Across a Green Ocean

by Wendy Lee

  Unfortunately, it was written in Chinese, except for one sentence toward the end of the letter—Everything has been forgiven—in neat but spiky handwriting, as if a crab had crawled over the page. Michael wondered if his father had racked up some kind of debt. He could ask his mother to translate, but that would bring up questions and uncomfortable memories. So instead he put an ad online for a translator, and it was answered by someone named Edison Ng, whom he arranged to meet at a coffee shop downtown. At first, he was skeptical of this skinny college kid wearing a backward baseball cap, but Edison assured him that he was fluent in both languages and could translate the letter for fifty dollars by the end of the week.

  “Heavy stuff, right?” Edison commented after he’d delivered the translation. “Who do you think this Liao Weishu guy is?”

  Michael was still trying to digest its contents. “Other than a friend of my father’s, I don’t know.”

  “For another fifty bucks I can track him down for you online. . . .”

  Michael had to admire the kid’s entrepreneurial drive. “Thanks, but I think this requires more than an Internet search. I’m going to have to go to China to find him.”

  As soon as Michael spoke those words, it seemed like the most logical solution in the world. Of course he had to go to China and meet this Liao Weishu. Liao did not know that his father had passed away, and it was up to Michael to break the news to him. You didn’t write someone after forty years and just receive a letter in return. No, a personal visit was in order. Without telling anyone, he applied for a visa.

  He wasn’t running away, Michael assured himself. Although there were other, very good reasons for him to get out of the city. The heat, which made his apartment feel crappier than usual. The fact that the lease on his apartment would soon be up, and he might not be able to afford to renew it. His inability to find a new job—no one wanted a graphic designer who had once accidentally turned in a report with rude drawings doodled in the corners. That it would soon be a year since his father died, and his mother would probably want him to come home and commemorate it somehow. He imagined what it would be like—an uncomfortable dinner at home with Emily, who would be preoccupied with her latest case; and Julian, who would hover awkwardly on the periphery; and his mother, who would try to fill the silence with chatter, answering questions no one asked. Also, there was David. By that time, he and Michael would have known each other for around ten months, on and off, but if you counted the times they were on, it would only be around seven months. Not that anyone was counting.

  After Michael found out what the letter had said, he told David that he had changed his mind about accompanying him to the wedding of his friend, Laurel.

  “I don’t understand,” David said. “You have female friends too. Like that girl who lived next door, Annie.”

  “Amy. And we never dated.”

  Michael found it amusing that in high school, David had played straight, captaining a couple of sports teams and dating the daughter of one of the oldest families in town. Laurel’s wedding was on the grounds of an organic farm, and Michael was sure he would be the only Asian person in attendance, aside from a couple of trophy girlfriends. Or maybe he would be the trophy boyfriend.

  “This isn’t what I signed up for,” he told David. “Being your plus one.”

  “Fine,” David said. “But you’ll be missing out on some amazing grass-fed beef. Or is it free-range beef? Anyway, you know, beef that’s so fresh it talks back to you.” His tone was playful, but clearly he was troubled by Michael’s reluctance to be considered a couple.

  Therefore, David went alone to the wedding, which took place on a beautifully sunny day in late June, a day on which Michael stayed inside his crappy apartment and only ventured outside in the evening to get something to eat. When he came back, David was waiting for him, sitting on the top step underneath the skylight that was plastered darkly with pigeon droppings.

  “How was it?” Michael asked.

  “Wholesome and bourgeois,” David said. Then, after a pause, “If you were there, we could have made fun of the flower arrangements. Fucking modernist sculptures, they were.”

  “I missed you, too,” Michael admitted, before realizing a moment later that David had not actually said that he’d missed him.

  But it didn’t matter, because then they were kissing, and somehow Michael managed to unlock his door, and they moved as if in a choreographed dance the few feet across the room from the door to the futon that David always swore he would catch something from, and things were all right again.

  That is, until a few weeks later, when David suggested Michael move in with him. By that time Michael had received his visa and was close to maxing out his credit card after purchasing a plane ticket, among other travel preparations. It was almost too easy to become upset at David and accuse him of things that were only partially true, before storming out of David’s apartment and ignoring his calls. This way he didn’t have to tell David anything about what he was intending to do, to explain himself when he didn’t even know why he was taking this trip.

  Michael realizes, though, as the train winds its way through the plateaus of northwestern China, this trip has everything to do with David Wheeler, and it was set in motion over a year before.

  That summer morning, Michael had made plans to meet a friend at a restaurant in Chelsea, a place that guaranteed a wait of about an hour, followed by awful service. Thus, he was already not in a very good mood when he came to Fifth Avenue and found his way blocked by hordes of shirtless young men, cheering on a street full of more shirtless young men elevated in gaudily decorated floats. He had forgotten about the Gay Pride Parade.

  Normally, Michael scorned this kind of event. Was there really a need to emphasize your otherness, to flaunt it in other people’s faces? He had spent so much of his life hiding—hiding where his parents had come from in high school, hiding his boring suburban upbringing in college, hiding his lack of corporate ambition at work—that it was second nature to hide a less visible aspect of himself as well.

  After struggling through the crowd for several minutes, he couldn’t find a way to cross the street. He gave up and was about to call his friend to cancel when he heard a voice behind him say, “This sucks, doesn’t it?”

  Michael turned to see a young man, somewhat preppy-looking in a polo shirt and khaki pants, blond hair gleaming in the sun. “It does,” he replied. “I’m supposed to meet someone on Seventh Avenue, but I guess I won’t make it.”

  “Me too,” the man said. “But I’m getting hungry. You want to grab a bite on this side of the street?”

  Michael only looked at him for a few more seconds before agreeing. He wondered how long this man had been following him before picking him out among so many fine, shirtless specimens. It felt good to have been chosen.

  Over lunch, at a fancy place he’d walked by many times but had never gone into, he found out that David was a lawyer and had grown up in Connecticut, and that his father, now retired, had also been a lawyer. Michael didn’t say anything about his family, not even his sister’s profession (Emily’s work was such that he didn’t think she and David were of the same tribe). By the end, when David took out his wallet, Michael let him pay.

  On the street outside, when David turned to him, Michael expected him to say he’d had a good time, maybe even suggest that they do it again sometime. Instead, David said, “You want to go back to my place?”

  In the cab, Michael reflected that this wasn’t so different from a normal hookup, of which he’d had a few—in college, when it had been new and exhilarating, and then after he’d moved to the city, where it seemed like a cliché. It was a bit strange, though, to be doing it not after an evening of drinking, to be seeing the other person’s face clearly, to be removing your clothes in the light rather than the dark. It was stranger still to wake up in that other person’s apartment, not in the middle of the night or in the grainy regret of morning, but with late-afternoon sunshine stipplin
g both your naked bodies.

  David was still sleeping, and Michael looked at him more closely. Without his glasses, his face looked younger, and he slept with one hand curled under his cheek, like a child. His body was long and concave in the middle, where the smattering of fair hair on his chest turned thicker and curlier. His penis was somewhat unremarkable, except for how quickly it had lengthened in Michael’s hand; now it was curled up against the inside of his thigh like a snail.

  Michael got up to get a drink of water, but it was really a pretext to examine the rest of the situation he had found himself in. The apartment was several times the size of his own, and appointed sparsely with modern-looking furniture. What looked like actual art, rather than prints, hung on the walls. More significantly, the place looked like it belonged to an adult, an adult with money. At twenty-five, Michael was still used to secondhand furniture and multiple roommates, buying expired items and day-old bread from the grocery store in order to make the next rent check. He had only just started living without a roommate, because more than one person in the space in which he lived would be considered a fire hazard.

  When he opened David’s refrigerator, he found little food, but a great deal of condiments and individual glass bottles of sparkling water. He opened one of the bottles and took it back into the bedroom, where David was awake and smiling lazily at him. Without asking, David took the bottle from him and drank long and hard. It struck Michael as a more intimate act than any of the ones they had experienced with each other.

  In the month that followed, he found himself spending most nights with David, or on rare occasions, if they were downtown, back at Michael’s place. At first, Michael was ashamed of his apartment, its cramped size and lack of air-conditioning, the unscrub-bable stains in the bathroom. There was nowhere to sit except on the frameless futon, as if it were a life raft. So, they usually ended up at David’s, and if Michael came over early, he’d hang out in the bar next door, because he didn’t have a key to David’s place and he thought the doorman looked at him funny.

  One day, Michael had just finished sucking David off, David’s taste still in the back of his mouth, when his cell phone rang. He wasn’t going to pick up, but he saw that it was Emily. Clearing his throat, he answered. Her voice was strangely calm, as if she were reporting something that had happened in another country. Although he comprehended what she was saying, his eyes were fixated on his own hand, lying on David’s hipbone, like a long, pale lizard. It was impossible that in one moment he should feel so complete, and then in the next, absolutely empty.

  Without telling David what was wrong, he dressed and left the apartment, walked twenty blocks downtown in a daze before remembering he had told Emily that he would meet her at the train station. That night, at his mother’s house, after his mother and sister had gone to sleep, he finally called David to tell him what had happened. He did not say he would see David when he got back. As if an outsider to the situation, he listened to David struggle to find the right words to say and give up, a pattern that he would later recognize with other friends, coworkers, and people he didn’t know at his father’s funeral.

  After ending the call with David, Michael sat in his old bedroom, still trying to feel something. He thought of his mother and sister in their own rooms, the efficient walls of silence that surrounded them all. Finally, he was able to dredge up an old hurt that had long since scabbed over but would twinge if he prodded it hard enough. It was much easier to feel anger at his father, and something his father had done years ago, than at the randomness of his father’s death.

  Michael had seen his father two weekends earlier, one of the rare times he’d gone back home that summer—partly to escape the heat in the city and partly to get some perspective on his relationship with David, which was turning out to be much more intense than he’d expected. At the time, David’s closeness had been part of everything that had felt too close about the city; simply another thing that he needed to get away from. His father had been his usual taciturn self, glowering over something as minor as a creaky door hinge or a dead patch of grass on the lawn. He’d also been particularly concerned about a crape myrtle tree in the backyard that had caught a disease and had consequently lost all of its leaves, appearing as though it were in the dead of winter. Michael’s father talked to him about what to do with the tree and finally announced he was going to cut it down; Michael had agreed. That was the essence of the last, illuminating conversation he had with his father.

  At the funeral, since he didn’t speak Chinese, most of the people there bypassed him. Emily seemed to be handling everything in her usual, capable manner, and he felt unnecessary, like an uninvited guest. So instead he snuck away early on with Amy Bradley, who had come in from Boston, where she attended design school. They went out and sat on the back porch.

  “How’re you holding up?” Amy asked.

  “Could be better,” Michael replied. “Any chance you got a cigarette on you?”

  Amy grinned. “I have something better.” She extracted a neatly rolled joint from her pocket. “I thought you might need this.”

  For a moment, Michael hesitated, knowing it wouldn’t look good if he were caught smoking pot at his father’s funeral. What would his mother think? But what the hell—next to Emily, he looked like a delinquent, anyway.

  Passing the joint back and forth reminded him of when he and Amy were teenagers, parked in the woods in her parents’ car, or up in her room. They spent afternoons at her house with pads of heavy Manila paper, Amy sketching clothing designs and Michael sketching her as she sketched. She was already into fashion then, making clothes on her own sewing machine and using Michael as a dress form. You make the perfect model, she gushed, which he interpreted to mean that he had the figure of an anorexic, prepubescent girl, and wasn’t sure if he should take it as a compliment or not. Still, he stood motionless for hours as she pinned and re-pinned.

  You would not have known Amy was talented in that arena from the way she dressed at school: torn black shirts, ripped black jeans, boots that looked like she would kick someone’s head in if they looked at her wrong. She convinced Michael to join her in a social experiment, in which they wore their clothes inside out for a week. No one noticed, which Amy said was the whole point. When Amy cut her hair and dyed it black, people said they looked like twins, which they did not bother to dignify with an answer. Aside from the fact that Amy wasn’t Chinese, she was short and her body full of curves that she tried to hide beneath her shapeless dark outfits. She decreed that she and Michael should kiss each other on the cheek, twice, whenever they ran into each other in the halls (So European, Amy had said). No one seemed to notice that either.

  Early in their junior year in high school, Michael discovered that Amy was in love with him. She had kissed him on the mouth one night, when her parents were out and they’d broken into her father’s liquor cabinet. One moment they’d been laughing about Courtney Snell’s ridiculous answer in social studies class (“Where do Chicanos come from, Courtney?” “Um, Chicago?”), and then Amy pressed her lips so fleetingly to his that he thought he had imagined it.

  “Did you feel anything?” Amy asked hopefully.

  Michael shook his head, although he had felt something, besides the burn of bourbon from Amy’s lips. What he had felt was disappointment. He had been disappointed that it had been Amy who had kissed him, not Peter Lawrence, the slender, brown-haired boy who sat in front of him in math class and smelled not only like gym socks, but something that made his very skin tingle. The other time he’d felt that sensation, like an itch somewhere that couldn’t be scratched, was when he was twelve and had been spying over the fence next door. Scott Bradley, Amy’s brother, who was Emily’s age, was swimming in the pool. His body looked long and tantalizing beneath the surface, the points of his shoulder blades glinting through the water. Just then Michael’s father, coming home from work, saw Michael at the top of the fence—although not what he was looking at—and yelled at him for do
ing something so dangerous. Michael had jumped down from the fence, twisting his ankle in the process.

  After the kissing fiasco, Amy became obsessed with boys at school who would prove to be just as unattainable: guys who had girlfriends, jocks who would never look twice at her. Michael would accompany her to dances where she’d hope to steal some boy away from his date, but it would go off badly, and she’d drink too much spiked punch, and the evening would end with her in the girls’ room, throwing up, with Michael holding back her hair. Why are you so nice to me? she’d say in between sobs. Because I can’t be anything else to you, he’d wanted to reply.

  Amy was the only person from that part of his life who knew he was gay. She’d known from that night when he was sixteen, when he’d had nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to. She hadn’t treated him any differently since then, except to get a little jealous of the female friends he made when he went away to college; especially Shannon Krist, whom he’d brought home once, even though he told her that Shannon thought she might be a lesbian. Over the years, Amy grew into herself, letting her hair return to its regular strawberry blond, although it was still spiky and short; keeping only a few tasteful piercings; dressing in her own geometric, angular designs that would cause people to stop her in the street and ask her where she bought her clothes.

  Now, Amy asked, her eyes half-lidded from the pot, “Do you wish you’d ever talked to your father about what happened that night?”