CLEAVE
The smell met Kara as the apartment door opened, sweet but with a mellow tint, like the walkway between the bath-and-body store and the food court at the mall. “I’m here for the cooking lessons,” she began, to identify herself as the one who’d answered the Creative Loafing ad. She tried pronouncing Minzhi’s name, then tried again, wrestling with the Chinese syllables.
Minzhi opened the door wider. She was Kara’s age, maybe a little older, though her lack of expression made it hard to tell. When she leaned against the door, her arm turned to reveal the veins at her wrist, a lush blue made even deeper by the paleness of her skin.
The smell intensified as Kara stepped inside. Fifteen minutes late, she thought about apologizing but didn’t. They crossed the small living room to the galley kitchen, where the staples of their lesson were arranged along the counter. Minzhi began quickly. “Garlic,” she said, holding up a bulb. “Star anise. Szechwan pepper. Ginger.” She fingered the brown root on the table. “Maybe you have seen only the powder?”
Kara wasn’t sure she had seen even that. “Probably,” she managed.
“People,” Minzhi continued, “will say that only taste is important in food, maybe smell. But cooking uses all your senses. How something looks, how it feels when you press it, even how it sounds—all these are important, too.”
“I figured,” Kara said, “that a lot of it came in bottles already. Like soy sauce.”
“Why do you want to cook Chinese?”
“I’ve just always wanted to try.”
Minzhi cocked her head, as if considering a piece of abstract art. “All right,” she said finally, “we start with garlic.” She slid a cutting board to Kara and handed her a cleaver. “When you can cut without getting the smell on your hands, we move to something else.”
Kara wasn’t sure why she had lied: she had no real desire to cook anything. Most of her nourishment came straight from the microwave, sludgy concoctions that emerged half-frozen when they weren’t half-burned. Instead, she was learning to cook because her girlfriend, Lily, requested it. “For Christ’s sake, Kara,” Lily had said a few weeks earlier, “I’m not asking you to move to Washington. Just something. Write a poem. Fix me dinner. Anything that says you’re still serious about us.”
Kara had come out to her family her sophomore year at Duke, about the time she’d met Lily. They were both Texans—Kara from Houston, Lily from Dallas—though they had little else in common. Kara was cute but reserved, prone to bouts of cynicism. In more sarcastic moments, she referred to Lily as her debutante lesbian cheerleader: a six-foot blonde, vain, rich without apology. Such shallowness annoyed Kara at times, but she had come to rely on Lily’s constancy, and Lily’s presence had helped her navigate social circles that would have been daunting as a single. In college, Kara had liked the attention, the exclusivity. She had even liked the parties at the ΣΑΕ house, where the brothers—almost out of earshot—looked at her and Lily and muttered to each other, “What a waste.” She was Lily’s first serious relationship, as Lily was hers, a novelty that felt like devotion as much as anything ever had.
Long distance, though, had changed the equation. Lily had another year at Georgetown Law, and they were surviving on a diet of late-night phone calls and brief trips between Washington and Atlanta. Kara assumed they were still in love because it was the easiest option. But she had stopped counting the excuses she’d made to explain why she failed to pick up the phone when Lily called. If anything, Lily’s request for a show of devotion was overdue, and Kara acquiesced in order to prove something to both of them.
For their second lesson, Minzhi started with produce. “Cloud ear,” she said, removing a piece of dried fungus from a plastic bag. She waited for Kara to feel it then offered another piece. “Wood ear—tougher than cloud ear but cheaper. Good for broth.” She proceeded to tofu, explaining the various levels of firmness, then smacked her hand against what appeared to be a waxed watermelon. “Winter melon,” she told Kara. “Makes anything from soup to candy.” She ran a fuzzy melon along Kara’s forearm so she could feel the hairs, then sliced what looked like a blistered cucumber, holding it at arm’s length until Kara tensed at the smell. “Bitter melon,” Minzhi said with satisfaction.
“Funny,” Kara said. She looked into the basket. “What are those?”
“Chinese eggplant. They’re milder than Italian ones. Fewer seeds.”
“They look phallic.”
Minzhi’s eyebrows furrowed. “What does that mean? Phallic?”
“Never mind.”
But Minzhi took the joke as a sign of interest. “We can make them now. Nothing fancy, just a chile sauce. We need minced garlic and ginger.” She passed Kara a cleaver. “I will put these other things away.”
Kara began cutting, trying to recall the techniques she had learned the last time. She separated the garlic cloves and smashed them with the flat of the cleaver, then repeated the process with the ginger. While she worked, she glanced over the breakfast bar into Minzhi’s living room, a patchwork of milk crates and mismatched chairs. Only the television seemed new, a huge off-brand whose layers of dust suggested Minzhi rarely used it. Kara assumed the set had been a gift, well-intentioned but off the mark.
They were both graduate students at Emory: Kara in English, Minzhi in chemistry. As she moved about the kitchen, Minzhi described her fellowship from the Chinese government—cooking lessons provided extra cash beyond her stipend. “Plus I get to meet people,” she concluded.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for chemistry,” Kara said.
Minzhi shrugged. “I like that some answers never change, even when people want them to.”
“Not like reading novels, that’s for sure.”
“Still, you must be clever.”
Kara paused over the description. “I was a B student in college,” she admitted. “Literature was something I didn’t absolutely hate. My father had enough money to put me through a Ph.D. program, plus a little extra for the endowment fund.” She wondered if she were revealing too much. “I guess that sounds pitiful.”
Minzhi smiled. “It is good your parents love you.”
“Love,” Kara echoed, “yeah.”
When it came time to cut the eggplant, Minzhi showed Kara how to loosen her wrist in order to roll the cleaver. “The knife does the work,” she said. She positioned Kara’s hand on top of the blade then stood nearby as Kara began slicing. The pieces of eggplant mounted. Kara could smell Minzhi’s hair, not quite sweet, an herb with a name she didn’t know. “It’s like some secret Asian technique,” she said about the cleaver, only half joking, the knife seeming to move on its own. She waited for a reply, but Minzhi just watched her finish, offering a few clipped compliments.
They carried the ingredients to the stove, where a thin layer of oil heated in a wok. “Perhaps,” Minzhi said, smiling, “your parents sent you here to find a boy to marry.”
“Well,” Kara responded, before conversation succumbed to the sizzle of ginger and garlic, “at least I know it wasn’t that.”
The first surprise was how much Kara enjoyed cooking. When she gave herself over to them, even simple tasks like chopping vegetables or mixing a sauce could prove relaxing. The second surprise was her talent. She quickly learned the subtle differences between various herbs and spices, anticipating by smell how they would combine in a dish. Minzhi held fast to her belief that skill was a matter of perseverance, but the speed of Kara’s progress impressed her. Neither of them said anything when Kara stopped paying for lessons. One meeting per week became two, and they occasionally shifted to Kara’s apartment in Decatur, closer to campus. By the middle of fall semester, Kara had developed a habit of calling the lab to see if Minzhi needed a ride home, so she would not have to rely on the bus or her faculty mentor.
In the kitchen, Minzhi suggested new dishes and offered pointers, but the relationship soon felt like a collaboration. Beyond the kitchen, their conversation floated atop the shallow sea of campus chatter. They commiserated about stubborn undergrads and tried to describe their research to each other but usually let such conversations subside into the air around them. Kara understood that food was Minzhi’s haven from the everyday, as it was becoming hers, and she was reluctant to clutter that experience with noise. She had never before considered the virtues of shared silence.
Such silence, though, made some questions surprising. One night after dinner at Kara’s apartment, Minzhi floated through her living room, fingering the pictures of college friends. “So,” she began, “your boyfriend is somewhere else?”
“Pardon?”
“All the beautiful girls have boyfriends,” Minzhi continued, a deadpan tone that could have been sarcasm or a mere statement of fact.
Kara had cooked the meal solo, and it had gone better than expected: shredded duck breast in an orange-ginger sauce with steamed bāo and dry-sautéed pole beans. A small pressure formed at the base of her neck, as if she were listening to her mother’s speech about finding the right man. “I don’t like guys,” she said, the words tumbling out before she could find a better way to make the point. Then, as if it needed further clarification, “I like girls.”
She hadn’t intentionally concealed the fact but was surprised to find it coming out now, after several months of friendship. She anticipated a host of reactions, but her guest simply nodded. “All the beautiful girls have girlfriends,” Minzhi said.
Though several pictures of Lily dotted the living room, they mingled with photos of other classmates. “Not me,” Kara said. It was her second outright lie, also without thinking. She worried Minzhi would notice. But since the cooking lessons had begun, she had seen Lily only once, a weekend trip to Washington she had played off as a family visit. “What about you?” she resumed. “Anyone special?”
“I don’t know if you could call him special,” Minzhi said flatly, “but I am engaged to be married.”
The light feeling pushing from Kara’s belly toward her chest stopped. She struggled to look nonchalant. “He’s in China, then?”
Minzhi nodded. “His name is Liang.” Her eyes narrowed when she spoke, as if trying to pick out a small detail in the background of one of the photos. For a moment, Kara thought a name was all she would get, but then Minzhi’s features softened. She looked up. “He is a stock analyst. My friends who know these things say he is one of the best in Beijing.”
“Sounds special to me.”
“His father directs several factories that make microchips. When companies started competing for American business, his father’s won contracts over its rivals. Liang received 200,000 yuan to invest, and he tripled his father’s money in a year.”
Kara nodded. “I guess you’ve known him a long time.”
“I have met him twice,” Minzhi said, her tone still neutral. “The second time was our engagement party before I came to America. Our parents arranged the match.” She noticed the look of alarm Kara was trying to fight back. “It doesn’t happen much in the cities anymore,” she explained. “But my father moved to Beijing from the south to work in the Ministry of Agriculture. There’s much of the village left in him.”
She turned back to the pictures and stared at them. They seemed suddenly important to her—a few dumb college shots—girls, drunk and happy, their arms slipped loosely around each other’s shoulders. When she spoke again, her voice seemed far away. “There are advantages. I should be able to finish my degree before I’m married. Liang is busy with financial affairs now. Our first meeting, he said he was not ready for a family.”
“You know, most people wouldn’t call that a good sign.”
Minzhi shrugged. “He was honest. I was glad he had other interests. A husband should desire his wife, I think, but not too much.”
The air hung motionless for a moment. Then, as if at a signal, Minzhi turned back to the table and started to clear the dishes. She staunchly refused to use the dishwasher and had started the tap by the time Kara caught up, turning off the faucet. “I’ll take care of those later.” She wanted to say something else, something that returned the favor of Minzhi’s candor. But she could not bring herself to reverse her earlier lie. “I should tell you,” she finally managed, “that my dad is king of the dumps.”
Minzhi regarded her skeptically.
“I mean it,” Kara continued. “After the Depression, my grandfather bought land all over the south. He was going to build whole communities—Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama—but they never panned out. My father turned them into industrial landfills and sold them to the government. Most things in my life,” Kara said, moving her hands in a semicircle to indicate the apartment, “I owe to garbage.”
Minzhi smiled in spite of herself, setting her hand on Kara’s. “Perhaps that’s true for many of us.”
Her touch was warm, still damp from the sink. Kara’s thoughts drained from her head. “Maybe so,” she managed.
Winter break, Kara visited Lily, who fawned over the idea of seeing her “for more than two days at once.” But the trip fizzled. When Kara suggested dim sum, Lily ordered a double cappuccino from the café in her building. When Kara waxed artistic about the Smithsonian, Lily lamented the cable channels she hadn’t watched all semester. She looked older to Kara; the stress of law school had made the skin around her eyes look as if it had been flecked with a safety pin. And for all her newly-acquired legal acumen, she still wouldn’t watch the nightly news.
Still, their relationship deserved better than a confrontation at the holidays. Kara spent most of the week in and out of Lily’s bed, amid a haze of takeout menus and pay-per-view movies, then flew to Houston for Christmas and back to Atlanta the day before New Year’s. It only dawned on her when she arrived at her apartment that she had not cooked the entire break, not even to make coffee.
She had invited Minzhi to Texas for Christmas, but Minzhi’s parents had requested her return to China. Liang had offered to pay for the ticket, and it would be an insult to refuse. Kara left a message on Minzhi’s phone as soon as she got back, but a week passed without reply. She resisted the urge to drive to Minzhi’s apartment in Stone Mountain, calling the lab instead. Minzhi, she was told, had encountered a problem with her travel arrangements but would return soon.
The campus droned back to life, undergrads loitering around the white marble buildings like flies settling on sugar. Atlanta hovered thirty degrees above Washington; Kara imagined Lily with frostbite because of her refusal to wear a sensible coat. She imagined Beijing as she’d seen it in pictures, a city vaguely like the ones she knew, pedestrians needled by the winter chill, frozen breath rising to meet a layer of smog.
Two Sundays into the semester, she lay in bed, trying to find energy to prepare for her Monday class, when the doorbell rang. Minzhi looked almost elegant: long hair wound tight and piled against her head, a navy blue dress and silk shawl, and several pieces of jade strung from gold chains so pure they looked fake. “Lunch time,” she said.
“But it’s only ten-thirty.”
“Brunch, then. I will wait while you change.”
Kara considered her pink pajama bottoms and Abercrombie t-shirt in the foyer mirror. “I haven’t heard from you in weeks.”
“I will explain over food. Call it a date if you want. But we should go. We are celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?”
“Over food,” she repeated. When Kara did not move, she continued, “Am I not your type?” The line was delivered deadpan but with an edge at the end, both a joke and a challenge. Resigned, Kara headed for her closet.
Minzhi directed her to a seafood place on the edge of Buckhead that also served dim sum—a façade of fake polished chrome with Chinese symbols in gold and its English name, Harbor King, in red. Inside, waitresses in brightly colored jackets pushed their carts around the dining room, stopping at each table to reveal their dishes with a pair of tongs. Where the floor shifted from rug to tile, the carts jumped a quarter-inch as they passed, the metal dish-tops chattering like a brigade of cymbalists.
Minzhi headed for a booth near the front. They had driven to the restaurant in silence, and even now she seemed reluctant to speak. Several carts passed, from which she selected small plates of eggplant and yu choy. Meanwhile Kara watched a little boy in denim overalls peel the doughy skin from a whole plate of ha gao, eating the wrappers and tossing the shrimp filling into his teacup. “All right,” she said at last, “what are we celebrating?”
“My wedding.”
Kara was sure she’d misheard. Minzhi pulled a clump of greens onto her plate. Another cart swung by, and she selected a container of steamed pork buns. The waitress dutifully stamped their ticket and, with a hunch of her shoulders, set the cart in motion again. “Wedding?” Kara repeated. “You got married?”
“Soon.” She motioned to the food. “You should eat.”
“How soon?”
“I fly back in four days.”
“But your degree…”
“The department has agreed to call it a personal leave. I have enough credits to keep my fellowship.” She looked at her plate momentarily, as if considering what the dishes were missing.
Kara sifted through the information. “You’re coming back, then?”
“After the summer, yes.”
“By yourself?”
“For now.” She pushed the pork buns toward Kara. “Really, eat.”
Reluctantly, Kara picked up the bread and peeled the wax paper from the bottom. The taste of salt and hoisin filled her cheeks. Mirrors around the dining room made the restaurant seem brighter than it actually was. Kara considered Minzhi, who was watching her. “I’m surprised Liang agreed,” she resumed.
Minzhi inclined her head to one side. “Liang’s father has been buzzing in his ear. He says China is fine, but the real money is in America. Liang did not listen at first, but after a time, what could he do? He says he wants me to finish my studies. He says that he has plenty of money, more than his father knows. He can take care of me and a baby.”
“A baby? That’s a switch.”
“That is why they want me home, Liang’s parents. And mine. They want me to have the baby while I am here. They think if Liang has an American family, he will have an easier time finding work that is … what is the word?” Her chopsticks hovered above her plate. “Suitable.”
“So you’re going to be part of a breeding program.”
“I gave my word.”
Kara wasn’t sure if she was angry for Minzhi’s sake or something else. “Why did you even come back? You could have worked out the details by phone.”
“I would not tell you by phone. I would not do that to anyone. I told Liang I would agree to the ceremony only if I could come here first.”
For a fleeting moment Kara considered a sarcastic reply, but something about Minzhi’s delivery, calculated yet heartfelt, made her stop. She considered Minzhi’s outfit—her hair, her jewelry—and suddenly recognized the moment for what it was: a farewell, perhaps even goodbye. No one could predict what would happen in the next few months, and it must have dawned on Minzhi that her plan might fail, that come summer she could find herself still in China, pregnant or not, her marriage to Liang calling her student status into question. “You have to let me cook for you,” Kara said.
“There is no time. And I did not mean to trouble you.”
But Kara insisted. “It’s no trouble. Tuesday night at my place. I’ll pick you up around seven.” She played her trump card. “I’ll be insulted if you say no.”
Minzhi took in a breath as if to protest but then let her shoulders drop slightly. “All right,” she relented. “I’ll be ready.”
The last boy Kara ever kissed was Peter Glaspie, a cross country runner who’d been her Physics lab partner junior year of high school. Lanky and boyish, with muscles strung like rope across wood, he had seemed a safe choice when he asked her to the senior homecoming dance, a “just friends” arrangement for two people not seeing anyone at the time. Yet after the dance, and after brief stops at a couple of parties, Kara found herself on the couch in Peter’s basement, her face slightly flushed as their lips grappled. A few drinks had put her off guard. The stale basement air mingled with Peter’s sweat and aftershave. When he put his hand on her knee, she at first tried to remember when she had removed her stockings, maybe at one of the parties. But when his fingers began a slow crawl up her thigh, she pushed him back down to her knee, then slapped his hand when he tried it again.
It wasn’t a hard slap, but it surprised them both. She had let guys go further before, guys she didn’t like half as much as Peter, and she couldn’t tell why she’d reacted so abruptly. Seeing his concern, she tried to pacify him by pulling his face close again, pushing their mouths harder together as she fought back the idea that she had somehow let him down. In the days that followed, though, she came to see that slap as a turning point, like she had reached the bottom of a hole and—planting her feet firmly—had started to climb out again. It hardly mattered that Peter stopped talking to her as a result.
She could not decide why that experience stuck in her mind as she prepared dinner on Tuesday. Her classes canceled, she had spent the morning at the Dekalb Farmers Market, checking ingredients for recipes, sampling produce and mulling crustaceans with the fishmonger. The afternoon had been a fluster of scraping, cutting, and mixing—the kitchen balmy two hours before Minzhi’s arrival. She had hoped to cool down on the ride to Stone Mountain, but despite a thin sweater and the winter chill, she could still feel moisture at the base of her neck, the blouse tacking to her skin when she reached Minzhi’s apartment.
She had wanted a special menu, not just to showcase what she’d learned but to offer dishes that were more than pale imitations of food Minzhi would find at home. Seafood seemed the best choice, perhaps more delicate than she would have liked, but food that expressed Kara’s desire to take chances and move beyond what they had practiced together. By eight o’clock, sticky but satisfied, she was ready.
They feasted on steamed red snapper with ginger and scallion, fried Dungeness crab in pepper sauce, poached scallops and shrimp, mustard greens, and an earthen-pot casserole of whitefish, pork, and tofu. For dessert, Kara returned from the kitchen with two bowls of tapioca custard browned in the oven, watching Minzhi’s spoon slide past the blackberry garnish to a hidden core of sweetened red bean puree. The entire meal, she had resisted asking Minzhi what she thought. But by dessert, she kept silent only by holding spoonfuls of custard in her mouth, letting the warmth pool around her tongue. “Well?” she said at last.
Minzhi pushed the empty bowl to the table’s center, lifted her wine glass but set it down without drinking. For a few seconds, her face locked in an intensely quizzical expression, which made Kara worry she was displeased. But then she stood, walked around the table, took Kara’s face in her hands, and kissed her—quickly at first, then at length. Kara tasted vanilla as she inhaled, tried to stand, then let her body fold back into the chair. She took Minzhi in. She shut her eyes and felt Minzhi’s breath pour down her throat.
They made love with purpose, unhurried but deliberate. There were no revelations. Minzhi merely fit to her. Kara could not help thinking of Lily’s rote performances, for whom sex was meant to prove something, self-satisfied but desperate. Minzhi moved like a knife sure of its cuts. No pride or shame—only the moment—body meeting desire in the flash of each small act.
They fell apart in a rush of cool air and lay facing each other on the mattress. Kara did not remember falling asleep, but she awoke to dim morning light beyond the window. She could see Minzhi at the bathroom vanity, wrapped loosely in the bed sheet, pulling her hair into a familiar ponytail.
Noticing her, Minzhi came and sat on the edge of the bed. She moved one hand toward Kara, who covered it with her own. They stayed that way for several minutes, until the silence became almost uncomfortable. Finally Kara spoke. “Your parents knew. That’s why they made you get engaged.”
Minzhi stared down at her, pressing her lips together in what seemed like an attempt to smile. “My father told Liang not to let me come back here. He said that husbands should learn to draw lines. Liang told me. He wanted me to stay out of respect for my father’s wishes, so he would not have to demand it himself.” She looked toward the window, where the light was starting to melt through the blinds.
“So what are you going to do now?”
Her jaw set. “I will go home and marry Liang.”
“You could stay here,” Kara said, not caring whether it was true or not.
“And do what?”
“I’m just saying you have a choice.”
Minzhi did not look at her. “Americans,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Minzhi pulled her hand away but did not stand. When she spoke, her voice was even, not angry but reconciled, as if she were somehow looking out for Kara’s welfare. “Go make dinner for your girlfriend in Washington. She will bless you for it.”
Looking back later, what bothered Kara was the word American. Even before Minzhi mentioned it, Kara had thought of Lily—the complacency, the willing ignorance, even the beauty. Whatever else Kara might have been, she was not that. Indignation sparked in her throat, but what she would remember later was a humbling disquietude she could never fully describe, the sensation of viewing herself obliquely through someone else’s eyes. She wanted to ask how Minzhi knew about Lily, but the question hung in her brain as countless others massed around it. There must have been a time when Minzhi perceived her with perfect clarity, or at least thought she did, and she wished to return to that moment when the relationship had started to change. Or else she wanted to know that, despite how much things had changed, they had somehow stopped where they had started, with Kara on a doorstep, fumbling with words that would always leap a half-syllable beyond her grasp. She said the only thing that would come out. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t marry him. It’s not who you are.”
“Yes, it is.” Minzhi’s face softened. She leaned down until Kara could smell the near sweetness of her hair. “This,” she said, laying her hand over Kara’s breast, “is who I am. But the word I gave—to Liang, to his parents and mine—is who I am, too. Whatever love I feel for you, it is true only because I keep my promise to them.”
“That’s not fair. Don’t make this some cliché, like I know you love me only because you’re willing to leave.”
“You know love here,” Minzhi said, pushing more firmly on Kara’s chest. “But what good does that do? You talk about choice, but where have your choices gotten you?”
A heartbeat repeated where Minzhi’s hand pressed her chest, though Kara couldn’t tell whose. “I know I love you,” Kara said, “whatever you think.” Later, it occurred to her, she might admit she was wrong. But right now she wanted only for Minzhi to stay in the room. If she could hold her a moment longer, if she could compel the answer she knew Minzhi wanted to give, then everything on the other side of that moment might fall away in a path different from the one they were on.
But Minzhi stood and pulled the sheet to her body. “I will make you breakfast,” she said. She lingered briefly in the bedroom’s gray light—like a ghost, there was no better description—before slipping into the living room and closing the door behind her.
In the end, Kara drove Minzhi to the airport. A taxi would have seemed too cold, and anyone else would have made her jealous. She thought about parking, going as far as security, but settled for an embrace at the curb. “Autumn,” Minzhi said, her word sucked into the Atlanta morning on a ribbon of steam. Unable to break her rental agreement, she had left her furniture in the Stone Mountain apartment, including the TV. Kara volunteered to check on the place from time to time, but Minzhi said she had made arrangements. She followed the skycap to check-in as Kara pulled away.
Two weeks later, Kara cooked for Lily, who’d flown to Atlanta on a last-minute fare. The selections were mild: steamed tilapia, mutton stew, a vegetable hotpot, and the same custard that she had made for Minzhi. Lily applauded each dish—she literally clapped—then sometime after midnight went into the bathroom and threw up. They stayed awake through morning, Kara nursing her with herbal tea and washcloths, wondering if she needed to say the relationship was over. By the next afternoon, though, Lily was back to herself and doubly grateful for the meal and its aftercare. She boarded the plane to Washington convinced of their future, and Kara allowed it.
No communication arrived from Minzhi, not that she’d expected it. She devoted herself to teaching and to her own graduate seminars, earning the best grades of her career before dropping out at the end of the semester. Her advisor acted almost too understanding. Mid-forties, partial to V-neck sweaters and crew cuts despite his hair loss, he had frequently professed his distaste for academics to students, though he could imagine himself nowhere else. “You should take the MA,” he told her. “You’ve earned it. And if you ever want to come back…”
“I won’t.”
“Still. Open door and all that.” He waited for her to nod, which seemed to satisfy him. “So what now? Travel?”
As he bent across the desk, his head turning to highlight one ear, she imagined him as a young teacher practicing, mostly without success, a solicitous pose—something to confirm he cared about his students and their lives, which he did, even if he would always be too timid to act on it. “Cooking school,” she managed, just to appease him. “I’d like some culinary training.”
“Cooking school,” he repeated. “You could do worse.”
He seemed to mean it, as if, in an academic exercise, he had once ranked all of the professions, sous chef a step below tax planner but somewhere above carnie. Out the door, she knew when she thought of him—if she ever did again—he would be staring at his shelves, a man convinced that books could open to the answers so long as the right questions were asked.
She didn’t have a plan. Minzhi would likely come back in September. But if she did, it would be Minzhi and Liang, or Minzhi and Liang’s baby—or, if neither of those, the thought of Liang and Liang’s baby hovering around her like a second skin. Kara could not stand the idea of proximity without contact. And even if she could convince Minzhi to let down her guard, to give her body over to what pleasure it would allow, she could not stand being the root of betrayal. To have only part of Minzhi, she understood, would be a hollow triumph, which is perhaps what Minzhi had meant all along.
As her car angled onto the interstate, Kara felt relief, though tinged with regret at not seeing Minzhi one last time. She would have liked to talk to her, to describe the dream she’d been having, where they embraced in her bed and professed their love. Sometimes they would fall asleep in each other’s arms. But other times, the camera of the dream would swing around them until Minzhi’s face blurred and her body became something else, a knife Kara could feel slicing her front. Their embrace turned into a struggle, the vividness of the cuts shocking her, but she held on because she understood that letting go would bring, if not death, something like it. She could feel her body opening, but she hugged the blade tighter until it stopped thrashing and disappeared. Or maybe it melted into her, she wasn’t sure. She’d never had dreams like this one, and she wanted Minzhi to understand what mattered more than the dream was its mere wandering into consciousness. It frightened her, this dream body, battered and solitudinous. But her waking mind slipped into it anyway—painful at first, then less and less—until she wanted to imagine nothing else.
