pried off tiles, swung sledgehammers.
I thought to call Alex. It was early evening in New York City. My working day was often no more than a fourteen-hour break from my insomniac half dreams of ex-girlfriends, dead relatives, distant friends, and old tormentors. Alex knew something about China—the food anyway. She’d introduced me to hot pot restaurants and soup dumplings. There was a place in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge we both adored. The staff knew what we were there for and brought out crab and pork dumplings in bamboo steamers and we hardly had to ask.
The whole time we’d dated, whenever I’d told Alex she was pretty, she would always find something. She would say her nose was too sharp at its point or her earlobes too long. I told her no one had ever once looked at her earlobes and her nose was cute, like a little bird’s beak. “Words to avoid in reference to a girl’s appearance,” she had said. “Beak.” Plenty of people I worked with would say they didn’t take any bullshit, that they “call it like they see it,” and what they were really saying is it made them feel important to yell at waiters. Alex would never throw a tantrum and was so polite to people she could come off as stiff, but her resistance to bullshit was a layer hard inside, gem in a rock. It was the thing I missed most about her—that she wanted to set the world straight.
I felt Alex and I were still close. Well, close-distant, near-far—these were relative terms. We didn’t hate each other as people who had once had sex often did. Sometimes I imagined trying to explain that idea to a robot, or a child, about two people loving each other very much, or thinking they do, about the awkward grappling in the dark, and then, so much of the time, within a year, wishing that person were never born. You’d get asked why—why is it that way? How does close not stay close? I had nothing to add to the paucity of the world’s collected wisdom about love and its disappearance. I did know that despite the odds—which were all in favor of hatred or indifference—Alex and I were better off in our breakup’s aftermath than most. I rattled my fingernails on top of the hotel room phone.
We’d met while we were both working on the Hill, though Alex hadn’t ever liked DC. There wasn’t enough of a city in the shadow of those monuments, she thought, not enough free air: all of it was requisitioned by government business. When the Ohio congressman she’d worked for died in office—physically in office, below his wall of honorary degrees—she took a vague-sounding program coordinator job for a ludicrously named nonprofit in New York City. She had a lot of extra time for email, I noticed, working at Give the World A Hug. They had a tiny office carved between the load-bearing columns of a flat-topped financial district tower, the barest sliver of the Hudson River visible through the hallway window.
For a while after she moved, I spent a lot of hours on the Acela Express. I had the Friday-evening trains memorized and waited all week to be discharged into Penn Station, that horrid, wholly unredeemable hallway. Every week I marveled that I was in the busiest train station in the country, and not once had an architect ever considered how a human would get on or off a train. Invisible entrances, mousehole stairwells. I had, more than once, been walking out of the train station and had a bewildered tourist ask where Penn Station was. I liked to imagine what it might have been like if Alex could have met me in the old Penn Station, the Beaux Arts one built a hundred years ago, with Roman vaulted ceilings and pink-hued travertine marble. We would have had to meet in another time, years before we were ever born, before that old station was demolished. But it would have been a beautiful thing.
I would walk a cross-town block from Penn Station and take the Q train to her out in Brooklyn. I liked to ride over the river, take stock of lower Manhattan, make sure everything was still in its place. My weekend visits never stopped as much as work intervened, and they trickled. Finally, it seemed like we were being realists to cut the official strings. Amtrak talked of cracks in the disk brakes on their Acela trains, and I got stuck in Baltimore about every third trip. Broken-down Baltimore might have been the sourest note—the boarded-up sections of the city you could see from the tracks made visible all the consequences of neglect.
It hadn’t been too long since I had seen Alex, probably about four months. No, more—five. She’d switched apartments, taken on roommates, trying to save money. When I imagined men she was dating now, I thought of bankers having affairs. I pictured men of a different infrastructure: a pied-à-terre; the Metro-North; Greenwich, CT. Lonely weekends where Alex’s phone rang only when he was sneaking a call from a corner of his property. I was making all this up because it was the worst thing I could imagine for her. The worst proves irresistible at certain times of night, usually between two and four a.m. Now it was nearing six. I have been an insomniac since I don’t know when.
I wouldn’t sleep anymore, so I walked down to see if Leo had managed to drown himself in the indoor pool. I thought it was smart policy to get away from my room’s phone—the easier it is to get in touch with people, the easier it is to forget how often you shouldn’t. At the pool, they wouldn’t let me in: the young woman was very apologetic, but she pointed emphatically to a sign specifying the seven a.m. opening hour.
I searched, and Leo wasn’t sacked out in the lobby, which I took as a good sign. The attractive planters of decorative ferns were no worse for wear—vases of floating cherry blossoms were unspilled and unbroken, so perhaps Leo had just gone quietly to bed. I wished him luck sleeping off Bund’s hospitality. In the hotel business center, I found my work email inaccessible, for reasons no one could or would explain, but this felt less like something I needed to correct than like the momentary lifting of a burden. I went out into the Beijing morning, where old limber men stretched at their apartment windows and women unhooked the hanging laundry. It was six thirty, so with twelve hours’ time difference, Alex would be just leaving work, maybe as restless as I was.
I was obsessed for a time with how Alex kept my memory, what she told herself about how we’d ended. But now I tried not to think about it. You can’t control posterity. When Alex moved away, I felt that all that was left in DC that I cared about were myself and the Jefferson Memorial. But a little sadness at least made the city feel like a more complete place to me: to live there and miss her was evidence that life had transpired, that I was more than my job.
OUT OF THE breakfast-room speakers, woodwind instruments played an Orientalized rendition of a Simon and Garfunkel song. An erhu accompanied, doleful. I picked at the buffet, dragon fruit and rice congee, espresso and an omelet bar.
“Someone to see you in the lobby,” a hotel clerk said, touching my shoulder. I wasn’t yet feeling suitable for company.
Thursday morning in a business hotel. The lobby bustled with anxious men hoping to close deals before the weekend. A young woman wandered out from the other side of a pilaster.
“I work for Bund International. My name is Li-Li. You remember?” she said.
There was a mechanical kind of lag as she spoke, as though she pronounced everything to herself in Mandarin, translated it to English, and made sure it was clear before she ventured it out of her mouth.
“I hope your sleep was pleasant?” she said.
“Wonderful,” I said. “We are very pleased.”
There was nothing to add—and nothing was said—about my misjudgment last night in trying to pull her into my confidence at the roast duck restaurant. I hoped for my own sake that I’d mumbled and she hadn’t really heard me.
“And your boss?” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The partners in Kaifeng will be very disappointed not to see him,” she said.
“This is what was arranged
