what I want right now. Everything’s crazy with my family, I have to figure out if I even have a career anymore. I just don’t know if I want to be that for anybody. I don’t want to have the kind of insane relationship where you would not see your daughter because of me.”