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“This isn’t an academic lecture, Liss. Cut the jargon and answer my question.” Catherine always did know how to cut to the chase.
“Friends?”
“Is that a question or a statement?”
“A statement?”
“Then why do you sound so uncertain?”
“Well, I guess it’s not the Valentine I would send to my friends.” Damn, damn, damn. All I wanted was answers. Someone to tell me whattheythought, to make sense of so many mixed signals and crossed signs for me, not more platitudes and ambiguity. God knew, I had enough of the latter from Nao Kao.
“So, again, let me ask: how would you describe your relationship with this guy?”
“I don’t know, Cath, I just don’t know! I guess, um, I guess, well, I don’t think there is a word for what we are to each other. Or if we are even ‘anything.’ Or if we are, then I don’t know what to call it.”
Becausefriendsis the only possible description, except that intuitively, this felt like the sharp edge of a knife.Intuitively, I sensed something deeper, unspoken but present just beneath the surface. And frustratingly, for the first time in my life, I, Liss Larkin, author of honors theses and master’s theses and a prize-winning doctoral dissertation, of academic papers galore, I simply lacked the words for whatever was happening in my life. Too well I knew the options: either I was plain dense or deep in denial. In vain, I searched for an elusive third alternative.
“Let me ask you this, Liss. When you and Jake were married, did you talk about him with your friends? I don’t mean your innermost thoughts. Just your daily lives.”
“Of course!”
“That’s my point,” she said. “So, you and Nao Kao might be friends, but you’re not normal friends. Normal friends talk about their spouses.”
“Normal friends talk about their spouses,” I repeated. If it walks like a duck…
“And I have to add, you sure don’t make things easy,” Catherine continued. “He sent you a picture of breakfast. Rather than asking something to the effect of ‘what happens after breakfast,’ you chastised the man for not sending flowers. You are impossible, Liss!”
“Well, I didn’t want to assume!”
Also, I didn’t add, at least in that moment, or in any moment of nervousness for that matter, I suffered from the condition best described by its French name,l’esprit de l’escalier.The spirit of the staircase. As in, the best and most appropriate answer comes to mind after leaving the dinner party, while already descending the stairs. Knowing me, if I were French, I would suffer froml’esprit de dehors, my witty comebacks appearing well after the night air smacked me in the face.
At least I had not fallen down the rabbit hole of telling him that his little digital Valentine, whatever it may or may not represent, was more than I had received on any other Valentine’s Day. I might have implied that I was accustomed to receiving an annual bouquet, but the truth could not be further away. Either way, and whatever we were or were not to one another, I was sure Nao Kao was not interested in hearing the ins and outs of my relationship with another man.
As his silence stretched to days, though, the question of intentionality ate into my mind, and I increasingly found myself rolling the marble around, guardedly asking another friend or two what they thought. They were split between “how could he have made this any more obvious” and “Asian cultures are warmer and friendlier and men have more latitude in their relations with women than they do here.” Translation: either he has feelings for you, or he is a player. I was back to square one.
I needed a guy’s opinion. Preferably a middle-aged man with long and extensive experience in Asia. Fortunately, I knew just such a person. While American, this man had lived and worked his entire adult life in Asia, first in Singapore, then in Taiwan, and now in China. I could also ask him anything, anything at all. Less fortunately, he was my brother, Theo, who had, in fact, found and married a nice girl in China, just as our mother feared. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. I took a couple of screenshots, scrubbed them of any possible identifying information, and sent them zipping across the Great Firewall. Thank you, WeChat.
Not for the first time my brother wondered what the hell was wrong with me. I tried to explain again.
“Well, I thought maybe he was just being friendly. Like he could have sent the exact same ‘Valentine’ to a hundred different friends, right? Is that so crazy?”
I waited for his response; at least this was still Chinese New Year and he wasn’t in his office. The pauses in our conversations on the days I caught him at work could stretch through meetings or phone calls, so that often I would just give up and read whatever response he sent when I awoke the next morning.
“Yes. It is. I’m sorry, Liss, but this is way more than friendly. I don’t see anything unclear about it.”
“Well this is a person I frequently find ambiguous. So, I just want to make sure I understand your interpretation.”
“My interpretation is that you should enjoy your date, whenever it is. And be sure to tell me about it.” Laughing emojis filled the next line.
I wished I could tell him the backstory, to see if it might influence his opinion at all. His loyalties might be to me, but if Rachael Zick should catch a whiff of anything suspicious and corner him the next time she saw him, say over FaceTime some unsuspecting Sunday, we would both be toast. My brother was putty in the hands of our mother. We were both safer this way.
“I just want to make sure I have this clear in my mind. Because this is complicated.”
“Jake-level complicated?” Despite the distance, Theo had had a front row seat to that debacle. I shuddered to think how many late nights I had spent pouring my heart out to him once that deed was done.
“On steroids. Final question and then I promise I will drop this. If a guy sent this to a friend, a female friend, his girlfriend would be pissed?”
“Oh, Liss.”
