I.
The bar was called Numbers. It had been called Numbers for twenty-three years, the name surviving three ownership changes, two renovations, and a fire that took out the back patio and most of the goodwill of the neighboring dry cleaner. He sat at the bar. The men on either side of him were of a certain type. His type, his age, his income bracket, his zip code, repeated at every stool down the room. They wore good shoes and ironed shirts and the cologne that men in their fifties wear when they want to smell like men in their forties. They drank well. They tipped well. They went home alone, or together, with an efficiency the transaction had earned by being stripped of surprise decades ago.
The drink was a vodka tonic. The bartender was young enough to be attractive and old enough to know he was working for tips, which in any other city would have constituted flirting and here constituted Tuesday.
The men talked to each other. They talked about work, about the market, about a restaurant on Abbot Kinney that had changed its menu and whether the change was an improvement or an act of war. They talked with the easy fluency of men who had been having the same conversation for years and would continue having it because the alternative, silence, or something new, was more frightening than repetition.
Nobody made his heart race.
He checked his phone. Gop’s Facebook. A gym selfie: the mirror, the flex, the compression shirt pulled up to expose the abdominal architecture, the caption in Thai that he couldn’t read and didn’t need to because the image was the caption: look at me. Fourteen hours ahead. He did the conversion without meaning to. Two in the afternoon there was midnight here, last night, so the photograph had been sitting in the feed most of a day before he got to it. The gym at Ratchada. The light in the mirror catching the sweat on his forehead and the smile that was for himself, for the camera, for the followers. And possibly, in the manner that distant things are possibly for the people who are missing them, for the man sitting in a bar in Culver City scrolling through a feed of a life happening on the other side of the planet.
He looked at it for a long time. Longer than a man looks at a photograph while sitting in a bar. The shirt was shoved up under the arms and pinned there by an elbow, a thing Gop does and has always done, and the band of skin above the waistband had the particular shine on it that means the second hour of a session and not the first. He knew what that skin tasted like at two in the afternoon at that gym. Salt, and under the salt the cheap eucalyptus soap they keep in the showers there. He knew the sound Gop makes when a mouth goes on him while he is still hot from the weights, which is not a moan, it is an intake, the noise of a man stepping into cold water.
Fourteen hours away, a boy held a phone up to a mirror and said look at me.
It was the only thing that had moved him in six weeks, and it was a photograph.
The men at the bar were still on the market. Someone’s adviser had opinions about bonds. Someone was up nine percent for the year. He held the same index funds. He could have pulled up a stool and rebalanced portfolios with the best of them, the shoes were right, the zip code was right, the numbers were, if anything, better than the room’s average. But somewhere along the line his own portfolio had consolidated into a single position, denominated in baht and muscle, currently appreciating in a gym mirror fourteen hours ahead, paying its dividend in grins and an arm that weighs eight pounds. No adviser would call that diversified. Not one of them would be wrong.
He put the phone down. He picked up his drink. He looked at the men around him and thought about expectations. About what he expected when he walked through the door of a bar, any bar, whether the bar was on a soi in Bangkok or a boulevard in Los Angeles. He expected to feel something. A quickening. What a body does in a room full of potential, before the brain has caught up with it.
A man came to the bar at his shoulder to order and stayed after the drink arrived. Fifties. Good shoes, a shirt ironed by somebody. He said something about the Dodgers and then something about the crowd, doing the low-stakes, well-mannered thing men of that age do in bars of that kind: holding a conversation while conducting an inventory.
He watched the inventory happen. It took about as long as those take. The face, the shoulders, the middle, the hands, the shoes, back up to the face, and then the small recalibration around the eyes that is not rejection, because nothing has been proposed and nothing will be. The man finished his sentence about the crowd. Said it was good talking to you. Took his drink down to the far end, where a lawyer was telling a story with both hands.
This does not happen in Bangkok. It does not happen because in Bangkok he is not in the market, he is the market, and six hundred baht buys the outcome before any assessment can be conducted, so the assessment is never conducted. He has arranged twenty-eight years of his life so that the assessment is never conducted.
Here it took eleven seconds, and it came back adequate.
Everything in the room was adequate. The vodka tonic, the bartender, the men, the shoes, him.
The exchange rate was 32.41. He’d checked at 2 AM, lying in the dark of the condo that was too clean, in the suburb that was too quiet, on the mattress that was too firm because there was no body on it running a degree hotter than average, no arm across his chest weighing eight pounds, no exhalation against his neck carrying the particular biochemistry of a man who had just told him, nine words at a time, exactly who he was.
You always choose you first. Then you choose Gop.
He finished his drink and left a twenty. He walked to his car in the parking lot behind Numbers and sat for a moment with the engine off, the dashboard dark, the silence of a Southern California evening: no taxis, no motorbikes, no distant bass from a bar that hadn’t closed, no mor lam from a phone speaker backstage, no chickens, no fans clicking, no spigot in a concrete cubicle behind a green house on a red road. Just the silence. Just the expectation of nothing. Just the man in the car in the parking lot, checking the exchange rate again, because checking was what he did when he couldn’t check anything else.
32.41.
He. I have written this whole evening as he, which I notice only now, with the engine off. I am going to leave it. It was easier to watch him do it than to admit that the man doing it was me.
I turned the key.
I was home by eleven.
II.
The pain started in my chest and radiated left, which is the direction pain goes when it wants to scare you. I know this because I Googled it at 3 AM while the pain was happening. Nobody having a heart attack does that. It is what terror does, the need to confirm the terror with clinical data before committing to the experience.
The data confirmed: radiating left = possible cardiac event. Also possible: gas, anxiety, muscle strain from sleeping on my left side, a psychosomatic performance that the body stages when the mind has been running through too many scenarios of loss and the body decides to audition one for real.
I called Dave. Not 911. Dave. Because calling 911 means you are having a heart attack and calling your partner at 3 AM means you might be having a heart attack, and the difference between is and might be is the distance between the ambulance and the admission, and I wasn’t ready for the admission. Not the medical kind. The other kind. The kind where you admit that you are a man in his mid-fifties sitting in the dark clutching his chest and the first thing you thought was not I’m dying but I haven’t seen Gop since February.
Dave came. He drove from his place in Van Nuys in twenty-two minutes, which means he drove fast, which means he was scared, which means I scared him, which I hadn’t intended. He found me on the couch with my laptop open to WebMD and a half-eaten sleeve of antacids on the coffee table.
“Are you dying?” he asked from the doorway. Not gently. Dave doesn’t do gently at 3 AM. He does direct, and direct at 3 AM sounds like accusation.
“Probably not.”
“Then why am I here?”
“Because I needed someone to tell me I’m probably not dying.”
“You’re probably not dying. Can I go back to bed?”
He didn’t go back to bed. He sat on the couch next to me, took the laptop, closed WebMD, and put his hand on my chest: over the heart, over the place where the pain had been and was now subsiding into the dull ache of a false alarm, the ache of a body that had rehearsed an emergency and was now standing down.
“Your heart is fine,” he said.
“You’re not a doctor.”
“No. But I’ve been listening to that heart for thirty years and it’s never skipped a beat. Even when it should have.”
We sat there for another forty minutes and the ache did not go away. It got smaller and more specific, which was worse, because a large vague pain can be talked down and a small exact one cannot. At about twenty to five Dave stood up, found my shoes, and put them by the couch without saying anything, Dave’s way of holding a vote and announcing the result at the same time.
“I’m not driving myself,” I said.
“I know you’re not.”
III.
The ER confirmed: not a cardiac event. Acid reflux, exacerbated by stress, compounded by the vodka tonics I’d been substituting for dinner, aggravated by the anxiety of lying in the dark at 2 AM calculating the arithmetic of a life lived in two places.
The doctor was young, efficient, a competence that operates on autopilot at 5 AM in a Cedars-Sinai cubicle. He asked questions. Did I smoke? Occasionally. Did I drink? Yes. Did I exercise? Not enough. Did I have a history of heart disease? My father. Died at sixty-three. Massive coronary, dropped in the driveway, dead before the paramedics reached the suburban street where I grew up. The doctor noted this with the clinical shorthand of long practice. He did not need the version where the son was twelve and watching from the kitchen window.
“Stress?” the doctor asked.
“Some.”
“Work-related?”
“Relationship-related.”
He made a note. He didn’t ask what kind of relationship. In Los Angeles, at Cedars-Sinai, at 5 AM, the sort of relationship doesn’t matter. What matters is the stress. What matters is the acid going through the lining of the esophagus because the man attached to it has been lying awake for months running the same sum.
They discharged me with a prescription for omeprazole and a recommendation to reduce stress. Dave drove me home. In the car, in the gray Los Angeles dawn, the 405 empty enough to feel like a different city, Dave said:
“You need to tell Gop.”
“Tell him what?”
“That you were in the hospital.”
“It was acid reflux.”
“He should still know.”
“He’ll worry.”
“That’s the point.”
I looked at Dave. Dave was looking at the road. The road was straight, the dawn was gray, the city was waking up with the reluctance of a place that doesn’t really want to be awake.
“If you don’t tell him,” Dave said, “you’re choosing yourself first again.”
Neither of them knows the other one said it.
IV.
I told Gop. By phone, from the condo, two days later, at an hour I calculated would find him at work and not asleep. Late enough that he would be on shift and could step outside, early enough that there was still some night left for the news to settle into. The calculation itself was a form of choosing him, though I recognized, and could not stop recognizing, that calculating when to deliver bad news is not the same as delivering it honestly.
“I go hospital,” I said. Using his syntax. A pidgin built for two, worn into grooves by five years of talking to nobody else in it.
“Why?” Fast. The word coming before the breath, the breath catching up a half-second later. The concern immediate, unfiltered, arriving ahead of the part of him that decides how a thing should sound.
“My heart. Pain.”
“You okay?”
“I okay. Doctor say okay.”
“Doctor say okay or you say okay?”
Nobody at Cedars had asked me that. They asked about symptoms and history and lifestyle, and I answered every one of them truthfully, because none of it cost me anything. He asked about the lie. Seven words, in a language he does not have, at a volume I could barely hear over whatever was going past wherever he was standing.
I opened my mouth to say doctor say okay a second time and it would not come out.
“Doctor say okay. I say maybe okay.”
Silence. Somewhere in Bangkok at midnight, heat and traffic and whatever else is out there at that hour, and a phone held against an ear.
“You come Thailand,” Gop said.
“I’m coming in three months.”
“No. You come now.”
“I can’t come now. I have work.”
“You work later. You come now. I take care you.”
The sentence, I take care you, landed with a weight disproportionate to its grammar. He has said it to me before, when I was drunk, when I was sad, when I was angry at the distance and not at him, and I never wrote a word of it down, because it is the kind of sentence that only counts on the day it is needed. This was the day, and it meant: I want to be the one who catches it. I want to be the hand on your chest. I want to be the one who drives twenty-two minutes in the dark because you called.
I was on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet. That is not where I take calls. The sentence went through me by a route that had nothing to do with comfort. I was hard before he reached the end of it. A man of fifty-five with acid eating a channel in his throat, sitting on tile in Culver City at ten in the morning, getting hard because a bar boy in Bangkok had said I take care you in the tone a man uses about property he has decided to keep. I stayed that way through the rest of the call, through no drink and you eat food, and I did not touch myself. Touching would have converted the call into something, and I wanted it left as it was.
And the man who had already done exactly that, two nights before, from Van Nuys, in the dark, was not Gop. It was Dave. Gop was eight thousand miles off and could not have driven anywhere, because the ocean was between us and the ocean does not care about acid reflux or arithmetic.
There is no post in that. The joke would have to be at my expense and it isn’t funny.
“I come in three months,” I said.
“You promise?”
I did not answer fast enough, and he waited, and he is good at waiting. Somewhere in a bar years ago I had told him that when he was old and fat I would still lub him, meaning nothing by it, and never wrote it down, and he has been carrying it since. In Gop’s world spoken is promised, and promised is owed.
“I promise.”
“Okay. You take medicine. You no drink too much. You eat food, not drink.”
“Yes, Doctor Gop.”
“I serious.”
“I know.”
“You call me tomorrow. Every day you call. I want know you okay.”
“I’ll call.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “I scare.”
Scare, not scared. Thai does not mark the tense, so the one word covers all three of them at once. It sat between us on the line, between Bangkok and Culver City.
“I’m okay, Gop.”
“I know you okay. I still scare.”
V.
The arithmetic. After the ER, after Dave’s hand on my chest, after Gop’s “I scare,” I sat down and did the arithmetic.
I have been visiting Thailand for twenty-eight years. Six weeks a year on average, which is 168 weeks, which is 1,176 days, which is three years, two months, and nineteen days of standing on Thai soil. That is the lifetime figure and it is the flattering one, so I set it aside.
Here is the other one. Five years of Gop. Three trips a year, twelve days a trip, and of the twelve I off him ten, which is thirty nights a year, which is a hundred and fifty nights across the whole of it. That is the ceiling. Every number from here goes down.
Because a night is not a day. He comes off shift somewhere after one in the morning and he is gone by early afternoon, so call it thirteen hours in the same room, seven of them spent unconscious. Six waking hours a night, and I am being generous with the six. A hundred and fifty times six is nine hundred hours.
Now the subtractions I have been leaving out of every previous version of this sum, and there is a reason I have been leaving them out.
The grooming ritual, forty-five minutes every one of those mornings. A hundred and twelve hours, call it four and a half days of Gop in front of a mirror while I lie on a bed and wait for him to be finished. Twenty-odd nights where he came off shift and we went on to a bar he was not working until it shut, call it sixty hours. Another fifteen nights that belonged partly to Dave, or Marta, or Chris, or the Indonesian dealer from the gem fair in Bali, or whoever else took a chair I could have given him, call it sixty.
Six hundred and sixty-eight hours. Convert it into whole days, twenty-four hours to the day, no rounding in my favor.
Twenty-seven.
Twenty-seven days. A day short of four weeks. Not even a month, spread across five years, and I have been calling it a life.
Five hundred and ten more hours went into an airplane seat on the way to him or on the way back. Set that against the twenty-seven days and it comes to three quarters of them. I checked it twice. I did not believe it the first time, and then I did the multiplication again on the back of a pharmacy receipt and it did not move.
In the same five years I have logged more hours photographing silver against a grey card, and I do not love silver. More hours stuck on the 405. More hours at trade shows in Phoenix, selling to retailers who haggle over markups while the desert sun melts the parking lot outside and I calculate the exchange rate in my head because it’s the only mental activity that connects me to the only place I want to be.
Twenty-seven days. And in them I have memorized the architecture of his body: every muscle group, every scar, the uncut cock with the head exposed, the mole on his chest that sprouts its single hair, how his deltoids flex when he strips off a shirt. I know his bathroom habits. I know his fish obsession. I know the sound of his breathing at 3 AM when the AC hums and the city outside conducts its business. I know the smell of his skin, the warm animal fact of it that is not cologne but Gop, the scent that hotel pillows retain for a day after he leaves and that I bury my face in before the maid arrives because the pillow is the closest I will get to him for three months.
Twenty-seven days. And I love him. Completely. Unreservedly. With total commitment: I had calculated the cost, itemized the investment, assessed the risk, and concluded that the return, the nine words and the “I scare” on a phone line at midnight, was worth every dollar and every mile and every night spent in a condo that is too clean.
But it is not a life. It is a highlight reel, the best-of compilation, the curated experience of flying in for the good parts and flying out before the laundry piles up and the fights last longer than one night and the silence has to be lived in rather than escaped from. I have never seen Gop sick for more than a day. I have never been with him when the bills are due and the money hasn’t arrived. I have never woken up next to him on a Tuesday with nothing planned and nothing special and nothing at stake except the ordinary, grinding, unromantic business of being alive together in the same room on a day that doesn’t matter.
The ordinary days. The days that don’t make the blog because there is no snarky title in them. Cereal and coffee and the trash needs to go out and did you pay the electric bill and I’m tired and you’re tired and the sex didn’t happen and neither of us mentioned that it didn’t.
Every day with him is a special occasion, which is what makes it feel epic and what proves it isn’t. And I have never stayed. I have always left. I have always had a return ticket.
You always choose you first.
Yes. And I choose departure first too. Because departure is the ultimate act of self-selection: the man who leaves is the man who controls the narrative. The man who stays is the man who surrenders to it.
Gop stays. Every time. He stays in the hotel room when I leave for the airport. He stays in Bangkok when I fly to LA. He stays in the relationship when I bring Dave into it, when I spend an evening on a soi off Sathorn and let him think I was at the hotel, when I write blog posts that turn his life into comedy, when I calculate the cost of his body and publish the math. He always stays. The eight-pound arm across the chest, the temperature, the “You come back?” answered with “I come back.”
That is the thing I have never done and do not know how to do, and I am sitting here with a prescription for omeprazole and a promise I may or may not keep. At three in the morning my heart rehearsed an emergency and sent the pain radiating left, the direction pain goes when it wants to scare you.
My father died at sixty-three. I am fifty-five. The arithmetic doesn’t need a calculator.
