Page 34 of Bad Words

And as the shock of his appearance faded, my ire mixed with reluctant curiosity. He’d been less shallow on our panel than I’d thought he’d be. I’d expected an hour of bluster and equivocation, laced with insults. But he hadn’t joined in with Christian Gatehead’s jabs. Maybe even more surprising: He’d had opinions, apparently his own.

The bearded bartender finally pushed his way toward us and crooked his finger at me.

“Gin gimlet,” I said. “Thank you.”

“And you, man?” the bartender asked Parker.

“Hey, uh, could I get a Jack Rose?”

I glanced sideways. The Jack Rose had been my go-to cocktail in undergrad. It was a sweet, bright drink, apple and lemon, prominently featured in The Sun Also Rises. Some strange part of me felt like I should admit this. Confess to having the same literary affectation.

Then a voice from his opposite side said, “Parker?” I watched his shoulders turn toward the woman in floral pants who’d appeared next to him. “I’m Emily Shapiro,” she said. “I work at Word Bookstore in Greenpoint. We were emailing a bit about your event?”

“Oh, wow, yeah! Thanks so much for helping me with that. It’s so great to meet you in person!”

“You too!” said Emily from the bookstore. One of her curls was tangled in a peacock-feather earring. “I caught your panel. It was great!”

“Hey, thank you. More eventful than I thought it’d be.”

“I know, right?”

Navarro laughed. “But I had a good time.”

“Good. That’s good!”

“Thanks,” Navarro said to the bartender as his cocktail came across the bar. He looked back to Emily. “Do, um—I don’t know if you’re here with friends, or—”

“I’m not!”

“Cool, well, I’m over there with some other people, if you want to join.”

She enthused. She seemed sweet and genuine. Navarro retreated with his red-gold glass. I watched him circumnavigate a low table with an old-fashioned globe set into its top.

In a nook between bookcases, he set his camel coat over the back of a low leather chair and sat among a group of cheerfully chatting women. I recognized one of them—Carla Lew, who’d written one of the most unmysterious mysteries I’d ever had the misfortune to read.

Navarro’s mouth had tilted into a smile. He listened for a while, jumping in for a few words at a time, flashing his grin around. When Bookstore Emily hurried over to their seating area, he moved sideways to make room, then leaned in over the low glass table as though he were telling a secret. As he spoke, the women broke into peals of laughter that cut through the noise of the bar. Emily touched his arm.

My feelings swung back into dislike. There was the Parker Navarro I’d expected to see all day, luxuriating in the spotlight and the attention from women, surrounding himself with people who’d treat him like the center of the universe.

As he looked down at the spot where Emily had touched him, his short story intruded into my mind. She inches her fingers down the yielding contours of her waist.

I imagined Parker Navarro lounging in the dim corner of a coffee shop, that flushed color high in his cheeks, thinking—for some reason—about my waist.

Feeling an unwelcome tug in my stomach, I looked away. I wondered if he believed some of the things he’d written about me. The section of his story where he imagined my expensive organic diet, for instance, which if anything gave me too much credit. And I would have liked to speak five languages, but in reality, in the years since I’d stopped speaking to my parents, my halting, childish Mandarin had atrophied to a degree that I felt embarrassed even swapping conversational basics with cashiers in Chinatown grocery stores.

For somebody who hated me to the point of fantasizing about my death in The Paris Review, he seemed to have a strangely high opinion of me.

My lips twitched, and I took a sip of gin. Fifty-three years later she will die in a hospital bed in San Jose, the only person in the room. I supposed I understood why that particular line had lit up the internet, but to me it was almost funny. Its frankness, its offhandedness.

Without even knowing it, Parker Navarro had written something that understood me. I’d known for a long time that the most connected people would ever feel to me was through my writing. I wasn’t really afraid of dying alone, only of dying without having done the best I could. I thought of this more often than was probably normal, lying awake in my apartment, considering what I would leave behind if I died in my sleep.

I took a long pull of my gin gimlet and picked through my bag of books, but before I could choose, my phone buzzed. Jacob or Cassie, I assumed, asking about the panel.

But when I glanced down, I went still. The bar seemed to rotate around me. A smiling photo had appeared onscreen.

Call from: Charles Chan

My parents hadn’t called me in two years. I hadn’t seen them in three. But every few days I opened WhatsApp and checked the line of text under each of their names: last seen online 11:22 a.m. Sometimes I imagined this exact situation: a call out of nowhere, an accident, a medical emergency. My father was a nervous driver, and my mother had a weak heart.