The Wangs vs. the World(87)
He’d win it anyway. Even without a prize, he’d win it.
Church bells, always in the distance, rang out again as they had done every hour that he’d been in this city. A gust of heat and sugar and fried dough hit him as he leaned his head into the donut shop.
“Sorry! Um, can you tell me which way is downriver?” The woman behind the counter stared at him. Blinked. Tapped the glass with her long silver nails.
What the f*ck? The donuts in here were purple. All of them. Row upon delicious row of purple-glazed confections glistening behind glass. Andrew stepped in.
“Also, can I just say that this is some excellent donut styling? All the cool donuts are wearing purple this season.”
She extended a talon and pushed up her glasses. “Where you trying to get to again?”
“Just any stop on the 39 line. Someone gave me directions, but he walked away before I realized that I didn’t understand them at all.”
“You are downriver already. You’re in Bywater, so you’ll want to take the 88 past the bend to the 39.”
“Man, what do you guys have against north, south, east, west?”
She adjusted a donut that was imperceptibly out of place.
“Okay, well, thank you. That was really helpful. And I really do like your place.” He held the woman’s gaze, eyes smiling, until his emotional sonar picked up a reciprocal ping from her. There. If he was the one writing definitions, that’s what he would call love. It was just hard to keep up that same feeling with someone once you got to know them.
“Oh, and one of the donuts, please.”
“That’ll be ninety-nine cents.”
He nudged himself into her gaze again as she passed back a penny and a donut, and this time she was already open. People, Andrew knew, just wanted to be seen. And, though he felt like an * if he thought about it too much, he was pretty sure that people liked being seen by him. It was almost like a public service. The thought made him cringe as much as it made him puff up virtuously, but it was true—he did it because every interaction could have some sort of meaning, because he liked the moments of connection, but also because freshman year of college he and his roommate, Fred, were walking out of Quiznos, and Fred said, “Every time, man!”
“What?”
“You’re, like, a flirt, but with everyone!”
“What do you mean? There weren’t even any girls in there.”
“No, the old dude behind the counter.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“I don’t know, man. You do this thing. It’s like . . . unsexy flirting.”
“So you’re saying I was trying to mack on a grandpa and not even being smooth about it? Cool. Thanks.”
“You know what I mean—you do it with everyone. It’s okay, they love it.”
And he did know. Up until then, though, Andrew had thought that he was doing it for himself, that he was the only one who needed to be seen. But once Fred pointed it out, he became aware of how much credit he got just for not being terrible. It’s not that he was flirting, unless flirting was just about wanting to really see someone. People thought that someone like him—good-looking, young, cool clothes—was going to be dismissive, and when he wasn’t, when he was just easy and open with them, they glowed. It was a feeling he tried to re-create a hundred times a day, in every interaction. It also calmed him. If he looked at someone and they looked at him and there was a true connection, no matter how brief, then it meant that he didn’t need to replay the encounter anxiously afterwards, trying to find where it had all gone wrong.
Shifting his duffel onto his other shoulder, Andrew pulled the donut out of its crinkly white bag and headed in the direction that she’d pointed. Mmm. Why was everyone always going gluten-free when there were donuts in the world? He bit into a greasy edge with thick globs of icing. It was a little disappointing that it didn’t taste more purple, but sugar was sugar. One, two, three bites, and done.
Days were confusing when you spent half the night awake. Andrew balanced his bag carefully on the tops of his shoes, one arm still looped through the strap so that it wouldn’t touch the gas-station bathroom floor and squeezed his travel-size tube of toothpaste, flattening it to force out the last drib of minty freshness.
It smelled like shit in here. Literal shit. He’d been breathing through his mouth, trying not to think of the little fecal particles he was letting in, but it was really hard to brush your teeth that way. He probably looked like shit, too. The gas station didn’t even have a real mirror, just a banged-up sheet of metal screwed into the wall, some inept graffiti keyed onto the surface.
To make the act work, he had to change into a pair of sweats. He pulled his Vans out and placed them on the floor, then set another pair of shoes next to them and carefully laid his bag across all four sneakers. Next, he slipped out of his shoes and stepped on top of them in his socks, balancing on first one foot and then the other as he eased his jeans off. Folded them. Tucked them into his bag. Then, bunching up the legs of the sweats so that they wouldn’t puddle onto the floor, he poked his toes through each leg and pulled them up.
Pushing through the fluorescent-lit single aisle of the gas station’s convenience store and out into the damp night, he still felt hazy, disconnected from himself. He’d spent the loose hours of the afternoon sitting in back of an olive green streetcar, riding the line from terminus to terminus and back again, watching as the sky turned a misty dark blue before he finally hopped off. Now Andrew crossed the street, walking past a dry cleaner and a couple of small houses. The green awning of the bar was covered with beer names—Bass, Carlsberg, Harp—and a couple of guys stood under it smoking. On the other side of the street, a power plant hummed. He felt like a greaseball, dirty and unshowered, dragging along a bag that was too big and too expensive-looking for this place.