The True Love Experiment

So much for joy. I tug off a black-and-gray-striped sweater and hurl it with just a touch of rage onto the mountain of clothes forming on my bed.

“I must be insane.” I’m headed to my first book signing in months. I’m not feeling myself, I’m worried my mojo has permanently abandoned ship, I’m going to have to face my readers and be as perky and excited about the next (still nonexistent) book as I can be, and in a moment of weakness, I invited Hot Brit DILF along on some impulsive quest to find our joy. Like we’re buddies.

“God. Tell me why I told this television executive to come pick me up for my signing tonight instead of just driving myself.”

In my bedroom doorway, my little sister shoves another handful of chips into her mouth and crunches loudly through them before answering. “Because you seek out power struggles with men to avoid being vulnerable?”

“Wow, drag me, Alice.” I reach for a sheer-sleeved black dress in my closet.

“Am I wrong?”

My answer comes out muffled as I wrestle my way into the dress. “No.”

“Also, Amaya called again while you were in the shower.”

Grimacing, I brace myself. “Did you pick up?”

“No way. I don’t want to get yelled at.”

I duck back into my closet to dig for shoes. “She’s cool with me doing the show, and we got an extension on the manuscript, but I need to give her some more concrete timelines and I just don’t have them figured out.”

“You’re really going through with this reality show?” Alice asks, badly feigning a totally chill vibe. My pregnant, overachieving sister had been told to cut back on work and take it easy, and is already painfully bored. This explains why she’s following me around my house instead of relaxing with her feet up in her own. I suspect she cares less about this dating show being successful than she does about it being the greatest rubbernecking opportunity of her lifetime.

“I signed the contract, so yeah.”

“Do Mom and Dad know abou—”

I emerge in time to cut her off. “No, and let me tell them.”

My gut immediately clenches at the thought of that conversation. Thirty-seven years old and I still stress about disappointing my parents. They emigrated from Hong Kong in the early eighties and have obviously lived here long enough to have grown comfortable with many Western ideals. But given how my mother still considers my romance novels to be training wheels for the literary masterpiece she’s sure is yet to come, I can’t really imagine how she’ll react to the news that I’ll soon be dating eight men on reality television. Pointing to the bed, I remind Alice, “You promised to relax.”

She finds an empty sliver of mattress and settles down. “Isn’t Dad going tonight?”

I pause, struggling to find the zipper pull and realizing that’s why I haven’t worn this dress in so long. “Oh, good point.”

“So get this producer guy to tell Dad,” she says, “and let Dad tell Mom.”

None of us would have predicted that the man whose sex-ed talk with his teenage daughters consisted of him finding us while we were doing dishes one night, putting a hand on each of our shoulders, and awkwardly muttering, “Your virginity is sacred,” would one day be the very proud father of a steamy romance author. He retired two years ago and—much like Alice and her doctor’s orders to slow down—was immediately bored out of his mind. A former workaholic, instead of putting in seventy hours at his lab at Scripps every week, Dad now spends his weeks reading three books, walking a cumulative thirty miles, helping my baby brother, Peter, restore his vintage Karmann Ghia, playing chess with friends, and keeping his garden meticulous. Not to mention bringing Alice whatever pregnancy concoction Mom finds at the market and dropping off meals for any of his three children that his wife tells him to deliver when she’s on a cooking spree.

My dad is also a beloved fixture at almost every signing I’ve had in the Southwest. Readers love taking pictures with him and getting him to sign their copies of my books, too. Some photos of him cheekily pretending to read The Pirate’s Darkest Wish or Dirty Deeds on the High Seas have gone viral online.

So Alice’s idea is smart: introduce Dad to Hot Brit, let the Brit do his flashy sales pitch, and let Dad take the information home to Mom. Boom, genius.

“Tell me about this guy,” Alice says, watching me fiddle with the broken zipper. “What’s he like?”

“Tall.” I think of some other adjectives. “Uh. Dark hair. Well dressed.”

“I mean is he nice?” she asks, laughing.

“I guess?”

“Is he excited for the show?”

“Not overtly.”

“How long will you be filming?” she asks.

“Five or six weeks, and then I pick who I want to take on some flashy trip at the end.”

“Oh my God, what about Peter’s wedding? Can you still go?”

Our baby brother is getting married in a matter of weeks, and it promises to be an opulent circus with the most ridiculous menu I’ve ever laid eyes on. Brother or no, I wouldn’t miss those eight courses for anything.

“I’ll be there, ah mui. This won’t interfere with any of that.”

I stand in front of the mirror, surveying. The dress is fine—it does great things for my boobs and is super comfy. But the problem isn’t really the clothes. It’s knowing this is my first public event in six months, that I have to face my readers and smile and pretend like everything is fine and the next book release is right around the corner, that the producer dude will be there watching, and that it was my idea for him to come pick me up.

It’s weird that I did that. He’ll be coming over. Will I invite him in? I don’t need to, right? It’s been ages since anyone other than Jess, Juno, or my family stepped foot in my house.

“Mui mui, does my place look like the home of someone who lets their cat casually stroll around on kitchen countertops?”

Alice sits up. “Did you get a cat?”

“I mean the overall vibe.”

“Um. No?” Alice returns to the plush array of pillows and digs back into the chips. “But can we talk about this show? What is it?”

“It’s me going on dates with some guys they’ve screened for DNADuo compatibility, and the audience gets to vote on who they think I’m most compatible with—Will you stop eating chips in my bed?”

She ignores me and angles a few more into her mouth, speaking around them. “Why do you need to go on a dating show, though?”

“I don’t need to. I—” I break off, unclear how to best explain to the most competent woman I know that I’m stuck in my writing, stuck in my dating, how the only thing I’m sure about is that I love my readers, my family, and my friends, and doing this show takes care of two of those things. I am the floppy wind sock in a family of sturdy street signs.

My sister and her adorable belly follow me into the kitchen, where I’ve just pulled open my nightmare of a junk drawer to find a safety pin for the broken zipper pull. I spot the shiny foil corner of a sealed condom and pull it out from beneath an avalanche of paper clips and broken pencils.

This moment feels like a perfect metaphor.

“You keep condoms in your junk drawer?”

“Ask that again,” I say, “and realize how funny it sounds.”

She snorts behind me, and I feel a wave of protectiveness. Alice’s life has never been out of whack for even one second. When she was fifteen, she made a milestone list, complete with goals, ages, sometimes even locations:

… Begin Stanford at eighteen, graduate at twenty-two, medical school at Johns Hopkins, residency in San Diego, marriage at thirty, first baby born at thirty-five…

So far she hasn’t missed a single one except for maid of honor at Fizzy’s wedding at twenty-eight. (She dutifully crossed that one out with a thick black marker a few years ago and we celebrated my book hitting the New York Times list instead.) But pregnancy hasn’t been her favorite experience, and I wonder if she’s feeling even a tiny bit of what I do right now, like she’s facing a future with unknown complexity, wicked blind curves, scary blank spaces.

“Have you ever felt like you’ve lost track of yourself?”

She points to her big, pregnant belly. “This kid isn’t even here yet and I don’t remember who I was six months ago. Did I really used to run every morning? For fun?”

“I’ve been so aimless lately,” I admit, and I’m sure it’s weird for her to hear. “I feel like this show might be a way to get back to myself. Even if it’s a colossal failure, at least it’s something different.”

“I get that,” she says wistfully. “I’ve been having skydiving dreams lately.”

“You?”

She nods. “Sometimes I’m skydiving into an ocean of Oreos. Last night it was beer.”

This makes me laugh, and I turn to wrap my arms around her middle. “Tell me I’m not making a huge mistake doing this.”

“You’re not. In fact, I wrote it on my list, don’t you know? ‘Fizzy does a crazy romance reality show when she’s thirty-seven and has the time of her life.’ ”