The Wangs vs. the World(56)

Barbra realized that she’d managed to drink the entire gin and tonic, and was now clenching the small red straw between her teeth. She let it drop, the plastic shredded and wet, onto her lap.

In Chinese, the word for ugly was chou—it was the same as the word for shameful. Ugly and shameful, both chou. And the slang for shameful was diou lian, which was usually translated to English as “lose face” but more literally meant “throw face.” As if the bereft had willfully tossed away anything worth finding and keeping. Thrown away the pretty face on top, leaving only the ugly, embarrassed face underneath.

Andrew stood in front of her, dripping sweat.

“Can we go?” he asked. She looked up, trying to pull together some words of congratulation or encouragement, but she had none.

“Now?” he added.

Andrew was too soft, thought Barbra. It made sense that you had to make people laugh. Comedy was an act of aggression, and Andrew was not a fighter.

“Please?”

For a brief moment, Barbra felt the urge to refuse, to make him stay and watch the other comedians, to point out the moments where he’d fallen short. She could coach him into being a better comedian. Force him into it.

But Andrew continued to stand, not taking his hurt eyes off her, and Barbra realized that it was a decade or two too late to be a mother, so instead she gathered her things and led Andrew out of the bar.





二十五

Helios, NY


IT WAS STRANGE that nothing calamitous happened when Saina and Grayson first broke up.

She’d expected the Los Angeles basin to split apart like a giant glacier, calving pink stucco islands studded with palm trees that would float off across the Pacific. She’d expected an epic fire in New York City. A crosstown conflagration that would swallow entire neighborhoods, leaving behind a crisped and broken Manhattan. An earthquake, a tsunami, another flood or terrorist attack—something, anything, to commemorate their cleaving. But instead, nothing. Just a mild winter and a glorious spring and fewer murders in the five boroughs.

It wasn’t vanity.

Everyone thought that their breakups should cause time to stop and birds to drop out of the sky. It’s just that with Saina’s, it actually happened.

In first grade she’d spent an entire art period building a papier-maché rocketship for Adam Garcia, who told Kelly Park that he liked Saina. But when she tried to present her handiwork to him, he laughed and said that it was a joke. As her heart broke, the Challenger exploded right in front of them on the classroom television screen.

Three months later, Adam saw a corner of her notebook where she’d written SW + AG. He said he thought she was gross. She cried.

Then Chernobyl.

Saina had sworn off boys after that, avoiding the potential nuclear disaster of spin the bottle and ignoring the famine that was sure to come if she confessed her crush on her best friend’s older brother. In tenth grade she’d developed a giant, embarrassing crush on her art teacher, who had praised her teenage insights and given her his favorite art books and stared a beat too long at her cutoffs. She imagined a bohemian life for the two of them that was interrupted by heartbreak when she saw him kissing the Spanish teacher in the school parking lot. That night, as she lay awake into morning, the walls of the house jumped up and slammed down into the earth with a crack and roar. It was heartbreak that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale and felled an entire apartment building in the San Fernando Valley. She limited herself to a string of amusing dalliances for the rest of high school, but after the first breakup with a college boyfriend who went on to launch an empire of pinup porn stars, September 11. After the second, with a sweet and lovely Canadian who studied the structure of snowflakes, Hurricane Katrina.



Saina knew it was gross. She felt guilty for ever having made that first connection, for thinking that her minuscule personal heartbreak had anything to do with the Challenger or Chernobyl. But we can only ever see the world through our own half-blind eyes, set in our own stupid heads, backed by our own self-obsessed brains, and from that vantage point, it just didn’t make any sense that nothing fell apart after Grayson left. If Saina was being completely honest with herself, half the motivation for her retreat to the country was a fear of some calamitous terror strike that was sure to follow that first, worst breakup with the man she thought she was going to marry.

Instead, she’d walked into the Catskills and met Leo.



It was the first warm day of spring. She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd. Except that there were no crowds in Helios. At four o’clock its only street was nearly deserted and the shopkeepers were occupying themselves by sweeping sidewalks and gossiping in doorways. Neither of the street’s restaurants was scheduled to open for another couple of hours, but the door of one swung open on a lazy hinge. Taking a chance, Saina pushed in, tiptoeing through the wood-paneled vestibule. All of the chairs were stacked on top of the tables, and a mop and bucket sat abandoned in the middle of the ceramic-tile floor. The lamps were switched off, but the late afternoon sun sent a hazy, dust-filled shaft of light across the men on either side of the copper bar, making the two of them look like a Caravaggio.

Behind the bar, a dirty blond with a red beard held a glass up to her. “Afternoon drinking. Nothing like it.” His voice echoed across the empty room.