He smiled and nodded.
—Well, my name does mean “love” in Arabic.
He was about to say something more but then appeared to think better of it and threw back his champagne instead. Had he met an Arab man? Curly hair and long eyelashes came to mind. And was this guy CIA or something? Why couldn’t he give a straight answer to anything? Clamming up every time my curiosity was piqued. Not that he seemed to have some big deal of a story. His voice cut through my thoughts.
—Does your name have a meaning? I think Koreans all have meanings to their names.
—“Shine brightly from somewhere high.” My father paid actual money for that name.
—Like a star?
—Like a nuclear weapon.
Even at this stupid joke, Habibi giggled. His face looked so tired in the dim starlight. I had a sudden urge to console him (most uncharacteristic of me), but I reached the reasonable conclusion that I was just feeling self-pity. Drunk, we got back on the elevator, and I stared at a spot of pomade on the back of his hair as I followed him to the room.
?
I woke up to the sound of something cracking in the bathroom. What the hell? Drunker than I had realized, I saw that I’d fallen asleep in my clothes. I walked to the bathroom, swaying a little. The sliding door opened to reveal Habibi collapsed by the toilet. I wasn’t sure if he had tried to throw up in it or was hugging it in his sleep, but it was a strange look. Thankfully I wasn’t met with anything unsightly in the toilet bowl, but there was a small crack in it now. Had he tried to get up by grabbing it? Wouldn’t the hotel put a huge charge on his bill? At least paying for a toilet would hardly put a dent in his finances. I managed to get his wet lettuce of a body on its feet and saw his face was covered in sweat or tears. Had he cried himself to sleep here in the bathroom? On the floor was his phone, its screen smashed but still revealing a chat with someone named Lu. A name that could be male or female. I skimmed the conversation, which was in a mixture of English and Chinese. I wasn’t absolutely sure, but it seemed like someone in his family had cancer and he needed to come back home as quickly as possible. Judging from the words and names, it looked like a Hong Kongese wife or husband. In any case, he clearly had a partner.
Despite my bad back, I managed to hoist up Habibi, who wasn’t exactly petite, and lay him on the bed. It felt strange to see him spread out where I had lain only moments before. I stripped him of his suit. Hugo Boss shirt, Burberry trunks, Missoni socks, my God. Such was the taste of a forty-something Ivy Leaguer, and the cliché of it all was enough to drain my spirit.
Why had he called me here?
?
When I got up the morning after that strange night, I saw that Habibi had left a note on the nightstand. He was going to a conference and would be back at the hotel late at night. On the table was a plate of room service leftovers and five 1,000-baht bills. Since it seemed a little excessive to be a maid’s tip, I supposed he meant it for me. I pocketed it and ate one of the leftover chicken legs that were so skinny that I wondered if the chicken had been on a diet. It had gone cold and didn’t taste great. The receipt next to the plate said it was about 20,000 Korean won. Judging from the price of things in Bangkok and the mass of the chicken, it was a pricey bird. I sat on the sofa and rubbed my legs. What was up with my circulation? I wasn’t an old man yet.
In the afternoon, I went up to the outdoor pool on the tenth floor and swam in the sunlight. A straight white couple was nearby, splashing each other like crazy. There was one of those ubiquitous trios of Chinese people lying on the sunbeds. When I walked by, I heard one of them whisper in Mandarin, “Fat Korean.” They thought I wouldn’t understand. I tried hard not to laugh.
Who knew that even my almost nonexistent Mandarin would turn out to be useful? I sank underwater and studied the skinny legs of the white people.
I finished swimming and showered off, then went down to the Central Embassy shopping mall, hungry from the exercise. On the second floor next to the Prada shop was a bakery called Paul, which I’d never heard of, and I made an impulse decision to eat there. I looked at the menu—filled with French and Thai words—and picked a pastry laden with olives and jalape?os as well as a latte. The bread was spicier than I expected and stung my nose. To think of all the idiots who bragged about how spicy Korean food was. I blew my nose in a napkin and messaged Habibi.
I took a swim and I’m having lunch. How is work? From your nuclear weapon.
He answered back that the conference was dragging on longer than he expected and he’d been invited to a dinner at the British Embassy and would come back to the hotel late. And that he was very sorry.
Don’t be sorry. It was good news for me. Thinking over my reply, I wrote, It’s fine . . . No worries . . . pretending to be more regretful than I really was with my plentiful ellipses. Sipping my latte, I launched Tinder and started swiping. This one went to Chulalongkorn University, that one to Thammasat, this one studied design, this one was Chinese, was biracial, was twenty-seven, was forty . . . Matches with strangers began to pile up. I was swiping through the men around me, wishing all these matches were money, when everything suddenly felt impossibly tedious and I put down my phone.
What if I went on a crazy shopping spree? Maxed out my card?
I left the bakery and looked around the other floors of the mall. Nike and Yves St. Laurent and Coffee Bean and Vivienne Westwood and Zara and Roberto Cavalli and Versace—I visited all of them but couldn’t find anything I wanted. I took the escalator up to the other stores, but nothing struck my fancy. And by the time I got to one of the higher floors, thumping my fists on my tired thighs, I saw a familiar sign.