How to End a Love Story(70)
Saskia was quiet in the room, but her sample had sparkled with heart. Nicole was consistently funny in the room, but had a tendency to run her mouth to the point of annoying Suraya—and Helen found her sample to have a similarly distinct voice. Owen, Tom, and Eve were good in the room—always funny and ready to build on the energy at the table, drawing connections from seemingly totally disparate conversational threads throughout the day. Their writing rose to the occasion too—more confident and capable than either Nicole’s or Saskia’s, but perhaps less special.
And Grant. She knew even then, he was great in a room. He always had been, and she had flipped through his sample expecting something hovering between adequate and good.
Then she read his sample pilot. She tore through his writing the fastest that night, drawn against her will into the tangled web of complicated relationships and secrets and lies binding his cast of characters together in a small seaside town of South Jersey. It wasn’t even the kind of TV show she’d ever willingly watch, yet when she reached the last page, she felt a stupid compulsion to text him to ask what happened next. (She didn’t, of course.) She’d been unpleasantly humbled by his work and the knowledge that no matter how great on the page she eventually was, he’d always be one up on her for being capable of both.
As Grant drops a collated printout of the first draft of his episode on the table in front of her, she feels a rush of nervousness. Not about his writing, but about hers. About the thought of him having spent a week intimately exploring the characters she had once dreamed up in the privacy of her own mind, in her first cramped studio apartment in New York, in coffee shops in Brooklyn, in public libraries around the city.
She worries that reading his script, she’ll catch an honest glimpse of how he sees her, and she’s afraid then it might ruin whatever burgeoning thing is happening between them. It feels more intimate than him being inside her body, somehow, and she catches a claustrophobic sensation building against her will.
“I’ll read it later,” she says finally. “Let’s go back to your place.”
He offers her a hand and she stands. He tilts up her chin to kiss her gently, and she feels a dizzy kind of warmth in his arms.
“Your heart’s pounding,” he murmurs. “Anything I did?”
She laughs.
“Pretty much always,” she answers, and he lets out a satisfied “hm” that fills her with a nervous kind of yearning.
Twenty-One
“I don’t know why you can’t just be happy,” Helen says to her mom over FaceTime. “It sounds like it was really nice.”
Her mom is calling from the road after leaving the farewell brunch of Helen’s cousin’s wedding in Canada, to tell her that the wedding was beautiful but felt more like the wedding of a work friend’s daughter than family.
“Not enough Chinese people,” Mom says. “Everyone is French; everything is French. I think your cousin is embarrassed to be Chinese.”
Helen rolls her eyes and pulls up her cousin Alice’s tagged photos on Instagram.
“She put up a neon double-happiness sign and they had a lion dance, that’s pretty Chinese, Mom.”
“It is not the same. I know her mother is a little sad, even if she is happy. You would not understand.” Helen thinks Mom’s right about that, at least.
Back in college, when she had vague aspirations of being a great voice on the American literary-fiction scene, she wrote a lot of short stories about the quiet tragedies of immigrant-kid assimilation, of the sense of disconnect she felt every time they visited her parents’ hometowns in China over the years, of the way she’d catch her grandparents tsking at her in their native Cantonese and not being able to understand them because of decisions her parents made before she was even born. She thinks sometimes if she ever wanted to pivot, she could still write an entire book of poems about all the ways she breaks her mother’s heart in a day.
“When you get married, just make sure you invite more Chinese people,” Mom is saying. “My sister is so sad. All she has is your uncle and me and Dad.”
“Uh-huh,” Helen says, “I will keep that in mind.”
“You will keep that in mind, ha! You don’t even bring anyone home for us to meet,” Mom says. “At least Alice is married.”
Helen nods at this entirely logical leap to being Team At-Least-She’s-Married Alice.
“I bring friends home all the time,” Helen says, and it’s mostly true. Her friends in New York still rave about the soy sauce salmon Mom made for them three years ago.
“You know what I mean,” Mom says. “A special friend.”
“Oh, a special friend,” Helen says, and thinks impossibly of Grant and the breakfast he made her this morning. She’d been impressed by his ability to poach an egg. “Mom, you spent two and a half decades telling me to focus on school and work and not to think about boys. Maybe the reason I’m not married is because I’m such a guai nui.”
Such a good girl. It’s one of the only Cantonese phrases she knows, the one her parents and her grandparents would say to her as a compliment—when they were in front of their friends, when she did something they approved of, when they were reassuring each other in hushed tones after the funeral that Helen would never do something like this.