THE ELOPEMENT PARTY was quite a shift from the last—and only other
—party I’d attended on this roof.
In the space of a single day, Mrs. Kim oversaw a total rooftop transformation. She’d brought in a band, set up a dance floor, hung a thousand bulb lights, and placed elegant dinner tables along the west side of the roof, overlooking the bayou, so we could eat dinner while watching the sunset.
When I say elegant dinner tables, I mean linen tablecloths, crystal stemware, hotel silver, candles in faded brass hurricanes, copious arrangements of magnolia flowers and eucalyptus …
Think of the most gorgeous outdoor table spread you’ve ever seen in a decor magazine—and then triple it.
Mrs. Kim had style. And Sue was her only daughter.
She took my hovel’s rooftop and turned it into the most elegant place on earth.
So … quite different from the last party I’d been to up here. Where people were doing the worm.
Also different: I knew it was happening in advance.
I did not arrive wearing someone else’s coffee-spilled clothes.
In fact, Sue had even lent me one of my favorite dresses of hers to wear. A pale blue bias cut maxi dress with layers of ruffles at the hem. Blue because that was Sue’s favorite color. Ruffles because they looked like they were just longing for a reason to go up to a rooftop and give themselves to the wind.
Miracle of miracles: It fit. Like, something about the way it hugged me around the ribs and then cupped under my butt just made me feel slinky. In
the very best way.
No Pajanket tonight.
It was all for Sue, of course—to celebrate the beginning of her married life with Witt. But I decided I could also quietly celebrate a new beginning for myself as well.
I mean, it had been a hell of a spring.
I’d faced some tough truths about life and myself and my family. I’d failed miserably at the only career I’d ever wanted to succeed in. I’d fallen madly in love with two people and then lost them both. I’d lost everything, in a way.
But then found other things. In other ways. The point is, I was ready.
Ready to face the party. And the rest of my life. And all the impossible faces.
Though I wasn’t sure exactly how many of them I’d be able to see.
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AS THE GUESTS clanked their way up the spiral stairs and filled up the roof, I’d guess my facial-recognition rate was fifty percent. I can’t say for sure, but the pattern seemed to be related to familiarity—to, maybe, the number of impressions my brain had already stored.
If I knew the person joining us on the rooftop, the features snapped right into place—fast and easy, like normal. When I saw Sue and Mrs. Kim
—looking positively ethereal in their traditional hanbok dresses—I saw their lovely faces right away. I could see Witt and Mr. Kim just fine in their suits as well—their faces just sensibly resting on their heads as if they’d never been gone.
If I didn’t know the person at all, though—Witt’s grandmother, for example—the faces stayed disjointed. If I knew the person a little bit—an acquaintance, say … the face might start out unreadable but then slide into place a little later, like it resisted for a minute and then finally gave in.
It was unbelievably trippy. But it was also progress.
I confess, I’d been hoping to put on that dress, walk out on that roof, and see every face with total ease in a blaze of triumph—just exactly like
old times.
But it wasn’t exactly like old times.
In some ways, it was better. Because seeing familiar faces again was a joy. And not seeing unfamiliar faces?
It was fine.
It was manageable.
The last time I’d been on this roof at a party, I was positively nauseated with fear.
But tonight? I was okay.
If I recognized a person, great. If I didn’t, that was okay, too. That was triumphant in its own quiet way.
Before the party, I’d come up with a throwdown phrase in case I started to panic, and it went like this: “Help me out here. I have a facial recognition problem. Have we met before?”
Want to know what the hardest part of that phrase was? The word help.” Which, as we know, had never been my thing.
But I wasn’t asking anyone for anything hard, I told myself. I wasn’t asking for help with trigonometry, or climbing El Capitan, or storming the beaches of Normandy. All anyone had to do was answer one easy little question.
This, I reminded myself, like all hard things in life, was an opportunity. A chance for me to practice asking for help.
And: Have we met before? You couldn’t buy a better starter phrase for that. A person could fulfill that request with one syllable.
That’s what I told myself. No big deal.
I practiced it over and over while I was getting dressed, and then I’d walked across the roof—as ready as I’d ever be—while arguing with the nervousness in my chest in a way that would make Dr. Nicole very proud. This was doable. No dry heaving out behind the mechanical room necessary.
I could just … breathe.
And admire Mrs. Kim’s magazine-worthy tables. And feel the rays of the setting sun warming my skin. And enjoy my skirt’s ruffles swishing around my calves. And sway a little bit to the music of the band.
If that’s not a triumph, I don’t know what is.
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ON A SCIENTIFIC level, it was totally fascinating to watch the fusiform face gyrus somewhere in between functioning and not functioning—seeing it do its thing in real time. It kept prompting me to think about everything my miraculous body did all the time without ever needing help or acknowledgment.
Which made me feel grateful. Scientifically and otherwise.
There was one confounding variable, though, in my data-gathering. One totally unfamiliar face that should have—by all established patterns—been unintelligible … showed up on the rooftop fully intact.
I could see it loud and clear.
A guy in a dark blue suit arrived maybe half an hour in … and I recognized him right away—even though I’d never seen him before.
I sidled my way over to Sue and elbowed her until I had her attention. “What?” she said.
“Tell me who that is,” I said, tilting my head in the blue suit guy’s direction.
Sue peeked over. “Oh god, I’m sorry!” she said. “My dad invited him.” “Tell me it’s not—”
“It’s Joe,” Sue confirmed, with a no-sense-fighting-it nod.
“No, no, no,” I said. Had I just been boasting about how okay I was? “My dad loves him, apparently,” Sue said. “He’s helped him move
furniture so many times, my dad nicknamed him Helpful. Did you know that?”
“I did,” I said.
“My dad invited him as a setup! For you! I cleared it all up and explained that being willing to help move furniture does not definitively make anyone a good person and that a setup was useless because he’d already dumped you and broken your heart. But by then it was too late.”
He’d already dumped me and broken my heart.
Wow. He sure had.
While Joe greeted the Kims, up here in the breeze, against a brilliant pink sunset, I let myself watch him.
Seeing my mom’s portrait had been bittersweet bliss. Seeing my own real face in the mirror had been a relief. Seeing Sue and the Kims and
various friends from art school had been all varying levels of fun.
This was something different.
First of all, I wasn’t seeing Joe again.
I can’t even capture how mind-bending it is to see someone for the very first time—and recognize him.
I mean, I had kissed this guy! Twice! But I’d never seen him before.
A memory of Joe’s naked torso as he threw me down on my bed rumbled through my memory like thunder.
I shook it off. Fine, fine—I’d seen him but hadn’t seen him. It was a brain glitch. Not news. We got it.
But here’s what was shocking: how dreadfully good-looking he was. He didn’t just have a face. He had a really, really good one.
Strong, straight features. Angles and edges. A chin! An Adam’s apple! Plus a nose, two eyes, and—here, a close-up memory flashed through my mind—that mouth.
Astonishing.
And dreamy. And heartbreaking.
And … the opposite of fun. Given that he’d already dumped me and broken my heart.
My awareness of his attractiveness—and the fireworks of longing it was setting off in my body—came into focus and permeated everything I saw before I’d had time to tell my fusiform face gyrus no. I mean, the man had a silk pocket square! And he could tie a double Windsor knot! And that blue suit! It looked so good, it made me angry. No one should ever be allowed to look that good in a suit. Who tailored that thing?
Agony.
Mr. Kim must have said something funny then, because Joe smiled and looked down. I stared, mesmerized, at the scruff of his neck as he leaned forward and nodded. He shook hands one more time and then turned to join the party, walking a few steps before I looked away.
But seeing a few of Joe’s steps were enough. Confirmed: Definitely Joe. With that heartbreaking gait. No wonder I’d fallen for him so hard.
“Just ignore him,” Sue said—watching me watch him—like, You got this. “And stay close to me.”
Ignore him. Ignore him.
Sue took my hand then and walked me over to her very dashing cousin, Daniel. She gestured back and forth between us. “Daniel? Sadie. Sadie? Daniel.”
Daniel was faceless, but he had great hair.
Sue went on. “Sadie is my best friend, and she has a situation tonight, so I’m putting you in charge of flirting with her for the rest of the party.”
And Daniel, bless him, gave a no-problem nod and said, “You got it.”
Sue was, of course, the star of the evening—so staying close to her was easier said than done. Fortunately, Daniel was happy to adopt me, and he took me all around, introducing me to his cousins and friends. So I spent the hors d’oeuvres portion of the evening nursing a glass of champagne and heartily doing that thing where you never, ever look at the only person you want to look at.
That thing where you pretend to not even be aware of the only person you’re aware of.
That thing where you give an Oscar-level performance of being totally, utterly, blissfully fine because the person watching you from across the party never kissed you senseless and then broke your heart.
Did that even happen? Because you sure as hell don’t remember it.
You’re too fabulous to remember it. You and your ruffly dress and your flirty new rooftop companion are far, far too awesome for a thing like being dumped—and then ghosted and then treated with contempt—to even matter.
Daniel turned out to be highly accomplished at flirting—and then it didn’t take that long before his face delighted me by coming into focus.
“Oh, hello,” I said, with a frisson of delight when it happened. “There you are.”
“Here I am,” Daniel agreed gamely, with no clue what I meant. “You are cuter than Sue said,” I said.
At that, Daniel laughed and gave me a side squeeze, and that’s when I looked up to see Joe watching us.
“Say something funny,” I said to Daniel real quick. “Like what?” Daniel asked.
And then I burst out laughing like that was it. Then Daniel laughed because I was laughing.
When we settled, Daniel said, “So. That guy who’s been watching you this entire time? Are you trying to make him jealous?”
Joe had been watching me this entire time? That felt like a sad little victory.
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Let’s go dance, then,” Daniel said, nodding at the empty floor.
“I don’t think it’s time for that yet,” I said, glancing over at Mrs. Kim, not wanting to mess up her schedule.
“Oh, it’s definitely not,” Daniel said. Then he gave me a nod. “Even better.”
And that’s how I wound up slow-dancing with Sue’s cute cousin, adding another kind of triumph to the evening, until the caterers started serving dinner. I then made my way toward the tables to find my place card and discovered that Mrs. Kim did not get the Joe memo—and she had seated us right next to each other.
The place cards were in Korean and English. The English on mine read
Sadie. And the one in front of the empty chair next to me read Helpful.
Mr. Kim, you adorable troublemaker.
Joe walked up next to me, read his own place card, and realized the same thing.
We turned and met eyes.
Did I say he was heartbreaking from across the roof? Up close, he was worse.
Those lips. That jaw. Those eyes. I’d seen them all before—in pieces. And here they were, miraculously together and adding up to far more than the sum of their parts.
“Sadie,” Joe said, acknowledging me with a nod.
“Joe,” I acknowledged back—noting how odd it was to know that for sure.
And so here he was. The man who had charmed me relentlessly with his sweetness and his thoughtfulness and his uncanny ability to rescue me. The man who’d shown up when I was at the most lost I’d ever been in my life—and cajoled me into crushing on him in a way I hadn’t crushed on anybody in years. Or ever.
And then he’d changed his mind.
Faced with an entire dinner seated next to him, I wanted to slump down into my chair.
But I didn’t.
I stood taller, damn it. I stood straighter.
I summoned all the dignity I could access, took my seat, turned to Witt’s grandmother on my opposite side, and then made the best, most scintillating, most relentless octogenarian-themed chitchat of my entire life.
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IT TURNS OUT, I am really good at ignoring people.
Who knew? Another unmarketable skill.
I ignored Joe through the salad course with gusto. And then through the main course with determination. And then all through dessert with a miserable kind of glee. If I had to pass him a bread basket, I didn’t even rotate my torso. If he dared to ask me for the sugar, I edged it toward him with the side of my hand and then leaned back in toward Grandma Kellner and demanded, “Tell me all about your garden.”
“Everything?” “Everything.”
I hope Grandma Kellner enjoyed the attention. I treated her like a movie star on Oscar night. Was I dying inside?
One hundred percent.
Seeing Joe was like being struck by emotional lightning.
But can we also appreciate how I was racking up the triumphs? I wasn’t weeping. Or hyperventilating. Or vomiting.
I was handling myself. Poised. Gracious. And ignoring my hemorrhaging heart like a legend.
All I had to do was make it to the end of dinner—when, with any luck, Joe would suddenly realize that even though he’d been invited, he wasn’t really welcome.
With any luck, he’d be just as eager to leave as I was to see him go. Then I could relax.
Then I could dance the night away with Daniel and his adorable friends.
Then I could let this whole weird chapter of my life go at last—and move the hell on.
