Teddy recounted this story before he got down on one knee at his parents’ house the day after my twenty-fifth birthday, just before the strawberry shortcake was served. Instead of looking at Teddy, I looked at my mother, who beamed with a look of pride I’d never before seen in her. Then I looked at his parents across the table, smiling as if their baby boy had taken his first steps. Then I looked back at Teddy and nodded.
It was a beautiful ring, but I hated wearing it. Wearing it felt like a cover.
I knew that what I really wanted was impossible. But I wanted it anyway. I wanted the excitement, the home, the adventure, the expected, the unexpected. I wanted every contradiction, every opposite. And I wanted it all at once. I couldn’t wait for my reality to catch up to my desires. And that need was my constant companion, the underlying current of nerves that caused me to overanalyze every interaction and question every decision—the source of the never-ending conversation in my head that kept me up nights while Mama snored softly on the other side of the thin wall separating our bedrooms.
I knew what people called it: an abomination, a perversion, a deviance, an immorality, a depravity, a sin. But I didn’t know what to call it—what to call us.
Sally had shown me a world that existed behind closed doors, but it still didn’t feel like my world, my reality. All I knew was that I hadn’t seen Sally since the night I spent at her apartment two weeks and three days earlier, and that in those two weeks and three days, I hadn’t spent one waking hour not thinking of her.
I picked up the ring and put it back on as the cathedral bells rang out eight times. After the final bell, Chaucer appeared, as planned. There had been no sound—not of the gate opening, nor of footsteps. He arrived silent as snow, wearing a long black coat and a plaid hat with flaps that covered his ears. With his funny hat and curious expression, he reminded me of a basset hound. “Hello, Eliot,” he said.
“Hello, Chaucer.”
“Lovely night for a stroll.” His accent dripped with the articulations of a high-class Londoner.
“Indeed.”
He remained standing, and a beat of silence passed between us. He made no move to hand me the package, but turned and looked up at the cathedral. “Impressive structure. You Americans do love making new buildings look old.”
“I suppose so.”
“Take bits and pieces from the Old Country, cobble them together, and put the old American stamp on it, isn’t that right?”
I wasn’t about to debate him, nor did I understand why he seemed to want to debate me. Maybe this was what the men did when they met like this, but I had no time for the volley of clever banter. There was a job to be done.
He looked hurt at my nonresponse and reached into his coat, handing me a small package wrapped in newspaper.
I placed the package in my Chanel purse.
“Let’s do this again sometime.” He tipped his hat and remained standing there as I left.
The thrill never dampened—like the moment when a roller coaster crests at the top of the hill and pauses just before it lets gravity pull it down. I walked to the corner of Wisconsin and Massachusetts. But instead of boarding the number twenty bus as I was supposed to, I walked the twenty minutes to the large Tudor house at 3812 Albemarle. If I couldn’t have everything my heart desired, at least I had that moment, that feeling—and I wanted to savor it as long as possible.
* * *
—
After slipping the package into the safe house mail slot, I continued down the hill to Connecticut Avenue, where I caught a bus to Chinatown.
A wall of warm air and the smell of fried rice greeted me when I walked into Joy Luck Noodle. The host pointed to a back table, where Sally was pouring herself a cup of steaming tea from the small iron kettle kept warm by a flickering tea light. She hadn’t noticed me enter, and when we made eye contact, I felt that familiar inner gasp.
Two weeks and three days since I’d seen her—since the day I told her Teddy and I were engaged, since the night we made love. That night I’d felt I’d been changed from the inside out—into the kind of person who is confident in her every action, someone who doesn’t question her every thought, every move. But seeing her sitting there made me want to retreat to the bathroom and steady my nerves. When Sally gave me that smile of hers as I took off my coat and hung it over the back of my chair, for a moment I relaxed.
She looked beautiful as always, except for the caked makeup she’d attempted to cover the bags under her eyes with. She wore a brocaded green silk turban, but the strands of her red bangs peeking through appeared stringy and unwashed. As she reached for her teacup, I noticed her shaking hands.
“Tired? Hungry?” she asked in our own coded language.
“Hungry,” I said. “And I need a drink.”
We never talked specifics of our missions, but tired meant things hadn’t gone well, hungry meant things had, and need a drink meant exactly that.
She signaled for the waiter to bring us two mai tais. “I went ahead and ordered us the cashew chicken and pineapple fried rice.”
“Perfect.” I took off my gloves and set them on the table. Sally’s eyes drifted to my left hand for a moment before looking away. She let the silence linger—an old trick she must’ve forgotten she’d told me about, something she picked up during the war to get people to start talking. People will do anything to fill an uncomfortable silence, she’d said. I sipped from my mai tai and remembered Sally had prefaced her invitation to a late dinner by saying we needed to talk. I’d thought nothing of it then, but now it was all I could think about. “You wanted to tell me something?” I fished out the blue paper umbrella from my drink and popped the cherry on the tiny sword into my mouth.
“Nothing big.” She sipped her drink through the blue straw, careful not to disturb her lipstick. “Just wanted to find out how your New Year’s Eve was.”
“Two turns down the bunny slope and I was done. Spent most of the night in the lodge sipping hot cocoa by myself.”
“I imagine Teddy’s a fine skier. The naturally athletic type.” She rarely mentioned Teddy, and certainly never complimented him.
“I suppose so.”
“Well, my New Year’s Eve was as lovely as ever,” she said after another long sip. “Went to a party. Danced all night. Drank a little too much, you know how it goes.”
She was punishing me. “Sounds like a gas.”
The waiter came with our chicken, and again I was thankful for a chance not to talk. Sally wielded her chopsticks like a pro. I reached for a fork and stabbed a piece of pineapple.
After the waiter took away our plates, Sally took a deep breath and said in rapid succession that we could no longer see each other, that she was thankful for the time we’d had together and for our friendship but it would be better for both of us if we went our separate ways, that she was about to be too busy with work and wouldn’t have much time for socializing anyway.