“I have questions,” he said cautiously, wary of taking the bait. “And I don’t actually work on Wall Street—”
“One day, L-L sees a beautiful woman inside the window of Duane Reade,” I said. “Turns out, she’s the granddaughter of Imelda and Ferdinand—”
“What do you know about Lapu-Lapu?” he asked, amused. “Is Magellan in this?”
“It’s a rom-com, Julian.”
“About the Marcos family? No way.”
“Haven’t you heard of irony?”
“You’re crazy,” he said, after he realized I was joking around. “You know that? You’re out of your mind.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m the crazy one.”
* * *
? ? ?
A week later, Julian called on a Friday night. It was just after eleven here in LA, so about two o’clock in the morning out there. I was propped up in bed at home, reading a comic book. I had a whole box of them. The books had belonged to my father, and I’d rescued them from the garage when I’d stopped by to water Mah’s spider plants and ferns last Sunday. She was still in Taiwan for another couple weeks, gone through Chinese New Year. Mah rooms with her sister’s family and keeps up relations with my father’s side, too, though she still refused to visit Baba’s grave. She says it’s a sin, how he died. She won’t ever forgive him. Passing by her room last weekend, I remembered when Baba used to read those comics in bed, the year before he’d moved to Taiwan, the absorbed expression on his face he wore while he tugged on an earlobe with his fingers.
Julian was walking home. His cell phone picked up scraps of other people’s conversations as he passed them on the sidewalk. I asked where he was coming from, and he said he’d gone out for dinner with a new friend, a woman he’d met at some young Asian professionals networking event.
I asked if it was a date. Julian laughed and said no, of course not. Then he asked if I’d been going on dates.
“Not really.” Naima’s face floated in my mind, and I felt a stab of guilt. “A little bit. Here and there.” It wasn’t that I wanted to hide her from Julian—I wanted to keep her for myself, just for a while longer.
“Come to New York. Go on a date with me.”
“A date,” I said. “You jealous?”
“We can work on the script. Don’t you want to find out what happens?”
“I already know how it’s going to turn out.”
“Is there a happy ending?” Then, he added, “Not like that, you pervert.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “A date?”
“You’re the only person in my life who makes me feel like I exist.” He paused a moment. “We don’t have to call it a date,” he said.
When we hung up, I went online and bought a plane ticket bound for New York City in two weeks. I forwarded the itinerary to Julian, and the next day he emailed back: “Who have you been going on dates with? Guys? Girls?”
* * *
? ? ?
In New York, Julian and I visited the Guggenheim. We rode the elevator up to the top then strolled down, winding leisurely through the exhibit, a retrospective of a Japanese conceptual artist. Several floors of the museum featured his “Date Paintings”： for a time, the artist worked on canvases with a single date in the center, simple white letters brushed over a monochromatic background of black, navy, red, or gray paint. On one of the middle levels, tall glass walls erected between the galleries displayed tourist postcards the artist had mailed to his friends throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Pictures of the Statue of Liberty washed in sunset hues, the Chrysler Building gleamed silver, the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers loomed above lurid blue water, and on the backs: “I got up at 7:48 A.M.” “I got up at 8:15 A.M.” Next to these were a series of Western Union telegrams, each of them declaring the same refrain: “I am still alive.” “I am still alive.” “I am still alive.”
That night in bed, I told Julian about my father. Baba had moved out on Mah and me when I was fifteen. After living in Taipei for a few years, he’d landed in Shanghai. Another job, the growing economy on the mainland, better pay.
We were kissing a little, stopping every now and then to talk, me in my flannel pajamas and Julian wearing a pair of green sweatpants stamped with usmc on one leg. He didn’t have any blinds over the bedroom windows yet, and a dark orange light passed through the glass, landed on the bare white wall next to Julian’s bed in a long rectangle with black vertical lines cutting through its middle.