"Want to sit at the counter?" I ask Terence as we walk into Nueva Estrella China.

He looks at the cigarette dangling from the lip of the waiter standing behind the counter and says no.

"How about here?" 

"Yes."

For months I've loved to hear Terence say Yes.  He's the only one I know who pronounces it with three syllables, like Shari Lewis' Hush Puppy sock puppet: "Yay-uh-us."

Ordering is the usual chore for him.  I always know what I want. 

"So what did you think of my little nephew?" Terence asks me in the middle of our meal.  "Isn't he precious?" 

There's another Terence word: Precious.  I remember our first fight, on our disastrous second date, and his calling me at midnight after I'd gone home hastily, his telling me he hadn't been going to call me ever again, "but then I thought about how you were two nights ago: so precious."

"He's very cute."

"Cute?  Is that all?  He's absolutely precious.  Oh, I want to have my own baby already."

"Actually, Terence, I don't know how to say this..."

He smiles.  "Try your version of English.  I don't understand Spanish or Chinese." 

When you say something you know is going to upset someone, sometimes saying it in a sing-song helps.  So I say, "I don't know, that ba-by looks white to me."

"What are you talking about?"

"If I were you...."  Bad start.  The only worse way I could begin a sentence with Terence would be "When I was your age...." even though I'm only nine years older.

"Yes?"  Yay-uh-us?

"I think that girl is pulling a fast one on your brother."

He practically spits out his huevo foo yung.  "You're crazy.  You're insane."  The way he says it reminds me of Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.

"That baby is white," I say.

"It's biracial," Terence says.  "Just like the baby we're going to have.  It's light-skinned.  Biracial babies sometimes are born light and get darker."  He's getting upset.  "Even totally black babies, too."

"I know that," I say.  "How do you think my cousin Rachel got adopted?  But this baby doesn't look black, it doesn't look like you."

"It's Terry's baby, and I won't hear another word about it."  Terry is Terence's twin (don't ask) in the air force in Bosnia.  The white girl we just visited claims Terry is the father of her baby, and Terry has been thrilled to accept paternity.  He's sending his ex-girlfriend money every month.

"Okay, forget I mentioned it," and I go back to work on my roast pork.  Terence doesn't speak to me for at least fifteen minutes.

2. Anger

Do-over.  This time we're at La Medalla De Oro, where I like to kid around with the owner, who's named Jesus Chang.  The room seats 14 on bar stools.  Since we're at the counter, Terence and I are sitting side by side rather than face to face.

"So what did you think of my little nephew?" Terence asks me in the middle of our meal.  "Isn't he precious?" 

Given our positions, I take the direct approach, like the CEO of my company would.  "I don't think that baby is your brother's.  I think that girl -- woman -- is using your brother."

Terence makes the worldwide symbol of disgust -- a curling of the lips, a tightening of the nostrils, as if he's trying to avoid tasting or smelling something foul.  It's not his chop suey with arroz blanco, so it must be what I've said.  He turns and stares at me for a millennium and finally says, "You sound like my mother."

I clutch my chest and collapse on the counter.  Jesus Chang, holding two plates of comidas chinas y cubanas, pauses for a moment to see what's going on.  I recover, Jesus moves on.  "Terence, you've done it," I say.  "I've been in all kinds of relationships for more years than you'll ever know, and you're the first person to tell me I sound like their mother.  That hurts."

He sips that thick mud they call coffee here.  I look for a hint of a smile.  "I know my own nephew," he tells me.

"Does your mother know her own grandson?"

"You know my mother, she's always so negative."

"Terence, she's a nurse.  Okay, she's a practical, not a registered, but you've got to admit she knows her babies."

He turns toward the door, entranced by some Hispanic teenager's entrance.

I try this: "So what does your mother say?"

Terence sighs.  "She say Terry should get a blood test to see if he's the father."

I know he reverts to "she say" only when he's upset.  Still, he said "he's the father," not "he the father" so he's not totally farblonjet.  I begin to feel guilty and little cruel.  It's not easy being me.  Like the beginning of my dad's cassettes of the old Gunsmoke radio series when William Conrad, playing Dodge City's Matt Dillon, says of being a U.S. marshal, "It makes a man watchful -- and a little lonely."
 Chastened, I give him one of those "I love you but I can't do any more than this because we're in public among strangers" looks, but he's staring at the greasy saffron-colored remains of his meal.

"Terry could be the father.  He slept with that girl enough."

"Hey, I've got the impression a lot of guys have slept with her.  Babe, that kid don't look like Terry.   Or like you.  That baby has two white parents, or maybe the father's Hispanic."

I feel someone staring at me after I say the word Hispanic.

I go on: "I know you want a baby, I know that you'd like that baby to be your nephew, but it's not."

"Fuck you," Terence says quietly, with more dignity than I've ever heard him say anything.
 

3.   Blame

Terence tries to talk me into some flan at Asia Numero Uno, which boasts the ugliest pagoda lanterns in the Western hemisphere.

"No, I can't," I tell him.  "I hate flan."

"You're whiny tonight," Terence says, sipping his morir sonando, a mixture of orange juice, milk and sugar that Cuban-Chinese babies love.  Morir sonando means "to die dreaming."

"Look," I say, playing with my fork and paper napkin, "when I was a little kid, my sister told me that flan was made from cow placenta, and I've never been able to eat it since."

"You got something against cow placenta?" Terence asks me. 

"I've got something against my sister.  I know it's irrational....Hey, didn't someone ever tell you something like that when you were a kid?  I know a elderly woman who's never had a raisin because when she was a little girl her uncle told her raisins were dried insects."

Terence's eyelids flutter.  The first time I got really close to him, I asked him if he used mascara because his eyelashes were so thick.  "If I were an uncle," he says, "I'd never tell a kid something like that."

"That little slut's kid would have been happy to eat dried insects," I don't say, and Terence doesn't punch me in the face.  I'm too sweet to say that, and Terence is a touch too sweet to do that.

Instead, I start playing with the container of soy sauce, dribbling drops of the inky liquid on my white paper napkin and then try to draw a curved line with the tines of my fork.  A couple of more curved lines and I have a smiling face drawn.  It could be Terence's face.  It could be his twin brother's face.  They're fraternal, not identical, but they look pretty much alike, especially in soy sauce line drawings. 

Terry has taken his blood test by now, of course, but that's not why Terence has been so quiet lately, except when he's baiting me, like trying to get me to eat flan.

"That's so immature," he says, of my playing with the soy sauce, paper napkin, and fork. 

The pot calling the kettle, I think, but all I say is: "Yo soy." 
 

4.  Grief

It's dinnertime at La Caridad, and I want to talk about something of substance.  "I read this op-ed piece in the Times today by Thomas Sowell that made me so angry," I tell Terence.  "He was writing about gay marriage...."

"I used to think he was very cute," Terence interrupts.  He's ordered overseasoned sweet and sour chicken.  I keep telling him to order Cuban, not Chinese.

"Who?  Thomas Sowell?"

"Yeah, when he was younger."

This strikes me as odd, both because I can't see anyone thinking that pompous reactionary Thomas Sowell was cute and because Terence has never mentioned being attracted to another black guy before.

So I say, "You thought Thomas Sowell was cute when he was younger?"

"Hel-lo," says Terence in an earth-to-me mode.  "Didn't I just say that?"

I nod, chewing the shredded beef of my ropa vieja so slowly it could be considered mastication.

"But in that vampire show on Fox, he looked terrible.  He played a cop on the show, not a vampire.  He pretended to have a Brooklyn accent like yours."

I put down my fork.  "What are you talking about?"

"Um, let me think," Terence says.  "Oh yeah, the show was called Kindred: The Embraced."

"Thomas Sowell?  The black conservative?"

Terence laughs.  "Silly, he's not black.  He only played that in the one movie.  Didn't you get it?  Do you think they'd have a real black actor playing a white guy pretending to be a black guy?  What do you think it was, a racial Victor/Victoria?"

"What what was?" I hear myself screaming, in my father's voice, no less.  Yet I can't be very loud because nobody turns to look at me.

"Soul Man.  You know, the movie where he pretends to be black so he can go to Harvard Law School."

"You idiot, I'm talking about Thomas Sowell, not C. Thomas Howell!"

"Don't call me an idiot.  And you got to admit, he was cute in that movie."

I sigh and stare at the map of the Iberian peninsula behind Terence's head.  "I liked him better in My Secret Admirer," I say.

"Oh yeah," says Terence, his face lighting up.  "Remember the scene with him in the raft at the swimming pool?"

Terence, this is stupid stuff.
 

5. Fried Plantains

The first thing I notice when I walk into Mi Chinata are the walls painted the color of bananas and the ghastly fluorescent lighting.  Then I see he's already at this table with some food in front of him: the rudest person I've ever met in my life.  I remember I promised myself not to be shady.

"Thanks for coming, Terence," he goes as I seat myself across from him.  "I wasn't sure you'd actually show up."

"Neither was I."  He says the word sure like it's pronounced Shaw, my last name.

Taking what I know is a Pepcid AC tablet from his silly little pillbox, he swallows it without water.  When he sees me staring, he goes, "Hopefully, Dolores Fuertes del Barriga won't be visiting me tonight."
 I forget exactly what the point of this joke is, even though he's told it before.

"You ordered already."

"Just fried plantains.  I know you're crazy about them."

I nod.  Those soft logs look luscious, but I won't take one yet.

"You got my letter?" he asks me after I don't say anything for a while.

I nod again.  "I liked the part where you apologized for the egg," I tell him.

"The egg?" he says, pretending not to know.

"You said you knew how horrible it was for me to put up with your enormous egg all those months."

He squints and is like, "Ohh," a light of recognition.  "My enormous ego.  Sorry about the typo.  I guess the spell-checker didn't pick it up because it's a real word."

I snort and grab one of those caramelized fried plantains.  It is as sweet as candy.  Does he really think I'm so stupid that I don't know he made that typo on purpose, to make me laugh or wonder or whatever?  Could I imagine him not re-reading that letter at least three times before he dropped in the mailbox?  I'm like, "You're so weird," finding I'm smiling.  He's still pretty easy on the eyes.

For the next forty minutes or so we talk about movies we've seen, Alanis' new album, when my brother is coming back from Bosnia, and old Saturday morning kids' shows like O Mighty Isis and Land of the Lost with those scary Sleestacks.  We do fine when we're not reading one another. 

"There's something I have to tell you," he says eventually, looking like an actor in a soap opera about to say a dramatic line that will have to wait until after the commercial and maybe a couple of scenes with other characters in them.

Finally he goes, "I’m twelve years older than you think I am.”  His eyes are kind of watery.

"I know," I go as I reach for the last of the fried plantains.  "Do you think we could get another order of these guys?"
 
 

-- Richard Grayson