“What’s that?”
“Only the place for some of the best Asian food you’ll ever have.”
“As long as it doesn’t come with a lap dance.”
Past a bakery and a sooty parking lot was a building with papered-over windows and a dirty cement façade.
“Is this place even open?” she asked.
Theo held open the door and waved her in. Up a flight of stairs, they entered a dusty cafeteria with food stands lining opposite walls. A handful of patrons dotted the communal tables, hunched over steaming bowls and colorful plates of food. The place smelled of sesame oil, garlic, and simmering meats.
“We’re talking cheap and no frills, but the pad thai here is going to blow your mind.” Theo led them to a far corner of the room.
“I don’t mind a little squalor now and again.”
They placed their order from one of the stalls and took Styrofoam cups of Thai iced tea to a nearby table. Astrid lifted the plastic lid and stirred the condensed milk until the liquid turned a bright creamy orange.
“My friends and I call this place the Blade Runner Café.” Theo shook his own cup, the ice cubes producing a muffled rattle.
“I can see why. It does remind me of the food stands Deckard goes to. And you don’t have to look so surprised.”
Theo’s eyebrows remained raised. “More . . . impressed than surprised.”
“Give a girl a little credit. I know Ridley Scott’s voiceover-free director’s cut is considered the superior version, and I agree. You’re not the only film snob at the table. I just keep quiet about it because it’s impossible not to sound annoyingly pretentious when discussing Fellini, who happens to be my favorite director. And I’m sure I don’t know about movies as much as you in general, since you probably went to film school and all that good stuff.”
“There might have been a year or two of film school in my past. But then I came to my senses and switched to marketing.”
She leaned back to accept the large plate of noodles set before her. “Sounds like the opposite of coming to your senses.”
“Depends on whether you want to be an artist or want to pay the rent.” He speared a piece of chicken and blew on it before taking a bite.
“Plenty of artists out there are able to pay their rent. If you have the talent, luck, and perseverance . . .”
“Yeah, I don’t know if I can nail that trifecta.”
Astrid squeezed a wedge of lime over her noodles and spread the crushed peanuts around with her chopsticks. “I’d be happy with one out of three.”
“Sounds like you’re still figuring out what you want to be when you grow up.”
“I just can’t decide between ballerina and astronaut.”
He waved away her faux Miss America earnestness. “What did you study in school? Besides astrophysics and dance.”
“I was an English and psych double major. Psychology was my safety net. Figured it would be more useful to learn how to read and analyze people than books.”
“But let me guess, you prefer books to people.”
“Pretty much. Hey, at least I ended up working at a literary agency, even though the most I do is unpack or mail the actual books.”
Theo offered a you-gotta-start-somewhere shrug. “Hey, maybe you’ll become an agent one day.”
“Naw, I don’t have the hustle for it. I’ll probably stay on as an office manager until . . .” Astrid stared at her plate. “I don’t know.”
“See, I bet you’ve got all three.” Theo picked the bean sprouts out of his noodles, making a little white pile of them in the corner of his plate. “I bet you have the luck, talent, and perseverance, but for whatever reason, you’re standing in your own way.”
She put down her chopsticks and looked past him, over at a group of middle-aged Asian men smoking and playing cards in the corner.
“Uh-oh.” Theo put a hand on her wrist. “You aren’t gonna walk off in a huff again, are you?”
“No, I’m thinking about something Robin—my father—told me when I was a kid. I came home one day after learning about snowflakes, how no two are alike, and told him the teacher said we’re snowflakes, too, each one of us unique. Robin said it’s only a matter of time until science proves snowflakes actually are alike. He believed the whole thing was a fallacy society latched onto as a bad metaphor for individuality. He thought it was more important for me to accept being ordinary than delude myself about being . . .”
“Special?”
She nodded.
Theo moved their plates aside and took both of her hands. “No offense to your dad, but that’s a shitty thing to say to a kid. And now I feel like an even bigger asshole for what I said on the bridge.”
“The thing is, when he said stuff like that to me, I saw it as his way to take pressure off me to be an achiever. Not that I didn’t try, but . . .” Maybe if I tried harder, he’d be more interested in me as a person. Maybe we’d be closer. She shook her head. “I figured I wasn’t different, I wasn’t born to do anything great, or stand out in any way, and that was fine.”
“That’s not fine. How could you know if he discouraged you from trying? It’s like he stopped you from . . . dreaming.” He smiled a crooked smile. “But I bet it didn’t stop you from feeling different.”
“You could say that,” she replied, her voice tired. “But don’t most people feel different, anyway? And if it’s such a universal thing, doesn’t that make it ordinary?” Doesn’t it make me ordinary?
As if reading her mind, he said, “You’re not ordinary. Your father is wrong. There’s definitely something special about you.” He squeezed her fingers for emphasis. “I wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t think you were somehow . . .”
“Snowflake-like?” She rattled the ice in her cup for emphasis.
“Until science proves otherwise, anyway.” He winked.
Astrid’s face clouded over. Her gaze shifted to a far corner, but what she really saw was much further away. “Robin wasn’t trying to be shitty to me. He wanted to protect me.”
“From what?”
“From ending up like my mother. She died when I was four, and he always told me it was from a brain aneurism. A couple of years ago, while I was visiting him in Brooklyn, I came across a newspaper article among his things. I wasn’t snooping, just looking for—it doesn’t even matter. Anyway, the article was from 1979, around the time Mom died. About a woman who was stabbed in the neck when she got in the way of a guy trying to mug a couple of girls on the subway. She stopped the mugging, but the guy was never caught and she bled to death before she got to the hospital. There was no aneurism.”
“I don’t get it.” Theo rubbed his forehead. “Why wouldn’t your father have wanted you to know she died doing something heroic?”
“He probably thought what she did was reckless and dumb. That’s what he always said when he saw news stories of local heroes.”
“And what do you think about it?”
A melancholy determination settled across Astrid’s face. “Some days I agree with him and get angry that she put herself in harm’s way like that. Other days, I think what she did was brave and selfless, trying to help those girls. And it makes me hope I inherited some of her courage. Anyway, I’m oversharing and making things the bad kind of weird again.” She twisted her hips in her chair, wished she could redo the last few minutes of their conversation.
His face didn’t betray any unease at the disclosure; his eyes were full of sincerity and compassion. He held her hands tighter and said, “Nothing weird here.”
An elderly woman in an embroidered forest green silk robe came out from behind the giant fish tank marking one of the Chinese food stands. She walked over to Astrid and Theo’s table and started speaking to them in fervent Cantonese. Her skin sagged and liver spots marked her thickly veined hands, which she waved around as she talked, her mouth smiling, her voice shrill and urgent.
She took two small objects out of her pocket, placed them on the table, and shuffled bac
k around the fish tank. Theo and Astrid leaned in and each took a trinket to examine. They were bronze coins with square holes in the center; Chinese symbols carved on one side and scaled creatures on the other.
“Are these fish or snakes?” Astrid held up one to the light to get a closer look.
“I’m pretty sure they’re dragons.”
“They’re probably good luck charms. Why do you think she gave them to us?” She peered at the fish tank but only saw the dark murk of the water.
“Maybe she thought we looked like we could use some luck?”
“We make our own luck,” she said.
Theo held his coin in the center of his palm and looked down on it, brow furrowed. “Is that from the O’Malley School of Hard Knocks and Tough Love?”
“Yep. It’s carved right above the entrance.”
When he looked back up, traces of worry remained in his eyes, which he blinked away. “I’m going to keep this anyway.” He pocketed the coin.
They pushed their chairs back and stood.
“Ready to go?” He held out an arm.
“Where to?”
“That’s for you to decide.”
“I don’t even know what’s around here or what might still be open,” she said.
“Well, then let’s go make our own luck.”
Astrid left her own Chinese coin on the table.
Outside, a couple of prostitutes in white patent leather mini-dresses asked for the time (“ten thirty”) and a toothless man with a garbage bag tied around his neck asked for spare change (Theo gave him a few quarters).
Astrid and Theo followed the narrow, twisted roads lit a dirty amber by dim streetlights, up to Downtown Crossing.
“Have you ever been there?” Astrid pointed at a low building whose second floor bore a giant purple and blue neon sign spelling out ‘TKO Karaoke’.
“I haven’t. Let’s check it out.”
“You sure?”
“It’s lady’s choice, remember?”
They stopped in the building’s crooked doorway, which smelled of cigarette smoke and bleach. Theo grabbed the sides of Astrid’s army jacket and pulled her in for another kiss. She leaned in and ran a thumb over the stubble on his chin and across his jaw. She pulled up the back of his shirt and touched a small patch of his bare skin, wanting to explore the rest of it, feeling hindered by the boundaries of his clothing.
A group of drunken Asian men in tuxedos stumbled out of the door and knocked Theo and Astrid apart. They held unlit cigars and sang Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” the song trailing them as they wove an uneven path down the street.
“Your eyes glow like a cat’s in this light, you know that?” Theo moved his face in close to look at them.
“I can, with all confidence, say that nobody’s ever told me that before.” She ruffled his hair. “So . . . can you sing?”
“Let’s find out.” He opened the door and held it out for her.
“How gentlemanly.” A mock-curtsy and she walked through.
The stairwell was foggy, as if filled with dry ice, and lit red. Astrid held on to the railing as she climbed.
“You better not be checking out my rear view,” she said over her shoulder.
“Why do you think men really open doors for women?”
She turned around to stick her tongue out and shrieked when he replied with a short spank.
“Hey!”
“Come on, we’ve got some bad singing to do.”
“Speak for yourself. I can carry a tune.”
At the entrance, a Japanese woman in a white pageboy wig and opera gloves greeted the couple and informed them of a two-drink minimum. They were led to a tiny square table next to a plate glass window illuminated by the back end of the neon sign. Astrid barely recognized her reflection in the glass: hair tousled, the corners of her mouth turned up, eyes bright and a little wild.
They ordered whiskey and Cokes and leaned over a shared binder to consider the song list.
“Do you think they have anything in English?” Astrid asked. They turned page after page of titles handwritten in neat cursive, housed in sticky plastic sheaths that made a tearing noise when pried apart.
“I don’t even want to know what might’ve made these pages so sticky.” Theo made a face.
“Oh.” she grimaced. “Let’s not even think about that.”
“Okay. But too late.”
The hostess returned with their drinks, a couple of slips of paper, and a chewed-up pencil.
“I also hate to think where this has been.” He examined the tooth marks on the writing implement.
“After The Eatery, I’d think you wouldn’t mind a little seediness with your karaoke.” Astrid nudged his knee with hers, was about to reach for the pencil, but reconsidered. “Actually, I think I have a pen.” She checked her jacket pocket.
“Now all we need is a song.” He flipped through the pages until they found some English titles.
“‘Islands in the Stream’?” she suggested.
“Sorry, Dolly, I’m not sure I can wrangle that one.”
“‘Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong’?”
“I’d need a lot more whiskey and about a carton of smokes before I could attempt a Joe Cocker impersonation. Not that I doubt your chops to sing the Linda Ronstadt part.”
“Jennifer Warnes,” Astrid corrected.
“Ah, Jennifer. That’s right. Is it me, or did she sing on every film soundtrack duet in the ‘80s?”
“Just about, but she was also friends with Leonard Cohen, and collaborated and toured with him a lot, too.”
“Sounds like she had the time of her life.” Theo pointed at himself with two thumbs, overly pleased with his joke.
“That was horrendous.” She swayed into him.
“I know, but I like getting a rise out of you because you get so physical when you’re annoyed.” He put an arm around her waist.
“How about ‘Somewhere Out There’ from that mouse cartoon?” Astrid was distracted by Theo’s proximity but still wanted to choose a song.
“First of all, that ‘mouse cartoon’ is An American Tail. Second of all, I think I’d feel like a cornball singing about wishing on the same star.”
“You sure seem to know a lot about it.”
“Let’s just say, watching that animated feature was a particularly emotional experience for me as a kid.”
“We’re still talking about a cartoon mouse here, right?”
“Fievel. A little respect, please. His name was Fievel.”
“Wow.” She looked at him like he was a pile of tangled puppies then turned back to the binder. “How about ‘Don’t You Want Me’?”
“Poor grammar notwithstanding, that’s a pretty bold question for such a shy lady. I think you already know the answer to that one.”
A flash of free fall exhilaration and fear. “Could you be any cheesier?” She shoved him with her shoulder and he held her tighter.
“Only if it makes you act out more,” he whispered in her ear. The hairs on the back of her neck and arms rose.
On stage, a bald man in thick-rimmed glasses sang a poignant song in Japanese or maybe Korean, based on the songbook categories. A younger Asian man nearby in a T-shirt with iron-on decals spelling out “The Greatest Love of All” screamed along. When the song ended, there were happy shouts and something came sailing from the back of the room that looked like underwear but turned out to be a doily. A bow from the singer, and then a cluster of inebriated women in jeans and sequined tops stumbled and giggled through a rendition of “It’s Rainin’ Men.”
It was tacky and noisy and smoky, and just about everyone there was far drunker than Astrid and Theo, but a pleasant hush settled over the duo. During the hostess’s rendition of “Blue Velvet,” they smiled the same secret smile, twisted their fingers around the loose fabric of each other’s clothing and kissed, not stopping even when the next table over began to hoot at them. Astrid could’ve been submerged in water; all sur
rounding sound gradually became low and garbled, until everything felt slow and muted. The whiskey added a tart flavor to their kisses, but dissipated as they continued to embrace, their bodies lit blue-purple, blue-purple, neon lights echoing off their oblivious forms.
More drinks followed more kisses; they got tipsy but not sloppy. Soon it was their turn to sing.
They got up on the low stage, which had a tinsel curtain backdrop and TVs mounted at each corner.
On the screens, pink dotted lines counted them down to the opening and the lyrics to “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” appeared at the bottom: in green for the male part, pink for female.
Theo hammed it up as he sang, swiveling his hips and pulling melodramatic somber faces, while Astrid reached out an earnest hand to him during her portions of the song.
The girls in the sequined tops got up and danced to the Dirty Dancing anthem, using their bottles of beer as makeshift Patrick Swayzes.
After the last chorus, Theo wrapped his arms around Astrid, dipped her, and planted a big one right on her lips. There was the fervent applause that only a crowd of twelve can create, then a man in overalls came up to sing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”
“I think it’s time to go,” Theo spoke in her ear.
Astrid nodded. “Okay.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
..................
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1999
Oliver calls me at the store on Saturday.
“What time do you go to lunch?”
“I was going to leave in a few minutes,” I say.
“I’m a few blocks away. Do you mind if I stop by?”
“I don’t mind.” What I do mind is this new caution and formality in his voice.
He waves through the front window when he arrives, but doesn’t come inside.
A ripple of relief is followed by a wave of uncertainty.
I call to Minerva and ask if she minds taking over for a half hour. She comes out from the back and says it’s no problem.
“Hi,” I greet him outside. Neither of us moves in for a hug.
“Hi.” His smile is flat, his blue eyes sharpened like they’re trying to cut through me.
Asleep From Day Page 21
