The Expat, page 4
“You’ll recognize me,” she said flatly, and hung up.
Google Maps said it was a thirteen-minute walk to Powell-Hyde, so if I left now I’d barely make it in time. I zipped up my fleece jacket and started walking toward Sanjay’s desk, rehearsing some lame excuse about how I’d forgotten about a dentist’s appointment. But just before I got there, I changed my mind and slipped out of the office without telling anyone.
Direct sunlight summoned my hangover from its dark depths. The way to Powell Street was very steep and I gagged as I climbed the hilly sidewalk. By the time I got there, the back of my shirt was damp with sweat. As expected, the station was swarming with tourists. I shouldered my way through a Chinese tour group and scanned the crowd for anyone who could be Vivian.
About 5’9”, she wore dark glasses and stood with her arms crossed waiting, not looking, for me. I almost turned back when I realized there was a chance she was slightly taller than me. The sunglasses accentuated her sharp cheekbones and jawline, which contrasted with her soft nose and forehead. She was wearing baggy white pants over chunky sneakers and some kind of lacy black top that she covered with a purple Patagonia shell.
“Glad you made it,” she said, taking off her glasses and looking at me disapprovingly. We stepped onto the trolley together and found two seats near the front of the car. Now that I was sitting right next to her, I could make out a faint scar that ran from the left bottom side of her chin to the corner of her lip.
“So, do you do this often?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Meet up in real life with strangers from the internet?” She smiled as she watched me squirm. “I mean, seriously, Michael. There was no profile picture. You could’ve been in big trouble.”
“You’re literally the one who reached out to me.”
“I know. And I’m only in San Francisco for a short while. I’m really hoping I don’t regret this.”
I wondered if I still smelled like alcohol. “So, why are you on Samarkand?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m just saying you don’t really look like someone who would spend a bunch of time on a coding forum.”
She gave me an incredibly disgusted look. “Wow—sexist much? Haven’t you heard of Girls Who Code? I thought Americans were supposed to be sensitive about these things.”
Don’t panic, but you’re completely fucking this up, I thought.
“Okay, fine, fine. But why did you ask me to meet you on a train that was about to leave? Instead of a coffee shop or something?”
Vivian looked bemused. “I just wanted to see if you would make it in time. Plus, I wanted to go see Fisherman’s Wharf.”
“Why?”
“Because I like seafood?”
* * *
Vivian did not care for the seafood at Fisherman’s Wharf, which was mostly served in bread bowls. She wrinkled her nose at the gooey cups of crab chowder we got at the Pier 39 Crab House, which we were now trying to enjoy on-the go. It smelled like sourdough everywhere, and the sidewalks were caked with seagull shit.
“Why is there so much corn in this crab soup?” she said, poking around her bread bowl with her plastic spoon without taking a bite.
“People here think it goes well with the crab. You don’t like it?”
“Okay. Whatever. By the way, you don’t seem to really know your way around here,” Vivian said.
“This isn’t a place real people go. It’s just for tourists.”
She sighed and suddenly stopped in the middle of the street. We were next to a merry-go-round, a boxing punch machine, and a creepy museum of twentieth-century penny arcade games. Vivian chucked her bowl of clam chowder in the trash can. “Sorry, this place really isn’t what I thought it was. I’m embarrassed that I suggested it. You can decide where we go next.”
* * *
I called us an Uber to Radhaus, an Alpine beer hall in Fort Mason built inside of an old army machine shop. The place was warehouse-sized on the inside and completely whitewashed except for the oak tables, like an Apple store. We sat by the window at an east-facing table with a direct view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Vivian seemed much happier here. When the waiter came over, she surprised me by ordering in German: trout toast, veal schnitzel, bratwurst with sauerkraut, and two pints of Weihenstephan Hefeweissbier.
“You speak German too?” I said.
“Yeah. I spent a year in Switzerland during uni. Mostly to get away from the insufferable social scene at my four-year-institution in England.”
“Interesting. I heard the skiing there is good. Did you ski a lot?”
“No. I hate the outdoors.” She left it at that.
The food arrived and Vivian went for the bratwurst first, having nibbles of the trout toast on the side and leaving the sauerkraut and schnitzel untouched.
“So what are you doing in San Francisco?” I asked finally.
“Work,” she said. “Why else would anyone come here?”
She had a point, I thought. “What kind of work?”
She looked at me while chewing as if that was a ridiculous question. “I’m really big on the internet.”
* * *
After lunch we went next door to the Great Meadow Park at Fort Mason. It was chilly here because of the gusts coming in from the ocean and Vivian zipped up her Patagonia shell. We wandered to the far tip of Aquatic Park, a man-made cove. There were a couple of pay-per-view telescopes that looked out at Alcatraz, but neither of us had any quarters so we just squinted at it with our bare eyes.
“What a beautiful island,” Vivian said. “I wonder who lives there. Maybe a reclusive billionaire?”
“I doubt a wealthy hermit would want to live in a place where people are spying on him with telescopes all of the time,” I said. “Plus, that’s Alcatraz. It used to be a maximum-security prison.”
“Wow. What kind of crime did you have to commit to end up at a place like that?”
“Oh, it didn’t take much. Being late on your taxes, stealing a loaf of bread. Sometimes children were sent there for being disobedient to their parents, but they were usually allowed to come home after a week.”
Vivian laughed. “Do you think the prisoners got telescopes too?”
“What?”
“The city must look small from there. Imagine that every cell in Alcatraz had a powerful telescope just like this one that you could look through to observe life in San Francisco up close, as if you were there yourself. Children eating cotton candy on the Wharf, old couples sitting on park benches. Us standing here, watching them. Could you bear the loneliness?”
“That is incredibly grim,” I said.
“I would probably spend all day looking through the telescope,” Vivian said. “As sad as it’d make me, I think it’d be too painful to live on memories alone.” Then she gave me a long, strangely melancholy look—her eyes looked not so much at me but through me, like I was standing invisibly in front of a ruined coliseum.
“Probably at least half of the cells just face the Pacific Ocean,” I said. “And then you would be staring at nothing. Like D. H. Lawrence said, ‘California has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific.’ ”
“Smooth,” Vivian said, maybe flirtatiously. “Not bad for a computer science guy. But actually, it’s looking at China. Always has and will be.”
With that, Vivian and I took our leave of the forsaken rock and started walking down toward Bay Street.
“There’s some more stuff I can show you,” I said.
Vivian shook her head and pulled out her phone. “Actually, I need to get back to my hotel in SoMa for a meeting. Do you want a ride back downtown?” I nodded.
The Uber stopped in front of the Four Seasons on Market.
“Thank you for today,” Vivian smiled, this time genuinely. “I really had a lovely time.”
“Me too. Wait, when are you leaving again?”
She hesitated. “Saturday,” she said finally.
“So I probably won’t see you again before you’re gone.”
Vivian shrugged and took a long look at me before heading into the hotel. “I’m glad we met. Bye, Michael.”
For the first time since she interrupted my morning, I thought to check the time and realized I’d been away from my desk for more than three hours now, much longer than what I could explain away with a fictional dentist appointment. I raced back to the office, but when I got there, it was obvious that no one realized I’d been gone. Sanjay was still playing online poker. I sat down and started halfheartedly trudging through some of my to-dos from the morning, but my mind was stuck replaying scenes from the morning. At five o’clock on the dot, Sanjay swaggered into the bullpen and started rallying everyone for dollar beers at Foley’s on Stockton. I waited for everyone to leave and headed out on my own.
Back home I had dinner with Daniel in Club Mandarin’s kitchen. We squatted on pink plastic stools and ate a staff meal together, some fried rice with egg and char siu. I asked him if he ended up buying that motorcycle he had mentioned; he hadn’t. Actually, it had been a pretty dramatic week for him. He had just gotten his girlfriend pregnant, so “there would be no need for the motorcycle anymore.” Instead, he was saving up to open his own barbecue restaurant with Tony and Jeffrey, one of those tiny places where they hung the roasted duck and chicken carcasses up in front of the window. Daniel described to me with intense enthusiasm the different lots they were considering and the sorts of meats they would serve. I guess that meant they were moving out, which made me feel sad, but now didn’t feel like the right time to bring it up.
For some reason, I didn’t tell him about my day with Vivian. I’m not sure why; maybe because telling it would make it seem like a real thing, something I should care about, when it seemed pretty unlikely I’d see her again. Instead, I told him about my evening with Lawrence and the two girls from the Y Hotel, which he thought was hilarious. We split a bottle of wine and a few smokes, then I went up to my loft.
At the time of this writing I am sitting in the living room of my apartment and the sun has set over Sydney Harbour. There is no sound other than the whirring of the air conditioner. Through the sea-facing windows I can see the inky dark waters of the bay, feeding into the void Pacific. Vivian was right about one thing: it was too painful to live on memories alone.
7
The rest of the work week unrolled with more disappointments. Sanjay asked to meet with me one-on-one and said he was going to transition my main responsibility at GM to platform-as-a-service, which meant coding tools and services for other engineers to use to build self-driving car software, rather than building the self-driving car software myself. “Think about the impact you’ll have, bro,” he said, “it’ll be like everyone is relying on you.” On Thursday night, I stayed in and checked Samarkand a bunch of times, but Vivian was offline. I thought about how I needed to get out more—maybe pick up a new hobby. On Friday night, I went to karaoke with Daniel, Tony, and Jeffrey and passed out on my couch before my DoorDash KFC arrived.
But on Saturday morning, Vivian called again.
“Hey. I decided to stay longer. Are you free for dinner tonight?”
I was ecstatic—not just to see her again, but by the faint possibility that she’d decided to stay because of me. I took her to an Italian restaurant called Sotto Mare in North Beach where we had cioppino, wedge salad with blue cheese dressing, mussel steamers, and seafood risotto. She was wearing a dress and makeup this time, which increased my confidence that I was not mistaking this interaction for a date. During dinner, we talked about Samarkand threads and I learned that she’d studied computer science at UCL and lived in Hong Kong. She answered only the questions she felt like answering and still wouldn’t tell me what she did for a living or why she was in San Francisco in the first place. I didn’t press her, fearful of breaking the spell that temporarily held her at the table across from me.
After dinner, in an attempt to prolong the evening, I suggested a drink at the Top of the Mark, which Vivian reluctantly agreed to. It was a glass-walled cocktail lounge on the nineteenth floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel in Nob Hill, some 305 feet above sea level. We stayed there for forty minutes listening to the jazz pianist and looking out the window from our corner, which faced Alcatraz and the Pacific. I told Vivian that story everyone knows about the Top of the Mark, which is that this was where the American soldiers went with their wives during World War II for a last drink and dance before they shipped out to the Pacific Theater; the next morning, the women would gather back at the bar to watch their husbands sail off together on the same ship. Those who returned reunited with their wives in the same place. I couldn’t tell whether or not Vivian liked this story. She only finished half of her drink, then suddenly announced that she had to get home. While saying goodbye I couldn’t get myself to ask about her itinerary. As I tossed and turned in bed later that night, I realized that I’d let myself get my hopes up.
Luckily, she only made me wait three days before calling again. We met for oysters that evening at Waterbar and a late-night bike ride along the Embarcadero. She wore a thick gray cardigan with sleeves that were too long. I wondered what she had been doing the past three days but didn’t ask. At the end of the night, she told me in a cautious tone that she was considering staying in San Francisco for a bit longer than planned. Soon after that, we settled into a rhythm where I saw her about once a week. I’d text her with plans a couple days in advance and steep in anxiety for a day or two to receive an “okay” or a “sounds good.” I spent a lot of time between meetings strategizing about places to take her, stories I could tell her—whatever was needed to sustain her interest. There was something Scheherazadian about this situation, except instead of killing me when she got bored, she would just ghost me.
So we dined at Monsieur Benjamin and ate steak tartare, baked brie, and duck confit. I got us lost deep inside Golden Gate Park and she navigated us back to the trailhead without looking at her phone. I took her to climb Twin Peaks, which she said reminded her of the hills in Hong Kong. When we got to the top, I took my phone out to take a picture of her by the Sutro Tower, but she told me not to.
I soon realized that even though we were spending more time together, I was approaching an asymptote in my understanding of Vivian. Past a certain point, everything was closed off. She struck me as someone who had very few close friends. I never saw her text or call anyone. There was a faintly aloof, even antisocial quality about her.
The excursions sapped my attention at work. I was not at all enjoying my new role and started responding more slowly, sometimes not at all, to Sanjay’s emails. No one reprimanded me for my negligence or even noticed, which oddly made me worse. I started taking Samarkand jobs during business hours and derived an odd sense of satisfaction from this petty time theft. Meanwhile, during the evenings, I continued to work late into the night on my spurned project, refining certain features, adding others. Some part of me thought there was still hope that the work, if done right, would speak for itself, even if I couldn’t speak for it.
The last time Vivian and I went out together in San Francisco was a chilly Saturday morning in July. She wanted to visit the California Academy of Sciences, a science museum in Golden Gate Park. I particularly enjoyed the Neotropical rainforest dome, which featured a transparent observation tunnel that simulated the flooded forest floor; you could look up and see cichlids darting through the roots of a mangrove cluster. Then we hit the aquarium and, after that, the Morrison Planetarium.
Vivian and I stepped inside of the planetarium’s vast, chilly auditorium and used the dim orange glow of the walkways to find two seats near the center. The seventy-five-foot digital dome loomed gray and inert over us, triggering a flutter of childhood wonder. Then the lights dimmed and a program called Searching for Solar Systems began. Suddenly we were enveloped in darkness; with an orchestral flourish, the image of the earth as a blue and solitary sphere appeared on-screen. A soothing voice-over waxed poetic about the comfort we can find in our cosmic insignificance. The perspective panned out to our solar system, then wheeled through space to neighboring and distant galaxies. I glanced over at Vivian, whose spellbound expression told me that she was as captivated as I was.
After the program ended, the other visitors filed out while Vivian and I stayed behind for a while. The program had triggered a memory, and in the comfortable dark and quiet of the room I found myself telling it to her. I was eleven years old sitting at the kitchen table with my parents, and everyone was in high spirits because I’d brought home a good report card.
“Of course,” my dad beamed. “Thank your mother. In China, everybody says the boy gets their intelligence from the mom. Your mom was always top of our class. Number one or number two every time.”
“And I still ended up with you!” she laughed.
We were in the middle of our astronomy unit in science class, and that night I couldn’t stop regurgitating everything I had learned in class about how there were diamond showers on Jupiter and the fact that eighty-five percent of the universe was made of dark matter. I must have talked for twenty minutes straight, encouraged by my parents’ patient, glowing faces. After we were finished, my dad announced he was going out to get some supplies. He knocked on my door later that night with a present. It was a home planetarium the size of a soccer ball. He turned off the lights and plugged it in; with a soft whir, the projector clicked to life and cast constellations on my bedroom wall. We stayed like that until past midnight. He showed me the famous constellations—Orion, Ursa Major, the Big Dipper—and told me the stories, in Chinese, behind each.
When I thought about my dad, I explained to Vivian, I always pictured him hunched over the desk in his study. He was an introverted, maybe even aloof guy who liked working late in his R&D lab at Xerox. Even when he was home, he was usually holed up in his study tinkering with something, so growing up I rarely actually spent time with him. It was nice to remember the planetarium, I said.
