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I hesitated again.
“Which was honestly just a dodge on my part because, realistically, I just…. well, what are the odds that would ever actually happen?” I continued.
“Stranger things have happened. But go on.”
“See, I wasn’t even sure if I should tell you. Actually, I’m still not. I mean, I never, ever planned to. But then I never planned to talk to you again, and definitely not for hours every week for months on end. So, then it feels like I should tell you, even though it’s possible that you’ll be angry and then you won’t want to talk to me anyway, and then it’s like, what was the point? Plus, it might be awkward to work together.”
“Liss, enough, please. Just tell me.”
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
My mind ricochetedfrom Grand Haven to East Lansing and back to Grand Haven again as the plane was cleared for landing and the flight attendants made their final pass, returning jackets to owners, ensuring suite doors were secured open, proffering the basket of chocolate mints. Janelle paused her efficient movements to wish me luck, “whatever that means.” Her eyes were smiling and I could almost see her laughing behind her mask.
“I hope to see you on another flight. I’d love to hear what happens.” She winked and continued on her rounds of the cabin.
Grand Haven was the first slice of the past that I broached with Nao Kao, and I did so gingerly. Our conversations to that point had been almost entirely professional. Sure, he had begun to flirt with me lightly and occasionally, as though testing the waters. Considering what Grand Haven represented in my mind, at least, that it was the closest I could come to defining the line between friends with benefits and an affair of the heart, it seemed like dangerous territory.
Or, perhaps in one of those tricks of the mind, I had remembered the day and everything about it incorrectly, and it hadn’t even dented the surface of his memory. When I asked if he remembered our day at the beach, though, he replied immediately.
“Oh, yes, vividly.” Up popped one of those annoying, oversize stickers that would come to taunt me. This one had hearts for eyes. Asians like stickers. I know sixty-year-old men with sticker collections to rival any teenaged girl here.
“Just the other day I was going through the pictures I took when we were there,” he added. I did not tell him that I already knew he had been through at least some pictures from his time in Michigan – or that he posted them only hours after he received my message.
“The waves were so big that day. Just crashing against the pier. You were worried about your camera getting wet,” I teased.
“I was! I still can’t believe I took so many pictures there.”
“Why not? You took pictures everywhere. And look, even now, your personal business is photography.”
I waited for the typing bubbles to reappear.
Like almost everyone I knew in Asia, Nao Kao was an entrepreneur who worked far beyond the capacity of most people I knew here. As best I could tell, he was the vice-rector of the leading university in Laos, a government consultant, and a professional photographer. I would not have been at all surprised to learn, would have bet money, that those three jobs, any one of which could have constituted fulltime employment on its own, was only a partial list of his commitments. He was Exhibit A in the data point that Asians work, on average, almost fifty percent more hours in a week than Americans. And we wonder why China is eating our lunch.
“But I could have better spent the time with you that day.”
I blinked once, twice, three times as I processed that little line of text on my phone. That this man whom I had not seen in close to two decades, to whom a few weeks earlier I was no more than the whisper of a memory, regretted spending time on a beloved hobby during a day at the beach, and after everything else that had happened, took my breath away.
Even now my cheeks burned thinking about it.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
My junior yearof college, “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen” was the anthem that animated spring semester. The song, which elevated what might have been an obscureChicagoTribunecolumn to the fleeting heights of pop culture, punches above its weight. The real troubles in life, graduates learn, are the things they have never considered, the ones that will blindside them on an otherwise mundane afternoon. Moreover, in twenty years, these young grads, their unlined young faces so unbearably young, will happen upon old photos and contemplate in wonder how much possibility life held, and how marvelous they had once looked. Mixed in with the cautions, advice to be neither reckless with other’s hearts, nor to tolerate those who are reckless with one’s own.
Check, check, zing. At least the lyrics spare me the indignity of asking what to do when you are reckless with your own heart.
As for the recommendation to hold fast to old love letters, I had failed to heed that, too. A wiser woman would have printed Nao Kao’s missives and saved them. They must have been lovely.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
As our conversationplunged along week by week, and as we became increasingly comfortable with both the present and past versions of ourselves, I mined territory with Nao Kao that I never could have anticipated. Our dynamic was the same,wewere the same – yet wiser and more self-assured. When I stood back to consider the entire situation, I was struck repeatedly by how surreal it truly was. My mind refined the fact of Nao Kao’s presence as waves work over glass, smoothing the jagged edges, rendering the clear opaque, wearing it all down to a nugget the size of a watch face whose presence in the sands of my life was undeniable, but whose origins were an utter mystery.
“I just remembered the most inappropriate thing; do you want to know what it is?” I would text him on occasion. Nao Kao always wanted to know. In this way, I reminded him that he was the only guy I had ever known, certainly the only one I had ever been to bed with, who did not prefer boxers to briefs. More than once I contemplated asking him if he had revised that opinion in the years since, but whatever lines we had crossed, well, that question screamed of driving the wrong way into oncoming traffic.
It was by teasing him about inappropriate memories that I also informed him how I had caught him looking – no, staring – down my shirt on more than one occasion, charges to which now, as a grown man well into his middle age, he could only plead “guilty as charged.”
Yet there were times when I think Nao Kao, too, was caught in an internal tug-of-war, when he would go a little quiet, and I wondered how much was for my benefit and how much was for his. Still, the only time he seemed truly hesitant to travel down memory lane was when I mentioned the time at my apartment that he invited himself into my bed.
“Let’s talk about anything but that,” he replied, and so we did. After all, no matter my intentions when I sent my first, innocent little note on LinkedIn, I had ultimately come barging back into this man’s life with all the subtlety of Hurricane Andrew. And if I still had places I was not yet prepared to probe, it seemed only fair that he did as well.
