Selina For the post-festival mixer, the Wiseman Foundation had booked a subterranean cocktail lounge called the Bar Car, located under a warehouse- turned-hotel. Its many spotted mirrors reflected smoky lights, stylish twenty-something waiters, and a long, greenish bar. I liked the place, exc ept for the bookshelves. The books were all turned backward, as though the most interesting thing about books was that they were made out of paper. After that panel, I’d considered slinking home to Brooklyn, to the Slippery Cork, the neighborhood dive half a block from my apartment. But crucially, the drinks here were free. I hoped Hayden was happy. “What I want,” she’d told me yesterday, “is a good sound bite.” Well, she’d gotten her sound bite. And I’d gotten Christian Gatehead telling New York how much the entire publishing industry despised me. I slipped into a seat at the end of the rapidly filling bar and arranged my bag of advance copies between my feet. Radiohead murmured over the speakers, and groups of lanyard-wearers jogged down the st eps, spilling sunset in behind them. I stretched a hand over the gutter, trying to catch the attention of the closest bartender, a man with a red-brown cloud of a beard and two full sleeves of tattoos. He didn’t see me. Someone leaned over the seat to my right. I caught the scent of cologne, something sharp and smoky—like orange bitters, toasted almond. The man braced his forearms on the back of the seat, two fingers resting on the curve of the bar.
I turned my head halfway before realizing it was Parker Navarro. I had to force myself not to jerk backward. His chin angled toward me. I could see the dislike on his face. He was readable that way, open. “Selina,” he said stiffly. “Parker.” A muscle moved low in his cheek. He looked down at my watch, at the crook of my elbow. In the half-light of the bar, these slight motions made shadows glide over his eyes. Saying nothing else, Navarro looked back to the bartender and pushed a hand through his dark hair. It stayed there for a moment, disheveled, before beginning to settle downward. I wished he’d stood somewhere else. I didn’t need to know he smelled like this, heady, faintly edible. My irritation increased. So easy for a handsome novelist to waltz onto magazine covers and keynote stages, covering up his mediocrity with his articulate hands, his sensitive eyes, the way his soft charcoal sweater stretched at the corners of his shoulders. Behind us, a hit of laughter. Down the bar, shouts vaulted over the roll and heave of conversation. But the silence between us was as dense as snarled wool. And as the shock of his appearance faded, my ire mixed with reluctant curiosity. He’d been less shallow on our panel than I’d thought he’d be. I’d expected an hour of bluster and equivocation, laced with insults. But he hadn’t joined in with Christian Gatehead’s jabs. Maybe even more surprising: He’d had opinions, apparently his own. The bearded bartender finally pushed his way toward us and crooked his finger at me.
“Gin gimlet,” I said. “Thank you.” “And you, man?” the bartender asked Parker. “Hey, uh, could I get a Jack Rose?” I glanced sideways. The Jack Rose had been my go-to cocktail in undergrad. It was a sweet, bright drink, apple and lemon, prominently featured in The Sun Also Rises. Some strange part of me felt like I should admit this. Confess to having the same literary affectation. Then a voice from his opposite side said, “Parker?” I watched his shoulders turn toward the woman in floral pants who’d appeared next to him. “I’m Emily Shapiro,” she said. “I work at Word Bookstore in Greenpoint. We were emailing a bit about your event?” “Oh, wow, yeah! Thanks so much for helping me with that. It’s so great to meet you in person!” “You too!” said Emily from the bookstore. One of her curls was tangled in a peacock-feather earring. “I caught your panel. It was great!” “Hey, thank you. More eventful than I thought it’d be.” “I know, right?” Navarro laughed. “But I had a good time.” “Good. That’s good!” “Thanks,” Navarro said to the bartender as his cocktail came across the bar. He looked back to Emily. “Do, um—I don’t know if you’re here with friends, or—” “I’m not!” “Cool, well, I’m over there with some other people, if you want to join.” She enthused. She seemed sweet and genuine. Navarro retreated with his red-gold glass. I watched him circumnavigate a low table with an old- fashioned globe set into its top. In a nook between bookcases, he set his camel coat over the back of a low leather chair and sat among a group of cheerfully chatting women. I recognized one of them—Carla Lew, who’d written one of the most unmysterious mysteries I’d ever had the misfortune to read.
Navarro’s mouth had tilted into a smile. He listened for a while, jumping in for a few words at a time, flashing his grin around. When Bookstore Emily hurried over to their seating area, he moved sideways to make room, then leaned in over the low glass table as though he were telling a secret. As he spoke, the women broke into peals of laughter that cut through the noise of the bar. Emily touched his arm. My feelings swung back into dislike. There was the Parker Navarro I’d expected to see all day, luxuriating in the spotlight and the attention from women, surrounding himself with people who’d treat him like the center of the universe. As he looked down at the spot where Emily had touched him, his short story intruded into my mind. She inches her fingers down the yielding contours of her waist. I imagined Parker Navarro lounging in the dim corner of a coffee shop, that flushed color high in his cheeks, thinking—for some reason—about my waist. Feeling an unwelcome tug in my stomach, I looked away. I wondered if he believed some of the things he’d written about me. The section of his story where he imagined my expensive organic diet, for instance, which if anything gave me too much credit. And I would have liked to speak five languages, but in reality, in the years since I’d stopped speaking to my parents, my halting, childish Mandarin had atrophied to a degree that I felt embarrassed even swapping conversational basics with cashiers in Chinatown grocery stores. For somebody who hated me to the point of fantasizing about my death in The Paris Review, he seemed to have a strangely high opinion of me.
My lips twitched, and I took a sip of gin. Fifty-three years later she will die in a hospital bed in San Jose, the only person in the room. I supposed I understood why that particular line had lit up the internet, but to me it was almost funny. Its frankness, its offhandedness. Without even knowing it, Parker Navarro had written something that understood me. I’d known for a long time that the most connected people would ever feel to me was through my writing. I wasn’t really afraid of dying alone, only of dying without having done the best I could. I thought of this more often than was probably normal, lying awake in my apartment, considering what I would leave behind if I died in my sle
Ep I took a long pull of my gin gimlet and picked through my bag of books, but before I could choose, my phone buzzed. Jacob or Cassie, I assumed, asking about the panel. But when I glanced down, I went still. The bar seemed to rotate around me. A smiling photo had appeared onscreen. Call from: Charles Chan My parents hadn’t called me in two years. I hadn’t seen them in three. But every few days I opened Whats App and checked the line of text under each of their names: last seen online 11:22 a. m. Sometimes I imagined this exact situation: a call out of nowhere, an accident, a medical emergency. My father was a nervous driver, and my mother had a weak heart. I threw a glance across the bar. Packed. By the time I fought my way across the crowd to privacy, the call would go to voicemail. I hunched toward the wall beside me and picked up. “Dad?” “Xueyan.” Those two syllables confirmed my fears. My mother and father hardly ever used my middle name. At home I was Xiao Yan in the day-to-day, Selina with company—Xueyan only under serious
duress. I slid forward on my barstool so its edge bit into my thigh. If I got a car back to Brooklyn and it took me fifteen minutes to pack a bag, I could be at La Guardia in an hour, although God knew if there were any flights to Minneapolis tonight. “What happened?” I said sharply. “What happened? You tell me. Fred Richards at work said today he see you in the news.” This took me so completely by surprise that for a moment I could only sit there, staring at the bottles of bourbon clustered upon an iron shelf. Thoughts of a rush flight to Minnesota vanished. I straightened up on my barstool. “Wait,” I said. “This is about the feud?” “The feud? The feud!” My father’s voice was a reedy, mournful baritone, like a bassoon turned into a sixty-eight-year-old man. “You say ‘the feud’ like we should know about this. We don’t know anything. You have a fight with this writer? You were in every newspaper for weeks? Why didn’t you tell us?” “What do you mean, why didn’t I tell you? What was I supposed to—” I hunched over the bar, my bewilderment interrupted by a stab of frustration. “Never mind. Okay. Now you know. Do you have questions, or something? Is that why you’re calling?” Now I heard my mother faintly in the background. “She picked up? Let me talk to her.” A moment later, she was saying, “Xueyan. What are you going to do about this? We heard about this fight from your father’s coworker! From—” “I know. Dad already said that.” “—so? So?” My free hand had curled into a fist in my lap. “I’m handling it.” “How?” The tattooed bartender had caught my eye. He made a motion toward his ear, a
kill gesture across his throat. “I don’t have time for this,” I said. “I have to go.” “Where are you? What’s all that noise?” “I’m at a bar. I’m fine. I just have to go.” My father again. “Xueyan, this is—” “I can’t be on my phone in here. Bye.” I ended the call and shoved my phone into my purse. My dress was sticking to the middle of my back. My face, reflected in the mirror behind the bar, looked blank and hard-eyed, but I felt like something inside my torso had bruised. My heart thudded against that soft place again and again as I drained half my gimlet in two long, bitter swallows. The panel, and now this, too? With the low roar of the bar churning around me, I returned to thumbing through the books in my tote bag, needing something beautiful to catch my eye.