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“God, no!” I shook my head.
“Well I have. And in the voir-dire, the prosecutor often asks prospective jurors for their definition of reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt does not mean that there is absolutely, positively, not one iota of a chance that a juror could conceive of the defendant’s guilt. The answer the prosecutor seeks, that he or she will repeat ad nauseum if necessary, is that without such contrivance of the facts, without bending and twisting them to anunreasonable degree, if the only doubts that remain are unreasonable ones, then the prosecutor has done their job and proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“If the glove fits, you must convict,” I interjected.
“Something like that, Liss. And it seems to me that the only doubts that remain as far as whether Nao Kao, as you put it, ‘likes you-likes you’ are of the unreasonable variety. More simply, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, odds are it’s a mallard and not heretofore unknown exotic water fowl.”
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I made myway through the airport, taking in the changes since I was last here. Incheon was once a shopper’s paradise, but now many of the designer boutiques were shuttered, the seating areas filled with reminders to allow space for those around you. Maybe it was better that way – jetlagged and weary, I’d more than once fallen into the trap of layover shopping, returning home with hundred dollar face rollers and designer bags I never would have purchased without the benefit of travel-induced brain fog.
Freed of the distraction of shiny objects, my mind spiraled inward, down the same rabbit holes it had explored now for months.
He certainly was not my first. I was a world-weary grad student by the time I met Nao Kao. He wasn’t even my third or fourth, but whether the work of chemistry or some weird cosmic connection or merely the power of knowing that what we had could not last, he left me molten from stem to stern and that, wellthat,was a new experience. But it was never just the physical pleasure. Being with Nao Kao was equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and I, at least, did not need to look at a calendar to know that the countdown was on.
Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, but merely changes form. So, too, emotion. Whatever conflict I still felt over the origins of the affair, the way Nao Kao had introduced himself so cavalierly into my bed, dissipated – only to be replaced by a growing, gnawing guilt.
The first time at his apartment, I noticed a picture frame lying face down on the dresser. I wondered whether he’d placed it that way for my benefit, to spare some small measure of further guilt lest I sense judgment in their dark eyes, or for his. Perhaps he hoped to avoid any questions I might ask – or the possibility that I’d feel the judgment emanating through the air and turn tail and run, the flight reflex triumphing over fight. I allowed myself to consider, too, that the position of the photo was no temporary measure, that it might well have been transformed for him from a warm reminder of home into a bald-faced accusation. Perhaps he felt their judgment even more acutely than I – it was he, after all, who had promised to have and to hold, not I. Nowhere was it written that I had a monopoly on compunction and remorse; for all I knew, those were the recurrent themes of both our days.
When he slipped out of the room, I sneaked a peak and confirmed what I already knew intuitively: it was a family photo, each parent holding a baby, each baby with tiny fists balled, one of them captured mid-kick. The expressions of Nao Kao and his wife were inscrutable, as was the backdrop. I wondered fleetingly which daughter was now fighting malaria as I returned the frame to its facedown position just before Nao Kao reappeared. The next time I visited, the picture had been removed entirely, tucked away, perhaps in a desk drawer or on a closet shelf. Whatever his reasons, at least the most obvious reminder of what we were doing remained out of sight.
Nao Kao had the unnerving habit of watching me intently, always. I never stayed the night, and for reasons I could not put my finger on, but the existence of which probably should have told me everything I needed to know, we no longer met at my apartment. As a result, when I was with him, in the bright light of day, my nakedness was more exposed than I have ever been. I would ask to turn a light off and he would plead to leave it on. In fact, as soon as the faintest shadow appeared, he wanted to turn more lights on, not off. “I like to look at you,” he said simply and unabashedly when I complained.
Once he left to grab a towel, and then, his lean body glistening with sweat, asked if I wouldn’t just hop in the shower with him.
It is the only thing I refused him, at least until the very end. It was hard enough to feel that every flaw, every little dimple in my flesh, was on display as we lay in bed, lights ablaze. A shower was simply a bridge too far.
Often, I would close my eyes, imagining that if I couldn’t see, maybe he couldn’t either. On the occasions when he noticed, he would ask me to open my eyes and to look into his.
“I want to see you,” he said, and I reminded him that was what his eyes were for, not mine.
“Not only your body, you, all of you. Eyes are the window into the soul. I want to see yours.”
He would place his finger under my chin and tip my head until our eyes were level. “Now I can see you,” he would whisper quietly, the sound of a man content with the moment.
Perhaps it was because I felt my soul withering that I was so keen to hide it.
Increasingly I was parrying arguments from my mother, whom I thought of increasingly not as My Mom but as The Formidable Rachael Zick, as I had heard more than one student – or faculty member – refer to her over the years. That she wasn’t wrong (because honestly, Rachael Zick was never wrong) only heightened my unease. Ever the scholar, she had honed her debate and delivery skills in front of audiences far more hostile than I. She knew how to keep her arguments narrow, how to claim and hold high ground. She never wavered from that first accusation she had flung so viciously the day we went to Grand Haven.
“He is a married man: have you no shame?” she’d demanded so self-righteously.
I’d only been able to gawp that day, but now I had my answer.
“Actually, Mom, yes. But I am not so sure about Nao Kao.” Not that I had the nerve to utter it.
Late into the night he would message me after I left, checking that I was home, asking what I was working on, occasionally confirming his understanding of some arcane journal article. At some point Nao Kao decided I should teach him French, and I began with the basics before he corrected me. He was not interested in learning the language of the classroom or the boardroom or even the ballroom. Nao Kao cared not how to conjugate verbs or of the difference between the formal and informal you forms. What Nao Kao wanted to learn was only fit for the bedroom.
No matter how late into the night we exchanged messages, whatever vocabulary lessons we covered, we never spoke about what we were doing. The hallmarks of high-context, indirect communication was stamped all over both of us that fall and the closest either of us ever came to acknowledging the extent of our impropriety was the afternoon Nao Kao asked me to listen to a new song he had just heard on the radio for the first time that day. The artist’s name was Shaggy and anyone of a certain age can recite the chorus by heart, the man caught red-handed in flagrante delicto with the girl next door. It was the closing lines that seared me, though, the admonishment that the guy might think he’s a player, but really, he’s just completely lost.
Whatever response I may have made upon hearing the song has been repossessed by the ravages of time.
Then and now I was forced to consider the possibility, though, that Nao Kao really was just a player, completely lost, all alone in a foreign country by himself, no worries about being caught. I thought it would be a one-night stand. Later I assumed it was a fling. Only much later did I consider the ephemeral nature of the line between a fling and an actual “thing.” Blurry or bright, lines exist, and they matter. I cannot say what he thought, on which side of the line Nao Kao may have stood, and I cannot remember anymore what I thought, but I do know what I heard and I do know what I said – and what I didn’t.
I never said I love you. Neither did he.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I was intoo deep not to tell him now. I turned off the mockery of the debate on the television behind me, three septuagenarians fighting to talk over one another, and I closed the extra browser windows I had open. I focused my attention on the Messenger box with Nao Kao’s name, dusted off the cobwebs in my mind, and pushed away the ghosts.
