weeks, and they had come together in halting lunges, preceded by a mutual denial of their deepening attraction. Instead of discouraging Fitzgerald, these events made it seem even more important to make and extract a commitment. “You just said you couldn’t imagine loving anyone else. Let’s hold on to that. We’ll get married.” He took her hand.
“Fitz, it’s something for later.”
“Then later. Put it this way: could you think of marrying anyone else?”
“Right now, no, I can’t,” she said, putting her other hand over his.
“These connections happen only once. We can’t throw it away because of the problems around us. Later is fine, but let’s commit to our feelings now.”
“You’ll be a good husband,” she said. Ming took his arm, sat closer, and looked across the landscape of hills cut in a strange way into ski slopes. She had not yet told her parents about him, and said that she needed to wait until she had moved away from home. “It’s stupid, but I wish you were Chinese. They’ll threaten to disown me. That happened to my sister.”
“But that would just be a pressure tactic, to make you choose between me and them.”
“They won’t, ultimately. In the end, they can’t lose me. I don’t think so, anyhow.”
“What happened with your sister?”
“She broke up with her boyfriend.”
“Oh.”
“But that was different. I only met him once. It wasn’t serious, I’m guessing.”
The five-hour drive from Ottawa would give her the distance she needed in order to tell her parents, said Ming. She spoke with the assumption that Fitzgerald would be admitted to medicine in the following year. This was easier for her to say, and he said “if” while she said “when.” He did speak as if he would move into her condominium. Ming suggested that he might have to live on his own for a little while.
She said, “My parents did buy it and everything.”
“You could move out. We could get an apartment, so it would be our own place.”
“Or something.”
At the end of August, Ming’s parents moved her to Toronto. They filled her freezer with white plastic containers of ginger beef, sesame chicken, and other favourites of Ming’s. Fitzgerald took the train to Toronto on the same day that Ming’s parents drove back to Ottawa. The night before Ming’s first day of medical school, he said, “Now you’ll tell them?”
“I’m tired,” she said. “Right now, I need to be on my own, plant my feet.”
“It should be easier, now that you’re far away.”
“You don’t get it, do you? That it won’t ever be easy.” She turned away in bed.
“I just said easier.”
—
In September, Fitzgerald returned to Ottawa. At first, he and Ming were both anxious to speak every evening. They fantasized about travelling, about being together, about when Fitzgerald would visit. During the school day, they anticipated these fantasies—which became satisfying in themselves. By October, Ming’s class was dissecting the abdomen, and she suggested that they speak every second night.
“The volume of information is overwhelming,” she said.
“But I’ll miss you.”
“Do you realize I’ve been cutting apart human bodies for the last month?” said Ming. The first rite of medical school was the anatomy lab, the opening of skin into the organs.
“You mentioned that,” he said.
She described the dissections on a daily basis. She complained that one of her dissection partners, Sri, was a sentimental wreck who couldn’t even cut open an arm, who did nothing but slow her down. Chen, her other partner, was tolerable. Every minute was important, she said, and she had realized that she was spending too much time on the telephone. “I didn’t learn the thorax well enough, because you need me too much. How much do we have to talk? Human anatomy is important—it’s for real now.” Whenever Fitzgerald mentioned her classmates she corrected him, because they were “colleagues.”
“Right.” Fitzgerald wondered whether his biology and biochemistry lectures were no longer real—perhaps they were only the means to an end. He had previously enjoyed the ideas and concepts but now, even as he became more obsessive about the details and patterns of facts, he hated knowing that his marks were soaring as a result of Karl’s study methods. He tape-recorded lectures, applied a meditative attention to details and trivial facts. His weekly time sheet was crammed with reading, eating, listening to tapes, memorizing, and working on medical school application packages. He worked with a desperate and fastidious zeal, imagining that each A+ brought him a step closer to Ming. One night, Fitzgerald told her that he wished they could stop studying, and instead could lie in the grass at the ski hill. Ming reminded him that achieving the last twenty marks required twice as much effort as getting the first eighty.
Fitzgerald said, “Another saying from Karl.” Ming’s cousin Karl’s systematically mind-numbing method of achieving near-perfect scores was Ming’s lesson for Fitzgerald.
Ming was silent.
It was the first time Fitzgerald had mentioned Karl. Until now, only Ming had ever brought Karl into their conversations. Fitzgerald had often thought of Karl while being coached in study techniques by Ming, and he knew that Ming had to push Karl out of her mind when they were in bed. He did the same, but had not told Ming of this. He said, “Sorry, that just came out. I’ve been studying too much.”
“I’m showing you how to get into medical school. Isn’t that enough? Is it my fault that Karl taught me how to do it?”
Fitzgerald felt his heart beating. He said, “It’s as if his shadow is on me when I’m studying.”
“Well, you’ve never met him so you can dismiss your excess of imagination. I’ve got his shadow on me, and one of us is enough.”
“I guess learning is learning. Sorry.”
After his midterms in October, Fitzgerald asked Ming when he should visit.
She said, “There’s no good time. Only less bad times.”
“When will you tell your parents?”
“Now that I miss them, it’s hard to hurt them.”
“Then you’re glad to be away from me.”
“No. But it is a relief to be further from our secret.”
“And easier to study your anatomy and your dissection than to face our relationship, our problem.”
“You have this amazing belief that things have something to do with you,” she said. “Don’t you see? I have to be as committed to renal anatomy as I am to us.”
In the first week of November, Ming told Fitzgerald that she and Chen had gone out for dinner in October. He lived in the same building. Occasionally, she said, they grabbed a quick bite after class.
“We’re nothing more than colleagues, but I wanted to mention it. I wasn’t going to tell you, because it’s nothing. Chen and I hung out once, maybe twice. Then I thought to tell you, because otherwise if you found out you might misunderstand and think that it was something.”
“He’s Chinese?” said Fitzgerald.
“Who cares,” she said.
“You kissed him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “This is why I wasn’t going to mention it.”
A week later, Ming said that perhaps