There Will Be Other Girls

Joseph was convinced that the only thing he needed to be happy was a woman. He had everything else: a nice apartment in downtown Chicago, a job at one of the top trading firms in the country, and the respect of his co-workers. At work he was in his element: he made trades with ease, reading off the order books and stock charts as if they were picture books. But it was at the after-work social events where he felt like he did not belong. At the office his colleagues did not seem so different from him, but when they stood beside their girlfriends and wives he felt that he did not know them at all. Joseph’s mere presence felt like an encroachment; he didn’t know where to stand, where to put his hands, who to talk to. Social cues, difficult enough as they already were, became a jumbled mess, and reading them was like reading an instruction manual in a foreign language. After a while he simply stopped going, and although the invitations kept coming he knew that it was out of politeness and that he was not really missed.

Joseph was a very eligible bachelor, according to his mother; he was of average height, of average weight, and nobody who saw his face could say with certainty that he was unpleasant to look at. Besides that, he was wealthy, successful, and very well educated. And yet, there was one crucial thing he lacked. He had learned math for his bachelor’s degree, computer science for his master’s, and statistics for his PhD, but somehow he had missed out on learning about the other sex. For thirty-five years of his life he had been celibate. He had never kissed a woman, never held hands with a woman, never been looked at in any way that could even be remotely construed as romantic. He had not been ashamed of this fact until it was suggested to him that perhaps he ought to be. His co-workers and friends were always careful to downplay the extent of their domestic bliss, but his mother was relentless in her mission to secure grandkids through her only child. She sent him articles about dating, gave him advice on dressing, and told him about the successful daughters of her friends, day after day, month after month, year after year. Mrs. Hu was not a woman who gave up. Even when Joseph’s father had been moved to the hospice she had said, “We are a strong family. We will get through this.”

He often wondered when it had happened, this separation from his peers. Was there a single event that had doomed him to this life of loneliness, or had it been a gradual process? There was one thing that he could remember, way back in second grade. It was Valentine’s Day, and Mrs. Whitley had decreed that those who brought cards had to give one to every student, so that nobody would feel left out. His mother had taken him on a rare shopping trip and he had decided on Batman and Robin’s V-Day Cards, pack of 32. When he had dumped the cards out onto the kitchen table, he had found that they were not all equal; one card was much larger than the others, a picture of the title heroes standing back-to-back, and a caption that said, “I may be Batman, but you’re Robin my heart!” He remembered this very clearly.

And then it was something in his pre-pubescent heart, which perhaps had an inkling of what was to come, that had made Joseph decide to give this card to his classmate Cindy. She sat in front of him in class and her long, red hair always made him think of falling maple leaves. She had small dimples in her cheeks and she had even laughed at his jokes, once or twice. He had not known why (the complexities of the human mating ritual would have been a mystery to any eight-year-old), but he had wanted to give it to her by hand, in a place free from prying eyes. Card distribution was in second block, and so he had chosen recess as his time of attack, the card hidden carefully in his pocket. He walked past the screeching slides, the clanking monkey bars, and there she was, sitting alone in the shade of a big tree, playing with the curls of her red hair. She looked up at the sound of his footsteps, and there was – he was sure of it – a smile on her face. It was the perfect opportunity. 

And then – well, what happened then? He didn’t want to think about it. He had not given her the card, that was for sure. If he had, he would not be the person that he was now. He did not remember why he had failed, but he did remember the feeling of that moment, standing beneath the shadow of the tree. It had been so ripe, so full of opportunity. Life from then on was mainly a series of closing doors: the parties he did not go to, the women he did not talk to, the Valentine’s Day cards he did not write.

It was a fine Friday evening in Chicago, one of the first real days of spring. Not that, for Joseph, Friday evenings were much different from any other evening. He had his routine, and as far as he was concerned, routines were meant to be followed: leave the office at seven, arrive home at seven-fifteen, cook until eight to some light classical music, go for a walk along the lake at eight-thirty, get home to do the dishes by nine-thirty. He liked Lake Michigan better by night because there were fewer people, and he would often think about some problem he had encountered at work as he looked at the city lights twinkling in the water. There were few problems he couldn’t solve within thirty minutes on the Lakefront. When he got home he would read old probability textbooks, skim some recently published papers, or leaf his way through his favorite poetry books. Not because he wanted to be promoted or anything like that. It was just what he did. 

But this particular Friday evening found Joseph on unfamiliar territory. He was sitting at the bar counter of a tavern that was slowly filling up with people celebrating the end of a long week. He had been here once before, for dinner with his parents when they had visited him (he had paid for the meal but his father had still complained that the prices were too high). It felt strange to be there on his own; everyone seemed to have somebody else and they were surely pointing at him or talking about him in their hushed whispers. 

The bartender was a large, Scandinavian man with two intricate tattoo sleeves of some flowery pattern Joseph couldn’t quite make out. He smiled at Joseph with the easy charm of someone who knew how to get big tips out of tipsy, loose-pursed businessmen. 

Joseph mumbled out his order but the bartender seemed determined to make small talk. “Are you new around here?” he asked. “I remember the face of everyone I serve, and I’ve never served you before. I’m Sven, by the way.” He stuck out his left hand, and Joseph could see that he wore a ring on his fourth finger, a fat band of gold. “I work evening shift every night except Tuesday.”

There was no way out of it so Joseph took his hand and limply moved it up and down. Sven seemed to be expecting a response so he said, “No, I’ve lived here for the past five years. Cambridge Apartments, around ten minutes’ walk away.”

Sven whistled. “If that’s the Cambridge Apartments I’m thinking of . . . I love the fountain in the lobby, it reminds me of something I once saw in Rome. Anyway, what finally brings you here, after five years? Your old place shut down?”

“I don’t usually drink,” Joseph said, “but I’ve heard that it’s a good way to deal with grief.”

“Oh no,” Sven said, his face instantly dropping into an expression of pain and concern. He began washing some cups in the sink and his gold ring flashed in and out of Joseph’s field of view. “Girlfriend break up with you?”

Joseph blushed. “My father passed last week.”

“I’m so sorry,” Sven said, recovering from his failed gambit with the grace of a professional. “Were you close?”

Joseph hated that question. How close could a man be to his father, anyway? When a stone-faced man came home at half past seven, ate dinner without speaking to his wife and children, and retired upstairs to watch Asian dramas behind a closed door, how could one really know him? When beatings were administered and only explained by a third party (he just wants what’s best for you, Joseph, he wants you to get into a good university so you don’t have to do labor like him), how could one know what he was really thinking? Joseph remembered with humiliation the one time in fourth grade that he had asked to borrow his father’s hard hat for show-and-tell. What he had gotten instead was a hard slap and a tirade of broken English mixed with Chinese (We would have been rich if we had stayed in China. Do you know how much we sacrificed for you?). Had his father really said those things? Memory was fallible, he knew, but this was the impression Joseph had of his father, one that remained until his death: an impression of a man brought low by emigration, embittered by a culture he did not understand, frustrated by a language barrier he could never quite overcome. 

The bartender Sven had moved away, taking an order from a woman who sat at the other side of the bar. Joseph didn’t like him; when he had a choice in friends, he usually gravitated towards others like him (and inevitably felt resentment when they betrayed him). The world was a cruel place. Even the ugliest, most socially awkward grad students eventually found someone compatible. But not Joseph. It was a numbers game, it was a numbers game . . . if Joseph had a nickel for every time someone had said that to him, well, he would have a lot of nickels. Sven placed a coaster in front of him before turning away again to prepare his drink. Joseph looked at it sullenly: Triumph Bar & Grill. That’s what he needed, a triumph. The word reminded him of the motorcycle brand, of big, loud machines that roared down the highways with impunity, speed limits be damned. It reminded him of that painting of Napoleon on horseback, a perfectly proportioned, perfectly angled painting of a commander perfectly at ease. It reminded him of Don Juan Triumphant, of an ugly monster lifted from misery on the wings of love, finally daring to look beauty in the face. If all those others could do it, then perhaps he could too. It was bound to happen. He just needed one triumph, and then the rest would follow like dominoes.

Sven came back with his drink, some opaque liquid and olives in a cocktail glass. He leaned over the bar counter conspiratorially. “You know, my father died too, couple of years ago. He was very close to me and my sisters. We went to the visitation, the service, then the burial, and when we got home, do you know what we realized? That life went on. At first we noticed his absence, then we got used to it. That’s the worst thing: seeing someone you used to love slowly fade out of your memory. So what we do is, my mother and my sisters and I, every couple of weeks we join a video call together and we talk about him, about all the memories we have of him, good or bad. You should give it a try if you’re having trouble remembering him. It’s always better to say things out loud.”

Joseph distinctively remembered not asking the bartender for advice; he made a mental note to tip at exactly the socially permissible 15% and not a cent more. Still, he tried to imagine what him and his mother would say to each other. Remember that time when he almost kicked down my door because he thought that I’d locked it? Or how about when he told me he would stop paying for my tuition if I “wasted my time chasing girls” in university? The very idea of it seemed strange. Theirs was a culture where people fought over the restaurant bill, where you had to pretend to reject the hongbao even though you really wanted it. It was not a culture where people actually said things out loud.  

But still, even if all the things he could remember were bad things, he thought it might be nice to have a conversation with his mother. A real conversation. Mrs. Hu never talked about her relationship with her husband to anyone, ever. To her parents, to her coworkers, to the few family friends they had made at church, everything was going perfectly fine (although it was tiring to be such paragons of the ideal Chinese marriage all the time, to be sure). At home, muffled shouting and broken plates told a different story. Joseph never understood why it was so important to present such an image to other people; it wasn’t like they cared about you at all. They had their own failing marriages to worry about, presumably. But Mrs. Hu was a strong person, the strongest Joseph knew. Maybe she didn’t need to talk about her problems with anybody else. If the issues in her marriage weren’t exactly resolved, she’d at least worked out a way of coexisting with her husband, and if the d-word was ever mentioned in their household it would be the first that Joseph had ever heard about it.  

“Do you want to buy her a drink?” Joseph snapped out of his reverie. It was Sven, leaning over the counter again. 

“What?”

Sven pointed to the woman sitting across from Joseph on the other side of the bar. “You’ve been looking at her all night,” he said. 

Joseph looked at the woman again. It was hard to tell, but she was probably in her late twenties. She was dressed casually, in blue jeans and a grey hoodie. She also looked like she was alone. She looked up, as if sensing Joseph’s gaze; Joseph blushed and looked away immediately.

“I-I-Is that something that people do?” 

“What, send a drink across the bar? Sure, people do it all the time. It’s easy: you tell me the drink you want to buy, or I can decide for you, and I just drop it off and say, ‘compliments of that handsome gentleman over there’. I probably get a couple of requests every night. Of course, I don’t always do it, not if the guy is acting creepy, or if the girl looks like she wants to be left alone.”

“So say I send her the drink. Then what?”

Sven looked at Joseph as if he had suddenly started speaking in Norwegian. “Then it’s up to you, my friend. If you’re asking for advice in that department, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I’m a married man.” He held up the hand with the ring, as if there was any way Joseph could have missed it. 

Joseph shook his head. What the bartender was suggesting was beyond vulgar and inappropriate: it was out of his character. But in a way, wasn’t this exactly what he wanted? To be late for work, for once in his life, smelling of perfume with a poorly hidden hickey on his neck? To be able to hint at his coworkers that his weekend consisted of more than just old textbooks and T.S. Eliot? And perhaps even – he allowed himself to imagine this, just for a second – to show up at the next Happy Hour with the girl on his arm, to be able to say to someone, this is so-and-so, we met at a bar one weekend, isn’t that the craziest thing? But then he had to acknowledge that this was a world he knew nothing about. People came to bars alone, looking for someone. A man might spot a woman that he liked. Sometimes he bought her a drink. And then what? Did he go to her, or did she come to him? What did they talk about? When did he pop the question? And what question did he ask?

And then it occurred to him that if there was such a thing as a question to be asked, and that if the desired answer was a yes, then the recipient must also have the option of answering no. And if she did . . . well, Joseph could not imagine what would happen then. He understood risk well enough (he traded on the stock market every day, after all) but this was different sort of risk. A rejection would only confirm what he already knew about himself, that he was incompetent, that he was different. He looked at her again. The woman was pretty, he supposed, attractive in a conventional sort of way, but not that attractive. He had seen women before who were much more beautiful. When he looked at her, he didn’t feel . . . what was a man supposed to feel before he made a move? Passion, lust, excitement? Joseph wasn’t sure what he felt. If he bought her the drink, then everything would change. Was it really worth risking so much for her? Was this a hill worth dying on?

He didn’t have to do it today. He didn’t have to do it now. There were other nights, other bars, other women. He could come back tomorrow, the day after, or the day after that. Today didn’t have to be a total waste; it could be a scouting mission. A trial run. Just getting his feet wet before coming back for the full submersion. What did he think - that he could cast aside thirty-five years of fear and ignorance in one moment of boldness? He had to take small steps, one at a time, and he had already overstepped what he was comfortable with, just being here at this bar, just talking to someone like Sven. And what about his father? His grave was not even cold yet. He was supposed to be mourning him, not chasing after girls. 

And yet, even as he resolved that he would come back another day, he knew that he was lying to himself. It was now or never. If he didn’t do it tonight, he never would.

Joseph hated this feeling of indecision that had become so familiar to him. He had felt it as he stood in the shade of the big tree, looking at Cindy and her flaming hair. He had felt it in his father’s bedroom in the hospice. He had taken turns with his mother sitting at his father’s bedside as he drifted in and out of consciousness, because it was what family did. What better opportunity was there of talking to someone than when the two of you are alone in a room, waiting for him to die? The chance was there, he had felt it, but still he had not said the thing he wanted to say. Oh, they had talked, about the weather, about his job, about pretty much anything else. But he had not been able to force the moment to its crisis. Something had been building inside him, a pressure that had risen and risen until it had seemed almost unbearable, and yet he had held it in. When a seal had been held and maintained for thirty-five years, it became habit. The world where he stayed silent was a world that he knew, and the world where he spoke was a world that he did not know; it was as simple as that. He kept telling himself that there was always tomorrow, always a better time to broach the topic. And then his father had died.

He looked back across the bar. Another man had sat down beside the woman and was talking to her, his hands moving to emphasize his speech. The sound of laughter told Joseph that he had probably missed his chance. He felt a simultaneous burst of anger and relief. Anger at himself for failing yet again, anger at the woman for baiting him, anger at the man for seeming to do with ease the thing that he found the hardest. What did the man have that he didn’t? A normal childhood, for starters. A father who gave him the sex talk in middle school and who gave him advice about girls. Parents who let him spend time with kids his age, who let him experience failure on his own and learn from it. Joseph wasn’t resentful. He was just embarrassed. Embarrassed that he thought he could fix himself, that he thought he could be someone other than who he really was. He asked the bartender for the check, taking care not to meet his eyes.

“Sorry man,” Sven said. “It happens. There will be other girls.”

There will be other girls. For Sven, maybe, but not for Joseph. He walked out into the warm night, leaving the noisy din of the restaurant behind. He thought about what had happened in second grade with Cindy. He had hesitated for too long, he had stood there, doubting himself, feeling afraid. And then, before he could make up his mind, another boy had sat down next to her. History had repeated itself, and it would continue to repeat itself. He would forever lose to these men who were bolder than him, who were decisive, who would do the things that needed to be done. For these men there was no gap between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act. And yet . . . he had felt it again in the bar, the heaviness of opportunity, hanging in the air like ripened fruit. He had been too afraid to grab it, but it had been there, and he could have grabbed it. Couldn’t he? He remembered the feeling of relief when he saw that he would no longer have to make a move on the woman. It was like the relief he felt when he had gotten into his Master’s, and then his PhD program, the relief that he didn’t have to take a blind leap into darkness but could continue on the path he knew. If there was one piece of life advice his father could have bothered to give him, it would be this: the world is dark and full of terrors. Be scared.

Across the street from Triumph was a small park, the project of some green advocacy group or another. He sat down on a bench facing away from the street. A worn-out plaque on the bench said, Emile Roger Johnson, 1943-2010, friend, brother, and loving father. Emile had died at the decent age of 67; when Joseph saw two numbers side-by-side like that, he could never resist subtracting them. If 67 was Joseph’s time to go as well, then he was already half way there. In China, single women over 27 were considered “leftovers”. When did a man like him become leftover? He thought about all the generations of ancestors that made it possible for him to exist, of the long lineage that was going to end with him, all because he didn’t know how to talk to women. 

He heard footsteps behind him on the pebble path. He resisted the urge to look back; maybe if he ignored them whoever it was would go away. They didn’t. It was a couple, whispering to each other, laughing and giggling. For a terrible moment he thought that it was the woman and the man from the bar, but the laughter sounded different. They sat down together at a bench behind him. 

 He tried not to listen to their conversation, but it was impossible. The night was too quiet and his thoughts, so clouded just a moment ago, had suddenly dispersed. They were telling each other stories about themselves. Remember when I accidentally spilled fruit punch down your dress at prom? You wouldn’t talk to me for weeks afterwards. Remember that time when we went to see the Bears game? You lost your ticket and you had to climb over the fencing while I distracted the stadium staff. They whispered loudly and with the obliviousness and abandon of people in love. This was the way love happened in the world: behind Joseph’s back. He did not even have the strength to look at it.

He turned around.

They were facing away from him, the man’s arm around the woman. They did not look anything like what he had expected to find. Their backs were bent and their hair was white. They were old. The woman was around his mother’s age. It occurred to Joseph that his mother must have been in love once. She must have been beautiful once, young once. But now she was old, and she had not loved for years. She was all alone in their old townhouse, with not even the familiar presence of a silent spouse to comfort her. She had stayed in a loveless marriage for half of her life, and what for? Financial stability? Emotional certainty? Was she the strong one in the family, or was she just another victim? America had appeared to them as a terrible giant, holding the torch of change and the book of uncertain future, and the three of them had quivered in its shadow. 

Joseph stood up. He was filled with an unspeakable rage, an uncontrollable desire to do something. Just one thing, just one triumph, to erase the injustice of countless decades. He looked around, hoping that some opportunity would present itself, that a sword would appear in stone, or that a damsel would cry out in distress, but there was only the fading light of the evening and the old couple still whispering to each other. Across the street, the neon sign burned itself into his retinas: Triumph. He took a small step forward, and then another. Something was building up inside him, and it felt so good. But there was nothing to do, no chance for release. He reached the sidewalk and looked at the street as if it were a torrential river, blocking his path to redemption. He could not go backward, and he was afraid of going forward. He simply stood in place, listening to the sound of laughter.