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Now I brought Nao Kao, who was sufficiently awed by the leaded glass windows that lined the hall, the Steinway in the Gold Room, the fixtures and finery of the Red Room. That I had lived in this relative palace and also attended enough frat parties to offer him a detailed description of the insides of half a dozen of the big houses simply astounded him. In America, in Ann Arbor, anything was possible.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
To this day,it’s an open question whether Rachael Zick would have been more appalled or less appalled if she had known that maybe there was more to the affair than met the eye, at least from the perspective of one of its parties.
I would go home to do laundry and find myself ambushed while I waited for the clothes to dry. “Are you still seeing him?” she might ask euphemistically. I vacillated from avoiding the subject entirely, pretending that she was no more than the whispering wind, to banging around in anger, protesting it was none of her business, to playing coy and responding “Oh, yes, I see him and lots of other people besides. How many people would you guess you see in an average day?”
I never let on to her that slowly the guilt was eating me from the inside out. Only Catherine, who had known me since we were barely out of diapers, and with whom I had laughed, cried, loved, and fought for two decades, could sense something out of place. When I declined to elaborate she offered the only advice she could. “You always have done things your own way. What I know is that you will do what you want to do.”
Whatever judgment she rendered beyond that, she kept to herself.
Telling Nao Kao was out of the question. Not only did I see no point, but he had clearly been keeping his own counsel as well, for I could not have been more surprised by the turn in our late-night texting sessions. The discussions about my post-graduate plans became more serious, his questions more pointed, and then gradually he began speaking of his desire to stay in the U.S. – and how he might do so.
It must have been November then, just around the time of that other strange plane crash when the world was so on edge. I told him not to be ridiculous. His visa clearly compelled him to return home, to serve and improve his country, for a period of at least two years. Hewantedto serve his country. So many times he had spoken of the good he could do, of the good he wanted to do, and especially of what it meant to him to be on a path that would allow him to be able to do well for himself while doing good for his country. I reminded him of the Chinese proverb he’d shared with me, the one that said “If you are planning for a year, sow rice. If you are planning for a decade, plant trees. If you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.” Laos was planning for a lifetime – his and the nation’s.
And he had a family. Just because I had fallen into the trap of believing that heaven was high and the emperor was far away did not mean I was prepared to steal another woman’s husband.A nice girl. Normal, as I could not help thinking of her. That was never part of the deal. I would graduate and it would end and I could pretend I was still a Very Good Girl. At least that was the plan.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
We had beentexting for months before we had occasion to set up a call over Zoom.
If Nao Kao saw me peering through the other side of a Zoom box months earlier at the alumni “reunion,” he had kept his own camera decidedly off. After the third time he commented on my appearance, I made him send a selfie, which he did: poorly lit and almost glowering. You might think he didn’t know any good photographers.
While I had seen the dozen or so photos of himself he sent me, along with others – mostly older – that I found poking around online, this call was the first time I would see him in the flesh, so to speak. After listening to him lament time and again about the weight he had gained over the years, I was surprised by the resemblance on the screen to the one in my memory. If he had been wearing a ballcap to cover the receding hairline, I might have sworn the likeness was one and the same.
As for me, although I was as self-conscious as any woman of a certain age of the crow’s feet that had taken hold and the lines that told of both too much laughter and too many furrowed brows, I knew I had generally aged well, and I could not help but wonder whether my likeness felt as similar to Nao Kao as his did to me.
From the way he fidgeted as I popped onto his screen, it is possible he was as nervous as I was. He smiled warmly, the same broad smile I remembered so well, and whose memory had concealed itself in the recesses of my mind for nearly twenty years. For all my sleuthing, I had rarely found evidence of that smile in the photos he posted online over the years. Then again, no one smiles as often or as brightly as we Americans do, and I am nothing if not American when the situation calls for it. I flashed my best smile, the one I have used to win friends and influence people – from faculty members to the parents who foot the bills to the donors who fill the scholarship coffers – for going on two decades.
His obsidian eyes fixed on my emerald ones, and we spoke at the same moment, an especial hazard of Zoom, both boxes flashing, each of us pausing, trying to let the other speak first. I gestured that he should do so.
“I can’t believe it is really you, Liss. My God, how many years has it been? Sixteen? Eighteen?” It was the same lilting voice that I remembered, and its familiar cadence caught me off guard, as though echoing back through the fog of time. The butterflies inside me fluttered and tumbled and multiplied madly.
“Almost nineteen, if you’re counting. It’s good to finally see you, too, Nao Kao.”
“I just can’t believe –”
“I know, I know. Me, too. But, Nao Kao, you’re a busy guy. And you told me the signal might cut at any moment, so we should get started.”
Almost imperceptibly, his expression changed.
We blew past the hour we had scheduled and were well into the second one before we called time on the conversation. As I hit the little red Leave Meeting button, I realized I had sweated through the sundress I was wearing. I hadn’t felt such nerves with a boy, even one on the other side of planet earth, since I was fifteen years old.
NAO KAO
“Let’s schedule acall to talk through course integration,” Liss texted me.
“Nao Kao, we need to talk about the course. Can I send you a link?” she wrote more urgently a few days later.
And finally: “I sent you a calendar invite for this Thursday – one for morning and one for evening. Please accept the one you prefer.” She always did know how to get things done.
As she popped onto my screen, I knew I’d been correct to postpone this as long as possible. Seeing her in one of one hundred small boxes at the alumni event was one matter, but life-size Liss on my monitor, her unmistakable voice piping through my headphones, was another. I would have known her anywhere.
“How many years has it been? Sixteen? Eighteen?” I began to reminisce, the pull of memory lane too strong to overcome now that I was face-to-face with her.
“Nineteen,” she corrected me. “But you’re busy. We should get started.” Her tone was firm, but her mannerisms soft.
“Yes, ma’am. You always did drive a hard bargain,” I quipped to mask my disappointment at being denied the pleasure of mutual memories. My consolation prize was a smile that reached her eyes and brought forth the dimples I remembered too well.
