Beautiful Debts

September 2, 2023

The minivan was a 2006 Dodge with a knock in the engine that Leo’s father had been promising to fix since 2019, and he parked it under a sign that allowed ten minutes and no more, hazards ticking, because a second pass meant another hour on the meter and there were limits to what the day was going to be allowed to cost. One trip. That had been decided in Scarborough before they left, decided the way most things in the Tse household were decided, which was that his father announced it and everyone agreed before the disagreement had time to become expensive.

He got the cart out first. A folding Canadian Tire thing, red, with one wheel that had never sat straight. It shrieked when it touched the curb. Leo took the two duffels himself so the cart could carry the boxes, and one duffel was his and the other was the carry-on his mother had packed without being asked, the one with the slippers, the ginseng, the Tiger Balm, and the three kinds of medicine for things he did not have. At the last minute, she had put oranges in the front pocket, five of them in a plastic produce bag, as if fruit could keep a person from coming apart in a city his parents could not afford to visit casually. He felt the weight of it in his shoulder and did not look down at the bag again.

The street was brick and narrow, with the early September wind coming down it as if the buildings had been arranged to make weather choose sides. It was not a bad street. Leo could tell the difference. He had grown up calibrating blocks by window glass, by porch lights, by whether people looked at you once or kept looking until you understood you had been noticed. This was the kind of street where nothing obvious happened to you. The danger, if there was any, was slower and better dressed.

Across the road, a black car was doing the opposite of everything Leo was doing. It sat at the curb outside a glass building with its engine running, and a man in a dark suit lifted matched luggage from the trunk while a girl got out of the back without a word. She was Black, tall even before she reached the curb, with a private-school posture and a coat too structured for move-in day. She did not look at the driver, or the suitcases, or the building doors. She moved as if doors were things that solved themselves near her. Leo watched the luggage go up the clean steps on someone else’s arms. He watched his own cart lean sideways on the curb with a box of instant noodles showing at the top. He did the math the way he always did it, fast and without wanting to, and then he put it away.

The sidewalk had a seam in it that had lifted, and under the seam was a soft patch he did not see until his left shoe was already in it. The cold came through the canvas at once. He swore quietly and kept walking. For the rest of the block he went quiet-loud, quiet-loud, one dry shoe and one wet, leaving a faint brown print behind him like a second version of himself arriving worse. Of all the ways to arrive, he thought, and then corrected himself because the wet sock was not the thing that bothered him most. The print bothered him. The part other people could see.

The house, when it gave itself up at the end of the row, did not look like somewhere they put students. It looked like somewhere students were kept. Dark brick gone almost black at the mortar, four storeys of it, narrow windows set too deep, and a stone bird worn faceless over the door. The carved beak remained. The eyes had been weathered out. Someone years before had called the place the House of Corvids, first as a joke and then because cruel-sounding names often survive better than official ones. Leo, who did not yet know the house’s private name, only knew that the front door stood open and that no one waited behind it.

He stood on the step with the small question of whether you knocked at an open door, then went in before his father could see him hesitate. Hesitating on a threshold was a visible thing. It made a person look as if he was waiting to be permitted.

Inside, the air shifted to cold stone and old paper, with a faint sweetness under it that might have been wax, old polish, or something trapped too long in the walls. Dark wood climbed the staircase and ran along the hall in panels that had been touched by too many hands to shine evenly. The house swallowed the street sound behind him. He was looking up the stairs when a voice came down from above.

“Welcome,” it said. “Your shoes are dirty.”

A girl leaned over the second-floor railing with red hair falling loose around her face and a phone held carelessly in one hand. She had the bright, assessing look of someone who had decided early that if a room was going to judge her, she might as well judge it first. Later, people would call that confidence because they preferred clean names for hungrier things. That morning, to Leo, she was only a girl looking down at him as if he had arrived in the wrong condition.

He looked at his feet. One print, drying. “A shoe is dirty,” he said. “Just the one.”

Something moved at the corner of her mouth and was put away before it could become a smile. She had wanted the high ground and he had made her work for it. He saw her revise him. Not much. Enough.

His father came in behind him with the cart, which shrieked once on the threshold and announced them both. He set it down, straightened, and gave the girl a small formal bow of the head. “Tse Wai-Man,” he said. “This is my son, Leo. First year.”

He said university after that, not because the sentence needed it but because he had been waiting years to say it in a place where it could be heard. He said it with the weight he used on relatives over the phone, polished and careful, and Leo felt more embarrassed by the pride than he had by the cart.

The girl came down the stairs. “Chloe,” she said, and picked up the box with the rice cooker before anyone asked. She settled it against her hip as if she had been helping people move into old houses all her life, though even then there was something staged in the ease of her, something that wanted to be seen doing the generous thing before anyone could decide she did not belong. “I’m second floor. Boys are up one more. Your room should be open.”

Leo had not expected her to carry anything. He revised her too, which was how people like him survived. Nobody remained the first version of themselves for long.

He climbed with a duffel in each hand, the wet shoe printing fainter on the wood until it printed nothing, and the house made the ordinary noises old houses make under weight. Boards answered. Pipes clicked. Somewhere behind a wall, water moved with a tired little knock. The first door off the second-floor landing stood open on a small room with a chess table by the window and a girl sitting alone at it with no one across from her. She was playing both sides or no side, turning a glass queen slowly in her fingers so the grey light came through it. She felt him in the doorway and looked over without hurry. She smiled, but not quite as a welcome. It was the smile of someone willing to let silence do part of the conversation.

Leo nodded. She nodded back. Neither of them said anything, and somehow that was the friendliest exchange he had had since the curb.

The room at the top was small and cold and beautiful in the way the whole house was beautiful, which is to say it had been built by people who expected space to obey them and had come down in the world to hold people who did not. Two narrow beds. Two desks. A window with leaded panes looking into a yard nobody seemed to use. One side of the room was already taken. The bed had been made tight, the desk left bare except for a brass lamp and a notebook aligned with the edge, and the top drawer had a small lock through it, the kind a person could buy cheaply and still mean seriously. The lock was engaged. Leo noticed it the way he noticed closed fists, covered cameras, passwords typed too slowly.

His father set the boxes down, looked around, and pronounced the room with the single word he used for anything he did not have the English or the heart to say more about. “Dusty,” he said. He ran a thumb along the windowsill, showed it to no one, and wiped it on his trousers.

They unpacked the cart in the kind of quiet that belonged to families who knew where every sentence would end. Rice cooker under the bed. Noodles in the wardrobe. Towels on the chair because there was nowhere else. His mother’s oranges ended up on the desk, too bright against the old wood. Leo wanted to hide them and left them there because his father had seen him see them.

Downstairs, at the open door, his father did not draw it out. He folded the cart with both hands, fighting the bad wheel until it snapped flat. Then he took Leo by the shoulder, more grip than embrace, and said in Cantonese, low enough that the house did not get to keep it, “Don’t make your mother worry.”

“I won’t,” Leo said.

“Eat properly.”

“I will.”

His father nodded once, as if Leo had signed something binding, and then he carried the folded cart out to the minivan. He did not look back. Looking back would have asked too much of both of them.

Leo stood in the hall with the radiators ticking and settling around him and did not, for a moment, know what to do with his hands. The minivan coughed alive outside. The engine knocked, caught, and moved away. He listened until it was gone, then kept listening after there was nothing left to hear.

The piano started from somewhere at the back of the house. Not from any room he had been in. It came along the hall slowly, a few notes and then a few more, and it was someone playing, not someone practicing, which is a different thing and easy to hear even if you do not know why. Leo followed it because following a sound was easier than standing in a hall with no task and no father.

The study was at the end of a corridor that turned twice. It had built-in shelves with half the books missing, a cold fireplace, and an upright piano near the window. A boy sat at it with his back partly to the door, white shirt sleeves rolled to the forearms, face angled toward the glass. An unlit cigarette rested on the sill beside him. That detail mattered later for reasons none of us understood when we were eighteen. At the time, Leo only saw the cigarette and thought rich, then corrected himself when he saw the boy’s shoes, the worn heel, the careful repair at one seam.

He knocked on the open frame even though the boy had already heard him. “Hey there.”

“Hey,” the boy said, still playing.

“I’m Leo.”

“Arsam.”

“You must be my roommate.”

“Clearly.”

The piece went on, sad and simple, circling back on itself without becoming sentimental. Leo did not know its name. He knew that he liked it, and that liking it made him feel, absurdly, as if he had been let into a room before learning the rules.

“What are you playing?” he said.

“Piano.”

Leo laughed before he could decide whether he was annoyed. “Clearly. I meant the track.”

“Satie,” Arsam said. His hands did not stop. “The first Gymnopédie.” Then, after another bar, “You know it?”

“No,” Leo said. “I just liked it.”

Something changed in the side of Arsam’s face, not enough to call expression and not little enough to miss. He kept playing. He said nothing for long enough that Leo thought the conversation was finished, and because Leo had never trusted silence not to become judgment, he filled it.

“What brought you here?”

“Mostly the piano,” Arsam said.

“To university.”

“Engineering.” He reached toward the sill and shifted the cigarette farther from the edge without looking at it. “The piano is separate.”

“What about you?”

Leo opened his mouth to say scholarship, because it was the true answer and the one that came first, the word that explained the cart and the noodles and the carry-on full of medicine. He did not get to. The chess girl was in the doorway now, no queen in her hand, leaning on the frame as if she had been there a while and had decided not to hide it.

“Naïka,” she said to Leo.

“Leo,” he said, though she seemed to know that already.

“I heard the cart,” she said.

“Everybody heard the cart.”

“Good. Then nobody will forget you arrived.”

It was not flirtation. It was not exactly kindness either. She looked at people directly, but without the need to collect them. That was rare enough to feel like a form of manners. Her gaze moved from Leo to Arsam. Arsam looked at her, then away toward the window, and something passed between them too quickly for Leo to understand. They had met an hour ago, so it was not history. It was only recognition, and recognition can be more dangerous because it has no facts to defend itself with.

Naïka’s eyes went to the cigarette on the sill. “That better not be lit.”

“It isn’t,” Arsam said.

“It smells like it was.”

“It has a past.”

“So do most things here.” She looked back at Leo. “First-night meeting downstairs in twenty minutes. Kai pretends it’s optional.”

“Who’s Kai?”

“House lead. Has keys and the personality that comes with keys.” She pushed off the frame. Before leaving, she looked once at the piano. “You play well.”

Arsam said nothing. Naïka left, and the matter of Leo’s answer went with her.

By the time Leo went back upstairs, the house had changed temperature without asking anyone. The old radiators had begun by ticking, then banging, then pushing out a dry, uneven heat that made the room smell sharper. He half-unpacked and then stopped because every object he touched seemed to create two more decisions. Laptop on the desk. Charger missing. Shirts in a drawer, then out again because the drawer stuck. Oranges still visible. He found the washroom down the hall, with ancient tile, two sinks, one cracked, and a showerhead fixed too low on a pipe. The water ran rusty for a count of ten and then clean and very hot, and he stood under it longer than he needed to because it was the first part of the day that did not require an answer.

He had left his clothes on the bed. He realized it only after he turned the water off. The corridor was empty when he stepped out with the towel low on his hips and his hair dripping down the back of his neck. He walked quickly, not because he was modest in any meaningful way, but because being almost naked in a house full of strangers made him feel badly cast in someone else’s joke.

Arsam was at the desk when Leo came in. The locked drawer was still locked. A book lay open in front of him, though one finger held the same line as if the sentence had refused to move. He looked up. His eyes went to Leo’s face first, then lower, then away. It was a small movement, small enough that a decent person could have missed it on purpose. Leo was not decent in that particular way.

“Forgot my clothes,” Leo said.

“Clearly.”

Same word as before. Different room.

Leo grabbed a shirt from the bed and dragged it over his head too fast. The cotton caught on his damp shoulders, trapping one arm, and for two seconds he was blind inside it. When he got it down, Arsam had turned a page he had not read.

The knock came from the open door. A tall boy stood in the hall, older by a year or two, with a ring of keys in one hand and a chipped mug in the other. He had the ease of someone who had survived the building long enough to stop resenting its inconveniences. “Kai,” he said. “I run the house, which mostly means I know where the fuse box is and which radiator screams like it’s being murdered. Everyone’s downstairs. We do a thing the first night.”

Leo found socks in the mess on his bed. Both dry. A victory. “A thing?”

“A house thing. Names, warnings, who not to call when the toilet breaks because I promise you it’s me.” Kai looked between them and smiled with enough restraint to be annoying. “Ten minutes. And by ten minutes, I mean now.”

He left before either of them could refuse.

Voices had begun downstairs. A kettle. Chairs dragging. Someone laughing too loudly, probably on purpose. The house carried sound strangely; it came up through the floorboards and along the pipes, broken into pieces before it reached them. Leo put on the socks, stepped into shoes that no longer matched in dryness, and went to the door.

“Come on,” he said, to Arsam or the room or the version of himself that still wanted to be alone.

He was halfway down the hall when he looked back. Arsam had come out behind him, slower, and had stopped in the doorway with one hand on the frame. He looked back into their room at the two narrow beds, the brass lamp, the notebook, the cheap lock on the drawer. Leo waited for him to pull the door shut. Everyone pulled the door shut. It was what you did with a room that had your locked things in it.

Arsam looked a moment longer. Then he left the door open and came down the hall without explaining it. Leo noticed. He noticed most things. Understanding them was less reliable. So he let this one sit where it was, open behind them, while the house made room for their voices below.