The Wangs vs. the World (8 page)

She felt that sick tug that leads us down paths we know are doomed.

“Leo,” she said, sad. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry
sorry
or you’re sorry
goodbye? 
”

“Don’t make me say it.”

“Be a grown-up, Saina. You make me stand here and talk to you while he smirks at us, you can say goodbye to me.”

And so she’d done it. Closed the door on Leo and turned around to Grayson’s triumphant hug. Later that night, after the tears and the confessions, after Grayson said that Sabrina had miscarried and he’d stayed out of guilt because she’d seemed so sad—an explanation that Saina had known was suspect but still couldn’t stop herself from believing—after they’d explained and apologized and finally crawled into bed feeling like they’d earned it, Grayson had turned to her with a grin and asked: “Is it true, then?”

Knowing exactly what he meant, she asked, “What?”

“What they say about black guys?”

“What’s that, Grayson?”

“You know, big feet, big hands . . .”

“Are you really asking me about Leo’s penis size?”

He’d shrugged and grinned at her again, and somehow she’d fallen for it. She’d shrugged back, and said, “Yep, all true.” And then she’d winked,
winked.
As much as she’d hated herself for it, she wanted to keep on being that person: loose and funny and lovable. The girl who can joke about her lovers and their dicks, and didn’t get hung up on little things like cheating fiancés who knock up their mistresses.

And for seven days that was who she’d been. Playful and light, blissed out on a permanent sex buzz that didn’t let up even when she’d come down with a urinary tract infection. For seven days it had been spaghetti out of a pot at midnight and long drives to estate sales in the middle of nowhere and ignored phone calls from her friends and family. Only the farmers market was off-limits, because Leo would have been there and how could she parade Grayson in front of him? Or worse, put him in a position where he might have to
serve
Grayson? Bag up his vegetables and count out his change? She couldn’t, and so the tomatoes in the sauce on their midnight spaghetti remained distressingly unheirloom, the off-season apples they ate while lying, legs entwined, in the backyard were dug out of a plastic bin at the local A&P.

Really, though, it wasn’t some sort of noble consideration for Leo’s feelings. It was more that she wasn’t ready to deny Grayson’s gravitational pull, to be knocked out of his orbit. A satellite, after all, can still look like a star.

But one phone call with her brother and sister was all it took to send Saina hurtling back down to earth. She couldn’t let them come here, battered and bruised, to find Grayson in her bed.

And her father.

She wasn’t even sure if he knew why they’d called the wedding off.

“Why you need to get marry already?” he’d asked, when she first told him about the engagement. “You still young. Is there a baby in there?”

And when the end had come, her father ranted about how he’d never liked Grayson, sent her peonies and a whole salted caramel chocolate cake, emailed Grayson’s parents and told them that he’d cover the lost deposits—how much did he now regret that oversize gesture?—told her to keep the ring and throw it out the window. But he’d never asked why. For all Saina knew, one of his friends had seen the Page Six item and told him about it. Maybe he thought that he was saving face for her by not mentioning the betrayal, just like he’d never mentioned the backlash to her last installation even though he and her stepmother had flown out for the opening and held court at the Hermès party, going drink for drink with her old sculpture professor and telling her gallery owner that she should be selling Saina’s work for more. He’d been a charming embarrassment and Saina had been glad when he’d packed up and flown back to Bel-Air after an obligatory Peking duck dinner.

That was it, then. She started up the stairs. Grayson had to leave. It wasn’t going to last anyway. She couldn’t keep him in hiding forever.

Just say it,
she told herself.
Just do it.
It would be worse if she waited until the last minute, until right before her family got here.

“Hey, baby, we have to talk about something,” she said, pushing open the door to her bedroom.

Grayson sat naked and cross-legged on top of her comforter. He held his cell phone up to his left ear with his right hand and held out his left hand, index finger up, to shush her.

“Oh my little darling,” he said to the phone, “and I wasn’t there for you.” A pause. “Yes. Yes, yes, yes.”

Saina went cold.

“Grayson.”

He looked up, annoyed, and shook his head wildly, waving his finger. “Wait, how big? Nine pounds? Nine? Wow.”

And then something happened: Grayson got beatific.

She had heard of people looking like they were lit up from within, but this was the first time she’d seen it. With that “wow,” all his edges and wrinkles smoothed out and the air around him thrummed, like he’d found a note on some universal chord that she still couldn’t even hear, much less play.

“I’ll be there,” he said to the phone. “A few hours. Don’t do anything else yet, okay? Just wait for me, I’ll be there. Yes. You’re amazing.” And then whispering it again. “So amazing.”

He dropped the phone and looked at her.

“Saina, I know I’m an asshole and I bolted and then I lied to you and she never had a miscarriage, but I’m a dad! I have a son! And I know you’re going to hate me, and I’m going to have to fix that at some point, and we can probably never be together again, but I . . . I have to go. And that’s all I can say right now. Okay?”

She was choking on something. Or she would be choking if she were breathing. Was that right? Maybe it was the other way around.

“Not okay. No! I can’t believe you’re doing this to me again. How could you say that she’d lost the baby? Is that what you wanted to happen?”

“I thought I wanted you.”

“And now?”

“I’m a father.” He glowed again, just thinking about it. “I have a child. Can’t you see? This changes everything! I can’t wait to see him. Maybe you’ll understand when you have kids.”

“Fuck off. You don’t have kids, you had a phone call. So you’re transformed just like that? In a minute? That’s all it takes? And Sabrina?” Just saying the name made her feel seasick, made the world shift and sway for a minute.

Grayson kneeled up on the bed and grabbed both of her arms. “She just had my
baby.
” Again, the glow. Like a firefly. Like a glowworm. A lying little glowworm.

In a minute Saina was going to hate herself, but she said it anyway. “And that makes you not love me anymore.”

He shook his head. “It’s bigger than that, hon. I mean, procreation, that’s the whole point of being a man, of being
human.
This is like the best piece of work I’ve ever made, or better than that. You’ll see, you’ll see. You’re going to be an amazing mother someday, too.”

That was it. Saina did the only thing she could think of. She reached out and stroked him, taking some satisfaction in his stiffening, and then tried to smile as she tightened her grip and shoved him as hard as she could back onto the bed. His head clunked against the wall.

“I was going to break up with you anyways,” she shouted. “I was just about to, and then you had to do this! Why couldn’t you just let me break up with you? You couldn’t just give me that?” Wild, disbelieving, she ran to the bathroom, locking the door and leaning against the vintage claw-foot tub. A minute passed in silence, and then she heard Grayson start to pack up his bag. When he knocked on the bathroom door, she opened it and threw his leather Dopp kit at him and then slammed it shut again.

“So, no chance of a ride to the train station, then?” She stayed silent, no longer even surprised at what he could say. “Okay, I know, of course not. And you probably don’t want to lend me your car, right?” Or maybe his advanced degree of fuckery could still surprise her. “I’m kidding, Saina. A little levity. You always like that, don’t you?” She sat on her fingers, smashing them against the penny tiles, examined a crack in the grouting between the basin sink and the wall, looked at her toenails, still pink. “Saina, please don’t hate me forever. Please try to be a little happy for us, for me and the baby. I think we might name him James. Good name, right? Solid.” He rattled the doorknob. She stayed very still. “Okay, I’m leaving now. You’ll understand someday.” He rapped on the door. Another moment. “I’m not sorry that I came up.”

And then he was gone.

十
Santa Barbara, CA

84 Miles

NOBODY CAME UP to say goodbye to Grace. Maybe no one knew. Her best friends, Cassie and Lo, were out of school at the moment—in Athens with their Greek class—and the thought of telling anyone else felt exhausting. Later, other students would drop out, their families bankrupted by Bernie Madoff and bad real estate, but right now there was only Grace, and she stood in the front vestibule alone, a pile of bags at her feet.

She wasn’t really used to being alone. That’s what happens when you’re the youngest child and every space you occupy already belongs to someone else: your sister’s clothes, your brother’s old kindergarten teacher, you as the tagalong, like a Girl Scout cookie, waiting to see if you’ll be included in their games. And then you’re the only one to be sent off to boarding school, where every moment is communal: breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the same 125 people who know exactly how you butter your toast and how high you roll up your uniform skirt.

Now this. Everything bad was happening to her before anything
interesting
happened. She sighed. Wasn’t that just the way life was.

“Hello, dear.” It was Dr. Brown, the headmistress.

“Hi, Brownie.”

Brownie raised an eyebrow. “You know we’re very sorry to see you go, dear.”

Shrug.

“But I’m sure that everything will be alright. Your family will find a way through this.”

Grace turned away. The school was built on a hill that sloped up gently from rows of red-roofed houses. A long driveway wound towards the front arch where they stood; over the suburbs and the cypress trees Grace could see a glimmer of ocean and town, and the highway that led south to home. Except it wasn’t home anymore. She wondered which car they’d be driving to Saina’s and how there’d be enough space for all of their things.

Or maybe all the cars were gone, too. Her dad tended towards small, fast vehicles—he was dismissive about the SUVs that crowded the parking lot on Parents’ Weekend:
“Gei bai pang zi,”
he’d whispered to her stepmother, and then said loudly, for Grace, “Fat white man, fat white ladies, only they need such big cars. Ha!” Never mind that she’d understood the Chinese—he always doubted her ability to understand the simplest words and then expected her to get allusions to old Chinese poems and pointless ancient sayings—or that everyone would hear him. Grace couldn’t care less if other people’s fat parents heard themselves get called fat. No, what completely annoyed her was that “Ha!” Any time her father said something that he thought was funny in English, he had to add that “Ha!” at the end. Totally irritating.

Brownie tapped her on the shoulder, trying to get her attention.

“What?” Was she expecting a hug? Grace hoped not, fake hugs were so gross.

“Grace, dear, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take your laptop, you know that it’s school property.”

Grace stared at her. “It’s not! We paid for this!” It was supposed to be part of the tuition package—a new laptop for each student, each year, with last year’s donated to the teen center. Except, oh god, now
she
was a poor at-risk youth. Maybe she could go to the center and find her laptop from last year.

“I’m sorry, dear, but unfortunately it’s the property of the school.”

“Brownie, you
can’t
take it away. My
life
is on there! And my dad
paid
for it, it’s not the school’s!”

“Well, Grace, unfortunately you have not paid for it. You actually began the year without any tuition being paid. We had no reason to doubt your family’s ability to do so, and we know that some accountants are not as vigilant with regards to tuition as they might be, so we chose not to press the matter, which clearly turned out to be a mistake.” She placed a hand on Grace’s laptop case. “It’s too bad that you have to be affected by these adult matters, but I do hope you understand.”

Oh god. This must be what a heart attack felt like. Something seizing her inside, pinching off her veins. Blood kept flowing out but no oxygen could get pumped in; it would keep on happening like that until her heart shriveled into a tiny thing and rattled right out of her chest.

“Fine,” said Grace, shoving her whole laptop case at Brownie. No crying. No. Crying.

The headmistress pulled out the laptop then held the case—really Saina’s old Marc Jacobs satchel—out towards her. Grace shook her head. Brownie sighed.

“Please, Grace. Your attitude won’t make this any better. You know we don’t want your bag”—they stared at each other for a moment, Grace refusing to move—“but we will need the power cord.”

“I know. Fine. It’s in here.” Grace dropped to the floor in lotus position and pulled her checkered rollie down so that its outstretched handle clanged into the brick floor. Jamming her hand into the side of the bag, she felt her way past the soft layers of her tank tops and dresses and jeans, searching for the white cord. “Wait, it’s not here. No, I know it is.” She looked up. “I’m not lying, okay?” Tears prickled against the back of her nose, crowded towards her eyes, threatened to pool over and spill. It took three more tries before her hand connected with hard plastic and she pulled out the cord.

Grace looked at Brownie again. The headmistress was staring at her cryptically. It wasn’t pity on her face. She wasn’t looking at Grace the way that Rachel had, with that totally cloying combo of pity and guilt. This was something different.