Selina I received Parker’s next email the day after Christmas, in the bath. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 10:36 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective This condescending review made me think of you, for obvious reasons. [LINK: The Fire Beneath Her Feet, Gabrielle Martin—Review by Xavier de la Cruz] Generally I didn’t take my phone into the bath, but I’d been reading a library book on Libby, and it had been building to its cheap and obvious climax. Now, naked, I felt oddly vulnerable as I read the email. I wondered what Parker was doing. 10:36 PM seemed late to be sending emails to people he hated. I opened the linked review and read it. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 10:49 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective I suppose I’m living down to your expectations when I say that the above review is well-written, and I appreciate both its clarity and its succinctness. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 10:50 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective That email sounds like you wrote it using the predictive text feature.
I scoffed, put my phone on the sink, and hoisted myself out of the bath. As I dried myself off, the phone let out another chirp. I picked it up quickly, grabbing my towel into place with my free hand. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 10:52 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective but he was right, that book is pretty bad. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 10:55 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Surely not? Is Parker Navarro saying something negative about a book? You’re right, though. Terrible book. Meandering MFA project that should have been killed in its overpriced workshop. Sometimes I wonder what the National Book Award committee is thinking. An instant after I pressed Send, I wondered if that had been wise to put in writing. Kellie had reviewed The Fire Beneath Her Feet for City, so my distaste for it wasn’t public. I shifted my weight on the dampening bathmat and wondered if I could expect the next notification to be from social media. Something along the lines of @Parker Navarro Writes has tagged you in a post: If anyone thought Selina Chan was less awful in private, I’ve got news for you. My inbox refreshed, Parker’s name in boldface again. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 10:56 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Oh, I would kill to know what happens in those committee rooms.
It’s funny. With the glaring exc eption of my books, you actually seem to have good taste. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 10:57 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Thank you. Did you find that out when you read my entire review archive? To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 10:58 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective God. I don’t know why I told you that. I tied my robe and reclined on my bed in a pool of warm lamplight, my muscles relaxing. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 11:00 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective No, please, tell me more about your disturbing internet habits. Did you Google “Selina Chan age” when you were writing your short story? “Selina Chan alma mater”? “Selina Chan height”? To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 11:00 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective 34, Columbia, 5’9”. Next. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 11:01 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective
I think I’m starting to understand. These late-night emails are a ploy to get more information out of me, which you’ll use to write a sequel to your fanfiction. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 26, 11:02 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Pretty sure I’d have an easier time heisting information out of a bank vault. I put down my phone, fighting off a smile. There was nothing to smile about. We were two bored people snowed into a city at a standstill while our friends and family were off enjoying their vacations. That was the only reason I would ever spend time emailing Parker Navarro, and the only reason he would email me. Still, he presented an unexpectedly entertaining distraction. With City closed until the New Year, my social life had made its usual December transition from “quiet” to “borderline nonexistent.” Yesterday morning, I’d exchanged all of six texts with my cousins—Merry Christmas! Hope you’re surviving the blizzard! et cetera—before Peter and Amanda had made a polite exit, and I’d gone back to scrolling through a list of 100 Christmas Movies to Watch Before You Die. Later in the day, arriving home from Rockefeller Center with my ice skates knotted over my arm, I’d had a short video call from Cassie. She and Jacob were sweet to make time, considering the scope of their family retreat. During the Face Time, I’d seen an entire platoon of seven-to-ten- year-old nieces and n ephews tearing past the rental chalet’s enormous stone fir eplace, whooping, pursued by a pair of rippling basset hounds. In that instant, as I’d watched the six-inch blur of color in the palm of my hand, a small part of me had wished I was in Vermont with them,
although I’d never admit to the feeling. I already suspected my friendship with Jacob and Cassie could be described as cod ependent. Presumably they wouldn’t have done things like call on Christmas if I weren’t estranged from my parents. Six texts, then, and a ten-minute video call. Besides these interactions, I’d had no human contact since Juliette’s event. So maybe it was this social quiet that had me mulling email topics to Parker Navarro the next day, while I stood, motionless, in the hardware store, contemplating shades of ivory paint for my apartment’s trim. I composed and rewrote sentences in my mind as I passed through the self-checkout and walked home. As I took the elevator up to my unit, a series of images came to me of Parker in some hypermodern apartment up in Greenpoint. Emailing me while he d epressed the lever of his kettle. Reclining on some leather sofa. Sitting by the window, looking out, thinking about what to write. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:38 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective So, here’s something I wondered as I read These Extraordinary Times. Did the section about oyster-diving near the end originate as a short story? To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:40 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective No. What made you think it did? To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:44 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective To be honest, I thought the section would have made a good short story.
At the time, I thought, maybe that’s the answer to the unsolvable mystery that is this book. I thought, maybe Navarro wrote a good short story and then decided he needed to wind up to it with seven hundred pages of unrelated family dramatics and bad sex. That’s another question. Were you trying to write the most unappealing descriptions of sex ever put to the page? To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:46 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Absolutely. It’s funny! Bad sex is galling and hilarious. That’s not my experience of sex, if that’s what you’re asking. Leaning against the counter by my painting supplies, I felt a strange warmth run up my forearms, as though two hot palms had slid up toward my shoulders. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:48 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Delighted for you. At least I don’t have to read your next book through the lens of neurotic sexual misery. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:51 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Very true. I’d argue that you don’t have to read my next book at all. Think of how peaceful your life would be. You wouldn’t need to spend weeks generating five hundred insults, then winnowing them down to the fifty that eventually make it into the storied pages of City Magazine.
To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:52 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective It’s adorable that you think I need weeks to generate five hundred insults. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:54 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Do the insults come to you while you read, or do you finish a book before unsheathing your claws? To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:55 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective While I read. They spring up from the rage and despair of the moment. It’s more organic that way. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:55 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Rage! Rage? To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 12:57 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Rage. As I said the other day, I have exactly one life. We should all feel outraged when the irr eplaceable moments of our time on earth are misspent. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 1:02 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective
So, let me get this straight. You’re on a quest to optimize every instant of your life? To live every moment in pursuit of maximizing your utils? You don’t see the value in disappointment or partial success, even just as, like, threads in the fabric of the human experience? I also have to say that you’re a lot more morbid than I thought. I might have to revise my short story. Have you considered converting to a religion that believes in reincarnation? To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 1:09 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective If the combined powers of Victor Hugo and Marilynne Robinson couldn’t bring me to faith, Parker, I just don’t think the conc ept of death is going to cut it. I admit I have a morbid streak, but I also believe that morbidity is just another word for realism. We’re all an inch from death at all times, and I don’t think it diminishes us to recognize that. Actually there’s something dignifying about the idea that, teetering on a precipice, we still reach for something sweet. Like the man in Tolstoy’s fable, on the tree, tasting honey above the dragon. As to your accusations of optimization. Yes, I see the value of disappointment and partial success. But while we’re talking about the whole fabric of the human experience, I also see the value in anger and even some level of defensiveness, which remind you to value your own life and time and perspective, and not to prostrate yourself at other people’s altars. He didn’t r eply for a while. I pr epared myself for a wall of text about my self-centeredness. Instead what arrived was this:
To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 27, 1:20 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Printing this out and annotating it. The perfect basis for my next fanfiction. I caught the laugh before it left my mouth. Paintbrush in hand, I settled to the floor and glossed long ivory strokes over the baseboards, but as the minutes passed, my eyes continually strayed to the phone balanced on the arm of the sofa. The emails continued over the next few days. The strangeness of speaking with him didn’t lessen. If anything, the conversation felt stranger and stranger, as I began to see snatches of Parker Navarro’s private life, his daily self-imposed walks and his extended vegetarian grocery trips. The Nouveau Burger is worth the effort of checking four different stores, he insisted. Some part of me began to imagine we were trapped in an elevator together, halfway up a skyscraper, and that everything we were saying was out of some kind of necessity, but at the same time I knew that wasn’t true at all. We could have stopped. I didn’t know why he wasn’t stopping. Surely you have friends, I said once, speculating on why he k ept emailing me. I do, he said. Dozens of friends. Possibly even hundreds, you don’t know. I’d expect nothing better of you. Better? Selina, it’s good to have friends. Take my word on this one, since I know it’s way outside the scope of your interests.
I have friends. Prove it, he said. I sent him a photoshopped picture of myself in a stock photo of Friends Laughing Around a Boardroom Table. Holy shit, he said. You make jokes? Dozens, I said. Possibly even hundreds; you don’t know. Did you just fix my comma splice in your callback? You hopeless nerd? I’m a journalist, Parker. We don’t get to use comma splices and claim it’s for “sound reasons.” On the thirtieth, Jacob and Cassie returned to the city, and I waited for myself to stop r eplying to Parker’s emails. We went out for dinner that evening, Lyra in the high chair beside us, and when my phone buzzed at the table, my hand twitched toward it. Frowning, I pushed the phone into my purse, but even as Jacob charted Lyra’s rollercoaster of a nap schedule during their trip, part of me was wondering what Parker had written, then feeling irrationally exposed for thinking about our emails in front of Jacob and Cassie, as though they’d be able to read my thoughts from my expression. “Overall, though,” Jacob was saying, “we’re feeling pretty used to what she’s got to throw at us. So we’re going to take a stab at a real trip in February.” “You are?” I said, coming back to myself. “Where? That’s exciting.” “Thailand!” said Cassie. “Well, I’m thinking we start in Thailand. Then down the peninsula?” She glanced at Jacob, who smiled in his noncommittal way. “Won’t it be a nightmare during the New Year?” I said. Cassie’s shoulders bobbed. “I assume the intercity travel and stuff will be, yeah. But honestly, the crazier the better. We were just realizing it’s been two years since we were farther out than Vermont.”
We talked through a dozen bullet points on Cassie’s itinerary. I had to be honest and suggest that hiking in Malaysia in the ninety-degree heat might not be received too well by a notoriously fussy twenty-month-old, to which Cassie scoffed and said, “I’m the one who had the C-section. She’s got nothing to complain about.” Then, in a sweet, gooey voice, plastering kisses onto Lyra’s downy head—“You have nothing to complain about, do you? Do you? Despite your literally never-ending complaints?” “Mama,” said Lyra proudly. “Exactly.” Cassie gave Lyra a last kiss and turned back to me. “Anyway, what’s going on with you, Lina?” “Yeah,” said Jacob, “what’d you get up to during the snowstorm?” I lifted my shoulders. My pulse tapped gently in my wrist. “Nothing much. I finished r epainting the molding in my front room.” “Oh, awesome!” said Cassie. “Do you have pictures?” My phone buzzed in my purse again. “No,” I said quickly. “Not yet. I can send some later.” “Or show us tomorrow night,” Jacob said. “You’re coming to the party, right?” “Of course, yeah. Should I bring anything?” “A drink, if you want,” said Cassie. “But don’t go crazy. No hundred- dollar bottle of Bordeaux, or whatever.” “Ninety-nine-dollar bottle of Bordeaux. Got it.” The next evening, I zipped myself into a white cocktail dress and curled my hair, listening to Vivaldi. Snow was falling again. I felt content and distant, like somebody at a museum looking into a favorite exhibit glowing in its glass box. A chime behind me, and the glass seemed to fracture. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 8:20 PM Re: Kavan
Retrospective So, do you have an equally high-maintenance list of New Year’s Eve traditions? To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 8:21 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective My Christmas tradition list is not high-maintenance. It consists of three things. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 8:22 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective It consists of duck confit and a carefully paired Cabernet Sauvignon. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 8:23 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective What am I going to do, pair it with white? I’m not a child, Parker. Anyway, my only New Year’s tradition is going to my friends’ house party. They throw one every year. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 8:25 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective The friends from the photo? Which ones? The bearded giant shocked by an empty spreadsheet? The woman laughing at a line graph with no Y-axis label? To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 8:26 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective
Yes, those are the ones. Dear friends. Cherished friends. I assume that you and your thousands, possibly even millions, of friends are drowning in plans? To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 8:27 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective You’d think. Those assholes are all still in California. Enjoy the party. Smiling, I pulled on my heels and headed for the train. By the time I arrived, ankles straining, at Jacob and Cassie’s place, two dozen well-dressed people had already dispersed throughout the loft. As I entered, Cassie exclaimed, “Selina! This dress. I love it!” “Thank you. You look amazing.” She was wearing a black canvas jumpsuit with a red silk scarf tucked into its neck, like a cravat. “You look like a hot mechanic. More than usual, I mean.” “You know just what to say to a girl. You want a beer? Or we’ve got gin in the freezer.” “I also brought this.” I handed her a bottle of sake. “I’ve been chilling it.” She checked the label. “Sweet, I haven’t had this kind before. Thanks, dude!” She hugged me. “Come on back, let’s have some.” “Where’s Lyra?” I asked as I followed to the kitchen island. “Back there. Behind our best wall of soundproofing.” Cassie cracked open the sake and poured off a couple of glasses. “We’ll see if the sle ep holds.” “Fingers crossed.” I clinked my glass against hers. “For real. Oh, Kieran! Do you remember Selina? I think y’all met last year.”
“Yes,” said the man who’d stopped at Cassie’s shoulder. He was blond and clean-shaven, with a guileless smile and an unplaceable accent. A childhood of moving countries, I remembered. “You’re the critic.” “I am.” “I saw you in the news a couple of months ago,” he said as the door buzzed again, and Cassie hurried away. “You really eviscerated that man.” “Just doing my job.” “Lethal.” He shook his head. “Goodness. I could never.” This was nothing new. Before I’d deleted my dating apps, I’d heard this wary tone every so often on first dates, as though the men had realized they were out to dinner with a serial killer. Still, I’d take the fearful ones over the men who suggested, with patronizing smiles, that it must be nice to get to read for a living. “Have you ever read a book you hated?” I asked Kieran. “Sure.” “So much so that you warned a friend about it?” “Yeah.” He was smiling now. “Okay, I see where you’re going with this. But the scale is different. Aren’t you scared that authors will—you know. Hate you?” “Lots of them do.” I took another sip of sake. “But that’s the deal when you write anything, I think. People are going to hate your work. They’re going to hate you. That goes for authors and critics.” “Fair,” said Kieran, still smiling. I’d heard this word a lot on dates, too. Fair, like I’d won a point in some tennis match I hadn’t realized I was playing. I would think I was opening up a topic to discuss, and my dates would say, “Fair,” apparently thinking it was the end of the line. The only option was then to pivot away from something I’d hoped would interest us both. I was about to ask how the past year had gone for Kieran when my phone chimed.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I should...” He seemed relieved to retreat. I dug in my purse for my phone and opened my email. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 9:16 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective How’s the party? Have the line graphs been decoded, boardroom table cleared, photos snapped, airbrush applied? All the usual New Year’s activiitesd1? I stared at this email for a minute. Then I began to laugh. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 9:17 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Parker, are you drunk? To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 9:18 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m sending emails to the closest thing I have to a mortal enemy. Of course I’m drunk. (How did you know?) To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 9:20 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective I read closely. It’s one of my favorite New Year’s activiitesd1. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 9:21 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Oops. Counterpoint: Who emails at a party? What are you doing?
To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 9:22 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective I’m helping a poor, downtrodden man in his hour of need. Really, you should be praising my selflessness. I paused in my typing. When I lifted my head, I surfaced into the laughter and the 00 s Party playlist and the huge, snow-littered windows of Jacob and Cassie’s loft. But for five minutes I’d been somewhere else, that dark, quiet place I tipped into during these conversations. I pictured Parker sitting alone in a silent apartment and felt something brush the edge of my stomach. My fingertips had warmed from the sake. Before I could overthink it, I wrote, The party is actually in Greenpoint. If your hour of need is really extreme, feel free to come. My friends’ names are Jacob and Cassie. They invite around fifty people, so you wouldn’t be imposing. Then I attached the party flyer Cassie had spent a not-insignificant amount of time making in Canva. To: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com From: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 9:23 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Really? I’d come. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: selinachanlikesbooks@gmail. com Sent: Dec 31, 9:24 PM Re: Kavan Retrospective Text 612.555.8739 when you get here.
Either he left immediately or he was Jacob’s next-door neighbor, because not even fifteen minutes had passed when I got a text from an unsaved number. Hey, it’s Parker. I’m downstairs. I reread the string of numbers a few times, disconcerted. Had this been a mistake? Parker Navarro was texting me. He had access to my life. Here he was, listed beside Jacob and Cassie and my cousins. I didn’t know why this felt so distinct from email. I drained the last of my sake and buzzed him up. Standing by the door, I put my phone away, took the phone back out, began to save Parker’s number, hit Cancel, and put the phone away again. Yes. This had been a mistake. What floor was he on? Maybe I could head him off. The door swung open. There he stood, two feet away. He’d clearly just pulled off a black beanie, which was snow-speckled in one hand, the other sunk in his dark hair. A triangle of wool scarf peeked out from the neck of his coat. He looked at me for a startled moment. I didn’t move, abruptly hyperaware of how much we’d been speaking this past week, how jarring it was to be opposite him, no longer imagining his facial expressions. “Hey,” he said. “Hi. Come in.” I stood back. “This place is...” “Yes. Jacob’s parents are real estate moguls, so.” “Right, got it.” Parker took off his coat. The man had an apparently endless supply of good sweaters. This one was goldenrod. His neck was faintly reddened where his scarf had rubbed the skin. “Where can I—” “Here.” I opened the closet. As he hung his coat, I asked, “Do you drink sake?” “Not regularly.” Parker shut the closet door. Faced me. I realized I had no idea what to say. He felt different in person than over email, so much more obviously the man who’d looked me over with raw
dislike at the bar, who’d snarled out his hatred for me at Cipriani. My body seemed to remember those encounters, my palms prickling, my pulse rushing, as though at any moment one of us would snap. I knew he felt it, too. I could sense something wavering in him from the quick motions of his eyes. I’d seen him with other people. I knew how quick he was to fill space, to pour out meaningless niceties, to smile and agree and smile and agree. But that instinct was caught somewhere in his body. His eyes traveled down to my dress, my heels. “You walk from the train in those?” he asked. “Yes.” “How’d that work?” “Are you familiar with how ice climbers use pickaxes?” One corner of his mouth twitched. We both looked away. The confused heat in my body quivered, like the air above a bonfire disturbed by wind. He held up a bottle of wine. “Where should I put this?” “This way,” I said, waving him toward the kitchen island. “How drunk are you, by the way?” “Not very. Maybe four out of ten.” “Okay. So I don’t need to warn Jacob and Cassie.” “I don’t think so.” We wove between two strangers. I poured him a glass of sake and refilled my own and didn’t suggest a toast. As he took the glass, Parker’s eyes strayed down to my dress again. Some band of muscles in my torso tightened. “So,” I said. But his eyes had landed over my shoulder, and behind me, Jacob said, “Selina?” I turned quickly. “Jacob. Cassie. I invited—I mean, Parker didn’t have anywhere to go tonight.” “Thank you guys for having me,” Parker said. His voice had changed, higher and clearer and flavored with a bright new smile. “Your
apartment is gorgeous.” “Thanks!” said Cassie. Her facial expression could not more clearly have asked what the fuck was going on. “I’ll be honest,” said Jacob to Parker, “I didn’t realize you and Selina were on speaking terms.” “We’re not,” I said. “This was an act of extreme charity.” “This is actually just me trying to confirm that Selina has friends,” Parker said. “We’re rare, but we exist,” said Jacob. I could tell he was already warming to Parker, that fucker. “She has high standards.” “Oh, I’m aware,” said Parker. Cassie laughed, then broke off with a guilty clearing of her throat. “It’s fine,” I said. “Parker can be funny, once in a blue moon, when he puts his entire soul into the effort.” “Exactly,” said Parker. “It’s the same way Selina scrapes up a single moment of kindness.” Jacob chuckled. “Selina’s very kind. She gives us free books and babysits our kid and reads all the grant stuff I send her within the hour.” “Jacob,” I said. “What?” “You don’t need to”—I made an irritable gesture with my sake glass —“defend my honor.” “If you say so, killer.” Jacob ruffled my hair. “We’re going to go mingle, but don’t murder each other, please. I hate it when the ball drops and I have to deal with a body.” “You got it,” said Parker. Jacob and Cassie filtered back into the crowd as I fixed my hair. “How do you know those two?” Parker asked. “Jacob and I went to undergrad together.” “Does he do that a lot? Mess up your hair?” “Only when he wants to annoy me.” I
narrowed my eyes at Parker. “Don’t get any ideas.” “I’m not. I like my hands attached to my wrists.” I suppressed a smile. Synthesizers bounced between us; among the voices, the glassy taps of toasts. Parker said, “So, you haven’t told anyone that we’ve been talking.” “No.” I lowered my glass. “What, have you?” “No.” The sake was beginning to set in. As Parker glanced over his shoulder toward the windows, I watched the light shift on his forehead, across the curves of his cheekbones. His hair had begun to stray from where he’d pushed it back, a lock scattered over his forehead. I thought about introducing him to some of Jacob and Cassie’s friends. I was acquainted enough with most of these people to approach them without feeling entirely stiff. They would like Parker, obviously. He would bend over backward to become likable to them. He would ask them questions, smile easily at them. They would think his job was romantic, because it was romantic, being an author. Authors were the people wandering down imaginary roads, and we were the ones watching, drawing attention to the artifice. Critics could be astute, respected, but almost never were we loved. Yes. I should do it. I should introduce Parker to people whom he would like more than he liked me. For some reason the idea annoyed me, and I said, “They have a good view from that window,” and moved toward the corner, glancing back occasionally at him following me. The window was tucked behind a record player and partially hidden by an eight-foot-tall fiddle-leaf fig tree. I rested one shoulder against the glass and looked out at the shining stripe of Manhattan rising above the roofs of the opposite block. Parker did the same.
“So,” he said, “rate this past year on a four-star scale.” I considered. “Two and a half. It was a good reading year, and I cooked a lot of new recipes, but the past few months have skyrocketed my blood pressure. Thank you for that.” “Thank you for more months of existential panic over my career.” “Please. You’re an artist, Parker. If I weren’t the source of existential panic, you’d find it somewhere else.” “Did you just call me an artist?” “Yes. But in a pejorative way, not a validating way.” He’d begun to smile. “You can’t do that in person. You can’t, like, edit your tone after the fact. I heard you.” My lips were drawing outward, too, betraying me. “Fine. Yes. I don’t think you’re a complete hack.” I sipped my sake. “What would you rate the year?” “I wouldn’t. Unlike some people, I’m not really into reductive judgments.” I caught my laugh in my throat. “What was that?” He turned his ear toward me. “Did I just hear—” “You didn’t hear anything.” “Sure. Sure.” A weird silence elapsed. We both drank. I watched his left hand dip into the pocket of his jeans. He wore a silver ring on his fifth finger. “So,” I said. “Do you have New Year’s resolutions?” “Yeah. I do.” His lips hovered over the rim of his glass. “I’m guessing you think New Year’s resolutions are trite and meaningless?” “Mostly. And I’m guessing you make little edits to your New Year’s resolution based on who you’re talking to?” He shook his head, smiling. “Wow.” “Feel free to tell me I’m wrong.” “No, I ... Yeah. I don’t know what it is with you.” Our gazes brushed and I became aware of how close we were standing. My heels brought me onto his eye level. I could have been looking into a
mirror. He had shadows under his eyes; a smile line was drawn down into his left cheek like a sculptor had taken the tip of a pencil and traced it gently onto clay. At the same moment we looked back out at the city. Behind us, the party clinked and laughed, underscored by a looping orchestral sample and a de ep bass thump. Across the river, the lights glimmered. “I always wanted to live here,” Parker said. “Like, so much that it almost feels childish to actually do it.” I looked over at his light-lined profile and for an instant saw through to someone younger. A confusing mishmash of images followed. The hillside he’d told me he walked in Daly City, south of San Francisco, where he’d grown up. The hammock he’d mentioned in his bedroom. He gave me a guarded glance. “What?” I shrugged and looked back at the skyline. “I came here when I was eighteen and assumed the city would fix all my problems. Childish, too.” Slowly, Parker’s shoulders loosened. “Teenage Selina Chan’s problems.” He spoke quietly, but his voice pierced the noise of the party. “My imagination’s failing me here.” I half smiled, my eyes still fixed across the river. “What’s your New Year’s resolution?” “Write at least half of the next book.” “You’re working on something new.” “Yeah.” Parker leaned against the wall. “I actually—” He cut himself off. “What?” I asked. He held my eyes for a split second, then looked down into his drink. “I’m going to get another. Do you want something?” “Sure. I’ll try the wine you brought.” “Okay, but you have to promise not to pan it.” “You know I can’t make that kind of promise.” “Worth a shot.”
But I did like it, the red he’d brought. It was tight and acidic and I could feel it staining my lips. Parker asked what I was reading lately and I told him I was catching up with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, and he exclaimed in outrage when I called the book a second-tier version of Never Let Me Go, but then we got into Never Let Me Go itself, its frankness and tender naivete and endless gentle feeling of suffocation, and time began to whip by like whitewater. The conversation turned from clones to lab-grown meats to my least favorite college class—biology lab; I had a squeamish streak—to Parker’s, a philosophy seminar whose professor, he said, would routinely spend fifteen minutes adding qualifiers to a single uncontroversial sentence. Then college. The ego games. The paralyzing freedom. As our glasses emptied, I felt as though entire universes of conversation were cracking open, colorful and enormous, as though we could chase any thread of any sentence and wind up in a place I’d never been. Then, suddenly, heads were turning toward the far wall at a surge of sound. Parker and I glanced over, too. Cassie was turning up the volume on the TV so we could hear Times Square. I glanced at my phone, disoriented, and realized that it was 11:58. Somehow two and a half hours had evaporated. Onscreen, a red-cheeked man and a woman in a parka were swaying to an acoustic rendition of “What a Wonderful World,” wearing bulbous blue New Year’s–themed hats emblazoned with the Planet Fitness logo. “Wow,” said Parker. “The passage of time, sponsored by Planet Fitness.” “So beautiful,” I said. “So poignant.” “So hard to cancel my membership.” I laughed. Parker looked at me strangely, an almost confused smile on his face. “What a Wonderful World” ended, and the presentation cut between shots of the crowd. The glittering silver podium appeared with its
glittering silver sphere, the mayor and several people in black coats gathered around. They pressed. As the countdown began, Jacob and Cassie’s apartment began to rev up like an engine. I scanned the groups rising from their seats, facing the screen, dashing to refill their glasses for a toast. Couples were gravitating together, beginning to melt into each other. I experienced a feeling of risk, as though I were holding my hand too close to an open flame. When the countdown clock reached twenty, voices around us started to join in. Parker and I started chanting, too. I wasn’t looking at him, but I could hear the smile in his voice, and the ring on his pinky glinted in my peripheral vision as he lifted his wineglass. The ball dropped, glowing in the dark, fifty voices settling into a rhythm. I raised my voice too—“Five ... four ... three ... two ... one!” The room exploded into a racket of celebratory yells. Everywhere around us, hands were joining, lips meeting. I glanced over at Parker and found him looking at me. The noise of the room seemed dull somehow, clouding up in my ears. He let his gaze slip to my mouth. Startled, before I could stop myself, I did the same, my eyes falling to the not-quite-smile still on his lips. Neither of us moved. Abruptly I felt hyperconscious of my motionless body, the angles of my shoulders and arms, the strange position of my wrist as my glass kissed my bic ep. The itch of my dress near my shoulder, one slipped strap. The bluish shadow dipping over the corner of Parker’s mouth, cast off by the party lights. Then someone restarted the music. A dance beat cut through the air, and in a corner, someone threw open a window and whooped out onto the noisy street. Down the road, cheering burst, far-off and echoing, like a firework.
Parker lifted his glass. I clinked without thinking, drank down the last of my wine without thinking. I felt the urge to move, to say anything. I looked away and said, “I should get home.” “Yeah.” Red was brushed on his cheeks. “Me too, don’t want to impose on your friends. Um—let me walk you to the train.” “Right. Okay. I’m guessing you want to watch me slip on the ice?” “Guilty.” We navigated through the crowd in uncertain silence. I hugged Jacob and Cassie goodbye, ignoring their inquiring looks, and then Parker and I were out in the cold darkness, heat sloughing off my body, breath curling from between his lips like smoke. We started southward down Newel Street. Sharp wind cut the space between us. “You must live close,” I said. “I’d barely hit Send on that email when you showed up.” “Very close. I’m ten minutes that way.” “By Mc Golrick Park?” “Just across from it, yeah. I’m next door to that coffee shop, Little T.” I couldn’t help a laugh. “Jacob and Cassie and I are there all the time.” “Cool. I’ve been warned.” “Very funny.” We passed an apartment whose drawn curtains showed the shifting silhouettes of a house party, then a garden unit whose cracked door emitted the thump-thump-thump-thump of house electronica. We checked down a one-way and crossed at the red light, and he said, “Second-tier Never Let Me Go, I can’t get over that. You’re unbelievable.” “Am I? Why?” “Like, Kazuo Ishiguro hasn’t won enough of your goodwill for you to like his other books out of hand? Genuinely, I don’t understand that. Where’s your loyalty!” “Unquestioning loyalty makes you a bad critic, Parker.” I steadied myself against a stop sign and adjusted one of my heels. “I can’t just love something because it comes from someone I’ve loved before.” “You don’t ever want to give somebody a pass?” “I—maybe.” I hesitated. “I mean, if Anna Kavan had ever published a bad book, I
would have found that a little bit devastating to read.” “What if Jacob published a bad book?” This drew me up short. I searched for words for a moment before saying, “Jacob doesn’t write fiction.” “Play along with the thought experiment, Selina. What if he did? What would you do?” “Well, I wouldn’t write about it in City Magazine, first of all, because it would be a conflict of interest.” Parker looked up at the night sky and laughed. “You’re terrible at this thought experiment. You know I meant—” As we were about to turn the corner onto Nassau, he broke off. Just in front of us, a golden rhombus of light lay on the snow, cast out by an open door down a few st eps to our left. I heard the chatter of muted voices, and I thought, a bar, but then my eyes found a small, dirty sign: THE BOOK BAR. Through the doorway I saw bookshelves. “Wait,” said Parker. “I didn’t know this place existed.” “Neither did I.” We traded a look. The look was conspiratorial. I felt softly aware of my lightheadedness, the tipsy blur of my thoughts. Then we wordlessly st epped through the low iron gate and down the st eps, each one a slick of ice pitted with green salt. I st epped into the warmth, Parker close behind me. The place was low- ceilinged and rough, a labyrinth of unfinished wood and dim bare bulbs. As we moved down the main aisle, the voices grew louder, rounder, along with the chatter of a TV playing the New Year’s celebration, until the book-lined pathway opened up into a half-full dive whose creaking stools and rickety tables were crowded against packed bookshelves. I loved the place immediately. The books’ spines all faced out. White creases split their titles from years
of reading. I realized Parker was watching me. I unbuttoned my coat, my face prickling. “Want a drink?” he asked. “Just soda water. Thanks.” We exited the bar with glasses in hand and turned down the fiction aisle, which was so narrow that we had to move single file. Obscure paperbacks from the nineties faced out with book-talkers hanging beneath, while one reluctant copy of last year’s biggest bestseller had been shoved anonymously into the G section. “Fun selection,” said Parker ahead of me. “I like this store.” “What makes a good bookstore for you?” “The weirder the better, definitely.” He glanced up at the higher shelves, his cheeks flushed. “I love when a place feels like a well-k ept secret.” I smiled. When I didn’t answer, he glanced back over his shoulder. Our eyes met. I inhaled, smelled his cologne, held my breath. “This is kind of late for me,” Parker said. “Me too. I’m not usually up past midnight. Unless I’m being hectored with emails by some author with nothing better to do.” I caught one corner of his smile as he faced forward again. “Do you email anyone else? Or am I your only victim?” “My parents.” The words had come out before I could think about them. Parker k ept moving toward the end of the aisle, where, at the corner, fiction turned into memoir. “Are they phone-shy?” Even as I thought about lying or evading, I found myself remembering the way he’d looked out the diner window at the falling snow. I remembered my words in his voice. The longest uncompleted project of their lives. “No,” I said. “We have a difficult relationship. They called me after the Wiseman Festival, and sent an email, but that was the first time
we’d spoken in a couple of years.” Now his st eps did slow. When we reached the corner, he stopped, silent. I busied myself with taking off my coat, grateful that he wasn’t just saying the first bit of pablum that came to mind. “Did you answer?” he asked eventually. “After about six weeks.” I didn’t admit that our evening with Juliette had shifted some piece of machinery in me, that maybe, without the diner humming peacefully in the back of my mind, I would have left well enough alone. I suddenly worried that he’d push, that he’d want to get to the bottom of me. I worried that even I didn’t know what was at the bottom, that down there in the pit of me was something—not terrible, not monstrous or frightening, that I could have dealt with—something small and curled and sad, like a little girl in a corner. I didn’t actually think I could stand to see that in myself, let alone for anybody else to see it. But Parker didn’t push. He pointed to something just out of sight, around the corner. “Look.” The aisle was narrow, but he didn’t move. I took a st ep closer and found myself imagining a wobble of my heel. I could see myself tripping forward, landing against him. He’d catch himself against the shelf, another lock of hair tumbling out of place onto his furrowed brow. I imagined looking up into his intense, sensitive eyes. I stayed even and upright. I tilted my head to peek around the corner. Written across the raw wood end caps were hundreds of authors’ names. Love you, Book Bar! they’d written, or just their looped and well-practiced signatures. I thought I saw Juliette Liao’s artful scribble on the next end cap down.
I opened my purse and handed Parker a pen. “Here.” As he took it, his fingers brushed mine. The moment of contact was long and slow, almost leisurely, his fingertip traveling up and over my knuckle. I couldn’t tell whether the slowness was intentional or whether he was just like this, unhurried, so used to contact and closeness that he was oblivious to the things that in my insulated existence felt like a shattering. I wondered for a single bizarre moment if Parker Navarro was flirting with me. If, when we’d left the party, he’d thought we were leaving together the way two normal people might leave a party together. I thought about those hands keying into a laptop, She inches her fingers down the yielding contours of her waist. He wrote on the wall in small, narrow letters, well-k ept secret Then he signed, P NAVARRO, an almost unreadable knot. He offered me the pen. I added Selina Chan in highly legible cursive underneath. We studied our names on the wall. “That look like a truce to you?” Parker said. “I think so.” His shoulder tipped against one shelf, and he said in a scratchy, uneven voice, “It’s funny. I’ve never been in New York for the holidays before.” He must have been properly drunk at this point, because his eyes didn’t move from mine, as bright and focused as they had been in the Bar Car, when we’d been an inch from each other’s throats. “Because of your family?” I asked. “Yeah. My mom and dad split up when I was twelve, so, twice the planning my whole life.” He exhaled. “I miss them so much. I miss Manila. You know how sometimes you like getting forced into doing things you’d normally never do? When my siblings and I, I mean, when we get up for the morning masses leading up to Christmas or
stay out half the night, there’s this sort of camaraderie to it. Like they all really like each other.” Parker hesitated. His brow furrowed, and he gave a sudden, self- effacing smile. “Sorry. I don’t know why I—I mean, you don’t want to hear ... yeah.” As I watched him brush splinters from his coat, understanding hummed through me. He hadn’t said anything objectionable, let alone something that needed an apology. But, of course, this was how Parker acted with everybody whose opinion he cared about. He sanded off every edge to avoid remonstration. And with that truce written on the wall, he was beginning to do the same with me, too. It made me unexpectedly sad. I looked at him and experienced that peeling back of time again. I saw a twelve-year-old kid with perc eptive eyes, looking around at his family and seeing the universal absence of forgiveness. “Parker,” I said. “Yeah?” “You don’t ever have to apologize to me for your opinion.” He studied me, a couple of millimeters left in his drink, the dark liquor thin enough to look blond. He was so still just then, photographic. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I guess that’s not what you want, is it?” I gave my head the smallest shake and felt a slow, warm clench under my stomach, and on the heels of the feeling, something like alarm, something that made me tilt away from the bookshelf and take a st ep back. “I should get home,” I said. He blinked, the stillness broken. “Right. I’ve got to close out.” He tossed back the last of his drink, and immediately, unwillingly, I looked at his throat, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed, the shadow under the line of
his jaw. My neck flushed hot. I took another st ep backward, turning away, as he said, “Happy New Year, Selina.”