All of Us and Everything Read Online Free PDF

inclemency, Mrs. Kwok, Liv’s acupuncturist, had shown up in the lobby, waiting to be let up. “Sure! Of course!” Liv told the doorman. Liv had forgotten she’d called Mrs. Kwok.
    When Mrs. Kwok arrived, she said, “I am here for your session, right?”
    “My liver is going to hell, Mrs. Kwok. Why wouldn’t I call you?”
    Mrs. Kwok shuffled in with her collapsible massage table and her box of equipment—needles, glass cupping jars, some with the rubber bulbs to create a seal, and smokeless moxa sticks. She was wearing a flower-printed smock dress like a pediatric nurse, but her short haircut and jewelry were high-end boutique. Mrs. Kwok owned the business and had exquisite taste. She might have even had some work done, a little Botox, perhaps? Liv herself had recently turned forty, but she passed for thirty-two. “What happened to this place?” Mrs. Kwok asked.
    Liv looked around at the walls covered with clippings and Sharpie and realized that it must look like the plans of an ambitious serial killer. She managed to say, “What happened? Well, the toilets. They stopped working.” And she wanted to add:
How long can we go without toilets before we turn into savages, Mrs. Kwok? How long?
But she stopped herself.
    “No, what happened to the stuff in the
apartment,
Mrs. P. It’s almost empty.”
    “I’m Ex Mrs. P. now, Mrs. Kwok.
Ex.
”
    “He took all of your pretty things?”
    “He bum-rushed me.” Liv meant on an emotional level and she wanted to cry. She felt suddenly drunk in a heavy way, as if gravity were pulling her down more than normal.
    Mrs. Kwok looked at Liv. “You drink too much tonight?”
    “I drink too much.”
    Then Mrs. Kwok got worried. “This is a
hurricane.
I came here in a
hurricane.
You are going to pay me, right? You still have money, right?”
    Liv had always taken Mrs. Kwok’s verbal tic of ending sentences with a questioning “right?” as a lack of self-confidence. Now, suddenly, it seemed that Mrs. Kwok didn’t lack confidence in herself but in Liv. Granted, Liv wasn’t terribly trustworthy. She didn’t answer the question. “What do you think of marriage?” she asked instead then quickly added, “But without, you know, the communist lens, the husband-as-hardworking-Chinese-industrious thing—no offense—and more about the soul. I mean, do you believe that two souls can be one? Are you a romantic, deep down?” Liv wondered momentarily if this sounded racist, but she quickly decided it was okay. She’d said “no offense,” and her excellent liberal education had to earn her some political capital, right? The question echoed in her head, but not for very long.
    “Two souls as one? No.” Mrs. Kwok scratched her forehead, the bit hidden up under her bangs.
    No, no. Mrs. Kwok was practical about all things, including marriage. This was what the two women had in common. Liv loved Mrs. Kwok in that moment, a big sweeping love. All of her friends bought into the idea of soul mates. But not Liv and Mrs. Kwok. Not them. Feeling suddenly close to Mrs. Kwok, Liv reached out and hugged her. Liv was aware enough to know that hugging Mrs. Kwok was a very drunken thing to do, but she couldn’t help herself. Scotch sometimes made her especially sentimental. “I’m going to tell you something,” she whispered. “Something I’ve only told one other person in the whole world and that other person was unconscious at the time, due to a bad batch of Ecstasy.”
    Liv walked Mrs. Kwok to the row of clippings. “These are the men who have publicly acknowledged that they are (A) capable of asking a woman to marry them. It’s how they’ve gotten into the engagement pages. So the commitment-avoidant man-child types have been screened automatically.”
    Mrs. Kwok examined the photographs, bewildered but not exactly
awed,
as Liv thought she should be.
    “This is genius, Mrs. Kwok. Do you understand how many years a woman can waste trying to wade through all