11
Rachel
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NEW YORK TO SINGAPORE
“You’re kidding, right?” Rachel said, thinking Nick was pulling a prank when he steered her onto the plush red carpet of the Singapore Airlines first-class counter at JFK.
Nick flashed a conspiratorial grin, relishing her reaction. “I figured if you were going to go halfway around the world with me, I should at least try to make it as comfy as possible.”
“But this must have cost a fortune! You didn’t have to sell a kidney, did you?”
“No worries, I had about a million frequent-flier miles saved up.”
Still, Rachel couldn’t help feeling a little guilty about the millions of frequent-flier points that Nick must have sacrificed for these tickets. Who even flew first class anymore? The second surprise for Rachel came when they boarded the hulking two-story Airbus A380 and were promptly greeted by a beautiful stewardess who looked as if she had materialized straight out of a soft-focus ad from a travel magazine. “Mr. Young, Ms. Chu, welcome aboard. Please allow me to show you to your suite.” The stewardess sashayed down the aisle in an elegant, figure-hugging long dress, ushering them to the front section of the plane, which consisted of twelve private suites.
Rachel felt as if she was entering the screening room of a luxurious TriBeCa loft. The cabin consisted of two of the widest armchairs she had ever seen—upholstered in buttery hand-stitched Poltrona Frau leather—two huge flat-screen televisions placed side by side, and a full-length wardrobe ingeniously hidden behind a sliding burled-walnut panel. A Givenchy cashmere throw was artfully draped over the seats, beckoning them to snuggle up and get cozy.
The stewardess gestured to the cocktails awaiting them on the center console. “An aperitif before takeoff? Mr. Young, your usual gin and tonic. Ms. Chu, a Kir Royale to get you settled in.” She handed Rachel a long-stemmed glass with chilled bubbly that looked like it had been poured just seconds ago. Of course they would already know her favorite cocktail. “Would you like to enjoy your lounge chairs until dinner, or would you prefer us to convert your suite into a bedroom right after takeoff?”
“I think we’ll enjoy this screening-room setup for a while,” Nick replied.
As soon as the stewardess was out of earshot, Rachel declared, “Sweet Jesus, I’ve lived in apartments smaller than this!”
“I hope you don’t mind roughing it—this is all rather lowbrow by Asian hospitality standards,” Nick teased.
“Um . . . I think I can make do.” Rachel curled up on her sumptuous armchair and began fiddling with her remote control. “Okay, there are more channels than I can count. Are you going to watch one of your bleak Swedish crime thrillers? Oooh, The English Patient. I want to see that. Wait a minute. Is it bad to watch a film about a plane crash while you’re flying?”
“That was a tiny single-engine plane, and wasn’t it shot down by Nazis? I think it should be just fine,” Nick said, placing his hand over hers.
The enormous plane began to taxi toward the runway, and Rachel looked out the window at the planes lined up on the tarmac, lights flashing on the tips of their wings, each one awaiting their turn to hurtle skyward. “You know, it’s finally sinking in that we’re going on this trip.”
“You excited?”
“Just a bit. I think sleeping on an actual bed on a plane is probably the most exciting part!”
“It’s all downhill from here, isn’t it?”
“Definitely. It’s all been downhill since the day we met,” Rachel said with a wink, entwining her fingers with Nick’s.
NEW YORK CITY, AUTUMN 2008
For the record, Rachel Chu did not feel the proverbial lightning-bolt strike when she first laid eyes on Nicholas Young in the garden of La Lanterna di Vittorio. Sure, he was terribly good-looking, but she had always been suspicious of good-looking men, especially ones with quasi-British accents. She spent the first few minutes silently sizing him up, wondering what Sylvia had gotten her into this time.
When Sylvia Wong-Swartz, Rachel’s colleague at New York University’s Department of Economics, walked into their faculty suite one afternoon and declared, “Rachel, I just spent the morning with your future husband,” she dismissed the declaration as another of Sylvia’s silly schemes and didn’t even bother to look up from her laptop.
“No, seriously, I’ve found your future husband. He was at a student governance meeting with me. It’s the third time I’ve met him, and I’m convinced he’s the one for you.”
“So my future husband is a student? Thanks—you know how much I like jailbait.”
“No, no—he’s the brilliant new prof in the history department. He’s also the faculty adviser to the History Organization.”
“You know I don’t go for professor types. Especially from the history department.”
“Yeah, but this guy is different, I’m telling you. He’s the most impressive guy I’ve met in years. So charming. And HOT. I would be after him in a second if I wasn’t already married.”
“What’s his name? Maybe I already know him.”
“Nicholas Young. He just started this semester, a transfer from Oxford.”
“A Brit?” Rachel looked up, her curiosity piqued.
“No, no.” Sylvia put her files down and took a seat, inhaling deeply. “Okay, I’m going to tell you something, but before you write him off, promise you’ll hear me out.”
Rachel couldn’t wait for the other shoe to drop. What fabulously dysfunctional detail had Sylvia left out?
“He’s . . . Asian.”
“Oh God, Sylvia.” Rachel rolled her eyes, turning back to her computer screen.
“I knew you were going to react like this! Hear me out. This guy is the total package, I swear—”
“I’m sure,” Rachel said, dripping with sarcasm.
“He has the most seductive, slightly British accent. And he’s a terrific dresser. He had the most perfect jacket on today, rumpled in all the right places—”
“Not. Interested. Sylvia.”
“And he looks a bit like that Japanese actor from those Wong Kar-wai movies.”
“Is he Japanese or Chinese?”
“What does it matter? Every single time any Asian guy so much as looks in your direction, you give them the famous Rachel Chu Asian freeze-out and they wither away before you give them a chance.”
“I do not!”
“Yes, you do! I’ve seen you do it so many times. Remember that guy we met at Yanira’s brunch last weekend?”
“I was perfectly nice to him.”
“You treated him as if he had ‘HERPES’ tattooed on his forehead. Honestly, you are the most self-loathing Asian I’ve ever met!”
“What do you mean? I’m not self-loathing at all. How about you? You’re the one who married the white guy.”
“Mark’s not white, he’s Jewish—that’s basically Asian! But that’s beside the point—at least I dated plenty of Asians in my time.”
“Well, so have I.”
“When have you actually ever dated an Asian?” Sylvia arched her eyebrows in surprise.
“Sylvia, you have no idea how many Asian guys I’ve been set up with over the years. Let’s see, there was the MIT quantum-physics geek who was more interested in having me as a twenty-four-hour on-call cleaning lady, the Taiwanese frat-boy jock with pecs bigger than my chest, the Harvard-MBA Chuppie who was obsessed with Gordon Gekko. Should I go on?”
“I’m sure they weren’t as bad as you make it sound.”
“Well, it was bad enough for me to institute a ‘no Asian guys’ policy about five years ago,” Rachel insisted.
Sylvia sighed. “Let’s face it. The real reason you treat Asian men the way you do is because they represent the type of man your family wishes you would bring home, and you are simply rebelling by refusing to date one.”
“You are so far off base.” Rachel laughed, shaking her head.
“Either that, or growing up as a racial minority in America, you feel that the ultimate act of assimilation is to marry into the dominant race. Which is why you only ever date WASPs . . . or Eurotrash.”
“Have you ever been to Cupertino, where I spent all my teenage years? Because you would see that Asians are the dominant race in Cupertino. Stop projecting your own issues onto me.”
“Well, take my challenge and try to be color-blind just one more time.”
“Okay, I’ll prove you wrong. How would you like me to present myself to this Oxford Asian charmer?”
“You don’t have to. I already arranged for us to have coffee with him at La Lanterna after work,” Sylvia said gleefully.
By the time the gruff Estonian waitress at La Lanterna came to take Nicholas’s drink order, Sylvia was whispering angrily into Rachel’s ear, “Hey, are you mute or something? Enough with the Asian freeze-out!”
Rachel decided to play along and join in the conversation, but it soon became apparent to her that Nicholas had no idea that this was a set-up and, more disturbingly, seemed far more interested in her colleague. He was fascinated by Sylvia’s interdisciplinary background and peppered her with questions about how the economics department was organized. Sylvia basked in the glow of his attention, laughing coquettishly and twirling her hair with her fingers as they bantered. Rachel glared at him. Is this dude completely clueless? Doesn’t he notice Sylvia’s wedding ring?
It was only after twenty minutes that Rachel was able to step outside of her long-held prejudices and consider the situation at hand. It was true—in recent years, she hadn’t given Asian guys much of a chance. Her mother had even said, “Rachel, I know it’s hard for you to relate properly to Asian men, since you never knew your father.” Rachel found this sort of armchair analysis much too simplistic. If only it were that easy.
For Rachel, the problem began practically the day she hit puberty. She began to notice a phenomenon that occurred whenever an Asian of the opposite sex entered the room. The Asian male would be perfectly nice and normal to all the other girls, but special treatment would be reserved for her. First, there was the optical scan: the boy would assess her physical attributes in the most blatant way—quantifying every inch of her body by a completely different set of standards than he would use for non-Asian girls. How big were her eyes? Were they double-lidded naturally, or did she have that eyelid surgery? How light was her skin? How straight and glossy was her hair? Did she have good child-birthing hips? Did she have an accent? And how tall was she really, without heels on? (At five foot seven, Rachel was on the tall side, and Asian guys would sooner shoot themselves in the groin than date a taller girl.)
If she happened to pass this initial hurdle, the real test would begin. Her Asian girlfriends all knew this test. They called it the “SATs.” The Asian male would begin a not so covert interrogation focused on the Asian female’s social, academic, and talent aptitudes in order to determine whether she was possible “wife and bearer of my sons” material. This happened while the Asian male not so subtly flaunted his own SAT stats—how many generations his family had been in America; what kind of doctors his parents were; how many musical instruments he played; the number of tennis camps he went to; which Ivy League scholarships he turned down; what model BMW, Audi, or Lexus he drove; and the approximate number of years before he became (pick one) chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief technology officer, chief law partner, or chief surgeon.
Rachel had become so accustomed to enduring the SATs that its absence tonight was strangely disconcerting. This guy didn’t seem to have the same MO, and he wasn’t relentlessly dropping names. It was baffling, and she didn’t quite know how to deal with him. He was just enjoying his Irish coffee, soaking in the atmosphere, and being perfectly charming. Sitting in the enclosed garden lit by colorful, whimsically painted lampshades, Rachel gradually began to see, in a whole new light, the person her friend had been so eager for her to meet.
She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but there was something curiously exotic about Nicholas Young. For starters, his slightly disheveled canvas jacket, white linen shirt, and faded black jeans were reminiscent of some adventurer just returned from mapping the Western Sahara. Then there was his self-deprecating wit, the sort that all those British-educated boys were so well known for. But underlying all this was a quiet masculinity and a relaxed ease that was proving to be infectious. Rachel found herself being pulled into his conversational orbit, and before she even realized it, they were yak-king away like old friends.
At a certain point, Sylvia got up from the table and announced that it was high time she went home, before her husband starved to death. Rachel and Nick decided to stay for one more drink. Which led to another drink. Which led to dinner at the bistro around the corner. Which led to gelato in Father Demo Square. Which led to a walk through Washington Square Park (since Nick insisted on escorting her back to her faculty apartment). He’s the perfect gentleman, Rachel thought, as they strolled past the fountain and the blond-dreadlocked guitarist wailing a plaintive ballad.
And you’re standing here beside me, I love the passing of time, the boy sang plaintively.
“Isn’t this Talking Heads?” Nick asked. “Listen . . .”
“Oh my God, it totally is! He’s singing ‘This Must Be the Place,’ ” Rachel said in surprise. She loved that Nick knew the song well enough to recognize this bastardized version.
“He’s not half bad,” Nick said, taking out his wallet and tossing a few dollars into the kid’s open guitar case.
Rachel noticed that Nick was mouthing along to the song. He’s scoring some major bonus points right now, she thought, and then she realized with a start that Sylvia had been right—this guy who she’d just spent six straight hours engrossed in conversation with, who knew all the lyrics to one of her favorite songs, this guy standing here beside her was the first man she could truly imagine as her husband.