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“Well I almost told you last week, when I was giving you such a hard time about how I just could not believe how, well, unprepared you were.”
“Go on, it’s okay.”
“I’ve told you before that in hindsight, well, I’m sure it doesn’t probably say the best things about me as a person, about my character, but it felt like my best option at the time. My only option.”
“Everything was just so impossible, the whole situation, and I just could not see my way clear. Nor did I have anyone I could talk to. Including you.”
“You can always tell me whatever you want, it’s okay.”
“Yes, you say that. Now and then. But this….”
I was stalling, simultaneously willing myself to go through with what I wanted to say – what I should say – and seeking to extricate myself from the conversation. God hates a coward. I plunged ahead.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Of all theperks Medallion status confers, the one I prize above all is the Club membership. The seats are comfortable and the food is nice, but the showers are a godsend, with water pressure that is built to blast the stress and grime of travel off a passenger’s weary body, and that is no metaphor. I had last showered less than twenty-four hours earlier, but it felt like a lifetime as I let the water pelt against my face. My life made sense. Risk averse to a fault, I could reason a problem to death. Ergo, I had no business here in Seoul, no business traveling to Laos, no business exchanging more than the briefest howdy-do with Nao Kao. If I stood here long enough, perhaps the water would finally clear my head, could literally as well as metaphorically wash away my doubts, lifting the haze, as a good rain does to a blanket of smog, so that I might piece it all together clearly for once. I think I actually prayed that there in the anonymity of an airport lounge shower.
I tried to remember when I first asked myself whether the ball was in play. It could have been when he asked if I still wore the watch I had sported every day in graduate school – and then described its silver links and charcoal and pink face. If not then, perhaps it was when he revealed the way he pictured me still looking over my shoulder in class, the tilt of my head just so. I must have asked the question when he shared that this,thatI, had stayed with him for far longer than I could believe. And only a foolwouldn’thave asked the question just from counting up the proliferation of heart-shaped stickers and emojis that dotted so many of our conversations. Whether I was dense or whether I was in denial, made no difference. The truth is that I didn’t ask the question. It wasn’t when I first asked myself if the ball was in play at all. Whatever my subconscious may have understood, it would have remained there, below the surface, if not for Stacy.If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably not heretofore unknown exotic water fowl.Nao Kao was a duck. The ball was in play.
And then he got bored. Or at least that was my impression. As always, the truth is more complex. We don’t properly communicate. I would like to put that all on him, but whenever I think that, I am taken back to how I handled everything with Jake, for years, or even the openings that Nao Kao presented and I rebuffed.‘I’m imagining sleeping under the open sky with friends and gossiping about old professors and new students.’ ‘So, what do you have on your docket at work this week?’Worse yet was the package with which I had undoubtedly blindsided him just days before this flight.
As they say, it takes one to know one. Or maybe it takes one to tolerate one. In any case, whether he was bored or busy or covering his tracks at home; whether we had simply said all there was to say; or whether we had exhausted all the words that could be exchanged between old friends in the midst of global despair, and without so much as a plan to meet for lunch, or even the hope for a plan to meet, Nao Kao faded to black.
Which is why the Valentine was such a surprise.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I handed theshower pass back to the attendant at the desk, catching snippets of the animated conversation she was having with a passenger who was learning belatedly that he was not actually booked through to Ulaanbaatar. I might feel myself well-traveled strolling through the terminal of any domestic airport in the U.S., but Incheon was a great reminder of how vast the world was, and how much of it I had yet to explore. “I haven’t been everywhere yet, but it’s on my list.” I had seen that declaration on more than one airport wall, and it was certainly true for me.
“Seventhousanddollars!” the passenger exploded. “But that’s preposterous! It was supposed to be paid!” I hurried off before either of them misinterpreted my snickers.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
“So really, youwould take a job anywhere in this country, anywhere at all?” Nao Kao asked for probably the thirtieth time.
“I’ve told you before I’m not sure why that surprises you so much. Yes, I want the best job I can find.”
“But you already turned down the job at the University of Virginia.”
“Because when I learned more about the job, it seemed boring.”
It was a Saturday afternoon in late October, and a cold rain was falling intermittently from the leaden skies overhead. We were on Nao Kao’s couch having the same conversation we had had too many times lately. Quietly, he rolled the thin, gold bracelet I always wore between his fingertips.
“And the job in Oklahoma.”
“I told you: that one didn’t pay enough.”
“And the one at Tufts.”
“Not enough vacation time.”
“Liss, la. Maybe you are too picky.”
All fall I had been interviewing for jobs at universities from the east coast to the west coast and points in between, adjusting to the new rhythms of travel in a post-September 11 world. The first time I had been nervous, and I still had not fully adjusted to the absence of friends and family waiting at the gate, but there was, as they say, nothing to it but to do it.
I sulked in silence.
“Staying here and enrolling in the doctoral program is definitely not an option?” Nao Kao asked quietly. He knew that was my preference, and that I’d been meeting with every faculty member I knew in an attempt to circumvent the unwritten but understood – and rigid – rules.
