In the middle of July, a heatwave made it impossible to go anywhere, so we stayed inside and watched the entire five-year run of Babylon 5. We followed the fan as it rotated on its pedestal. Julian was spending the summer in Hong Kong, so we had the place all to ourselves. We found a thumb of pot in a kitchen drawer, and after we got high, we stood on chairs and made Oscar speeches.
Cyrus lived with Julian, and Julian, or rather, his family, owned the house. It was gray with red trim and a steeply pitched roof. It was enormous. There were rooms crammed with heavy furniture and the kind of curtains you wanted to call drapes. There was a library, a glass conservatory, and two dining rooms. This was Julian’s father’s way of showing his disapproval—saddling him with the family home in the fancy part of Cambridge, where he received letters from the neighborhood society requesting that he mow the lawn and please take his mail out of the overflowing box on the curb.
When the heatwave passed and the evenings were cool again, Cyrus invited me to a wedding.
“Who’s getting married?”
“I haven’t actually met them,” he said. They were friends of friends and they’d asked him to come up with a ceremony.
“So you gave them a theme?”
“Sort of. You’ll see.”
Cyrus wanted to do something—many things—with his life. He wanted to travel and paint murals and get a law degree so he could run for office. But another part of him was already tired, and maybe that was why Julian had been able to convince him to move in. He held on to a lot of those old plans, but in the meantime, he continued to earn his living by conducting baptisms and cremations and writing little prayers for people to say at the bedside of a sick relative. There were so many others out there, he explained, for whom God served as a placeholder for what they really wanted—something that was greater than they were. He just helped them find that meaning without the baggage of religion. Released from compulsion, they were free to build whatever kinds of scaffolding they chose around their lives. I dubbed him a humanist spirit guide, and this made him happy.
* * *
The wedding was two hours outside of Boston in a bookshop that used to be a sawmill. We rented a car and Cyrus drove and we listened to Jeff Buckley singing “Hallelujah,” which put me in a very somber mood even though I was wearing my most cheerful outfit, a red tunic which was one half of a matching set my mother’s cousin had sent from Bangladesh. Cyrus was dressed in a not dissimilar shaped shirt with a small round collar and a navy waistcoat.
We pulled over at a rest stop and Cyrus unpacked two triangular-shaped rice balls he called Onigiri. He was always making me taste things—mostly Japanese things—I’d never heard of. He unwrapped one and showed me how to put the seaweed around it so it looked like a large samosa. It was delicious, filled with pickles and sour plums. As I plucked off a piece of rice that had stuck to the corner of my mouth, I felt his hand cradling the back of my neck, and then he was hovering over me, and I can’t remember which of us leaned in first, but soon we were kissing, and a little sound escaped from my mouth, a noise that appeared to originate elsewhere, deep down inside where my brain couldn’t reach.
He tasted like rice and vinegar and his lips were very soft. I tried not to count the number of years I had been waiting for this moment. Until this morning, we had hardly touched. A few days before, we had run into someone Cyrus knew on the corner of Harvard Avenue and he had introduced me to her—it was a girl—as “my friend Asha. Asha, this is Ling, my Chinese tutor.” Being called his friend nearly killed me, but then last night he had called me and said he had booked a room in a small hotel and would I consider spending the night with him? And that is how I knew for sure that we weren’t just friends.
The kiss lasted a long time and lingered on my mouth for a while after that. We arrived in Montague; the mill was perched by the side of a river and there was a long driveway leading down to a cluster of buildings. Strings of lights decorated the path like a tangle of fireflies. We were early; Cyrus deposited me inside and went to attend to the bride and groom. I found myself in a large rectangular room with wooden beams holding up a low ceiling. The shelves were built along the walls and over the windows, which looked out onto the river below. People were unfolding chairs and moving large vases of flowers, and over the bustle you could hear the sound of the water as it rushed by. I tried to make myself useful by carrying in a case of wine.
Cyrus returned with a small purple wildflower in the pocket of his waistcoat. There was a little time before the ceremony, he said, so we went to an adjacent building where, in a nook, we found two small stools next to a bookcase.