Golden Gate Park. He still gives her gifts, lockets and fountain pens and glass figurines that he leaves wrapped in her mailbox, and several times a week he calls her at home or at work, begging to be taken back. The breakup was a result of Ricky’s infidelity: Annie caught him in the act with his best friend’s sister. He had given Annie a key to his apartment, and she walked in on them one night after her bartending shift, the two of them half-naked on Ricky’s kitchen floor. She still loves him, she’s said, and wishes she could forgive him for what he’s done. Nick adores the sound of Annie’s voice, but when she says her ex-boyfriend’s name he always wants to laugh. “Rick,” “Richard,” even “Dick” he could accept. But a grown man who goes by “Ricky”?
“You know what I think?” said Nick.
“I’m afraid I don’t.” Annie closed the book, replacing it beneath the bar.
“I think I’m going to write Ricky a letter.”
My-Duyen is indeed beautiful, with bright green eyes and tea-dark skin and the muscular calves of a bicyclist, her hair shaped in a wedge. She wears a red knee-length dress, open at the neck, and stands barefoot on the wooden floor. The apartment, a studio not much larger than his, reminds Nick of a chapel: low-burning candles on every surface, the walls aglow with the solemn guttering of a dozen tiny flames. There’s a couch, a coffee table, a bookcase, a full-size bed. On a nightstand four wrapped condoms are stacked like casino chips beside a roll of toilet paper. My-Duyen takes his wrist and leads him to the bed.
“Sorry I was so short about being late,” she says. “It’s just that I have a schedule to keep, appointments all night long.”
She’s thirty or so, not young but not old either. Mature, he thinks, like a friend’s big sister. Nick is unable to take his eyes off her, and feels lecherous and rude staring the way he is. He can’t quite say what it is that draws him to them, but a shiver passes through him whenever he encounters a woman of Asian descent. Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese—the particular origins make no difference. An irrepressible hunger comes over him, and he can think of nothing but sex. He sees them in Chinatown and Union Square, young Asian women with sleek black hair and soft-looking skin—sees them jogging up and down Powell, hard-bodied and sweating in tight T-shirts and high-cut shorts, their wiry legs bowed like parentheses. Nick often pictures these women when he masturbates, and he’s spent a small fortune at the new sushi restaurant in Cow Hollow, where he’s taken countless lunches simply to eat in the company of the all-female Japanese waitstaff. Now, looking at My-Duyen, he forces a smile to calm himself, the shiver lingering in his limbs like the aftereffect of an electrical shock.
“I would’ve been here on time,” he says, “but I got a call on my way out the door.” He doesn’t want to admit that he was playing Dr. Mario, only moments away from reaching the coveted twentieth level, when he realized the hour. He doesn’t want to say that as much as he looked forward to meeting her, he was on an unprecedented roll and thought for a split second about standing her up, staying home and seeing how much farther he could get. “I walked here as fast as I could.”
“I don’t serve alcohol, but I can get you a soda if you’d like.”
“No, thanks,” Nick says, folding his hands over his lap to hide his arousal. Sitting beside her at the edge of the bed, he can smell her citrus-scented perfume, a trace of mint on her breath.
“Well then,” she says. “Before we get started, I think you have something for me.”
Over the telephone she never specified an amount, and so Nick brought only what he could afford, a hundred dollars. He hands My-Duyen the money—three tens, four fives, a fifty—and she counts it out, nodding amicably.
“This’ll do,” she tells him, and places the folded bills into the nightstand’s drawer. “Now we can relax.” She scoots closer to him, caresses his arm with the tip of her finger. “What is it you came here for?” she says.
“How do you mean?”
She gives him a slow, off-balance smile. “What would you like to do to me, Jack? What would you like me to do to you?”
“A letter of what kind?” Annie said, palming the lemon wedges into a pile.
“I want to make him jealous,” said Nick. “Tell him we’re getting married and he isn’t invited to the wedding. Tell him we’re a thing, you and I, even though we aren’t. Generally, I’m not such a vengeful dude, but wouldn’t it feel good to make Ricky feel bad?”
Around her, Nick often talks in a manner to which he isn’t accustomed—feels more confident, almost cocky, though he can’t say why. She’s out of his league for sure, but he’s never been intimidated by Annie’s appearance. Nick knows he isn’t handsome, not in any classical sense, but he’s reasonably desirable, he’s always thought: dark-haired and tall, with a genial, long-toothed smile he’s cultivated in adulthood. Every now and then he catches himself wondering what her ex-boyfriend looks like—wondering who Annie finds more attractive, him or Ricky.
“You’ve never even met him,” she said. “He’s actually not a terrible person. He just did this one terrible thing. When I think about it, I was really happy with Ricky. Happy in a way I’m not sure I could ever be without him.”
Nick and Annie have had dinner together outside of Salty’s, have shared nightcaps at nearby bars, though only as friends. Whenever he takes her hand her fingers wiggle free of his grasp, and when he tries to kiss her she turns sharply away. “Not yet,” she always says. “It isn’t the right time. A new boyfriend’s the last thing in the world I need at this point in my life.”
In truth, Nick’s attempts to hold her hand and to kiss her have been somewhat strained. Despite his feelings for her, he isn’t sure he’s attracted to Annie—isn’t sure his interest in her is carnal. She’s an attractive woman by anyone’s standards, but she isn’t Asian, and there are too many times when he looks at her and feels no shiver throughout his body, no hunger for sex, only a contentment so deep that the second they part Nick longs to be near her again. He’s never quite certain, then, if love—romantic love—is the right thing to call whatever takes hold of him when he thinks of her, when he’s around her. He can make no sense of his preoccupation with Annie, any more than he can make sense of his fixation with Asian women.
Annie took his empty beer bottle, tossed it into a recycling bin behind the bar. “Another Redhook?”
“What’s stopping me?”
She got Nick his beer, placed it on the round cardboard coaster that read “Salty’s” in big turquoise letters. Then she set to tidying the bar. He watched as she worked through a row of foam-stained pint glasses, plunging each glass into a sink full of soapy water, rinsing it under a faucet, then leaving it to dry on a long white towel. Heady from his third beer of the night, Nick said, “I love watching you move.”
Annie rolled her eyes, drying her hands on the tails of her shirt. “I miss the guy,” she said, and sighed. “I’m an idiot, but I miss him.”
Nick took the coaster from beneath his beer, flicked it back and forth against the tip of his thumb. “Writing utensil, please,” he said, and held out his hand.
Annie gave him a pen. He laid the coaster down on the bar, blank side up. Dear Ricky, he wrote.
Sex, he wants to say. I came here to have sex. But somehow the word seems crass, despite the urgency of his desire and the fact that
