The Partition by Don Lee

Author:Don Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books

UFOS

FOR THE MOMENT, VICTORIA CRAWFORD had two lovers—one who was married, one who was not. The latter, the one who wasn’t married, he was new, a mistake, really, a charity case of sorts. She didn’t know what she was doing with him. The other, the one who was married, he was safe, predictable, familiar. He was, until recently, her boss.

They worked together at WFTN, the NBC affiliate in Boston. Richard Early had brought Victoria aboard in January 2008 as a nightside reporter, but after a tepid February sweeps, a media conglomerate took over the station and cleaned house, demoting Richard to special assignments producer. He had more time than he knew what to do with now, free to leave the newsroom whenever he wanted to conduct “research,” which for the last four months had happened to land him, every Tuesday and Thursday, in front of Victoria’s door.

This particular Tuesday in July, he was loaded down with groceries, out of breath from the three flights of stairs to her one-bedroom on Marlborough Street.

“You’re sweating,” Victoria observed.

“It’s hot out.”

“There’s a news flash.”

Eleven thirty in the morning, and it was already ninety- three degrees, no breeze, no letup in sight to the weeklong heat wave. New England weather. Victoria was sick of it. When she first got to Boston, practically all her assignments had required her to don her blue Storm Watch parka for stand-ups in front of the Mass Turnpike’s sand and salt depots as crews prepared for nor’easters, half of which never materialized, or shivering in Copley Square, asking wind-whipped passersby what they thought of the cold. Now it was about the heat, the never-ending heat and humidity and dew point, which always seemed to be higher in her apartment than out.

“Come in the bedroom,” she told Richard. “I’m living in the bedroom now.” The apartment didn’t have central air-conditioning, just a window unit in the bedroom. She’d bought a second air conditioner for the living room, but it had tripped the circuits, the wiring in her building apparently inadequate for the load.

She was still in her nightgown, unshowered, having awakened just an hour ago to read the newspapers with the half a cup of coffee she allowed herself a day. Caffeine was bad for the throat. After Richard put away the groceries, he stripped off his clothes and climbed into bed with her, and within minutes they were fucking.

Richard was twelve years older than Victoria, at forty- two the oldest person in the newsroom, but he was, without a doubt, the best lover she’d ever had, ready to go at a moment’s notice. He was a rice chaser, California slang for a white guy with a fetish for Asian women. In that parlance, Victoria, who was 1.5—born overseas, in Korea in her case, but raised in the States—was a yellow cab, or a lu. As a general rule, she only dated white guys. Of course, Richard, after a lifetime of Asian girlfriends, had married a Wasp attorney, Bettina, who had ended up being unable to conceive.

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