German exchange student he took to his high-school prom, a thick-ankled Protestant who was saving herself for marriage—and despite his every attempt to negotiate at least a one-night stand, he wakes each morning alone. That he’s resolved to pay for sex only magnifies his long-established feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.
The door is ajar, a black number seven hanging upside down above the peephole. He steps into the apartment, clears his throat.
“Close it behind you,” My-Duyen says, drawing curtains across a giant bay window. Music is playing softly on a stereo, a jazz composition he doesn’t recognize. She turns to face him. “You must be Jack.”
He left home after high school, vowing never to return, not even to visit. Growing up in Las Vegas, he used to envision the day he would board a plane as an adult and fly off to some better city, escaping forever that place of false hopes and ever-changing luck—a place with more churches per capita than any other city in the United States and a suicide rate twice the national average. During Nick’s first semesters at USC those two statistics would interlace in his mind, relevant in some way to his newfound freedom. He moved to San Francisco a little over a year ago, after graduating with a degree in comparative literature, and has decided that no place is without the potential to let you down.
His apartment, a small studio, is on the top floor of an old white-brick building that overlooks the Powell Street cable-car line, a twenty-minute walk from the converted carriage house in Cow Hollow where he works as a copy editor for a weekly trade magazine called Footwear Today. Every so often he has a beer or two at Salty’s, a seafood restaurant around the corner from his apartment building. Down the hall from the dining area, the restaurant’s bar stands at the back of a large wood-paneled room that’s always darkly lit, its low ceiling supported by four rectangular pillars that make you feel as though you’re sitting below a pier. The walls are hung with fishnets, anchors, and oars, with mounted marlin and tarnished brass astrolabes, and at the end of the bar a model lighthouse stands beside an aquarium that showcases an assortment of sad-looking lobsters, piled against the foggy glass. He likes the kitschy maritime atmosphere, and has taken an interest in the new bartender there, Annie Peterson. She’s blonde and tan, and her face glows in a corner of Nick’s mind (big blue eyes, a full-lipped mouth, a tiny knob of a nose), hurtling to the fore like a shooting star when he least expects it. Though he’s only known her a short time—two, three months—he thinks he might love her.
The other night, Nick was sipping a Redhook when Annie asked him, “What happens if you’re in a car going the speed of light and you turn the headlights on?”
“No idea,” he said, and shrugged.
“Stumped again,” Annie said, slicing lemon wedges on a plastic cutting board. She wore faded blue jeans and a white oxford shirt, her shoulder-length hair sticking out from beneath a purple wool beret. It was eleven o’clock, and Salty’s had emptied out for the night. Roy Orbison sang “Blue Bayou” on the jukebox.
“Lay another one on me,” he told her. “Scramble my brain.”
Annie looked up at the ceiling, set the knife down on the cutting board. “Let me see,” she said. “Let me think.”
She has a fondness for paradoxical questions—owns a small book of them that she keeps beneath the bar—and Nick finds it both puerile and endearing that she’s committed so many to memory. She never tires of watching him labor to assemble a response, narrowing her eyes, placing a slender finger to her lips. Annie’s favorite question of all time: Can a person drown in the Fountain of Eternal Life? Her second favorite: Can God create an object so heavy that even He is unable to lift it? Nick likes obliging her with his earnest attempts at reason, though as often as not he capitulates with a shrug.
“I think I’ve already asked you all the ones I know,” she said, then reached down and pulled the book out from under the bar: Persistently Pesky Paradoxes.
“That alliterative title might have you thinking it’s a book of tongue twisters,” he said, trying to sound smart—trying to impress her—but Annie said nothing in return. She closed her eyes, opened the book to a spot somewhere near the middle. “Bop-bop-bop,” she said, scanning a page. “Here’s one. ‘In order to travel a certain distance, a moving object must travel half that distance. But before it can travel half the distance, it must travel one-fourth the distance, et cetera, et cetera. The sequence never ends. It seems, therefore, that the original distance cannot be traveled. How, then, is motion possible?’”
“That’s an oldie,” Nick said, finishing off his beer. “Even I’ve heard that one before. Where’d you get that book, anyway?”
“Ricky gave it to me. A long time ago, when we first met. It was a gift.”
It’s been six weeks since Annie broke up with Ricky, a taxi driver and aspiring sculptor of whom nearly everything reminds her: the restaurants and movie theaters they used to frequent as a couple, the big yellow taxis that weave through the crowded city streets, the outdoor sculptures at the Embarcadero and Golden Gate Park. He still gives her gifts, lockets and fountain pens and glass figurines that he leaves wrapped in her mailbox, and several times a week he calls her at home or at work, begging to be taken back. The breakup was a result of Ricky’s infidelity: Annie caught him in the act with his best friend’s sister. He had given Annie a key to his apartment, and she walked in on them one night after her bartending shift, the two of them half-naked on Ricky’s kitchen floor. She still loves him, she’s said, and wishes she could forgive him for what he’s done. Nick adores the sound of Annie’s voice, but when she says her ex-boyfriend’s name he always wants to laugh. “Rick,” “Richard,” even “Dick” he could accept. But a grown man who goes by “Ricky”?
“You know what I think?” said Nick.
“I’m afraid I don’t.” Annie closed the book, replacing it beneath the bar.
“I think I’m going to write Ricky a letter.”
My-Duyen is indeed beautiful, with bright green eyes and tea-dark skin and the muscular calves of a bicyclist, her hair shaped in a wedge. She wears a red knee-length dress, open at the neck, and stands barefoot on the wooden floor. The apartment, a studio not much larger than his, reminds Nick of a chapel: low-burning candles on every surface, the walls aglow with the solemn guttering of a dozen tiny flames. There’s a couch, a coffee table, a bookcase, a full-size bed. On a nightstand four wrapped condoms are stacked like casino chips beside a roll of toilet paper. My-Duyen takes his wrist and leads him to the bed.
“Sorry I was so short about being late,” she says. “It’s just that I have a schedule to keep, appointments all night long.”
She’s thirty or so, not young but not old either. Mature, he thinks, like a friend’s big sister. Nick is unable to take his eyes off her, and feels lecherous and rude staring the way he is. He can’t quite say what it is that draws him to them, but a shiver passes through him whenever he encounters a woman of Asian descent. Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese—the particular origins make no difference. An irrepressible hunger comes over him, and he can think of nothing but sex. He sees them in Chinatown and Union Square, young Asian women with sleek black hair and soft-looking skin—sees them jogging up and down Powell, hard-bodied and sweating in tight T-shirts and high-cut shorts, their wiry legs bowed like parentheses. Nick often pictures these women when he masturbates, and he’s spent a small fortune at the new sushi restaurant in Cow Hollow, where he’s taken countless lunches simply to eat in the company of the all-female Japanese waitstaff. Now, looking at My-Duyen, he forces a smile to calm himself, the shiver lingering in his limbs like the aftereffect of an electrical shock.
“I would’ve been here on time,” he says, “but I got a call on my way out the door.” He doesn’t want to admit that he was playing Dr. Mario, only moments away from reaching the coveted twentieth level, when he realized the hour. He doesn’t want to say that as much as he looked forward to meeting her, he was on an unprecedented roll and thought for a split second about standing her up, staying home and seeing how much farther he could get.