JOHN WALKED TOWARD CHINATOWN, SLIGHTLY DAY DRUNK, reeking of cigarettes and whiskey. Others on the street were bundled against a brisk October wind—he passed two old ladies in quilted jackets with scarfs wrapped around their necks, but his leather jacket was open to welcome the cool air. He hoped Walter was still sitting in the bar, waiting for his beer.
John’s cheeks were flushed—partially the cold, some of it the booze—as he turned onto Mott Street past a seafood restaurant, bass and carp swimming in glass tanks in the window above giant, spindly crabs piled atop each other, waiting for their turn in the steamer. He passed the arcade where he had brought Brennan and Hunter to play tic-tac-toe against a chicken in a cage. Stores with imported furniture and trinkets. Coffee shops with Colombian brew and Chinese bean cakes. Farther up the street was the storefront where John bought his noodles and bean sprouts and soy milk. His parents, if they were alive, would be walking the street here, like the other grandparents, in cheap shoes, polyester pants, nylon coats zipped high against the wind, carrying bags of provisions, stopping in stores and negotiating in differing Chinese dialects.
John stopped to take three deep breaths, inhaling the smell of roast duck. He felt like he was being followed, but whether it was by Walter, a memory, guilt, or the implications of Walter’s knowledge, John didn’t know. He looked back down Mott Street from the corner of Bayard and recognized no one.
Walter had known about him and Jessica. John couldn’t believe it. They’d been so careful. They made plans by phone or in person. They rarely put anything in writing, but there were notes and letters despite their better judgment. John would sometimes sit at his desk at home, the family asleep, and write letters. He maybe delivered one in ten that he wrote. The rest were shoved into a hidden drawer in his desk—a novelty when he bought it, designed to hide important documents like a deed or a will. He never used it until he started writing his letters.
He addressed them Dear J—, and sometimes he didn’t know whether he wrote them to Jess or Jane. Maybe both. For his whole life, until he met Jessica, he approached writing as a purely utilitarian exercise. He had never been moved to write poetry or prose or anything other than to-do lists, school assignments, and legal memoranda. He was a great legal writer—concise, precise, and easy to follow. No metaphors, allusions, alliteration, similes, meter, or rhyme to wrestle with. Just facts, law, and analysis broken down into their simplest component words.
But a day or two after the Christmas party—the beginning of everything—John sat at his desk, door closed against the secretaries, the associates, and his partners, and started to write Jessica a note. He hadn’t seen her since that night after she left his office. Two sentences: Dear J—, I would like to talk. When is a good time? John never wrote in cursive well, so over the years, he developed a quick, casual block letter style, all caps, but with a flow nearly like script.
John looked down at the slip of paper. The message looked like a summons, brusque and impersonal. John added another line after the question: I enjoyed sharing that cigarette with you. He scribbled out that line and wrote instead: I want you. To see you again.
Sitting back after writing that, John saw how stupid the sentiment was. First, the blatant confession I want you. Was it too forward? Was it even true? He barely knew her. They were both married. Is that why he appended the To see you again at the end? To blunt the intensity of the prior sentence? Stepping back, in totality, the note was unlike anything John had ever written. He’d explained law, rendered opinions, transcribed statements, drafted contracts, listed tasks, and summarized facts. But had he ever written the truth? It was a little one, confessed on the scratch pad. But the scribed desire demanded some sort of further attention. Elaboration? Decoration? Form or substance? He tried writing the words again, focusing on the sensation of the pen on a new sheet of paper. Was there a transference of energy into the paper beyond the friction of the ballpoint moving across the sheet? If he gave the note to Jessica, would she feel the tension of his writing it in her fingertips? In copying the words, John added another line to the end, almost a non sequitur: I want to know why me? And why you?
Arranged on the page as they were, the words almost looked like poetry. John blushed, embarrassed that he had started jotting a quick note requesting a meeting and it had devolved into something resembling a song lyric.
#
Jessica laughed and pulled the hotel sheet up to her chin. “I wrote a song once with the lyrics ‘why me’ but threw it out. It sounded whiny.”
Warmth spread across John’s face. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Relax,” she said. “I’m just teasing you.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek—he could feel her lips spread into a smile as she did it.
“On the other hand,” she continued, as she settled back, “maybe I’m not. I’m a disaster.”
John turned so he could face her better. She let the sheet fall when she kissed him, and it lay in her lap. She wore her smile the same way—a careless modesty covering less than it revealed.
John’s lip curled into a half grin. “With that kind of attitude, no wonder you wrote a song like that.”
Jessica grabbed a pillow and hit him in the head with it. Before he could recover, she sprang on top of him, knocking him onto his back against the headboard, straddling him. She grabbed his wrists and held them against her thighs.
“I didn’t get to do this before,” she said.
John took a second to record as much of the moment in his mind as he could—her weight on his hips, how her breasts looked, her legs smooth underneath his hands, the cocktail of mirth and melancholy in her eyes. She raised one hand to touch his cheek and then his hair.
“You’re going to be bad for me,” she said.
“Then why did you come?”
“I got your note.”
In the end, after eight drafts of varying lengths—all of which John dumped in a subway trash can on the way home—he left a simple piece of paper on her desk late one night: J—, I’ve been thinking of you. Can we have dinner?
“I liked that you were thinking of me,” she said. “I was thinking of you.”
They ate at a small, dimly lit Italian place in the West Village. Dinner was a blur of wine and laughter. When he hailed a cab for her, she took his hand and pulled him into it with her. The driver asked them where they were going, and she gave him the name of an old hotel in Midtown. John raised an eyebrow, to which Jessica responded, “I don’t have a curfew. Do you?”
She waited at the bar while he booked a room and handed him a scotch when he returned with the room key. He left cash on the bar, and they brought their drinks with them to the room. It was small, mostly the bed. Jessica shut the curtains against the windows across the street while John threw scotch into his suddenly dry mouth. Jessica turned to face him. The bed lay between them, an obstacle and invitation. She tossed her coat across the bed.
“Be a dear and hang that up for me?”
John hung his as well on some hooks near the door. When he turned back, her suit jacket was laid across the foot of the bed, and she was removing her earrings.
John watched, a question across his face.
She placed her earrings on the bedside table and took a sip of her wine as she unbuttoned her blouse with the other hand. “Yes?”
“Why me?” he asked.
“Hold that question for a bit.” So John held it while she draped her blouse, and then her skirt, across her jacket. He put the question to the side when she crawled across the bed to him, rising to her knees at the edge closest to him, pulling him close to kiss him, pushing his jacket open and then off his shoulders, loosening and then undoing his tie, never taking her mouth from his until after her hands found his belt and solved the puzzle of the buttons and zipper of his pants. When she took his cock into her mouth, he wondered if he was her only lover, and if so, why she’d chosen him, and if there were others, why him as well. But his lust eradicated the questions—and nearly every other thought. He couldn’t wait to taste her anymore and flipped her onto her back. He brought his lips down to her and took his time, measuring out pleasure, creating tension as she stretched her body across the bed, contracted to pull his face to her hips just so, and then expanded again, arms out grabbing at the sheets, until her release, which he felt through the whole of his breath and into his chest like a hum. She pulled him up and onto her and told him that turnabout was fair play, that she wanted to finish him with her mouth. But when he was close, she said she wanted to feel him inside of her, to hold his body to hers, and she wrapped herself about him when he came.
After, they lay in each other’s arms until Jessica got up to go to the bathroom. John pulled the hotel sheet over his lap. When Jessica returned, John smiled at her and said, “Okay. I held it. Now, why me?” And she laughed at him and joked about her song, and time was circular in the room, and the question wouldn’t leave John as she straddled him, reminding him of his note and saying, “I liked that you were thinking of me. I was thinking of you.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine why you would think of me.”
“Maybe you’re lucky? Or cursed? Or maybe I think you’re very handsome in your suit? Something about your eyes? Let me keep some of my mystery. You start asking questions like why, and things may become serious. We’re agreed, right? This isn’t anything special. We’re just working through some things?”
John nodded, but the question rampaged through his mind like a song even as she kissed him again and they made the most of the time they were stealing.
#
The question clung to John with the cold air when he entered the coffee shop on Bayard. He sat in a booth toward the back, ordered a cha siu bao and some siu mai. He had sat there once before, with Jane on their third date. They caught the subway down after their last class one day in October. He wouldn’t have been surprised if it was the anniversary of that date.
John had ordered nearly every type of dim sum on the menu for Jane so she could sample them all. They arrived before a rush, so it seemed like one minute they had the place to themselves, and the next they were surrounded by a crowd shouting at the staff. Jane’s favorites were the cha siu bao and the rolled chow fun. After, he gave her a tour of his usual errand route: the grocers, the butchers, the fishmongers, and the bakers. She held his hand, and he was thrilled even though they had already kissed at the end of their first date.
After eating, they stood together on the 1/9 platform. Jane leaned against one of the painted steel columns, long blond hair falling straight down to her shoulders, her cheeks still slightly flushed from the wind. John wished he had his camera, she looked so beautiful.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
“Because you’re really pretty.”
Jane didn’t say anything. Her eyes were open, waiting for him to move closer, and he did. They kissed until Jane giggled and said, “I hope my breath doesn’t smell like garlic.”
“I can’t tell. We ate the same things.”
“Thank you for taking me,” she said. “I really liked it.”
“You’re welcome. It’s the first time I’ve taken a girl—a white girl—down here.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He turned his head to look up the tracks to see if a train was coming. Nothing stirred in the dark tunnel. “You know how it is, right? A lot of girls like you, they’re not looking for someone like me.”
“Are you asking me to help you figure out your girl problems? You’re standing awfully close to the tracks to be taking that chance.”
“No!” he said, then saw her grin. “I’m sorry. In my experience, you know, Italian girls want to marry an Italian guy, Irish girls want to marry Irish, and on and on. Sometimes I think I have something with a girl, and then she tells me, ‘No, I’m sorry, I can only date a Jewish guy.’”
“What do the Chinese girls tell you?”
“They want a Jewish guy, too.” He laughed. “But seriously, nothing ever just worked out like that for me with a girl like you.”
“And?”
“And when I met you, I thought you’d be the same. You’d tell me you only date the sons of uptight, square-jawed guys who wear fancy sweaters and own sailboats. But here we are.”
“Here we are,” Jane said. John never imagined someone could smile with their eyes so completely as Jane did.
“So, why me?” The question fell out of his mouth before he knew he asked it. John felt like he was hanging over the edge of the platform, heels in the air, with a train oncoming. This was certainly not the smooth-talking leading man he saw in films and imagined women like Jane wanted.
“If I wanted any of that, I’d have married my college boyfriend.” She slid a hand up to hold the lapel of his jacket. “My God, all my friends thought he was perfect. And my mom would have left my dad for him. I tried telling myself, through four years of college, look at this guy! He’s tall and handsome, he’s going to make a mint, and he’ll give me good children. But I imagined sitting through dinner with him for forty years, with all of those empty days—because he didn’t want me to work—and I have to tell you, John, I knew I’d only make it to four. He somehow got more boring as college went on. I already knew everything he ever told me. I’d seen everything he wanted to show me.”
The air moved in the station, carrying the distant rumble of a train.
“When I first met you,” Jane continued, “you promised me something. Something different. Something interesting. It’s there in your eyes. So that’s why. Now kiss me, fool.”
John leaned forward until their lips came together. He pressed his body to hers, holding her against the column as the train rushed into the station, screaming past them like a gale, Jane’s hair whipping around their faces. He’d never been so disappointed that a train arrived before.
Ten years later, John sighed at the memory and ate the last of the siumai. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate there, but everything—the food, the staff, the customers—was the same, except for him. John pushed the empty plates away and left a ten on the table—at least five dollars too much. He didn’t want to wait for change. As he left, he remembered that the fall before Jessica and the Christmas party, he’d called Jane at work and suggested that they meet at the coffee shop for lunch.
“Why?” she asked.
“We went on a date there. I thought it might be fun to walk up for cha siu bao together.”
“Did we? I don’t have time to walk up to Chinatown.”
“Come on. It’s twenty minutes to walk, and it takes five to eat.”
“John,” she said, “go if you want. You know I don’t even like those things. I’ll eat something near my office.”
She spoke to someone in her office and hung up the phone. He held the receiver to his ear, the hollow echo of the open line reverberating, growing louder in his ear, promising connection but never delivering. It was a lonely sound, a tone humming inside him his whole life. Each time he thought he had drowned it out, it resonated forward through the years, until it was a deafening hiss laid over his waking day.